Ninja/Dark Knight... 4x the hate 4x the pleasure.

[Karinya]

Re: Ninja/Dark Knight... 4x the hate 4x the pleasure.

What about or
Or as long as we're shooting for ideal, unrealistic gear >_>

The attack and subtle blow are dead stats: you're not wielding hades sainti to hit things with them. I think it's because of the fact that you're not meleeing for any significant amount that enmity will outperform haste. You don't get the usual double benefit of haste for NINs (more damage *and* more invulnerability, making jobs who have to trade off between damage and toughness wonder "wtf were the balance team smoking?"). You can stun faster and get more hate that way, but I guess the OP is of the opinion that it will be inferior to more +Enmity in that slot. I'm sure he has plenty of haste gear for DD and merit situations and the decision to change it out for enmity was an intentional one.

[ItachiKujata]

Re: Ninja/Dark Knight... 4x the hate 4x the pleasure.

That's really the point. It's not that NIN/DRK is necessarily bad at kiting fights, it just doesn't offer anything over what NIN/WAR does, with less maintenance. The trouble with kiting is that you're constantly losing enmity every time you're outside of melee range or run out of spell range, so the continual enmity gain gets largely negated - hence why the spike hate of Provoke actually works better, not to mention not needing Refresh.

And yes, as you say (and as I mentioned), you need a small head start to build enmity, otherwise BLMs or DDs can easily jump ahead of you on the hatelist.


Icemage

Actually it does offer a lot more than what NIN/WAR does... you essentially only have provoke/warcry with NIN/WAR... defender is nice but with kirin specifically, I don't see it as a benefit. I started out kiting NIN/WAR and I could never get hate from a PLD. Once I tried NIN/DRK, not only was I able to get hate but I was able to keep it through the fight. Since then i've consistently been using NIN/DRK and have seen much better results. This has also been against the same PLD with the same gear as before so somewhat of a controlled situation.

The loss of enmity from moving out of melee range isn't as large as you might think. Especially since i'm usually spamming stun/bind/sleep/kurayami anyway... not to mention souleater/last resort. compared to provoking/warcry/ninjitsu. If you haven't tried NIN/DRK kiting, I suggest you try it out and compare it directly to NIN/WAR, you'll be surprised how much better it is.

Of course this assumes you do have the support, but with refresh and about 170mp I usually don't have to wait for mp.

[Icemage]

Re: Ninja/Dark Knight... 4x the hate 4x the pleasure.

Actually it does offer a lot more than what NIN/WAR does... you essentially only have provoke/warcry with NIN/WAR... defender is nice but with kirin specifically, I don't see it as a benefit. I started out kiting NIN/WAR and I could never get hate from a PLD. Once I tried NIN/DRK, not only was I able to get hate but I was able to keep it through the fight. Since then i've consistently been using NIN/DRK and have seen much better results. This has also been against the same PLD with the same gear as before so somewhat of a controlled situation.

The loss of enmity from moving out of melee range isn't as large as you might think. Especially since i'm usually spamming stun/bind/sleep/kurayami anyway... not to mention souleater/last resort. compared to provoking/warcry/ninjitsu. If you haven't tried NIN/DRK kiting, I suggest you try it out and compare it directly to NIN/WAR, you'll be surprised how much better it is.

Of course this assumes you do have the support, but with refresh and about 170mp I usually don't have to wait for mp.

Actually the main problem with NIN kiting on Kirin, regardless of sub, is that you're in trouble once daytime hits, even with AF+1 boots, as Gravity won't save you for long.

It works OK on Kirin, especially as he's already immune to Sleep so you don't have to worry about building resistance, but if your BLMs are even halfway competent there's not much you can do about them ripping hate off of you with Tornado II. And woe is you if you get a bad draw on Astral Flow and get KO'd (which is just going to happen sometimes no matter how much you try to avoid it), as it'll take you quite a while to climb back up on the hate list - and there's always the issue of your poor RDM having to chase you all over the place trying to keep Refresh on you while you're dodging Stonega IVs (same criticism can be levelled at PLD/WAR and PLD/NIN, though they spike hate much faster than NIN/DRK).

NIN/DRK is cool, I just think it's roughly an even trade for NIN/WAR in kiting fights. It improves in quality with multiple kiters, since you don't bleed enmity when you're not at the top of the hatelist, but the tradeoffs are still there - unlike in cases like CoP Wyrms, where there really aren't any drawbacks aside from the longer lead-up time to rebuild hate if you get KO'd.


Icemage

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: Ninja/Dark Knight... 4x the hate 4x the pleasure.

Actually the main problem with NIN kiting on Kirin, regardless of sub, is that you're in trouble once daytime hits, even with AF+1 boots, as Gravity won't save you for long.

Kirin actually stops to cast spells very often, which makes it kitable. Just have to remember to keep running if it's a -ga. >_>;

and there's always the issue of your poor RDM having to chase you all over the place trying to keep Refresh on you while you're dodging Stonega IVs

It's actually not that bad, from what I can tell by watching. Since the kiting path is a circle, just cut across to intercept.

[ItachiKujata]

Re: Ninja/Dark Knight... 4x the hate 4x the pleasure.

I initially wrote out another long post but thinking about it we pretty much agree NIN/DRK is good. I think you're underrating it's kiting effectiveness and the time it takes to build hate with it. NIN/WAR might have spike hate initially (remains to be seen as souleater/last resort generate as much hate or more as provoke/warcry) but I guarantee after a couple spell cycles, NIN/DRK will get hate... if that's too long to wait then yea NIN/WAR is probably the tank you need because /DRK really excels at longer fights... not to mention the fun you can have meleeing with souleater hehe...

but back to the point of the thread...