design Playstyles Part I: Weapon Mastery

[Ueda]

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!

[Deviax]

Hi, 

Great Post, its good to know and i cant wait to read the next posts in the series (especially wind/fan)

 

I was wondering about this tho:

6 minutes ago, Ueda said:

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.

what do you mean by that? what makes you unhappy about sword mastery and how do you plan on changing it in the future?

[Rumaki]

15 minutes ago, Ueda said:

(and have honored till today. Only Shauri will ever hold a Tsuarigi sword as a player!)

can u post a ss of that sword ? Cuz ive never heard of this player before nor seen him/her

[Dona]

12 minutes ago, Deviax said:

Hi, 

Great Post, its good to know and i cant wait to read the next posts in the series (especially wind/fan)

Ye it will be interesting to see the playstyles of every masteries detailed and how advanced masteries will change the dynamic of the game 

[Dayum]

Uhh.. I like the beginning of this series. I guess this will be good for everyone to understand the meaning you put into those masteries. 

[Itachi Uchiha]

Nin has never before been so well balanced. There are a couple minor things that are still way too strong in pvp *cough* flicker *cough* but overall, we’re just about ready for advanced masteries I’d say. Now that you’ve successfully balanced what we already have, we can start adding in the new and repeat the cycle of people saying “That’s too OP!” for the next 2 years. YEET

[Light]

Is lightning ever going to be a fast mastery, why it doesn’t excel in small fights aka 1v1 as described in-game? Are there any plans changing the description that future players are not misslead as well? For research you can look up Miki vs Kaguya Light.

[Mana]

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.

[mav]

Looking for healing missions for medic ninjas!

[Kayn]

 

I'm glad to know that you are thinking sword mastery

[Byakurai]

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.

[Pr9phet]

I like this forum but how’s full wm adv lookin like

[Stylish Ninja]

Here for my biyearly visit :). Every time I come back I always see so much improvement. Branding and community is important and you seem to be doing a good job. Keep adding that good content and the players will follow. Continue to follow that passion Rory, Seth, and others; you will be rewarded. Hope life has gotten better since you couldn't afford a chair!

Just my 2 cents on the collective growth of Nin-Online over the years as an observer. Keep at it!

[Lumy]

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.

5 hours ago, Indra said:

Exemple, one goes earth + water. Then add 70 str to his build. 70 str, 60-65 int. (basic hibrid WM builds) He will have earth spikes, mud river, earht pillars, (earth prison for team fights) Water subistitution, water prison, water bullet. All those jutsus are better and more usefull than WMs jutsus. Now comes the unfair part, they can have the exact same melee attacks as a real Weapon masters for the same cost.

This is where I actually want to get. Weapon masters are a melee focused mastery literally based on the same stats system everyone can use. It is based on something anyone can do. Therefore, chosing weapon master will close some opportunities. A 2 ele user can weild a sword but a wm (sword weilder)cannot have 2 ele. WMs were intentionally balanced so it doesnt have ''good'' jutsus.(was said by rory himself.) 

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.

[Lumy]

But that doesn’t make sense, you’re saying int shouldn’t do that and then say that wm should(even though wm cant have 2 elementals). they shouldn’t anyway, melees and homings are dominating the game right now and WMs have both.

[Mell]

4 minutes ago, Lumy said:

But that doesn’t make sense, you’re saying int shouldn’t do that and then say that wm should(even though wm cant have 2 elementals). they shouldn’t anyway, melees and homings are dominating the game right now and WMs have both.

Melees that dominating the game is Tai melee and Fan melee imo 

[Lumy]

15 minutes ago, Mell said:

Melees that dominating the game is Tai melee and Fan melee imo 

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.

[Tameshi Hinode]

The issue is that strenght wm,s dont nearly go as well with other masteries as int based ones.

The basic melee attacks are nearly impossible to hit with(especially if you add lag to this),unless you use them in a combo.

And to do that,you need to hit with 1 of your homing,s.....that are not instant,and can be interrupted by a RANGED instant skill.

Its also kinda funny that as a wm,sometimes you dont even want to go into melee range...for pve,thats old news,learned to live with that.

But a lightning+earth user can be a real challenge for a pure WM with basically just 2,,okay''skills(and no wm sub)that are not just homing skills,but also putting you into melee range and despite being a wm with a sword...you dont want that sometimes,because you can get countered really bad.

Ofcourse,you could pick a second mastery,but here,youre heavily limited in what you can pick.

If you pick a element,you got to spend points on int,points that you would need for your wm jutsus to be stronger.

You could do average damage with both,or high damage with 1 mastery,but someone with 2 elements can do high damage with both masteries and depending on his mastery combo,also have nice stuns or ranged homing skills while wm,s dont have that luxury.