So, opinions on the Ninjutsu rebalance?
It's got a few more fringe benefits, but at the cost of a substantial nerf to raw sustained damage potential, at least how I'm reading it. Does not feel good. It was really strong for both dueling single tough targets and killing mobs of trash, but now you're pretty much required to try to play it by ducking in and out... with the issue being that even with the sound buffs most enemies have detection as good or better than you, unless you focused your entire build around avoiding notice.
cant find the reference for the changes in Github but just from reading what you posted i guess they rebalanced the art so its more closely to the idea of how it was used in the past. i mean, ninjas were assasins and spies so they were supposed to go in, bring down the target and get out. sustained damage doesnt make sense in that situation, you should have killed the target with a single attack and GTFO before being caught.
"Sustained damage" in the sense of an innate crit chance and associated damage buffs to blades and blunt weapons. Which makes sense when parsed as exploiting weaknesses in protection and form, and that ninja traditionally were weapon-users.
Now there's a damage buff on the first attack and a damage debuff on all subsequent attacks, which makes less sense. Not to mention that I have
zero confidence that the system can adequately track when you've disengaged and re-engaged. Worst case scenario is that you keep the damage debuff for as long as enemies are alerted, which instantly dumps Ninjutsu into garbage-tier.
This is doubly bad because Ninjutsu wasn't even a top-tier martial art, just passable. Muay Thai, Scorpion Style Kung Fu, Dragon Style Shaolin, Taekwondo and Krav Maga were all objectively better than it for anything other than using martial arts with a zero-range melee weapon.