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With all those cast times, melees are tremendously strong, it doesn’t “lose” to int masteries. Two run cast homings, WMs melee people after using it. You go tank or water and you’re a 1v1 machine. The mastery needs a rework because it’s boring to play with but doesn’t need any buffs on melees or such stuff. This example isn’t right, yeah if an int user put 70str he’ll have the same melee attacks but not for the same cost. They’re sacrificing 650hp/40 damage.

New Menu Music (Thank you @Afilion!) Fixed Shockwave Slash Technique description (Thanks @Magatama)

There's always a lot of questions, or rather complaints, that come in the form of "How come X mastery can do this while Y mastery can do this". Eg. Why doesn't fire have any targeted jutsu, How come Gentle Fist has 100 CP cost and long cooldown on their main jutsu. This is going to be a short series explaining the design behind more unique masteries, or atleast the thought process when I designed them. Balancing Playstyles The idea behind each mastery being good at a different thing comes from classic table-top RPG archetypes. However, instead of building classes around Tanks, Supports, Damage classes. In the ninja world, every class is able to fight, but can also be built to be more tanky, or do more damage, or in some cases be built for utility. Eg. having a Earth Ninja that purely uses agility and chakra, standing behind his team mates in a group fight to quickly cast CCs for his team. Or having a fully attack medical ninja vs. having a fully support medical ninja or anything in between. While some of this is held back by meta, or by incompleteness in features. This is the vision™. We want each mastery to be different in not just how they fight, but how they are experienced on more fundamental levels, with each class having unique leveling experiences, focus in progression, and different improvements when they rank up and how they should traverse the world safely. Tools Ninja aka. Ten Ten Style The mastery is built with a different sustainability dynamic than other masteries. While Tools Ninja can only use their jutsu a limited amount of times before needing to restock up on tools, and become virtually useless when they don't have tools, Tools ninja jutsu cost half of what their non-tool ninja counter parts cost in terms of upfront Chakra Points. While a Fire mastery ninja would be able to last longer out of their village, a tool ninja who is well stocked can last twice as long in a single encounter without charging chakra if their stat distribution is done the same as their enemy. Their downtime would be much less, giving them more time to punish enemies who have ran out of chakra. At the cost of ryo, they get a more complete set of jutsu, being the only mastery that at full potential can utilize Stuns, AoEs and high damage potential. Like a Trapper in D&D, they can set up traps to prepare for fights ahead of time and will find their use more in situations like defending against incoming raids, and fights in the Forest of Death where they can hold their ground more. Traps will be increasingly useful as more possible scenarios are created in the game. In terms of game economy, they also serve the purpose of being ryo sinks where in-game currency is given an almost direct conversion into fighting power. As time goes on and there are more smaller villages in between to stock up on tools it may become more convenient, but for now, having your team members hold tools for you is one way to extend your usefulness without returning to villages. Sword Master Although a lot of people are going to like the idea of carrying around a sword, just because they look aesthetically pleasing. The overall design of the Sword Mastery play-style is based on giving players who love hunting gear in MMORPGs a class just for them! In Nin Online, gear are mostly cosmetic, because we don't want to force players to look a certain way in order to be PvP viable, or look a certain way to be optimally powerful. Looking how you want to look is a big part of giving people the ability to immerse themselves in their ninja identity and role play. The class is based around the way Suigetsu is going around the ninja world trying to collect all the swords of the 7 Swordsmen of the Mist, except on a larger scale, where you go around fighting different enemies to collect swords from all over the ninja world. Playing any hybrid of Sword Master with an elemental mastery will give you a hybrid of both, because having the best swords won't matter as much when only half your kit relies on it. As time goes on and more of the game is fleshed out, I hope to have hundreds of swords with unique abilities, so switching between them can be useful in different scenarios. There should be a good combination of swords you get in different ways. Ones which you can do by simply finishing missions. Ones where you have to hunt bosses for days or months, and when you get them, they are the rarest items in the game. Ones which you can just buy from a shop. Ones that you can only buy from a shop somewhere obscure. Ones that you can only earn from events like we did back in 2013 (and have honored till today. Only Shauri will ever hold a Tsuarigi sword as a player!) To be honest, the current state of Sword Master is something I'm quite unhappy with and am still hoping to distinguish their fighting style more. And... There's still a lot to be said regarding why things are a certain way, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask them and I'll answer them in the next development log!

Hybrid WM is indeed bad(except water) but tank str wm is tremendously good because of their melee and their homings that either cancel stuff or CC. Melee masteries in general counters int users. But yeah they’re not « overpowered » or « dominating » (they’re mostly countered by GF/Tai/Fan) but they’re really good for 1v1s.

Your own contribution to the village's Economy, Intel and Manpower is now being recorded. (Resets if your character resets) Dark Clearing and Ledge Forest Encampment are now linked by pathways.

Are there any plans to differentiate Gentle Fist from Taijutsu to a more significant degree. Right now they are both mostly focused on the same type of jutsu, Gentle Fist will mostly spam Crusher into Palm Bottom while Taijutsu will spam Sesimic into Breaking Kick. I like Gentle Fist cause of the whole "slower but hard hitting" playstyle and I'd like to see it be focused more on Vacuum Palms and 16 Palms since they are the more unique and iconic jutsu of this mastery.

Looking for healing missions for medic ninjas!

The main problem with INT WM is that unlike other masteries that do have a lot of more options to use in a fight (even with higher CP Costs) it only has 1 and I repeat, 1 reliable ability to poke with. In a sense of being a solo mastery, comparing to Gentle Fist which does not require a secondary mastery to be strong, INT WM set of jutsu does not work well together, mostly ruined by shadow shuriken change which everyone agrees upon as it used to give players good use of hit-and-run strategy that worked the best for INT WM. And if we look in the future plans, it is supposed to be a solo mastery. So no, INT WM cannot fight for longer period of time than others, because they cannot put any pressure or even threaten the opponent as they used to. I also feel like hidden explosive tag jutsu is completely useless, it should be removed and replaced by some other jutsu that could compensate for the lack of long range poke that this mastery truly needs and not another suicide jutsu. Also as previously mentioned gazillion of times, the amount of ryo one must must must must spend, even with the changes to Takumi shop is abysmal. The amount of tools you can carry is too low for INT WM, Not to mention the damage nerf/scaling nerf to an already low base damage abilities that INT WM has, made its value far less than it was before. Problems: Lack of poke, a little to no sense of playstyle for a solo mastery, with the exception of pre-setting traps in areas. Has 1 completely useless jutsu and 1 jutsu that just doesnt fit the playstyle in a already empty and not well oiled kit. Abysmal cost of tools, could be solved with more solutions to the economy overall for players past 50. That does not include relying on alts. Amount of tools INT WM can equip. Saying your allies can hold them for you is not reliable option or answer to the problem. The ally can die before you, or you can run out of specific tool that the ally cannot hold by themselves already as they use the same tool. Low Base Damages, with the exception for exploding spike ball. The low CP cost on Shuriken and Kunai does not give this mastery an advantage over others. Unreasonable choice of mastery to choose as solo mastery. Not enough ways to grind with, again kunai the only reliable ability until exploding ball. Cost too high to level with, if it only goes advanced then you must pick INT WM at the start, I cant imagine new players who want to play ten-ten, come after all the advanced changes and see that it is impossible to level up with or even use, early on. As of now this mastery is only possible to play if it is your secondary account. Solutions: A good way to balance this mastery out would be an option to toggle the teleport of shadow shuriken on/off. Meaning when ON, your ability will teleport you. When OFF, your ability will not teleport you. This would make that Hybrids who do not mind to teleport can still do it, and INT WM's who dont really want this to happen, can be happy. Remove hidden explosive tag jutsu, could be replaced with a better trap jutsu like a set of explosive that are connected with a wire that triggers an explosion when passed over the wire. Something like a scroll that Ten Ten used, like many of us have asked before, that could hold tools (unknown capacity) would solve this issue. Increase Base Damages, Increase CP Costs. I think all can agree that this would be a lot better balance. Scrap entire thing and rework it.

If you experience high ping, you should look into paying for a gaming VPN. These exist to eliminate the latency trips that your network ISP has to travel, by optimizing the network pathway. The server we run is in Canada and if you aren't inside Canada, the pathway to it could be really bad. This is something we can't fix, which is why we will look in the future to provide an alternative server for EU region and US. It just is not something we can do with our budget, time, or resources at this time. The only real solution is to pick a good VPN/proxy and use it for the time being. ExitLag NoPing WTFast PingZapper KillPing These are the major ones that I have researched and used most of them. I use ExitLag personally.

Dear Ninjas, This development log is to explain why some people have bad ping and why tunnel programs like ExitLag and NoPing help with that, and why it is out of our control. What is Ping? So Ping or Latency with Nin Online is the amount of milliseconds it takes for your client (in whichever country you are in) to send a packet of data to and fro the server located in North America. How do Tunnel programs work? First of all, watch this: https://www.nptunnel.com/en/how-it-works If you were to assume that data is moving linearly from your computer to our server and back, that should mean that Tunnel programs are somehow making data move faster than the physical limitations of our network sea cables etc. right? Wrong. Tunnel services simply provide more direct access to our game by running dedicated servers in strategic locations. This reduces ping drastically in some cases if your ISP is not providing you with a direct connection to servers (in this case) in Canada. Why is my ISP being a little shit and not giving my a direct connection to Canadian servers? Some people wonder why is it sometimes even when you're not located far away from the server, you can get bad ping? It's because your ISP is being a little shit or you've bought into an ISP that isn't being completely transparent with you on how they tranfer data. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/isp-peering-high-speed-internet-slow/ ISPs do this because they can sell your "high quality / premium" plans labelled with fancy terms like gigabit connection or 1gb/s speeds. Without actually shelling out money to provide you direct connections. They're also not lying to you because your connection speed will actually really be 1gb/s - just to local servers or servers that are favorable. So how is it not our problem your ISP is being a little shit? In some sense, it does become our problem. When you experience lag, our game service suffers. We also need to find ways to optimize further (within physical limitations of science) to make it so our server can make you feel like latency doesn't exist. Why is it some other games have better ping for me? This can be for a variety of reasons. Firstly, they could be using non-authoritative server architectures. Which means more of the game's data is being processed on your client locally. However, for an Online RPG where we need to prevent hacking, this is not ideal because the more things processed on the client side, the easier it is to cheat. When all data is processed on a server, it is called an authoritative server. They could also be located nearer to you or have their own tunnel service dedicated to their game. They could also just not be transparent about the actual ping you have and use advanced client side lag compensation methods that make the game seem like it isn't lagging like I'll explain below. How do we deal with lag in an online game with an authoritative server? We compensate by making actions you take reflect on your client before they actually happen on the server, in some cases. But this is a move that has to be done strategically on only some areas of the game. Examples are, movement. If you move in Nin Online, it reflects on your client right away. However, this in rare cases can cause a situation where your client thinks you're on one spot, but the server knows you are actually somewhere else. We deal with this by making sure your client holds you in the spot where the server knows you are, until your client is ready to move again. We also minimize the amount of time the data takes to process on the server before a return packet is sent to your client. That is within on control. How it works is.. Client Packet is Sent ------ (Eg. 100ms) -------> Server Processes Packet (eg. 10ms) Server Packet is Sent -------- (Eg. 100ms) -------> Client receives packet The ping would be 210ms in this case. Because the Data was processing on our server for 10ms before the server started giving your client a response. However, our ability to optimize this is very limited at this point. The reason being, our server is capable of performing millions of calculations per second. This means any packet that is send is almost instantly processes. It spends almost no time at all on our server before it gives you a response. Our server is actually so powerful that we cap the amount of calculations it attempts to perform to how many it actually needs to. So far on a busy time, the server performs around 10,000-20,000 calculations per second. Which is almost 0.1% of the server's calculation processing prowess. There was a point in time where we had a lot we could do to optimize the game to be less laggy. We've solved the problems within our control like major issues that caused the server to hang when certain things were done for example. But there is two things we can't solve.. your ISPs lies and the engineering and physical limitations of data transfer (in 2018). Perhaps breakthroughs like quantum entanglement will create a quantum internet where we can transfer data instantaneously, but until then, we can only dream. Why is our current and only server in North America? Conclusion There's also the chance that if we can make Nin Online populated and monetarily profitable enough, we can run multiple servers in different locations. But right now, the only thing that will do is dilute the player base in a game focused on community, RP and engaging in fights with other players. On a bright side, we've got a major breakthrough for FPS lag!

Dear Ninja, With the eventual release of new higher level content, expect that a lot of changes will happen to current jutsu. A lot jutsu will have cast times and longer cooldowns, but people will have a lot more jutsu overall. Yeahhhh. Regards, Rory

Then can we get 2 hotbars one on top of each other when that happens? Switching them out in middle of combat is kinda awkward

Having to buy 3rd party programs shouldn't be a thing just to play a god damn 2D game...

Dear Ninja, First of all, I apologize for the lack of updates once again! Hopefully things will start picking back up soon. It's such a waste that we can't get Open Beta out quicker. I don't want to over hype whats coming, but we've been working on the new sub-paths for masteries, namely Kenjutsu (Sword Style), Gentle Fist and Fan Style. Sword Style This is one of the jutsus I've completed for Sword Style! It's called Risky Blade Technique. Why is it risky? You'll see! Gentle Fist Though it's name states it's gentle, the amount of power these techniques will push out will depend on the controlled strength of the user. Art by @Master Ant In addition to it's regular kit, Gentle Fist will be the first sub-style to include a Hidden Technique, which will be rare and not attainable through scribes. Fan Style Wind Mask Technique is a utility Jutsu for Fan Users that I think will come in handy for a lot of war/pvp situations. Art by @Master Ant I hope everyone continues to give us your support and patience as we try to make sure the game is ready for Open Beta! Also, do note that from now on we'll be trying our best to roll out large changes like entire new sub-paths at once. Also, new mob coming soon! Also, miss you guys! Regards, Rory