War Time Readiness and Combat Tips

Discussion in 'Adventure Time [A^T]' started by Blaise, Aug 25, 2013.

  1. Blaise

    Blaise Well-Known Member
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    Hail Adventurers and all!

    I'm going to write out the basics of what I believe to be essential for our purpose.
    War Time's purpose here on UO:R is multi-faceted, much like our great guild Adventure Time has always been. Primarily this is a warring guild, suited for combat with the PvP community of the realm. Personally, that is fun for me but I want to hunt murderers mostly. I've never had the pleasure of playing a shard with a seriously committed anti-PK guild and I am greatly honored at what we have already accomplished. We may have lenience with criminals at times of idle or recovery, but when it comes to protecting the innocent of Sosaria, I will not hesistate to put my life on the line to do so. We are not all hardcore PvPers and as such, some bring more skill and experience to the table than others. So below I will try to list out some must-haves that I feel are appropriate for combat in these lands. Some people do all of these things already, or just some of them. Hopefully everyone who reads this will learn something. I'm going to attempt to write them in order of difficulty. What I mean by that is, at the bottom, I'll get to wand macros and other such hooliganry, if you're ready to take it to that level.

    Party System and UO Positioning:
    USE IT, seriously, I cannot stress how beneficial this is to combat, ESPECIALLY if you can't be in Vent. Many do it already, but even with anyone you ally with, throw a "/add" (in game) and get that party going, or ask for an invite.
    In Razor, on the General Tab, bottom left corner, you will find the Open UO Positioning System button. UOAM is nice, but UOPS shreds in the case of performance and simplicity. This system keeps a marker up for everyone in the Party, like UOAM without all the linking.
    Get HEALTH BARS, try making a habit of pulling up player health bars before you even start talking, ie: as soon as they are on screen. You never know when a player may need a heal or a purple pot to the face.
    HOLD ALT and DOUBLE CLICK to detatch health bars from each other. :p

    Ventrillo/IRC/etc:
    USE IT, seriously :p Get a headset with a mic, if you don't have one. They're like $20 for what you need up to a couple hundred for spoiled awesomesauce. Get one.
    Stick around in IRC, stay in guild channel (use /j #A^T command) and pay attention to call-outs for PKs on the roll. Communicate, collaborate and dominate. ;)
    Voice is truly essential to high level group combat in UO and many other games.

    Dress Items:
    If you are a weapon user, or a blessed mask wearer, you need Dress Items. In the Arm/Dress tab in Razor, add an item for each weapon or item with the Add buttons. Make sure you have 'Automatically remove conflicting items' checked. On Caramon, I have three weapon dress items. Halberd, Axe and Sword. The neat thing is that you can add multiple items 'by type' to the list and the system will 'look for' any one of them. For example, I have two handed axe, double axe and large battle axe so no matter what type I restock with, I'm ready to rock. It is random though, so be careful if you loot some booty item and it matches one of your Dress keys.
    Now just go to the Hotkeys tab and set keys for each on the Toggle option. On my Med Macer, I have only two, warhammer and qstaff. It's F9 and Alt+F9. Granted, I have a Logitech G510 keyboard, so that's not the same as your F9.
    When fighting disarm thieves, this is essential. I had faught a guy in Skara for like 20 minutes once who was repeatedly trying to take my axe. I keep my paperdoll up and as soon as it dropped, I hit my Toggle key.


    Resources and Restocking:
    Restock Agents are awesome and if you're not restocking with them yet, you should be. On most of my combative characters, my primary Restock Agent is as follows:
    100 of Each Reagent and Bandages (this can probably be balanced better in time, but has suited me well thus far)
    20 Each: Agility, Strength and Refresh
    30 Heals and 60 Cures (Poison is the bane of any long fight. Do not be caught unprepared to cure)
    I have hotkeys set for Heal/Refresh/Cure pots, BandageSelf and Use Bandage (for targetting others). If you are clicking anything, you're likely to die faster.
    I built a simple macro that I use on all my fighters, called Buffs. It reads: Double Click Blue (by type), pause 0.5s, Double Click White (by type), pause 0.5s, BandageSelf.
    When I encounter an opponent I can either land an opening blow, then hit that, or if I have enough (1s lead time) hit it before them. I end up with my Str buffed and already have a bandage ticking for any impending damage. I have this macro set to a single hotkey and if I have to use Str/Agi otherwise, I just click them.

    Target Keys:
    Most importantly, Last Target and Attack Last Target. I don't use Last Target that often, but I'm also 'bad at UO', :p Perhaps I'll use it more in the future.
    Personally, I have Target Nearest Grey (for managing mobs/thieves), Target Nearest Enemy (War/Faction/PvP Event opposition), Target Nearest Murderer, Target Self and Target Closest Friendly (Admittedly, I still manually target a lot of times, especially in tight group combat where we are attempting to focus on a target)

    Trapped Pouches and UseOnce:
    Carry 5 or more pouches, by themselves, within another pouch. (I tend to carry around 10+ but have seen others pack way more)
    Cast Magic Trap on them, or have someone do it for you.
    Set a hotkey for UseOnceAgent, under Agents, at the bottom.
    In Razor, Agents Tab, go to UseOnce and either add each trapped pouch manually, or use Add Container (best). If there is ANYTHING else in the container, it will also be added. If you opened one of the containers before you trapped it, you can put your reagents/potions inside that AFTER adding it to the UseOnce queue.
    Now that you have your pouches trapped and added to the queue, any time you are paralyzed by the Paralyze SPELL ONLY. Paralyzing Blow (fencing) and Stun Punches, cannot be broken. You have to wait it out.

    Surviving the 'dump':
    Knowing when it's coming isn't nearly as tricky as living through it. However, when you see your opponent 'load up' the Explosion spell or other 6th Circle or higher spell, be ready for a big influx of damage. If you're not already damaged, and you can pull it off fast enough, pot up and get your bandage rolling (see Buffs macro above). If they are opening with a weapon hit, you'll be already working on that damage by the time it lands. If you're under 60% while your bandage is still ticking, hit your Heal pot (or Cure then Heal pot if poisoned). If more damage is coming, start spamming your miniheal/cureself key until that bandage finishes.That's kind of long winded, but to put it simply:
    Bandage, Pots, Mini, to survive most mana dumps.
    If two or more opponents are synched on you, you might barely survive, but not likely. Fighting a single opponent, unless you miss a beat (and believe me, timing is everything, so practice those keys), you can survive anything they can throw at you (including purps and wands).

    Purps and Wands:
    I guess a clever macro for purples, is really based on your ping time. There's no magic number that will make your purple potions bazooka rounds with %100 accuracy. I believe Mes posted up a macro at one point that was Cancel Current Target, Use Purple, Cancel Current Target, pause 3.12s, Last Target. That could be way off, but it was something like that. Point being, you can make them fairly automatic, but it's risky because if you lag slightly, you're blowing up. :) Thus, you need to get a feel for when to throw these things and personally, I just use the Target keys listed above. I have a single key for Use Purple, then when I think it's primed right (like the grenade that it should be) I hit the target key for the right color (Orange/Red/Gray :p)

    Wands are a bit more complicated but still stupid easy. Add Dress Items for each type, I have LWand and HWand, and I make those uniformly on all my combat characters that will use them. This way I only have to have a single macro for each type, in my macro list. The macro calls up the dress item by name and it doesn't care what profile you're on. I have a macro for them both that is Dress Item: *wand type*, Pause 0.25s, Exec: Use Item in Hand. (remove the wait for target when you record this). I bind GHeal to an Alt of my natural GHeal Spell key, so it was easy to adapt. What I get is a 0.5s pause and a reticle that I can GHeal on the run with.
    Same thing goes for Lightning. Hit that guy until he was %90 dead and now he's running? Slap that LWand key and Last Target a few times, you should be good to go.


    Anway, this was all written by a dexxer nerd. I would welcome feedback from anyone who wishes to help me and everyone else reading this get better at UO. There's a lot of talk of 'who's bad' and 'who's good' and quite frankly, who cares? Let's all get out there and fight. I have no desire to keep secret sauce combat techniques in a 15 y/o game. Let's help everyone learn and we can all have more and better fights. :)

    Hail Renaissance!!

    EDIT: Additional Tips
    Make profiles for every character or character type you have, in Razor. Having customized profiles for each character allows you to tailor the restock agents, hotkeys and dress items to that character specifically.

  2. Rue

    Rue New Member

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    Nice post
  3. Dalavar

    Dalavar Well-Known Member
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    This is 9 + 60 + 90 = 159 items. Aren't backpacks limited to 125?

    I'm pretty sure the action delay here is 1 second, which means you have presumably checked "Auto-queue actions" in More Options in Razor. So whether you say "pause 0.5 sec" or not, you're waiting a full second for each item in the list. Likewise with your wand timer.

    My .02 on this setup... for one thing, you're not chugging a red potion after that blue, so you're adding +20 DEX but no Stamina. Which means you're not actually swinging any faster (you may use bandages faster, I don't yet know if that's based on DEX or STAM, nor if it's capped at 100). I go White potion, Bandage, Blue potion, Red potion.

    A further .02, and I think I may be in the minority with this opinion, but I also *hate* the Auto-queue actions option. If you panic or goofily mash a few buttons at once (my potions are the QWEASD keys), you will have a queue and a bunch of things waiting to happen. At 1 second per action, you can sometimes find yourself in a situation with a queue between 4 and 8 items long. Which means that if you actually really need something (i.e. circumstances change in a few seconds), you're screwed, because the next item you try to use is not done immediately but rather gets put at the back of the queue. If you uncheck this option and try to use something before the 1 second action delay timer is up, it simply fails. But once the 1 second from the prior successful item usage is up, you can immediately use the next item. This allows you to stay on top of what's happening and not accidentally back yourself into a corner with a long action queue.

    I use Target Next (or Target Next Humanoid, I forget). It moves to a different player onscreen each time you hit it. For various reasons, your prey or your allies in a given encounter may be a color or criminal status you don't expect. This allows you to properly target regardless, though if there's many players on screen it can be a few clicks before it picks the correct target for you.

    Most useful perhaps for those who also often play blue *and* red characters in PvP, which I guess seems to be rare. You can have your blue char hotkey look for reds, and your red hotkey look for blues, but this can get confusing.
  4. Pirul

    Pirul Well-Known Member
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    Dalavar, my friend:

    (1) Potions stack here, so the item count is drastically reduced. (I so think that what Blaise proposes is a bit over the top in terms of expense and weight. Losing half a keg of cures because of dying would suck. Plus you'll hardly go through 10 STR and DEX pots, let alone 20. Also, this seems mostly a stocking suggestion for warriors, who will not be casting as much, so you could reduce the number of regs. This looks more like stocking to go fight a 6 month campaign more than a 5 minute fight where restocking is a recall away)
    (2) Item delay is less than a sec. Still not sure exactly what (my guess is 600ms), but I use 700ms and it works a-ok!
    (3) I have: target closest red, target last, target self bound to hotkeys. I also have hotkeys for dbl click bandage -> target self, and dbl click bandage -> target closest ally (or something like that). And I use CTRL+Shift a lot.
  5. Blaise

    Blaise Well-Known Member
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    Correct, potions stack, thank you. Go fight a nox fencer for over ten minutes straight without restock and tell me how many cures you have left, if you live. I pack heavy because I want to be ready to carry on the fight and not call out 'regs' before I recall away. So yea, as indicated my reagent amounts could use a bit of adjustment (especially if I readjusted for a Mage character), but otherwise, loaded to the hilt is the way to go. Personally, 60 Cures is chump change compared to how much value I'm carrying in weapons alone. I could give a rat's ass about losing a stack of pots, if having them keeps me alive longer (it does, trust me) then that's what I'm gonna carry.

    I don't know about anyone else, but at home, I set my object delay to 666ms in Razor and my Buffs macro works flawlessly. I'm fairly certain the amount of stamina you have only impacts swing rate when it's low, otherwise it is based on dexterity level. As such, swing cycles and bandage timers are given a boost. Granted, I don't run my Buffs every time and I often forget to kick it back in when it's worn off.

    As for the queues, I don't have any macros or things that would possibly queue up more than a few actions and as such, it has never been a problem in combat. I might not even auto-queue at home on pvpers, I'll have to check.

    Maybe I'll try the Target Next key sometime but I'm comfortable with the setup I have now and personally try to incorporate as few changes as possible at any given time, in order to get acclimated to each with practice.

    The only difference in my keys for my 'red' characters, is the Target Nearest Murderer, which become Target Nearest Innocent.

    In any regard, thanks for the feedback, keep it coming and let's all get out there and test it more!
  6. Dalavar

    Dalavar Well-Known Member
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    Perhaps the biggest annoyance I have with this shard is I never know what's intentional and what's not.

    I mean...

    and

    These are pretty radical departures from actual UOR mechanics, and now I guess I can see why the spell cooldown thread generated such ire. If you're changing the item delay, I can certainly see why the spell cooldown could be on the chopping block too. Personally, I like the in-era timers for both of them, but whatever. I PMed Chris to ask about the dex/stamina issue specifically though - that impacts PvP, PvM, taming, all sorts of stuff.

    * * * * *
    I've always traveled much lighter on gear as well. 5 cure, 10 heal, 15 stamina, 15 explosion, 3 STR, 3 DEX, 20 each reg, 75 bandages. Would definitely need to up the cures with this ruleset, but if the fight's not over after 20 cures, it's a tie as far as I'm concerned, and I'd rather just move on.
  7. Blaise

    Blaise Well-Known Member
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    Tell that to your teammates when you're in group combat.


    As for the stamina thing, I guess I'm wrong on that:
    http://www.uoguide.com/Swing_Speed

    Not sure how accurate that is to this shard, but I thought your speed wasn't as drastically impacted by stamina. I guess, if it helps any, I left out part of my macros. The end of my Buffs macros actually executes my Heal/Eat macro that kicks a bandage and munches a fishsteak, although I haven't steadily carried fishsteaks here yet, I do chug reds when I get below %50-60 stamina.


    Also, the amount of gear you say you pack seems ideal for intentions of dying and not losing much. I gear up for the long haul and big fight so no matter what hits, I'm ready to rock. I've done business deals with PvPers who tell me I need to just drop the item on the ground because they have no room in their pack. This was prior to potion stacks though so I can assume it was mostly pots.
  8. Dalavar

    Dalavar Well-Known Member
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    One thing I can say is that the reason it may seem like Stamina doesn't impact swing speed is actually because stamina "damage" is greatly reduced, and/or nonexistent, on this shard.

    Certainly during T2A, and I thought during much of UOR, you lost some stamina if you took a big hit from a weapon or spell. Here, that never seems to happen. I have no idea, beyond mace strikes, being overweight, and pushing through mobiles, how one loses stamina here.
  9. Blaise

    Blaise Well-Known Member
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    You lose stamina when swinging weapons, I'm fairly certain, in sustained combat. I'm not sure exact mechanics on it, but I know I lose stam over the course of any fight, even when I'm not fighting macers.

    I know on my macers, I keep folks chugging reds like it's going out of style, as it should be. :)
  10. Dalavar

    Dalavar Well-Known Member
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    That was introduced well after the dawn of UOR... I think that was actually the first mechanic change I noticed when I tried UO in the AOS years.

    My dragons definitely don't lose stamina from meleeing, though I suppose technically they're wrestling and not swinging weapons (but their claws are registered in the city of Brittania as deadly weapons, AMIRITEGUYZ!!!)

    Again, super annoying to not know what's intended (er, "perfected") and what's just a relic of whatever copy of RunUO was initially used to build this shard.

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