“The Ninja perk grants you the power of the fabled shadow warriors. When attacking, you gain a +15% critical chance on all Melee and Unarmed attacks. Additionally, Sneak attack criticals do 25% more damage than normal.”— Fallout 3 in-game description
To attain this perk, you are only required to have an 80 Melee Weapons skill, even though the perk affects the critical bonus and sneak damage of both Unarmed and Melee Weapons.
In both games, the extra 25% sneak attack critical damage only applies to melee and unarmed attacks.
PC In Fallout 3, the extra 15% critical chance does not work without the help of the unofficial Fallout 3 patch. [verified]
PCPlaystation 3Xbox 360 In Fallout: New Vegas, Ninja multiplies your critical chance by 1.15 instead of adding a flat 15%, unlike all other perks/traits that modify critical chance. For example, a character with a critical hit chance of even 25% would have it be increased to only 28.5% rather than to 40% as it should. (25% * 1.15 = 28.75% vs 25% + 15% = 40%) [verified]
In Fallout 4, the bonus to the actual sneak attack damage multiplier on silenced weapons provided by this perk is known to behave erratically when interacting with Cloak & Dagger and Mister Sandman. Patch 1.4 tried to address this bug, so that you could no longer reach a 6.3x multiplier. However, there was still some variance depending on the order you obtain the three perks. The current multipliers are:
Sandman 3, Ninja 3, Cloak = 4.4x
Ninja 3, Sandman 3, Cloak = 4.7x
Sandman 3, Cloak, Ninja 3 = 4.7x
Ninja 3, Cloak, Sandman 3 = 4.8x
Cloak, Ninja 3, Sandman 3 = 4.8x
Cloak, Sandman 3, Ninja 3 = 4.8x
Right now the only solution for Playstation 4 and Xbox One appears to be selecting/receiving these perks in the "correct" order. The reason these differences happen is because, although Cloak & Dagger and Mister Sandman both use multiplication, Ninja is set to use addition. Because order of operations matters when both are mixed, results from having all three perks can vary.[verified]
PC In Fallout 4, the Ninja perk works very oddly with melee attacks. One-handed weapons are always treated as melee, and unarmed are always treated as ranged attacks. Rank one doesn't affect two-handed melee weapons at all, rank two treats two-handed weapons as ranged weapons, and rank 3 finally treats two-handed melee weapons as melee weapons. This results in a very bizarre sneak attack damage progression for two-handed melee weapon users, and a very low one for unarmed users. On the PC version, a fix for this and the above issue is available here. [verified]
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