War/ Nin or War/Sam?

[Dyanisus]

Well right now my WAR is at lvl 30 and I dont really know what to choose by. Is a war/nin a better sub or war/Sam? Currently my sub is a Mnk at lvl 18.

[DrivenTooFar]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

Both are pretty good but I think most people will say War/Nin, especially if you plan on tanking and if your weilding dual axes. But Sam is great for the tp and 3rd eye doesn't hurt either.

[Dyanisus]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

is it too early to start war/nin at war30?

[Jei]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

most people goes /nin for dual wield, and you can use it as soon as 20/10. 24/12 utsusemi is a good plus.

The reason to sub Sam is for their meditation which will give you instant 70 TP as sub job I think... It is a level 30 ability, so unless your warrior is 60, you won't gain anything from /sam.

The drawback tho... high level warrior's WS are pretty powerful. Use it once and the monster are likely to be attacking you for a while. Now if you add Sam sub and use it twice a battle you can get toasted.

On HNM where you are not allow to hit them but you need TP for skillchain, /sam is pretty much required. Also balista, /sam is fun.

[Kagerou]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

War/nin will mostly fnc as a DD post-37 by dual wielding stat bonus axes. Pre 37, u might be either a back-up tank or a sub-tank (switching hate with another nin or war).

/sam doesn't get u much bonuses compared to /nin sub or /mnk sub in xp pts imo

[Dyanisus]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

so would being a war/nin at war30 a good idea?

Double Post Edited:
and if i do become a NIN, is there a lot of gil i need to spend ? Like for equipment?

[Jei]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

you can get nin up to 20-25 pretty cheap... getting utsusemi might be a bit painful but if you farm for your fame and quest for it, it can be cheap too... it's up to you. I wouldn't recommend taking nin further without having money tho.

[Sammitch]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

No /SAM before 60. Ever.

/NIN is good for DD or tank at 30, although 95% of the time you're going to be asked to tank. It's not too bad, but I'd stack up on VIT and Defense over Evasion and AGI. I'm guessing this is your first job, so from your point of view levelling NIN and buying utsusemi tools is going to cost a metric f**kton. I'd say to sub something other than NIN until at least 40 so you can do some decent farming for Ninja money.

Other options are:
- /MNK and Dodge, Counter, and HP/VIT bonus for tanking
- /THF for massive SA Sturmwinds, and a bit of Steal to build gil

Oh and please, please, PLEASE if you take one piece of advice to heart let it be this. At the very least keep Axe and Great Axes skills capped at all times. The other useful skill to have up is Sword, the rest like Great Sword, Dagger, etc are just icing on the cake. Specifically, if you let Great Axe lag behind you'l will sorely regret it later. It's very powerful and VERY slow to level in your spare time.

[Armando]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

What the previous posters are pretty much correct. No SAM before 60 and keep Great Axe up to date. You don't always have to do Sturmwind or SA Sturmwind too; Shield Break may be half the damage, but it's Evasion -40 if unresisted. Hard to argue against that if you land it early in the fight. By the way you don't HAVE to change subs. WAR/MNK is excellent for tanking and WAR/THF is a better DD in my opinion. It's hard to tank alone as WAR/NIN since the recast timer is long and you'll run out of shadows fast - you WILL take hits, unless you have another tank. Two WAR/NINs work well, but that requires another WAR/NIN. It's possible for the mages to help you solo tank and keep shadows up with spells like Flash and Stun and Haste on you and Slow on the mob but those spells (except for Slow) all come in the 41-45 range for WHM and BLM. WAR/MNK gets you TP faster and takes hits well enough to tank effectively. WAR/THF gives you Sneak Attack which is enough to compensate for the haste on Dual Weild (and can be used on a Great Axe.) Besides, if you cast Utsusemi you've already thrown away the haste benefits of dual weild anyways, so I don't see why people glorify its Haste bonus so much.

My recommendation: level both /MNK and /NIN, /THF if you can. They're each very useful in different circumstances. WAR is all about the versatility. One last tip: just because you have Dual Weild doesn't mean you HAVE to use it. Great Axe is a wonderful thing. There's nothing wrong with choosing it over Dual Weild if you're WAR/NIN. And if you're taking a lot of hits as WAR/NIN for whatever reason, or taking more hits than you're blinking off, there's nothing wrong with an axe+shield (shields neglect a fair share of damage.) Good luck, and have fun!

[Kittyneko]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

I personally think for a Warrior it is best to just keep Sword and Axe leveled. Focus on your DD, and level Warrior with /Nin sub. Even though /Sam gives you Meditate at level 60, Dual weilding gives you more TP . Also on higher levels, your weapons usually give you nice stats such as Accuracy Bonus, Attack Bonus etc.. So weilding two weapons could give you more stats. Most Warriors choose to sub nin, and im sure you wont regret doing it either. Forget about tanking.. What you ~could~ do is always keep a shield with you, IF you are tank you just sub a shield and youre fine. For leveling Warrior as DD, which is great, you probably will use 2 Axe's most of the time, sometimes people sub a sword for the status effects.

About Ninja
To get Ninja higher leveled, and eventually 37(If youre going to get the warrior job really high), you will need to farm Norg-fame, because the quests for the Ninja scrolls are gainable in Norg(www.ffxi-atlas.com). To read more about these quests for the scrolls, visit http://ffxi.allakhazam.com Or http://ffxi.somepage.com . Both sites give a lot of information about jobs, quests, missions... everything, to be honest. You might not like farming the fame for the Ninja scrolls, for example Utsusemi, cause its quite a bit work if youre doing it on your own. Basically you will have to farm Yagudo Necklaces, 200 if i remember correctly. (There is also another same quest that gives Norg-fame in Bastok, but its said to take more time.) The best place to farm these necklaces would be Giddeus, an area near Sarutabaruta(Windurst). The bad thing about this, is that Yagudo Necklaces dont stack, so its best to keep as much room as possible in your inventory while running back and forth. I did this fame building in 2 days with 2 people. And trust me, its worth it.. just time consuming. After this, when you got both scrolls Tonko(invisibility) and Utsusemi:Ichi(Shadows that absorb damage for 3 hits, you will have to farm for a little money in order to buy "Ninja Tools", which are needed to cast Ninjutsu(the magic ninja uses). You should be fine with just these 2 scrolls, till level 30-37. You probably will use Utsusemi when youre leveling Warrior as well, in case you have to pull or get hate from your heavy damage.

I hope this helped.. I love warrior/nin, but i only got both my warrior and ninja to 30 yet :S. Partying with Warriors is great too, at basically all levels.

[Dyanisus]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

alright thanks for taking your time to help me guys, thanks

[Sammitch]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

The Norg fame quest in Bastok is trading Zinc Ores to a Tenshodo guy in a Warehouse in Port Bastok. Zinc Ores also do not stack, and can get a bit pricey if you try to just buy them. The cheapest way would be to mine them from Zeruhn or Palborough. If you go the mining route you've got the chance to dig up more valuable ores that can earn you a bit of profit, but I'm willing to bet that it is indeed slower than the Yag Necklace method.

Oh right, also if you want to level Blacksmithing or Goldsmithing then your mining exploits will give you many low-level ores [copper, tin, silver] to start yourself off.

[Armando]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

Dual Weild doesn't give more TP. It lowers your attack delay, thus your TP per hit is lowered too, so you gain it at the same rate. Dual Weild's haste pretty much lets you get in 1-2 more hits per minute. But if you're casting Utsusemi, as is often the case, which is around a 6-7 second cast, you've already forfeited one attack round (2 swings.) But your TP gain per hit is still lower than single weilding, so you ended up with the same ammount of hits, and that TP loss eliminates the benefit of the 7 extra TP from the extra hit in your WS. You actually slowed down your TP gain. As you can see, you can't enjoy the full benefits of Dual Weild's haste bonus and Utsusemi at the same time. If you cast Utsusemi, you can avoid some hits, but you lose an attack round (more like stop your attack timer for an ammount of time equivalent to an attack round if you don't cast, you get the haste benefits, but don't mitigate damage.

That being said Sneak Attack is a better attack buff for a few reasons:

1) 10% Haste from Dual Weild will grant you 2 extra hits at best every minute if you don't interrupt your attack timer. Sneak Attack with a Great Axe adds 1 to the number your weapon's DMG is multiplied by, which is your Attack divided by the mob's Defense, with a random element. The Atk/Def rate can be as high as x2, allowing you up to a x2.4 multiplier if you "roll high" on the random factor. Criticals will add +1 to that, allowing you to reach x3. You probably won't have twice as much attack as an IT mob has defense though (probably closer to a x1 multiplier) so you get the full +1 in the multiplier (if you rolled +0.4 on the random factor, there's only a 0.6 increase between x2.4 and x3) A Great Axe will generally have twice as much DMG as an Axe. So, Sneak Attack more or less adds a full Great Axe swing's worth of damage each minute, which will probably match two axe swing's damage.

2) Consistency. That dual weild gives you 2 extra hits a minute, but you can still miss them. Sneak Attack will always work if you align it right. Also, Sneak Attack allows you to power up Great Axe WS and guarantees their first hit. Also, like stated earlier, a critical will add roughly one great axe swing's worth of damage into the mix, and that's more damage than the extra axe swing in your dual weilded WS will add. Even if you SA with a single-weilded axe it still adds as much damage as the extra hit would, but with more consistency.

3) Guaranteed Break WS. Break WS are single-hitters so if you SA them they can't miss. Also, a Sneak Attacked Break WS can match non-SA Sturmwind power. I'd recommend Shield Break over any axe or great axe WS available 'til 50+, too, and even then, it doesn't decrease in usefulness. Unresisted Shield Breaks lower the mob's evasion by -40. That can make an IT check as low evasion! That's such a big accuracy improvement for every melee in the party the damage improvement outweighs the extra damage you would've dealt with Sturmwind. Even if you have a half-resisted Shield Break (occurs when mob isn't weak to the break's element, here Ice) it'll still last a minute and a half, which is time to get 100 TP. Also, not only will the other melees be doing more total damage, they'll be gaining TP faster. Not only that, the Evasion penalty on the mob is so overwhelming, the other melees could trade Sniper Rings/Life Belts and other acc gear for STR/Attack gear and do even more damage. They could also ditch Sushi (that's a popular trend nowadays, and a bad one to follow in the early levels) in favor of Meat Mithkabobs for more Attack bonus. If you have a BRD, Accuracy song would be pointless at this point so instead of having Attack + Accuracy songs, you can have Attack x2 or Attack + Haste. If you're not the tank, the tank's accuracy will go up, and that'll help him generate hate. If you have a PLD he can enjoy Ballad + Attack song to do more damage and help keep up with the DDs. In a way this whole thing also benefits the mages. The nuker can now conserve MP better, because since the melees are doing more damage, he doesn't have to overcompensate to kill the mob fast, and can pace himself as needed. Because the mob is dying faster, it's doing less damage to the tank, and the healer has to expend less MP. This results in longer chains. All this taken into consideration, it's not hard to see it's probably the best WS a WAR can use for quite a while. In itself it's already better than most WS, with Sneak Attack you could make it a guaranteed hit and double its power. It also closes Fusion skillchains, which is very nice.

That aside, dual weild also means lack of shield, and shields can block off a decent percentage of the hit every time you shield, which is fairly common. That's also a very heavy loss.

As you can see, in paper Dual Weild looks nice and all, but in practice, it's not as rewarding as you think. I don't mean to discourage you from levelling as WAR/NIN or anything. It's a useful sub, very powerful for dual tanking, but on its own it's not nearly as effective. It's a situational sub, requiring specific party setups to make it work. That being said you shouldn't rely on it to take you all the way to 75. I'd recommend you keep at least MNK sub levelled too, and if you're serious about taking WAR to 75, THF sub as well.

[Dyanisus]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

So am i better of on being a mnk instead of choosing an adv. sub job?

[Jei]

Re: War/ Nin or War/Sam?

you should try them all. But by popularity, I would recommend you give priority to nin first, and thf second. mnk sam are nice alternative but not that popular.

I have thf and nin fully levelled to sub my war. I PT with a war/nin once and her damage with SATA sturmwind was pretty impressive.
Sturmwind can end fragmentation, so if that's the SC you're going for /thf to end the chain is really nice.
Rampage can end distortion, again rampage is pretty powerful on it's own and /nin you will still get nice damage ^^

up until 60 I never get to close fragmentation tho. Especially since I learnt rampage all PTs seem to want me to use rampage. And nothing wrong about it really I'm doing consistant 700 damage with it ^^ with occasional 900.