Worthless ninja training?

[GReg]

Hi!
Can anyone tell me what advantages gives a ninja training? As for me - wizard, priest and fighter skills are pretty obvious... but ninja one?!:)
Throwing things at oponents gave results only at the begining of adventure - getting deeper into the dungeon was only possible because of the power of sword and mighty wizards.

Following my curiosity I tried to find out what are the effects of ninja attacks. Throwing and shooting things at monsters harms them, but the true number of taken health points is always unknown. The only way to get some measurable results was to make a party a source and a target of these attacks at one time. The blinking teleporter at (05,18,31 (or sth:)) was very helpful. And here's what I figured out:
The best result for throwing things never came better than 10 points, where a fighter attack on adequate skill level gave easily 20-40 points(measured on a monster of course). The lightest version of fireball (LO) made at least 35 as far as I remember.

And now something, that makes me laugh every time I think of it:
I tried to simply throw rocks and shoot them with a sling. I repeated the operation for several times. Rock boosted with a sling has NEVER made better than 1 healt point. Rock throwed with bared hand has never made 1 point... I has ALWAYS done 3 points?! I didn't check if it works with shooting and throwings arrows - i quick got bored because of all this tests:)
I can tell, that my troops weren't skilled much as the thoughest moments were far ahead...

As a conlusion - my question: what's the true purpose of a ninja training and what's wrong with the throwing/shooting stuff (or where I went wrong in my experiments:)

by the way:)
GRAT SITE... I have never seen so much work carried out to make a site such helpful for other gamers.
My first contact with DM was 7 years ago, on amiga. Today is the day when I finished this game for the first time... and it's all because of Your maps - I needed them because of my rather unpatient nature:) THANKS:)

GReg

[sucinum]

ninja lvls increase the stats like dexterity, str etc. thats enough and thats all i use them for.

[beowuuf]

Also some weapons work better with ninja levels than fighter levels, i believe - but yes, getting much better stamina and nice health added on is the only reason most people do ninja levels!
Someone once did the game with ninja attacks only...i forget the findings of that....

Oh, you can get about 30 points of damage when you boost your stats with throwing, but i always thought it was range rather than damage that was the reason for weapons over throwing

must check it out at some point...

[PaulH]

Some monsters are harmed more from missiles than others, for example screamers. A screamer with 50 health points can be slayed by throwing a dagger at it (usually) with a moderate character. In my DM record, I killed a lot of monsters early on by throwing things at them as they died quicker than the attacks from swords (because my characters were not proficient with swords at this stage of the game). But later in the game this is reversed, and the sword is the number one choice of weapon.

I think they may be some relation between the ninja levels and the damage from the stab option of the Diamond Edge, which in my opinion is the best weapon in the game.

[Seoub]

What interesting things I've just read in tjis topic !!!

hey, from my point of view, a good ninja in a team could be very useful (but in dm1 I think ...)

When I played on DM1 amiga version, I usually took 1 good ninja (Iaido or Alex), 2 warriors and the powerfull gothmog (59 antifire, 48 wisdom and 60 health and, the most important, the Cloak of Night !!!)

A Ninja with more than 70 dexterity and a good level, and equiped of course with the "speedbow" and a set of slayers make outstanding damage !!! (squeletons, screamers, vexirk ... many monsters could be finished by a slayer !).

[Wil]

Yes, but aren't slayers useless against higher level monsters such as scorpions? I just ask, I never played it this way, stopping throwing things once chars get decent abilities as fighters.