I'm not sure how the gloves of mining work. For example, I have a character at 97.0 displayed skill in Mining, but wearing the ringmail gloves (+5) to give him 102.0 skill. This character is however unable to dig up valorite ore, even from known veins. My hunch is that the mining skill check is using the character's value (maybe "real" skill and not "displayed"?). In a similar vein (heh), if I use a gargoyle pickaxe on a known verite vein, I do not get any valorite ore at all... just iron. (though a Valorite Elemental will still spawn). On the other hand, my character with these gloves on can smelt valorite armor pieces. So it seems the gloves are impacting one's abilities with that.
I always remember these being purely to help with smelting - I could be wrong on this count though, my miner on OSI was barely over 80.
Cool, I had no idea the history of these things... I am a complete rookie to mining. If it is intended to just be for smelting, maybe there's a better way to signify that then. Perhaps call them "ringmail gloves of smelting", if such a change can be made to all of these things out there. Would of course be cool if they actually did raise your Mining abilities as well. Especially if going from 100 to 105 allowed you to mine more ore, or get the ore from a vein more quickly, because they'd also hamper mana regen ability. So it might tip the scales a bit towards *actual* mining instead of Recall macro mining.
I haven't mined without Ringmail Blacksmith Gloves of Mining in well over 9 months. Even after dropping my Med down to accommodate other skills, I haven't had any issues with recall mining. http://www.uorenaissance.com/?page=m_player&id=54965 http://www.uorenaissance.com/?page=m_player&id=123392 Zorn has a significant amount more Med but I have yet to have a hiccup in the macros on either character. Never really cared if it helped in ore gathering but wanted the benefit when smelting. Even though I generally only smelt with one of these chars. lol
That would help I suppose, as you could then regen mana faster while banking... but the majority of time spent recall mining is during the actual mining phase. So if you disarmed the gloves during that time, you'd regain mana faster but would not gain the benefit of the gloves. You're also looking at an extra 2 seconds per loop, to arm/disarm, which is meaningful IMO. On a related note, the mana regeneration on this shard is not what I expected... it seems it is not only the type of armor you're wearing, but the number of pieces as well. I thought during the Renaissance phase of UO, it was still based on whether or not you had *any* piece of an armor type on. Anyways, not something I've thought a ton about, but I do think that any change that can be made to level the playing field between recall macro mining and actual, individual single char mining would probably be a good thing.
As I've been led to understand, any single piece of armor with metal in it, cuts meditation rate in half, flat. Studded gorget, or full plate suit, same %50 med rate, is what I've been told here.
So as far as I can tell, Mining actually uses *real* skill to determine what ore you receive. Even your Strength bonus to the displayed skill does not seem to impact it. I have two miners I've raised to 70 displayed skill (62 real), and to this point have gotten zero Dull Copper ore.
