Negated damage and concentration

[archaicsubrosa77]

My friend and I were talking and we were unsure on whether if you had negated damage on a hit by magic or armor if it still disrupted a spell. Is a Parry mage Viable if you were planning to cast big to combo with a better chance to not be interrupted using RA and Shield for example? Dumping a flamestrike while your buddy comes behind with a hally hit ensures at least one will hit if you can pull it off in tight quarters.

Or like a parry thief who would morph into something to maybe get hit as he is snooping so that he can steal without worry in killing after. Say like in targeting a recall rune.

Parry 60
Snoop
Steal
Mage
Med 80
Resist 80
Eval 80
Wrestling

[Menkaure]

If my mind serves me correct you can parry spell damage but it still interrupts.

[archaicsubrosa77]

I am talking melee. I am pretty sure you can't parry spells. I heard rumors of later eras being able to do so with chaos/order shields.

[MatronDeWinter]

You can't parry spells. It just makes the little flashy animation sometimes. (If it even still does that)

[Menkaure]

I thought parrying spells was pre uor?

[Kaivan]

It was never possible to parry spells on OSI servers. However, the ability to parry some spells was slated to be added into the game during T2A. The comment about it should be on one of the old HoC chats from early to mid 1999, although I can't recall the exact location of the discussion right now.

[Boomland Jenkins]

It was never possible to parry spells on OSI servers. However, the ability to parry some spells was slated to be added into the game during T2A. The comment about it should be on one of the old HoC chats from early to mid 1999, although I can't recall the exact location of the discussion right now.

They had spoke about letting you parry projectile spells (magic arrow, fireball, energy bolt), but as stated previously, it wasn't added.

At one point, Reactive Armor would reflect spell damage if you were standing toe to toe with the caster, not sure when they removed that from the game (I know it was a pre-T2A feature, use to do it during the old notoriety system)

[Kaivan]

Reactive Armor was fixed such that it wouldn't reflect either spell damage or ranged weapon damage during the beginning of UOR. The exact patch note is a mini patch that states the following:

Reactive Armor will no longer react to magic damage and arrows

We should have this property functioning here.

[archaicsubrosa77]

Can we go back to the question please I can figure it out it's just I never had a primary caster with parry. I figured someone, anyone would know before I did.

[Boomland Jenkins]

Before EA made a change to skills (the one that made Anatomy useful for combat, improved healing, added meditation, and updated eval), parrying was very common on casters, especially Great Lords because they could cast with their Order or Chaos shield on.

After UO:R was released, parrying became popular on Scribe pages, typically called a roach mage (at least on Lake Superior) - Mage 5, Scribe, Parry. With a full set of leather, 15AR+ shield, and improved protection/reactive armor, these mages could dance with fighters (using a poison spell spam + quick casting spells)

With that said, back to your question about using parrying on a mage in T2A...

"Is a Parry mage Viable if you were planning to cast big to combo with a better chance to not be interrupted using RA and Shield for example?"

I don't know how you'd benefit from parrying in terms of interruption, because you need to have both hands free to cast. I suppose you could precast a spell and then put a shield on until you are ready to drop it. I don't know if it's worth the 100pts (or 60 in your example above) for a chance to take less damage per swing for those short periods of time.

[archaicsubrosa77]

right now you can cast and then arm even before the casting duration is finalized... why would that be any different with a shield? It causes no interruption. Okay let's put this more simple. You hit with your dagger for two points which gets negated by your clothes or protection spell. Are you interrupted in taking no damage even if you are hit?

[MatronDeWinter]

If you aren't doing any offensive spells, you can always outlive the attacks from 1-2 players with just wrestle, mage, and med, if you know what you are doing.

If you are up against 3+ players, then maybe parry would help you, but, then there is no way to survive a sync without just invising or something. Either way it blows your cover as a monster or animal. Seems futile to have points in parry in this case.

[archaicsubrosa77]

Nevermind I was too lazy to dual account for this...I guess I will make a cast BS arm shield macro and take a swing at my dude.

I would get better responses from the white house

[Kaivan]

It's highly unlikely to be effective to have a character with parry on UOSA.

On OSI servers during early UOR, when parry was useful due to the requirement of holding a spellbook to cast a spell, inscription paired very well with it because of the strong effect it had on the overall chance to be disrupted. If reactive armor was active it significantly modified the total damage that would actually get through to the disruption check. Specifically, 80% of the damage was absorbed by the reactive armor, 10% was reflected back, and 10% was allowed to pierce through. The 10% damage that was allowed to pierce through would sometimes be an extremely low number, which would net a respectable chance not to be disrupted while casting a spell, and parry would further reduce the damage if the attack was blocked, bringing a broader range of attacks to that low damage threshold.

Needless to say, reactive armor doesn't work that way here on UOSA, and as a result, its effects on spell disruption are vastly different. On UOSA, virtually all attacks are going to have a significant amount of damage actually get through to the caster in question, so even if you've got the shield equipped during the casting process, you're not likely to have any real effect on whether you are or aren't disrupted. In some extremely low damage cases, you might have an effect, but with only 60 parry, that chance is narrowed even further.

Edit: Interesting side note, it was possible to cast with a virtue shield equipped up until the reputation patch on OSI servers. The demo contains code that checks to see if the core server was compiled with a flag to use the reputation system, and if that flag was not present at compile time, the older notoriety system was used. In the casting scripts for spells, the check for items in your hands would ignore virtue shields as long as the compile flag was not present for the reputation system.