NIN/BLM (A must read)

[Divine_Spirit]

That videos awesome! Makes me wanna level BLM ^^

[jinshyro]

Nsxtasy, how were u able to evade IT+++? i find it hard to cycle ichi>ni when i dont evade much at all doing IT +++. I currently have about 19 evasion and even when i had 30 evasion it didnt help that much. And being lower lvl to the mob kurayami dont stick as often so makes it even harder. Maybe in next lvl i can wear harness and should be a lot better.

[nsxtasy]

I don't really evade much at all on IT+++. If para doesn't stick, it can get pretty hairy. I've died a few times I suppose. Another luxury I have, is both rng/nin in my pt. If I know I'm gonna be short on shadows for 15 sec after a Ni->Ichi, I let aggro go a little and the rngs bounce it between them for 3-4 hits and then I can take it back again. This can be a real lifesaver if something is really nailing me ever hit fast.

Another thing my spt ninja friend did on darters in Boyahda when we were way low for them(lvl 61-62 PT), was he would do the pulling w/ para. This got him a little jump on gaining aggro over 2 rngs and gave him another shot at stickin para pretty quick, since it didn't take first time alot.

Most of the time I don't have a problem w/ Ni being ready again after goin ni->ichi, Ni is always w/in 0-5 sec. when that last shadow wears. w/ para on i try and stick to just Ni casting if possible.

I don't really stack on the evasion. I wear kote's, 2 snipers and life belt. I use Navarin for food. And I wear Moldavite and 1 dodge for earrings. I think the pt setup really gives me an easy time of blinking, with the rngs ability to take aggro, and the bard and rdm hasting and singing and lastly the smn can stoneskin me which can be a lifesaver. I'm only 51 though. Dynamics change quite a bit when the rangers get sidewinder. We kill pretty fast as it is. Nice and steady, fast enough for chain #5 time each mob of the chain, w/ no downtime after chain mostly.

[jinshyro]

I pretty much wear what you wear except the moldavite which i've been tryin to get. seems camped by othres so much for a Ex item. i have the worst luck with EX items. 1/15 on hototogisu T.T

I guess having your static is nice. hard to find such a nice setup like that in pickup parties. And i've staticed for most of my lv 70rng and 60thf jobs so im kinda sick of doin statics especially when my play time is more limited now.

Well at least i dont feel so bad now that im not the only one not evading IT+++ well.

[Svina]

The first thing I heard about this, I had to try it. My BLM has been 34 for a while, but my NIN was a measley 27 for the longest time. So I level grinded to 40 to gives this a go... I'm now almost 50 already and let me say my thoughts and opinions of this job combo, as it is my personal project to take the job to 75 with black mage as my only subjob.

NIN/BLM at first seems like a stupid idea, as BLM sub hardly gives any benefits to anything but RDM ord occasionally, rarely DRK. At least I used to think so. Based on how I've been playing the job up till now, NIN/BLM appears to function like the mage version of a MNK's job... consistent damage over time. However instead of doing physical damage over time, you're doing magical damage. At level 40 your average nuke unresisted will do 110-120 damage, that is with only Magic Atk. Bonus I and no other significant boosts. You can only use so many int boosting items at that level too, druid's rope, morion earring(+1), and wisdom rings seem to be the limit of your options, for a whopping +9 int. If you factor in the best INT food, melon pie, you get another 5 int there, however while that might seem like the best choice, I prefer to stick with melee boosting gear, and for a good reason.

So I gave it a whirl, at lvl 40 I tried the same beetles as in that video of the taru nin in garlaige... and just as he did, I was chaining the Ts pretty quick and levelled to 41 within 1.5 hours solo.

At 41 I decided to get more daring. I went to the Crawler's Nest and pulled a nest beetle, conned IT. Needless to say, I pwned the thing pretty easy. Though it seemed to take a while and not be worth it since my xp was pretty much capped at 200... however I tried another, VT... most of them conned VT with about 1 in 3 being IT. Here is the result.



As you can see I had no downtime, and came out with about half HP left due to a few mistakes that got me hit... which brought me to my next test... how could I put to use the nukes with halved black magical talents? Well it seems kind of farfetched, but I tried a drain to get my HP back, and to my surprise I managed to pull 60 HP back! I doubt this will be practical in later levels, but I was fairly impressed with the effectiveness.

Now my final test was to see how NIN/BLM works in a party, both as a tank and just a standalone nuker (having a real tank in the pt)... in both cases I still ended up tanking the whole fight. This was with a PLD spamming voke, flash, and everything in his power to hold hate, and yet I still held it through the entire fight. Of course it is not reliable in cases where another mage were to pull too much hate themselves and you need a quick voke spike to get it back... that is where nin/blm is a failure... as the BLM in that party got a little too nuke happy and died because the pld's voke was out and I just could not pull it off him after getting hit myself.

NIN/BLM should be equipped to nuke, meaning INT gear where salvageable. I used Nikkaraoie and Druid's Rope for some 35% spell interruption prevention altogether, also for the +1 int on the rope. Now... another observation I found was the effect of Burn on the job of NIN/BLM, as well as Haste.

Burn from a BLM added about 8-10 dmg per nuke, which adds upt to an extra 48-60 dmg per cycle, unresisted. Nukes were rarely resisted anyway, but with burn, even less, and I was hitting 130 dmg per spell on IT+ mobs. With an alltime high MB of 168!

Anyway, the damage per spell at 40 might not be as impressive as the 180-200s pulled at later levels with a moldavite and elemental staves, but at 40-50, think about this. If you do 110 dmg per nuke, and it takes about 18(?) seconds to cycle through an entire set of ni spells, you just did 660 dmg over 18 seconds, not including damage from your katanas, while more miniscule, still add up. Now, there is some downtime between cycles, because the ni spells do have a fairly long recast, however with haste you can almost keep this chain going nonstop, doing the damage of a good DRK's melee every 2-3 seconds, and never taking a hit along the way. However, there may be instances where you do want to balance hate to a real tank, because you can maximize your usefulness to a party even more if you use a little strategy in your nuke selection.

Let's say you're doing a Distortion skillchain, usually a ninja cycles through the ni spells casting one that the mob is weak against to start and then casting the spell they were just weakened to (i.e. Hyoton weakens them to fire, so next you cast Katon, then Suiton, and so on)... if you were to start the cycle at the element of the skillchain (in this case, we choose Ice, Hyoton), cycle through Hyoton -> Katon -> Suiton -> Raiton -> Doton -> Huton and stop there, the skillchain will now hit for extra damage and less likely to be resisted. AND THEN you can follow up with Hyoton again for a magic burst before continuing the chain from start!

Also, I've found solo that doing a similar thing as the above for your own WS can be handy, for isntance, Blade: To is ice elemental damage, so why not throw a Huton before you use it? It appeared to add significant damage to my WS strike if I timed it after the right jutsu.

Anyway these are just my experiences playing this new fad for myself... I hope to be one of the few who intend to try and stick it out all the way to the end just to say I did it. I plan to level WAR eventually also so I do have the optoin of tanking at higher levels... because frankly I'm normally playing mage jobs and never in my life thought I'd enjoy tanking... but Utsusemi Ni turned me onto it shortly before I hit 40 and went /blm.

Before 40, I would not bother with this combo though, since the Ichi nukes are too slow and you get nothing significant worth mentioning before then.

I'll keep experimenting with things. Oh and, expect to get some bad criticism at first. I got an invite to several parties, only to be kicked for not subbing WAR when they realized I was intent on using BLM sub with the comments "BLM sub? Gimp (Good bye.)"... so what did I do? I found their camp a few minutes later, and solo'd the mobs they were fighting for XP!! OFTEN FASTER THAN THEIR ENTIRE PARTY COULD KILL THEM!! XD

They weren't making fun of me after that. In fact, some of them left their party not long after to XP with me... with 3 people in my party we were able to chain #5 for 250 xp. You heard right, 3 people!

[pdac]

Well, after camping profblix for a few days to get a moldavite, I'm going to try and give it a shot as well. I xp my ninja in a pseudo-set with a war and a whm, so I've got someone else to voke if hate is pulled off me.

So far, for ninja gear, I'll be using my AF head, moldavite, elemental staves, +int body gear, rse stone for +int, etc. I'll post all the gear here soon, once I'm set up to try it.

I'm also going to see how it works soloing with the 300xp limit...might be able to solo steelshells in Boyahda actually. We shall see I guess.

[pdac]

my god, it works!

I went into Boyahda today, found some T robber crabs, and went to work.

Starting out with my moldavite, no +int, and elemental staves, I did 121-129 damage per shot, only one resist, average damage was 127.

Cycle cast time was 20 seconds total.

This comes out to 762 damage per cycle. 5 cycles to complete a kill.

Next I went with a melon pie for +4 int. 131-144 damage per shot, averaging 141 damage, with two resists.

This came out to 846 damage per cycle. Still 5 cycles to complete a kill (well, almost ^^ )

I managed to chain #2 tough robber crabs all on my own in 3 total kills. I used the 8 second delay between cycles to recast utsu, kurayami and if needed, hojo. Highest xp was 190.

Going with these calculations, and the cost of the tools overall (48,000gil total), and I ended up using for the session 15 tools from each stack. 80 gil per tool total overall comes out to a cost of 1280 per stack used, 7680 in total. I'll try and get a rng around my level and compare numbers here, we'll see what we can find.

I'm now going to load my ninja up with +int gear, (flora cotehardie for +3, two rings for another +6, royal knights belt +1 for another +2 int, phantom earring +1 for another +2 int, and whatever else I can scrounge up) to get myself 58+13 int. Not too shabby for a mithra anyway, and I might be able to match damage then. I'd like to get over 1k damage per cycle, and also see its effectiveness against stuff like hnm's (I'm only nin 65, though rdm 75, so I can't use this against gods or in dynamis yet...oh well, give me a week or so ^^v )

If you would like screencaps, let me know and I'll provide some ^^/

----addendum----

Went out with a whm friend, had him haste me. With a total of 58+16 int, I was doing 158-166 damage, average 162. Utterly nuts.

[Omni]

thats pretty crazy~

has anyone attempted this set up or knows of anyone attempting this in a hnm/dynamis raid? ie: fafnir, tulia, etc...

if so, how was the dmg/usefulness?

[Navia]

I'm really interested just to see how much of a difference the moldavite earring on a nin/war helps elemental ninjitsu casts in general or bursting on a skillchain without staves or subbing blm.
I guess its time to go camp the goblin for the earring :sweat:

[pdac]

Moldavite helped a lot for landing debuffs in normal exp pt's.

Wish me luck, about to use this combo on the thf af3 nm, and the rdm af3 doll nm.


----addendum----

We didn't end up doing the rdm af nm, but the thf af nm went fine. He resisted my spells a lot though, so bombs might not be an ideal target. Average damage unresisted was the same as tough crabs, but he cut damage to half a lot.

Next experiment, xp party!

[Navia]

Hmm thats good to know it helps enfeebles stick, monsters all of a sudden like to resist ninjitsu at my level even when its capped alot more than usual.

[pdac]

Any sort of magic attack bonus decreases the chances of a monster resisting your spell, no matter the type. I got the moldavite not only for nin/blm, but also my rdm (debuffing gods is a /pain/ I tell you >< ).

Doing this combo as a mithra is actually still effective, but I've no taru nin/blm to compare this with on my server, so we'll have to see if I can compare damages.

[ntgn]

After reading all the fun from subbing /rdm or /blm for nin i went out and tried nin/blm or /rdm in xp pts. Ended up getting nin from 43 to 50 with /blm , and to 51(where I am at now) with /rdm.
Firstly, i think /blm is not better than /rdm till you are 60 that gives you mag att 2 and 2 more INTs. While /rdm gives you mag attack and fast cast. I did that with almost all PT setups:
Secondary tank/first voker for sa/ta - NIN/war, WAR/nin , NIN/BLM(me) and healers. Hate is never been a problem whenever I had thf in pt. But when there is no thf in pt, it would be better if there is second tank that can voke at start, giving me time to enfeeb the mob then get the hate after a few nukes.

Yesterday I made a pt consisting of
NIN/RDM 50( me), WAR/nin 51, RNG 52,RNG 50,BRD 50,RDM 50 fighting Helm beetles in CN.
At the beginning the WAR always voked at start and I'll get the hate off him( and off the RNGs too) with nukes. Always had haste all of course. But eventually the WAR stopped voking , saving it for whenever my blink is down or the mob is after the RNG. I got the hate from the first jubaku.

I was doing ~140 on unresisted nukes, getting resist around 1/4 of the time. And 190 on MB Reverbation.
I was constantly checking the log parser. I was doing the same dmg with the RNG 52, doing more or less than him by ~100 . And clearly outdamaging the RNG 50 by 200-300 every fight. Not sure about when RNGs get sidewinder, even if they do more with that, lvl 60 with magic att 2 will get us the lead back for sure.



This is what i had on:
Weapon: 2 Crimson Blade -> switch to staves at 51
Head: hairpin, tempting to get the INT +1 bastokan cap
Neck : Spirit torque
Earrings: Ninjitsu earring, moldavite
Rings: Eremite +1 x2
Hands: O Kote - need something better since there's no reason to fight with staves
Body: Brig +1
Back: Nomad +1
Belt: Ryl. Knight Belt
Legs: llvl 43 dex+1 agi +1 one
Feet" HUme jse - INT +3

[Silkiv]

At first I thought maybe this playing style was just a fluke, but it seems S-E obviously supports it.


Yasha Jinpachi - Head, DEF:22 INT+7, Spell interruption rate down 4%, Enmity+2, Lv.71 NIN

Yasha Jinpachi +1 - Head, DEF:23 INT+8, Spell interruption rate down 6%, Enmity+3, Lv.71 NIN

Yasha Samue - Body, DEF:43 INT+3, Parrying skill +3, Spell interruption rate down 10%, Enmity+4, Lv.71 NIN

Yasha Samue +1 - Body, DEF:44 INT+4 Parrying skill +4, Spell interruption rate down 11%, Enmity+5, Lv.71 NIN

Yasha Hakama - Legs, DEF:31 HP+25 INT+2, Spell interruption rate down 2%, Enmity+2, Lv.71 NIN

Yasha Hakama +1 - Legs, DEF:32 HP+30 INT+3, Spell interruption rate down 3%, Enmity+3, Lv.71 NIN

Yasha Sune-Ate - Feet, DEF:13 HP+10 INT+3, Spell interruption rate down 5%, Enmity+2, Lv.71 NIN

Yasha Sune-Ate +1 – Feet, Def:14 HP+12 INT+4 Spell interruption rate down 6% Enmity+3

Yasha Tekko - Hands, DEF:16 Parrying skill +7, Spell interruption rate down 3%, Enmity+2, Lv.71 NIN

Yasha Tekko +1 - Hands, DEF:17 Parrying skill +8, Spell interruption rate down 4%, Enmity+3, Lv.71 NIN

Rock on