New Skill: Ninja (in General)

Has the same XP cost as armor prof, and also does not need any more XP.

Makes that character reverse his targetting with ranged and melee weapons, so he will attack from back to front.

He will still skip AoI units, and if he's using an exBow or whatever, they still target the same.

I like it. Simple, balanced and useful.

Personally I think it should cost more exp. Also it would kill the usefulness of a SF.

I like the idea, but along with Elite the SF came instantly to mind. I have thought DD's in general need help all around compared to USD backed weaps, but *blah* to that trodden path .

The other thing I think would be awesome if the Ninja Skill allowed a UC user to utilize the dual wielding weapons idea that has been tossed around here and there, but ONLY for certain weapons. Make Katanas and *cough CHANGEMONTH* a new weapon called a Murasame, or even MORE fun with a ranged 'Throwing Star' which penalizes them not being able to have a shield, but somehow balanced that makes using 2 weapons beneficial for that type of strat.

Also, how would UC users be effected by this, being they have no choice in that style of combat is skill linked?

^Sorry I initially was writing about UC forgetting it was a skill.... so take the UC out of that paragraph. EDIT: *if the Ninja Skill allowed a user to utilize the*

Melee/ranged weapons = physical damage front to back.
EF = magic damage front to back.
SF = magic damage back to front.
????? = physical damage back to front.

I don't see the ninja skill taking the place of the SF, I see it filling the void up above.

i ike the idea as it allows a physical damage team to circumvent heavy AC front minions. though i think it should have a 100k training fee and be non-upgradable

This is good, but will kind of break quite a few people's strat.

How about you make it percentage based? Its initial cost is the same as AP (960) but to work at full damage of 100% it has to be trained at 10% of the characters MPR.
For every 1% of the MPR it is short, damage is reduced by 5% and 7.5% of remaining damage is dealt to the front minion.

I.e i have a character with 1mil MPR, with an average damage of 20,000 a hit.
With Ninja at 10,000, damage is 100%
All 100% damage is dealt to the last minion. 20,000 damage to last.

With Ninja trained at 9,000, damage is reduced to 95%.
7.5% of the damage is dealt to the first minion and 92.5% dealt to the last minion.
1,425 to first minion, 17,575 to last minion. 19k total.

With Ninja trained at 8,000, damage is reduced to 90%.
15% of the damage is dealt to the first minion and 85% to the last.
2,700 to first minion, 15,300 to last minion 18k total.

Etc. to
With Ninja trained base, damage is reduced 50%.
75% of the damage is dealt to the first minion and 25% to the last.
7,500 to the first minion, 2,500 to the last minion. 10k total.

It would unfortunately mean it would require more experience to go into it at the beginning to get it off the ground but that comes with a suitable explanation.

You don't become a Ninja overnight, you have to put some effort into it :).

That's way complicated. It would involve, among other things, calculating the to_hit against two minions at once (otherwise people would train it low to score a hit against the rear minion while doing nearly full damage to the front.)

:-) A newbie's opinion:

Although I do have to agree that it would kind of fill a "void" in the possible attack orders ( (c) Wraithlin), I believe some items will have to to be added or modified to really create something balanced because there is currently no rough equivalent to the Mage Shield or the Shield of Capacity, the two being very different in their interactions with different strategies on attack orders. I think the two gaps should be filled at once.

Did they have ninjas in LoTR?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whb4qQflVTw

Could always just make UC do what you're proposing.

I thought ninja increased typing speed by 10%... not really enough to make a huge difference, but breaking stalemates in the race to get the answer out first...

Thought that idea might have been too complicated how about the same idea except it doesn't have damage split between the minions?

Its initial cost is the same as AP (960) but to work at full damage of 100% it has to be trained at 10% of the characters MPR.
For every 1% of the MPR it is short, damage is reduced by 2.5%.

I like Myth's idea. >.>

How about this for a different way of working it. The ninja skill is based on str of the minion. At 1/10 (or whatever ratio is deemed best) the effect is 1.0. This is the % chance of the minion targeting in reverse order. So if you only have a .5 ninja effect then you have a 50% chance of targeting front to back and a 50% chance of targeting rear to front each round. So chances are you will target the front minion one round and the rear minion the next.

^GL, Nem. I Seriously wish you GL in all that you TRY to accomplish.

Random targeting between battles is a lot less desirable than random targeting between rounds, so at least you're on the right track. Show me where the merit is.

How about keeping the existing UC skill and call it Ninjitsu, and make a version of UC that swaps Evasion for Endurance?

Less dodgy, nor Durable.

If you want sneaky, add an anti HoC property to Ninjitsu.

;)

So in Essence it would work similar to BL(Relating to Str) with an Archery Setting(1.0 Effect) but for Targeting.....nice.




Hmmm Well one Merit I will see for this is that it can be extremely Diverse for All Kinds of Strats. It can even be Effective for the Jiggy/Hal Via AoJ. Besides Adding Spice to the Game it would also bring about more Strategies and Counters ie this could be the Stepping stone for Future Items/Skills/Familiars(Runes/Tats) as well as Tweaks for Items we currently have. I see it as an all win for implementation of this Skill.

Making it have to train with that much experience would make it not worthwhile to take.

Magic Missle targets back to front but does alot less damage than shocking grasp, why? So that you can front load your tanks in the actual front, take the brunt of the damage there, you get hit with a smaller attack in the back.

If you make it a skill, that is trained once like armor prof, then you can't train bloodlust or archery, which means you already gimped the damage. you can't use an ELB and you can't hit 2x as hard in melee. There is no need to make it complicated and add experience training to it to lower the damage already, by making it your skill slot you already gimped the damage.

Not to mention making it target randomly means that you already destroyed the damage capability by removing possibility of BL or archery, but now you are saying it won't even hit 100% of the time, wow, we just came up with a worthless skill.

First at 1.0 effect it would work 100% of the time, just like archery. Also AP and ninjitsu are far different in how effective they are. I don't think it should be as costly as something like BL though, that's why it would be 1/10 of str. If you leave it as base it opens up abilities for abuse, mainly with junction. So I believe that a fairly balanced version is a moderately cheap skill but not one that works at base.

As for how good a skill like this is. It opens up a lot of possibilities. Good targeting goes a long ways. Often with teams they have a very good anti tank wall in the front. If you have to ability to lose a portion of your potential damage but target differently you could very well turn the tide against teams like that. However when facing a damage race you will likely lose out. There are benefits and drawbacks to each. This would be a good addition.

Rogues do it from behind! ;)

I think your making the cost of a potentially very powerful skill too low. This would also kill MM. If this was implemented at such a low cost (1/10th str) then MM would have to be reworked.

One thing to note, is that with ranged damage SoD already does damage to all minions, exbows already have their own targeting, and bows need archery to be effective. This would be a melee only thing more or less. Might just make it melee only anyways. MM will still be the only ranged rear to front targeting thing.

So why do people train shocking grasp, we already have physical damage that targets front to back?

And the low cost is one of the things I want, which is why I want it not even as high as 1/10th str. I want it to be able to be trained and untrained at will without losing too much so that you can vary your fight list back and forth and possibly get defensive wins. And on the other end, if you know someone is using this skill as the method to beat you, you can get defensive wins against them by reversing your lineup. Gives incentive to pay attention to when people are fighting, adds more to the game than just logging on and clicking fight.