SAM/NIN?

Thanks for your input, everyone.

Sam/nin-->Ni-->TE/SE--->Ichi stacked with haste and soboro make's you pretty good tank^^

I main heal in alot in things like nyzul and limbus or sky/sea. sam/anything vs sam/nin is a huge diff in lvl of survivability and of course being less of a burden on my mp. And yes third eye can absorb more you also have to keep using it and using it even if you dont have hate. And loss of hasso is almost as bad sometimes worse then potential of subjob. Also try counting anticipates like you can shadows i dare you. Too many times ive seen a mob take down Third eye unexpectantly just to ws or EES or something and bam dead tank. If you really want to up dmg while maintaining survivability (at least in situations without lots of AOE that shadows can absorb) /dnc or for that matter /drg since a good one will outparse sam/thf or saw/war anyday.

I guess if you can't do damage to where you take hate... then yeah /nin is pretty much worthless.
If you can't take hate then maybe you should quit sam~
Pretty much, /nin is the most useful subjob a sam can choose, Unless! it's in sky~ then you /thf to trick attack tanks. SE/TE fails at keeping you alive, only useful at getting ichi back up, don't listen to these people -.-
It's obvious they can't dish out the damage w/o having war sub.

Maybe I missed someone saying it, but /NIN is also useful for anything that has resistance to silence. SE/TE will not do anything to save you from a single target spell off something that doesn't get interrupted or silenced easily.

From my experiences on RDM in a single mage merit party it is my problem to manage my MP. /nin is a horrible sub in meritpo for DD!

and you sir are the one of the reasons i don't do nyzul isle with anyone that wants me /NIN. f u good sir :P

i tanked most of my last nyzul isle 30-35 run as SAM/WAR. just gotta use Seigan + Third Eye macro asap if you get hate. and i can tank until the mob is dead even on NMs. also, if the mob hits especially hard and you have 20 seconds til TE is up again. might wanna throw up defender, which will help you lose hate and take less damage. sure occasionally they use AoE spells, but thats when i either decide to pull out iron ram lance, to {run away!}, or to take it like a man.

Also I personally LOVE SAM/DNC, its great for survivability especially with SE/TE up. But it also gives you support options for you party including extra heals, erase with 15 second recast, and defense down. And if you time your sekkenoki + meditate correctly, you can still pull off a good number of ws's if you're trying not to go below 100 tp. But in nyzul isle thats not really a must. I'd much rather have the survivability and support options of /DNC than /NIN.

Actually taking into account the OP's current levels...

The trouble with SAM around 60 is that you really start kicking a bit too much *** for your own good. Chances are that's why people are asking you to sub NIN, but at the same time going /NIN instead of /WAR you're kicking reasonably less *** and don't really need /NIN. It's a bit of a double edged sword and you have to judge the pt before you leave town, if you're low on healing power you might have to self-gimp with /NIN so you're not an MP suck, but if you've got some decent mages /WAR will rock.

That said, /NIN is a valuable sub for just about any job and levelling it is only going to hurt your pocketbook. As much as I personally dislike subbing NIN it is a necessary evil to keep me from spending all my time getting a buffer. If you really piss something off as SAM/NIN it's very nice to just rotate through Utsusemi and Third Eye until the tank gets hate back, or the mob dies.

SAM has a fairly limited number of useful subs, but as an alternative to /NIN there is always /DNC. It's a great match to SAM's TP generation and can make up for weak mages. Plus, its use for soloing rivals, and might even surpass, that of /NIN.

I think I might do that instead. SAM/DNC. DNC is fun to play.

That's more of a solo thing to do.

You are now my friend :)
And if you were on my server I'd help you with 31-35 nyzul isle right now lol



And you sir have made a wonderful choice ;)
SAM/DNC is definately one of my favorite jobs to play as.

I can heal but alas... I have no mage jobs to speak of. -.-

Hell yes! Especially as a Galak I found it fun to be a "mage" without having to worry about MP. :3


lol I finally got through to 41 a little while ago, but I got burnt out on climbing and have just been doing boss floors. :P

Lolwut? It's been known and acknowledged for a long time now in the endgame SAM community that /nin is completely useless in meripo. In fact, with a decent ohshi macro you can effectively tank even in Nyzul floor runs (although I wouldn't suggest anyone doing it in gimp /shout runs). /NIN has its uses, and it is VERY limited.

Refer to this old but good post made by Richardd:

http://killingifrit.com/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=165322&view=findpost&p=3458328

/nin isn't worthless... people who don't want to sub anything other than /war or /thf might claim it is, but there are situations when it is fantastic to have shadows. The style of your play and the effort and intelligence you put into merits and gear are just as important as your subjob in merit parties. Fact of the matter is, if you merit GK, overwhelm, and store tp, maximize your dmg output through using quality gear and good str and tp macros, and simply do your best to maintain the efficiency of your actions while fighting, your damage output will crush a good number of the lazy players out there that will argue constantly that /nin is a waste. They're using /thf and /war as a crutch to put up decent numbers, and have no versatility.

NIN isn't worthless...for every other melee DD job. I live and die by it on MNK for nearly everything except zergs. SAM already has very good innate defensive Job abilities available to them and adding shadows is pointless unless you're in a situation where you absolutely CANNOT take any damage.

***is situational but after doing just about everything the game has to offer (outside of lowmanning certain events) it's extremely rare for me to have to sub /nin and meripo is definitely not one of those rare occasions.



Ok, I don't even know how to respond to this one (LOL). I'm being trolled, aren't I? Next you'll say that you TP in Askar body without an Amano ^^

So you're suggesting that shadows outweigh the benefits of double attack, berserk, warcry, innate attack bonus and defense bonuses or having a critical weapon skill and hate transfer abilities?

A subjob is not a crutch in any way shape or form. It's used to maximize the potential and purpose your job serves, or in some cases (particularly for soloing) to make up for exposed weaknesses and to mitigate damage (read: /nin). For you to suggest that /nin is the say all end all sub for damage dealers and that /war and /thf, and other feasible subjobs are a crutch for dealing good damage, is quite simply laughable.

Totally agree.

Any job can be uber at anything, but to have only 1 subjob for all situations is the crutch itself. Having mulitple subjobs (and mulitple jobs with multiple subjobs for each of them is even better) can turn a lolplayer into a lolendgameplayer.

Any good player would know, and will tell you, that things are situational for everything.

Not going \nin in nyzule just piss off mages, because then they gotta use more mp than needed, and then they have to rest and you loose time because of you not beeing \nin and loosing more HP than needed. If i'm melee in nyzule i'm allways \nin, if i'm RDM i hate it when people arent \nin.
\nin is good for SAM too, for some events.

This^ /nin is a survival sub job not a 24/7 sub like it is for war and is very situational just as /thf is.

/war is the sub of choice for sam because of the obvious offensive bonus and the fact sam has third eye to give tank time to re-establish hate control after sam does ws.

But, as sam is used in a variety of situations, some where (like in ISNM 3k jade sepulcher) there is no tank present and you could be holding hate for a long time third eye wont cover you the whole fight then you go /nin.

Sorry wont even ready all threads, im gonna be simmple.

you go against DD mobs screw nin.
but no SE/TE gonna save your *** from flare2 end else.
Plan your SJ accordingly.

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa.

Hold it there buckaroo.

WAR/NIN is not always the best solution. WAR/SAM is very good as long as you know when to Hasso and when to Seigan/Third Eye. Its just like SAM in all cases, where its very situational.

See, my WAR is a 6 hit WAR when I sub /NIN (meaning all it takes is 6 hits to have 100% TP to WS with) but 5 hit WAR when I sub /SAM. I never dual wield now that I have Fort Axe, because my TP gain is a ton faster with Fort Axe than it is with Axe/Joytoy, not to mention the fact that I triple attack/quad attack a lot with Fort Axe (mind you, I triple attack/quad attack more with dual wield, the TP gain is not the same).

So, I prefer to go /SAM at all times, including merit parties, but so few leaders allow me to go /SAM because A) I'm always tanking, including as BLM, and a Stun BLM at that, and B) They don't understand the benifits of a GA WAR....

Did you even read what I wrote? I didn't say that shadows outweigh the benefits of /war. I didn't say that /nin is the end all sub for DD's. I said that many lazy players often use /war and /thf to give themselves boosts to their damage, and flail at the idea of /nin because it would reduce them significantly because they don't properly merit or gear themselves or play the job well... hence their subjob being used as a crutch for them. /nin is a good option at times, and if you do your job right the damage that you lose out on by having it can be minimized, and in comparison to lesser players, you can be more productive /nin than they often are as /thf or /war.

Yeah, it's RDM's job to manage his MP the best he can--I abuse the heck out of my Regen macro, steal a tick or two of rest whenever I can, always have Saction Refresh, and swap in auto refresh gear (Duelist) in standing, resting, haste, and refresh macros just to be sure that 1 MP/tick is there. Heck, I even pick up an Imperial Coffee to shave a second or two everytime I take MP rest (as opposed to cookies) when I'm not rushed to camp.

It's also a RDM healer's job to keep people out of orange HP. MP really just go *poof* fast when DDs make the RDM toss out Cure IV > Cure III > Cure IV > Cure III in less than 20 seconds, and 15 seconds later they make the mage do that again. There's just no way to sustain that no matter how carefully one manages MP.

Maybe I just have bad luck with pickup group merit parties...

* * *

By the way, I never did understand the logic behind "I do more damage so we kill faster and so I take less damage" argument. As far as I can tell, to save me MP, I need DDs to take less damage per minute, regardless of how long the monsters live. Whether we kill in 45 seconds or 26 seconds, there's practically no pause between fighting in a working meripo, right?

I DO see how much easier it is for DDs--even the "Third Eye only" ones--to avoid excessive damage if the front line member do about same amount of damage, so the critter isn't focused on killing one person exclusively, and everyone can reasonably recover whatever damage mitigation spell/ability timer(s) they use.

* * *

IMO, it's worth repeating that nothing kills exp/hour for a meripo like an K.O.; if you don't die, and don't get your healer killed, or kill a fellow DD by sponging up all the MP, then go for whichever SJ you think is good. (For SAM, I guess /DRG is the "best"?)

When/if there's doubt, may I humbly suggest a DD consider /NIN, and use those lovely Utsusemi ninjutsu... ._.

I like that >.>

"When in doubt, sub nin.." XD

Says ushi Sam. LOL

Anyone crying for Sam to sub nin outside of /sh pickup Nyzul doesn't have a damn clue how to play Sam.

Itazura gets to the heart of why I love to merit on SAM/DNC.

Take if from the mage's perspective. Every single time the melee lands a hit, they drain anywhere from 10-37 HP back. I say 10 as a base low end, and 37 is the highest I've seen with my Soboro (450 delay, so a higher delay Great Axe, Polearm, or Scythe might get slightly more.

During a single attack round for every melee in the party, you're looking at potentially an entire Cure III worth of overall healing that is saved. On top of that, if I ever find myself at 140+ TP because of multiple hits from Soboro, I just drop Divine Waltz, then WS.

I almost always skillchain off other people in the party to squeeze out more damage, but with Soboro, I get in the 500-600 range consistently on weaponskills and can drop 2-3 per fight (except Rana, which I'll usually only use to setup another SAM). With 45% Haste or more(20% Gear, Hasso, Haste Spell), and more if I have March, I basically hit non-stop with Soboro.

Not only does the Platinum Grip +1 proc a lot more often, which helps everyone, but I drain HP so fast that I can face-tank most merit mobs easily until someone else drops a WS and pulls hate. I actually try to maintain 200 HP below maximum, and usually ask healers not to cure me if I'm above 800 HP.

As a fall-back, I have a heavy evasion set (280 skill +32 Evasion, while maintaining 6-hit!!!) and SE/TE with TE merits, so I can go defensive when I need to. A lot of time, I'm actually the one who drops off the current mob and starts wailing on the next one while the other people finish it off. When mob gets to about 20%, just drop Desperate Flourish on the new mob and change target.

How do I have steps? Because just like with Divine Waltz, if I find myself at 110+ TP, I will gladly Quickstep then WS. It's a small bonus, but it helps everyone.

I guess it's just a style thing, but it usually allows for the RDM to Haste everyone and cut back a lot on MP spent so that in that "oh shi" moment they actually have some in reserve. /DNC is just a lot more fun to me, and it really works well once you know how to use it.

While I'd gladly use /NIN for ZM16 or possibly a few other things (like tanking ToAU22 Khimaira 13), you'll never see me /NIN for merit parties. If a party leaders asks me to use it, I'll either convince them to let me merit /DNC, or they can find another SAM. I'd rather solo merits chaining Phuabo than beating on birds /NIN.

Just for lulz, friend tanking Serket last night on SAM/DNC barely took a lick of damage. He has far from awesome gear, not full merits, and it was a piece of cake. I was on WHM and other than Haste, Regen III, and Poisona, barely had to give him anything.

SAM\DNC makes you waste TP on healing youself instead of WSing, this will gimp your dmg way more than going \nin and not get hit by aoe moves and singel target spells.

Both are gimp as hell for damage only purposes, at least silly dnc gives some other utility.

But \nin is the better dd-option of the two >_> i'm not saying either one of them can compare to other subjobs, just that \nin -> \dnc in a place you'r trying to take as little dmg as possible(if you still want to deal some dmg)