It is a sad sad day, indeed.

Not going to discredit anything Telamon has done, the shard is great and will be my home for a long time...also works great for a new parent to get his gaming fix in! And I also agree that parry, archery and stealing need a tweak. Just putting my 2 cents in on the topic at hand because it happens to be my favorite play style. With the limited play time I do not get to partake in many of the events and spawns around the world so take my comments with a grain of salt

El, you are a bard with a dexxing habit! And I agree that either of the bard/dex templates are far superior to just the base template for pvm...but being the stubborn player I am I will never bow to these atrocities! That being said, I am wasting time here and need to get back to collecting data for your thread!

I resent that! But seriously, the base for a dexxer is only 400 skill points. You can take that base in a PVM farming route by adding some barding skills, you can take that base in a PvP route by picking up resist and some other stuff?
If the claim then is just that PVP dexxers are under powered at farming PVM end game, then we are in complete agreement. But a PVM dexxer can accomplish a hell of alot.
Oh and thank you so much for all the data your sending me.

He has 100 dex and he hits stuff with weapons until they are dead. How is he not a dexer?

If you're not willing to move beyond a strict PvP style template, I don't see how you should expect to be as successful as a character that has. This goes for tamers and peace/disco dexers. How is it even possible for enemies to be designed such that a 7xGM pure warrior does just as a bard/warrior?

Gideon, absolutely agree about Archery and Parrying. I have some ideas on this front and I'll try to be more of a pest promoting them (hint: restore the in-era AR and block rate of shields, and give archery a Crippling Blow that reduces Dex in enemies).

For Stealing, I actually think anything that makes people use expensive weapons is probably good for those folks, since it makes for some juicy targets. Additionally there are some spawning rares that require stealing I think. And I recently did the AMIBs in ironman-style with my pure thief, which involved stealing keys and everything else those pirates carried, while they chased me in circles, got blocked by walls of stone, and otherwise embarrassed themselves.

.

Also, keep in mind that dexxers are subject to the disarm thieves too. This really erodes any choice I would have in bringing my dexxer with a 100k+ slayer out to an event. I might be able to get a recall off if I see a PK but a disarm thief is gonna hit me by surprise and there's very little I can do.

I bring a tamer, however, lol... There's no stealing pets on this server.

A high end slayer is nice but low ends still perform very well. During overland prime time hours I farmed with silver Hally since its weight prevents it from being stolen.

For stealing get rid of always turn grey (can't use gates, can't recall, can't shop, can't supply self from bank if you didn't want to risk losing supplies from the guardwhacks, and it doesn't make sense a gm thief would get noticed every single time)

no fails on anything below 5 stones, notices but not gws (unless in line of sight of npcs or player initiated) from 5-9, and 10 something like 50/50

no fails on stacks (osi never had that, you would get a randomly low number but it would still reflect the 10 stone limit of gm stealing) I was checking it out the other day and was stealing stacks of regs and getting weights that didn't even raise my weight, much less 10 stones. From what I remember a stack of 100 regs would go in 1-3 steals.

when you combine the disarm fails with stealing fails and wait times to rez and the fact if you play a thief with hiding/stealth/stealing/snooping you are severely limited either on offense, defense or both (unless you have an ethy which once again makes it a rich man's game) and notice while a dexer just keeps up and hitting you and a mage just keeps hitting hot keys while you're trying to heal/cure, snoop packs (packs under packs) set last targets, blah blah blah, it's a lot tougher than you'd think, so the gimped class makes me sad.

make the statues and stuff lower than 10 stones (if a pk can come by and kill someone and make them lose the statue, then a thief should be able to run by at a bank and grab it. I don't like how pks are favored over thieves here)

On OSI calling someone a crate thief (someone who would steal rares off of the floor in doom, or out of crates) became grounds for a stratics forum ban because people were so derogatory about it. I do think that's a great addition to the class as long as it enhances the class by adding to what it can already do, not as a piss poor replacement for player vs player stealing.

take out faction and runebook bless deeds, allow bod books and runebooks to be target stolen.

more tmaps, slayers, plat, blah blah blah that we can steal.

take out anyone being able to determine if the thief is perma by using the stealing skill on them (I propose make that a feature of the forensics skill)

take out a thief being able to steal from a perma thief, but if the perma thief steals back or attacks gets guardwhacked.

And I'd like to see some various thief quests geared towards the various templates (disarm, stealth, lp, etc..) that will reward the thief with some deco for the house (rogue themed stuff) and clothing for us to bless (a +10 stealing mask only wearable by a gm thief would be great, shroud of shadows, black hair dye, ninja masks, I dunno, just throwing out ideas)


I just woke up and am making it through my first cup of coffee, so that was probably a fairly sloppy presentation since I typed it from the top of my mind and am not proof reading it. But I really wish the thief class would get fixed, it's so bad a part of me doesn't want to play here, just because that's always what UO was to me and the most fun. It was never about driving people away or griefing (for me) or even profit (though it's nice to have gold) and was such a unique part of a game that's never existed anywhere else, that it makes me very sad that it's so gimped here.

I always support giving players the means to handle thieves (esp through the detective class) rather than changing game mechanics to make the class not worth playing.


Thx thx, I'll be here all week.

When you resurrect with your blessed Slayer weapon, it will be "dead" with 0 HP and default durability. So just like tamers who have 40 bonded "weapons", there's a cost for death too.


I like it. Someone PM me when the patch hits.

Sorry about ranting at you in IRC the other day blaise, you have the gm ability to push my buttons the wrong way at the wrong time and make me want to slap the black off of you. I still consider you a friend and respect your opinions about the game (agree or not)

I've been very much pro-slayers since my first week here. Spawn rates, spawn mobs, damage output, and effective target monsters are all things we could adjust without changing the dynamic of the game for non-dexxers.

IMHO, I don't think warriors should be equal to or greater than tamers at something like taking down a boss monster - at least not when fighting alone. The tamer template is more difficult to create, less versatile, clunky for fighting off "swarms", and anchored by the need to gate instead of recall. So even though they make the most money and have so many benefits, they have their (slight) disadvantages in other aspects of the game. And it does just makes sense that two dragons, an evil magic horse, and their wizard-master should be able to take on more than a dude with a sword. But slayers probably wouldn't upset that balance too much because warriors will always still have trouble with handling damage from single powerful casters whereas tamers are the ultimate "tanking" template.

It really seems therefore that increasing the drop rate of slayers is a win-win.

As a matter of fact, I'm even interested in the idea of altering the super-slayer/sub-slayer categories and calculations. It'd be pretty cool if maybe one or two of the less-sexy sub-slayers were particularly devastating. I'm picturing something like an air or earth elemental slayer katana of force costing 10k but allowing you to cut through them fast enough that you'd make serious bank. Then add a boss to that spawn which takes a long time to kill but is manageable. Give that boss a high chance of dropping stuff that dexxers want. Maybe this would produce legitimate dexxing hot spots and bring some social interaction to areas that new players are more likely to explore on their first voyage off occlo?

Jack, you know I don't hold grudges for long or hate people for discourse or disagreement, ever. It's my fatal flaw.

Slayer armor from colored ingots would not only make a viable market for colored metal armor, but give warriors another leg to stand on in the big monster fights.

Yay for idea flow!

Slayer shields is a clever idea. I think you would be surprised though at how effective magic shields would be against non-poisoning bosses if they had their in-era properties according to Stratics. Whitelisting think there is a way too male this work without a UOR custom solution that didn't exist in era.

I'm confused. . . Why don't people think pure mages should get a PvM boost? They're really more hard up than dexxers. There's also plenty of pure mages out there to lobby for it.

Also, I don't think other classes should be asking for their own equivalent of the zookeeper quest. That's the worst addition this shard has in my opinion. Dragons are free and you earn money training them. It's extremely time-consuming and boring trying to complete the scrolls and the way the quest gets done is appalling to me. I'd pay NOT to have to sit around doing nothing while some other people went on an adventure and fought over who gets what rare. I was super stoked for new content when that came out. I figured it was finally an enforced team-play sort of thing and spent most of my time turning over spawn and looking for tames and contributed dozens of animals to other people's scrolls. When I saw how people where going to act about the whole thing. . . well, that's when I went inactive for quite a while.

Really? So having a sack of reagents and the ability to summon daemons to tank for you and blade spirit swarms on the bosses isn't working out for you?


Also, I agree that the inclusion of rare drops in that Tamer Quest was a burden Telamon could have avoided for himself. All the crying over who got the rare because they trusted the wrong person or person's is just nonsense.

I think Tela already increased base magery damage to monsters on the server a while ago so even people without eval can fire off ebolts on monsters for decent damage. I guess we could add slayer books or something but I think mage tamer would be the new defacto template then at least I actively fire off ebolts/lightnings while I hunt its nice to add in the extra damage and if the critter only has resist around 70-80 a lot of those ebolts are going to be solid 50-60 damage hits. I know dexxers can already pick up a slayer and do the same but magery gives so much utility on top of the damage. If we wanted a change I think it would have to be dependent on eval int since you wouldn't want everyone with magery to just get more damage outright again.

Perhaps my point was too oblique. I was sort of suggesting that everyone naturally realizes that the pure mage is the bees knees at one aspect of the game so shouldn't get a leg up in PvM.

But actually, no, that wasn't working out for me so I got some dragons.

Sounds like you've had some bad encounters with greed. Thus is human nature. That said, there's only been a couple public pay-to-enter events like that. The majority I've seen since the quest inception have even let people come and help for free. If they want a bonding slot, however, that will cost them 100K.

Archery needs poison arrows.

Seriously Cynic? A server announcement for your tamer? You are very special

Don't you ever forget it