Einherjar: To /NIN or to /DMG, that is the question

[blackmail]

Whether it was intended, this thread title made me laugh. Mostly because it aptly describes this debate. The soliloquy from which this is from is about death.

Your choice on sub should reflect how comfortable you are with the possibility of dying. I prefer /nin for most things because it gives me greater control over the damage I take. I dual box a healer and melee, and yet I still prefer to make less work for myself on the healing side by mitigating damage on the melee.

Then again, perhaps I'm just one to whom Hamlet meant when he said "thus conscience does make cowards of us all."

[Kidnoftle]

BG just got poetic.

/world

[jammalamma]

Or you could do a split zone and double your profits and it still wouldn't take 2hrs.

Oh and inb4 you say BUT THEN I WONT GET TO MY NEXT EVENT FAST N STUFF

If you're really that all over endgame then plan your events like you have half a brain (although at this point that might be accrediting too much to you) and plan around windows or whatnot.

And I have my melee sub nin because the max amount of people I get to an Einherjar is 23.

I can't afford to have my melee mp sponge but I guess by your logic I should go out of my way to recruit 13more fucktarded members who won't contribute anything so my melee can go /war to t3.

Or I can go claim HNM, sell drop and make more money.

Events are stable, if you can get an event done to go camp windows then do that. If not, well, there's a reason people don't claim shit.

We don't have to recruit more people to get 36, but in your case, don't kid yourself in thinking that going in with 23 would somehow be better than going in with 36 if you had the option.

A blend between DRK and BLM stun works well, it really depends on the mob. On stuff like slimes DRK stunning is good enough because the BLMs will pretty much better /assisting and nuking, and occasionally free stunning On shit like leeches where BLM doesn't have a damage advantage, they're more involved in the stun order. Seigan/Hasso doesn't really hurt it too much because the slimes die pretty fast with BLMs helping with damage. But most of the time, since most of the mobs really don't do shit, it's not an issue at all.

The size of your group doesn't really matter. For the most part, you'll have the same core set up as every other group. The difference between the larger group if you just have more people. DDs subbing /SAM and /WAR still do more damage, they still don't have to play like morons, and you can still utilize the same methods of stunning with small groups. If you were really hardcore you'd make people not come useless jobs in your small group.

Or invite more people to make up for your failure.

[Kidnoftle]

Or I can go claim HNM, sell drop and make more money.

Events are stable, if you can get an event done to go camp windows then do that. If not, well, there's a reason people don't claim shit.

We don't have to recruit more people to get 36, but in your case, don't kid yourself in thinking that going in with 23 would somehow be better than going in with 36 if you had the option.

A blend between DRK and BLM stun works well, it really depends on the mob. On stuff like slimes DRK stunning is good enough because the BLMs will pretty much better /assisting and nuking, and occasionally free stunning On shit like leeches where BLM doesn't have a damage advantage, they're more involved in the stun order. Seigan/Hasso doesn't really hurt it too much because the slimes die pretty fast with BLMs helping with damage. But most of the time, since most of the mobs really don't do shit, it's not an issue at all.

The size of your group doesn't really matter. For the most part, you'll have the same core set up as every other group. The difference between the larger group if you just have more people. DDs subbing /SAM and /WAR still do more damage, they still don't have to play like morons, and you can still utilize the same methods of stunning with small groups. If you were really hardcore you'd make people not come useless jobs in your small group.

Or invite more people to make up for your failure.

oh I'm sorry. I thought you were just bragging about how you're the most efficient ever.

I didn't realize that doing inefficient things was the new way to go.

Get the fuck out you downbaby.

[Yugl]

I don't understand how you're comparing an event where if you split up you can still enter with the same pop set to one where if you split up you can never rejoin.

I'm not sure where you're getting at since you can split up and obtain feathers separately then reform on Odin. If you're asking how splitting up will benefit the group, it's quite simple, and actually uses your own argument from earlier. Lets say I have 36 people available. Of those 36, I only need 25 for a certain tier. That means I have 11 people that can go out and complete other events.

But, using the limbus example. Having 18 people for each Apollyon zone > 6 people in each. You have the people who want to go, you take them. Completing an Omega set in 15-20 minutes > 40-50 minutes. That extra time we could be using to do someplace else, such as placing as many bodies in DA for comeptition for all windows instead of half assing the claim for 2 windows.

If you put 18 in each zone, you only obtain one Omega set. If you put 3-6 per zone, you obtain 4-5 Omega sets. Lets take this a step further. The next time you do a run, you have 72 people and 1 Omega. This means, at most, three drops for a group of 72. For the group that has split up into smaller sets, they have 12-15 drops for a group of 72. I prefer to the latter.

Same with dynamis. If I can take everybody I can and do what you might take 2 hours to do in 45 minutes, then why wouldn't I? After those 45 minutes I have my full force of people ready for the next event instead of lacking 12 people for 2 hours.

It's simple. The time you take to clear that event with that many people is time that individuals not apart of the 12man group can spend completing another event. Moreover, a smaller group has the advantage of coordination, and thus, takes less time to prepare for events and less time trying to communicate during events.

Also, the /DMG SJ isn't a crutch for skill or whatnot. /NIN is and it allows lazy mages to continue being lazy mages. If your group can handle the few mobs that people might think you must have /NIN for with out a problem, why would they then use /NIN? They weren't having any problems to begin with. There is a significant amount of damage that comes from /WAR and /SAM over /NIN, and it's insane to miss out on it when you don't need it. Which you should never need it, but everybody can't be cool.

If /DMG is not a crutch for skill, and you can win without it, why not prepare for the "rare" instances instead? You said it yourself, there are rare, but real scenarios where /NIN will prevail over /DMG:

Spoiler: show

Shadow mantle proc tourb. But on a serious note, you can't do the whole einherjer argument. One boss out of how many? And not only that, but just one TP move? Well, I guess plague swipe too but besides that, two TP moves out of like the 4958904095 chances for another TP move from another boss? I'll take my chances. Cause I mean, if you're eating like 5 tourbs somehow then well, you're probably fucked regardless what sub you have.

Almost any situation where you would say "it's situational" about /nin, you'd be better off playing smartly as a different SJ. The situations where you might have a case, like about a single einherjer boss, the context overwhelmingly favors any other SJ where it would not be practical at all. Well, maybe for people with QQ mages "baaaaw gotta spend MP". Pointing out specific mobs in einherjer that you probably aren't going to have to fight to begin is not a really good case when you have many more chances of fighting something you just subbed a useless SJ for.

It's like saying that people buy ragu sauce instead of making their own because it's easy and requires a minimum amount of skill. When asking somebody why they make their own sauce instead of buying ragu, because making the sauce can be time consuming, their response would be that whatever difficulties you might have with making sauce they don't, and thus they don't need to buy cheap ragu.

Yes, because doing end game events is like making ragu. Needless to say, the event of Ragu has a cooldown period much like EG events.

[jammalamma]

Cause having as many people that you possibly can to claim over a window is really less efficient than having a few people there against 50 other people.

If you can't see the point in keeping scheduled events stable, then well.

Mule can only enter 1 run at a time. So pretty much what you're suggesting is to take longer to get through a single cycle. But, I could just have all 36 go, finish the event quicker with out a problem, then start on the event with everybody and get shit done with everybody.

That'd work except you know, you can't have multiple groups in limbus at the same time. I guess I should just schedule all of the limbuses at different times then? Sounds like a nightmare for record keeping and would gimp opportunity to do another event with full people.

Coordination? Why wouldn't I just split the group of 64 into small teams to clear different sections of the dynamis simultaneously? Everybody gets to lot shit, everybody is happy the run is over in a fraction of the time, and I'm happy because now I have 12 more people to do other shit when we're done. If an LS is organized to begin with, starting and organizing events isn't a problem. May want to check your leadership to see if they're working with a full deck then.

Because those rare instances aren't a problem. If in those instances we were going to wipe, we'd wipe regardless of what SJ people were because of some stupid spam fast that we couldn't control, which has yet to really happen. If we don't have problems with dragons and lolhydra with out /NIN already, why would we go /NIN..?

The whole point is, why would I adjust what I'm doing to accommodate you when the problems you are having are not relevant to me. At all. Instead of you know, being open minded and not being lazy to try and organize a stun order, or you're afraid that if you tell your mages they fucking blow they'll leave, you're going to play on easy mode. /NIN is not necessary for any strategy given you do more planning than "Ok guys, we're running in and killing shit." and if your support doesn't blow, but most of the times it does.

[Pendulum]

That'd make you a moron. If have 40-42 people show up for a run and only tell 20 of them that they can go, then you're an idiot.

Except you don't need 40 fucking people for any regular event. Hardly any shell on any server has 40 active members.

But taking more people because shit gets done faster is the smart thing to do.

Because Einherjar is a huge timesink with chambers lasting 30 minutes.

While you're busy trying to duo the chair boss, I'll be afking in my MH watch Law & Order.

This is where you completely fucked up. The correct phrase is:

"You play that shit, imma be playing with my girls tits in the club."

[Seedz]

Completely disregarding NIN as a potentially useful subjob is more retarded than casting silena on yourself. However, it isn't really smart to make things harder on your LS for the sake of an hypothetical "efficiency", so not taking 36 people to Einherjar would be silly if you had the option. Dynamis is a different story, though.

[jammalamma]

Except you don't need 40 fucking people for any regular event. Hardly any shell on any server has 40 active members.




Because Einherjar is a huge timesink with chambers lasting 30 minutes.



This is where you completely fucked up. The correct phrase is:

"You play that shit, imma be playing with my girls tits in the club."

40 people doing ZNM, Sea, and pretty much anyt shit will always get more done than just 12 people doing small events in a longer period of time. And uh, I think every major HNMLS on this server is well above 40 active memebrs. Not hard since there's only two.

If you can do a run in 15 minutes instead of 30, why not? Shit adds up, especially when you have windows opening shortly after event start time.

No

[Despain]

You get more events done, yet you still end up with a fuck ton of people standing around with long lines just to get 1 piece of gear. I'd rather get shit for a small group of people quick, and not have to deal with so much bs that comes with having so many members. Shit's retarded, and unnecessary.

You won't win this argument.

[jammalamma]

Most of our gear lists are cleared though. =( Now we just camp shit so other people can't get it pretty much, or to make money.

[Despain]

Most of our gear lists are cleared though. =( Now we just camp shit so other people can't get it pretty much, or to make money.

I should have clarified. Most* people would rather have shorter lines than longer lines. Generally speaking, a linkshell with a lot of members will have long lines for most of the equipment you go after.

[Yugl]

Most of our gear lists are cleared though. =( Now we just camp shit so other people can't get it pretty much, or to make money.

If you did it the efficient way, your gear lists would have been cleared by now.

[Despain]

If you did it the efficient way, your gear lists would have been cleared by now.

[jammalamma]

If I did it the efficient way, I'd just lot everything and jump servers. But I'm really a nice person.

And /NIN is still gimp. Stun.

[Chojja]

My LS isn't an einherjer LS. Einherjer is just one of the events my LS does.

Our time is more valuable than trying to epeen low number runs.

If your time was that valuable, you'd split into 2 runs and get drops twice as fast so you didn't have to do einherjar as long.

[Despain]

No point in trying to continually argue with him. He won't listen, he'll remain adamant about his position on this issue.

[NynJa]

Most of our gear lists are cleared though. =( Now we just camp shit so other people can't get it pretty much, or to make money.

Kill yourself.

[Amastacia]

Bit of a mega-post inc since I apparently:

bash on /nin, and then vanish like a faggot as soon as people provide examples of good situational uses for it.

EDIT: Oops! Spoke too soon! And having DD's go /nin to einherjar accounts for bad luck, you asshole. That's the whole fucking point.

(actually, I just had to sleep/work)

/NIN is not useless. I never said it was. I just don't think Einherjar is a shining example of when it is the Right Thing™ no matter what.

And the edit there goes back to my point of playing aggressively. I've always found that accepting that FFXI carries risks and going for it anyway averages out to more success in the long run than worrying that something *might* go wrong and playing defensively because you're concerned about bad luck.

Two faults:
1-Even with Seigan, Third Eye can completely shit it up, and last one shadow.
2-I guess your Third Eye's block the following TP attacks:
Condemnation
Grim Halo
Fluid Spread
Fox Fire
Trembling
Wild Rage
Sepentine Tail
Whirl/Flurry of Rage
Single Target spells (AM/T4)
etc etc
3-If you pull hate off a WS, youre defenceless for a good 1-2 seconds (ability lockdown) while seigan/Third Eye are down.

Citing "/sam or bust" is ignorance to the same level. Much like everything else in this game, shit is situational.

1- And an AoE can wipe your just-cast Ni while you have hate. You get pounded either way. Conversely, TE frequently lasts more than 3 hits and doesn't penalize you Ichi's casting time.

2- It doesn't. Some of those can be stunned. Some can't, but die fast enough that you shouldn't get overwhelmed.

3- 10 STR isn't going to be an earth-shattering factor on your WS damage (10% JA Haste is pretty nice for overall DPS though), and you should have a fairly good idea if you're going to pull hate. If it's highly likely, the penalty to being wrong about pulling hate is generally less than the penalty for being right and unprepared.

I don't think "/SAM or bust" is the right answer, I do think it is entirely possible and not entirely unreasonable to collect a group of people that can, through a combination of strategy and a modicum of competence, make /SAM more frequently useful than /NIN, including in Einherjar. I prefer being in such groups, and I advocate leaders try to build such groups if practicable.

I hate /nin as much as anyone else, but if you honestly can't see the benefits to it on certain fights, you're just delusional. It's situational for sure, but if you never /nin on melee, you're doing something "wrong". And "wrong" doesn't mean you can't still win, it just means you're a moron.

To Amastacia, I disagree as to the difference /nin makes on slimes that aren't stunned, but out of curiosity, how do skeletons go for you? I've never seen a shell that had 0 problem whatsoever with skeletons. They generally run mages out of mp and likely cause multiple deaths. Slimes are stunnable, blinkable skeletons that maybe hit a little harder (and take less dmg), but it is night and day between /nin and /other on slimes assuming they aren't stunned, similar to the difference between skeletons and uhh single bats or doomed?

In the end, "Shit is situational", most competent players -should- vastly prefer /sam or /war, but yea, people should acknowledge when shadows are far more useful than anything else (and as a side note, you can most definitely fulltime Hasso in ein as sam/nin).

Completely agree with paragraphs 1 and 3. I don't think Ein is a situation where defaulting to NIN sub is a necessity unless you are certain that given your group or your particular healer, that safety net is not optional.

In response to paragraph 2, my experience is that skeletons dole out about an equal amount of suck regardless of subjob. They certainly can be problematic, and having dealt with them many a time as both melee and mage, I can't say it ever much mattered what people subbed, stunlocking and killing fast enough were the main factors on smoothness. As for slimes, our stunners were usually pretty on the ball. That's not to say that we didn't get hammered sometimes, but that happened before more people started using offensive subs too.

The original leader of the Einherjar LS I ran with (which has since broken, and not really needing anything badly from it, I haven't rushed to find another) was big on the /NIN melee thing. It worked okay, but when that rule started to be relaxed, runs tended to end quicker and not really go any more messily. I don't deny that shadows are useful, but just not an absolute necessity.

And, if I'm brutally honest, your side note makes me scratch my head a little. It's certainly possible to ride Hasso the whole time, and I usually did, because only a small fraction of the time would I need the lower recast to help mitigate a substantial amount of damage. What that said to me is that most of the time, smart use of Hasso and Seigan with a better subjob would've made me a more effective DD without a tremendous drawback. And I was usually right. It'd be a bald-faced lie to say that not subbing NIN never got me killed, but I don't think the death count would've been a lot lower in the long run if I had chosen the "safer" route.

Better mage for what ? You can't stun every move, the mobs in einherjar spam it. /war is stupid yes. Fluid spread ? Who cares. What about body slam ?

Dieing is not being aggressive. Dieing is sucking, blood tanking is sucking. Going /war and bragging about how you don't take damage is being gimp.

Body slam is entirely stunnable. And since there is a lot less requirement for crowd control on dragon waves, there are more eyes to be watching to stun it.

Dying is not being aggressive. But if you take enough people who are aggressive... you really don't die that much. Blood tanking excessively is sucking, but for something like Ein specifically, you shouldn't be for long. If you are, you're either playing like a moron or there's a gross imbalance in DD quality which is another issue altogether. Going /WAR means you will take some damage, and while it will likely be more than you take /NIN, playing smart means you don't take more than your healer can handle.

I guess you're equating aggressive play with beefheadedness. The two terms are not synonymous.

Please please please someone tell me I'm not crazy when I say this, but you cant try to stun Fluid Spread. You can pre-stun and hope it uses Fluid Spread, but its fucking instantaneous.

You can't specifically target Fluid Spread. But if you have enough stunners and they're smart enough to know that not everyone needs to stun the first WS they see, many fewer Fluid Spreads will get through.

Again - you are misconstruing efficiency with overkill. THEY ARE DIFFERENT. Bring 36 who all want an EBody, and as such will take 100 Odin's..or bring 18 who all want EBody, and take 50. Both of them have 30 minute time limits, both can full clear tier1-3 and Odin without a hitch or an issue with time limits, one of them will be doing Einherjar until the day they die.

I don't see a problem taking a larger group in since
a) Not everyone will be chasing EBodies. Demand may skew that way but should be distributed enough to be reasonable.
b) No group is perfect, but more good people helps dilute the weak links if they'd want to go anyway (who you might not want to or be able to politely refuse).
c) Using feather mules makes the Odin cycle short enough that a larger base group better corrects for attendance fluctuations. If everyone has 100% attendance, that's an entirely different story. Haven't yet been in any LS for anything that did.

It's only grossly inefficient if you have a larger group that would be 2 perfectly functional smaller groups, which is often not the case.

I only do /SAM to T1-3 but I also am almost always in a pt with Kirschy + DNC BRD WHM COR so we have maximum focus on us (as the main DDs)

I think all of our DD sub /SAM or WAR though and we have a pretty high win rate. Only loss I know of in recent history was 1 or 2 wave T3 ein with skeletons and like KB boss.

Not saying everyone else should but there are situations where in an ein shell you can /SAM fulltime and never have issues. Will slimes still rape? Yeah, but that's what stun is for.

I prefer this strategy for managing DDs you know will be overly strong. Side benefit is that the other DDs can push harder.

Losses will occasionally happen, I just don't feel that defaulting to a DD sub necessarily causes the loss percentage to rise drastically. And it seems I'm not the only one whose experience agrees. It's not that I won't sub NIN in Einherjar, I just see it as an undesirable choice made out of necessity and not preference.

[Despain]

He wasn't talking about you.

EDIT: At least, I'm pretty sure that first quote was directed towards Jamma. May be wrong.