Bonuses For Useless Skills

Just wanted to get some input and ideas for skills that have no bonus and maybe implement them. Here are just some ideas

Bowcraft n Fletching- Adds a hit bonus to all archery weapons.

Cooking- Allows crafted foods to debuff curse affects.

Spirit Speak- Allows the use of spirit speak to restore 15 mana instantly every min or so.

Remove Trap- Allows the use of the skill to disarm Parablows and Stuns

Herding- Allows 2 extra control slots but makes your pets skills gain slower.

Camping- Camping in the cold has allowed you to have 8 AR with no armor.

Begging- Allows extra gold to drop off of mobs

Forensic Eval- Allows the use of wands to sometimes not consume the charges

Taste ID- Allows you meat/fruit fed to pet to instantly get wonderfully happy

Remove Trap- Allows the use of the skill to disarm Parablows and Stuns

I like the concept of this and the others.

If any of these were to ever be implemented, I would choose these.

DELETED: Original reply posted twice

Also Please post some of your own thoughts on these skills. Tried to keep them true to the skill and not overpowering.

Bowcraft n Fletching- Adds a hit bonus to all archery weapons.
Archery should already have a bonus shot, like every other weapon skill. I would suggest possibly fewer lost arrows/bolts and significantly decreased wear on archery weapons.

Cooking- Allows crafted foods to debuff curse affects.
I would agree with a reduced duration, like reduce the effects to 2/3 of their normal duration. Or possibly an increased stamina replenish, or a minor HP restoration (like 2-5hp random)

Spirit Speak- Allows the use of spirit speak to restore 15 mana instantly every min or so.
Would rather it allow/cause all ghosts to be visible to the user of the skill, without being manifested. Every minute would be excessive for mana restoration. Perhaps every 3

Remove Trap- Allows the use of the skill to disarm Parablows and Stuns
I disagree on ability to disarm, but perhaps it would be ok if it drained significant stamina to do so. Thus making it impossible if you don't have more than X amount of stamina. This only hurts fencers and stun mages in your original inception

Herding- Allows 2 extra control slots but makes your pets skills gain slower.
I like this, but feel that herding should increase pet skill gain AND damage healed with veterinary!

Camping- Camping in the cold has allowed you to have 8 AR with no armor.
I like this, but feel in order to be appropriate and not OP, it should be nullified once you equip armor exceeding the default 8AR

Begging- Allows extra gold to drop off of mobs
Disagree as any already wealthy tamer could just drop resist or wrestle and make even more than they already did. No idea yet for alternative bonus

Forensic Eval- Allows the use of wands to sometimes not consume the charges
I don't see the association with wand use and Forensic Eval. Perhaps a bonus of being able to detect a thief through a means other than the 'Use Stealing on them' trick

Taste ID- Allows you meat/fruit fed to pet to instantly get wonderfully happy
Disagree. Tamers are OP enough. Perhaps allows for a greater chance to cure DP with potions or a slight buff to damage healed or buff given (ie: 12-13 STR from a Str pot)


Love the concept of trying to get the most out of the game. These are my opinions in red and in no way meant to downplay your ideas. Let the thoughts flow freely.


Item Identification - Allows passive use of the skill so you can just click an item and see it's identifying properties without exposing it on a global scale. IE: with the skill you can just 'look at' (click once) an item and see what it is, but it will remain unidentified to the masses until such time that you actively use the skill on the item with the requisite 10s delay. This would also solve for the other thread, in a way, because personally I would never actively ID another item again. Along with such a change, disallow the ability to ID something currently equipped on another player or in their pack, but leave the ability to ID in accessible containers (corpses, house containers, etc).

For the most part I think this is a terrible idea, just because it seems geared towards "WoW'ing" the game.

But.

I do like the bowcraft/fletching idea. Or if not a hit bonus, then perhaps rather a hit speed increase with those weapons.

Spirit speak... I like Blaises idea, unfortunately, of having spirit speak work as a kind of passive, allowing ghosts to be constantly visible. To someone with GM spirit speak, anyways.

The remove trap idea is just horrible. Para blow and stun are not traps. 'Nough said.

The herding idea would be good if it played into an over-all construct. Having herding alone give 2 control slots is too exploitable. I'd say that having GM taming/lore/vet AND herding, should give 2 extra control slots.

The rest of the suggestions from both Swift and Blaise are... well... "not very good", to be gentle.

The game is the game. It should be kept the game it is, as closely as possible. Then again, it's not as if the GM's see it that way, otherwise there wouldn't be any control slots, we'd have weapons with secondary attributes like "of lightning", we'd have invis/tele jewelry, and casting npc's wouldn't be helping you taste the rainbow with every circle they've got. :/

Technically speaking, if we were going for making the game the game it is, it wouldn't be 'history perfected'.
Not to derail, but the overall goal of the shard is to find perfection and balance within the basic alignment of this era.
Charged weapons were removed in UOR, in lieu of special moves. Control slots for tamers were also a change for this era (and slighlty modified on this shard)

I thought it was implicit, but I did mean 'At GM Level' in regards to every suggestion/comment I made.

Aftear reading your reply, I think I may have misinterpreted swift's idea for Bowcraft, if he did intend to mean a 'chance-to-hit' bonus, not a 'special hit' bonus.
I think there should be a special hit for Archery, regardless. I also think a 'weapon speed and/or chance to hit' bonus for having Bowcraft on your Archer, would be really cool.

Again, not trying to derail or flame. Thanks for taking part in the conversation.

I would not like to see any of these added.These skills are not useless.

The on hit weapon effects were not removed in Renaissance. I played from 98 to mid 02, including time in Renaissance, and they were there still. I remember this rather well considering I was a mages nightmare, collecting vanq kats/doubleaxes/spears of ghouls touch, just for them. They didn't remove them until Third Dawn or so. The same with control slots. I remember because I ran around with 4 pure WW's and remember seeing these people with like 30 tamed creatures trying to block gates for faction ganks.

As far as being "history perfected", changing things in the game is what ruined UO... it's hardly perfecting it to continue changing things. UO went downhill after they implemented their idiotic "insurance". When half of your players are pvpers, and you take out being able to loot the good stuff, nobody is interested in pvp anymore. No rewards = no interest. Lol.

Incorrect. Ignoring broken things and not striving for balance, so they could push another profitable expansion, was OSI's problem.
There is no profit and no expansion here and as such, 'changing' things is exactly how perfection will be achieved.
Leaving things as they were, without consideration for improvement, if there is room for it, will leave us shy of perfection.

As for the special moves/charged weapons, they were patched to no longer spawn in Age of Shadows. I was a bit off base, but the entire point of the special moves was to supplant charged weapons and rightly so.
To get para-hit with a lightning spear would be so OP it's not even funny.

Control slots for pets was Publish 16, and as such, in era.

To expand on the opinion of when UO went downhill, it was on the release of UO:R when Trammel was introduced. Your opinion is different and that is your right, always.

Not that it really matters, but it means enough to me to keep saying it - Publish 16 was not Renaissance era. It was released several months into the LBR expansion, which came after Third Dawn, which came after Renaissance.

I get wary whenever I hear proposals like these because I've played on custom servers before where the owners didn't think twice about sudden and sweeping changes, and it never seemed to work out well. I'm not against ever changing skills to make them better but I'm also not dying for it to happen. If it were to happen I'd like it to be a slow process that was thought through fully, as almost all changes here have been.

I'd point out that I'm a very easy-going player and a lot of people might have more extreme reactions to this kind of thing than I would. For example, I think the small stone and marble workshops are hideous but the end result of that is only that I don't own any. Many other people are a lot less tolerant about things they don't like about servers (i.e. omfg I hate [insert random mount/neon object]and i never want to see them; omfg [insert random aspect of pvp] is horrible, i quit - et cetera).

Cool, thanks for the clarity. I also dislike the small stone/marble shops but only for their shitty door/stair configuration. The open first floor is way cool, in my opinion.

I also agree there should never be any sweeping changes like his and if any of these concepts are implemented, extensive and thorough testing should, and likely will, be done before publish.

I have no issues with adjusting skills in the game as long as they are tested for balance retention. It's awesome players are still brainstorming for ways to make the game more enjoyable for us as a whole. The skills I'd like to see changed, not necessarily as a new PVP or even PVM template, would be Spirit Speak, Forensic Eval, Cooking, Taste ID. It would be cool to have a reason to want those on a mule character at the very least. As it stands right now. I've never had a GM any of those. And have been fine forgetting they've even existed .

Something I've often talked about with some other members of the community also would be some type of Parry bonus exclusively for PVM. To make farming with dexxers a little easier. Later on down the road if the players decided they ever wanted to create a Bard , Tamer, Mage to farm with they can still use the dexxer they started with as character to fight in factions with. This idea would drive newer players into levels of dungeons that are currently not frequently visited.

Just my opinion.
Thanks for the post swift.

Ability to deflect magic damage in part or whole, with GM Parry, would be great. PvM only.

Although I would love to see some balance brought in for PvP without magery. The ability to have extra amounts of Resist IF you have 0 Magery and are wearing platemail (something to make the dex loss worth it).

Improving is NEVER a bad thing. Make changes for just the fact to do something different doesn't mean it'll improve anything. Modifying variables of the environment to make things better for the majority of the people in the long term it's always a good way to carry on something. That's why it's called 'improvement', and not just 'change'.
As the example you gave, it's very clear that they never thaught in the long term. "What will be the effect of this change in 4 months from now?" "Will the change modify the way users play?" "Is it enough to introduce this modification or should we add something else to balance the effect?"

Blaise- The game didn't go downhill because the game's pvp wasn't balanced. UO is famous for being one of the only games to ever have truly balanced pvp. Look at WOW, AOC, etc. No balance whatsoever. (Going to mix my reply to Sneaky on his parry for pvm only improvement into this). WoW got an incredible imbalance in pvp, for example, when they started changing things for PvM, such as their ridiculously OP Healers, capable of out-healing a raid boss. How can a player contend with that sort of damage? Pfft. Though you do say pvm only, but I'd hate to see differences implemented that start to divide the world, pvp, pvm, etc.

I honestly don't see parry needing any change at all, and don't see warriors needing any kind of bonus to be able to go into dungeons, and warriors don't NEED a bonus to be able to handle it. My warrior does just find in any dungeon I want to be in. If you can't handle what's down there, then don't go until you're capable enough to do so.

Additionally, parry is a great help in itself, as it is. Increased armor AND a good chance to avoid damage entirely? I think parry is just fine. When a warrior can go solo an ancient wyrm with a warrior because they have GM Parry, I think the skill is holding its own.

Remove Traps isnt a useless skill.

You just dont like what it does.

hmmm yeaaahh, but no; thanks.

The fact is Archery and Parry usage is less compared to others and underwhelmed, and definitly needs some tweaking after some tests one way or the other. Can anyone confirm me whether if these skills are being reworked recently by any extent ?