Little Talked About Duo NIN Tanking

[Everest]

Hey all this is my first post but I figured I might as make it a helpful one..

I have played an assortment of jobs but when my wife decided to join me in FFXI I decided to static with her as duo nin tank. When I first started asking around about this I got alot of poo poo about how its sloooooow etc..

Ok some background...

Im a Manthra Nin/war and my wife is playing a Taru nin/war at the moment. We static with a friend who is playing blm/rdm and are currently at lvl 35.

Pre-lvl 40 I would say that duo nin has worked out extremely well. But to combat the whole slooow argument which it indeed was when we first gave it a try I'll explain what we did.

Ok so here is the thoery... you got 2 people who can blink tank.. provoke.. while other casts blink and swap. This works great and when we were first spec'd for eva. what was happening was we would lose hate before our blinks wore and the swapping got messy. This is when I had a change of heart and we changed all our gear to focus on attack+, str, and some eva. This has been fantastic and our battle times greatly improved. Also.. with a friend as blm in the static duo nin can start a distortion ws chain early on which our friend MB on every time since he used to it.

Thoughts for the future... As we get uts. ni my guess is we going to run into the problem where we losing hate before blinks wear again so I'm thinking as mithra I'm going to continue as nin/war and my wife will take her taru taru int goodness and change to nin/blm and basically become a nuker/tanker. This way I can focus on attack+ and rng attacks while she blasts away with ninjutsu. This is speculation though for the time being until we are there.

Let me know your experiences of duo nin at various levels. Particularly those of you who focused on DD vs. having two super eva+ nin tanks which in my opinion doesnt work so well.

[Armando]

Re: Little Talked About Duo NIN Tanking

BLM/NIN requires a ton of gil. I say just gear for max melee damage and keep duo tanking as normal.

Large doses of Evasion aren't practical for EXP in my opinion. I geared for max melee damage; the only item with +Evasion I wore was Empress hairpin, because +10 Evasion in a slot that barely gets any stat boosts is a no-brainer.

[Everest]

Re: Little Talked About Duo NIN Tanking

I meant to type a bit more in strategies for duo but Im at work so my posts are sort of random atm..

Just some things Ive observed regarding party setups...

duo nin from 12 -> 25 we always made sure we had a whm in the party. Since we also static with a blm the last two slots usually were a thf,war,rng,dnc,blu etc..

From lvl 18 -> 22 or so we leveled off of lizies in Saur. Champ. just outside of Jueno for some great exp.. worked very well for duo.

25+ since our blm friend can throw cures to use when we need them inbetween casts etc.. I have been focusing more on 2x nin/war, blm/rdm and the last three slots as dnc,brd or smn and then any 2 super DD.

General notes... SAM does great damage but even with two provokers going it was really hard to keep the hate balance between the two nin. This has caused me to lean more towards other DDs. Also.. 2x thf with SATA on a duo tank is crazy nuts as far as keeping order in the party but we ground through mobs like no tomorrow so I think it was worth it.

Food wise in dunes we used grilled hair, 20 -> 25 we used dhamel steaks and 25+ jack-o-lanterns work like a charm. All very cheap food and helps attk and acc.

[Chveya]

Re: Little Talked About Duo NIN Tanking

My friend and I have duo'd NIN since 15 (I'm now lvl 28). And I mean duo, just the two of us. Well, we did try partying once, one party which took us from lvl 23-25. That was pretty fun. Otherwise, with the exception of a few bad judgement calls (shoulda guessed that the Gobbie Gambler's Blaze Spikes would be painful ><), duoing on NIN has been fantastically fun.

Bouncing hate back and forth according to who has shadows is like second nature now. It's very very rare that we encounter a mob that takes down all 6 of our shadows before the recast is up (the raptor we aggro'd in Sauromuge Champ. is a good example of a mob NOT to fight ). This is without any significant evasion gear; maybe +3 eva total? Personally, I use a lot of +att, +acc, and +STR gear on my NIN. I'll be getting the Emp. Hairpin from Mog Bonanza, and that will probably be enough +eva for me for a while. Previously, I was using Jack-O-Lantern as food, but recently switched to {meat dishes}. I do still carry the Jack-o' in my bag in case I need the eva or acc.

Though our duo doesn't have to worry about losing hate to some DD, I prefer keeping those stats in order to kill faster. Perhaps soon, we'll test our luck in another party but for now, duoing is where it's at for us. XD