Ninja guide

Well, I kind of consider myself a career ninja . It was my main job before I leveled black mage. So I figured I’d write this guide to shed some light on one of the most versatile jobs in the game. Having dual wield and utsusemi on your main job, frees up many different sub-job options to make ninja excel at many portions of the game.

As a damage dealer:

Dual wield is one of the more powerful physical damage dealing abilities in the game. At the same time the warrior sub-job has the best offensive abilities while also having the least amount of serious defensive abilities. Having access to utsusemi lets ninja get away with using /war sub without being too much of an MP sponge for the healers. The huge amounts of delay reduction along with berserk and double attack makes ninja a pretty good melee against higher level mobs. The tremendous attack boost can let Ninja reach very high attack which overcomes the defense of higher level mobs. For 3 minutes nin/war can parse with a mnk/nin followed by 2 minutes of sub-par damage while berserk recharges.

As a soloist:

Dancer sub-job has recently become popular for Ninja soloists. It does work really well for obvious reasons. Continuous source of healing as well as some evasion bonus gravy. Another sub-job that works well for solo is red mage. Fast cast allows for additional reduction off of utsusemi timers and also allows for faster casting utsusemi: ichi. Having regen is just as good as drain samba and of course cure III. Having access to refresh in sanction and sigil areas is a big boon to the limited MP pool of nin/rdm. Magic defense bonus is also another advantage nin/rdm has over nin/dnc as well as being able to use TP solely for doing damage.

Tanking with /war sub:

Nin/war tanking can either be really tough or really easy. If you have great gear and merits, just throw up berserk and count shadows. Protip: save your provoke to claim the next mob. If you don’t have great gear and merits, it’s really tough to hold hate because most of nin/war hate is just simply doing damage. The biggest thing that nin/war needs to do is not take damage. Do not let your shadows go down as you lose large amounts of hate from simply taking damage. The act of casting utsusemi also builds hate. There’s inherent problems with nin/war tanking. First off, you have to be able to do damage and it’s hard to out damage a black mage on gods and HNMs. Secondly, nin/war doesn’t have access to a lot of really good hate grabbing abilities besides provoke so if provoke doesn’t work, you’re kind of stuck sitting there for 30 seconds. Add to that fact that the enmity from provoke is purely volatile enmity that completely decays in the 30 seconds it takes for it to recharge. Lastly, gearing up for DD limits the amount of HP, enmity, and damage reduction gear you can wear. Nin/war works great in a lot of situations but is not as successful in endgame. And honestly at 74+ war/nin often does a better job than nin/war as a tank.

Tanking with /drk sub:

This one is tricky. The fact that ninja gets utsusemi from their main job allows them to utilize other sub-job options for tanking as opposed to pld who‘s forced to sub nin to get serious damage mitigation. But how do you balance hate with an extremely skilled pld with only 150 MP? The trick is that nin/drk gets access to hate building spells that are extremely MP efficient. If you consider that cure IV costs 88 MP while refresh is only 3 MP a tick, you can make a case for the fact that having 400 MP, which a pld/nin usually does, isn‘t a large MP pool at all. Nin/drk can do more with 50 MP than pld/nin can do with maybe 200 or so, granted you get some refresh from your friendly neighborhood red mage. Stun is just as good as flash and actually even better because it stops the enemy from acting so it could save your butt as well as your co-tank‘s butt. Weapon bash works just as well as shield bash. Last resort and souleater pull large amounts of hate when needed as well as allowing nin/drk to do some impressive spike damage should the situation present itself.

Upon looking at the rest of the arsenal available to nin/drk, it becomes clear how it manages hate so well with such limited MP. Sleep and aspir are the main cumulative enmity building tools in the arsenal. Cumulative enmity does not quickly decrease over time like that of provoke. Probably contrary to anyone’s belief, aspir is one of the most valuable hate tools any job in the game has. It builds a large amount of hate, costs only 10 MP, and you often get some MP back even against gods/HNM. Sleep also builds a similarly large amount of cumulative hate and is on a much lower recast timer. Bind also builds a fairly good amount of hate and costs only 8 MP. Having haste buffs lowers recast on these spells making them even more useful. When MP isn’t tight, absorb spells also pull a large amount of hate, although they cost a lot of MP.

The fact that nin/drk doesn’t really need to do damage to keep hate lets them equip earth staff for the large 20% physical damage mitigation. Another often overlooked benefit of wielding earth staff on nin/drk is that you’re not gonna hit shit and you’re not gonna give any TP to the mob. That's right...0 staff skill. It also allows nin/drk to swap out str, accuracy, attack, and dual wield gear for HP, enmity, and damage mitigation gear. Arhat’s jinpachi +1 and arhat’s gi +1 give a nice combined 15% physical damage taken reduction. Jelly ring is also nice to have. Although nin/drk is far superior to pld whenever evasion is a concern, at the end of the day ninja still can’t quite mitigate damage like a pld but it’s actually pretty close with this setup. However, nin/drk still can’t cure himself which may help a pld survive if the white mages are taking a nap.

Tanking with /rdm sub:

This is even trickier. You lose stun, aspir, absorb spells, weapon bash, souleater, and last resort but you gain magic defense bonus, fast cast, blind, barspells, and dispel. You give up hate management ability to gain survivability. Magic defense bonus is nice to have and pld/nin doesn’t get access to it unless they use the newly introduced Iron Ram gear which takes away from their ability to wear haste gear.

In the hands of someone that knows what they’re doing, nin/rdm can be pretty useful. It definitely helps when kiting Kirin or facing very powerful magic damage like some HNM wyrms or proto-ultima citadel buster. Nin/rdm can balance hate with a skilled pld/nin. Not having stun is a pretty big deal however because nin/rdm can’t produce volatile enmity very well. I think not having aspir is even worse since nin/rdm still has a sort of limited MP pool. The best thing is to rotate blind and a barspell and don’t miss rotations of sleep and dispel. Problem is dispel is nowhere near as good as aspir because although it produces similar hate and is actually on a much lower recast, it costs 25 MP.