Game Balancing Changes for UO

Yesterday, I asked if we were getting PvP arenas soon and while that may still be the case somewhere in the future, yesterday’s downtime was based on game balancing:

From the UO Herald

Summary of the Game Balancing Changes
Bonnie “Mesanna” Armstrong
22 Jun 2011 11:41:01 EST

Greetings,

In yesterday’s downtime we have started to bring some changes to Test Center 1.

The following list is a short summary of the addressed topics:

Focus Skill Spec – Increase of spell damage increase cap from 15% to 40% for templates that focus in only one spell school.

Poisoning – A few tweaks to Poison and Poisoning Skill

Healing Skill

Cure Potions

Cleansing Winds

Enchanted Apples

Petals/Poison Immunity

Special Moves
Lightning Strike
Dual Wield
Defensive Mastery
Block
Psychic Attack
Force Arrow

Chivalry
Divine Fury
Cleanse by Fire
Enemy of One
Remove Curse
Consecrate Weapon

For details of all the changes, please see the discussion thread on stratics.

We look forward to your constructive feedback.

This was a message that Mesanna/Bonnie Armstrong posted on Stratics:

These proposed changes are being put up well in advance of Publishing them to all production shards. We do look forward to your opinions and feedback.

Thanks everyone

Mesanna and Logrus

This is from Logrus, a UO Designer:

Slight mistake in my wording, it should be Greater than or EQUAL to GM Poisoning or Magery. Poisoning won’t be going up to 120 for now.

The Focus effect is automatic. Basically once you hit 30 in one of the other skills you no longer receive the effect, but as long as you remain under 30 you are fine.

If your normal heal time is 4 seconds at 140 dex ( and greater than 80 heal/anat), then you have a chance to cure the poison at the 2 second mark. If you succeed your final heal will amount will be reduced in proportion to the poison level that was cured. If you failed then you will make a second cure attempt at 4 seconds.

My quick opinion – this is a bit of a revamp to PvP, which is needed, and is probably being done ahead of the arena work.

It’s a good sign that they are wanting to discuss it quite a bit with players before the final changes are made, and it’s also kind of sign that there is some serious long term work being done. I harp on this a lot, but looking at my crystal ball, there are a lot of little things being looked at these days.