Blessing Runic Weapons for non-Faction Characters

GM Animal Lore for Slayer Crafting option with Runic Hammers (including their default behaviors)!!!

Many wants
Much yes
Wow


As I said, many times in my time here, I'd rather there be no blessings at all for weapons. As it stands, it feels like it singles out people who have a team to roll with as the only people able to take advantage of it. This is contrary to the general MO of the shard wherein everyone seemingly gets a fair shot at almost everything, with or without a group.

I am a wealthy player, yes. I think that this adds to my credibility as I am almost unfailingly in support of changes that increase the accessibility of the server to new players and limit the power of wealth, despite it not being in my best interests as a wealthy player.
I can afford to have a runic weapon in my hands every time I go out, yet I am in favor of buffs to GM weapons so that players don't have to buy runics and magic from wealthy players to be competitive.

This absolutely true and one of the reasons why I think that gold sinks are flawed as a concept.
If you make advantages like this cheap enough that everyone can afford them, they don't function as gold sinks. Just like I pointed out earlier.
If you make the advantages strong enough to be necessary and also very expensive, they become a mandatory tax on new players and a hurdle for them to jump over while getting established.
If you make advantages like this expensive but still powerful enough that the rich will want to pay for them but new players cannot, you create a powerful privilege only accessible to the ultra-rich.
If you make advantages like this expensive but not powerful enough to warrant the huge cost no one buys them and the sink is completely ineffective.

There is no happy ending here, only four undesirable results.

Well, it is still a gold sink for 250k. What players do with their gold and items beyond that is irrelevant, all that matters is the gold that's leaving.

This is all so relative though. Yes, you need a force+ weapon to do respectable damage. But you also find force+ weapons on monsters about every 25 kills or so (guessing here based on experience). I spent far longer as a noob dexer than most players, because it was my first character and I refuse to take handouts, and I think I was without force+ weapons for maybe my first day and a half on this shard.

To call it a gold sink is misleading, though. It redistributes wealth at a rate much greater than what it actually removes from the economy. The money to bless is a drop in the bucket compared to the value of the runic charge. The result is that it's actually a great way for bod barons to make money, and the paltry amount that leaves the economy is a secondary concern.
You could increase the amount of money that the blessing takes, but to serve as something where the gold sinking isn't an afterthought the costs would have to be much much higher than what was initially suggested. And as I said in the last post I made, there really is no happy ending for gold sinks. They are one of four undesirable outcomes.

I think gold sinks only work when they are cosmetic things that rich players buy so they can look super trammel.

http://www.uorenaissance.com/itemgraph/EED/Gold/single

The reason there are things of high value in this game is that new players should feel motivated to work towards that end. Being at the top tier of equipment, comes with the time investment of developing your characters AND your resource pool. What do you think motivated me to actually get this stuff, just like everyone else who does? The reward of putting it to use.

We play in a time where the character development portion of the playing field is entirely moot. This brings us to present day UO wherein it is all about what you have on hand that you have acquired through whatever means you can muster in the game to do so. Fortunately for mage-based PvP characters, they have next to nothing to worry about in the field of battle. Once your character is built, you can restock and re-field immediately for roughly 2500gp, maybe 3500? with pots or 5k with wands?

The entire idea was specific about TEMPORARY blessing (this equals more people fielding with that care-free attitude of a bag of reagents and suit of leathers) and gold-sinks. I don't know much about economics but I can't say it makes any sense to me to only have means of adding gold to the system with practically no options to remove it. The amount of people who give a crap about neon hair is a minor fraction of those who care about how much it's costing them to get out in the field again every fight. How is that fair to newer players when they have a weapon in their hands worth more than 2-3x (or vastly higher) whatever loadout a simple 7x heal mage is carrying, PLUS the same loadout the mage is carrying?

Don't get me wrong, this is not a problem I'm dealing with. You know full well I'm established and have no concerns about losing high end items. This is about putting something cool in the hands of others while benefiting an economy that's only real problem is that wealth never decreases and a PvP scene that lacks a real showing of newbie dexxers running amok. At such a rate, with so few things to remove gold from the economy, the barrier to entry for new players will only increase, in regards to field gear or otherwise. Don't really lose sleep if the idea doesn't make sense to administration but we've got useless runic hammers and crafters who only leave the house to say "order status", a vast supply if gold pouring in from spawns and BoDs alike, and PvPers wondering why no one wants to field again as soon as faction stat wears off.

So all that matters is that gold exits the economy, and it's just a happy side effect when you get rich(er) in the process?
Something like this certainly would increase the profitability of pushing bods, some people would make a lot of money if this change were implemented.

You're acting like I want to keep the dexers down by keeping weapons out of their hands, despite the fact that I've said many many times that I am in favor of buffs to GM weapons so that players aren't forced to look to runics for their weaponry needs.
I would like a world where the weapon in the hands of the player wasn't that much more expensive than their regs. If GM weapons were reliable, this would be the case. I don't know why you repeatedly ignore this option, other than that it won't make you richer.

I also see you attempting to imply that the lack of action in factions is due to high barriers of entry to pvp. Currently, this is not the case. Well, at least not in any economic way.
Activity is down for another set of reasons, but that's a bag of worms this thread probably doesn't need to see opened.

Do we really need more gold sinks? My 150k in the bank says (nooooooo)

I'm not ignoring the option to buff GM weapons, I just know they are out-moded in the era of barbed leather mages and runic weapons, which isn't going away here for obvious reasons.

What part of people making the money regardless, is not making sense?
No one's going to make a ton of gold selling charges from DC and Shadow hammers any more than they already do. That swing value is going to stay the same, no matter who can bless them. If for some reason there's, all of a sudden, a shortage of runic hammers, you can be certain it means they'll be dropping in the field more often. Which seems like a nice way to spread things around as well.

Anyway, just another thought. Thanks for sharing.

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I would imagine that many players [ esp the trammies ] are interested in that particular type of gold sink at least. An example would be if Tela made something like a super-hard instanced event that yielded no gold/plat reward but did give you a chance at several mystery prizes with trivial (if any) benefits. I can think of players who would pay 100-500k over and over again just for a shot in the dark at (A) the fame of having accomplished it or (B) a rare/unique item. Another example would be a gold sink for RP purposes like paying an exorbitant sum monthly/weekly for town/house decorations.

Of course, all these gold sinks would value/devalue certain items and perhaps the currency itself and ummm.... anybody feel like RPing Lord British' Federal Reserve?

As for the original topic... I can't help it. I'm just not into blessing useful things. I'm ok with clothes I guess cause that's fun and harmless. We're all "feluccia" players and we know that risk makes the game fun. As a matter of fact, after getting my dragons "blessed" aka bonded I kinda feel like it took an element away from taming. I don't need to tame dragons anymore and I don't have much motivation to do another tamer's quest. I almost kinda wish the dragons would die of old age every year and take my bond with them so I had to re-do the bonding quest and more people would want to buy my scrolls/tames and I'd have to endure the challenge of taming new dragons once a while.

I'd do a tedious quest to "bond" a weapon without question.

Proposed solution:

1) Remove faction blessing on weapons
2) Eliminate magics from CTF
3) Create slayers with runics

As a possible 4th I would look at tweaking AR a bit (full leather barbed should be almost equal to an iron light archer suit, not 10 points above) and melee (seems somewhat crazy to me that gm (iron) weapons aren't exactly useful for anything beyond newb-spawn)

This would help get more runics out in the field (or maybe just locked down as deco) since they would be worthless anywhere else. They would also get spread around a bit more.

If you want insurable weapons, OSI would gladly take your money for that privilege. We can find much better ideas for gold sinks.

No one wants insurable weapons. Everyone who mentions it in this thread seems to be ignorant of the difference between three weeks, and forever.

Oh, but then again, in another thread regarding Slayers I did say I absolutely want Slayer Weapon Bless Deeds to balance out infinite bonding of 'weapons' for tamers, whose only expense is a sack of reagents and some bandages.
Least effective against top tier monsters (lest I remind anyone of the original UO artwork depicting a warrior fighting a dragon), most value lost in the field on death.

I may be crazy but that seems imbalanced.

I'll be happy to 'res' my bonded slayer axe with PoF and a smithy hammer.

First let me say I like these ideas. But. . . taking magical items out of CTF will probably just make a lot of people mad. If they aren't gaining anything beyond satisfaction why not let people have a safe place to use what they'd otherwise be unwilling to risk losing? Perhaps we should think about having non-magic, non-free-use events for trophies and then free-use anything goes events just for fun. Also, your possible 4th solution should be way at the top of the list. . . in bold, giant font, imo.

Hmmm....

In an argument that starts boiling down to risk vs. reward, it is sad to see that the proposed solutions are reward without risk. Its pathetic, actually.

True Risk vs. Reward should be the goal here.

• No Blessings, not even in factions. It only ever existed in a Trammel Paradise.
• Bonded animals should lose more stats/skills to make it a real "loss" upon their deaths.
• Tweak weapon damage and armor ratings to make GM weapons/armor actually viable and heaven forbid, encourage some more player interaction in buying/selling.
• Narrow the gap between GM and Runics and make this game less about items, and more about skills/interaction with others.

From day one of UO Dexxers lost all their items when they died, so quit trying to pretend its something new that needs to be addressed.

You absolutely should lose your shit when you die, folks.

The alternative is players getting to their end-game scenarios, then never having a real reason to farm...never having a real reason to buy/sell/trade/interact with BOD's/people...never having a real reason to use their crafters aside from repair/PoF....never having a real reason to buy/sell/trade items on the forums....never having a real reason to do much of anything....a stagnant game and economy.

Stupidest logic path ever folks. Stop trying to make the game easier and stop trying to make it single-player.



This whole conversation is a product of the Trammel-Minded.

~ L / S

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I believe there are other posts that talk about doing more to balance out the infinite bonding (increasing the skill loss, temporary stat loss, etc). I would be reticent to attempt to use tamers as a counter point to attempt to justify any type of weapon blessing. If nothing else, I would say that most of the time analysis of PvM should be done in a vacuum (can a dexxer kill a balron? not even with plus gear? what can we do to adjust that?) but PvP should be done for balance (mage vs dexxer, equal skill levels, shouldn't be 90/10 but doesn't have to be 50/50 either)

Back to the topic at hand, three weeks is a long ass time in the game world. And plenty of time to farm enough gold/bods to find replacements meaning it would essentially become infinite without really solving the problem we're trying to address. Ultimately this would serve to further reduce the supply of runics as there would be more benefit to hoarding them and less benefit to selling them out (I am indeed the #1 badass of the field since I'm the only one with a blessed val hally, and I have 12). While I would assume that your choice of three weeks is somewhat arbitrary i think anything longer than a day or two would push things too far. Basically give people enough "free time" to get used to how the weapon performs (but of course there's TC for that so why bother).

@Godric Greycliff I hear what you're saying, perhaps a reasonable compromise would be to have non-magic CTFs with the current rewards, and magic CTFs with reduced rewards (halved maybe?) That way those that don't want to full on risk their runics still have some chance to use them, but at greatly reduced reward and reduced rate (2-3x a week). This will still tend to push people towards using their runics out and about more since they aren't getting as much out of them in CTF world. I would also say that in addition, the magic CTFs should have weapon/armor damage so runics actually do disappear at a normal-ish rate or at the very least need a normal amount of tending and PoF love.

I see LS beat me to my post with a lot of the same points so I will leave it at this...

No, No, and No!