As I grind out my living as a mainly melee character, I thought of some ideas to help this style of play...or at last make it more interesting. Why not have more..or create more...melee friendly(noob) bosses, there are no orc/troll/ettin/brigand style bosses that I know of. Casting mobs, why not lower their armor rating so their heal spam is not as painful (this may not be an option, but I thought it a good way to balance magic/melee mobs) ... an example may help better, went to kill an ice fiend with a little kiting and no problem getting it to 20% but that last 20% took 3x longer then the first 80% because of the heal spam ... Yes I know this also just helps pet damage increase on said mobs making them easier to kill, I am sure there is some balance. Slayer weapons...they are only made for Pvm and have no use in Pvp...why are they not more abundant? And no I do not want to see more of them spawn on high level mobs so that tamer/bards can just farm them and make more money selling them to melee players (they are already getting all the power/vanq weapons), have them spawn on mobs that melee fighters are out farming! Just a few thoughts I had to get out there. No I will not make a tamer and join the bandwagon, but I am also not asking a lot here. I will stick to my farmable mobs and grind out a living, just looking for a bit of spice to my world. Seems all the "end" game stuff is where the fun is at, but what if a 7x melee character is the end game I want to achieve, where is my spice?
I like it. PvP is the ultimate yes but PvM is still a huge part of UO and if the goal of this shard is to perfect UO then PvM could definitely use some perfecting. I don't know if this is feasible but can we make it so if a monster is killed by melee only, it has a small chance of dropping a PvM item such as a slayer weapon or maybe a kind of MiB that will send the warrior on a quest to rescue someone which would involve more PvM. Just a though.
There have already been some changes to bring the classes closer together in terms of abilities. A recent patch decreased the amount of total HP that boss monsters have, but made them more resistant to dragons. As such, it takes the same amount of time for a tamer to kill it, but now other classes have a chance too. I have also commented that Slayers should be significantly more abundant. I'm also of the opinion that they should do like 4x damage on bosses, instead of 2x. What would also push warriors into the higher levels of PvM capability, would be implementing the AoS features of the various armor types (extra resistances, etc), for PvM only. Hell, I think full plate on it's own should give higher magic resist to balance the field for a pure warrior, but that's a risky and slippery slope. Also, I'm pretty sure Ezekiel had some plans for tweaking the healspam on casting mobs at some point, but I don't know the intended timeframe for such things.
I definitely think making things more melee accessible would be a great step in the right direction. Casters already do double damage, so making slayer weapons more abundant would be a good thing. Upping their damage might not be a bad idea either. While I'm not sure I support it, it has always seemed strange to me that full plated armor doesn't provide some sort of magic resist.
Regarding "Resist Buff": If anything, make it skill-based through Parry & not Item Based through Armor. I know that if I wasn't already playing here and I saw that Spell Resists were somehow determined via Armor, even if only for PvM, I would not give the server a second look. Perhaps a knee-jerk reaction to something, but that's my honest take on it & I'm quite sure I would not be the only person to feel that way. AoS destroyed UO, slippery slope, & all that. *Edit: I guess that adding the old-style "Dragon Scale Armor" setup might not cause such a knee-jerk reaction, or perhaps a modified version of it.
I like the PvM concept. There are rescue missions a melee char can do but they are low level. Might be cool if there were a higher level MOB there every so often. Regarding resist, a player in full plate should take more damage when energy spells are cast on them, like lightning but less on FS, more if standing in fire field for an extended period, etc etc. Given some spells should be more, some less - seems it's already somewhat balanced on it's own. I don't think it makes sense for parry to enhance resist unless there were a parry/resist skill check... a min of 80/80 of each skill for enhanced chance at resist.
As far as armor goes, it is made to resist physical attacks, the reason many warriors do not wear it is because of the large dex penalties that is provides... I know myself and more dex character prob already have balanced stats to help with the mind blast spam that most monsters in our ballpark spit out, so lowering my dex even more is just not an option. The ideas of more slayer weapons with a greater increase in damage to their class I think is the first solution. But again I think they should spawn on mobs that are farmed by melee characters, rather then say the largely farmed greater mobs. Think I might hit up test and see what damage some of these slayer weapons do, assuming they are found there..?
I'd agree that slayer weapons need to be more abundant, but not easy to get. Perhaps as dungeon loot so you actually have to enter danger to get them.
You don't need to change anything about dexing itself. I think the hit rate buff is enough. What dexers need to be as viable as the other templates is a peacemaking buff. Currently mobs break peace quite a bit (almost every hit) when at low health. I don't believe this is era accurate. I think that it was done to make things a little harder on peace tamers, but it also makes things extremely difficult for peace dexers. It's not really a big deal for tamers since pets are great at tanking damage, but player characters just can't be sturdy enough to deal with large hits and spells from large monsters. If peacemaking were more reliable at low levels of mob health, peace dexers would be able to farm safely.
But what if you are not a peace/warrior? I just think a little lift to the melee friendly farming spots, be it more slayer weapons or a few melee level bosses, could give a boost to the server and bring in more melee oriented players who just want to grab a sword/board or a bow and Pvm a little.
Why not add a boss to all monster types? its so many monsters out there thats not worth killing atm. Maybe even add some loot to things none is killing, things like a dp potion to poison eles for example.
There are more boss mobs of various levels in the works. However, there's a huge laundry list of things to work on and not a great amount of time to work on them. Expect to see plenty in good time, as far as various levels of boss mob. I do feel that Parry would be a great skill to give a resist bonus for, only in PVM. For example, warding off flamestrikes and things, maybe with a chance based percentage. The melee hit chance bonus is definitely a great improvement though and we should be considering things in very small change states, so as not to create a crazy imbalance. It wouldn't be hard to setup two dexxer alts with attack nearest grey macros, that you can lure mobs to and auto-tank them.
It seems obvious that a regular warrior shouldn't be as effective at farming as a peace warrior. Everyone else has to pick up pvm skills like barding and taming to really be effective at killing monsters, I don't see why warriors would be any different.
Blaise this gave me a great idea, started up another two warriors, making them fencers for the stun, and giving one peacemaking and another enticement...skill closest target and then attack last target macro, or just tab and manually do this, and run on my archer to loot and gate them around...should be pretty fun with a heal macro set up between the two...still would like some variety while I solo box hunt though. napo, this is my whole argument wrapped up into one statement...why should any one class have to pick up barding/taming to be effective...yes picking up these skills will make you MORE effective but why can't a warrior be effective to a degree with just using their base skills, and by this I do not want warriors out farming large mobs as well as bards/tamers..but give us something more then just the scraps of dungeon mobs. I recently hit Dungeon Wrong back up today to check out the brigand changes, and I like how there are brigand "leaders?" which are a little harder to kill but give a larger(3x) gold drop and random magic item....this is exactly what I would like to see across the board with the melee level mobs. With an increase in Slayers weapons, a few new Boss mobs, and mobs like the listed brigand "leader" above would be a huge UP for the warrior/melee class to hit the dungeons and get to laying waste to the vermin of Sosaria, but until then it seems to be a bard/tamer paradise for making a steady living.
My take on this is not necessarily to balance the dex class, but to increase general interest to continued exploration of all the world. There is so much more to UO than camping seven dungeon high level mobs. the introduction of lower level bosses and chance for slayer weapons is infinate. Imagine the lower levels of hythloth being visited to slay an ettin chieftan or an orc champion. A also to prevent tamers from camping lower bosses a 1-2 hit dragon slay should be added so the focus would be player v monster not mvm (monster v monster). Also imagine a random boss out in the open! How many times have I walked from trinsic to yew and thought there is so much more content here than those seven sinful places. - Jupiter
I love melee characters, and when I began on this server 25 days ago,my first idea was to make a dexxer to PvM. Im bored of tamers and bards(although im raising a bard, just to go to events and be helpful), aye they are very powerful, no one can regret it, but i think it is boring... Aye you can tell, you have to heal ur pets, be ready to save them if any pk squad comes to you etc... But I find more fun to be aware of my own health, to run away if I think a damned lich will finish me with a 40 HP flamestrike... Call me rusty, call me simplyguy, but I like it. If I am not wrong, strongest mob which a lonely dexxer can afford it is a Lich Lord, in group, and with crosshealing you can stand vs most of highend mobs,i would say, just need more people in the group. Are they weakers for this reason? Mages can stand highend mobs alone just provoking, taming or just nuking? Aye they are, but in a big group of dexxers crosshealing, I think wouldnt be that bad to handle a blood elly, for example. I wont talk about champs, cox I just have visited a 4 or 5, and just one of them was viable to solo as dexxer, the revenant. I understand champs shouldnt be killed just by one person, neither a bard nor tamer, maybe increase their resistence, so a at least a couple of guys needed to do them, I include revenant on this list, if all champs would be harder, people wouldnt farm them, you would seek for cooperation and help. If the champs stay like that, I would like to find more champs as revenant, that a dexxer could handle. I know this could be much job, and I am not telling to do it right now asap, but it would be a great add to people like me, prefer the melee option PD: BTW! If anyone interesting in go to hunt highmobs as dexxer, we could think on create a melee group
You call them mages, but if a mage is using provo or dragons to kill things, doesn't that make him a tamer or a bard? Those skills are also available for you to to take on dexing templates. I think that peace should be a bit easier to use so that peace dexers will be about as good as bard mages, but I don't like the idea of dexers being able to farm on par with characters that dedicate skills to farming without taking any for themselves. I won't say that dexers don't have a tough time with the boss mobs, but they aren't gravy for mages, either. Even tamers and bards struggle with a good number of them. You may not be aware, but boss mobs take drastically decreased damage from pets and they have extremely hard barding difficulty levels.
