UO Second Age

morganm wrote:[he-who-should-not-be-named] should just stop posting in this thread... it's getting really hard to find the good advice amongst all the bullshit.

Yes, and hard to find the PvM advice amongst a page-and-a-half (thus far, of two pages) of PvP discussion ...

Over-elaborate and fanciful tactics intended to "outwit an opponent" are useless against the AI, because the AI is nothing more than a slow-moving, gigantic hitpoint pool which, sometimes, can cast things like FlameStrike and Energy Bolt.

SS

That's what everyone was focusing on because they don't know how to synch pots or the effect of field spells so act like they know it all...

But for PVM high magery like I said before has many uses.

High mage is like having detect hidden, hiding, an extra person to hunt with, great tranportation, extra bit of protection so on and so on.

Thing is this isn't like modern MMOs, there is no difference between PVP and PVM here, you are either on the field or in a town...and in either place you are not one hundred percent safe.

Expect PVP when you are hunting...no matter where you are, some people ghost others track you down and gate their reds in wherever you are.

I think Sighelm is onto something here, this is afterall a discussion of PvM, and as such, high magery would come really handy for an EV which is like hunting on easy mode.

You could also do a bard dexxer, pretty efficient for PvM.

You can easily defend from a single PK on any of those templates, and you're always a recall away of getting out safely.

We were discussing the dexxer bard before actually,

And I found something interesting it's only a five second wait after a fail.

Going

Weapon
Tactics
Anatomy 80
Healing
Magery
Resist
Music 60
Provocation 60

Isn't as bad as it looks on paper. The success rate is actually pretty good and you sacrifice very little in the way of the dexxer.

Thank you for bringing the thread back into perspective. You could drop magery a bit but I think it's pretty useful myself. A summoned Daemon makes for the perfect bait in making your provo attempts, well against things that won't dispel it anyway.

If you did drop magery, I'd drop resist too actually both to about 80...and instead of putting those points in provocation put them into parry to boost AR. 80 is a nice round number that would be treated like you had 100 magery with scrolls.

The reason I say Parry is because you'd make a good companion to a dedicated bard and would be playing luresman alot I would imagine drawing all the aggro...or when finishing off the final monster.

Going Back to the Archery issue...Archery is a good companion skill, or in groups. If you take that, you want a melee weapon to coincide. You'll kick yourself if you don't.

Thanks, Pirul.

Advice that intends to be holistic needs to be just that: considering the overall goal(s), determine the easiest, most-efficient and most-economical method(s) of achieving them; this includes overall template construction, plus time and expense devoted to training skills, plus expected performance while skills are still being developed.

It must, of course, consider all of these aspects of playstyle in the context of the expected play environment: devoting 100% of a character's design to deal with something that occurs less than 1% of the time is simply wasteful; further to your "solo-PK" remarks, this is the most anyone can reasonably control against, as you will survive 2-on-1 or worse only if you are extremely fast, and/or extremely lucky, and/or the attacking PK-squad is extremely incompetent. I will concede that this is possible, and indeed occurs with greater frequency than one might expect, but it can't be relied upon to provide a foundation for template design: one must expect PK-squads to be perfectly-synchronized Razor experts who get the drop on you.

The primary difference between PvP and PvM in UO is that PvM can very-capably avoid the "don't-dare-fail" mentality characteristic to PvP play: in PvP, skill-failure almost-always means immediate death; in PvM, skill failure almost-always means, "drat, this is going to take a tiny bit longer"; another difference concerns the vast amount of hitpoints most powerful monsters have, far beyond the 120 maximum available to players; PvP OHKOs do not OHKO high-end mobs.

Now if one wishes, for example, to use Energy Vortex, these considerations need to be evaluated:

• Free-casting will demand GM Magery, and still impose a hefty failure percentage, and regs are consumed on failure; GM Magery is largely wasted without both high (90ish+) Int and high Meditation and, in the absence of high Evaluate Intelligence, direct-damage spells are also a complete waste;
• Scroll-casting requires only 90.1 Magery for "guaranteed" success; 75ish skill returns about 60% chance (comparable to, but better than, free-casting at GM), and scrolls are not consumed by failure.

The other primary consideration is desired playstyle: in this thread, a player has asked after weapon choices for a PvM warrior; PvP-duelling-dexxers, and mages and mage-hybrids all share one commonality: they weren't invited; there do exist a couple of satisfactory variations on the Provocation Warrior.

Returning to some advice originally offered by Sandro, I can point out some things about one of my own characters, a PvM "dexxer" with Archery, 35 Int and 35 Magery (total Ability is roughly 38ish):

• Can capably hunt wearing mega-cheap exceptional ringmail (which I make), using exceptional weapons (which I make) and ammunition (which I make), carrying bandages (of course I make these), a few potions (which I make), less than 100 gp worth of regs (mostly Nightshade), one Recall rune (I have a character to Mark these), and two Recall scrolls (which I, erm, also make), riding a horse (you guessed it, I train these): potential loss if PKed is essentially carried loot plus nothing;
• Nonchalantly goes "bow-to-toe" with Trolls, Gargoyles, Elementals, Sea Serpents et al.; I can come out with a silver bow if I know I'm going after Liches;
• Has taken down several Elder Gazers, Dread Spiders, and even one White Wyrm (not all of these critters all at once, mind) solo without grief (the Wyrm took a long time to go down); can't even touch a Liche Lord (had a few passes at these), and Ogre Lords seem to naturally regenerate almost as fast this character can damage them (unless I want to waste more-than-their-loot-is-worth in EPots).

SS

Actually none of this was invited, the dude had parry and asked if macing, swords, or fencing was better Somehow archery got brought up and I don't know how parry an archery go together lol.
Then for some reason people were talking him out of not GMing magery

Best advice right here for the original question, imo; go with Sandro's original archery template and use wrestling as your wildcard skill. When a PK shows up hit your recall macro and go bank your cash instead of gambling it, you're on a PvM character...