New in the shard and need help!

[FisuUOSA]

***EDIT: Just realiez I posted in the wrong section, Sorry!.****


Hello everyone, im new at SA. Been 4 days since I started and im having a great time so far.
However, its been ages since my last contact with UO, so im quite rusty.
Its going to be a long post I warn

I have a number of doubts I would like to clarify.
1) Im building 2 chars right now. A warrior and a Bard.
Warrior goes:
GM Anatomy
GM Sword
96 Tactics
80 Parrying
30 Magery
70 Hiding
51 Resist
65 Healing

I wonder if Parrying is really needed, or if I could swap with any other skill. I realised that I mostly use 2 handed weapons, And if I ever use a shield is just to skill it. Im not much into PvP, I enjoy most killing creatures, but who knows.. maybe In a future I do.

Also, where can I find a fair amount of liches? Up to now I just go through the ones at Yew crypts, which are 2 and they take long to respawn.
Another question, how can I access to Ice Iseland without magic? Are ships useful? Are they expensive?

Finally, regarding the warrior, I dont like skilling with macro, unless its really necessary. I enjoy going out and killing stuff and make my skills like that. But I found that as I made GM sword and 96 tactics, my MR is barely above 50, and my healing at 65.. Any way to fasten up? I guess I'll have to macro them right?


2) Now, regarding my Bard.

Music
Magic
Meditation
Provocation
Wrestling
Resist
Hiding.

Its my first bard I ever make. Always been a warrior player. So, I made it today, and right now, im macroing provocation. I've reached 100 music up to now.
Now, first problem I encounter: Each Wordlsave ruins up my macro for Provocation. Im provoking a creature against myself. IT works great, slow, but steady, but after each Worldsave, the macro stops working correctly. It comes with a Target self queue message, together with a: "Cant incite that" text. So everytime I have to go back to the Razor and retarget myself and the creature.
Now, how can I avoid this? During day its ok, I can fix it most of times, but Im planning on leaving it all night long, but it would only work until the first worldsave :S. Help with this!

2nd question also includes my warrior character. I understand that Wrestling goes fast with a hired mage. Problem is, when I tried to hire one and put them to fight, I couldn;t make the hired npc stop attacking me.
Once I get an answer for this I'll go and put my bard to train wrestling, and have my warrior healing the hired NPC so I can raise Healing also. Any advice on this? Any better way to do it, or what should I be aware of?

Final question. I dont have much money to spend on reagents to macro Magery up, soooo, it works if I work up Magery in the field while killing creatures? I know this will make Meditation skilling last forever, and also resist.. Any tip? I guess I should gather money and macro them also right??


Thanks A LOT for reading! Greetings from Argentina!

[MatronDeWinter]

For the warrior,
Parry is pointless. Get a good high-dps weapon (kryss/katana) to use, which is one handed, so you can drink a potion if need be. There is nothing WORTH fighting, that qould require parry.

You might want to think about adding magery. Life is very hard without it. Even magery without med or eval, you can get off about 2 Greater heals on the standard dex stats. Not to mention, recall, mark, freaking meteor storm (awesome spell for non-eval mages, if you have the mana), releport, invis, et al.

You can get to dagger island (ice island) by boat. Or have someone gate you. Or recall there from one of the various rune libraries that people have set up all over the map.

You can absolutely GM your skills while playing as a dexer fighting liches and stuff. I recommend you fight lighes in the back of deceit (the lich in that corner, NOT near the lord room), or the yew liches, or the city of the dead north of Delucia in T2A (thats a pretty safe place).

The problem is, you will probably stop gaining healing around 75 or so. Well, it will start gaining REALLY slow. I highly recommend that you macro at least this skill. It's just not practical to GM it the natural way unless you plan on fighting scorpions (or other poison monsters) for 8 hours a day for a month. Heal to 60/60 (heal/anat), cure any poison to 80/80, then res to GM. You could just fight normally and heal yourself using magery or potions to cure until 65ish, then macro with a mage casting poison, or trap a snake in a house and use it to train. Always heal ANOTHER character. That way the timer is shorter and you gain faster.



For the bard,
Set all of the "timeouts" on the "wait for.."'s in your macro to =1. Then use target nearest grey, and target self, to prevent the macro from hanging up. Toss in a "use instrument by type" every so many loops (using "for") so it uses an instrument from your backpack to keep it working.

Regs cost money. Kill liches to get money. You can gm magery on 50k or so, which doesn't take long at all to earn on a dexer with 75-ish skill levels and a silver weapon.

[faber]

For the warrior,
Parry is pointless. Get a good high-dps weapon (kryss/katana) to use, which is one handed, so you can drink a potion if need be. There is nothing WORTH fighting, that qould require parry.

You might want to think about adding magery. Life is very hard without it. Even magery without med or eval, you can get off about 2 Greater heals on the standard dex stats. Not to mention, recall, mark, freaking meteor storm (awesome spell for non-eval mages, if you have the mana), releport, invis, et al.

You can get to dagger island (ice island) by boat. Or have someone gate you. Or recall there from one of the various rune libraries that people have set up all over the map.

You can absolutely GM your skills while playing as a dexer fighting liches and stuff. I recommend you fight lighes in the back of deceit (the lich in that corner, NOT near the lord room), or the yew liches, or the city of the dead north of Delucia in T2A (thats a pretty safe place).

The problem is, you will probably stop gaining healing around 75 or so. Well, it will start gaining REALLY slow. I highly recommend that you macro at least this skill. It's just not practical to GM it the natural way unless you plan on fighting scorpions (or other poison monsters) for 8 hours a day for a month. Heal to 60/60 (heal/anat), cure any poison to 80/80, then res to GM. You could just fight normally and heal yourself using magery or potions to cure until 65ish, then macro with a mage casting poison, or trap a snake in a house and use it to train. Always heal ANOTHER character. That way the timer is shorter and you gain faster.



For the bard,
Set all of the "timeouts" on the "wait for.."'s in your macro to =1. Then use target nearest grey, and target self, to prevent the macro from hanging up. Toss in a "use instrument by type" every so many loops (using "for") so it uses an instrument from your backpack to keep it working.

Regs cost money. Kill liches to get money. You can gm magery on 50k or so, which doesn't take long at all to earn on a dexer with 75-ish skill levels and a silver weapon.

Most thorough response to a new player's questions I've seen in a long time. +1 Matron for going above and beyond.

[FisuUOSA]

Thanks a lot for your answer!

Im still having problem with the provo macro and worldsave, can't set the Target Nearest Grey thing, or maybe is the Target by Type 29? Thats as much as I can get besides Last Target or Absolute Target.

And lastly, It would be good to swap parrying for magery then? Im thinking right now 100 Magery, and then im having 30% for another skill, or 50% if I drop to 50% hiding.

[folo]

Im still having problem with the provo macro and worldsave, can't set the Target Nearest Grey thing, or maybe is the Target by Type 29? Thats as much as I can get besides Last Target or Absolute Target.

Use the second macro ("Faster macro method") here: http://wiki.uosecondage.com/Provocation

Use only absolute targets. Target a creature and then target yourself ("Creature 2" in the macro above).

[Pirul]

Parry and Magery really depends on your playstyle.

I always used to butt-heads with Mikel123 about parry because I love it, and he hated it. The reason I love parry is because I love to see the hally-harm tank mages do no damage like 75% of the time with their hallys (50% from having GM swords making them miss completely, and 50% of the other 50% for GM parry blocking their shots). Yes, it is more complicated to disarm shield-drink pot-arm shield, but you gotta know when to time it just like tanks time hally cycling. Once you practice alot and get it down, you can do it without much thought. Sure, it won't help A LOT in PvM, but it also comes in handy sometimes. Allows you to go solo against medium to large creatures like deamons and lich lords without too much trouble. With 0 parry a deamon would mess you up MUCH faster.

Topping off Magery on a dexxer is really a waste of points, again, in my opinion. Of course there are many here who disagree with me, but allow me to elaborate. As a dexxer you want to hit fast, hit often and keep your enemy on their heels. For this you need max DEX. Sure you can have 90 DEX and 35 INT, but anything bellow that I would strongly not recomend. So, with that in mind, we know you won't be able to cast any 7th or 8th circle spells because you don't have the mana to. The most you can aspire to is to have slightly bigger Greater Heals, sure that's a bonus, but if you have time to off-screen to disarm your weapon (and shield) and cast Greater Heal, then you have time to run 9 tiles away and hide behind a house or corner, which even vs. someone with tracking, who after finding you still needs to reveal you, you will have gotten valuable extra seconds for you to drink another G Heal potion or for your bandage to kick in. Now comes the second inconvenience, once you blow your load (use your mana), it will regenerate very slowly because as a dexxer you want to use armor, which CONSIDERABLY slows down mana regeneration, so you'll really have to fight the 2nd part of your fight as a pure dexxer with less skill points assigned to a skill that might actually be useful to you at that point in the fight. So in short, my advice is: if you can't cast 7th or 8th circle spells, if the benefit on GHeals is slight between say 75 and 100 Magery, you make little damage with offensive spells because you have 0 Eval Int., and if your mana will be regenerating slowly, then why on earth would you want all those points assigned to magery?

...and don't get me started on med-warriors...those are mages who wear armor and call themselves dexxers (of course Halbu will call everyone a dexxer ).

[MatronDeWinter]

Code: Select all

[u]tl:dr[/u]
Tank/Dexer are more or less equal.

Magery (without med/eval) is just plain awesome on a dexer. I strongly disagree with the above statements made by the honorable Dr. Pirul, but we are all entitled to our own opinions, and I recognize that the style/template that one uses is dependent upon their particular play-style.

However, let's take the most basic case of a mage-dexer:
Sword/Tact/Anat/Heal/Resist (these are the 5 basic dexer skills)
Magery + you have 100 pts left over.
Let's assume 100 dex and 100 str, leaving 25 int/mana.


Now, the tank mages damage output isn't that great. They are really hoping that you will let your HP get so low that they can finish you off with a combo. It's very easy "not to" let that happen when you can have a Greater Heal prepped, use healing potions, and you can bandage yourself while moving.

You can heal about 85 damage with a bandage, and each bandage takes approx 15 seconds. A greater heal potion can heal something like 10-30 hp, so let's call that 20, and it has a delay of 10 seconds. Additionally, everyone (this depends on food, but I will estimate very low) can regen about 1hp every 15 seconds on average.

So, for one "heal cycle" (which I will define as 15 seconds):
Dexer (no mage), can heal 85+20+10+1 = 116hp

I think mana for a no-med dexer, regenerates at something like 0.25/s.
3.75 mana per "heal cycle" (let's call it 4 mana)

That means that in each heal cycle, the dexer can cast about 1 mini-heal, or, in 3 heal cycles, they can cast a greater heal.

Greater heal does something like 40% of magery skill plus up to 10 extra hp each use. So let's call that 50 hp.

In 3 cycles, the mage-dexer (no med) can heal 116*3+50 = 398hp
That is ~8.84 hp/second! (that a non-med dexer can heal)


Now, this same dexer, using a 1 handed katana probably swings about 1 time per second. But that won't cut it, because you know that Jousty Mac'tankerson will be running all over and you probably won't hit that often. So, after doing some duels in an area about the size of your typical UO screen, I found that I hit a good tank mage about 1 time every 3 seconds on average. Let's say that katana does about 15 damage each hit, which I feel is a nice low estimate. That is 15/3 dmg/s = 5dps.

Mage-dexer (no med)
Output: 5hp/s
Input: 8.84 hp/s


Now let's look at Senior-Halberdsalot.

The tank mages "cycle" (for the sake of understanding), is about 4 seconds. (This obviously varies depending on experience, personal-timing, euo-use, number of red pots etc). So, on average, every 4 seconds, the hally hits for n damage vs the opponent. (This is actually a high estimate, because they often switch from hally-joust-mode to run-and-heal mode, so it should be less, but let's say it's 4). Versus a GM armored opponent, the typical GM hally probably does something like 26 dmg. That's about 26/4 dps = 6.5 hp/s in damage.

Now, healing. With gm/med and no armor, one regains about 1.5 mana/s passive and something closer to 2.5 mana while actively meditating. I'm going to say that the tank mage will be actively meditating 1/4 of the time (which is obviously another simplification, which would actually make the tank stronger than it is). So in 1 hally-cycle, they can regain 2.5 + 1.5*3 mana = 7 mana. That's 1.75 mana/s on average, which I will call 2 (another pro-tankmage estimation).

G heal takes about 10 mana (I know it's 11 or something) to cast, and at 2 mana/s the tank can (on average) cast a G-heal every 5 seconds. If each G-heal is good for 50 HP, that is 10hp/s the tank is reliable good for.

Tank mage can also use g-heal pots, so that's 20 hp every 10 seconds, or 2 hp/s. So, 2hp/s + 10hp/s = 12hp/s.

Tankmage:
Output: 6.5hp/s
Input: 12hp/s

It's clear that these fights will always end in a stalemate, as no one character can out-damage the others healing.


So what good is this information? Well, let me explain my base assumptions. I am assuming that both characters have a good connection. I was also liberal in regards to the tank mages actual figures, making them slightly more powerful than they are. These numbers also specifically account for a situation in which, the tank mage is only using the halberd for damage, and magery/pots for healing. When you toss in offensive spells, well, offensive spells are ALWAYS less efficient in terms of hp/mana. So using damaging spells is actually bad for the long haul. That's why UOSA pvp has evolved into this game of hally-jousting.

The tank mage really shines when you account for their very high burst damage. But it consumes mana at a greater rate.

The tank mage can land the "dreaded" explosion-fs-hally combo, which could instantly KO a non greater-str-pot-modified character. But luckily, avoiding this is as easy as not letting the halberd touch you, or drinking a greater-heal between the damages, or having your bandags timed correctly (you can use trap pouches to alter your heal time), or having a G-heal precast... It's not difficult. The tank mage ALWAYS telegraphs it's moves. You will see the explosion-eq-hally coming a mile away, if not, shame on you.

To put it short, unless you have seen a mage cast another spell and not leave your screen, just assume they have explosion up and be prepared.

Whenever the tank uses offensive spells like this and fails, they put themselves at a disadvantage. You can use this time to mop the floor with them. The dexer really has the advantage if they are skilled enough to not die to stupid combo moves.


Let's talk about other factors:

Magic weapons:
This benefits both players equally more or less, so it's a non-issue, except in the case of ghouls-touch weaponry. These are basically like insta-kill weapons when in the hands of the dexer, and not as serious in the hands of the tank mage.

Explosion potions:
Just flee from this nonsense and heal yourself with bandaids. They are wasting money and their supply while they do this. It's usually used for a finishing move vs. fleeing opponents anyway. If you are a dexer, you can use this to significantly increase your damage/second, but usually people will run from you if you start this business without them already being low on HP or fleeing.

Wands:
You can both use these, no big deal.

Hit-Chance:
You both have a 50% chance, so really the "avg damage" calculated before is very high. But it doesn't make much of a difference except that, it increases your liklihood to survive a tank-mage-combo. It can also be frustrating when you wiff vs a casting mage or on a kill shot though, but explosion pots can help you there.



What is realistically going to happen?
Well, provided you are a skilled player, you are going to be victorious as long as you are comparably equipped. But in reality, they are going to take off running, only to save their mana and try for some more bust damage. This is no big deal because you can always mitigate this with a well-places (and unexpected) MR item, or with healing, pots, G-heal, or running to avoid the hally kill shot. It's really hard to die on either of these templates when you really think about it. The reason people do, is because they don't equip themselves properly, or they die to flaky attacks like the lame explode-fs(or eb)-hally combo, or they run out of cure potions (no excuse).


It's completely viable to play as a dexer and be competitive. The only really big issue you might run into is that you could insta-die to a synced attack from 2 mages. But, there is nothing you can do about that except disrupt one of them, hide, MR-item, get a good heal in between their bad timing, etc. But 1v1, I feel that dexer is the easy way to win. At the very least, it is fair, even with the non-era-accurate hally mechanics.

The only problem you will face, is getting a kill shot on someone. ANYONE can easily escape PvP/PK/thieves (anything) very easily here. You (and they) are always one recall+invis-item away from escape. Not to mention the efficiency of simply running in one direction until you recover some HP or mana.

I forgot to mention, if you want to cheaply insta-gib someone, you can always go at them with meteor precast. You might have to arm a wizard hat and be blessed to cast it though. But once they are at 50hp, drop it on them and time a purple pot for hilarity.

I hope you find this at least remotely helpful. I am sure someone will come in and find something wrong with my estimates, but it doesn't matter. I think that this is a decent explanation of the pros/cons of the two templates, and at the very least, it demonstrates that it's totally viable to play as a dexer.

[Pirul]

But, but, but...I was trying to say that playing a parry dexxer was awesome!!

My point was that the benefit of GM magery vs. 75-80 magery is not THAT high for a dexxer.

[MatronDeWinter]

But, but, but...I was trying to say that playing a parry dexxer was awesome!!

My point was that the benefit of GM magery vs. 75-80 magery is not THAT high for a dexxer.

G heal is 40% of magery skill + 1-10 dmg or something:
That is a max of 50 at GM.
That is a max of 40 at 75.

Sure, 40 could help you avoid dying to a lame combo or sync, or heal you while waiting out a bandage though. If you opt to use meditation, well, you will likely be casting MANY more spells, and then that extra 10 healed damage really adds up and it's advisable to use GM magery.

I suppose you could do 75/75 mage/med in that case, and have an additional 50 pts for something. My no-resist thief can stand toe to toe with basically anyone with 90/70 mage/med and that's without bandages so I don't see why a dexer with resist couldn't do the same, though they are more limited on mana reserves.

You could pop that into hiding, but 50 hiding isn't really worth it. I don't even really care for hiding at all without it's sister skill, stealth.

(I used g-heal formula from stratics, too lazy to look up UOSA-specific one, but it's close enough)

[Pirul]

That is a max of 50 at GM.
That is a max of 40 at 75.

Using your same analysis and calculation of 1 GHeal per 3 heal cycles that's 10 pts in 45 seconds. What's that come to? .22 pt per second. Is it really THAT significant?

[MatronDeWinter]

That is a max of 50 at GM.
That is a max of 40 at 75.

Using your same analysis and calculation of 1 GHeal per 3 heal cycles that's 10 pts in 45 seconds. What's that come to? .22 pt per second. Is it really THAT significant?

That's true in the general case.

But consider that you can get off 2 G-heals with one full mana pool. That comes to healing 80 damage in about 4 seconds, to healing 100 damage in about 4 seconds. If two mages are trying to nuke you, those 2o points can really help. What else would you spend that 25 points on? I guess you could do some tracking or something, but I think that mage/med makes the most sense as a combination. Then, it's best to just drop med a little if you really need the 20 points for base 1-screen tracking or something.