Crafted VS Looted Weapons

[Asmodean]

Many people say crafted weapons are junk, and I just don't agree.
So I did some math, and this is what I found out...

If you had a 4x46 looted weapon, what kind of crafted would be about equal to, or even better than it?
Using a 4x46 with stats

life leech, stamina leech, magic arrow, energy area (because i have one sitting in my bank, so i know they drop),

You would have a total of 1139 total points by the time you leveled it to 100.
46 * 3 (life leech) = 138 points
46 * 3 (stamina leech) = 138 points
46 *4 (magic arrow) = 184 points
46 * 4 (energy area) = 184 points
5 * 99 = 495 levelling points
total points = 1139

If you took a crafted with the 4 base stats, Where would you need to be, to be about the same in the end?

Well, You get 198 more points by leveling looted than crafting, (5 * 99) - (3 * 99)

So, if you bumped it up to say 4x58 crafted, you end up with 1109 points, vs 1139 points with a 4x46 looted, which is pretty darn close enough in my book to call them equivalent.

[Dain Firehelm]

Brilliant post! Congrats to you, Asmodean

I totally agree with your thesis and have a 5x48 +8hp +8str 12% poison resist 12% DCI crafted warhammer that also agrees with it

[Yoda]

yet every time I hinted at this very point in the last many years in worldchat I got flooded with people telling me Im wrong..

Im not going to say I told you so I'm just gonna make the face

[Rankul]

imo theres no crap relayers ,sure bc and titans give more hp but what stops us from using the *crap* relayers on a bio once we can afford the *right* relayers ..just thinking

[Asmodean]

re-layers are something completely different than weapons i think.

There's 2 schools of thought here as well.

1) Bone Crushers/Titan's/SoT's are it. Spend the extra cash now, and only do it once, to have the best/most hp/damage

2) in the time it takes you to get 5 bone crusher re-layers, you could have 7 "other" re-layers, because of the additional 200ED it costs per bone crusher.

I don't think either way is "wrong". I also think if you have 7 re-layers, bone crushers or not, you will be able to experience most, if not all of the current content.

I don't know what Elysium, and Touria hold, and it may be that without those extra hit points, you'll die a lot. or not be able to do the content. At this point it becomes relevant whether you did bone crushers previously or not, because you may need to re-do your set, to be able to continue progression. Nobody knows just yet.

Personally, I did bone crushers the first time, because I didn't want to do all that leveling over again after I already did it once. It worked out well for me. You may feel differently, or you may be fine with less damage and hit points. I don't know You're the only one who can answer that for you.

I guess you could use the re-layers on a bio if you really wanted to. I know at least one person who started to do that, before they stopped playing here.

[Pariah]

My only question would be how common is a 4x58 crafted or a 5x48 crafted weapon? For looted weapons, 3x58, 4x46 etc. are not exactly common. They aren't as rare as other drops (5x46 etc.), but they aren't seen too often. Do we know if the looted weps are balanced out similarly? Just curious as I did a search on vendors and couldn't find anything crafted close to your stats which seems to indicate they are fairly scarce. Thanks for the interesting insight Asmo.

[Asmodean]

I don't know Pariah. I'm also out of platinum hammers right now so I can't do much testing until I get some.
Maybe I'll work on that today or this week sometime.

That being said, I think even a crafted 3x38 or 4x38 would make a fine weapon to get anybody started.

[Yoda]

I think a big part of it is the perception that "crafted is garbage" means except for a certain few people aren't regularly bashing out large quantities of anything crafted to see just how good they can get.

I have faith in the guys who developed these scripts for this shard... crafted weapons have 3 points per level vs 5 for looted, if you don't think there is logic behind that you are silly.

its quite possible with a full smithy suit platnum hammers, and the ancient +60 smithy hammer to make platinum weapons with over 200 in blacksmithy skill that coupled with 120 armslore a big enough pile of platinum and enough attempts I think you'd find several candidates for good weapons in the resulting pile.

regardless there is enough of a possibility that for balance it was decided long ago 3 points per level.. this wasn't arbitrary or an attempt to make "crafted crappy to use" if they had 5 points per level they would have the potential to make "looted crappy to use"

the only issue with this has to do with the quality of the base weapon, as having 3 points per level makes a much higher junk to sellable/tradeable ratio.. having said that I recognize the scripting required to weight the points per level based on the weapon's potential would be a nightmare huge complex mess. In some ways there would be a benefit to looking into this though especially when it comes to some of the modain's legacy era craftables. Its a shame the amount of work coli likely had to put in to activate those special abilities only to see them go unused.

personally I have always liked the potential of crafting since having an amazing weapon "crafted by ______" has some appeal and cache value to me

[culichi]

I crafted a couple of thousand yumis using skill suit and +40 fletching hammer and ive had a few close to 5x48 but I don't think ive ever had any hit over 50% on a yumi. I also think crafted weapons are underrated here and cant understand why people prefer to level a horselord as a weapon and not as a relayer when any decent crafted yumi is better.

[Pariah]

I crafted a couple of thousand yumis using skill suit and +40 fletching hammer and ive had a few close to 5x48 but I don't think ive ever had any hit over 50% on a yumi. I also think crafted weapons are underrated here and cant understand why people prefer to level a horselord as a weapon and not as a relayer when any decent crafted yumi is better.

All about dem stats, bout dem stats, no dispel (feel free to use that at your next party). I find quite a few looted weps that would be great except they have dispel and like hit phys area. I'm wondering if the same is true of crafted and that's why there is such a low supply/demand.

[Melkor]

Just wanted to chime in and agree that crafted weapons can be amazing, so long as you are willing to make 1000s of them. The crafted Yumi that I used for a very long time, after being leveled was slightly better than a dropped 46x4 after being leveled. The +gear and armslore help, but in my experience it's more about making 1000s of them. I didn't have much +gear or 120 armslore when I made mine way back when.

[Devlin]

bonus info: crafted weapons with an exceptional tag do more damage than non-exceptional/looted weapons (the reason crafted get 3 pts per and looted get 5).

also, arms lore 120 does nothing.

and +1 to culichi on the crafted yumis being better than a HL/hanzos. get a 3x with fireball or lightning, ML and whatever else. even just FB/lightning and ML. All you really need on a wep

[apocalypse]

Just curious, how much more damage does a crafted exceptional weapon do, versus the same weapon that's looted?

[mattwaldram]

On 'UO-Proper' after they did the whole weapons-overhaul (suspect it was probably AoS), crafted exceptional weps did 120% of their own base damage, unless they were made with runics, in which case it was 110%. It doesn't look to be anywhere near that high on UOEX, though - I've tested quite a few weapons in the past - while I was creating a spreadsheet I use for working out all my character/weapons stats - and it looks to be about 105% here.

It all adds up - I've just compared two axes, one looted and one I crafted, both with the same Damage Increase stat. The looted one gives me a damage range of 87-96 and the crafted-exceptional gives me a range of 90-101.

And I've just done the same test with Demon Forks vs crafted-exceptional Sai (both with 35% damage increase). The War Fork has a range of 40-49 and the crafted-exceptional is 42-51