This needs to have a better success rate. PvP here is currently horrible, especially 1v1. I am sure this has been discussed, but at the current state of how things are it is damn near impossible to enjoy any type of solo field PvP here.
I think it's the level of the poisons that need a bit of love, not only the spell but GM poisoned weapons as well. Curing seems good and GM resist SHOULD resist level 4 spells often. But I feel that "damaging" spells should drain more Stamina from their target. I know Refresh potions ... But it is usually the millisecond needed to drink a refresh that result in a kill. I am going to play and enjoy with whatever the rules / settings are and try to use them as their best but if it can help pointing toward solutions, i will try to voice my opinion.
Nah poison spell is resisted far too often. It's really rather ridiculous when you can't hardly land a poison which is critical in Mage fighting.
We have had a few PVP issues for awhile now. Hopefully Chris/Staff will or has already planned to address the well documented concerns in the future.
Just a little food for thought here... Did a bunch of dueling last night with Pax and Gen. In a praticular fight Pax vs Gen, Pax failed 6 poisons in a row. He succeeded his next two and then failed another 2. 2/10 REALLY?! Please lets avoid arguing and put some good info into this thread and get this fixed.
A sample size of 10 is pretty meaningless. If Greater Cure potions cure Poison with 100% success rate, there's an easy way to actually test this for say 100 castings. Just have a guy macroing Poison on an alt, and have the alt with a macro that chugs an orange whenever he's poisoned. Give the caster 100 Nightshade, give the target 100 orange potions, go have dinner, and come back and see how many orange potions the target has left. According to Stratics, the formula for Resisting Spells is the GREATER of: 1) Chance to Resist: MagicResist / 5. So 20% minimum for any spell under any circumstances if you're GM. 2) Max Chance to Resist: MagicResist - [(AtkMagery-20 / 5) + SpellCircle * 5]. Again assuming GM all around, this means 100 - (16+15) = 69% chance to resist Poison at GM. So what you should see is a 69% resist rate, according to Era mechanics.
This is all wrong. You're using the resist essay and calculator from the stratics archive (http://www.uorenaissance.com/stratics/resist_eval), but if you keep scrolling to the end of the essay, you'll notice there are "various notes" on spells for which the formula does not apply: I'd also like to point out the entire essay and calculator is T2A-based and not accurate to this shard's era. The page Telamon has hosted is dated to March 2000, slightly before the UO:R publish. It's completely unchanged from a copy in November 1999 (https://web.archive.org/web/19991128220053/http://uo.stratics.com/resistance.htm). In fact, it's exactly the same even in October 2002 (https://web.archive.org/web/20021004105619/http://uo.stratics.com/content/basics/resistcalc.shtml). They all give the same average damage values for every spell on the list. If you were to go by stratics, you'd think magic arrow, harm, lightning, energy bolt, etc. all did the same damage in 1999 as they did in 2002. But we know that's false because of Publish 13 in August 2001 (http://www.uoguide.com/Publish_13): Energy bolts did do something like 24 damage on average to GM resist in T2A, but they sure as hell didn't in this era. And according to that resist calculator, harms would have been resisted 74%, and magic arrow 79% -- in an era of dueling that was all about low level spell damage. That's hilariously wrong. Archived stratics essays are useful, but they should not be treated as divine text. Stratics was notoriously bad at updating their information not just from publish to publish, but era to era. And sometimes the information was never right at all, e.g., "higher levels of resistance reduce... seemingly the duration that it remains potent." Uh, no.
This would make me assume the Resist skill didn't change between those dates. And sure enough, reviewing patch notes from the Renaissance publish to the AoS publish, there was no change to the Resist skill. Nor was there any mention of this mysterious "poison" change that baffled our friends at Stratics. So this information seems extremely relevant. IIRC, on another shard they examined this on the UO Demo and found that Paralyze, for example, had half the duration if resisted. If you're not watching the left-hand side messages like a hawk, I can see how you'd simply get the general impression that the duration was shorter at higher levels (when really it was just more often half-length).
Poisoner: 100 magery, 100 meditation, 100 evaluating intelligence, 100 magic resist Poisonee: 100 magery, 100 meditation, 100 evaluating intelligence, 100 magic resist Sample size of poison casts: 1,000 # of times Piosonee resisted poison: 339 Now for some math: 339/1000=.339= 33.9% chance to resist poison More math: 100-33.9= 66.1% chance of landing a successful poison
You're right that there is no mention of some mysterious poison change in any 1999 patch notes -- that's sort of my point about stratics. The essay still talks about mindblast working off the caster's intelligence versus the target's intelligence in OCTOBER 2002. And as I pointed out, stratics never even updated it's calculator to reflect the increase in spell damage from Pub 13. There's also something else I just noticed. Look at their Eval vs. Resist sample data (http://www.uorenaissance.com/stratics/resist_eval) and check the resist results for 0v100, 50v100, and 100v100 (each one consists of 15 casts for each spell). Eval boosts damage but doesn't affect the chance to resist, so each set is on equal footing of 100 magery vs 100 resist. I went ahead and added them all up: Third circle: 18 out of 45 Fireballs resisted - 40% (Stratics calculator says: 69%) Fourth circle: 20 out of 45 Lightnings resisted - 44% (Stratics calculator says: 64%) Sixth circle: 18 out of 45 Explosions resisted - 40% (Stratics calculator says: 54%) 12 out of 45 Energy Bolts resisted - 27% (Stratics calculator says: 54%) That makes for 30 out of 90 6th circle spells resisted: 33% (Stratics calculator says: 54%) Seventh circle: 6 out of 45 Flamestrikes resisted - 13% (Stratics calculator says: 49%) That's Stratics' own sample of 225 spellcasts for 100 magery vs 100 resist and the resists are significantly lower than what their own equations suggest they should be, and more in line with what players remember. I don't know what the resist chances are here but there is no way we should be using the stratics essay as you suggest. 69% resist for poison and 74% for harm? No one who played a mage in UO:R can claim that 3 out of 4 harms were resisted. That's silly.
Ah good call, I forgot about that part. Of course: I think the changes they refer to are the ones in the Feb '99 patch notes: ...but that's not enough detail to really know anything for sure. The reason I tend to believe the formulas is because there's just no way you'd be able to reverse-engineer some results and come up with that formula. I know some GMs would feed info to Stratics folks, so my hunch is that's where this comes from.
I've commented in depth on this in the past, poison resist here is much much too high. Poison is an extremely important spell in mage 1v1, and the high resist adds an element of randomness in that sucks a lot of the fun out of the art.
There's another not-so-subtle difference here on UO:R that no one has brought up: Everyone has GM resist. We have sacrificed the Magic Resist skill to the gods of player activity with the notion that "Resist events are good for the server." They aren't. Completely devaluing a skill forever is not worth 150 extra clients being logged in for two days every couple of months. Resist used to be *extremely hard* to GM on OSI. Most PvPers that I knew crapped out around 80-85 and never finished it. The ability to gain Magic Resist from Meteor Swarm and Chain Lightning should be removed. It is the easiest and clearest step we can take in the direction of adding value to this skill.
Too late for this imo. All this would do is make a higher barrier for entry into the pvp scene for new players. I hate joining shards where it comes down to simply who joined the shard first.
What are the alternatives? A) Change how often Magic Resist resists lower-level spells. B) Change how often Magic Resist resists poison, specifically. C) Forever have a broken system. Am I missing a suggestion or option? (A) affects far too much to solve a fairly simple problem. (B) is a hacky exception that makes the spell system needlessly complicated. (C) sadly is the likely outcome here due to apathy. Sorry to be "negative", but look at our history of affecting changes to PvP mechanics. We have had pages and pages of discussion over serious issues that affect PvPers every day and yet the only changes I've ever seen get published are some idiotic heat-of-battle changes that Crew presumably pressured Tel into publishing despite there having been zero public discussion on the matter.
I guess I don't see your suggestion as being a viable alternative/option. If your issue is that the poison spell gets resisted too often, nerfing magic resist for anyone who joins the server after the patch wouldn't solve anything. Anyone PvPer that's worth their weight in salt can gm magic resist without using meteorstrike and chain lightning. The cost of repeatedly flamestriking oneself and having an alternate character healing is hardly prohibitive to someone who has experience in this game, ie pvpers. So what I am saying is, PvPers are going to gm resist regardless of your nerfs without even batting an eyelid. Your experience in the game will remain unchanged. That said: This is where we are at with the poison spell. 33.9% chance to resist poison. Is that really too high? If I were to guess which options would/could work, it would be option B. Messing with resist rates would open a huge can of worms.
