Posted on UOHerald.com

FoF: Feast then Famine
Jeremy Dalberg
16 Nov 2007 20:53:51

In this week's Five on Friday, find out the deal behind repairing items, get an event update, and check out some goodies from the upcoming publish!

November 16, 2007

"What’s the deal with Crushing Blow? It seems to not always add damage."

Crushing Blow is a 150% damage modifier (the same DI modifier most things use, code-wise.) What's probably happening, if you don't see a difference, is that you're running up against the 300% cap (fifth question down.)

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"When a monster loots you, how is that loot handled? Does it just become regular loot, distributed via normal loot rules?"

No, actually, that loot is separate. When the critter that's looted you dies, the looted items are placed on your instance of the corpse - and even if you wouldn't normally get an instanced corpse for it, one is created for you to hold those items. That corpse will remain available to you (and only you) until the corpse decays entirely.

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"I'm a Legendary Smith - why do I lose durability points so often when I try to repair things?"

"Because there's a pretty high base chance to lose a point of durability" seems to be the simple answer. The formula is as follows:

Chance to lose Durability = ((40 + Max Durability) - Current Durability) - (repairSkill / 100) (where repair skill is Test Center-style, i.e. GM = 1000, not 100.0)

Example: Blacksmithing of 1100 (110.0), 50 current and max durability, yields a 29% chance that max durability will be reduced by 1. If an item has taken more than 71 points of damage, the chance for it to lose a point of durability reaches 100% even for a Legendary smith. So there's a definite choice to be made - do you repair early and often, and risk failure, or late and seldom, and guarantee it?

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"I bought the 20% Storage Increase, but my vendor slots didn't go up by 20%. What's the deal?"

So, despite what the KB says, it's NOT a 20% increase to your vendor slots. Your vendor slots are derived from your total storage (by an incredibly arcane formula) so increasing your total storage will make your vendor slots go up, but it's not as simple as just adding 20% (or 40%, if you have both ML and the new bonus.)

There's no terribly useful way to find your new vendor slot amount (short of just buying the bonus and trying it) so I'll get a new chart put together and added to the vendor page/kb in the relatively near future.

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"We STILL aren't seeing any rubble in Magincia!"

Oh, you will Here's an update from the Master of Disaster himself:

• The invasion is switching to its near-final (but not quite done) phase where Light and Void daemons gain their full powers from the corrupted moongate
• Destruction can averted by killing Light Daemons before they reach buildings
• Destroyed areas come with an initial set of "rubble", and, for a short time thereafter, will occasionally spawn duplicate pieces of "rubble" for collectors
• Items marked as "debris" cannot be picked up or removed by players
• The top few attackers on Light and Void daemons now have an exceptionally high chance of receiving their related rare artifacts (Staff of Pyros, etc) directly into their packs

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"When's the next KR patch? It's been a loooong time."

We're planning to go to TC next week. Here are a few of the things you can look forward to:

• CatHat tweaked the tree colors to make them stand out more ("Everything is a big green blur!" has been a common complaint.)
• Added mouse-wheel targeting
• Added a bandage countdown
• You can select chat colors now, both overhead and in-window, and pick the background color (along with several other chat improvements)

That's not to mention all the performance improvements, the fully-moddable UI, Legacy Art Mode, legacy container art, and tons of tweaks, bug fixes, and improvements.

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"I don't play KR - do *I* get anything?"

Oh, perhaps we can come up with something... hmm, how's this?

The Salvage Bag:

The Salvage Bag is the core of the enhanced recycling system. Players store items in the bag like any other container, but when a recycle command occurs, they target the bag to handle all the items at once.

Layout:

• a blue leather bag labeled "A Salvage Bag"
• Available on Provisioners for a nominal (~1000gp) fee

Details:

• 2D/KR: Player clicks the bag after obtaining targeting cursor from Smelt (Blacksmith Menu) or using Scissors

  • All items of the appropriate type in the bag (metal for smelting, cloth for scissoring) are recycled into their resources
  • The player gets a message containing number of items successfully recycled

KR will have some additional functionality with this item (cool things with the macro system that reduce the number of clicks involved) but the bag itself will be available to anyone.

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Fansite News
UO's got a new fansite, focusing on KR skins and mods! Check out uoskins.com - it's brand-new, and needs some submissions, but it looks like it will be an excellent resource.

UOForums interviews Crystal Rose, from Whispering Rose Radio!

"Crystal Rose took some time out to answer questions submitted by our staff and posters alike. Many thanks Crystal for a great interview - check out the full interview here!"

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Next week is Thanksgiving, so there will not be a Five on Friday. Instead, we hope to have juicy patch notes by midweek!


- Jeremy

Unless this was changed recently (1.5 years or less) this is 100% incorrect.

The Salvage Bag is a nice addition, good to see that years later they incorporate one of the more useful items from UOAssist (recycling bags) in game. Just wish they didn't have to wait so long for it.

It must be a new thing as Ive not seen it yet in UO .

Exactly, 'cause I'm pretty sure that Oni's don't usually have a Ring of the Elements on their corpses.

How do you get an instanced corpse if you don't get the rights to loot?

I would assume when the timer goes off for the "rights to loot" group, but before the body decays.

Still don't think it's true, I have not seen any changes done that would reflect what is being claimed.

So what she's saying is, even if you don't get the right to loot, none of the others who killed it will have your looted stuff in their corpse? It will show up when the corpse goes public?

Guess that would be easy enough to test out, if a group would like to.

If I am not mistaken i think this is how it works.

You die,and critter loots you.
Critter dies,and a seperate corpse is created that only you would have the rights to loot.

If you reach critters corpse before it decays,you will see that corpse and get back your stuff.

I have seen this happen at Lady Melisandes.I have opened a corpse,with loot inside,but seen the same corpse with totally different loot just before it decayed and anyone could loot it.

If this is what Jeremy is refferring to,then I take back my previous comment,as I have seen this.

I just didnt relate it at the time.

I proved last night in magincia that this works only 50% of the time. I also found a faerie fire bow on an arcance demon. Dont think they spawn those!

To prove it, I died and got looted by an arcane demon. Another player watched it loot me, killed it, got my bandages, tehn gave em back. Instanced corpse? plooie.

About 15 minutes later, I died on accident and saw a daemon loot my corpse. After res (4 minutes return), i watched other players loot the daemn corpses. Then i went and looted my killer, and voila, my bandages! (they have this THING for bangages).

Yes its always regs and bandies for sure.

Unless... maybe... those others didn't need the bandages.

And they loot the heaviest items first, so I'm assuming it was a large stack of bandages.