The Sealed Dagger: A Ninja Guide

People say evasion is useless but to fair I've never seen anybody actually try to use it. It's just been assumed. I'm sure there are many fights where evasion taking is viable. That said, I only see it being useful in solo situations. If you have support then you can floor Utsusemi recasts and negate the need to evade.

@Ruaumoko

Nice video ! but what addon do you use for the number of shadow ?

Yeah esp. since DD-ing is NIN's primary hate tool I can't see a lot of situations where evasion would be useful. MAYBE against a mob with a lot of multi-attack, but even VD Byakko isn't quite that bad.
The times it seems as though it may be useful is dealing with adds. If your shadows are down you better be in PDT and i suppose you could work in counter and/or evasion from there. However, say you've got a couple mobs on you - evasion might make your shadows last just the little bit longer that you need to reach re-cast.

That's because it's not anywhere close to necessary. Back then when evasion tank was viable, mp was an issue and it was harder to cap magic haste. So we wanted to dodge attacks to save MP and but time to recast shadows. Fight was also longer back then.

These days on things that we have a solid chance to evade their attacks we would just pop, tp in DD set, have trusts to cure us and end fight in a min.

I'd have to argue with you about being able to sleep to super-tank. Yes if you have an available sleeper, preferably AoE then you don't need to do it yourself, but if you don't, or they're busy it's pretty important - especially as a nin b/c your shadows wipe soooooo much faster w/more mobs.
As for /blu - why??? AoE enmity? Cocoon? Lack of better options?

Has anyone tried to ninja tank the Dynamis-D sandy boss? Had one go at him and didn't have the buffs/setup I would like but since we're on the topic of evasion/shadow tanking being able to ignore that hate reset sounds pretty awesome.

It seems viable to me as NIN/RUN. Just don't melee it.

Wonder if trusts will refreshII you as NIN/RUN.
I think most trust AIs use your main job as key factor to decide wether or not they're gonna refresh you, not your subjob or MP pool (especially because in the ilevel era any job has an mp pool after all)

King of Hearts refreshes who summons him regardless of job.

I thought he does that only if you remain on top of the hate list?
But for NIN/RUN that would be obvious.

Nice catch anyway, guess KoH is a viable solution.

So we may have a new BiS OFFHAND for a lot of scenarios, assuming all the Fudo Masamune stats work when offhanded (that's definitely a significant assumption that would need to be verified). Lots of Acc/Racc, good skill, and the shadows:attack+ gimmick. It's up there as an offhand even when attack capped (shadow gimmick adding nothing at all), and if you're ever uncapped atk it should be a powerful option that's likely BiS offhand regardless of mainhand.

Mainhanding the final stage new katana is not worth bothering with. It's better than non-RMEA, but still falls well short of Heishi and Kannagi, and only competes with Kikoku if you assume ability to continuously maintain max shadows. Don't be fooled by playing around with spreadsheets to get uncapped accuracy - where Fudo Masamune can look good at a glance, but when you compare with a better RMEA mainhand and a highly accurate offhand (say, Shigi) it loses out.

Also, don't get suckered in by the new neck. Even in cases where the Racc is helpful for more Daken TP gain, you're giving up STP+3 from Moonlight on every single attack on a job with a ton of multiattack, in exchange for a Racc buff on the 54% of attack rounds with a Daken chance. From my initial spreadsheet tinkering, Ninja Nodowa +2 can barely win over Moonlight (single digit DPS) when taking full advantage of the extra Racc+25. Not really cause for rushing to get rid of Moonlight, especially considering the likelihood that the new necks will be a pain IN the neck to obtain and upgrade. Not to mention, Moonlight is still also good for SAM MNK if you happen to play them.

i cant remember if someone on here or in my ls was suppose to do a test on doing a all stp build on nin and seeing how viable it was, sound familiar?

Actually this new neck might replace moonlight, as they're adding a a augment system to all the necks. Whether the augments will be any decent. I wouldn't shun this neck just yet.

I agree. It could be very good if the augments are even half decent. If the both the offhand and neck augments are good then it's a really great update for NIN (assuming you have the determination to get the gear.)

Fair enough, if the augments are good the neck may well be worth it in the future. Definitely not a Moonlight killer with the current base stats on the +2 neck though (as some overenthusiastic posts in the July update post were saying last night upon seeing the initial stats).

Katana actually looks pretty excellent as an offhand though, even without further augments. NIN's in an interesting situation compared to other DW jobs, since we never did get the great empy offhand options that sword and dagger users did...

Would you rather Metsu or Hi it?

Think they were referring to the wave2 boss.
I'd imagine Halphas would be a pain to eva tank, especially with counters and AoE.

The T1 bosses are statues that can all be tanked by NIN. You should not have any issue ever getting hate keeping utsusemi up if your haste is capped, and with migawari, you should never die. The only issue you'd have is hate retention, especially if you're doing a MB or heavy multi-step skillchain. NIN wouldn't have any super hate tools to help them either, maybe spamming utsu in Yonin stance.

Seeme kinda irrelevant to me anyway, since surely you're bringing a sturdier tank if you're going for Wave 2+ Divergence. There's really no good reason to use a riskier NIN tank when you have a PLD or RUN (or even a puppet if you're MBing a boss). Other than increasing the degree of difficulty because you can.

I mean, yeah, you can prob tank fine with Utsu on the T1 boss. But I bring my RUN to T1 boss, pop my JAs/spells and literally AFK while I focus on nuking with my alt/mule who is usually on SCH/BLM/RDM. I'll occasionally tab back to my RUN and cast a couple enmity spells in between magic bursts, but the point remains that this is kind of trivial for a real tank. I guess NIN is fine if you're just going in for Relic+3 armor unlocks or your real tank DCs or AFKs before the T1 statue?

We tried Halphas with me tanking on Nin, used an EVA/HP/PDT hybrid set and just focused on spamming voke and ninjutsu(using an enmity toggle for them) kept hate fine, switched into high ACC tp when I thought/knew counterstance was down to help with hate. Got him to 31% before I *** up and got hit w/ hate reset tackle

Question for To/Chi whats the priority for buffs to increase its damage? On any semi relevant content I do w/ my LS it would be a farcry to waste a bubble on something like Malaise(Assuming idealy need something like frailty/malaise or fury/malaise?
Also if any of you have screenshots or just remember, what was your damage like? I'd rather know numbers on things like omen bosses/HELMS and wave 2+ dynamis if anyone has anything

Change to SAM

Go back 10-15 pages or so and look around there. I posted some SS of fodder, and others mentioned on Apex they were able to land 99k Chi/To/Teki with the proper buffs. On anything worth a damn (the examples you mentioned), I'd stick to Ten spam if you're a Heishi user. Far too many things don't take amazing magical ws damage, but even if they did, it would be hard to convince a group to give you as NIN Malasie/Frailty/Fury/Chaos/Fighter's for the ideal scenario. It's fun to mess with on Fodder, can hit 30k-60k quite easily if buffed properly.

https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/33470/the-sealed-dagger-a-ninja-guide/109

Metsu = Bestu

Ok thanks! I figured on anything worthwhile it probably wouldnt do that great on them. Every other WS kind of hovers around the same for me buff being 26kish then Ten pushing 33k depending on TP/OAT proc. I normally just stick w/ metsu to metsu or shun to metsu for sc dmg but it doesnt normally get any deeper than that

I managed to hit 52k Ten this past week with some decent buffs (no rolls). I was quite impressed, but it was a one-off. Ordinarily, Ten is very consistent and reliable. Shun for low attack.

Most of the time I only use shun when I'm solo w/ just fury or just mins otherwise it feels kind of ***I only ever notice ten not being garbage when max buffs and even then its still sharing a set w/ metsu so its probably not optimized enough but its so close to metsu I normally just spam that for SCs. Both of them ive seen spike up in mid 30s w/ assuming TA/QA proc