Meh, still not going to be a substitute for ninjutsu for me.
Though I'm sure using ninjutsu with a cavalry saber is some sort of heresy.
To be fair, ninjutsu is one of the better martial arts largely due to simple utility. Grab a weapon with a block/parry and a rapid attack and ninjutsu takes care of the crit technique. It's actually better offensively with katanas than niten ichi-ryu unless you made some kind of min-maxed nightmare, for instance.
Speaking of niten ichi-ryu though, it's always been a bit bad even before the damage nerf
*. The slow water cut is just bad, the nodachi is a newb trap because of the water cut
**, and the buffs are both utterly absurd yet still not enough to make it anything more than a below average style in most situations
***.
Also, looks like the vorpal strike technique doesn't actually work on diamond-coated piercing weapons due to only applying a cutting damage multiplier. With a weighting of -250 though, vorpal strikes are mostly just an easter egg that destroys loot.
*This actually made it better since it would no longer blow up corpses. At least if you weren't just screwing around with a debug character.
**Yeah, lets spend 3 whole turns setting up the perfect cut like it's a sword demo on youtube. Nothing could possibly go wrong with all these grabbers and brutes next to me.
***Slow attacks and vulnerability to being flung around by brutes/hulks are the most noticeable flaws, but it cuts down those tankier monsters decently enough.Edit: There was a nutrient rebalance few weeks ago. Looks like soup got a big nerf in total servings and calories. A lot of these changes don't take recipes into account, so a serving of meat soup is worse than eating the ingredients separately.
Edit2: Looks like the rebalance was solely based on an online nutritional guide. Doesn't take into account that recipes in game are way denser than whatever is listed, so most soups are actually thick stews instead of whatever watered down crap got put into the game.