I'm Annoyed By /NIN

[Raitox]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

I wonder if I'll get flak for saying that Ninja is my favorite job in the game and that you guys are way too bitchy about it's usefulness and other crap? You guys need to get a grip lol

[Eiyoko]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

I wonder if I'll get flak for saying that Ninja is my favorite job in the game and that you guys are way too bitchy about it's usefulness and other crap? You guys need to get a grip lol

You'll "get flak" for having a cheek more likely than not.

Personally, it's not so much that I hate /nin, but the fact that people think it's the ONLY good subjob and they turn a blind eye to everything else...tends to piss me off.

[Telera]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

Meh, I guess I always got lucky when I tell my Summoners to go wild and just backup cure as needed, I've seen them do some crazy stuff when given the opportunity.

We can. :p I had a leader that when I was invited said 'Okay. You're here for DD/support. Only heal if we absolutely need it. I want to see what you can do.' Most fun party of my career. I was opening/closing SC's, MB'ing other SC's, keeping up a steady buff rotation, all kinds of things. I swear it's one of the few times I actually had fun in a party. I had a few other parties that had me on more of a MB/Buff duty, but that was the only one where the leader more or less told me not to heal. I'm guessing he was a summoner on the side. XD That or he really was just curious about how the job performed in some niche other than heal.

[Electricity Gone Human]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

At least you Summoners got to use your Summoning Skill to an extent when main healing.

[Nuriko]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

The nice thing about SMN is that it's so easy to set up a Distortion SC, among others ... call Carby, use pact, and watch somebody with some experience in SCing go to town (and it could well be that THF who really wants to SATA on to the tank ... and maybe even set up a MB if you have a BLM by some miracle!)

[assumedvigilance]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

>.< this isnt a smn or rdm thread....

i dislike /nin because as a mnk it makes my hits and def weaker. evade does little to nothing for me and its hard to pay attention to shadows when you are looking at timing a skill chain or seeing which abilities are ready for use. mnks have alot of abilities and i use them often, probably more then i should, but that is my play style. /nin has value in certain situations, but even then as long as i have a healer around i would still prefer /war

[Kittyneko]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

>.< this isnt a smn or rdm thread....

i dislike /nin because as a mnk it makes my hits and def weaker. evade does little to nothing for me and its hard to pay attention to shadows when you are looking at timing a skill chain or seeing which abilities are ready for use. mnks have alot of abilities and i use them often, probably more then i should, but that is my play style. /nin has value in certain situations, but even then as long as i have a healer around i would still prefer /war

If you have to wait 10 minutes after every battle because a healer spend all MP on you, you wouldn't prefer Warrior. Yes timing can be a pain.. But note this: We all know that /ninja for Monk (and some other jobs) are downpowering the job. But you can try out /warrior sometimes.. Even though you put out a lot more damage, it will still affect your experience points rate. And that's not even mentioning your increased risk of death.

Don't worry, you'll get to play Monk at it's highest potential later during TP Burn events and such.

[assumedvigilance]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

1-75 i lvled mnk/war. at 75 suddenly everyone wanted /nin. so i lvled nin to 40. as a nin playing nin i thought it was ok. i simply dont like how /nin makes my mnk punch for 69-89 per fist instead of the 122ish per fist with /war. granted i can equip gear to make up for this to a certain extent, but have you seen how damn diffuclt to get/expensive that crap is? i mean you almost have to live the game to ever be able to afford the time/gil to get any of it. i dont have that much free time.

then there is a side bonus to going to a party /war...
the tank and healers have to actually earn thier xp for a change. bunch of slackers they are....

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

>.< this isnt a smn or rdm thread....

i dislike /nin because as a mnk it makes my hits and def weaker. evade does little to nothing for me and its hard to pay attention to shadows when you are looking at timing a skill chain or seeing which abilities are ready for use. mnks have alot of abilities and i use them often

._. Not that I don't understand where you're coming from, but amount of juggling a MNK/NIN must do just doesn't compare to say, PLD/NIN, much less RDM/anything. You trade three abilities (Berserk, Defender, Warcry--don't think most MNK/WAR's use Provoke) for two spells in combat (Utusemi: Ichi and Ni); it's not that much more complicated, IMO, nor much more difficult.

[assumedvigilance]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

._. Not that I don't understand where you're coming from, but amount of juggling a MNK/NIN must do just doesn't compare to say, PLD/NIN, much less RDM/anything. You trade three abilities (Berserk, Defender, Warcry--don't think most MNK/WAR's use Provoke) for two spells in combat (Utusemi: Ichi and Ni); it's not that much more complicated, IMO, nor much more difficult.

sorry you seem to have misunderstood me there. it isnt that the macros juggling is difficult, it is that i tend to surf my menus looking for any skill i can pop as soon as it comes back up. now just to clarify with out going to indepth into mnks (this isn't a mnk thread either), i find there are two styles of playing. one you kinda slouch back in your chair staring at the text log for shadow use and hit a couple macros through the fight. or you play like me,sitting forward in your chair, constantly looking for another ability to use, and always surfing your menus. but again that is my play style. aggressive...

which is why i fell in love with mnk in the first place. /nin makes it

[Saren]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

sorry you seem to have misunderstood me there. it isnt that the macros juggling is difficult, it is that i tend to surf my menus looking for any skill i can pop as soon as it comes back up. now just to clarify with out going to indepth into mnks (this isn't a mnk thread either),

recast....macro

Also, you sound like the DD I stop hasting about 15/20 minutes into the party so we can get higher chains and more exp. Efficient healing is as much in a DDs control as it is in mine as the whm. I love when DDs deliberately step past the hate line, cost the healer an extra 100-200mp in a fight (and usually resting time too) then get annoyed with low chains.

Like it or not part of being a good DD is either keeping under someone elses hate line or mitigating damage well if you get hate while doing good damage. You don't necessarily do that by spamming your abilities as soon as they become available.

[LyonheartLakshmi]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

>.< this isnt a smn or rdm thread....

i dislike /nin because as a mnk it makes my hits and def weaker. evade does little to nothing for me and its hard to pay attention to shadows when you are looking at timing a skill chain or seeing which abilities are ready for use.

If you're tanking the mob so often that you find that it's hard to keep your shadows up and pay attention Chakra/Dodge recast timers, then that's all the more reason to sub NIN. Just imagine what it would be like with /WAR in that situation. Not only are you pulling more hate through the extra damage from Berserk, Double Attack and Attack Bonus, but you have nothing to mitigate that damage you are now taking without Utsusemi.

Though I don't see why you have to watch your JA timers so closely. You can basically just make one macro to fire off any of your JAs that have a timer longer than a minute, and hit it at the start of every fight.

Hopefully you aren't watching Boost so closely that you're firing it off every 15 seconds. That does more to generate enmity than it does to actually increase your damage output.

then there is a side bonus to going to a party /war...
the tank and healers have to actually earn thier xp for a change. bunch of slackers they are....

Yeah, like being a MNK requires so much work that you are "earning your xp". There's a reason why MNK is the butt of most auto-attack and just watch TV jokes.

If anything, having to pay attention to shadows (which isn't that hard if you're not trying to be full time blink tank) brings you as a DD closer to having to work as much as the tank, healer, support, and puller (which I contend has to be the hardest working pt member).

[Karinya]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

And years before that, the mobs we favored crabs, which were somewhat resistant to most damage types and favored targets because they were easy to tank and not terribly magic resistant, though they required dispellers.

Didn't I debunk this once already on this very same thread? There were lots of non-crab camps in regular use - VoS, Kuftal depths, moongate to name only a few.

Crabs were favored targets *in the 50s* primarily because of overhunting. Overhunting a crab leads to a slow frustrating fight that isn't really worth it in exp/hr terms. Overhunting a scorpion will probably kill someone, maybe the whole party. There's something about the way player and mob abilities grow with level that made the 50s particularly vulnerable to this, so unless you were lucky enough to have a static with the brains to go to KRT instead, crabs were just plain safer to fight with players of unknown skill.

Fighting *appropriate* level scorpions with a *competent party* is better exp than fighting crabs of any level, but if you don't trust your tank or you're in a camp that's too high level for you, dangerous mobs are dangerous.

And guess what - Warrior, Dragoon, Monk, Thief and a lot of melees were shit out of luck for a party invite because tanks and mages were too scared to fight anything else but a crab. DD slot in PT was usually two members tops. Three slots for mages and one for tank.

If by mages you include bard, yeah (cor not existing back then). Fighting crabs without a blm is just dumb. But it wasn't the tanks (IMX) who were afraid of mobs with attack - it was the DDs (including blms) that couldn't control their hate and could get one-shotted by anything more dangerous than Big Scissors. That, and people who obsessed about downtime without realizing that long fights are just as destructive to your overall exp/hr.

I'd much rather compete for 2 party slots (not counting the blm slot, even though blm is also a DD) than compete for 0 party slots (that's how many slots there are for dedicated tanks in a modern party, or for nukers). And I'm surprised you'd mention thief given how much *more* screwed they are today. They're a gimpy vanilla DD instead of the masters of SC closing and hate control they were designed to be.

There was a tremendous glut of players who just wanted to hit things and wouldn't play any other sort of job no matter what was actually needed. Some of them have left, some of them have branched out and some are still around meleeburning colibri every night, but the population pressure of too many DD players was created by the players, not by SE. Traditional parties had some room for any type of job. If there had been a huge glut of people who wanted to play healers do you think SE should have created healburn parties? Demographics are no excuse for screwing up balance (let alone making party coordination and teamwork unnecessary or actually counterproductive - the SC/MB dynamic actually distinguished FFXI from other MMOs where people just stood around and whaled on the same mob until it died and that was considered teamwork. Now FFXI *is* one of those games.)

In any case, you're talking about the early days of RoZ (or the 50s specifically). Once roving shrine parties started up, BLMs were out (except for manaburn) and four NINs and WAR/NINs, BRD and mage were in. In KRT it was monks, but otherwise the same - little backline, no tank. Even then, it was apparent that faster kills meant faster exp, if you could manage to not get killed, which creates a lot of downtime; but it could be limited by mob availability, because there weren't any camps with super-abundant supplies of weak, low hp, fast-respawning mobs.


One more thing on this issue: If players used a mix of old and new camps depending on what party members were available to them, this wouldn't even be an issue. I think this was probably what SE actually had in mind by creating meleeburnable mobs. Parties with a tank, SC and BLM go for one type of mobs, parties with a bunch of DDs and few mages go for another type of mobs, everybody's happy, right? Wrong, and we all know why: huge disparity in exp/hr achievable at those camps. Both pt styles need a support pt member and why would they accept half (or less) the exp/hr going to an old camp? Balance the exp/hr rates between the various types of camps and the problems would be far less severe. Manaburns and arrowburns aren't really a problem if they make the same exp as anyone else - it's only when they make fantastically more that it's a balance issue. Ditto for meleeburns, but SE dropped the ball big time with TAU on balance between different camps and pt styles, and in the several *years* since then, they still haven't fixed it effectively.

Unless SE comes up a better balancing of risk/reward with mobs, people will conform to the path that is easiest to them. The jobs that got big heads back in RoZ/CoP are now the ones not getting invited or are no longer invited for thier specialization.

Except for nin, war/nin and bard, of course. Their godlike status never changes.

You seem to imply that replacing one problem with a different problem (maybe worse, maybe not as bad) is just fine and expecting an actual *solution* is unrealistic or something. Why? I understand why a brd or cor might think that other jobs come and go, but the game keeps moving along - because for them, that's exactly what happens. But for the jobs that were overpopulated before, or the ones that are completely unwanted in *any* quantity now, it's not so easy to be philosophical about it. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not a fix, no matter how much Paul supports it.

This has wandered from /nin a bit - but only a bit, because without utsusemi, those meleeburns would often be piles of corpses. 0-mp invulnerability is a big help if you want to get rid of healers and tanks from your party to cram in more DDs.

[assumedvigilance]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

recast....macro

Also, you sound like the DD I stop hasting about 15/20 minutes into the party so we can get higher chains and more exp. Efficient healing is as much in a DDs control as it is in mine as the whm. I love when DDs deliberately step past the hate line, cost the healer an extra 100-200mp in a fight (and usually resting time too) then get annoyed with low chains.

Like it or not part of being a good DD is either keeping under someone elses hate line or mitigating damage well if you get hate while doing good damage. You don't necessarily do that by spamming your abilities as soon as they become available.

another county heard from... whm's sheesh, silly creatures they are.

ok when i play i do exactly what the party wants. i dont like to play this way because it sucks to put out less damage then i know i can. on the other side of that coin i know when i can hit the skill/ability and when i should back off for hate control. my point is that the play is more intense when i feel like im interacting with the character instead of using 3-4 macros and drooling upon myself for the remainder of the fight. but i do play with hate control and shadows if that is what the party wants. on occasion i'll go a little overboard just to make sure the whm and tanks are well exercised but i know how to handle my job... and i do it well.

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: I'm Annoyed By /NIN

sorry you seem to have misunderstood me there. it isnt that the macros juggling is difficult, it is that i tend to surf my menus looking for any skill i can pop as soon as it comes back up.

/recast "Focus"
/target <stpc>
/ja "Focus" <me>

One press to check timer. Press again if you want to activate. Hit cancel button on controller (or Esc key) if you want to wait, and not activate now.

Or, just have one macro which lists all the job abilities' recast, as Saren suggested.

now just to clarify with out going to indepth into mnks (this isn't a mnk thread either), i find there are two styles of playing. one you kinda slouch back in your chair staring at the text log for shadow use and hit a couple macros through the fight. or you play like me,sitting forward in your chair, constantly looking for another ability to use, and always surfing your menus. but again that is my play style. aggressive...

Don't really see the difference; one is checking ability menu constantly, one is checking chat log constantly. I'd combined them, and put recast info on the chat log with macros.

which is why i fell in love with mnk in the first place. /nin makes it

*shrug* A friend of mine on MNK/NIN tanked most of the prime avatars for me; he couldn't have done it on MNK/WAR, I think.

Did most of those as RDM, but for one fight I happened to be on PLD/WAR, with all the defense and enmity gear (for ToAU44 fight) I had. Two-third of the way through the fight, my Provoke simply stopped working. I hit Berserk and let my MNK friend tank the rest of the way; too bad I didn't have any DD gear or food on me at the time.


MNK/NIN is a useful and powerful combo, that's for sure.