SAM/NINFollow

It has it's uses. The main argument against it is that it doesnt add anything to your DPS. For example, /WAR gives you attack bonus, double attack, berserk. /DRG gives you attack bonus, accuracy bonus, jumps, and opens up more gear options. /NIN has nothing that directly adds to the DPS of a 2-handed class.

That said, a lot of people still use it for its defensive bonuses, and a lot of party leaders still ask for it because they don't understand how Seigan/Third Eye works (or perhaps because theyve had experiences with SAMs who dont understand how it works...) It has to be said, Utsusemi is more consistent with its damage reduction, and working them together makes for some very solid defensive play. The biggest issue really is that playing defensively in a merit party (beyond reasonable precautions) is going to be slow going.

/NIN is situationally useful against mobs that have strong single target magic, TE wiping AOE, or moves you absolutely can't risk getting hit by. In a merit situation none of those situations is true, in fact SETE tends to work -better- than utsu in exp since it absorbs every hit of a multihit WS (pecking fury, vorpal, rushing). Utsusemi also lowers your DoT considerably (casting time), while /NIN does not give you any of the offensive boosts offered by other subs. It's just a inefficient play style advocated by lazy mages and party leaders that don't trust their members not to be idiots.

Correct. You should never sub NIN in a meripo. Especially with a competent RDM and competent melees in your party to share hate with.

Thank you all for answering my question. now i know why i havent seen that combo before.

i approve of everything in this post except putting 'but' in the edit explanation.

(comments like that are so wittgenstein; he's always saying that the platonist isn't speaking falsely but rather that s/he's adding "isn't that weird?" to sh*t that isn't weird)

wittgenstein aside, semantics are good. everyone, repeat after me: there's nothing wrong with talking about semantics. what could be more important in understanding someone than knowing what the words they're using mean? also, i like the wrong/bad right/good distinction quoted above. well, also, there is something inherently wrong with SAM/NIN in meripo... it's like going SAM/no sub. no go.

awesome.

i'm not being hostile either. i thought my reply might be mildly offensive, but hoped it would just be mildly weird. as for the rest of the subsequent post, maybe i'll come back and throw it around later, but for now i must be off.

I totally just got b***hed out for going sam/thf into a Caedarva Mire imp party...

"You should sub nin man, a good pld doesn't need a thf to hold hate...and sam/thf is only for sky gods. Learn your job."

That's a cute thing to say since I took hate without weapon skilling!

So I told them "Let me show you what happens when I play like I can't put hate on someone else."

Sneak attack gekko (with soboro...?) for 1067. Couldn't get the enemy off me and I died. Simple as that. I'm still ticked about my Marinara Pizza +1 I wasted. lol

The tard PLD who couldn't keep hate also had a terrible habit of standing 20 feet from the monster she's "tanking". So, trick attack was out of the question. Over-confident tard.

So anyway I agree with everyone in the thread who contributed that /nin IS useless for sam in exp parties... and provides no assistance in doing your job well. If you need to avoid getting killed when taking hate, just avoid taking hate altogether by placing your hefty weapon skill damage on the pld! Then you can run behind the enemy and sneak attack+ws for even more damage after that. Yes, I also understand that if there's not a designated tank, then thief sub will not work well other than for sneak attack, for a damage boost that other subs provide better. My point is, if there's a pld, the samurai is better off subbing thf... It's helpful to them, it's helpful to the pld, and even the other dd's who can unleash without taking hate. I had a pld today ask me to run back to whitegate and sub thf, because I went sam/war expecting no tank.

Their justification for subbing ninja is "I've seen sam/nin do 2000 damage gekko" ... Well I'm sure they were also Lv75 fully merited with overwhelm and hagun. The party I was in was Lv69. Besides, if a sam/nin can break 2000, i'm pretty sure a sam/war could do better...

Edited, Oct 1st 2009 6:00am by StephisaMAN

I love when ppl say "/NIN destroys your XP". Kinda triggers the "your DDs suck" thoughts in me.

The counter-sense however is that the better your DDs are, the less you'll need the over-protection of Utsusemi. /NIN with good melees will (agreeing 100% with Mysso, who in my humble opinion gave the best answer here) severely slow down the kill rate, although that doesn't necessarily means breaking chains. Thus it doesn't kill your XP. At most, you'll need about 5 extra minutes to get the same XP in a several hours long party (this of course, can be considered fallacy, but so can any empiric argument saying otherwise).

But coming back to the original argument, if your melees are good enough to keep chain as a full /NIN party, then they sure are good enough to share hate properly and kill mobs before they can eat anyone's SETE.

Strictly to merit parties, I think Drigo got it perfectly right with this:

Gotta add to that however the willingness to spend time with such party in detriment of spending time forming / waiting a better one.

Outside merit parties there are (maybe "should still be" would be more appropriated) several uses for /NIN, but this is given certain specific activities, and I'm not sure of your interest about them.

There was a lot of math done on the SAM/WAR vs. SAM/DRG issue on KI I believe it was, not too far back. I'll try to find it for you

Shinta I normally would agree with you. I prefer SAM/DRG for the reasons I've stated above. But my question was the realistic percentage time that a SAM would have Hasso up vs Seigan. Both are on a 1m timer so there is a gap between when the monster is no longer kicking your a$$ and when you can reapply Hasso. Or more importantly, the amount of time you have Seigan up to prevent the monster from kicking your a$$. The better the player, the more time they would have Seigan up. Also seigan isn't preemptive, the player must manually activate it upon being on the receiving end of the mobs fury. This means you get hate and the monster hits you before you've even had time to react, hopefully by the second to third hit you've activated your defense's.

As for canceling out Hasso to reapply Utsusemi, depends on how bad you want to optimize things. There is a windower plugin (ohh no!!) called Cancel. It allows you to cancel out buff icons from a macro. Basically you put it in your Utsusemi macro so its instant. Then you hit Hasso again immediately after you see the icon appear (regardless of the animation). Ni itself doesn't take any real time to cast, its Ichi that sucks the most.

But still... I know SAM/DRG full time Hasso would kick the a$$ of anything a SAM/NIN could do... but what if I'm forced to full time (or nearly so) Seigan?

Its a chick vs egg arguement.. the better the player... the more defensive options they need. Unless they always merit with other players of the exact or higher skill / gear / merit level.

While I don't agree with the "sam/thf is only for sky gods" portion of this, when did /THF become an acceptable sub for XP PTs? It's not as bad as, say, /WHM would be but wow, really?

The problem with the wording of these two comments is that they seem to suggest that /THF and /NIN as being interchangeable as subjobs. They are not.

If you need /NIN, chances are there's a nasty AoE or single-target spell you need to not be hit by. If you need /THF, chances are you need to keep the mob fixed on the tank while mages and other DDs chip away at it (Sky Gods, HNMs, etc).

As Shintasama pointed out: In an XP/Merit party neither of these situations is true. If you're /WAR and hitting the ground too often (read: at all) because you're pulling a disproportionate amount of hate you, your DoT and your party's XP/hr would be best served by you holding back, researching enmity, and riding hate lines a bit more attentively than you would be switching to /NIN or /THF.

Edit: That said, sh*t happens and sometimes a Skoffin will drop a Fang Rush/Deadly Dive on you the split second you pull hate with shadows or TE down. The point is, this should be a rare occurrence. If you start off a fight dropping an lolepeen Tachi: Yukikaze against an imp before the PLD has time to Flash/Voke, you deserve the facerape you're likely to receive

Edited, Oct 1st 2009 12:24pm by Beltenebros

The reason I like subbing thief is because I can go all out and not pull hate most of the time. I can pretty much get away with anything after a trick attack + tachi gekko on a decent pld. I am not saying it is interchangable with /nin... In fact I think /nin is pretty stupid for a lot of jobs.



Wait... what? o_o

Edited, Oct 1st 2009 1:11pm by StephisaMAN

Yeah that's true, it depends on how the party is setup mainly. If there's no actual tank then /thf is almost more useless than /smn lol... Sneak attack would be the only thing to bat an eye at, and even then it's maybe 150%~ of the normal ws damage, once per minute...

Well I'm not at merit levels for SAM yet. :P

Another reason I like using /thf is so I don't get my damn food eaten and tp stolen every pull... The damage you lose from having tp jacked or food downed every 15 seconds is pretty bad, no?

Edited, Oct 1st 2009 2:35pm by StephisaMAN

I subbed war to about 74 occasionally subbing thf along the way depending on the situation. Been 75 for a while now and have had the opportunity to recieve a bunch of various gear to build several different setups.

I never meripo but I do limbus, nyzul, sky, sea, dynamis, MMM, campiagn and various other events. The one thing I don't do anymore is meripo because I'm capped at exp and I prefer campaign to cap off any exp loses.

I have pretty much every job there is exept pup and brd available to sub at 37 or better and I can honestly say that I cannot remember the last time I subbed war beyond testing a new weapon or equipment.

THF, NIN and DNC are really the only subs I use and in testing out WAR sub I certainly notice hitting harder and the added DA proc but I don't see a difference in WS

May just be me, but that seems contradictory...

It's either have a damage boosting sub and no food, or a hate control sub and food... The /thf wouldn't be getting their food stolen lol... nor would the /war samurai if the sam/thf actually has a decent ws set...

I'm not dissing on /war or /drg... Those are actually good subs... You missed the part where I said I don't sub thf without a pld...

My thoughts on this aren't up for debate... I know what I sub thf for and why it's effective for me and my parties. If it isn't for you, tough luck.

Edited, Oct 2nd 2009 4:10am by StephisaMAN

All this stuff about food being stolen? A good SAM will take ~4 stacks of mithkabobs to a colibri party. After a fight when your food has been stolen, you pop another.

Marinara Pizza+1 = ~6K, 2-3 stacks of Mithkabobs = ~10K. Not much difference, but for a colibri pty, it makes all the difference, and it shows others you know what your doing.



Its not about wealth. If you can't make a few K to help your SAM perform better with either cheap ACC or cheap ATT food, experienced players will just forget about you or write you off as gimp. As the game is now 8years on, experienced players are not exactly rare.

This kinda thing is what being a good SAM is all about,

LVL40+ you gear for ACC, if your new, you farm for Hauby, 2xwoodsmans, life belt etc. Being 'good' at a job isn't just gaining experience points, its putting the outside work in too.

If Gil really is that bad you can't afford mithkabobs, then eat Meat Jeryk's. They are still STR+3 ATT=30 @ 1.2K/stack which still shows your making an effort.



If your a DD, during a Colibri pty, and that marinara lasts you the whole pty, your doing many many things wrong.


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Ok, I hate coming across as an ass, these job forums are here to help players better their game. My first 10-15 posts on Alla 3-4years back were all sub-default, because I went on about how VIT rings makes Asuran Fists do uber dmg etc, I couldn't understand why everyone disagreed with me until I read the recent threads at he time, and properly learned how to gear/play MNK. Everyone called me a sock and troll (it was that bad) but all I really was, was a noob thinking my own experience was top.

so StephisaMAN, if your serious about SAM, and/or need gil to help, list your gear, level, tp/ws sets and ill help you sort your SAM out to be uber good with what you have, and help you make the gil to get the gear you might need.





Edited, Oct 2nd 2009 10:23am by Sandmasterr

yuuup


Cap on recast is 50% so if you cast with hasso up (1.5x recast time) you're only getting your cast time to 25% off. This limits you to ~6.6 shadows a min, which is crap compared to seigan, especially since multihit WS completely clear utsu blinks. Whats worse though, is hasso increases casting time by 1.5x as well, so if you're constantly getting pounded you'd be spending ~20seconds of every minute casting, killing your dmg. Having hasso up does not come anywhere close to making up for this.

I don't think I've ever died in an AU party, or had a mage run out of mp. I can solo/dual heal all melee colibri PTs as a SAM/DNC for @#%^s sake. If that sort of bullsh*t is happening in your parties you need to get competent healers, not gimp your melee.

If we're talking about meripo colibri, either have pimp gears and eat a mithkabob or pop a sushi/regular gears while using polearm.

Really, if you're that well merited and geared compared to the rest of the party, you might as well throw up Seigan, spring for some damage reduction and eva gear for when TE wears, and call yourself the tank.

when i would party SAM/DRG (which is the only way i'd party on SAM), i think it was about 95% hasso, 5% seigan. seigan was only for HP dips, MP dips, obvious hate-going-to-be-sustained-awhile type moments. i also used third eye without seigan quite often.

this is for pick up parties and ls/semi-ls parties alike. if i wanted to go /NIN, i'd be MNK/NIN. i've XP'd SAM/NIN a few times and it didn't ruin my life (likely i was drunk and partying during JP hours), but there's no point to it. seigan/hasso have those tiny recast times for a reason. anyway, i'm chiming in to answer the curiosity question, not argue. in my experience with varying healers and melees (never being outparsed on SAM in years), i'd say it's like 90/10 or so hasso/seigan, if not 95/5--always /DRG.

apologies on not reading any post after the one to which i responded.

edit: whoa whoa whoa. actually, if you're looking for /DRG vs /WAR opinions, i generally partied with GK instead of polearm, so /DRG is the obvious winner (haste, y/g/k pDIF bonus). i didn't do enough parties to really get a feel for /DRG vs /WAR with polearm, though the comparison is a bit obvious... /DRG wins handily when super buffed, /WAR wins handily when not. edit: also this.

Edited, Oct 3rd 2009 3:52am by milich

Those are some great pointers, I will take a lot of them into consideration. Well as for fulltiming Sipahi turban, I would but I use Fourth Division haube now. Forgot I had that in storage.

I've been working pretty hard on CoP lately (especially to get soboro) and I'm on mission 4-3 now... Hit a road block when my static group ditched me and went ahead while I was sleeping... As for Rise of the Zilart, I don't have an excuse other than I haven't started any real work on it, I'm still on the Temple of Uggalepih.

One thing I've been wondering, is the Askar Korazin something I should be working for as well? I'm halfway to 72 now and I'd really like to have that piece, but it just seems to me like it's better suited for some other jobs that don't have access to much Store TP gear... After all the accuracy on my Haubergeon isn't something I want to lose any time soon.

Also, I have dusk gloves from PLD... Should I use those over Ochimusha Kote? (at 72)

Oh, I just edited this in, but my newest addition to the WS set is Warwolf Belt now that I'm Lv71.

Edited, Oct 3rd 2009 2:15pm by StephisaMAN

Actually getting access to sky is very easy, there's only 3 pretty simple battlefields, but I can imagine finding ppl to do that nowadays is tough.

Try and form a new CoP group, a Rajas ring is so amazing and won't come off your left hand ever on SAM.

Once 75 with 4merits in STP (i did Stp first), and until you get a Rajas ring, you'll need Hachiman kote & Shinimusha haidate in your tp set for your 6hit. Fuma's on feet are generally better than dusk hands because they don't have -movment speed. You also need 4/5 stp merits.

Once you get Rajas ring, you can use a different leg piece for tp (this is why I say sky as end game priority, becasue 2 great leg pieces, Byakko's haidate and Shura haidate come from it, along with Osode for WS & as an option for /DNC tp body solo or campaign.



Askar just looks good, Hauby is god for most important things, Askar just has situational uses like much other armor pieces do. Using Askar over Hauby means a loss of 6% ACC (or 8% ACC HQ) which is HUGE in activity's like endgame and meriting.

Okote's don't really have a use for a 75SAM.

If you need a pair of fuma's, they drop pretty regular from Copy Cat KSNM, at least 40% drop rate.



Yeah, Soboro is just an amazing weapon. I had SAM @ 49 for over a year because it took 5 runs for me to get it.

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I did notice Soboro's greatness dip a bit when I was 72-early75 in comparison to Hagun /WAR, but now its picked up again (/WAR) because (and this is what i think) with 5/5 overwhelm, not only does soboro have the fSTR advantage, but the extra ws's means the 19% ws dmg from overwhelm is presant more (talking /WAR only here to anyone who might want to discuss it) we obviously know /DRG's capabilities.

It will all get easier with STP merits.

At 75, Haste/Acc set > all, so yeah, swift belt is pretty much the best you can put on your waste except the haste+6 belts.

Walahra Turban, Swift belt, Fuma's will be 12% haste, that'll jump to 17% haste if you manage to get a byakko haidate from sky. /DRG is the best SJ for a Soboro build @75, as long as you use the wyvern Earring with it for an additional 5% haste.

8/8 GKT merits + /DRG = an additional 13% ACC. That should sort your ACC problems out once your 75, otherwise, if you merit @ MJSP, just pop Marinara pizza.

There should be no need for Attila's earring, if you work at sky, you'll be able to get a Bushimonimi from ZM14 Ark Angels. Thats a nice earring to pair with Brutal for your /WAR tp set, and saves buying a Triumph earring for your ws set. Note though, if you do a Dual Wield job like Nin or Thf, then suppa is one of the best earrings in the game.