The Sealed Dagger: A Ninja Guide

With all these buffs, self SC should not be an issue with any sub.

Unless you're the only DD, the chance of self skillchain is pretty low. Its most likely best for all DD to be in optimal DPS sets and just catch SC by chance.

That's been argued to death, and right now, it's not the case.

Skillchains were so lackluster, when square "fixed" them, they REALLY overshot it. I'm actually kind of surprised they haven't been "re-adjusted".

Gearing NIN around skillchains seems to be to just be taking a more difficult path to worse results than using a SAM for the same thing with more WS/SC damage due to worse WSs/lower damage weapons. And bringing NIN along with SAMs is honestly just getting in the SAMs' way. Not to mention it's easier to gear a competent SAM.

This is why most groups will prefer not to bring a NIN DD anyway. I don't really blame them, honestly. Needs some fix...

I think his point was more of the fact that SC's are more powerful now then "back in the day".
I don't think his point was to take a Nin for SCs vs a Sam or another Heavy DD. As well as, gearing a Nin for SCs...
I agree with you tho, wish they would make a Nin a better DD. Feels so much of a lack luster job when it comes to DPS output in these higher end fights. (Not to say that it can't be used by any means.)

I understand that's the point he was making, but implicitly what you're saying by talking about SCs being exceptionally strong these days is that jobs that are less powerful in the WS/SC department are inherently worse off. Relatively low DMG one-handed weapons and WS = a major disadvantage when SC is so powerful.

Your NIN trying to self-Darkness with Blade: Hi is like comparing a flyswatter to a baseball bat when you compare it to SAM's Fudo and massive light SC. Even trying to be competitive for your own personal damage is making the party worse off overall when you mess up the SAM's SCs. Might make you get a higher percentage of the parse, but will likely lower the party's overall DPS.

If ppl decide to not use NIN for events. meh Not everything SAM works in like those AA DMII fights and same goes for NIN in other fights. Some fights other jobs just perform better than others but saying you shouldn't try too hard to spam WS too much cuz SAM is better makes no sense. I mean what about mythic DRG,WAR or MNK should they not WS as much as possible and just surrender to SAM's superiority? They shouldn't but NIN should? Why would you not wanna WS more often if you could.

Fewer DDs using WS actually IS stronger on a lot of content these days. Overall damage from 1-2 DD not getting their SCs interrupted by a horde of people popping off WS actually generates MORE total damage in the same time than a bunch of DD using WS without SC.

I've done incursion with a single good SAM with a backline of BRD BRD COR BLM RDM WHM, and honestly it was way smoother than I've ever seen in a group with multiple competent DDs. Allies Roll, Chaos... maybe bring a 2nd COR, some GEO, SCH, DNC or /DNC, SMN... those are more useful than trying to bring a bunch of melees.

EDIT: And yeah, you could bring a single NIN with self-Darkness... but WHY? When a SAM hits so much harder and isn't significantly harder to keep alive.

Your point for SAM is best for Incursion is understood. I'm not disagreeing w/ any of that just what I said prior comment and also NIN is untouchable. SAM is not only touchable but is no wear near as immune to dmg as NIN is. Only real responsibility for WHM using NIN is erase which I bet you could probly Incursion w/o a WHM using NIN. Wouldn't be half as much curing nor stunning needed if NIN only melee.

Btw, prior to Nagi I parsed w/ Kannagi many many times vs other DDs. Maybe not mythics but I was always in the parse sometimes even winning parse. So thinking NIN can't compete vs DDs is definitely not true and that was before OAT and Daken ever arrived as well.

This NIN thread went from NIN to NIN vs SAM, dafuq.
To add to this though, if you're parsing that close to a sam or beating them in todays events, then they're not good SAMs I'm afraid. The times I've gone NIN to incursion, I got destroyed by our koga SAMs and our Tsuru SAMs, this was before Daken/Sange change though. After the update I've only gone three times since then and only one out of the 3 runs I parsed 6% behind the Tsuru sam, even when they lose buffs/weapon from dispels and encumberence. It was mainly because I was able to ride Innin alot with yain on.

SAM finds it's way into every thread, inevitably. It'll go away, we hope.

I do always enjoy the "I parse better than the terrible sams I play with so this job is the best ever" comments though. Those always entertain.

This... Is SO *** funny to me... You have... NO idea how funny this statement is....
Like.... This is as funny as an African American wishing ethnic slavery was a thing again.

FFXI History Time Y'all!
Back when NIN was new... SE said: "here players, take this DD. You use its magic to increase DPS and it's weapons are like better daggers."
The players responded: "that's stupid. Utsusemi = blink tank god."
SE didn't approve of their DD not only being used as... But EXCELLING as a tank instead of a DD...
And with the advent of the relic sets, SE pushed even harder for NIN to be a magical DD... (Unlike, say, SMN where they recanted their pooping-BP-dismissing style with the relic sets.)
To no avail.
Then came the end half of WotG and Abyssea... And that's when SE said: "*** it. They want NIN tanks, here's there damn NIN tank armor"
And thus the Empyrean set, as well as +75 JT and JAs, further cemented NIN's ability to tank.... So much so that it fully eclipsed PLD at tanking.
Then Adoulin hit.
Where every mob's AA completely wiped shadows...
NIN effectively became useless.
They have since buffed shadows a bit to not get wiped with auto attacks... But...
With the iLvfication of the Artifact and Relic sets not giving much in the way of tank benefits. (That relic set is basically 100% hard DD stats and the artifact is in that same vein though not as focused.)

So it's rather ironic that all it took was ~1yr for SE to make people want NIN to be the job SE always wanted it to be: a DD that's overshadowed by RNG, SAM, WAR, MNK, DRK, BLM, SCH, etc...
tl;dr: NIN needs to be strengthened as a Tank more. We have too many DDs. Go go iLv Empy set to bring back NIN as a viable tank.

Thank you for the history lesson Marty McFly. You've opened my eyes to a whole new world of stupid. Assuming we're all playing with the best efficiency gear/items available to us at the time, some jobs are not NEARLY as effective as others, in ALL categories: healing/nuking/dps/tanking.

During abyssea, anyone... on any job.... could be "the tank". Atma and a good healer are all you really needed. The only reason for specifically ninja was efficiency at procing and dps. It was 'two birds, one stone.' But I digress. Fast forward to today's conent:

Ninja can still "tank" Incursion (yep, have done this regularly), the AA fights, and other HT fights but in a lot of cases most ninjas are inefficient compared to other jobs. The point was, ninja -can- be a good dd/tank if properly geared and played.

Don't compare someone that has done their homework and geared the job based on the content(and level) they are fighting to someone that glanced once at the first page and then just threw on whatever gear they had in the Mog House.

Removing the "Behind the Target" requirement from Innin is the only thing NIN really needs any longer imo. The problem trying to DD solo or outparse someone whom stands beside you do to thier own ability Overwhelm instead of across from you negates and diminishes NIN's greatest tool to dealing dmg. Other than that NIN is fine as is. Overwhelm and Innin do not mix well but if SE decided to buff NIN further so non R/E/M NINs can be like non R/E/M MNKs or tsuru SAMs idm lol only boosts R/E/M NIN further ahead.

It's a great job for anything that requires utsusemi (mainly high level battlefields), at least it has a place in the game now as opposed to the majority of DDs.

Aren't you begging for the comparison when you bring up the buff to skillchain power? I'm as tired of the general SAM-fest attitude as anyone, but it's impossible to ignore that when WS/SC is emphasized, the job that's designed as the master of WS/SC is unsurprisingly very strong. That's what any other DD is competing with, so pushing NIN more into a DD role inherently means comparing to other DD jobs.


Great enough to warrant NIN main over ???/NIN? In my experience, usually not. If /NIN isn't good enough to mitigate damage, 99% of the time it's dangerous enough that NIN main is probably screwed too and people are gonna gravitate toward a tank + ranged strat.

Probably the only thing I've seen since Adoulin started where I can confidently say I feel NIN is better than any other choice is... Gessho BCNM? Maaaaybe Celestial Nexus fight? That's about it.


Exactly, NIN can do a lot of things competently enough to fill a role. But there are few things NIN can do best, so if you have the better option you're really just artificially increasing difficulty by choosing to use a NIN anyway. Maybe you're cool with that and just playing it for fun, and that's perfectly fine, but if you're doing something challenging there are probably more ideal jobs.

I can "tank"/DD Incursion on my NIN, sure. But other jobs can do it better, so why bother with NIN except for fun? In the same role, SAM and MNK survive just fine with a competent healer and put out more damage than NIN (and as noted earlier, the less clutter from additional DDs messing up SCs, the more SAM benefits the party).

For Incursion, I've even found DNC (which gets generally forgotten by most of the community even more than NIN) to be really fun and far superior in the role. Similar damage output (slightly worse than NIN), plus the massive benefit of being able to keep 2-3 potent lv10 step debuffs on the mob that help the entire alliance instead of just focusing on my own DPS. Total alliance DPS is substantially higher with DNC over NIN.


That actually probably would give NIN enough of a DD buff to be on par with (or better than) top DD jobs. Maybe even overpowered, but then again, other jobs have received overpowering buffs too.

I'll look at the spreadsheets since I believe they were just updated for Dakken but from my experience Nin is definitely up there on the Utsusemi job spectrum. I've been using it a lot since the update for fights like Tenzen, Shadow Lord, AA GK, etc and have got great results against Mnks and Sams. I think that Sam -might- still be ahead DPS wise but it obviously has serious problems with blink tanking because of Hasso while Nin has serious benefits from more shadows and migwari. This in my opinion leads to Nin being the best shadow DPSer, even if it might do a small amount less actual DPS than Sam on paper.

Having to cast utsu a lot less make nin very good for for blink tanking fight an equally geared nin is most likely ahead of other dd IF they have to recast shadow often.

OK, I'll admit some of these BC battles are fairly NIN friendly (in addition to the others I mentioned before, NIN does great on Gessho and Nexus). I dunno that NIN necessarily wins the argument over anything else, but at least it should be a perfectly fine option.

Tenzen: I can see your point, certainly not a bad choice. Personally I've been fine on MNK/NIN and haven't felt like I really need a lot more recast than I would on NIN/WAR (and I prefer some of MNK's other benefits like counters, high HP, impetus, better 1hrs). And the fight is pretty easy/short anyway without having to really worry much about slightly increased DPS from a few less Utsu casts by a DD/NIN. But OK, at least NIN works.

Shadow Lord... interesting, maybe I'll give it a try. I haven't just because I tend to love bringing my RUN there - since it's one of the fairly few chances I get for that job to shine ;)

AAGK yeah I guess so, but just as easy on the more common RNG strat (and seems to me that people doing AAGK has largely died out anyway)

Current content outside of high tier battlefields though (i.e. Delve and Incursion)... Eh, I don't really think NIN is ever better than the alternatives and I only bring mine for fun when I know we can win easily with the party regardless of which DD-ish job I choose.

I agree, what I'm saying though is that we should be happy that Nin has at least some place to shine now as opposed to most jobs. I'm very happy that Nin is good at something since now I get to actually use it. I've used Nin more since the dakken buff than I have War and Drk since adoulin came out...

I actually used Nin while having a Rng strategy this week, it was fun. Can be scary though.

Personally I think Nin needs a better WS for it to ever be a competitive DD for Delve 2 or something. We have a pretty high WS rate (probably on par with Sam now) but :Hi is just so bad outside of abyssea. I tried it on Yorcia for fun and even with Geo, Cor, and Brd buffs my :Hi average was something like 4500~ which when compared to Fudo averaging 8k+ just doesn't work.

what are we discussing here?, every job can be put in any type of fight if you really want to work it out. I don't think anyone would argue that you can't bring a certain job into a specific fight, that is just being ignorance if you think a specific job will not work. The main point still come down to efficiency and percentage of player base that can actually play that certain job to help on the fight. You are able find more decent sam,mnk, and any other brain dead job on the player base than those jobs required more skills to work. Counting shadows is a learning curve for many of the player base, I know its sad but its true. As for anyone saying their nin is out damaging the sam,mnk and whatever heavy DD out there, then yourself the same question but compare to your own heavy DD jobs, will your nin out dding your heavy DD jobs?. If its a yes then congratulation you are the exceptional one.

While I do agree with you that you will likely find a good Sam DD easier than a good Nin DD, I'm not really sure that translates well to utsusemi usage. I feel like a large majority of Sams almost never use shadows, and using shadows on Sam is significantly harder than just about any job in the game, while on Nin you are almost expected to know how to shadow tank and it is way easier with more shadows and faster casts. So what we were talking about, Nin being used for things where Utsusemi required, I feel like your argument that finding a Sam that is good is easier than finding a Nin that is good isn't that solid.

Also I have no doubt that Nin is better than not-Sam when shadows are involved, so those heavy DD jobs and likely Mnk should be losing to the Nin.

again when you dealing with shadow tanking, you are also dealing with shadow sharing. Even if you put a nin in there with better shadow skill its pointless, you work better with everyone sharing shadow instead one person trying to hold it all. The best way to share shadow are competing damage output and shadow will become useless if that person will never get hates back. Anyway it still all come down to which job finish the fight faster and higher % of player can only play brain dead jobs with occassionally shadow casting. I have saw my fair share of stupid nins too, and it'll bring us back to the basic arguement. If you are playing with good players then you can make every jobs work in every fight. If you are playing with ***nins, even 3 nins shadowing share will make you wipe.

Right but the point is that Nin is actually a good DD when you are using shadows so there is no real DPS trade off and you can share shadows just as well as any job just more safely. In theory you actually would share shadows better with jobs like Nin because of faster swing speeds making the mob turn more, but that's such a small detail it doesn't matter.

I know nin can do good damage but when compare to sam,mnk and the other heavy DD I play. It just pale in comparison but I can't complain because nin got its fair share of action during the abys day. We'll just have to wait on the next best thing when SE shift to a new focus job direction and upgrading empy will not make nin a better option, it was the red trigger ws that make nin so popular in abys.

You are comparing them to /nin remember that, this gives Nin a huge advantage and places it actually as a competitive job. I highly doubt that "other heavy DD" would be near Nin, War/nin and Drk/nin aren't exactly powerhouses. Mnk/nin and Sam/nin have the best chance to out DPS Nin, doing some very quick spread sheeting I found Nin to be better than both. I wouldn't be suprised if Sam/nin after SC damage was in fact better than Nin/war, however it would be a small DPS tradeoff for increased survivability, less shadow casting (thus more DPS), and so on.

Well, well, well... You were right on target with that :)


Veeeeeery interesting, and seems like NIN is one of THE main targets for a buff since they're already discounting THF and BLU in this response. DNC could prob be justified as not needing as much of an offensive buff too, since they seem to be taking it much more heavily down the debuffer/support path. Axe and Sword are fairly strong already too, so Katana is the obvious one getting a potentially strong buff.

Consistent with my thinking that they're trying to differentiate the native DW jobs:

NIN: the DD of the bunch. Sub-role is tanking, with Utsu damage mitigation (not as major as it was in old days, but something) and holding hate through damage.

THF: TH, of course. But maybe some revamps to enmity shifting abilities (I personally think they should make TA more of a stance like Decoy Shot, instead of a single hit move)

DNC: Strong debuffs, which they could make even stronger to compete more with the support roles like GEO RDM especially, but also BRD COR. Can maintain 3x lv10 steps now AND a samba, and can take a hit well and even contribute some damage.

BLU: sort of the kiss of death of "flexibility" in a specialist's game, but blue magic DOES have some powerful effects that make the job unique.

Anyone ever noticed that Daken ignores PD? Was just runnign around doing Genkai clear for my alt and suprised my ***.

Ranged attacks in general go through PD

Oh ok, I'll just remember to Sange when something PDs then D:

We were discussing the :Hi thing on BG yesterday.
They said they want to do something about 1h WSs, there's a tiny chance they will address Katana ones as well.
As preposterous as this sounds (they literally just rehauled WSs lol)

Not ruling it out but honestly I can't see them fixing :Hi easily.
It would be easier to fix :Ku or :Shun.
For the latter they could simply remove the attack penalty and change the TP bonus from "Attack scales with TP" to "Damage scales with TP".
Give it a better FTP and there, Shun fixed.
Something similar could be done with :Ku or :Jin.


Even in this particularly optimistic scenario though, the other big problem isn't solved: SC properties.
In this age where everybody brings SAMs to spam Fudo, it's a problem if your WS interrupts the Light SC spam.
So anything that's not Fudo, Vsmite, Ukko's Fury or CDC is going to make that WS undesirable.
And realistically I don't see them changing Katana WSs that much =/