Eorzean Evening Post: The Great Ninja War .

Last week, Patch 2.4 released with a massive amount of content added. It’s been an exciting time in Eorzea, and not least of which is the new classes everyone’s been anticipating: Rogue and Ninja. The arrival of the job has shaken up the landscape around it and caused a lot of change within the mere pace of the game. But what exactly has it done? There’s been a great deal that’s changed in one patch thanks to that class alone, and today we’re going to take a look at it all.

 

Silent Blades in the Dark

So the first problem that has arisen is that the class is actually a pretty cool class to play. Rogue and Ninja have amazing synergy with each other and work fantastically with their chosen secondary classes of Pugilist and Lancer, both giving them good options to raise their DPS as well as a few very interesting skills to add. Their damage is outright crazy, and they’re probably one of the hardest classes for me to tank for. They tend to pull threat about as bad as Black Mages did before – which means they’re also pretty often the first DPS down in any particular instance. The backstab – which amusingly has a counterpart frontstab, which I don’t think I’ve seen very often – and poison mechanics flawlessly seam into the ninjutsu to make what has become a very powerful class. As a Warrior, I absolutely adore the class thanks to one skill in particular, Goad. This skill gives me my TP back as a regeneration just under my usual regeneration rate, ensuring that I always have something to keep the bad guys occupied with.

The class also has a fair amount of really appealing aesthetics. It has incredibly fluid animations which take just under the right amount of time to complete, allowing the ninja to appear to be weaving a dance of death. Rather than the standard hack and slash of most melee classes, the ninjas use trips, martial strikes, and other styles of melee attacks to supplement their fury. The ninjutsu skills are completed via use of mudras, hand signs, and the correct one adds a splash of multiple different effects into the combat, from fireballs to corrupted ground to a skill speed boost and more, giving them unprecedented versatility. As one might guess, this means everyone wants to play one.

Unfortunately, being the only class that was introduced in 2.4, this means that everyone did play one.

This is the general appearance of any city in Eorzea right now.

Making a Bad Problem Worse

While it’s not particularly a problem that people wish to try a brand-new class – indeed, that’s kind of the point of introducing it – it is when the game already has an issue with having too few DPS. One of Final Fantasy XIV’s persistent problems has been getting people to play roles that aren’t damage dealer. Dragoons, Bards, Monks and Black Mages have always outnumbered White Mages, Warriors and Paladins in large amounts. There’s something to be noted that if you have a 50 Summoner, you also have a 50 Scholar, but most people seem to favor Summoner over Scholar as well. Queue times for DPS were always pretty long, approaching fifteen to thirty minutes when any of the non-DPS classes could basically head for a dungeon upon clicking the “Join” button. Now, the non-DPS classes may wait five minutes, but at Level 50, queue times are on average an hour for a DPS, with the highest I’ve heard thus far being six hours. No joke, six hours. A while back, Square tried to rectify this by offering unique mounts to the tanks who would queue, but so far this seems to have had little to no effect. The situation has gotten so bad that my newest manner of making money is to place my services as a tank into party finder and wait. In ten minutes I’ll have two Ninjas who just want to do ANYTHING, as long as it gets them experience, and they’ll pay for it. Within two days, I went from having under ten thousand gil to over a million.

I’m planning on getting a house at this point.

We’re a few days into the patch at this point, and some serious problems have popped up for me, the first of which is optimization. I can barely teleport into Coerthas without having my computer lock up at the sheer number of players around me. Note that I’m not playing on a standard laptop, or even a gaming one. I play on a desktop made to play video games. Dropping my graphics settings doesn’t even help a lot, it just gets me far enough from the madness that I can recover.

A good example can be made here. An average FATE will have five to ten players defeating it.

Most of those are ninjas. I can tell by all the knives everywhere. And the fireballs, but that really obscured the image.

This is a pretty regular FATE that just happened to be overwhelmed by an assload of Ninjas from every possible angle. When this many players are in the same area, troubles tend to start up that aren’t easily solved without some significant work.

 

Solving Problems Without Violence

So what can be done about this? Well, there’s not a lot now that can be done. The best way to solve this situation would have been to either wait for Heavensward to introduce the Ninja, along with Dark Knight, the new race, and presumably another healer so that the class distribution was a little more balanced. That didn’t happen though, so we’re left with what we have. Square has rolled out a few optimization changes that required barely a day’s advance warning before they took down the servers. The 24 hour server preparation likely lightened the load, but the game is still struggling from the sheer amount of players in the same place at the same time. A fair number of healers and tanks have also deviated from their paths, going into the Ninja profession as well and taking them out of the loop.

Unfortunately, Square can’t force anyone to queue in a particular role. If people wish to play Ninjas, then they will, and that’s just the end of that. Some suggestions could be made though. As of current, a lot of the tank and healer players don’t find value in the gil bonus given to an adventurer in need. It’s a nice little chunk of change that helps people out, but ultimately when sitting on a couple hundred thousand, an extra five grand doesn’t do much but add up over time. If one does everything they can, they get around 25K, which is nice, but also takes around three hours of time just for dailies. Ultimately though, much of the community has settled on patience. Most feel that the Ninja phase will play out given about a month’s time, at which point the people who wish to keep the class will and those who want to return to what they were will do the same. Surviving to then is the question, which given the amount of backstabbers in our company now may be a bit of a challenge, but we’ll find a way, we always do.

To be honest, it’s a fun class. It’s very entertaining to watch and quite enjoyable to play, though I’m still barely a rogue into it. FFXIV has needed a true stealth class for some time now, and it’s good to see that niche filled. It’d have been even better if they’d managed to fill it while adding some other classes around it, but it can’t really be helped after all. What’s done is done now, and we as the players either have to play with it or leave. There’s a few problems now, but there always will be little bits to file out of virtually any game addition, whether it be patch or expansion. What matters is whether or not the class is received well and plays better. I’ve heard nothing but good from Ninja players, and as a core tank I’ve met an awful lot of them lately. They say it’s fluid and dynamic, allowing for adjustment as needed in ways that the positioning-based Dragoon and Monk can’t fill. It’s stylish and fantastical beyond that of the other two melee, which can be summed up as “stab it/jump on it really hard” and “punch the hell out of it with your soul.” It’s a bit of Eastern flair added to a predominantly Western-influenced world, and to this writer it’s a welcome addition. I’m honestly surprised it took them this long to get it into the game, given that this is an Eastern developer, but at least it was introduced correctly in its mechanics. Sure, we’d have liked a tank or healer with it, but we’ll live. Ninja just needs a bit of work put into it, but it’ll come around, and we’ll be there when it does. Until then, we’ll keep our eyes on the shadows. Never know where they’ll be, after all…

So cool looking.