Now You See Me

The Ninja doesn't fight fair. By the time you realize what happened, you're already dead and the Ninja is looting your corpse while invisible. Backstabs, poison, smoke bombs, and the fastest movement in the game. If you like winning fights before they start, this is your class.

The Math of Murder

Here's the number that matters: 4.5× damage in a single hit. Vanish gives +50% on your first attack out of stealth. Backstab gives 3× on melee hits from behind. Use both together and that salvaged sword strike deals 4.5× its normal damage. Stack the Blade Master passive's +25% on swords and you're in one-shot territory on anything wearing light armor.

No special resource to manage. Your weapons are swords, machetes, a crossbow for ranged finishers, and spears for poke. Everything in the kit is designed around one philosophy: get in, delete one target, get out.

Getting In and Getting Out

Vanish

10 seconds of complete invisibility with a +50% damage bonus on your first attack. This is the longer stealth in the game, and the damage bonus stacks with everything else in your kit. Vanish, walk behind the target, Backstab. That's the whole gameplan. 60-second cooldown means you plan your engagements around it.

Backstab

Activates a 5-second window where melee hits from behind deal 3× damage. At 20 seconds, it's the shortest cooldown in your kit and the most frequently used. The positioning requirement is what separates good Ninjas from great ones — you need to be behind the target, not beside them.

Shadowstep

Drops a smoke cloud at your position, grants 5 seconds of invisibility, and boosts your movement speed. It's your gap closer and your escape. The enemy loses track of you every 45 seconds — use it aggressively to reposition behind someone, or defensively to vanish when the fight turns.

Death Lotus

A 6-meter AoE burst dealing 20 slash damage plus poison and knockback to everyone around you. Your "I'm surrounded and I chose this" button. Shadowstep into a group, pop Death Lotus, then Vanish out while they're poisoned and staggered. 45-second cooldown.

Everything Is a Passive

The Ninja has four passive perks — more than any other class — and each one fundamentally changes how you play. Swift gives you 1.25× base movement speed and 1.5× while crouching. You're the fastest class in the game, and crouching barely slows you at all. Blade Master adds a permanent +25% damage bonus with swords and knives, turning every melee weapon from "decent" to "terrifying."

Wall Runner reduces fall damage by 50%, turning verticality into your playground — jump off buildings, drop off cliffs, take shortcuts that would break anyone else's legs. And then there's Shadow Clone: once per life, a lethal hit is negated entirely. Instead of dying, you burst smoke, go stealth, and teleport away. The enemy thinks they got you. They didn't.

Picking Your Prey

Shadow Clone means you can take risks other classes can't. Dive deeper, pick riskier fights, go for the Cleric in the back line — if they catch you, you just teleport away. Don't waste Poison Blade's charges, either. It grants three applications, not one, and each hit applies a 5 damage-per-second DoT for 8 seconds. Land all three quickly and that's 120 poison damage from a single button press.

The Shadow Arts tree is 16 nodes across 5 tiers, tightly focused on building from basic assassination tools into a full kit of escapes and AoE. By the time you reach the top tier, you're the most slippery and most dangerous one-on-one fighter in the game.

The Ninja is available now on Tarnished Crown. See the full Shadow Arts tree at the Ninja class page.