Player: Spell casters, however, will still require all their regular skills in addition to parry and arms lore.

Not a happy day for spellcasters.

Wilki: No, no and for the last time, NO! :-P

You will not be "required" to have arms lore or parry as a magic user. (In fact, making shields almost necassary for magic users is something else that needs to change...) That's the entire problem with the system as it is. There is absolutely no differentiation between templates as far as what armor to wear. Explain to me why that makes sense, why that is such an awesome design that it shouldn't be changed, and I'll listen.

"Because EA made it that way" and "because I have the perfect suit" are not valid reasons not to fix a horribly broken system.

Plate should be plate, leather leather, and so on and so forth.

You guys asked to be included in on the early design phase... well, here it is. It's rough, raw and unrefined, and you get a chance to have some major influence on it. All of this doom and gloom stuff and threats to quit is really quite annoying, as most of the people saying it haven't even tried the changes as they are, much less after they're tuned and working as intended. Heck, many of the comments I see are from people who don't even play UO!

The entire point of the resist change is so you won't need high end resists to survive combat. Instead of forcing everyone to have near 70's resists to survive, you'll actually see more variation in the game, as people can choose between offense and defense. You want to load up on full plate and have high AR? That's great, but you're going to have to make some choices to do so. The flip side is that if you want to be an offensive powerhouse, you're going to have to make some tradeoffs there as well.

If it turns out that the difference between 40ish and 70ish is too great in terms of balance, then we'll tweak the numbers so it is balanced. That's the entire point of asking people to please go try this out, help us tweak it, give us your expert opinions!

Wilki: I keep seeing this repeated, and it couldn't be further from the truth. The entire point of this system is to make it so that you don't need 70 resists across the board (or near it) to survive combat. As a mage, you won't need a shield, you won't need massive DCI and parry. Those aren't "magey" things, and it's a horrible system that forces you to need them to be competitive.

Maybe the difference between 40 (what the average player w/o arms lore will be close to) and 70 will turn out to be too great. Perhaps giving up 100 skill points for arms lore won't be enough of a drawback to compensate for taking that much less damage. That's exactly why we've got this on the TC, and why we're asking you to go try it out.

Also, I've seen some comments about needing to understand math to understand the new system. I can assure you that the current system is FAR more complicated than what is being proposed. Once you've gotten your mind around the threshold and interval terms, and how they work, it's really quite simple to figure out exactly what a stat or item property is going to do for you. No more needing to multiply by 80000, divide by 800, multiply by 5, round up to get your result.

Please, no panicking! :-)

Player: Then fix up PVP, stay out of PvM.

Wilki: If you were a monster, you might have a different perspective.

"Those players need to be nerfed! A year or two ago I could actually kill one now and then, but now? Those devs must play player characters, cause they're unkillable killing machines! Especially, that EoO stacked with slayer properties! I've don't even have time to cast two spells before OOOoooOOOooo! Nerf players!!!!"

Ok, all joking aside, PvM is as broken, or even moreso, than PvP. For the vast majority of the monsters in the game, they've remained unchanged since AoS, while player damage output has easily doubled. Of course, that's also one of the big issues with PvP as well. It just gets more noticable when you're on the receiving end of such power (in PvP), while most people think it's cool in PvM until they realize that most of the content in the game is about as challenging as a pack of mongbats.

Honestly, when's the last time you got together with some guildmates to go hunt in one of the original 8 dungeons and got your butt handed to you? Unless you run across one of the monsters that has the insane necro AI, or one that has to use some lame cheat for spell casting to make itself "difficult" (read annoying), you're not likely to be challenged at all.

The entire combat system is far out of balance, and thus these changes. Some players won't like the challenge they will now face against monsters that they used to cut through like butter, but most players will. There is a rule of thumb in game design that goes something like this: give the player enough of a challenge to make it a struggle, but let them win most of the time, without taking out the very real chance that they will lose.

Unfortunately, that is no longer the case for much of the PvM game.

And yes, we'll adjust any monsters that end up being too hard after the changes, as some of the newer things added to compensate for players being so overpowered are probably going to be too powerful

For all practical purposes I have quit UO. I just haven't made the time to play since Halloween? With the changes they are talking about I sure don't see me rushing to get back in. Well it was a good 8 year ride for me. No regrets but I got a train set to build now.

If you can actually make sense of Mr Tacts description of diminishing returns it is a bad read.

On a funny note though, it looks almost exactly like the 'enhanacment diversification' that hit City of Heroes a few months back. It ruined tons of characters and cost boatloads of i9nfluence to try and rebuild characters (influence is their version of money)

i haven't played UO in a while because ive been too busy irl.. but with all the changes i almost don't see any reason to rush back until they are done... whats the point of getting all used to this system only to have to change and adapt... my accounts are active, but my play time is on hold until things get sorted out..

i might jump on test and see whats what..... but aside from that i have job hunting to do and a mortgage to refinance... yay.

Loving Wilki's latest posts. Laying it out like it is, politely yet straight up. Gets my sympathies for trying to talk some sense into the whining ranting Stratics population with a chronic chicken little syndrome whenever something changes.

It will be interesting to see how things work out in the end. I don't plan on changing any of my templates until things get settled. I like the challenge of trying to figure out how my current templates can survive. I really want to see how the changes to armor are gonna effect my crafter. It would really be nice to use her for making armor instead of just for enhancing it all the time.