A Provocation Question

Has anyone else noticed that one cannot Provoke an animal/monster to attack themselves? I just found that out and was quite surprised. My provoker is GM Music and low 50's Provoke.

I just tried provoking a Goat to attack myself. I used the Provocation Skill, targeted the Goat first, then targeted my own name tag and got the system message: "You can't incite that."

Is this only because I am so low in the provoking skill, or is this how Provocation is really supposed to work here? What about using Provocation to protect myself from would-be PvP'ers? Can one provoke an animal/mosnter to attack another player (grey or red)?

For the record, I am in no way complaining here. If this is how Provocation is supposed to work here, I am good with it. But, if Provocation has somehow been broken, I know that the Renaissance Team would want to know.

Thanks

I made a fisherman that I used to help fello fisherman fish while I handle the serps. I would provoke the serps onto me and deal with them, while my crew went on fishing.
Now, here, I realyzed, I can't monster manage, since I can't provoke the serps onto me. Hmm, is this intended or no?

You cannot provoke monsters onto yourself here. As far as I can tell, you cannot provoke them onto other players either. I tried it several times against a criminal who had attacked me and flagged grey and got the message 'You can't incite that!'. It's also impossible to provoke anything onto a wandering healer, so it might be that other (or all) NPCs are immune as well. Bard skills are fairly weak here. You can make them work for you in PvM (though Provoke is useless in some cases) but they should only be secondary skils. My advice is to add just Music and Provocation - maybe with Peace or Discord - to a tamer or a dexxer. If you don't have any other combat skills besides magery, you have a very weak character. I'm pretty sure that all the current functions of bard skills are known and intentional.

I'm pretty sure you're right Zagyg, but I sure hope you're mistaken and that the current Bard issues will be looked into, and resolved, soon.

I'm not a fan of the inability to provoke monsters onto players. I always enjoyed that on other shard(s).
Is there some balance based reason this was changed in era or otherwise?

Lol... yeah, it's all about the balance.

Until just a few days ago I didn't even realize this aspect of barding here. Since this thread started I tried looking this subject up and I found nothing at all. I read all possible notes regarding Publish 16 (even the early proposed changes which were superseded when the publish was implemented) and the dev notes regarding Publish 16 that I shared in Bug Reports a long time ago, and they say nothing about removing the ability to provoke monsters onto players. Even more than that, Publish 39 from February 16, 2006 had a bug fix in it involving Provoking pets onto characters in a guard zone to get them killed, clearly indicating that provoking onto characters was possible at that time. For all I can tell, you might still be able to provoke monsters onto players in Felucca on live Ultima.

References, in chronological order:

http://update.uo.com/design_408.html

http://update.uo.com/design_410.html

http://www.gatecentral.com/ultima/uobod ... &blatt=940

http://update.uo.com/design_421.html

http://www.uoguide.com/Publish_16_-_Barding_Changes

http://update.uo.com/design_415.html

http://www.uoguide.com/Publish_39

Provoking monsters onto players would giving a pure bard the desperately needed offense. Otherwise you only can run/recall/hide away.
There should of course be restirctions of how it is working.
Maybe GM Music + GM Provo + GM Peace or Discord to provoke monsters onto players.
just some fast thoughts.

How about +Eval = Able to provo on players?

Duffrey, I don't know how you can say in the same post that it's a bard's only defense outside of running and there should "of course" be restrictions on it. I don't know if you've played a pure bard on Ren yet, but I've played one here and on various non-Trammel servers going back to OSI in 1999 so this is a qualified statement: the pure bard is a horrible character here with or without this ability. It is 100% useless in PvP and also 100% useless against several different monsters. The only character type that statement should be true for is a crafter/gatherer.

Zagyg, sorry if this was misunderstandable. What i want to say is, that only a pure bard should be able to provoke monsters onto players.
One can define a pure bard in this case with at least gm music, gm provocation and gm at one of the other bard skills. you should not be able to provoke monsters onto players just with some skill in music and provocation. That is what i meant by "of course be restrictions".
I have not that much experience with bards as you but I think this would be fun playing a bard. At the moment i am going for gm music, gm provo, gm discord, gm resist, 90 magery, 90 wresting, 70 meditation, 50 hiding.

Why would you have to need anything but music and provo for provoking on other player?

Even if that was possible right now it would be a very weak ability and get hardly ever used.
No sense in real PVP and also no protection against pks.

The only monsters that are dangerous to other characters are hard to provoke and fail often.


Well i don t care that much, even if it was enabled right now i probably wouldn t use it. But it should be possible.

Okay guys (and gals too), your replies are great, and so far, non-confrontational. I must say that I too would like to see the ability to Provoke a target onto one's self or onto another player added here. That being said, after reading all your replies, I did begin to develop a new train-of-thought on the subject and wanted to share.

I had mixed-up, in my head, the two skills, Herding :? Inticement. I erroneously thought that Inticement made one's target move to a specific location, but that is what the Herding skill does. I now understand why OSI nerfed Provocation, even though for a brief period of time, in the first place. It was their attempt to remove what they deemed a duplicated skill. Fortunately, they discovered their error and changed it back eventually. Thank you kindly Zagyg for your time and research on this.

In my opinion, Inticement is a useless skill without Provocation and/or Peacemaking. And for my needs (my gameplay), Peacemaking is also useless, though not as much. I can work with Provocation this way if this is how it has to be. I am really enjoying this server and this issue is not going to ruin it for me in the slightest.

I will point out that in UOR, Enticement is not the skill it states in name. Enticement has been changed to Discord, but the name in the skill list remains Enticement. Discord is very useful vs Monsters as it lowers their stats.

Hope that helps

You're welcome Lance; glad you found the information useful. I don't know how the subject switched from Provocation to Enticement but Vandyke is correct. You really should read up on Discordance.

That said, I have opinions about this subject but I'm no longer stressed out over it either. I started building a tamer; when it is done my troubles are gone and the world is my oyster. But take my advice to heart and build a tamer/bard or dexxer/bard and not a pure bard. You don't need to learn the hard way as I already have. There is no other character class in this game that is as bad at doing what it was designed to do as the pure bard. Trust me.

No cynisism in that response.....lol

Let's work towards making Bards something other than just Mob humpers!!!

Uh, that was me in my last post.

Vandyke, that is very usefull information, thank you very much. If you don't mind, please describe just how the Discord skill works.

Make provo to human players like 0 difficulty so there is no way to gain significantly off from a player.

Actually, as far as Bards go, my build is Provo, Cartography, LP bard with hiding Solo my own chests at least to lvl 5 (or will when my cart gets there)

Now THAT'S what I'm talkin about!!!