A blade in the shadows, master assassin, the actual ninja in a space ninjas game - Ash!
Passive: Slash procs inflicted by Ash’s weapons and abilities deal 25% more damage and last 50% longer.
Shuriken - Launches a spinning blade of pain, dealing high damage and impaling enemies to walls.
Smoke Screen - Drops a smoke bomb that stuns enemies and obscures their vision, rendering Ash invisible for a short time.
Teleport - Ash teleports towards the target, bringing him into melee range and making enemies vulnerable to finishers.
Blade Storm - Project fierce shadow clones of Ash upon groups of distant enemies. Join the fray using Teleport.
Acquisition: Main blueprint can be purchased from the Market. Component blueprints are obtained from Venus Proxima (Systems), Neptune Proxima (Neuroptics), and Pluto Proxima (Chassis) Survival, Defense, Exterminate, and Volatile missions.
I’m most interested in the changes to Teleport and Lethal Teleport (now Quickened Teleport). Gaining a Smoke Screen refresh as well as parkour on kill is very exciting to me, be interested to see if it scales off strength. Blade Storm having its own exalted loadout is also really interesting, although I’m 90% sure it’s going to still be Exposure and Influence, lol.
Other than upcoming changes, in terms of existing changes: Ash had an interesting meta shift around him. Specifically, Smoke Shadow being multiplicative with Acuity on most projectile weapons gave him some excitingly high crit tiers.
Ash is getting some much needed changes in the next update and I’m quite looking forward to them! He was always my favorite of the invisible frames so I’m happy to see him get some love. His 1 is getting a dmg boost which likely doesn’t matter (unless it scales with the mods on his new exalted weapon, that would actually make it interesting!) but the projectile increase from 2 to 5 makes running it with it’s armor stripping augment much more appealing. Smoke Screen getting a massive 50% duration increase makes this ability way more comfortable to use without needing to slot in every single duration mod possible (or subsuming over it and running Arcane Trickery instead). Teleport is actually useful now without needing to run it’s augment, I still wish it worked like Kullervo’s 1 and just let you teleport to anywhere. And Blade Storm getting turned into an exalted weapon and having it’s mark mechanic condensed to just 1 turns it into an actual good end game nuke!
Still haven’t gotten around to unlocking Ash.
Oof. I hope you like railjack then, because that’s what you are going to do… Alot.
Or you can just say “fuck it” and go for the prime.
That may be the route I go.
ash is in the circuit rewards in 4 weeks.