Presented for your approval, a never before described (I believe) PvM class for ultima online. The Artificer is a provoker, but he does not merely provoke the monsters available in a given location, he uses mining, and gargoyle pickaxes, to summon earthen minions. As a template, an Artificer can be as simple as three skills: Music, Provocation, and Mining. For this guide, I will be discussing an Artificer that is also a mage with the following 6 skills: Music, Provocation, Mining, Magery, Eval Int, and Meditation. The 7th skill is up to you, wrestling/anatomy or resisting spells would provide much needed defense. Personally, I like to live dangerously, and chose Discordance as my 7th skill. (It really helps soften up the tough monsters you will be fighting with this build.) Just keep magic reflect or reactive armor up and stay on your toes. Or, you could even forget magery altogether and go with a melee build. Notable Ore Elementals Shadow Iron Elemental. Immune to magic Immune to all poisons but deadly 90% Physical damage reduction from provoked targets* Dispels Summons Barding Difficulty 61 Copper Elemental Reflect Magic Dispels Summons Barding Difficulty 62 Marble and Valorite Elementals Reflect Magic 90% Physical damage reduction from provoked targets* Dispels Summons Barding Difficulty 63 Strong Melee Attack ~ 25 points of damage *Sometimes a monster can re-aggro a target (for example a shadow iron elemental) outside of provocation mechanics, if you go out of range, or provoke the same monster onto multiple targets, due to the elemental damaging the monster. When this happens, the 90% damage reduction no longer applies. The shadow iron elementals do little damage, but are respectable tanks. The copper elementals are poor tanks, but they do alright versus weaker casting enemies, such as evil mages. Finally, the marble and valorite elementals are the cream of the crop. They reflect every spell thrown at them, and they are virtually immune to physical damage. In testing, one marble elemental can solo one for sure, and nearly two Balrons with no outside assistance. With just myself using discordance and casting flame strikes, one marble elemental is typically good for about four Balron kills. If you like to use blade spirits or energy vortex, all of the elementals have a handy auto dispel feature. Just position your summon so that the monster, and your elemental are between you and it, with the monster's backside closest to the spot where you summon. When the monster dies, and the BS/EV targets your elemental, he will dispel it away for you. There are some areas of the game where mining is not available, its true. But at least you dont have to GM Animal Taming. And bond. And train. And bonding quest. (Not hating on Tamers...just that all that business is too much for me.) One advantage Tamers maintain over an Artificer is that the AI they work with guards them...while the AI an Artificer works with is generally trying to kill the Artificer. An advantage the Artificer has over traditional provokers is the low barding difficulty of ore elementals. It is much easier to provoke a Balron onto an ore elemental than a 2nd Balron. Speaking of GMing skills, if you're lucky enough to already have a miner, like this one, for example, then raising mining on a provoker can be very easy. Just setup a macro to smelt ore one ingot at a time. I like to use dull copper ore from 65 all the way to 85 skill. Then you can start using golden ore, agapite, verite, and finally some valorite. An easy macro looks something like this with some pauses thrown in to make it work smoother: Restock Agent (2 of the smallest ore types) Absolute Target Double Click (iron ore) Wait for Target Target by type forge Finally to add spirit or flavor to the Artificer as a class, I like to incorporate as much outside help as money can buy. I'm talking potions, wands, even firehorns. Also consider earth shattering instruments; something like a super slayer for this build. Thanks for reading!
I actually just finished creating this build. It seems to be pretty great. The only downside is that you really need to heal yourself a lot, since your pets will try to kill you . Still, I pulled up 1 valorite & 2 marble elementals and went to town on Balrons. I got through 10 or 12 of them and my elementals were still around 50% life.
That's awesome @Blendax . Should be relatively easy to provo them onto balrons too rather than balron on balron right? Especially if you have an elemental instrument. And here I thought I stumbled across all the old interesting threads already...
Yeah, I stumbled across this and had to give it a shot. You're absolutely right, it was stupid essy to provo the elementals onto the balrons. I did it with only a GM instrument, and only failed once!
The bad news is that anything with deadly poison will demolish even marble elementals. I tried this against the ancient wyrm... and I had to run out of there. Shadow wyrms were slightly more manageable.
I was wondering both of those things too. Really, val and marble eles should be able to handle most of the bosses. I should stop extolling the virtues, so I don't have competition, but I also like the fact that when I'm done I can either kill them or just recall away. Much nicer to just smash a recall macro than to worry about pets when a PK shows up.
I did a little writeup on this build here: http://uorforum.com/threads/newish-play-style-the-elementalist.49460/
mage med eval mining music provo anat/resist/disco? eval maybe not worth it if the line above isn't anatomy? peace self for when your tames are mad at you? hide? the ingenuity behind this is making me want to elementalist
Its a very versatile build, I messed with mine a few times. Im currently usign Magery, Medit, Mining, Music, Provo, Hide and Stealth. These last two are very useful on tight situations and lets you farm pretty much safe or look for new nodes without being visible. You could drop Hide and Stealth and switch to Disco and Resist, or Disco and Eval, or whatever. I think that going for Disco would be of great help. You can even go full bard and have the complete bonus for barding skills.
That's what I am going to try. Mining,magery,med,music,prov,disco,peace Done with music,peace,provo,med...still have to work the other 3 skills yet.
