Trick Attack

[aloneatsea]

In my opinion there needs to be a distinction between "how it feels to play alongside NIN" and "how it feels to play NIN". These changes seem like they won't have any real impact on how the job actually feels to play. And when it comes to "how it feels to play alongside X" I would always de-prioritize such an aspect when it comes to adjusting X.

I disagree, actually! For a job which relies a lot on buffing allies, I would consider how it feels to play alongside NIN just as important as how it feels to play NIN. I think this sort of thing should be considered for all jobs, to an extent -- for example, Black Mage wants to stay still as much as possible to keep uptime with its casts (and remain in leylines), but it is given a myriad of tools to allow it to move so that it's not burdensome for either the Black Mage or its team to play alongside it. Even so, the limited mobility of Black Mage is something I would take into account, relative to the higher mobility of Summoner or Red Mage. This is just an example, however.

I can understand why it might make more sense to prioritise the gameplay feel of a job over how it impacts other classes, and I would generally agree with you that when changes are incoming, the preservation of the gameplay feel of the job itself takes more precedence over how it impacts others. Despite this, I can't agree that in a team game, designed to play in groups of 4 or 8, "how it feels to play alongside X" isn't important enough to consider. I think that the interactions between different jobs with their various quirks is one of the many things that makes this game incredibly fun to play.

Regarding Mug

I would also have to disagree here, though we're definitely arguing on a shaky foundation, given we don't know the exacts of how these changes will shake out. Despite this, there is a definitive 'best time' to activate party buffs in the opener, which is exactly where we currently pop Trick Attack. Popping the Mug buff earlier (to leave the current opener unchanged) would desync that buff from other party buffs. Embolden, for example, is 20s, and is generally popped at the same time as Trick. This would also do nothing for the fact that Ninja currently struggle to fit its entire burst into the 15s window on odd/TCJ windows. I would imagine that Mug and Trick would be double-weaved together to ensure alignment with other party buffs. Extending the duration of Mug doesn't really impact when we pop it, because we will always want to synchronise with other party buffs as much as possible, givne that they're multiplicative. Searing Light is, I think, the longest party buff at 30s (? not 100% on this), so at the very least we would want to pop Mug at the same time as Searing Light, to maximise their overlap.

[Grimoire-M]

Terrible NIN player here. Literal grey parser. My static only goes for clears and BiS. Nothing more. I don’t want Trick Attack changed at all, for the following reasons:

- I don’t want a worse version of two already existing skills.
- NIN has bigger problems than a personal damage buff can solve and SE needs to accept that those limitations are a part of the job.
- Design wise I see this as an erosion of Ninja’s Identity. Specifically targeting their utility and value to other players.
- While it’s not a change for change’s sake, Prioritizing numbers over fun is a good way to kill your MMO in the long run. WoW made this kind of mistake too.


The reason that players struggle with XIV is because they’ve never been taught how to play it by the game itself and its intentionally built so the only difficult aspects are dodging and pushing for perfect DPS uptime. I’ve played long enough to know what I’m supposed to do on a given role, what I like to play, and know how long it takes for me to get good at something. I’m not going to get to enjoy this class as what I consider to be it’s best state post mudra rework if these changes go through. If SE wants to make things easier for NIN players then I can think of a dozen things that matter way more than nerfing Trick Attack. Most of them involve encounter design or global combat changes, such as giving high impact abilities charges and the ability to start at only one charge prepull. If they didn’t want raid buffs to matter they should not have made them all line up perfectly.

[Ash_]

On one hand I should be happy a rogue action is going to be useful again. On the other hand.. nobody asked for this. It feels like trick attack or mug (pending patch notes) now becomes like old shadow fang that applied a debuff increasing slashing damage. Turns out maybe the simplest solution would be to restore HW shadow fang, and maybe stop deleting our skills every expansion. They say button bloat, I say choice on what to bring for each situation.

[Manofpassion]

if they wanna remove button bloat, get rid of forked raiju. I probably only use it for adds on p3s, and even then that is pretty situational. I guess the devs decided screwing up trick instead of making forked raiju more useful is more worth their resources.

[baklava151]

From a DRK perspective mainly but this applies to other classes, it was nice having something on the odd-minute mark to engage with and break up the time between 2-minute raid buffs. Without it I'm pretty much mindlessly building up and using resources to avoid overcap until 2-minutes came up again at which point I can finally go hog wild for a 15-second period before going back to the monotonous period of downtime. Also, if I got a Dark Arts proc before odd-minute bursts, I could save that proc until TA came up again for an extra bit of damage, now that nice little interaction is gone.

[Manofpassion]

We have made ninja's raid buff 120 secs in order to promote synergy. Now dark knights and every class that can pool resources can't synergise with trick and can just mash buttons. Please look forward to it.

[angienessyo]

Really the only thing I'm annoyed about is they're making this big change right before an Ultimate when the only reason I didn't raid this tier on NIN was I didn't feel like relearning muscle memory for the savage tier. Gonna need them to stop dropping major NIN changes when new content drops.

As for my feelings on trick changing? I mean, as long as they properly compensate us damage wise it's fine. Trick has long been a thorn in our side in terms of how Square balances us. We're either disgustingly strong because everyone is pumping big damage into trick which makes our rdps look great, or we're so weak people lock us out of joining their PFs. There's like, no in between for how we've been the past 2 expacs. We have long since lost our identity as a support dps when they gutted all our utility at the start of Shadowbringers. (anyone remember goad, shadewalker and smoke screen?)

This also has the added benefit of making us better with more casual groups. My static finished reclears forever ago so I've been assisting my much more casual friends with getting them through the tier. They all want me on my NIN even though I did this tier on RDM (I've cleared 2 ultimates+3 tiers on NIN+plan on doing DSU on it though so I still know what I'm doing). And boy, nothing makes you feel helpless quite like being a BiS NIN and seeing your friends not lining up buffs correctly so your trick is completely useless. In those situations I'd be more useful as literally any other melee that'd bring a lot more damage. I would imagine the trick change will mitigate this issue a lot, we shouldn't only be useful in more serious statics.

I've played NIN since Stormblood and trick attack has never been its identity for me and we never should have been defined by a single buff. The mudras and quick gameplay are why I enjoy the job. I don't really care what they do with it as long as it retains what I like about it. The only time I have ever dropped this job was at the start of EW because doing a million animation locked gap closers wasn't fun for me. So I'll wait and see what the balance changes look like. I don't really care if people that don't play NIN aren't happy about it.

[dadong]

besides the whole 1min to 2 min change for ninja. I really dislike making mug the raid buff. It feels like they're shoehorning it in to the ability because they're unwilling to properly reorganize ninja into a 2 min job and decided to throw the raid buff into the next available closest ability and let the players figure it out.
Again if they feel like ninja should be a 2 min job they should have made trick attack 2 mins and maybe have that the headliner for a expansion and not a patch 4 months in to and expansion.

[Kazimere]

We have made ninja's raid buff 120 secs in order to promote synergy. Now dark knights and every class that can pool resources can't synergise with trick and can just mash buttons. Please look forward to it.

That would matter if flogs actually gave the damage to the person maximizing things during TA. As it stands, everything is given to the Ninja, and that is garbage.

[Manofpassion]

Take it up with the people in charge of fflogs then. I'm only complaining here for the small chance the devs care about what the eng nin community has to say. If the game is being balanced around what the fflogs team does, that would be hilarious. Drks and whatever class with resources don't take advantage of trick for the logs, they do it to increase party dps lmao

It's a team game