Excelsior

Melkor and I were talking and he brought up a good question. I have Bushido at 120 and Parry at 130. According to the calculator on UO Stratics, I have a 7% chance to deflect with a shield as opposed to a 37% chance if I had 0 Bushido. Does that information hold true here? I have my bow and titans hammer made 1-handed. Am I crippling myself by having Bushido? If there any official word that a knowledgeable staff can give on this? I would hate to drop Bushido if there is no need to.


*Edit* Is there anyway a player can test this accurately?

Skill decrease
A staffmember will decrease any skill you would like to any level you would like, as long as that new level is lower than your current skill level. This is possible due to no-skill-limit, since you cannot decrease your own skills. For example, Bushido collides with Parrying.
- 50,000 tokens

From the codex.

Yeah, I had asked +Rayne sometime back about it and she told me at that time that it only hurts when both skills were GM or less, but since I had 120/130 they should be working correctly. Guess it doesn't really matter if I drop Bushido though since I don't use any of the spells, evasion doesn't work and my weapons are 1 handed.

Me and Calan have tested it. Several hundreds of arrows later, seems that with 130 parry and 120 bushido, you get hit about 20% less with a two handed weapon (obviously no sheild) than you get hit with a one handed weapon and a sheild. We tried to eliminate the most variables possible: 0 hit chance, 0 defence chance, no hit lower defence and we both have 120 weapon skills.

120 Weapon skills? I have 130 in all the weapon skills.

I had my Bushido dropped to 0 to see if it makes a difference in the normal fights I get into.

Calan Caitin wrote:120 Weapon skills? I have 130 in all the weapon skills.

I had my Bushido dropped to 0 to see if it makes a difference in the normal fights I get into.

True true, me too, i dont know what i was thinking. 130 in all weapon + wrestling anat and tactics;-)

How about a test. 1 person 120 bush 130 weapon and 2 handed weapon. The other having 0 bush 130 weapon with a single handed weapon with shield.

Melkor wrote:How about a test. 1 person 120 bush 130 weapon and 2 handed weapon. The other having 0 bush 130 weapon with a single handed weapon with shield.

120 bush 130 weapon would parry 60-70% of all hits (28-38 hits/100 arrows) vs a 130 archer. For the second, i will try to get a hold on calan tomorrow to test it, now that he has dropped his bushido.

I did a thread on this a few months back where we picked apart the RunUO code. Since that time I have had a chance to talk to Colibri on the issue where she verified that the RunUO code for parrying hadn't been changed to her knowledge. The link to the thread and the code explanation is here: http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php ... ilit=parry

I have also done in game statistics testing via the use of the Bushido ability confidence. The test was pretty simple, gather up a group of 6 earth elements, use Confidence, then let the earth elements bash away at me and count how many times I got the confidence parry message within the set duration of Confidence. I repeated this test several times for both 2 handed weapons and 1 handed + shield at 120 bushido + 130 parry. My findings with the test was that 1 handed + shield does indeed have about half the parry rate of a 2-handed weapon, so it goes with what the runUO code says with

"if ( shield != null )
{
double chance = (parryNonRacial - bushido) / 400.0;
}"

For a while now I've advocated removing the Bushido penelty since it doesn't seem to do much on this shard other then make using a shield inferior to using a two handed weapon. If the Bushido penelty was removed then the chance to parry with 1 handed + shield would be increased to about 35% while the chance to block with a 2-handed would still remain at about 42% so it would make for balance since you would need to choose if you want bonus stats from the shield or a slightly increased parry rate.

I decided to re-raise my bushido. I was at one of the oak champs while I had 0 bushido. I totally got ate up by the spawn whereas before when I had both parry and bushido, I could solo the oak champ without too much trouble. I'll take my chances of the parry rate apparently being lower for the plain fact I seem to take less damage in PvM with both.

I'm going to stick with 130 Parry and 120 Bushido and a 2 handed weapon. According to uo stratics, you have the best chance of blocking using a 2 handed weapon with 130 Parry and 120 Bushido. With my stats, its 5% better chance to block that way then 130 Parry and a shield. (42% vs 37%) That, plus all the uncertainty and the 1000ED it would be to change my weapons over makes me just want to maintain what i have.

There is a cloud of confusion around this subject. I have gotten mixed messages on it, but like I said, I take less damage with 120 bushido and 130 parry in PvM crowds than with just 130 parry with my 1 handed weapons. This doesn't follow the Stratics calculator at all. Perhaps according to the coding, it shouldn't be as effective, but is one of the things that is broken (like shields self repair), but is actually something that is broken in a favorable way.

Indeed, Stratics can give you an idea about how something works on our shard, but it's always best to test it. For an example, Stratics will say it is not possible to parry with a ranged weapon while on uoex, parry does kick in while holding a bow.