Mae Mae's Ranged Ninja Guide
Introduction
Ninja is a versatile job that has three build paths. In this guide I'll be covering the physical ranged build.
Strengths and Weaknesses
People that know me will know that I advocate for ninja being the fastest/best farmer in the game. There's a few reasons as to why I think ninja is the best farmer:
- Access to all elements through kunai
- All abilities are character centered or ground aoe's. Some of them even linger on the ground and can kill mobs that walk into it.
- Nearly all abilities are multi-hit, meaning they trigger leech effects such as HP and SP absorbs very frequently. Stacking these effects in your gear is advised.
- Flashy and fun to farm with
Ninja is kinda easy to level and has a pretty smooth gear progression, making it ideal for a first char. It can be an efficient farmer with minimal investment.
Being an expanded job, it obviously suffers in certain departments. You will notice that at high gear levels many classes surpass you in damage output, especially in the true endgame. Although we are technically ranged, we need to get into melee to maximize our damage, leaving us very vulnerable at times. Ninja also has no real party buffs or utility to speak of, so in parties you will only bring your own personal mediocre damage.
Skills and Rotation
Once you reach level 200 you'll notice you gain a lot of skills and most of them are actives. Knowing how these skills work and interact with each other is vital because nearly all of them are useful in their own way.
So let's do a rundown of what skills we'll be using!
Buffs:
16th Night
Removes your fixed cast time and halves the variable cast time. Makes you cast super fast.
Distorted Crescent
The wording on this skill can be a little confusing. The gist of it is that when you cast this on yourself when your CURRENT HP is an even number (Ends with 2, 4, 6, 8, 0) you gain an ATK bonus at the cost of your MATK.
If your HP is uneven this will reduce your ATK and increase your MATK instead.
Earth Charm
Summon 10 of these to increase all physical damage you deal by a large amount.
Ninja Aura
Smol STR/INT buff. Cast this AFTER Distorted Crescent because it costs a bit of your hp.
Active skills:
Huuma Shuriken - Grasp
Ground targeted aoe. Leaves a spinning shuriken on the ground that does damage over time. You can have 2 of these up at a time. Enemies hit will be afflicted by the nightmare status. This is your highest damaging skill.
Huuma Shuriken - Construct
Ground targeted aoe. Consumes your Huuma Shuriken - Grasp to inflict bonus damage. While technically a dps increase if used towards the end of Grasp, one cast of this consumes both grasp, netting you a dps loss.
Kunai - Nightmare
Self-centered aoe. This is our AP spender. Deals big damage in a 13x13 area and deals 1.5x damage to targets afflicted by nightmare status.
Kunai - Rotation
Self-centered aoe. Deals massive damage around you. Leaves a distortion zone directly under you. This is you second highest damaging skill. Also gives you big zoomies for a few seconds. Weee.
Kunai - Refraction
Distortion Zone-centered aoe. This aoe is triggered in a 5x5 area around your distortion zones.
Kunai - Distortion
Ground targeted aoe. Applies nightmare to all enemies hit and leaves a distortion zone.
As you can see our active skills interact with each other and have some added effects. The maximum damage rotation (hehe) is however, very simple:
Grasp > Rotation > Refraction > Repeat
Note that Refraction is only 5x5 so you wanna get in nice and close to make sure you hit this.
Kunai -Nightmare is useful for aoe when farming. Construct and Distortion should be avoided unless you can not be in melee range of your target.
Utility stuff:
Cicada Skin Shed
Dodges attacks from mobs, does not work on magic. Avoid using this if you can face tank stuff because it bounces you all over the place.
Mirror Image
Dodges ranged attacks (Not magic). Useful stuff like the Edda Biolabs MvP which uses spiral pierce.
Stats
| STR | 120 | POW | 100 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AGI | 80 | STA | 0 |
| VIT | 120 | WIS | Rest |
| INT | 80 | SPL | 0 |
| DEX | 120 | CON | 100 |
| LUK | Rest | CRT | 0 |
Stats are pretty straight forward. Note that you wanna tinker you vitality stat a bit to where you end up on an even number of max HP. This will help a lot when rebuffing Distorted Crescent. This is explained down below.
When it comes to gearing you want to get a good grasp on what modifiers make your character stronger. Some modifiers (such as skill damage) are stronger than others, but in a general sense: A good mix of everything will net you the highest damage, but as a rule of thumb you could say that ranged% and skill% are the best modifiers.
Stats indepth:
We can split the formula for physical damage into two parts, Attack Formula, and Damage Formula. The Attack Formula calculates your ATK value, so Attack Modifiers will increase this value. (Except they do not increase "StatusATK" which comes from stats/traits). Atk% does not scale with any of the other Atk modifiers, it gives you bonus attack equal to a percent of your WeaponATK and EquipmentATK. (500 WeaponATK, with 10% Atk we would gain +50 Atk) After the attack formula, your skills base formula is multiplied by your ATK Value. (1000% ATK on a skill is equal to multiplying ATK Value by 10)
The Damage formula calculates your damage after the base skill formula turns your ATK into damage. Damage modifiers will increase your damage (including StatusATK and Atk% parts)
Attack Modifiers
Race%
Size%
Enemy Element% (Damage against fire enemy, etc)
Class% (Damage against normal or boss)
P. ATK (Also applies to Atk% and StatusAtk)
Elemental Table (at the end)
Damage Modifiers
Skill Damage%
Melee%
Ranged%
Critical Damage%
Final Damage Modifiers (Dark Claw)
(Credit to Yvonne)
Gear
Final Words
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