Swinging on the run.

[Joueur Moyen]

If you are still playing the "It takes more skill to play a mage than a 'dexer'" card than I am sorry but you are a total retard.

If you are talking to me then take it to trash talk. If not, never mind.

[Matt]

Dexers have been severely gimped. Let's assume everything about the patch is 100% accurate-- why not be accurate about the coveted Hally mage as well?

Regular heal didn't always heal from 10-13 HP. Remember that? I sure do. It healed from 6-12, sometimes 13 HP, even with GM eval.

...But this is the one bug that allows the tank mage to survive when he otherwise would die or be forced to run/recall-- so my guess is that's why it isn't looked at. I don't understand what UOSA's obsession is with hoisting up the Hally mage like it was the only game in town. Since I've been here this server has seemed hellbent on tilting the playing field towards the Hally mage, at the expense of anyone who is seen as a threat (::cough:: ::cough:: dexers). If you want to be accurate, the Hally mage needs to be gimped.

[Iced Earth]

NO WAY MAN! ANYONE THAT REMEMBERS KNOWS THAT HALLY MAGES RAN EVERYTHING THEY JUST DOUBLE CLICKED A LOT OF PPL AND THEY WOULD JUST DIE AND ONLY THE MOST ELITE AND SKILLED COULD STAND UP TO THE HALLY MAGE!!!

[Faust]

Regular heal didn't always heal from 10-13 HP. Remember that? I sure do. It healed from 6-12, sometimes 13 HP, even with GM eval.

Where is your source for this provided information?

The original code yields a 11-16 value at GM magery. Also, the eval skill plays no role in the increased value of this particular spell. The skill only provides maximum magery damage to spells once GM'd.


Also, those that question swings only holding in a held state OR not advancing during movement please refer to this UOR mini-update...

Players using melee weapons in combat will now hold their swing until their target is in range. Additionally, the timer that determines melee weapon swing times (combat timer) will now advance as the player is moving. Thus, melee weapon users will no longer be required to stop moving before swinging.

[Psilo]

Both the hally mage and warrior were changed this patch. If you ask me the warrior became more powerful while the hally mage was only changed and slightly nerfed. For the better.

Now hally isn't the only viable weapon skill, so is macing and archery for mages as a side weapon. Swords hally mages were nerfed alittle since you can't hold hits as easy or spam hally as much and you also have a arm delay before your hally can swing even if the hit is ready. That's all good, the hally now acts more as a finisher than anything, it can't be relied on as much.

Warriors are fine, just practice around. They are better than before, now weapons do more damage for some reason but GM weapons seem right now. Good.

Please go pvp more! You'll see how everything is much better.

[Eaglestaff]

Dexers have been severely gimped. Let's assume everything about the patch is 100% accurate-- why not be accurate about the coveted Hally mage as well?

Regular heal didn't always heal from 10-13 HP. Remember that? I sure do. It healed from 6-12, sometimes 13 HP, even with GM eval.

...But this is the one bug that allows the tank mage to survive when he otherwise would die or be forced to run/recall-- so my guess is that's why it isn't looked at. I don't understand what UOSA's obsession is with hoisting up the Hally mage like it was the only game in town. Since I've been here this server has seemed hellbent on tilting the playing field towards the Hally mage, at the expense of anyone who is seen as a threat (::cough:: ::cough:: dexers). If you want to be accurate, the Hally mage needs to be gimped.

If you want to be accurate you don't do thing's just to "gimp the hally mage" you do them because its accurate. I'm not "hell bent" on tilting the playing field to the hally mage. I'm just saying that they are the best dueler temp and that no amount of amount of added accuracy is going to change that because it's accurate that they are the best. I actually enjoy my various hybrids the best.

My dexer build also had archery and magery so I had a skill to drop runners and another way to heal/cure. He also had high resist, although it probably wasn't GM until UO:R. He was always mounted.

I don't know what shard you were on, but my memories of Atlantic, Cats and Pac is that most pvpers were mounted in the field.

Now hally isn't the only viable weapon skill, so is macing and archery for mages as a side weapon.

Archery was severely gimped in this patch despite what you might have read. Having archery does little to help you gun down a running enemy because it is so easy to get out of range before the damage applies. You have slightly over 2 seconds to get out of bow range and the shot will miss. If they are already running from you then you will always miss. Even if the shot goes off they have to remain in range for the damage to apply. Thats over 2 seconds. Now I am not sure if this is accurate but currently here they can avoid the damage even if the shot is fired as long as they are out of range before the damage delay. I have not been able to get on the demo to test it there. I would love to know. Your better off chasing down them with a melee weapon.

As far as magery for dexxers healing: You have only 25 mana and shite for regen. Your heals are probably half powered and you wont get many of them. You also have no wrestling. If you try and cast heal after the mage's dump you are begging to be hit by his hally followup. Having minimal magery to heal and recall helps you very little against the mage's primary weapon: the exp/eb/hally combo.

Of course the other thing is that if your talking about using magery with a dexxer now your starting to cross over into the hybrid temp world. I love hybrid temps. I find them the most fun to play particularly in group pvp.

I was GL and saw very few mounts.

[Faust]

Dodging arrows by avoiding range is definitely accurate based on the same code that is used in the demo. State 2 and 3 both apply a range check before being called in the timer. State 2 occurs one second before state 3 and the same range check that was called for state 2 is called for state 3 only 4 ticks later. Btw, state 2 is the animation(one second delay) and state 3 is when damage takes place.

The same combat timer is used for archery that is used for melee. If there were no range check on state 3 than melee weapons would be dealing damage rather your opponent was next to you or not. The same would hold true for archery and this would include being several screens away or clear across the world too.

[Matt]

Dodging arrows by avoiding range is definitely accurate based on the same code that is used in the demo. State 2 and 3 both apply a range check before being called in the timer. State 2 occurs one second before state 3 and the same range check that was called for state 2 is called for state 3 only 4 ticks later. Btw, state 2 is the animation(one second delay) and state 3 is when damage takes place.

The same combat timer is used for archery that is used for melee. If there were no range check on state 3 than melee weapons would be dealing damage rather your opponent was next to you or not. The same would hold true for archery and this would include being several screens away or clear across the world too.

Archery ain't accurate. I don't care what you say. You don't even have to run out of range. Just a few tiles away.

Right now I don't have any proof that lesser heal healed less than 12 HP more often than not, but if I find it UOSA will be the first to hear about it if I still play here with all the lame patches that are going on. You seriously don't remember heal sometimes only healing 6 or 7 damage, even with gm magery and eval?

[Eaglestaff]

1. Eval does not affect healing.
2. The heal spell will heal caster's skill/10 + 1- 6 hp, that's 11 to 16 at gm mage.

About your archery statement, if you are saying that you cannot hit someone who has moved a couple tiles then I have not found that to be the case unless they move out of range. I have tested this and been able to hit targets on the run, (albeit very ineffectively). I can see where you are coming from. In my test's I was standing next to my target with my bow ready to fire. I immediately attacked my target and ran away with my target (unmounted). I found that if the target was more than one tile away when i began the shot he would get away. Yes that means that you have to be standing RIGHT NEXT TO your target when you begin your bow shot or you will miss if he is running away. I feel your pain. Forget about ever hitting anyone on a horse with a bow.

[Iced Earth]

Somethings a bit off with archery actually.

The damage is right, the rate of fire is good.

But I remember back then that if you fully fired off the shot, the arrow would still hit them even if they left your screen unless they rounded a corner or something.
It seems here that even if you let the animation fully go, the arrow can be outrun by simply moving 1 tile out of range.


Archery was never GREAT because you had to fully stop and fully let the animation go, but at current state, you can stop, let the animation fully go, but it wont register hit or miss if the target runs off screen, which is not right. You would still land the arrow shot if they went off your screen but you still got the full animation off.

[Eaglestaff]

Upon further testing I believe archery may be indeed be f'd. I'll post back after I can say something for sure but it seemed like it would never hit even if they are within range and moving.

Update: Testing is done and I have concluded that archery is not broken. It's just totally useless. Like I said before, If you want to hit a target that is running away from you then they must not be mounted and you must begin the shot with them standing right next to you. I know... I know... its ridiculous. Unless you can prove that it is inaccurate for arrows to miss if the target moves out of range then the system appears to be functioning properly. Although it may be nigh impossible to hit anyone with a bow it still appears to be functioning as I have been told that it does in the demo. I would love for some hard evidence to turn up that archery wasn't quite this useless. Iv'e had alot of fun with my archer/swords-mage/eval hybrid until this patch. Probably give him med now.

[Faust]

Somethings a bit off with archery actually.

The damage is right, the rate of fire is good.

But I remember back then that if you fully fired off the shot, the arrow would still hit them even if they left your screen unless they rounded a corner or something.
It seems here that even if you let the animation fully go, the arrow can be outrun by simply moving 1 tile out of range.


Archery was never GREAT because you had to fully stop and fully let the animation go, but at current state, you can stop, let the animation fully go, but it wont register hit or miss if the target runs off screen, which is not right. You would still land the arrow shot if they went off your screen but you still got the full animation off.

No, it's correct... You were always able to avoid/dodge arrows by getting out of range. This just was never used much during pre-t2a as a tactic when bows were popular since most people ran on foot.

The original code is quite simple...

There are four states with the swing timer which are state 0, 1, 2, and 3. The 'plant & shoot' feature happens in state one with a total of 4 ticks(1 second) for processing. State two is the animation delay of the weapon which is also a total of 4 ticks(1 second) long for processing. State 3 is when damage takes place... However, state two and three both fall into the same logic statement that resides in the range check for your weapon.

This means when you enter state three for damage to take place that a range check is checked logically. This prevents ALL weapons from hitting screens or even worlds apart after the swing animation and finally damage taking place. However, since state two(the animation delay/shot fired) is in processing for ranged weapons. The damage doesn't get processed until the end of that delay where a range check is processed after every new swing state change.

This old feature did not change until EA finally modified it in the UOR publish.

[Biohazard]

i recall in t2a pretty vividly running along side someone and hitting them without stopping at all.. granted the connection i was on back in the day (56k) was pretty weak.. so weak that maybe it thought i was actually stopping for .25 seconds. just throwing it out there. when i say running along side someone.. on my screen i was actually 2 steps ahead of them running parallel with them to pull this hit off.

[SighelmofWyrmgard]

Two things upon which no one has remarked (in this thread):

1 (least important, but very relevant): because of skill-gains, it's too easy to make a Hally Mage here at UOSA, compared to in-era OSI; related to this is the fact that in-era, without stat-locks, it required constant maintenance to maintain max strength and min dex --dedicated "pure" fighters and fighter-miners and similar builds could "effortlessly" maintain 100 STR, but no one else could, and not without a lot of see-saw skill-training.

Therefore, here at UOSA, it is painless and easy to create and maintain the optimal Hally Mage Skill and Stat template; as a consequence, we have a higher population of Hally Mages.

2. Poison, in-era, provided the "Great Equalizer", and Dexxers "dexxed" with dagger/kryss/katana (& shield), not with broadswords and war forks (and macers, in fact, constituted the smallest segment of the population):

Only the super-fast weapons, even on a 90+ stam warrior, offered sufficient profusion of "practical" hit opportunities (the swing-timers satisfied with the fixed min. delay; a "hybrid" mage dexxer chugging Agility pots was thus just as good as a "natural" dexxer in terms of realized attack speed), because you had to stop to execute your swing and, if you happened to be out-of-position, the swing would be wasted; the uber-fast weapons made-up in swing-refresh more than what they lost in raw damage output;

The Qstaff-Macer's strategy was to whumpity-whump the opponent out of refresh potions until he was unable to run away from the Dexxer's attacks.

I have had very little experience here at UOSA with poison, but what I have observed bears little resemblance to my remembrances: if what I hear about cure potions is actually true (that NPC potions are sufficient to deal with GP and DP), this is severely era-inaccurate: Greater Cure had only about 33% success v. GP, and maybe 10% v. DP (and something like >1% v. L5; on Chesapeake in-era, I earned the dubious honor of being told once, "I've never seen anyone survive Lethal Poison"; btw, that 100-Str character survived only by being constantly GHealed and slurping GHeal potions until the poison actually wore off; several GM-Mages repeated attempts of Cure and ArchCure all failed; neither was the poison cured by more than a dozen GCure potions ...)

If poison is not this "nasty", here at UOSA, this is another aspect of the PvP environment that disadvantages Dexxers over Hally Mages.

Indeed, in-era, a counter (exploit) to Dexxer Poison was to chug a lesser poison potion yourself, beforehand, and keep yourself (lesser) poisoned: one was either poisoned, or not; poisons of greater strength would not overwrite the effects.

As a summary, I guess what I am saying is that "swinging on the run" operates now pretty much exactly as it did in-era; if poisons don't work the way I've described, though, this constitutes something Derrick & co. should address.

SS

[Grom]

Two things upon which no one has remarked (in this thread):

1 (least important, but very relevant): because of skill-gains, it's too easy to make a Hally Mage here at UOSA, compared to in-era OSI; related to this is the fact that in-era, without stat-locks, it required constant maintenance to maintain max strength and min dex --dedicated "pure" fighters and fighter-miners and similar builds could "effortlessly" maintain 100 STR, but no one else could, and not without a lot of see-saw skill-training.

Therefore, here at UOSA, it is painless and easy to create and maintain the optimal Hally Mage Skill and Stat template; as a consequence, we have a higher population of Hally Mages.

2. Poison, in-era, provided the "Great Equalizer", and Dexxers "dexxed" with dagger/kryss/katana (& shield), not with broadswords and war forks (and macers, in fact, constituted the smallest segment of the population):

Only the super-fast weapons, even on a 90+ stam warrior, offered sufficient profusion of "practical" hit opportunities (the swing-timers satisfied with the fixed min. delay; a "hybrid" mage dexxer chugging Agility pots was thus just as good as a "natural" dexxer in terms of realized attack speed), because you had to stop to execute your swing and, if you happened to be out-of-position, the swing would be wasted; the uber-fast weapons made-up in swing-refresh more than what they lost in raw damage output;

The Qstaff-Macer's strategy was to whumpity-whump the opponent out of refresh potions until he was unable to run away from the Dexxer's attacks.

I have had very little experience here at UOSA with poison, but what I have observed bears little resemblance to my remembrances: if what I hear about cure potions is actually true (that NPC potions are sufficient to deal with GP and DP), this is severely era-inaccurate: Greater Cure had only about 33% success v. GP, and maybe 10% v. DP (and something like >1% v. L5; on Chesapeake in-era, I earned the dubious honor of being told once, "I've never seen anyone survive Lethal Poison"; btw, that 100-Str character survived only by being constantly GHealed and slurping GHeal potions until the poison actually wore off; several GM-Mages repeated attempts of Cure and ArchCure all failed; neither was the poison cured by more than a dozen GCure potions ...)

If poison is not this "nasty", here at UOSA, this is another aspect of the PvP environment that disadvantages Dexxers over Hally Mages.

Indeed, in-era, a counter (exploit) to Dexxer Poison was to chug a lesser poison potion yourself, beforehand, and keep yourself (lesser) poisoned: one was either poisoned, or not; poisons of greater strength would not overwrite the effects.

As a summary, I guess what I am saying is that "swinging on the run" operates now pretty much exactly as it did in-era; if poisons don't work the way I've described, though, this constitutes something Derrick & co. should address.

SS

My first char was a fencer/planned poisoner, until I used it a couple times, realized the low damage output and ease of curing, and switched to macing. I only played during UO:R, and I don't know what changes poisons went during that time, but even then when I used them, they did way more damage, tic'd more frequently, and were harder to cure, I pretty much just ran around with nothing but a backpack full of deadly poisoned weapons on my fencer.