UO Second Age

The melee skill gain here is reminiscent of post-T2A UO:R, definitely not T2A accruate here at all. Melee skill gain was not use based in 1999, it was completely based on the skill of the enemies you were fighting. Getting a paladin to help you gain skill wasn't really very useful unless the paladin already had already been used long enough to have GM tactics and a GM melee skill.

In 1999 newbies would go to fight specific monsters to gain skills, e.g. skeletal knights to GM a melee skill and tactics. Newbies used to line up at deceit for a day or two straight sometimes to block the skeletal knights and cross heal each other to gain skill. Melee skill gain was much slower than it is here in 1999.

On this server you can GM tactics and fencing at the Brit Graveyard, off a goat, or even get your last point off a rat. On OSI in 1999 you couldn't gain skills unless the mobs you were fighting had a high enough skill level. For example, you couldn't gain much past 60 something at the graveyard. Eventually you had to move on and find someplace else to gain skill. I think having melee skill gain more difficult here would not only make the server more accurate but it would add a richness to the world and force more people into the dungeons and out into the world to work their characters up in skill.

I agree.

I used to spar paladins and fighters to GM tact/weapon (and tact ALWAYS GM'd first).

But it would take me days to get them both to gm.

Nice thread.

What if you fought a tamed dragon?

dren wrote:wall of text

I definitely agree with this. Also, although I haven't been able to find any patch notes to support it, I remember sparring with guildmates for quite reasonable gains up in the 90s for weapon skill & tactics, but here as we all know, it is insanely slow to gain against other players (only ever played T2A, so quite sure it wasn't another era).

OhSnap wrote:

dren wrote:wall of text

I definitely agree with this. Also, although I haven't been able to find any patch notes to support it, I remember sparring with guildmates for quite reasonable gains up in the 90s for weapon skill & tactics, but here as we all know, it is insanely slow to gain against other players (only ever played T2A, so quite sure it wasn't another era).

I don't recall the penalty for sparring other players either. I recall that being a big passtime among the various guilds.

I agree Matron. There was some patch note in 1998 that says something to the effect of "weapon skill gain from sparring with other players has been drastically reduced". However, as I pointed out in the past on this issue, we don't know what it was reduced from, nor do we know what it was reduced to. For all we know, it could have been 10x the gains you'd get from similar NPCs, and the adjustment simply made things equitable.

I remember fighting in bone knights for a good 10-15 hours to go from 30-100 in melee skills during T2A. Not sure how this measures up to the rate of gain on BKs on UOSA, also can't provide any physical evidence of this (just a memory, use to do it monthly back then)

Mikel123 wrote:I agree Matron. There was some patch note in 1998 that says something to the effect of "weapon skill gain from sparring with other players has been drastically reduced". However, as I pointed out in the past on this issue, we don't know what it was reduced from, nor do we know what it was reduced to. For all we know, it could have been 10x the gains you'd get from similar NPCs, and the adjustment simply made things equitable.

The point is T2A skill gain % chance was skill based off the npc you were fighting, not use based like it appears to be currently. There were definitely monsters you could fight where there was a 0% chance to gain skill. Introducing a skill based combat system would bring us closer to era accuracy and improve the mechanics of the game.

From what I've gathered, it's not easier mechanically, we've just found better and more effective ways of doing it over the 14 years this game has been out. We use to spar and it took forever; on UOSA it still does. However, somewhere along the line, someone found much more effective ways to gain skill and that is what we do now.

The problem is that there is nothing new in UO. We know most every tip and trick there is to know.

Trammel was introduced following that same logic.

The fact of the matter remains it is still not era accurate.