I made my ninja a pure tank with critical strike and martial arts, and just had her fight hand-to-hand. She really rocked at the end.

Well, if you use your ninja for martial arts, you could have taken a monk. A high-level monk does 50% more damage with hand&feet than a high-level ninja.

Thanks Yaag. How has your ranger done as an alchemist? Once I jammed points into my ninja to learn alchemy spells, but he did not learn them as quickly, nor did he get cool spells. Is this the same story as the spell learning ability of a lord vs. priest or a monk vs psionic?

His Alchemy skill itself is going up pretty fast. All I've really been doing is mixing potions. His Realm skills are another matter, I haven't been casting too many spells with him yet.

So far I'm really happy with him. His kill rate is up to 177 while everyone else is still below 100. [img]smile.gif[/img]

As far as training your hybrid for magic, practice is what matters. I usually run a party with a bishop and some form of hybrid and it works out well after the hybrid picks up some buffer spells. Specifically, the samurai rocks eventually because the mage has buffers in all but water, so he can practice a lot as well as save your main caster (if you have one) from using points in those areas. The problem with ninjas as casters is that they tend to have too many good qualities to practice casting in battle. Whenever I use a ninja, s/he ends up with a high divine from casting heal, a moderate earth from casting chameleon, and a low water from stamina, but most other things are negliable. The lord/valk are great as hybrids because you will use their skills more often for healing/stamina than you will want to use your ninja. Plus magic screen/armorplate/soul shield are almost a necessary in late game, so this class will get lots of practice. The ranger get some practice, but already having a ranged attack really hurts magic casting since you probably will want to attack rather than cast. Monks are also quite handy, especially once they develop enough to start casting Haste. Overall, i would say that the ninja is the weakest of the casters when you consider casting against whatever else s/he could be doing to cause damage

--Mr. Tesh