Ninja Guide v. 0.1

Contest:
1. Introduction
2. Basics
3. Equipment and Skills
4. Leveling/PVE
5. PvP
6. Different options
7. Final words

1. Introduction

Welcome to the Ninja Guide v 0.1. This is still work in progress so I will be updating it with new information once I have time or find new information about being a Ninja.

So who am I and who am I to write a Guide? I'm Endet on the forums, obviously, and Minanova 130-117 Ninja-Ninja on Sapphire Server. 4 years of game experience. I hope this guide will help you with your Ninja.

2. Basics

So a Ninja. You want to be one but not sure about it? Basics of the Ninja is quite simple actually. Unlike people think, it is not the ultimate killing machine which will dominate the battle fields. It's more of a Support Character capable of causing some serious damage. Why, I'll get into to that in Equipment and Skills section. So why choose Ninja if it's not a ultimate killer? Well most likely the same reason why you choose anything not Trojan, cause it's needed and is fun! Ninja can turn the tide of a battle in GW easily with a good guild. Skills of the Ninja just beg for team play and are seriously something to watch out and be prepared to.

3. Equipment and Skills

Equipment of the Ninja is the same as any other melee character except they have their class specific armour, Vest, and possibility to wear a Veil/Hood instead of Earrings. Veil/Hood is a good choice if you can throw the money in it to make it good, it has more physical defence and magical defence than Earrings have. You can check them to make sure, physical defence is way more and they also have 1% more magic defence than earrings have. The Vest has same magical defence as Trojan armour has.

Katana, the weapon of a Ninja, is by far the strongest weapon in 1 handers. It has more maximum damage than a Club but also lower minimum damage making it have insanely wide damage range. Of course, this can be countered easily with high weapon proficiency since it affects how often you hit your higher end damage than your lower end damage. It is a great weapon but lacks any passive skills and has only one ranged skill, Twofold Blades range 3. Also they look quite wicked compared to other weapons.

Let's look at the skills then.

- Twofold Blades, or short 2fold, is Ninjas only killing skill. It has range of 3, half of FB/SS which have either 6 or 7 can't remember correctly right now. It gives 30% increase in damage at fixed level which can be acquired at level 120 making it truly devastating in damage but due to the range, it's quite hard to use. If you think, it will be easy since you know how to FB/SS, you are wrong. It's nothing like FB/SS since with skills like them, you aim at the ground. With 2fold, you need to aim at the character instead of the ground. Also with the range of 3 only it is the 2nd hardest skill on my list to use, right after direct hitting. None the less, it's the only skill which you can use to kill an enemy making it Ninjas work skill so to say. Eats 30* points of stamina, unlike as FB/SS which eats 20 points.

- Toxic Fog, the skill everyone whines about. They whine for a reason, it's insane! At fixed it takes 50% of the targets HP and it has a splash meaning you can get even 10 people poisoned with one toxic fog. Overpowered? Perhaps. It's truly an amazing skill which you MUST learn to master as a Ninja. Hitting with it on moving targets isn't hard as 2fold or FB/SS but it's not easy either. It takes a while to learn how to use it but practise makes it perfect. Toxic Fog is best used in GW against group of enemy players. Last GW, I myself was mostly running around finding groups of enemies or important characters like good Water Tao's to poison. People seemed to get incredibly irritated of me doing a "3 jump toxic run" at the pole meaning I ran trough the pole area and used 3 toxic fogs (with heavens blessing that is) on 3 different spots to make everyone there poisoned for our Archers/Fires/Hercers. Turned the tide of a battle many times, I'll tell you that! Toxic Fogs bad side is that it eats your stamina like hell. 50 points of stamina each run meaning even with Heavens Blessing you have to sit for a quick moment to make that 3th Fog.

- Archer Bane, Archers nightmare. Great skill to take out those archers. It makes the flying Archer fall down and lose 10% of the Archer HP. If it doesn't make them dead for Trojans to kill, it will at least make them run away giving you and your guild more time. It also often coses Archers to Disconnect since they are moving mostly while they get hit, making them do an invalid jump. Great skill against Archers indeed but it's like Toxic Fog, Stamina drainer. 50 points each use just like TF (Toxic Fog).

- Poison Star, Ninja-Ninja skill. Now this is useful skill on 1 person at a time. Stops the target from potting for 20seconds at fixed level, it really means no pots also but healing sitll works. Eats stamina 50 points just like AB or TF. It's not really useful most of the time but it also has it's shining moments. If there's one hard person to kill, lets say high potency Fire or Trojan, use TF on him/her and then Poison Star. 50% hp away every 3 seconds and no potting for 25 seconds (at fixed level). Few Fire or Archer or a herc and he/she is down no matter the potency. Useful eh?

- Counter-Hit, Ninja-Ninja-Ninja skill. No personal experience yet until I 2nd RB.

- Shuriken Vortex, XP skill. Shuriken Vortex is a nice skill but mostly useful in PvP only. Why you might ask? Because it only does 1/4th* of your damage. That's right, only half damage so for leveling it's not no where near as good as Fatal Strike is. But for PvP it's indeed a nice skill since you do half your damage every 2seconds to everyone on your screen and all damage you take is reduced to pure 1. Yup, immortality for 15-20 seconds, not sure how long it lasts and can't confirm it right now. Only reflect is not reduced to 1 damage only so you better watch out in a big group of xxx-war-xxx reborns. It also stops you from jumping so you can only run with it or "swirl" away. You also are capable of direct hitting and some people say they can use 2fold with it also while you are swirling away, haven't confirmed the 2fold fact.

- Fatal Strike, XP skill. Fatal Strike it the leveling skill of Ninja. It gives you 5x damage and ability to teleport to mobs. Usually at lab 1, I was getting easy 50-60 kills at Slingers with it so it makes you level extremely fast. A great skill indeed but doesn't work on other players, only mobs so remember that in PvP.

There's the skills and about the gear. The skills are extremely potency dependant so keep that in mind. You WILL need high potency to have any use of the great skills of a Ninja. But as you can see from the skills, Ninja is not really a killer, more of a supporter. But of course you can get nice kills with it also.

:EDIT:
Added some stuff and fixed information, thanks to Quanster.
*Thanks for Quanster for this

4. Leveling/PVE

Leveling a Ninja might seem hard, after all you have 2 Katanas which doesn't have any area skill. It's true it's hard as hell, IF you level with Katanas on both hands. Best way to level a Ninja is to get a lvl 5 club and rage. With a Katana, you will have nice damage and with rage you will do really nice damage to mobs. Fatal Strike works with a Katana+Club combo and with rage too so it's seriously fast leveling with this combo. I suggest not to even think of leveling without a level 5 club at least, it's just useless and stupid really.

Now how to and where to level. If you are lvl 100+ or already reborned and have a Tower Talisman, free Elite or bought Super, you can easily level anywhere in the game if you have it +4 or +5 depending if it's Super or Elite. I had a Super +4 Tower Talisman and could go kill RedDevils at level 60 taking 1's from them. Best place is to go to mobs which you can one hit with Fatal Strike, that way you maximise your exp gain. It might seem at start to do enough kills with FS to make it come fast again but you'll get hang of it. I usually got 50-60 or even 70 from time to time with FS and there was no more than 1minute between the end of FS and start of the next FS. Extremely fast leveling then. For people who don't have a Talisman, if your higher than level 100 get them from the free quest. If your not level 100 yet, then just go to mobs you can survive and make your armour better, not much else you could do.

5. PvP

Now for the interesting part, at least for me, PvP. PvP with Ninja is quite interesting. As I said earlier in this guide, it's not really a killing machine more like a support. Let me explain. The skills of a Ninja are made for supporting in my opinion, just look at them. Toxic fog, Archer Bane, Poison Star. All of those skills don't kill the target, ever. But poisons them, takes Archers down, prevents them from potting. Incredibly good skills but not for killing. Two Fold Sword is the only skill which is capable of killing and that has 3 range only. I don't really see it as a killing skill either, more like self-defence skill cause of it's range. With that range, there's no point of trying to hunt someone. Rather poison them and let a Fire or Archer take them down. If someone gets on you, then it's a good skill to protect yourself if you know how to use it that is. Against melee Waters it's great since they have to get 1 step closer to you than you have to them. Meaning you can stand there, smashing right click on them and once their in range, BAM dead. Trojans, Fires and Archers are a different story then but I'm not gonna write a guide about that, at least not now.

PvPing with a Ninja is truly about supporting your mates and making killing the enemies easier. Archers you take down with AB. Others you Toxic Fog to down their HP or at least to eat their pots away. Really, remember to support your guildies/mates with the skills, they will love it. Toxic Fog is also effective to save yourself. Countless times did I at last GW scare my chasers with TF. Once they are poisoned, they run in the fear of dying to a single hit, effective tactic. I mean literally anyone who I poisoned ran away, not one stayed to fight me unless I started chasing them and harassing them. Using TF is quite tricky from time to time. You have to know where the enemy will land to hit, but it's quite easy to learn since it has a huge splash radius where it poisons.

There's lots of lots of things to go with about PvP but I don't want to start writing them all since it would take days to write them all down. But I already gave some tips, figure the rest out yourself like I did.

6. Options

When I say Options, I really mean different builds. RB path you can choose yourself, I have chosen pure Ninja for Back-Strike, you can go what ever you wish. I mean, different weapon choices. Yes, Ninja has them as well. 3 options to go in total:

Katanas, the name says it all.

Katana+1H. Could be good combo since with katana you could get really nice damages and a ranged skill with a Sword or Blade. Only down side is that you will need 176STR and 264AGI to be able to wear both weapons at level 115+ to gain maximum damages out of this. You could use level 15 blade or whatever but from my testing, the damage is not really good. You would have 22k max damage at 130 with Super +6 gear and full 2SDG. That's not really shabby I'd say, but of course Warriors have those damages as well (with +12 weapon) so you should be okay with it if you wish to have little higher damages than a Warrior but Ninjas skills. I don't personally suggest this.

2 1Hs. Yup, you read it right. Throw those Katanas out the window and restat to 176STR and no AGI. You can wear your Trojans weapons, have the same damage as your Trojan but have Ninjas skills. Of course you would have less HP and no hercules but the Ninjas skills are enough to make up for that. This would be the only way to have really a killing machine Ninja. TF helps to take the HP out so you can one hit your enemy, AB saves you from those high + Fan Archers. I haven't tested this out yet, but in theory it would be extremely effective build. More HP than Katana Ninja, less damage but ranged skills. Only skill you lose with this weapon choice is 2fold which isn't THAT great but all the other skills, including XP skills(!) work. I would suggest this to most Ninjas unless they absolutely wan't to use Katanas and 2fold. I will most likely turn in to this once I am 130 2nd RB. Weapon combination I suggest is Club/Hammer/Axe/Scepter (for their highest damages from 1H weapons excluding Katana) + Sword/Blade for FB/SS. Just think about it, you'll understand.

7. Final Words

In the end, Ninjas are indeed great. They have over powered skill Toxic Fog, it should really be nerfed down to 30% at maximum in my opinion. They look amazing, have insanely annoying jump and have sweet skills for supporting. Also can be effective killers like Trojans with the right weapons. So, conclusion would be it's an amazing class. Might be overpowered in most peoples mind but with TF nerf it would be nothing which couldn't be countered. It can already be countered thanks to their ridiculous HP with Katanas AGI demand. Really, nothing insane here only an amazing class with options, something fresh I'd say. Up to you if you hate it or love it, I love it myself.

Hope you enjoyed reading, sorry for the wall of text but guides are always wall of texts. Hope it helped, if you have something to ask/add post a reply or PM me, either way.