initiative is not for damage lmao its for who goes first.

i believe he means that if initiative is the only enhancement he should be dealing the same amount of damage due to them having maxes stats but initiative.

what i can tell you is that, for sure, only initiative changes the 'power' you get displayed when you pass the mouse over the character portrait in arena (i tried to remove runes or magatamas of every single stat to prove it and the power showed there changed only when i removed intiative ones) and that my power neither changed when i brought tenten GNW to 3 star from 2 star, so, at least officially, only initiative and basic stats matters there for real.
The problem is that when I do arenas doesn't seem at all that what is said there is true and i'm experiencing too the same thing you are experiencing. For example the fact that if i meet my exact same setup (mabui tenten gnw mei af one) and i lose initiative, so i don't have the barrier up, the enemy's tenten many times does not land at all a damage compatible with the +40% effect of the barrier only that she should have in comparison with my one (i tried on kakashi clone to not use 'water enhancement', to get the same effect as losing the barrier, to see the difference in damage i would land against it and the numbers i get don't match many times with what i often see in arena (are a lot lower)), so the only thing i can think about it is that actually there's an hidden % of defense/resistance/ninjutsu/attack that gets calculated in and it shouldn't be so.
Another thing i notice is that my ninjas in those cases also crit/combo/control a lot less than enemy's one. Could be a random case dued to rng, but it's another clue that adds up to the others. This post was last edited by 988***@uf16 at 2017-4-16 21:36

From my experience, winning and losing initiative wars it's fine, if I'm losing against someone who is a level or two higher than me. Problem is, whenever I am in the arena and I ask someone what level they are(when they have higher initiative than me) I got responses like: 90,87,84,83 when I was bellow level 80. I will always lose an initiative war against them, they get initiative though leveling alone, let alone how old their server is and how much time they had to get those refines. If me, a jonin who's 77 right now gets matched with another jonin who is level 90 I will lose only because they had more initiative than me. If I get matched with a kage or super kage I am just wasting my time, I will lose in 99% of the cases. I don't get angry for losing an initiative war, I get angry because I lose a war which I didn't have a chance to win in the first place.