What are the actual odds that dexxers will ever be useful in PvP?

the economy wants you to play a dexxer

think of the economy

Right. And I'm telling you the reason dexxers don't appear as good is because most people don't know how to play them. That doesn't mean they're broken. It just means that it is more difficult to play them efficiently. However, for those that do understand how to play them, they absolutely can be stronger than even the best mages. The problem is, everyone expects to just be able to walk up and freely unload lethal damage at very little skill requirement. Considering a Mage has to understand efficient combos, and manage mana conservation, the trade off is being able to land consistent, guaranteed damage. Yes, dexxers rely on a dice roll, but their damage supply is endless and has extreme potential in the right hands. My entire point, is that if a dexxer builds and stocks properly, there is a very efficient way of negating a mages offense while dishing out lethal damage. I'm not sure what you all expect.. For even the most adept of players to be able to effortlessly run into a seasoned Mage and dirtnap him/her solely based off high damage output..at the cost of what? Attack/follow? Like I said, yes, they absolutely can be very effective in the right hands, but you can't expect to rework the class and allow even the most novice of users compete with the the most elite mages. Of course mages will have an advantage when roaming in packs due to high burst damage, coordinated attacks, but that doesn't mean that dexxers aren't effective and don't have a place on the field.

One thing to keep in mind is the scale of the battles that happened on production servers. My group would rally in glow and it would easily be 20-30 people dropping gates onto our enemy guild houses. I think at these size pvp fights with a good mix of dexxers and having greater build diversity in general was a good thing.

My team "allows" me to use my dexxer on occasion.
Dexxers work.

pax romain could win a fight with a potato as his wingman

ive seen it happen at many 2v2 tournaments

I lol'd at this

It's because we're terrified of taking an ebolt to the spine from you on a mage.

Yeah that may be true. Pax did die to these guys at least once during our fights though. I wouldn't classify these guys as easy pvp targets at all either.

That's a special something I only reserve for you.

Pretty sure ive taken a couple as well lol

Ha! one of the Ham's horses was named "neggs"

Pax and I beat Isabel and Mandevu in a 2v2.....after I died.

*potates*

Yeah cuz we both tried to 1v1 him after killing you. We all know how that goes around here

I read like 40% of this thread because it became the same old argument of my dick is bigger than yours, here's screenshots to prove how correct I am, etc...

The bottom line is that dexxer are not PvP balanced. You all say "if you know how to play it right, it would 'rape city' on mages"... yet none of you do it. Also if you know how to play a mage right on this server, you should never lose to a dexxer, ever.

This whole pissing contest is a good thing because it's started a conversation (I'm sure for the 900th time) about fixing things like archery and stacking cure potions, swing rates and the fact that anything other than fencing or DP Katanas are useless in PvP....

Hopefully if the powers that be see this post being made for the 900th time, they'll look into making minor changes.

As much fun as stun magery is to play, why have we almost forced everyone into one competitive template? Variation is the spice of life and I think we'd all like to see some of it here. Be it changing dexxers to compete or even making other mage templates more viable.

And put your "if you know how to play it" arguments away. 80% of the population that fights is a stun mage, we all play it because it's the best, by a long shot.

"And put your "if you know how to play it" arguments away. 80% of the population that fights is a stun mage, we all play it because it's the best, by a long shot."

under the current shard rulesets, template limits (700, 225), weapon damage output - accuracy - speed, stacked potions, poison, etc then with the extreme veteran population of great players we have that makes total sense. Just imagine if there were some modest tweaks to some of these areas and how that would affect everyone's templates and pvp style?

Edit - I don't think that would be a bad thing either

Are we here to cater to a veteran population or are we here to expand the fighting population by making various play styles competitive and promoting diversity?

Sometimes it takes fresh eyes to see opportunity in an otherwise "perfect" system.

a first, very easy step to help poisoning would be to get rid of stacks, and to implement a timer for cures just like heals. That's easy to do, and it probably should have been like that anyways. Then, bring back the nox mages to at least bring a bit increase of variation to Mage play. Increase (slightly) damage from bow's including a slight uptick in the timers for all 3 bow types.

You're absolutely right. I don't blame server staff for the meta because it's just not a balanced design by Origin. They succeeded more in later publishes and expansions however. It's plausible that Origin had not even intended for warriors or mages or tamers to even be balanced until the end of renaissance when some changes (by Evocare?) made it clear they were working on class balance.

I think it's likely that this server's custom armor and weapon damage has hurt dexers in pvp, but there's some reasons that are hard to fix without serious changes to the era mechanics. People pvped more on dexers and were successful more on dexers back in 2000 but there wasn't much information for people to learn about the meta game. Tapion had a pvp essay that might have been published on UOpowergamers.com but outside of that I can't think of many online resources that players knew about. It was also a time when many players were still on dial up.

Whether anything will change here I think is doubtful and it's difficult to make good decisions about these changes. If you wanted to buff poisoners, I'd reduce the cure rate on greater cure potions. Let magery cure/bandage cure continue to have high success rates though. If a poisoned player needed to stop and cast a cure it might give the poisoner an opportunity to swing again. Maybe if staff could be convinced to enact small changes like that you can nickel and dime some balance into the system.

What about smaller, simple changes like adding reflective clothing and jewelry?