Evasion and Enmity - How much?Follow

Merits? Full DD, the best mix of Haste/Acc/Att/etc. that you can get with a STR/DEX/acc/att build for WS.

Remember a good melee burn merit party don't have real "tanks", one person can first voke but then it's just a hate bounce, when fights are 40~ seconds long it's impossible to hold hate with just ENM+ gear, as for evasion, there is no point when things die so fast. Besides, do you know how accurate these seemingly-weak common merit mobs are? Just screw EVA, and KILL IT '-')b

Correct, and no not really, you are unlikely to see any difference in a voke with ENM+ or without, because if all the DD's are doing what they should be, they'll get hate when they WS regardless, and if your really good you might pull it back with a nice Jin.

Anyway, don't bother bringing all that enmity gear to merit parties. Your pretty much just another DD with shadows.

NP, have fun.

It depends. I usually voke at the beginning of the fight if there are DDs that don't sub nin in my pt.

In merits my ninja is a tank because it's a DD.

In merits I still try to retain hate for as long as possible, I do it with the idea that so long as I have hate the other DD's can push that much harder to turn it towards them. They do that by bringing their A game and doing as much damage as possible, making things dead, faster.

I try to be a tank in merits because it gets me xp faster, or at least, seems to. If I leave it up to anyone else, or let it bounce around, the mages end up curing like hell and everyone loses haste, slowing mob death. Perhapes it's different for others but in my experience thats how it's played out.

That's quite true, 3-4 people subbing /nin will have the potential to mitigate more damage that just I alone would ever be able to do. And maybe this is limited to the fact I do most of my merits with friends but when I am there they tend to sub /war (i.e. sam/war, war/sam, drg/war, drg/sam etc. etc.) "because" they are able to with me without there being an overabundance of curing going on.

In the past and even in today's 2hand update era I've been able to hold hate for nearly the duration of any merit mob (20-40 seconds, tops) because of the way I look at merits and NIN's roll there-in. I swap in 6 Enmity with every voke, including the first voke. I gear my Nin for damage the same as I once geared my War. I gear to do the most damage possible, same as any DD would.

As I said it's what gets me faster xp, the DD's are able to worry less about the business of taking damage and worry more about the business of Doing damage. They make it their goal to rip hate off me, I make it my goal do keep hate, through both raw damage dealt, and enmity produced.

I've not done a pick-up style merit party in quite some time, until this past weekend I could probably count on one hand the amount of them I've been in in the last 6 months, but I needed a buffer so I threw my flag up. It was late (2AMish) so only ones seeking were JP and I subsequently ended up in a 5member JP and me party. Conversation was limited but after 30 minutes we had to stop, the 2 wars and the one drg wanted to go change sub, all from /nin, to /sam.

It's not to toot my own horn that I say these things, it's just to reflect that bouncing hate isn't always the best way to go about it. That's just what I've seen in my experience. No, a evasion nin with enmity is not going to be able to pull such a thing off, they don't have enough enmity comparatively to cover the enmity lost from raw power through dot. My Nin, geared as it is, played as I play it, seems to be able to push the hate line far enough in my direction to allow the other DD's to bring up a high DD cap.

Ehhhh, I haven't observed much evasion with a neutral set. Maybe around 7-8%, when the assumption would be that mob ACC caps at 95% just like player ACC...so really only 2-3% over -20+ EVA. At least, that's been my experience with it.


Generally, I just go all out, though I have to say that occasionally you do want people to take hate from you. Common merit mobs can wipe shadows with TP moves...so if they do a couple back to back or something, having someone able to turn it is beneficial.

Bouncing it can also keep any one person using Ni only, which helps for overall damage output.

If I have to cast Utsusemi: Ichi in a merit pt, I usually leave. It means the DDs are not pulling their weight & generally wasting my time.This goes double in bird pts, when I'm going through 5 stacks of meat miths in 2 hours it's time to go....

PS With friends, I usually have lower standards so they can get away with it. :)

Edited, Oct 8th 2008 5:18pm by Kittyn

I don't merit much anymore, i've had capped merits (on NIN) for a long time.
It lets me be very picky about parties.

Also, just because you aren't able to do something doesn't mean I share your impairment.