Hi I was going to make a roach mage, but the passive mana regen is really quite bad when you're holding a shield! I did some rough tests with my fairly low-skilled player (see below) and you basically suffer a 50% passive mana regen penalty for just holding a wood shield (and more for a metal shield!) Would you guys consider allowing a mage to hold a wood shield without suffering a regen penalty? Considering you can hold a sword or wear leather armour without a penalty... I can't remember what is era-accurate, but the roach/parry mage just doesn't look viable to me with such a harsh regen hit. no shield :- 9.00pm + 35 seconds @ 10 mana <45 seconds> 9.01pm + 20 seconds @ 20 mana <44 seconds> 9.02pm + 04 seconds @ 30 mana sword :- 9.18pm + 34 seconds @ 10 mana <40 seconds> 9.19pm + 15 seconds @ 20 mana <45 seconds> 9.20pm + 0 seconds @ 30 mana metal kite :- 9.03pm + 15 seconds @ 10 mana <70 seconds> 9.04pm + 25 seconds @ 20 mana <70 seconds> 9.05pm + 35 seconds @ 30 mana wood shield :- 9.07pm + 10 seconds @ 10 mana <63 seconds> 9.08pm + 13 seconds @ 20 mana <65 seconds> 9.09pm + 18 seconds @ 30 mana
I seem to remember something about order and chaos shields being the only Mage use shields. This probably requires a bit of research through patch notes and such. Would be nice to see some more variation in the field.
You might be right! I remember they used to allow spellcasting, but that looks like it was fixed by this era :- https://web.archive.org/web/20001018013 ... atics.com/ (re: chaos/order shields)
Just a heads up: some other useful info to know about Parrying right now: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3546 tl;dr: it's a bit underpowered, and a restoration to the Renaissance-era mechanics would help rectify that. I'd not heard of your template before, but it sounds cool.
Parry-Heal-Mages were quite common. Groups of them would roam in factions and were a pain in the butt to kill. Everybody used chaos/order shields as you could cast spells while holding them. I definitely would not be opposed to seeing no med penalty while holding a shield.
I don't think spell channeling chaos/order shields would be unbalanced especially considering you can't stun/disarm while wearing a shield. It's not era accurate and I'm not aching for it but I don't think it would be a harmful change especially since chaos/order shields are pretty much the worst shields imo.
Nightshark made a post about this on other shard forums once previously. He called it a turtle-mage build and it only lasted a few months or so before being stealth patched out. Not truly casting while equipped but being able to immediately put the shield back once you started casting, without disrupting the cast like you would if you equipped a weapon mid-cast. That was the buff to the at one point and I do not think there was any documented patch to correct it but newsgroups suggested this was a functional mechanic, however briefly.
Thanks! Also my recollection... Both interesting ideas, but all I'm suggesting is that the passive mana regen penalty for having a shield equipped is removed. This makes the parry/mage at least semi-viable! I think it would be fine to make this a faction-shield only change, but don't really see how it unbalances anything to have it across the board. Parry/mages will still be underpowered vs. most other pvp templates.
inre: passive mana regen: in my opinion, without spell channeling the roach mage is all novelty and none effective. While not casting you can avoid melee hits by moving. While casting you will be forced to allow melee swings but unable to equip a shield. It's always been a cool idea but hardly a solid way to spend 100 skill points. So changing the passive mana regen for wooden shields couldn't hurt anything, but it won't make them viable in any way, imo.
This is sort of why I think it would be a good start. If you aim to make something immediately viable, 25% of the time you're gonna overshoot by mistake. Plus, if it's a new template to most of us, we won't know how to use it right away, but he might. Maybe he's got some tricks up his sleeve...
Not all melee hits you can't Not unless you run in a bee-line away from your opponent, which doesn't make them particularly inclined to continue fighting if they're a dexxer...
my opinion is that allowing passive mana regen while holding any type of shield is harmless and desirable (adds template variability).
hehe, I know a little about how to use them learnt a lot watching a friend who was VERY good with his (really an artist with the template) Think about dungeons and how important it is to stay alive vs. your opponent... do you need to win 1v1 in a dungeon? Also, if you get into a 1v1 with someone and you are well supplied, you WILL run them out of potions, and you WILL run them out of regs before you run out, if you know what you're doing. the long-pitched battle is what the roach mage is best at. They also work great in group pvp. I do think they'd still be underpowered, but we'd see more than none of them, for sure. stun/parry is also a viable template, and very balanced 1v1 vs. almost anything.
During the notoriety system days of Ultima Online, you could only use the O/C shields if you had max noto (128). You could cast with it equipped, that was one of the perks. They removed this feature sometime around when mediation was added and "templates were born" - once they made Eval and Anatomy useful for PVP/PVM besides for getting an estimate of who you were fighting (which many of us did use back in 1997). During UO:R, Roachmages (on Lake Superior at least) were 5x mage, Scribe, Parry. This gave you incredible defense options with Leather AR + Chaos Shield + Reactive Armor/Protection when fighting lumberjacks and the new dexer format. It made town-fighting a bit easier. Low on mana? Fire up a shield while you bait them around town, keeping them poisoned and using harm as much as possible. Sometime post-AOS, they added spell channeling and totally destroyed all the story behind O/C shields when they became craft-able, hued, and use-able by anyone. I haven't tried a roach mage here yet, was considering it, but considering how little PvP goes on, the added defense is far from necessary.
I have on on another (t2a) server, and the mechanics aren't honestly too far off from what they are here. It works pretty ok, considering you can just arm-disarm it before taking a hit etc. It's actually really great vs. tank mages because their hits are (2 seconds there, way more here) apart and you can just block them. The downside was that with such mechanics you can't really kill anyone who knows anything about PvP, but here on UO:R, it's entirely possible to fight with any character that has mage/med/eval, so I think it would work without any spell channeling gimmick. I don't think the UO:R countryside needs a pack of roaming spell channeling shield weilding stun mages. Relpor had that, and it was pretty lame, they also added parry to give a small chance to parry magery, which just made dexers completely pointless.
