So earlier today I nabbed a paragon chest from a cyclops warrior. My lockpicker was currently at 77.0, so i started attempting the chest. I failed, and started to notice some damn nice skill gain... fast forward to 2 hours later, the chest is still locked, and I have hit 92 skill. At 92, it opened. I have come this far, might as well keep going onward to GM. I have a paragon lich lord chest, but after ~20 minutes of failures, I am still at 92... Is there a cap on failures?

I doubt there would be a cap on failurs that would be silly =P but I do not know this for sure... who knows with UO hope we can get members who have been playing longer to hope answer this for yeah.

-RMS Carpathia-

its the skill level needed to open the chest. the paragon lich lord chest is a gm or higher chest so it is out of your range for skill gain.

I used to use the rule of thumb that f I broke 4-5 picks in a row, the chest was far too difficult.

Usually the good gain range was; 10 tries, 2 broken picks. Youd usually open one in 20.

Gains tend to fluctuate. I gm'ed lockpicking the way you described. Went through probably 1000 or more lockpicks. No matter how many times i failed, i kept going at it and eventually i gained. I think it helps if you also try to gain another skill as well while you're doing it. It may just be that it seems that way, and it actually doesn't help, but I thought it did. In either case, you can gain GM lockpicking this way, it just takes a while. Lockpicking is a time consuming skill to raise.

What gets me is that when you GM, you cannot open the higher lvl chests at first go.
The other night I must have broke about 30 lockpicks and spent at least 30 mins trying to open a Para Titan chest before it finaly opened.