Hey guys,

in one of the leaked gameplays, it was pretty much confirmed that the first rank of Ninja perk is as follows:

Rank 1: Trained as a shadow warrior, your ranged sneak attacks do 2.5x normal damage and your melee sneak attacks do 4x normal damage. (Requires: AGL 7)

Unconfirmed ranks:

Rank 2: Your ranged sneak attacks do 3x normal damage and your melee sneak attacks do 5x normal damage. (Requires:Level 16, AGL 7

Rank 3: Your ranged sneak attacks do 3.5x normal damage, melee sneak attacks do 10x normal damage. (Requires:Level 33, AGL 7)

This seems to be a must-have perk for anyone that would try to do any sneak attacks, as the increase in potential damage is just too great to pass up (assuming that 2x normal damage is base for ranged weapons and melee). This is a bit unfortunate as agility 7 is a pretty steep requirement.

If I was to speculate a bit, the wording also might indicate that sneak attacks are not considered critical hits anymore and as such might not benefit from relevant enhancing perks (such as Better Criticals), increasing the importance of Ninja even further. This theory is also partially supported by the mister sandman perk details, which apart from allowing killing sleeping targets instantly now also increases sneak attack damage with silenced weapons by 15% (no mention of sneak criticals there either, just sneak attack damage).

If interested, leaked perk descriptions for the entire chart are already on the orcz website for all to see and plan accordingly (only rank 1 descriptions are confirmed I think, so beware)

What is your opinion? Is this perk too strong? Can you imagine building a sneaky character without Agility 7 now?

From my experience, sneaking in Skyrim worked a heck of a lot better than in NV and FO3

Im sure there will still be sneak damage, just not as much like it was in Skyrim

Don't forget Mister Sandman upping sneak damage, too. All in all, my technical sniper build is looking re-gosh darn-OP. Second play through will definitely be an obnoxious laser rifle soldier.

I think your sniper build would fancy the new surviva mode with legendary enemies. I'm gonna start off with survival mode as well and sniper revolver build

I wondered the same thing. If they did stack you'd be doing what sounds like stupidly high damage so I doubt they do.

I plan to start on "Hard" and work my way up. Though, to be fair, I abhor bullet sponge difficulty mechanics. Looking forward to FWE/PN and MMM for this. I tend to gravitate towards mutual destruction; that is, I headshot all day long and one bullet = one body... including my own if I get sloppy and take one to the dome.

I'm guessing that's why they giving you legendary items to deal the sponge bobs.

Not sure if it counts as "spoiler," but where is the info on Legendary Weapons? Is that just a new name for Uniques?

I was watching You Tube Videos. One of the reviewers (Open World Games I think) stated that if you fight legendary enemies, there is a chance for legendary drops. (like gear or weapons) It was not specific. It had to deal with modes of play or something. No source data was given, so I am inclined to think it is speculation. But we will know in a number of days! Woot!

In my opinion, it looks like there might not be any more unique weapons. From what I've read (even though it hasn't been corroborated), the legendary weapons are basically just stat boosted and have rare properties or something. It seems more like the Borderlands RNG weapons than anything else I can think of.

I'm not sure I could have imagined building a sneaky character without AGI 7 before...

If I were making a stealth-based character, that would certainly be one of my top attributes to begin with. My first character won't be focusing on that so much, but if I were making a stealth build, I'd plan on advancing AGI all the way eventually anyway.

Is anyone nervous that sneaking might be overpowered now? It was already powerful in previous games, but considering how powerful the first rank of ninja is, I can only imagine the other ranks. Hopefully it isn't too powerful.

The other two Ninja ranks:

People who have been watching streams claim that sneaking is pretty much as OP as it was in Skyrim.

Personally, I'd rather stealth be overpowered than underpowered. The hard part should be avoiding detection, not killing the enemies while in stealth. I got very frustrated with Far Cry 4 compared with 3 because by the middle-ish part of the game, it felt like the bow was practically useless for stealth. You could stick an arrow through a grunt's chest, and he'd shrug it off and broadcast your location to all his buddies. Even the Signature sniper rifle, Predator, became relatively useless pretty quickly, because you could hit heavies in the head and merely knock their helmet off. I guess my point is that the high multiplier is fine, since the real challenge should be dodging the AI.

You know, there's 69 other base perks if you don't like it...

Me too. I utterly despise bullet sponges as well. It feels like I am fighting with paint guns and makes the world less believable.

I hope the AI will be good enough for sneaking.. I hope the maps are sort of built for sneaking.. I hope the enemies walk-paths allow for sneaking..

The problem is that you quoted unconfirmed ranks, the op made that clear that they aren't confirmed and that it's speculation. However, a site I do trust which is the Fallout wikia lists the ranks exactly as the op has them. So maybe it's real.

Ranged sneak attack multipliers make sense to go from 2.5x to 3.5x over three ranks, but melee going from 4x to 5x to 10x is nuts. That's op to me, especially compared to what ninja did in previous games which was +15% critical chance on all Melee and Unarmed attacks and a bonus +25% to sneak attack damage...this is a massive sneak attack damage increase compared to before.

Especially if melee has been improved to Skyrim levels. Though a natural archer, that crazy dagger sneak modifier perk was utterly insane and impossible to skip.

Look likes it's Skyrim level of op

It does seem like it's Skyrim level of op, and I'll surely be taking all 3 ranks of ninja myself, I'm just worried that it will make the game so easy that it kills the fun and challenge.

Oops, didn't even notice he put that in the OP. I'm reading like 10 different forums at once .

The place where I got this info from takes care to separate speculation from fact. This is supposedly factual.

If sneak attacks weren't powerful then there would be no point. Plus I feel like stealth/sniper builds are for people who want to play on the hardest difficulty anyway. No reason to play like that on an easier setting when you can just yolo everything.

I don't mind them doing a lot of damage(because they should). The problem was in Skyrim is that you could be right under someone noise and they still don't see you. I love doing sneak builds(they are favorites one in FNV and Skyrim) but they was way too OP in Skyrim. They are fun at first but near the end of the game only bosses were even a threat