The Sealed Dagger: A Ninja Guide

Yes but maybe you're not thinking that offhand requires ~5% less acc than main hand, since they cap at different rates.
Which means having the same acc for offhand as you have for mainhand, brings to a small amount of "wasted" acc.

Gokotai is the weapon that grants your main weapon the highest accuracy bonus. Granted it's just a small bunch over Fudo Masamune so it's probably not worth mentioning, but this is the point Sirris was making.

Also it's hard to ignore the fact that Fudo Masamune is >150m and Gokotai is virtually free.
If you're buying one of these weapons for "omg best acc bonus OH!" it's something to consider.


Personally and I say it again personally I think Gokotai (which I don't even own and don't plan to get any time soon!) is probably the best "all around" OH Katana.

Fudo Masamune C is surely the best MH if you wanna tank though, in my humble opinion. I just wouldn't spend 150m just to get an "acc OH", that's it.

The amount of additional racc is either smaller than you're saying, or not existant. AGI converts into Racc, but I'm not sure if it still uses the old conversion rate of 1:0,5 or if it uses one of the newer ones (1:0,75 or 1:1). Either way, we're talking about very very minimal differences.
So yes, personally and I mean *personally* I wouldn't trade the two even if both were free, you can imagine I'm not gonna do it when one is 150m and the other is not :x
Att bonus is nice sure, but not spending 150m "just" for that.

If we're talking about wanting to use Fudo primarily as a MH tanking weapon and secondarily as whatever else (OH?) it's a different story of course.

I thought about this too, and the low delay is appealing. However, Tauret has some pretty significant downsides in:

(1) NIN has 46 less base dagger skill (A+ katana skill = 424, C+ dagger skill = 378), which more or less eliminates Tauret's accuracy advantage at least as far as the offhand is concerned (though as discussed in detail, Acc+40/DEX+15 stats do apply to mainhand)

(2) No Racc for Daken (which Fudo & Gokotai have in similarly large quantity), and

(3) much lower DMG, which does have some impact even when it's only for offhand white damage (which isn't quite as irrelevant for NIN as most jobs, in large part due to high amount of crits).

I'd like to poke around more with Tauret as an option though, it's interesting. Also always worth keeping in mind if for some reason you need piercing damage, or if you want a respectable damage mainhand dagger still while maintaining the ability to use Aeolian Edge. Certainly a useful addition to the NIN toolkit.


Fair enough, but you're still talking about an approx. acc+16 edge to begin with. So even when that advantage is eroded a bit due to lower capped acc rate, is still probably slightly in favor of Fudo?

Not to say that I disagree that the two weapons are very much sidegrades from an acc perspective though, we're all really splitting hairs here just for discussion purposes.


Yeah - but we all realize that a 1 acc mainhand difference is obviously not significant.


Yup, price is pretty obviously the selling point for anyone who doesn't already have Fudo. Unless you care to tank, in which case Fudo might have more appeal.


Whoops, I just temporarily spaced on the AGI:Racc. Sorry bout that! So yeah, like melee accuracy, the two are almost identical in total ranged accuracy.


Obviously the price is a consideration. But if both were free? You really wouldn't prefer Fudo over Gokotai, given that the two are extremely close sidegrades for Acc/Racc/DMG/delay, and Fudo brings a LOT more atk to the table (not to mention the tanking possibility)? Can't see how you wouldn't go Fudo there.

I mean, I already had a Fudo before final stage Ambu weapons existed. So I see no real need to make one. But for anyone with neither weapon, totally sensible if they didn't feel like Fudo was "worth it" for extra atk and the option to mainhand it for tanking when Gokotai exists for "free" (assuming you have the pulse weapons and you don't have higher priority Ambuscade weapons).

That brings up another possible consideration: there are some other Ambu weapons that are arguably a bigger boost to their jobs. Naegeling (which even opens up new possibilities for NIN), Shining One, Dolichenus, Tauret, etc. Gokotai has a close analogue available, whereas these others are a bit more unique - so if someone is less interested in the Pulse weapon/Ambu grind and has some other job priorities, but can afford to drop the gil on an Su5 katana... that's not necessarily an unreasonable choice. Could even leave the Fudo un-augmented to retain ability to re-sell it, and it still works just the same for offhand purposes.

Ninja San Scrolls are next, change your merits before July 10th~

Possible silly question but need confirmation:
Working on Kikoku trials and Metsu appears to be a 4-hit WS by animation. However, while fighting a monster with Utsusemi up, it only took one shadow. Is it a 1-hit WS? Thanks.

also, i will retract my previous sentiments about Gokotai as offhand. I overlooked its stats and it's very good.

All relic ws are single hit. (*)Before procs/offhands

It's really stupid that Onslaught, Blade:Metsu, Mercy Stroke all look like 5~ hits (Apex arrow too, lul) ((also, yeah, FH says it's two hits now, one main one off))

Sooo, what are people expecting to see in NIN merit 2 categories in place of the 6 spells?
I guess Ninjutsu Tier 3 Accuracy, Ninjutsu Tier 3 Damage, Ninjutsu Tier 3 MB potential, Ninjutsu Tier 3 ele down duration, Ninjutsu Tier 3 ele down potency, dunno what else.

More interested in how they will synergize that with AF2's pieces (namely Head and Feet, which previously increased Tier3 damage and Tier3 casting time)

Honestly if it were me I'd be hoping for completely different categories of Tier2 Merits, but I don't think SE will be that creative.



General NIN fixes I'm hoping for:
1) Make Innin and Yonin undispellable
2) Remove the potency reduction over time on the 2 mentioned JAs, raise the cooldown to use them if need be. I can accept a price in less freedom to swap between the two roles, if in the end those two roles will be more solid and reliable
3) Change the acc- penalty on Yonin for something else
4) Give Innin something to boost WS damage (just a small amount of WSD working on all hits, maybe? 5-10% more than enough)
5) Merge all the existing tools into just 3 categories for *everyone* not just NIN main. Completely remove the specific tools. Just leave Enfeebles, Elemental, Self-buffs
6) Release T2 version of Kakka and Myoshu, or bump the current version so they're stronger (Myoshu really has to be SB2 honestly, otherwise it's useless)
7) Increase the Ranged Accuracy hidden bonus that Daken gets when it procs, so that there is less need for racc for end-game builds. (it's currently ~100 iir? Should be around 150!)

Realized that I basically wrote what Sechs said in my own response... But to summarize:

Yes to likelihood of T2 merits focused largely on San elemental ninjutsu: Macc, MAB, MB bonus, potency (the elemental resist aspect), etc.

Yes to this:

No to major changes to Innin/Yonin, despite those being an easy target if they really wanted to give NIN something interesting (remove positional requirements, remove penalties, give more bonuses, make undispellable or shorter timer, etc.).

No to likelihood of significant changes to Daken. Though perhaps some minor adjustments like a new T2 merit category giving +1% Daken rate, and/or a merit giving Daken Racc+.

Maybe to Myoshu: Ni (or changes to Ichi)? It's dumb that we have a Subtle Blow spell that's usually useless, SBII sure would be nice. Though, I don't expect this to be a merit, since they seem to want to get rid of merited spells. No reason they couldn't add a new NPC scroll though, much like they added a round of PUP attachments.

Maybe they will fix Dual Wield so that you do not continue to get a TP penalty when overcapped.

... just kidding, that will never happen!

Considering how they added merit traits for enhancing whm's solace/misery (lol banish), it's possible for them to add new trait merits to boosting Innin/Yonin (slightly...lol...)

they need to remove the decay from Innin/Yonin!
The rest of the stuff I listed is just pure fapping dreamy wishlist that will never happen.
The decay thing removal could be a thing though.

Not saying it's gonna happen, but I can see it as a realistic possibility. The rest of what I said... lolno.



Yonin and Innin would need a complete rehaul starting from zero, from the initial concept.
They were born as additional, mutually exclusive "stances".
They are in a different position than, say, Afflatuses or Arts for SCH.
You normally don't play WHM and SCH without any of the two (if I'm not wrong, Arts can't be dispelled either).

For NIN when they created those 2 stances they had something else in mind. They wanted players to pick between 3 choices
1) Default NIN, no stances
2) Tanking NIN
3) DD NIN

To make 2 and 3 as viable options and keep 1 somewhat relevant, they had to put pros and cons into each of 2 and 3.
That's why they created the -acc, -eva and positional requirements.
Concept wise it's cool, I think it's a nice idea, it just doesn't work anymore in current game meta with how it's implemented.


Which leaves them two choices, either keep true to their original intent (which would require a complete rehaul of the JAs, for them to offer noticeable pros that come with a "cost") or just do minor tweaks to the current versions.
...or simply pretend everything is working perfectly and do absolutely nothing about it.
Which is probably what's gonna happen lol? We'll see in a few weeks.

Add spells as scrolls.
Add MAB, MBD, M.Acc for 3 of the merit slots
Add two additional merit slots that enhances Innin/Yonin by eliminating the decay, as well as making it so that max merits allows the full benefit from any direction

I'm thinking along the lines of Snprphnx. SE is going to do this the lazy way and basically copy/paste the BLM merits into NIN form. They'll swap the augments on relic onto the merits themselves, and remove the spells and make them scrolls:

T3 Ninjutsu Elemental Damage + (Relic Head aug)
Ninjutsu Elemental Resistance Down Effect (per subsequent element in wheel -3)
Ninjutsu Magic Accuracy (5 per merit)
Ninjutsu Debuff Effect Potency (this will be their weak version of giving T2/3 spells.
Yonin (Increased Enmity Base by 2 points per merit)
Innin (Increased MAB by 5 points per merit; they are stupid and care too much about NInjutsu over straight melee dps increases)


Reduce the timers on Innin/Yonin to 3 minutes each, remove decay effect.



This isn't what I hope to see, it's the lowest bar we should expect. Anything more than generic changes to niche Ninja roles like Nuking and Tanking is just wishful thinking. They have a very bad habit of not wanting to improve basic things that will better NIN's DPS, and I don't see them budging off of that.

My hot (slightly warm?) take... eh, Innin and Yonin really don't need that much of a change. Making them unable to be dispelled would be nice, but otherwise... I don't particularly have any big issues with them.

Decay is kinda dumb, but whatever. The buffs are still a net benefit to either role and can be reapplied before it wears to re-up the max initial benefit (at 1 point/% decay every 15 seconds and 3min recast, a 30% buff only decays to 18% by the time you can reapply). At least it's a better system than Impetus! I'd sure rather start at max and have some minor decay than start at the bottom and have to "earn" the full benefit.

Yonin DOES make a massive difference in tanking thanks to the Utsusemi enmity modification, and the small bit of Acc- is not very relevant in today's game (obviously mattered more at 75cap). We are loaded with accuracy in many gear sets (I tank in a lot of Kendatsuba for Meva, for instance) to where 10~30 Acc makes zero difference. Or other times, when you're blink tanking something truly deadly, you are usually gonna be a non-factor on offense anyway. Constantly casting Utsu/Miga and using enmity generating subjob actions, perhaps turning from the mob to not give it TP or avoid stuff like Orcish Counterstance (Hi Halphas) or spikes, etc. I don't give a damn about a little Acc- when I tank on NIN.

Innin likewise DOES make a difference offensively. It's a pretty substantial crit rate boost, the acc+/enmity- are nice (if not hugely consequential), and the eva- is pretty meaningless. Yes, they COULD make Innin even more powerful (throw in some Store TP, TP Bonus, WSD, PDL, crit dmg, whatever). But as Buukki alluded to, they seem to be somewhat resistant to improving NIN DPS, so I'm not getting any hopes up.

Positional requirement for Innin is a little annoying, but I can see why they did it - to prevent NIN from tanking a mob while getting Innin benefits. Would be nice if Innin didn't require being behind the mob, and instead just require that you are not directly in front of it (the anti-Overwhelm), but this is a relatively minor gripe. Yonin positional requirement isn't a big deal, just go stand in front of the mob when you want to tank it.

Yonin: replace enemy crit for pdtII-5%
Innin: add attack bonus, stp, or crit dmg
Both: remove positioning and decay

Why replace enemy crit- on Yonin? That's a useful tanking stat, arguably more valuable than PDTII for a NIN (where the real danger in tanking is usually that one lucky hit that lands with shadows down). I'd see that change as a downgrade, TBH. If anything, I would hope that if they wanted to add stuff to stances, just add to both instead of taking useful stats away from one/both.

If you're looking to add significant defensive benefits to Yonin, I'd look more to Magic Evasion or Magic Defense Bonus (or hell, just dtII- or mdtII- instead of pdtII-), since magical damage that bypasses shadows (JA or AoE spells) tends to be more troublesome for NIN to deal with than physical. Part of why I <3 my 5/5 Ken+1 set for tanking when shadows are up (swapping in some enm+ gear for utsu/voke, and a DT- set for oshit moments and predictable moves that go through shadows).

I'd be very surprised to see a change to stance positioning requirements. Just can't see them removing it from Innin and letting NIN get those offensive benefits while tanking a mob, and positioning requirement is a minimal impact to Yonin.

But like I said in my previous post, I guess I might be in the minority in that I think Yonin/Innin (especially Yonin with the big time enmity tools) are kinda fine as is, outside of them being able to be dispelled. Not that I'd complain about Innin getting even more offensive power, but I don't think it's unreasonable as-is.

I'm in a spot where I cant even afford the space for enmity gear on my ninja. And I never really needed it. I think it holds hate just fine. I wouldnt mind them getting rid of the decay effect but I'm sorry. I don't think its needed either. Relic R15 is a power house. Or even shun spamming with aeonic it's hard to pull hate off a ninja. I never even get the option to use innin because I'd have hate in no time.

Now I wouldnt mind some freakin duration to our ninjitsu. Or some more magic acc. Maybe potency?

Holding hate purely through damage isn't always an option for a tanking job. Yonin absolutely needs to be made non-dispellable and there's no modern reason for the +enmity to decay and for it to come with -accuracy.

NIN doesn't need "normal" damage mitigation as in DT/MDT/PDT. You have shadows for that.
What would be cool is what is present in other games.
If you have Yonin up and shadows get wiped by an AoE attack or multihit attack, then that specific attack (or remaining hit) will do less damage.

In terms of FFXI that could be a dynamic DT2-5% that works only for the TP move that removes the shadows, not for the following attacks/moves.
That would still make NIN unviable for holding multiple targets, but way more reliable for several other fights where currently NIN works but it's very very risky.


The -Crit is sorta stupid. I mean you're not supposed to be getting hit, and it supposedly doesn't work on AoE attacks that wipe your shadows, so really, why?
I'd rather get like a small amount of Enmity Retention+ rather than -Crits or simple PDT.
Just my 2 cents.

You're obviously supposed to be Yonin tanking without shadows for the counters fellas. That's why crit- makes perfect sense.

you know, i legit have thought about trying a max counter build on nin.

So there are two instances of counter on Ninja that are unique:

-Countering with shadows down (normal counter)
-Countering off of a parried attack (Tactical Parry Job Points, 20% chance)

If I understand the logic for counter on Ninja with shadows, You cannot counter with shadows up (or so people have claimed) UNLESS the counter is from a parry. This means that adding counter gear does absolutely zero for counter rate, unless you either have no shadows, or parry an attack. There's no way to gear for parry counters, but you could put some high counter in your midcast utsu set, to possibly evade a hit while you're re-applying. It might just be better to add Parry skill/augment gear to your tanking set if you really care about Counter, as that would do more than straight counter+ would with shadows up.

I wish counter worked through shadows without a tactical parry counter proc. It would make empyrean +1 legs far more attractive as a tanking option. They are already a good utsusemi down/yonin tanking piece

51% 53% if you add Amar Cluster
ItemSet 367202

Herculean Hands/Feet with Counter+4-5 is way better, due to TA and other stats
Body you can rock Otronif Harness +1 with the da/pdt/mdt, but I wouldn't bother downgrading that much. Herculean Body is better anyways
Head you can use Rao Kabuto +1 for high accuracy, since counter will fail if it misses

+8% if /mnk

When does a tanking NIN usually die? Aside from OHKO gimmicks, it's usually when they get shadows wiped by an AoE move, then get hit with a quick strong attack (often an unlucky crit) in the short window of time before they can reapply shadows. Since that one badly timed crit can be a matter of life and death, enemy crit- does have some practical benefit and I certainly don't mind having it on a tanking stance.

Yes, you should have shadows up the vast majority of the time, making it irrelevant most of the time when you're tanking (but the same goes for xDT-, aside from moves that ignore shadows). And I'm not saying crit- is some massively important NIN tanking stat that changes any strategies... But it's not that crazy to include as another little tanking perk.

Hey what if they made the NIN update awesome and allowed multiple shadows to absorb AoE attacks with Yonin up?

I know, LOLnoway it would happen. But damn, to dream the unreasonable dream.

Other people made that suggestion through the years. Making so there's a chance (or 100%! <3) that moves that would normally wipe shadows, would actually consume a certain number of shadows instead.

Would work so nice into making NIN more reliable as a tank in a larger amount of content.
I think after all that's probably one of the biggest issues: reliability. If all goes well and you're lucky NIN works pretty well even nowadays, but it's kinda a gamble most of the time, it brings much more risks compared to other tanks. Less space for errors/randomness, we could say?

Such a solution would really be nice but they would need to think of a way to "balance" it.
And with that I mean that they would need to avoid so people could exploit it to turn NIN into an "impossible to kill" DD, rather than a tank.


If I were a developer, that's what I would be afraid of. Because at that point you could say like, I dunno, let's have a proper tank and then use a pt of NIN dds using Yonin but also their Enmity- Ninjutsu and Sirvent (so they don't get hate) and make them stay in melee range spamming their WS with very little risk of being killed, or even very little need to be healed at all.
See where I'm tryin to get to?
So yeah, they would need to find a really good way so that such a thing could only be used for real tanking, and not exploited in any other way.

I'm not sure there's anything that could truly work for that, other than something that reduces the NIN's DPS output.
I think that was the purpose of the -accuracy on Yonin actually, maybe? Or one of the purposes.


So I dunno. Considering NIN doesn't have to rely on DPS>Enmity to keep monsters on them (it's not even remotely efficient I think) but mostly on Utsusemi spamming (which is quite good! As it was recently proved) then I suppose we could afford a stat that reduces your damage by a certain % when Yonin is up.
At that point you can make Yonin much more powerful without running in the risk of it being exploited for DPSing instead of tanking.



I dunno, your thoughts Capu?

Agreed that they would want to weaken Yonin damage output in order to give it something that powerful for tanking (though I guess some would say DD RUN refutes that point since it can put out some serious damage while being really sturdy, but I digress)... And the 75 cap stuff like Acc/Atk penalties were significant back when the stances were first implemented, but kinda laughable now (unless it's just a massive penalty) and not really a great solution, since people will just stack more buffs until it's a non-issue... And it would have to be relatively easy to code, with their skeleton dev crew...

Is the answer Physical Damage Limit MINUS?

Sets a hard cap on offensive power regardless of buffs that's lower than a typical DD, which is a pretty steep price to pay, but kinda reasonable in exchange for a tool to really let NIN be a viable tank in a substantial majority of scenarios again, as opposed to the now niche role of the occasional blink tank friendly fight.

On the flip side, PDL+ could also be a straightforward answer to helping buff Innin's offensive potential. Not that I think NIN is attack capped as often as a lot of people assume, so it would be sometimes useless... but with adequate buffs, perhaps!

I'd sure be in favor of such a change, would shake things up a bit and be quite interesting to play. I actually kinda get a kick out of NIN tanking these days when given the opportunity. It feels likely that S-E wouldn't pull the trigger on major changes like that due to being risk averse and fearing a new broken meta. But then again, that never stopped them from allowing stuff like the recent SMN shenanigans, the current power of RUN, etc...

The point you raise about RUN is valid, other people have raised it in the past and it's hard to argue against it, it's valid.

Altough I'm not sure we could put that and the proposed change for NIN (shadows absorbing, even partially, moves that would normally stripe all shadows when you have Yonin up) on the same level.
On one hand you have partial damage mitigation, on the other hand you have potential complete damage negation, heh.

Also, I feel like a big part of RUN's damage mitigation (other than the huge Meva/MDB, that's part of RUN's niche and I'd like it to stay that way) comes from two things:
1) RUN's Mythic weapon with its 25% PDT2
2) RUN's high parrying rate, mostly through inquartata

For 2) to work you sorta need the monster to be fixated on yourself, so this makes the "let's bring a bunch of RUNs acting as DD" point moot. Which is why it's sorta "balanced" and can't thoroughfully be exploited.
1) is kinda a feat of a specific item, not built in the job itself.
NIN could have the same with, I dunno, a specific set of weapons that boost Yonin but have low damage? That's a potential solution to the issue maybe.

Last but not least I don't think RUN's damage output using a Hybrid build and riding Epeolatry's AM3 is compareable to the damage output of a proper DPS, say NIN.
I could be wrong here but RUN's DPS truly shines when you're buffcapped and use Lionheart. In all other situations it's a very respectable DPS output but nowhere close to what a "real" DD can do, no?


Glad to be proven wrong but I feel NIN with a change like the proposed one to Utsusemi and without any sort of negative countermeasure to lower the overall DPS, would be way beyond what RUN can do in Hybrid builds nowadays.


The PDL minus idea you proposed is quite nice anyway. If potent enough, I feel it could be good enough to counterbalance the strength of the proposed Utsusemi-during-Yonin change without running in the risk of people abusing of such a change for pure DPS purposes, like mentioned before.