Blessing Runic Weapons for non-Faction Characters

Then stop logging in? It's already here and you're all blind or ignorant if you're pretending that it doesn't exist.

Meh. I just accept that you have to play a certain class and play style to take advantage of certain things; and I like getting mad when I lose valuable items. Or rather, I prefer it to minimal loss. Maybe I will think differently after 2 years. Will keep you posted.

I definitely like the risks but would rather only replace most of my gear instead of all my gear including the bread and butter piece. Granted, I've likely lost more top tier slayers here than most.
Every risk would still remain including loss of reagents, gold, armor, runes/books/etc. Why people make such a big deal out of a single concession that is nearly identical to what has already been done, is beyond me.

I'm down with this if there are runic bows.

You can't make the game so hard that people are risk adverse to using their nice gear.. but adding blessed items would not create a gold sink. Items would never get lost therefore people would have no need to buy more or replace them.

Making smaller yield of resources per action may make everything in game worth more but unless you can count on gear being regularly list it won't create a gold sink to stabilize economy..

I played on a server once where virtually every ore other than iron was semi rare and when you did get a pocket of it the yield was tiny.. it put a real value to craft ables and even the crappies of ore was made to be better than dropped gear.. it was definitely interesting.

This may sound lame but what about not having blessed items at all and just having insurance. A nice piece of gear may cost tens or hundreds of thousands to insure..

Those who have nice things most likely could afford it.. it would give them the ability to gear up in best of stuff to pvp with the trade off of ridding the server of a crap ton of gold they have collecting dust

I am for some form blessing/insurance especially if it comes in the form of a gold sink. I think that the risk to any slayer-weapon-wielding template during a single outing far exceeds the risk to any other template several outings. That ought to be changed.

I have a few thoughts on this topic.

The first is that I don't like the way Blaise approaches this topic or those like it. He's always putting characters into boxes like mage, tamer, bard, dexer, and so on. This is a game without classes, characters are defined by skills. A good character usually has two or three areas that it's good at. There are characters that use weapons and cast spells. There are characters that use pets and swing weapons. There are characters that both bard and use pets. I feel that Blaise picks one of many tools available to him and then complains that it isn't good enough compared to the others while completely ignoring the fact that to reach the highest level of success in UO your characters need to be good at two or three things.

The second somewhat related thought is that while Blaise acts like blessed runebooks and spellbooks are somehow things that help the other "classes" and that dexers need something similar, he very likely has a spellbook on every one of his characters and more blessed runebooks than many of us.

The third is this acknowledge the writing on the wall - tamers really are the top dog when it comes to monster slaying. Blessed runics won't fix this though. Even with a valorite axe in hand a lone dexer will still get his ass blasted by a lich lord, something that a tamer will kill with ease. It's not a matter of what weapon you're using or how much damage you do, what dragons do so much better than players do is to tank damage. Giving blessed runics to everyone still won't change the fact that a player can't tank a lich lord. A solution that would actually fix this problem would be to buff peace dexers. Remove the chance for monsters to break peace on player damage, this lets peace dexers farm on par with tamers because it removes the high damage that peace dexers currently have to deal with.

I think that those boxes in which Blaise places characters already existed. We call them templates and the guides section of the forums should be evidence enough that they exist. The point, I believe, is not that dexxers can't tank like a dragon and that that's unfair. The point is that tamers keep getting great enhancements to make them more and more ridiculously powerful (and increasingly the only viable PVM choice) while the rest get jack squat.

A tamer with 2 bonded dragons, 1 bonded mare, a weapon skill/tactics and a blessed slayer = the ONLY way to farm viably.

Glad I wasn't the only one thinking how this was just going to create a wider gap.

Your putting words in my mouth I like this idea and would LOVE to start rolling around on tamer/dexxers haha, but as it stands why would you carry around a 300k weapon just to add a little dps when your dragons are free to rez and train. But I do want to keep this conversation honest and I really do think the dexxer-tamer would be the new farming build.

To be clear, I think this would just shift the gap. Tamers would benefit and farm at a higher level as would dexxers.

I still am vehemently against this idea as it represents the fundamental shift that took UO down the wrong path and destroyed what little interaction was left in the game. If you want a single player game, fire up your old NES, folks.

The argument that one class doesn't have MUCH to lose should NEVER be a reason to justify giving another class something they would NEVER lose. It does not even logically follow. The argument for blessings should be able to stand on its own merits.

When you bless items you affect a LOT of things in this game. For example, you chip away at player interaction in this game. The buying/selling of magic weapons and the farming/PK'ing will just decrease. Its bad enough that we are all allowed 3 accounts for 15 characters, thereby dramatically decreasing our need to interact with other players. Fire up the Blessings Train and people will have even less use for interacting with others.

A solution that negatively impacts player interaction and the use of player classes even a little bit....should NEVER be considered. Ever.

Items NEED to be lost and cycle through players. This is what keeps the game economy healthy. This is what keeps players actually playing the game long-term. Adding in blessings just causes players to reach an end-game scenario quicker and interact less.

No to blessings.

I will reiterate this yet again: Blessings is the COMPLETELY wrong way to address what you perceive as an issue of balance. Think of a COMPLETELY new idea that has nothing to do with Blessings.

I humbly present again the minor modifications to hirelings. I agree with all the concerns regarding the blessed weapons, but allowing us to equip hirelings with our own gear would open the door to training them. As it is now you can train them, but their gear gets destroyed. So you would have a GM swords hireling with no armor.

This solution would also not remove any element of risk, it would actually add to it!

Yay.

Lightshade, first I'd like to ask just exactly what interaction would be disrupted?

I've rode from one end of the map to the other tracking as I went and saw no one outside of a house, every person that popped up on the radar was safely locked away in their houses either macroing or BODing.

I searched dungeons and there was one person attempting to tame dragons in Destard, but other than that no one was to be seen after looping my search three times.

Blessing one weapon per character isn't going to ruin a game that is already suffering from atrophy and attrition.

The only people I see that would have a problem with this are the mage class, yes there would be whining and tantrums because they would have to step up a "tiny" bit once people hit the field with blessed runics, but since most PvP mages run in groups I don't see how that would be a problem.

The only big issue might be a shift to everyone playing dexxers....oh my, what a catastrophe, but when everyone is running a dexxer with a blessed runic the fights would be so equally matched that people would be once more forced to develop different templates, oh no, not that, experimenting with a different PvP template :0

As far as people selling weapons they've farmed, I see the same stuff on vendors every time I visit them, unless it's a high end katana, kryss, warfork, long spear, axe or slayer it's just going to sit there and collect dust. So it's not like those items represent a LARGE part the economy at this point.

The folks who have BOD'd to get those nice hammers might take a little bite as most people would just need one runic, but runic sales would conversely go up as a result, because more people would actually invest in them if they could be blessed. Also, GM repair deeds sales would go up and fort powder sales would definitely go up to keep those blessed weapons in tip top shape, so there is a little boost to the economy and some "INTERACTION" as not everyone has a GM smith (myself included).

Yes, more people might be inclined to make a GM smith with such changes, but once again, they would be out there mining, battle mining and buying ingots from others so there's a little more activity going on right there.

As far as the tamer dexxer idea, oh boy a tamer could kill spawn a little faster than if he had a vanq already, plus if the "bonded" weapon cost a follower slot then it might balance out a bit.

I know one thing, it would definitely boost PvP on this server because one of the main reasons given for poor participation is (yes I've actually talked to people in game) is that they are afraid of losing their "good" equipment after farming forever to get it. So they take to the field and dip their foot into the blood red waters of PvP carrying sub-par gear and get demolished, thus ending their experimentation with PvP.

You might counter with "well they could always play a mage if they are interested in PvP". Well many do and without the training or connections find mage combat a bit more daunting than dexxer PvP and after a few humiliating defeats go back to crafting or macroing within the safe confines of their houses or Occlo bank.

This is not the case with everyone, but it is a fair assessment of alot of new players on this shard.

I think this game needs something, not sure what, but something to keep it going. Blessed weapons wouldn't be the end of this shard, but might be the end of you as you have threatened to quit over such changes. Such is the way of a 17+ year old game, some will welcome changes and some will simply try to hang on to some past remembrance of a game long past. This is not OSI UO, this is not UO:R, this is someone's version of UO:R that at this moment is probably the best free shard out there, but it can be improved.

Why not just buff warrior class with more armor to put on par with tamers.

This doesn't solve issue with tamers being incredibly low risk to play, but it would make warriors more viable and thus more apt to want to carry and use their gear regardless if they could actually do something with it... despite risk of losing.

Problem with that is people are so scared of losing stuff here it's almost like a phobia. Some people I talk to at Occlo bank are terrified to go out to a dungeon for fear of getting PK'd and losing their stuff.

It's like people can't wrap their head around an MMORPG that allows such a thing. WOW and other games like it have ruined the existing playerbase with the no-risk, high reward mechanics. Yes, I will admit it's terribly popular and lucrative, but makes for a rough transition when someone wants to give this game a try.

I don't know what the answer is, but maybe allowing one blessed weapon slot per account would be more realistic.

Just throwing ideas out there, it's one thing for people to bash an idea, it's another for them to come up with an alternative solution. Then again some people just like things the way they are because it caters to their comfort zone and others be damned.

Honestly the more I think about this, the more I am jumping on cynic's bandwagon. The crux of this discussion is in my opionion this:

Instead of introducing what appears to be a very divisive and potentially game changing issue for a lot of players, why not just increase the drop rate of slayers.


It solves the problem on the pvm side anyway because slayers won't be selling for 300k. In terms of the pvp side, vanqs are cheap and effective in pvp and I do not see how a 3-5k vanq is going to hold someone back.

This is true.

This is also probably true, but what if you give them time to adjust here and get comfortable with going to dungeons and losing things. Maybe get rich over one of many awesome events that go on from time to time and then they won't care about losing stuff. Or if they don't like the game play here they will move on to something they enjoy more. I want the chance to gain or lose my "bread and butter items" when I leave my house. That and in-world (VS instanced like RIFT) housing is the only reason I play UO period.

EDIT: I think this is more about the established players not wanting to lose their +25 VanQ 2HD Super Slayers than the new players losing their regular Vanqs. (This is not a jab)

It's more then just losing them, its the fact that you will have to wait months and months before even seeing another for sale.

I'm in total agreement with that, finding one is an ordeal, losing one is devastating because it's going to be a good long time until you find another one, let alone be able to afford it if you're a fairly new player that doesn't powergame here day and night.

The options available are make a bard/mage which limits you when encountering boss monsters and tamers who have become the be all, end all of PvM here. I'm basically forced to play my tamer when I farm anymore if I want to tackle high end mobs/bosses.