Ninja

**The Ninja** was one of the seven Survivor Classes. In order to access its perks and avatar items, the Ninja class must be purchased from the Shop with 1250 **Shards**. The Ninja prioritized stealth, silent movement, and trickery.

## Overview

The Ninja was a stealth-based class, focused on being quiet and sneaking around the world and avoiding getting detected by the killer.

The Ninja's theme was **stealth**.

## Perks

 Sneaky Tactics |  | *Conceal yourself better when you need to hide* | While crouching, you can use Sneaky Tactics for up to **4/5/6** seconds, making the player **fully invisible**. After use, this perk goes on cooldown for up to **28/35/42** seconds.

## Tips

#### General Tips for Playing as the Ninja

* The Ninja class is generally **underpowered** right now. Purchase this class last unless you want to use a completely stealth-focused class without much else. However, the developers are planning on buffing the Ninja class. It might be worth buying it once the update comes out.

* Because of how weak Ninja is during chases, try to *avoid* getting chased and use its perks to sneak around the killer.

#### Tips for Evader

* Evader allows you to move around the map slowly, but stealthily. However, this is a riskier and slower strategy when compared to other classes (for example, Marathon Runner from the Athlete class).
* Evader is the Ninja perk with the *least* utility - if you want to use Ninja perks, stick to Silent Steps or Sneaky Tactics instead.

#### Tips for Silent Steps

* When using the Silent Steps perk:
	+ Healing yourself, healing others, rescuing other Survivors, opening fuse crates, and footsteps are silent.
	+ *However*, filling gas tanks with cans, vaulting, barricade creation, barrier demolishment, and door repair are ***not*** silent and still make audible sounds. Be more careful when performing these actions while the killer is near.
	+ This perk is great for maps with water (specifically, Lakeside). Even though footsteps are much louder in water, Silent Steps completely negates this effect.

#### Tips for Sneaky Tactics

* At this time, Sneaky Tactics is one of the better perks of the Ninja class when used appropriately. Its strength lies in trickery - it can be used as a looping strategy or for obfuscating (hiding) your location.
	+ When being chased by the killer, quickly find a hard-to-see location (e.g. inside a house, behind a wall). When the Killer cannot see you, crouch and use Sneaky Tactics to turn invisible. If the Killer did not see you using the ability, they will often walk right past you due to the invisibility.
		- This strategy is less viable for more experienced Killers who can quickly readjust if your disappearance is too obvious.
		- You can **still get hit** when invisible.

#### Other Tips

Many Killer perks and abilities hinder the use of Ninja perks, which often contribute to its overall weakness. For example:

* The Dream Demon can still see your insanity meter above your head - even when invisible using Sneaky Tactics.
* Abilities and Perks that highlight the location of Survivors will still reveal your location regardless of how stealthy you are (this includes being invisible). These include:
	+ Crow Sight and Night Watch from the Scarecrow.
	+ Intimidation from the Butcher.
	+ Fearful Scent and Sleep Paralysis from the Dream Demon.
	+ Motion Tracker and Heavy Air (unless crouching) from the Toxicologist.

In this way, many perks and abilities from the Killer will render any stealth effect practically useless. It is advised to use other perks in place of those from the Ninja class - you can still be stealthy without using *any* of these perks. For example, crouching significantly reduces the sounds caused by walking (albeit with the tradeoff of lower speed).

In general, the exception to this is Sneaky Tactics, which can be used to hide or juke the Killer when you become cornered. However, they might see you turning invisible and hit you anyways. Silent Steps has some use, but Evader has very specific use cases that make it difficult to justify a perk slot.

## Changes

#### **Buffs:**

* **Silent Steps** - Buffed to completely silencing the following actions: **the sound of healing, rescuing, unlocking crates, and footsteps**. Originally, only silenced footsteps.

#### **Nerfs:**

* No nerfs to report for the Ninja class.

#### **Bug fixes/Other:**

* **Proning Tactics** have been removed and reworked into **Sneaky Tactics**.
* **Sneaky Tactics** is a reworked perk that makes the player invisible for a brief time while crouching.

## Trivia

* The Ninja was one of the least popular survivors, alongside the Scout, specifically due to the overall weakness and lack of utility in their perks.
* Proning Tactics, an old Ninja Perk, used to allow you to prone on the ground for a short period of time, with a cooldown depending on how long you used it. Since this action had next to no use in rounds, it had been considered one of the most useless perks in the game before it got reworked.
* In general, the main drawback of Ninja perks is that Killer abilities and perks would still reveal your location, regardless of how good you were at being sneaky or invisible. This rendered most stealth abilities irrelevant in most cases.