GreatWhite

After 4 months of committed work, Wado finally acquired. Great Tournament Race 1st place finish 4 in 1 Vaga, Kama, Raido, MM attempt(failed); the hardest encounter up to that date.

Ice Cold Embrace of Winter (t3 passive) - The cooldown reduction and range increase feel incredibly minor. I've tried it, didn't like it, now I don't run it and I don't miss it at all. Frozen Senbon Strike - Deals too little damage. Could maybe have the passive stacks from Cold Embrace of Winter increase Frozen Senbon damage instead, then it would make for an actually good jutsu to have on Ice's PvE rotation. Permafrost - Feels perfect for what it is. Quite strong against those that choose to not chakra jump out of it. Flash Freeze - Very useful ability for Ice. Flash Freeze will let you land skillshots when your stuns are on cooldown. The damage on this is sneakily high and it's completely viable to just ignore the fact that this is supposed to be a CC jutsu and use it purely for damage. Crystal Ice Mirror - Even without the Cold Embrace of Winter passive the TP range does not feel too small and the baseline range is enough to live comfortably provided you remember to not stray excessively far. Absolute Zero - Admittedly, this jutsu is overpowered relative to others. The cooldown is quite short, but it also feels like Ice lives or dies by this ability; to be able to stunlock and burst on short timers is sort of Ice's calling call. Great Glacial Barrage - It goes hand in hand with Absolute Zero along with Windscythe Gale all sharing similar cooldowns to make up Ice's bread and butter burst combo and it feels incredibly satisfying to hit. Crystal Mirror Dome - An ultimate that feels like an ultimate and the epitome of Ice's damage capabilities. Nothing has been more satisfying and more fulfilling in PvP than hitting multi-man Domes and having a rapid-fire of numbers fill your screen. It's a very strong jutsu and the cast time provides many avenues of escape, making it seem more fair. In my opinion, Ice feels very well designed and fun to play. There's always a button that can be pressed, which can be overwhelming at first, but hours of time spent with the build will only inspire more creativity with how you use each of its jutsu. Overall, Ice beautifully ties in Wind and Water jutsu together into a cohesive toolkit with a hit-and-run, CC heavy, glass cannon style that is synonymous with Rogue gameplay from WoW. Water Flooding Water/Deepsea Rupture - The real hitbox is about half the size it shows it to be visually. Making them smaller by matching the hitbox could also help with FPS issues. Rising Geyser - Water's main filler ability. Wish it could be used without the restrictive target requirement. Giving this a minor range buff could also help alleviate clunkiness while trying to aim for something at max range. Aqua Prison - *chef's kiss* Quite literally single-handedly carried Water for many, many patches now. Great Waterbullet - Currently lies in the backburner of water's box of tools due to its low damage. The cast time feels fine, but the slow could afford to be stronger. Visually, it looks great but it also looks like it should pack a bigger punch. Water Dragon - Water's trademark. Still has the issue of the DoT aspect of Water Dragon not applying on targets that are suffering from hard CC. Wind Slicing Tempest - Not to be confused with its more popular and better looking sibling, 'Slicing Wind'. Slicing Tempest has the shortest cooldown out of all of Wind's abilities which makes you feel like it will be the star of the show, but no. It doesn't provide any fancy buffs or debuffs, and with a cast time that feels like forever, it doesn't even bring notable damage to the table. Reducing the cast time would only make this jutsu go from unusable to barely usable so what it really needs is a buff to damage. Gale Palm - Recent cooldown buffs were exactly what it needed. Good change. Earth Earth Spike Explosion - There comes a time in every young earth chuunin's life when Earth Spike Explosion is useful, but that time passes by fast because it scales incredibly poorly. It's clunky to use, the cast time is too slow, and the damage is too little. If it were up to me, it would be reworked into Earth's own version of Rising Geyser; a ground-aimed AoE with knockup. After all ain't it a little odd that Earth can't throw rocks yet? Rock Barrier - Sadly over-nerfed. Has the same cooldown as Susanoo Shield yet nowhere near as strong. Two seconds shorter, can't be used in hard CC, has a cast time. There's really no comparison in power between the two. It used to be a fantastic AoE grinding jutsu to group mobs together before grounding them up, but now it's too often on cooldown to be of much use. It deserves only a minute long cooldown at most. Earth could benefit a lot from having a general tech that reduces its jutsu cooldowns by 10 seconds similar to Poison and Genjutsu. Hyuuga Air Palm - Hyuuga's only gap closer got bitch slapped with a huge cooldown nerf and is now in the running for Shinobi Story's worst jutsu. It deals unremarkable damage, and the stun lasts merely a single second. Air Palm used to be a staple ability for Hyuuga's breaker-palm combo and their most reliable interrupt for pesky medical shinobi, but after several consecutive nerfs it is left in the sad state that it's in now. I feel the nerfs to Air Palm should be reigned in a bit, perhaps by increasing the stun duration to two seconds so that it can be worked in as a solid gap closer again; it's the least Palm should be able to do for its 45 second cooldown. Byakugan Farsight Technique - Fulfill the Hyuuga rp fantasy of being able to see hundreds of meters away by changing this spell to be similar to WoW's Eagle Eye. Or at the very least, buff the duration of the current Farsight. Thanks. Overall, Hyuuga has received some respectable nerfs but that hasn't stopped it from being a decent support mastery that can be plugged into nearly any melee build Left Kenjutsu Dance of the Flocking Birds - The damage is a bit low but more power can be put into the rest of the kit to balance it out. Samurai Swordsmanship Style - Surprisingly potent due to lasting 10 seconds and a short cooldown is always a plus. Swordsmanship Slashing Strike - The slight buff to damage was much needed and the new general techs add some good flavor to the stock Kenjutsu slashes for both trees. Heavenly Strike of Autumn - It's no secret that subsequent patch changes has drained out all the damage from Left Ken like pre-nerf Heavenly Strike used to drain chakra. Post nerf, Heavenly Strike is not even draining enough chakra to be a threat anymore and the same could be said for its damage. The armor reduction debuff sounds good in theory, but in Shinobi Story's current low-medium armor culture, a 4% armor reduction debuff per stack leaves much to be desired. In addition to that, a big caveat with Heavenly Strike is that it's surprisingly difficult to get 5 stacks of the armor penetration debuff on a target, even more so if you have to switch targets at any point. If the armor penetration was a bit higher, like 15-20% per stack, the damage boost from 5 stacks would be significant and I could see it start to tie into Left Ken's new identity as a bruiser-type mastery that is viable for both PvE and PvP. Think of it like a Samurai being able to bring anyone down to size by wearing someone down with cuts to the body over the course of a long fight. Final Glimmer of Evening Light - Damage is kind of low now, but fine enough. A crit with this will still certainly live up to its name. Soul of the Swordsman - Probably too strong for its own good. The toxic relationship Soul has with how effectively it works with other masteries means the rest of the kit will take a hit if paired with over-performing masteries.

Disclaimer: All damage tests have been conducted by a lvl60 player against a lvl60 Ninja Training Dummy for consistency's sake. Way of the Blade (passive) It's an old issue yet despite the new patch it's still not working at all which brings Kenjutsu down a passive. Heavenly Strike of Autumn Here are the damage numbers running 1393 attack power with Heavenly Strike's fully stacked 20% armor penetration debuff on the target(which adds about ~200 damage with all 5 stacks against low armor targets) Here is Heavenly Strike with 3480 attack power with the same 20% armor penetration debuff. The damage for this is similar to Swordsmanship Slashing Strike, but the cooldown is longer and it costs chakra. For PvE, the boost to armor on mobs has been significant and allows the armor penetration to hold up, but in return making physical damage abilities feel inferior across the board without it. The extra damage dealt bonus per stack feels negligible and it would be nice for there to be a slight buff to this. "...the target loses 25 chakra every second for 3 seconds." This isn't true. In fact, targets lose an upfront amount of chakra ranging in the thousands. I have no idea how this works, but perhaps it pertains to character levels. Against a lvl26, Heavenly Strike drained 4093 chakra, but against a lvl60 target it would drain 3271 and 3443 chakra...Weird. The answer is resilience. Dance of Flocking Birds Good ol' flocking birds. The damage on this is very similar to how it was pre-patch despite a larger amount of attack power, but I find this to be fine since instead of chunking someone for half health, it now deals about 1/8th of a health bar. Although, there is a massive problem with this jutsu now which brings us to... Early Morning Wind The stun duration was reduced from 3 seconds to 1 second. I cannot stress enough how awful this jutsu feels to use now. Charge into a flock was the old bread and butter of Kenjutsu and you used to be able to get off the whole duration of flock inside of the stun, making these two abilities synergize incredibly well. Now with the 1 second duration, people can simply walk out of range of flock and even certain mobs will jump behind you and dodge your flock. This also makes flock feel clunkier to use in return as you cannot move in the process while your target can. Pre-jumping the charge also completely invalidates this jutsu. On top of all that, it has anti-synergy with other masteries since using charge for the 1 second stun will DR any other stuns from the rest of your toolkit. Bring back the 3 second duration. Samurai Swordsmanship Style The nerf from 300% to 200% was justified but it doesn't feel like a 4 minute cd jutsu anymore. I would like to see the cooldown reduced to 3 minutes or even 2 minutes in return. Swordsmanship Slashing Strike Feels like it has the same issue as Heavenly Strike where the scaling is severely underpowered. I am currently doing less damage with this now at 3.5k ap than I ever did at lvl40 with 2.6k. Considering hp pools have been doubled or even tripled, this ability now tickles and it's especially bad against mobs near your level due to armor. Here are the numbers running 1393 attack power: Now here it is with 3480 attack power where the difference was only an increase of ~1k damage with an increase of ~2000 attack power which leads me to believe that slash scales somewhere around ~50% of attack power now. This is HALF of what it used to be and makes it feel incredibly undertuned. Final Glimmer of Evening Light Execute still trucks. The damage increase was perfect for the new adjustment in health pools. Solid. Soul of the Swordsman This jutsu is dope, ngl, but at the same time it doesn't feel like a jutsu worthy of being at the bottom of the tree yet. "...as well as grants you the ability to deflect any blows..." This doesn't seem true at all as I've yet to block anything, auto attacks or abilities with this activated, so if you were a full melee character, you would not be able to attack anything at all while still taking damage from external sources. You also can't chakra jump or dash while Soul is in effect which I think is an oversight. I'd hope to see the "deflect any blows" part be fixed, but if not, I believe a cooldown reduction would be in order.

Mist ninja rebreathers And their poncho (posted earlier in this thread)