Ninja/Time/Mace ... "It's a BOW Time ..."

[Redlynne]

2 hours ago, Redeyeknight said:

I get excited any time I see a wall of text, because I know the information is going to be accurate, relevant, and entertaining.  

 

Thank you for being awesome!

In that case, you might like the Tri-Form Kheldian builds (Peacebringer and Warshade) that I'm going to be posting up once I get done writing up all the ... pontificating ... that they're going to require (and their keybind files, and their proc chances, and ... and ... and ...).

[Redeyeknight]

The amount of time that you must spend on your carefully crafted posts is staggering.  Do you ever actually get to play the game?

[Redlynne]

2 hours ago, Redeyeknight said:

The amount of time that you must spend on your carefully crafted posts is staggering.  Do you ever actually get to play the game?

Yes ... some ... but honestly it feels like I spend more time playing the forums than I do playing the game.  😖

 

Oh and the v2.0 Tri-Form Kheldian builds are posted now ... and yes ... what I learned from making this Mastermind build informed how to build my Kheldians.  The knowledge loops back around.

[Blaque Zeke]

Man, I really appreciate the time and hard work you put into this guide.  It has made me love ninja's even more than I did before which was a lot already haha.  As far as Incarnate abilities which ones do you run with?  I started working on mine and I have Support, Barrier, Degenerative, Pyronic, Musculature.  You probably already answered this question but I can not remember if I read it or which post.  I also wanted to know what settings you usually run ninjas on, because I know the key is to not overwhelm them with too much so I have been running 1X4.

[Redlynne]

15 minutes ago, Kingrjhamilton said:

Man, I really appreciate the time and hard work you put into this guide.  It has made me love ninja's even more than I did before which was a lot already haha.

17 minutes ago, Kingrjhamilton said:

As far as Incarnate abilities which ones do you run with?  I started working on mine and I have Support, Barrier, Degenerative, Pyronic, Musculature.  You probably already answered this question but I can not remember if I read it or which post.

My Ninja/Time Mastermind is still Level 10 in Praetoria.  I was planning on getting her to 11, but paused to check the forums.

 

It's been so long since I had to know anything about Incarnates that my knowledge of what options there are (and how they inter(re)act with everything else in a build) has long since atrophied beyond the possibilities of useful data recovery.  Suffice it to say that I've forgotten everything about Incarnates in the past 7 years.

 

Best advice I can give to you about Incarnates, on this or any other builds that I've posted, is ... do whatever makes YOU happy.  After all, it's your character, not mine.  I just provided the framework that got you to 50.  What you do after getting to 50 is up to you ...

20 minutes ago, Kingrjhamilton said:

I also wanted to know what settings you usually run ninjas on, because I know the key is to not overwhelm them with too much so I have been running 1X4.

I've been playing mine at +0x3 (the default setting) simply because I'm doing ALL of the Praetorian story arcs before leaving Neutropolis and I have to stop XP in each zone to avoid outleveling contacts, so there's no point in pushing my difficulty levels higher (while stuck with TO enhancement level IOs pre-Level 12).

[Redlynne]

On 10/7/2019 at 7:30 PM, Redeyeknight said:

The amount of time that you must spend on your carefully crafted posts is staggering.  Do you ever actually get to play the game?

Well ... I've spent a little time playing the game in the past 6 weeks or so instead of writing posts all over the forums.  In that time, I got to respec my Ninja/Time Mastermind into the Bow using version you see posted in this thread AND been able to run a few missions to start to get a feel for the kinds of changes having the personal attacks available makes to overall gameplay (in a solo context, since I'm playing a Praetorian).

 

I actually waited until reaching Level 14 to respec to the Bow Time build, so that I wouldn't lose access to Time's Juncture (I wanted the -ToHit debuffing to help protect my Ninjas and to assist with Tankerminding).  Since I want to run ALL of the Praetorian content in each zone before moving on, that means doing both Loyalist and both Resistance story arcs (meaning piles of reward merits!) and needing to lock XP gain before going too far.  With my Ninja/Time Mastermind I've completed the Warden arc in Imperial and switched Loyalist to Resistance in order to do the Crusader arc ... which meant going up against a lot of Seers and PPD and Syndicate in the Imperial Warden arc.

 

The first thing that I can report is that ... taking the personal attacks on a Mastermind is VERY GAME CHANGING(!) ... and I'm kind of underselling that point.

I say that because I'm used to the conventional wisdom of taking 6 of the 9 primary powers on a Mastermind and just ignoring the personal attacks (like almost everyone else who plays a Mastermind) and letting my Pets do all the heavy lifting for me when it comes to damage production.  However, with Ninjas at least, there's a very curious synergy going on that's kind of hard to explain, but I'll give it a (snap) shot here.

 

 

 

Before the respec to the Bow Time build here, I was typically using 1 of 2 engagement strategies ... either ranged pull or jump in and grab aggro.

There were problems with either strategy.

 

For the ranged pull strategy, without personal attack powers from my primary powerset, I basically had two options ... the P2W Origin Attack Power (I picked Magic Origin for my Ninja Mastermind and the Amulet gives -Resistance debuffing that helps all my Ninjas do a smidgen more damage each) and/or the P2W Ranged "staff" Attack Power (either Nemesis Staff or Blackwand, and since I'm playing a Magic Origin I chose Blackwand).  Neither of the P2W powers can be slotted with Accuracy, so as you increase in level the accuracy of these powers keeps falling further and further behind, making them increasingly unreliable for pulling.  Additionally, the Origin Attack Power (Amulet in my case) is relatively short ranged, meaning you need to get rather close in order to use it.  The Blackwand (or Nemesis Staff) use the full 80ft range of ranged blast attacks, but recharges slowly ... as in use once per spawn group slowly.

 

But ... assuming the ranged pull is successful, a common response is that the $Target will use a ranged attack against your Mastermind (triggering Bodyguard to share the damage with the Ninjas around you) causing the Ninjas to retaliate and engage.  However, curiously, the Ninjas don't initially charge into melee to start kicking/slicing as their first option.  Instead, the Ninjas tend to unload their own ranged attacks throwing Shurikens (Genin) and Poison Dart (Jounin) at whatever has decided to bumrush towards your Mastermind ... and against a Minion this is often sufficient to defeat the Minion before the Minion even gets into melee range (a lot of the time they faceplant at the feet of your Mastermind) due to the incoming volleys of ranged damage from your Ninjas.  That then leaves any adds brought along in the pull for the Ninjas to mop up and you'll want to reposition your Mastermind to put those adds inside your Time's Juncture aura radius in order to debuff them and protect your Ninjas from incoming damage (as much as you can).  You can AoE Taunt using the Presence Pool power, but the duration on that is short (too short to be all that useful to you without enhancement slotting...) and because you aren't doing damage yourself, just debuffing via Time's Juncture while your Ninja Pets are doing all the damage, it is actually rather easy for your Ninja Pets to pull aggro from you while you aren't attacking because you're doing no damage yourself (damage inflicted is a multiplier for the effectiveness of Taunts, meaning that no damage has no multiplier when using Taunt).  Your Ninjas basically do all the fighting while your Mastermind spectates and all you've really got to do is cast Temporal Mending from time to time (usually at the end of a fight, but also sometimes during) in order to keep your Ninjas topped up on HP.  You're basically a glorified Empath with Ninjas, and it really isn't all that much fun. 😪

 

The alternative is to just dive in from the start, cast your Presence Pool AoE Taunt and let the Ninjas "get the idea" when you take damage that they ought to start fighting for you.  You've basically still got only the two P2W Attack Powers (in my case, Amulet and Blackwand) and the Presence Pool AoE Taunt and ... you're basically a spectator watching your Ninjas fight for you again.  It can be done, but it really isn't all that interesting to watch or play and it's kind of unsatisfying since you're "just watching the game, controlling it" rather than actively "shaping" the outcome of each battle through your own direct actions from moment to moment.  Without attack powers of your own, the gameplay is more passive and observational, making it feel ... distant ... even when you're in the thick of things pretending to hold aggro for 4 seconds at a time (ha ha, I slay me!).

 

So while either of these strategies are "successful" in isolation (in a one and done sense) neither one is all that satisfying to play when you're wanting to rip tear shred mangle maim bend fold spindle and/or mutilate your way through a mission solo in a way that feeds your inner need for ACTION BABY ... which is why I'm so pleased with what happened when I respecced into the Bow Time build.  Okay, we ready?

 

 

 

So with the Bow Time build you've got personal attacks at your disposal (2 ranged and 1 cone) which are actually pretty decent and for reasons that don't show up on the Hero Planner statistics (strangely enough).

 

The first is that you've got "ranged blast" attacks that you can slot with enhancements (yay! accuracy!) and which don't wait "forever" to recharge (double triple yay!).  So now you can do the whole ranged pull routine from further away than the P2W Origin Attack Power (still Amulet in my case) meaning that it will take a bumrushing Minion that much longer to reach your Mastermind meaning that you'll be able to get in more attacks over the time making them very much less dangerous to you and your Ninjas once they finally get close enough to faceplant in front of you.  In fact, just doing a simple rotation of Snap Shot, Aimed Shot, Snap Shot on $Targets some 80(ish) ft away from my Mastermind has yielded some pretty surprising results that I wasn't anticipating.

 

First of all ... you don't always pull entire spawn groups.

 

This is something that I'd noticed back on Virtue when playing an Empathy/Archery Defender (don't ask, I got her to 50 for Hamidon raiding) which is that archery styled attacks seem to be really low threat relative to other ranged attacks.  What I mean by that is that Bow attacks of any sort seem (to me at least) to be less likely to cause a $Target to do what I think of as an "aggro shout" letting their nearby friends know that they've been attacked.  It's simply more likely that I'll be able to make single ranged pulls using archery attacks than I can (or do) with other ranged attack powers.  It's as if the Bow attacks are "quieter" somehow, meaning that I tend to get more single pulls than I do entire spawn group pulls when using Bow attacks.  I figure that game mechanically there's basically an "aggro sharing radius" around a $Target when they're hit and that archery attacks have a "smaller radius" for this making it easier/more likely to successfully do single ranged pulls than entire group ranged pulls.  Now don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of times that I can Snap Shot one $Target and draw the attention of all of the Minions in a grouping, so that can still happen ... it's just less likely to happen that way when using Bow attacks.

 

Anyway, back to the storytelling.

 

So using your personal Bow attacks, I can quite commonly get a single bumrushing Minion from around 80 ft away about 1/3 to 1/2 damaged before the Ninjas "wake up" and also join the fray against that Minion, at which point the volley of Shurikens and Poison Dart and so on usually finish off that Minion in pretty short order with basically minimal (if any) damage taken on my side of the ledger ... and I've still got Snap Shot and Aimed Shot ready to go again for Round 2 and it just becomes a matter of wash, rinse, repeat to take out spawn groups.  With clever timing, positioning and situational awareness I can often times pick apart spawn groups one by one so as to defeat them serially rather than trying to take them on in parallel, further enhancing my ability to "shape" the flow of battle while soloing in a way that keeps my Mastermind actively participating rather than passively observing (and directing traffic).  It also feels like I'm defeating $Targets at a faster tempo than the alternative no attacks of my own playstyle, which increases my satisfaction with playing using the Bow Time build.

 

But then you also have the collection of pulling adds ... and that's when the Fistful of Arrows comes into play, because you get the most "bang for buck" out of Fistful of Arrows when you've got a cluster of $Targets that you can get inside of the cone.  Now, with the way that everything fits together, for the most part the only times you're going to be using Fistful of Arrows (until you can slot some Range enhancement into it) is at ranges shorter than 80 ft, so you aren't using Fistful of Arrows as an opening attack most of the time.  You also don't want your Ninja Pets getting more than 60 ft away from you, since that's the limit of your Supremacy Aura that empowers your Pets.  But above and beyond that you're often times going to be using Fistful of Arrows (or maneuvering to do so) while you've got one or more $Targets within your Time's Juncture Aura which debuffs their ToHit and movement speeds.  So to get the most out of Fistful of Arrows you want to move into a position to get as many $Targets as possible within the cone while also keeping them within the radius of Time's Juncture ... which can be a bit tricky at times (but also feels really good when you pull it off).  That then adds a bit of damage production to multiple $Targets making the "mop up" action for your Ninjas that much faster to finish and reducing their exposure to the risk of incoming damage.

 

Right now, I haven't been able to slot up Fistful of Arrows with a load of enhancements (and I'm still only Level 15 so it'll be a while before I get Set IOs rolling in those slots) but already I can "feel" how use of Fistful of Arrows is starting to add that "thumb on the scale" feeling for being able to dispose of $Targets in a way that then allows my Ninjas to gang war up on the surviving $Targets in way that cascades against them and in my own favor.  Fistful of Arrows is helping me to tip the balance of battle further in my direction, and I know that it's only going to get better as levels are gained and enhancements get slotted.  It isn't a game changer all on its own, but in concert with everything else it is actually helping to make a difference that I find both favorable and discernable (and therefore, satisfying).

 

 

 

I had respecced into the Bow Time build just before doing the mission for Doctor Steffard of meeting up with the Syndicate rep that wound up spawning some 8 Ghoul ambushes on the map and found that my ability to (actively!) control the flow of battle was seriously enhanced and increased by switching to the Bow Time build.  I'd be shooting up Ghouls as they came into range, my Ninjas would engage as soon as I took any damage from them, and I was even able to hold some (some...) of the aggro on myself as the chaotic melee swirl around my position began while continuing to shoot up Ghouls and could even take down runners as they fled so I wouldn't need to pursue them.  With the slotting I had in my personal attacks (not much, but some) the endurance cost was quite bearable and I only needed to use Temporal Mending between ambush waves to "top up" the HP of everyone on my side of the fight and thus really wasn't hurting for endurance the whole way through, even though I was running Time's Juncture full time.

 

To put it mildly, it felt ... liberating.

 

In other missions after that in the Warden arc, I kept noticing the same dynamics ... where even though I was using my endurance on Bow attack powers I wasn't draining my endurance too badly (it usually recovered just fine between spawns or I'd just take a knee since Rest recharges in 30 seconds on Homecoming) and everything just felt more ... active ... and stuff happened at a more satisfying and rewarding/engaging tempo of events.  I was actually PLAYING my Mastermind, rather than just merely WATCHING my Mastermind, and that just made the whole experience "come alive" for me.

 

 

 

So I don't know if anyone else will have the same experience as I have had where adding personal attacks to a Mastermind build changes things for the better so palpably.  It might be something which is somewhat unique to the Ninja/Time combination and how the two powersets synergize together, since you can debuff and heal and "trade" aggro around rather effectively between your Mastermind and your Pets in a way that means (I at least) a resummon for Pets is almost never needed.  It's not a steamroller, per se ... but it is a far more manageable way to play than the alternative of the armchair Mastermind that I had been playing previously.  I figure that a very large reason for why that is so is because Time Manipulation isn't a very Click heavy powerset, meaning that it isn't demanding active attention/animations all the time, leaving plenty of opportunities to use the personal attacks with the Bow rather than needing to be casting supporting powers for my Ninjas all the time to keep them alive (or keep resummoning them a lot).

 

Just figured other people might like to know that not only is the experiment "successful" (so far) ... but in my estimation is a superior way to play than the builds I'd made previously for Ninja/Time.  The surprising thing is that a lot of the difference is something that has to be "felt" in actual gameplay (and "how" it plays), rather than something that becomes obvious when looking at a build planner.

 

Nin nin!