Quote Originally Posted by aloneatsea View Post
I feel you, I do, even if I don't agree with some of your personal takes. Ninja feels like it's being tugged in two distinct directions right now, and it just feels like a mess as a result.

I'd feel like the levelling argument would hold more weight if not for two things:

1. Levelling is temporary, endgame is forever. While it's important to make sure the levelling process isn't outright awful, I strongly disagree with making sacrifices on the part of Level 90 content for the sake of making a temporary situation better. You spend so much more time at level cap than you do at any other point during the game. Levelling is faster than it's ever been, too.
2. Other jobs suffer worse! Dancer and Bard are even more reliant than NIN on party members feeding into buffs to make the most of their kit, so should we gut them as well? What about healers, with their incredibly low personal DPS? Sure, they can heal themselves, but doing any kind of solo duty takes twice as long.

I do really agree that levelling Ninja doesn't feel super great, but I just can't agree with gimping Trick and giving more personal damage for the sake of levelling. Rather, we should tune solo content such that it can be completed by any job.
The thing is that Leveling is actually forever because level sync exists. This is especially true for any player still using the Duty Finder for roulettes. Players don't stop running the Duty Finder even if they finish leveling up because they run roulette for tomestone gear and rewards, which means level syncing down will always be prevalent even at endgame. Therefore, they can still queue up to their main job (ninja in this case) and be level synced down - thus reduced to the experience of "leveling".

Level syncing down will mean the leveling process will become more common than any - especially for any new player or veterans who haven't done old content and want to experience them as close as possible. I strongly disagree that this is a temporary situation. In content where your level sync is not at the endgame level cap, you will always be playing with a worse toolkit as a result (Palace of the Dead, Heaven on High, Bozja, old Extremes, old Ultimates, etc.). Endgame content is temporary, because the current endgame will always be old endgame by the time new endgame content comes out. However, old endgame content will always exist and in greater amounts - which means leveling will always be forever.

The problem of tuning solo content such that it can be completed by any job is that all jobs can already complete solo content. However, is it fun for healers with their single attack skill to take forever to beat up the enemies because incoming damage is so low that they can't use their healing toolkit fully at all? No. Not at all. This is a core problem of job fantasy when it doesn't align to the job & to the encounter. You wanted to play as a healer but you became relegated to gimped DPS pressing the same attack button over and over until the instance ends. If you can't get the flavor of your job fantasy, no amount of retuning will feel good. The same applies to ninjas with their assassin job fantasy here. It feels like utter garbage to play as an assassin role that is known for going solo, but not have the ability to properly assassinate the enemy because a large portion is just made up from having allies to do it for you.

Quote Originally Posted by aloneatsea View Post
The common opinion that Ninja is difficult stems from the fact that you have to learn three mudras in order to get functional with the job. I've never heard anyone who's spent a significant amount of time on the job call it difficult or complicated. I'd say Ninja is problem one of the easiest jobs to play at a high level -- it's very rote.

As butchersblock has pointed out, it's also been absurdly strong since....5.1? The only time between then and now where it's been anything close to weak was 6.0 release - 6.05. 6.05 left it in a very reasonable state of balance (the problem at the time, iirc, is that Monk and Reaper were absurdly strong), and 6.08 buffed it to all high hell, where it became the single job with the highest DPS output.

6.1 then made the changes, which pushed its DPS to absolutely ridiculous heights. It was already absurdly strong, it absolutely did not need more buffs. You can look at the statistics from 6.0; Ninja had the highest overall damage throughout it all. The argument that Ninja didn't deal enough damage or needed to be stronger just doesn't hold up. So I ask -- what about Ninja needs to be 'stronger'? It certainly isn't -- and wasn't -- damage.

That 'single skill' was kind of the identity of the job. Should we remove Dance Partner so that Dancers can deal some better personal DPS? Why is a buffing class less valid if it does one thing and does it well? I just don't understand your arguments. Trick Attack was supremely powerful, what more did it need to be?

As for why Ninja hasn't been popular until now -- let me break down the contributing factors. Looking back at Shadowbringers, at least for Eden's Promise, Ninja was about the second most popular melee to bring to a fight, behind Samurai. What's changed since then?
5.0 ninja was actually very weak. They got buffed heavily in 5.08 5.1 ninja was when it felt strong because Trick Attack overall rDPS got nerfed (10% to 5%) and the overall toolkit had been buffed to compensate. - Aka rebalancing Trick Attack to increase ninja's personal damage.

And that's the thing. Because of how prominent Trick Attack was to raiding, Ninja ended up developing a trick attack identity. People hated ninja when ninja wasn't a trick attack identity. However that's not the only identity that makes up a ninja. It's two core identities were always - support + fast paced high burst DPS via through melee or ranged (due to assassin job fantasy). If Trick Attack became too impactful, ninjas basically put in a ton of work on their core rotation for low DPS. That's why there were plenty of problems with balancing ninja to not just be a "trick attack" job for raiding and to make their own damage toolkit still impactful. I don't play ninja for trick attack only, I play it because I want that assassin job fantasy outside of raiding. I might want to support my teammates sometimes, but I also want to feel impactful when I'm doing solo stuff because this is a job that is supposed to be able to annihilate an enemy instantly when they use their entire burst. And honestly, sometimes it doesn't feel like that. Sometimes I use my entire burst and the enemy's still kicking, hale and hearty. It really puts ninja's job fantasy in a weird place for that reason because of how much Trick Attack makes up for ninja's damage. Raiding should not be the only thing that influences a job identity if the job fantasy doesn't align with the identity.

It's why I think PvP makes ninja exactly that good. You still get lots of support utility (Raiju stun, Doton heavy + Goka Mekkyaku synergy, Huton shield + movement speed buff, Meisui healing buff, damage up via mug) but your utility is all focused on enhancing yourself and becoming more impactful / flexible to adjust to the situation. It captures the essence of the job fantasy without losing any value as a support-based job. The problem is that this can't translate well into PvE due to how static and inflexible job design & encounter design has been.

Dancer and Bard are known for being a support ranged job that supports their allies' DPS in particular, which is why their personal DPS is generally much lower as a result. They have multiple skills designed to be support oriented for a team setting. However, ninja doesn't fall into this category of being a job that solely supports their team. Ninja is the only job that holds two unique identities that counteract each other. In the past, Ninjas focused on support - yes, but that support also aligned to their personal DPS. In the past, they had Slashing debuff and dripping blades. While some jobs can take advantage to their slashing debuff, their debuff solely exists to help them - with Fuma Shuriken being used often over Raiton for clipping as it benefitted from both slashing debuff and dripping blades. Their whole toolkit - from support to damage all amalgamated to give that quick and high burst DPS job fantasy, which is what made it fun to play in a party setting and in solo instances. No matter where, they always had a toolkit that fit their job fantasy.

If you asked me what changed from ARR to Shadowbringers, it's that ninja became more streamlined and removed a lot of personal support buffs to directly increase their overall DPS per skill. Trick Attack was the only support buff that still exist as a result. However, Shadowbringers still kept their core job fantasy of being a high damage assassin via Hyosho Ranryu. Even then, it took some work to adjust ninja to feel powerful. On its initial release, ninja was actually undertuned again when mudras moved over to a GCD-centric gameplay and went through multiple patches and buffs to make it feel good again for leveling - without just trick attack padding.

From Shadowbringers to Endwalker, we just lost flexibility to account for the big DPS gains other jobs have (raiju being lost upon using another weaponskill and Phantom Kamaitachi being an underwhelming skill on release). It honestly felt like they were trying to balance Ninja's rDPS because of how much stronger Trick Attack was, but our overall DPS didn't change much. It was after multiple adjustments on these skills that we got ninja's overall DPS back to where it was again - which is also due to its dual identity as an high burst DPS assassin. On Dragon Song Reprise release though, Trick Attack's damage got moved to mug - which I believe is exactly because of the issue of how impactful their RDPS was in relation to its personal DPS.

I would be fine if there was a job that was more support oriented than personal DPS oriented, but that's not what ninja's job fantasy is. It would be great if it can have both, but it becomes an issue later down the line, I am more willing to move the trick attack's raidwide debuff and have another job be what ninja couldn't if it becomes too much of an issue with its job fantasy.