Patch 58 - November 25th 2014, Thanksgiving & Combat Changes

I'm glad that you speak Blaise.

What Telamon meant to say was he will be reverting actual system messages from crafting back to being system messages while also enabling fully automated crafting with Razor by adding crafted item quality messages back into system messages like prior eras. Once that's in place, recalling into caves will be restored and he will open an exchange system to swap out hundreds of colored shovels for shit that's useful.

Colored shovels are moderately useful (though IMO, Golems should drop more ore).

It's the Iron shovels that aren't useful. Given the current setup of the shard, it would almost always be better for someone to buy iron ingots from the NPC vendors than spend the time digging them up (or paying someone to do so).

Will Elemental Ban work on Golems/Elementals now, too?

Yeah, iron shovels are useless as-is. They are also 85-90% of what you get from turning in. The colored shovel "drop rate" needs a tweak IMO

I'm generally OK with the amount of ore dropped by the golems, but wouldn't mind a slight increase, either

Yeah, I've been unable to test with a Battle Miner (both because I lack the requisite skills/template, and the requisite uberleet weapon).

Right now shovel drops match ore veins and BOD distribution. So I think iron is around 50% of shovels. If you remove the irons entirely, you could essentially double the rate of the colors. I think that might make a logical next step.

I'd be ok with that. I've gotten exactly one Valorite shovel, and no Verites. Agapite seems to like me, though, and I get more of those than I do Gold

Gargoyle picks seemed to net me far more gold, items and colored ingots but I'll admit I haven't spent more than one session fielding the shovels on my battle miner. I'll happily trade every gargoyle shovel I have for gargoyle picks.
Granted, I didn't math it all up, but that's how it seemed.

I'd easily trade every iron shovel for a pickaxe. I like the targeted nature of the shovels, but I guess you can do that with pickaxes, too, as long as you know what the vein is...actually, now that I type it, the pickaxes are a lot more flexible.

Yeah, only about 1000x more flexible. I take them to iron veins all day and come away with thousands of DC/Shadow ingots. In the rare instance that I need higher tiers, well, I've got those veins marked too.

Can you fix the war axe so it drains stamina?

I can't wait for the alliances patch!

My hopes are it helps bring guilds into factions/alliances big enough to consistently have people playing. We might not have the numbers we did in olden days but if we try to concentrate it I think it might work.

Hmm...

We could do a kind of UO secret society-luminati situation. All the GM's of the good guys, the bad guys get together behind the scenes to organize a larger scheme.

I think the best bet is like Tela said, let's form a kind of council or group that makes larger things happen between our factions.

I'm thinking a really simple structure that would divide up everyone on the shard into one group or the other.

Example

Good guys - People who don't PK, wants to participate in struggle/interaction. (RP guilds, any good aligned blue guild)
Bad guys - PKs (not griefers), Orcs, Thieves, Undead etc.
Innocents - Merchants, Cooks, Noobs, People who have no interest in our larger scheme here

Really bad guys - Griefers, the skum of UO that no one likes... not the RP'ers not the best PK's. These people we can all join to battle. A battle no roleplaying would be required to feel like a justified warrior in a worthwhile struggle.

We could do a roleplay like "Stormhold Besieged by Bandits, Lord British refuses to send help!" Translation: This month I want you Orcs and PK's (rp them as brigands) to make runs through the town or go their and just start trouble. We could even have a larger RP thing to it if we get bored. Also maybe the Stormhold Knights and her allies make some runs at the orc fort? Heck we could do lots of things.

Whatcha think? Anyone wanna star the UORluminati with me?

Like to see this work but I'm not sure we'll get enough people to join the new alliance factions to make consistent interaction possible.

Is it possible to add to the alliances a form of hiring an npc like we can hire npc fighters? Maybe a limit/control slot of say you can hire 1 Orc Mage, 2 Orc Captain, or 3 Regular Orcs? Would it be possible if we also have a Royal Guard alliance, where we can protect outposts with guards? Maybe create a few unique npc guards?

Can I ally with the thief guild and have npc hires that auto steal from people?

I'll have an All Steal hotkey