Suggestion to remove the Bushido penalty

[NewPlayer241]

This suggestion is a follow up to the post http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2325.

The aim is to make it so a player can switch between one-handed and shield and 2-handed weapons without having to page a GM to reset the bushido skill, while also making sure that 2-handed weapons are not made inferior.

At the moment with 130 parry and 120 bushido your chance to block with a 2-handed weapon is about 42% and your chance with a one handed and a shield at 7%.

At the moment with 130 parry alone your chance to block with a 2-handed weapon is about 21% and your chance to block with a one handed and a shield is at about 37%.

This makes it virtually impossible to switch back and forth between sword-and-board and 2-handed without having to call the GM to lower your bushido to use one handed and shield, or having to grind it up if you want to start using 2-handed for a change.

By adjusting one line in the check parry code:

double chance = (parry - bushidoNonRacial) / 400.0;

to

double chance = parry / 400.0;

It makes it so with 130 parry and 120 bushido you have a chance to block with a 2-handed weapon at about 42%, but you keep your chance to block with a one-handed weapon and shield at 37%.

Anyways, thoughts and discussion about if it would be a good change or not? Who knows maybe if we all think it’s a good idea the GMs may even consider it.

[amadman]

I think this is a balancing thing that should not be changed.

With bushido you get to block without a shield and even get a better chance to block in the end.

Giving up the shield means you will lose some of the abilities you could be getting from a shield. This is true just switching to 2 handed but training bushido to get that extra blocking makes you commit to fighting without a shield.

[NewPlayer241]

I can understand balancing, however even with the change 2-handed weapons still have the higher block rate to make them shine in specific situations such as Evade, where other situations the stat boost from a shield may be better.

It's just it seems counter productive to force people to choose on a shard where we are supposed to train every skill. Training magery doesn't lower your chance to hit with a weapon. Training talioring doesn't mean you are less effective at smithing. Training macing doesn't make you less effective with swords. Why would training bushido make you less effective at using a shield?

[Lyandrin]

I can understand balancing, however even with the change 2-handed weapons still have the higher block rate to make them shine in specific situations such as Evade, where other situations the stat boost from a shield may be better.

It's just it seems counter productive to force people to choose on a shard where we are supposed to train every skill. Training magery doesn't lower your chance to hit with a weapon. Training talioring doesn't mean you are less effective at smithing. Training macing doesn't make you less effective with swords. Why would training bushido make you less effective at using a shield?

I find this quite funny. The thing you dont see here is that you arent forced to use bushido nor train it.

We are not supposed to train every skill, we have the possibility, although it is up to us which skills we do want. Like in every other aspect you have to choose which route to go.
If you go 2handed you have better innate avoidance/defense chance and if you go 1h+shield you get more stats to use.

For the other part, thats just ridicolous. Tailoring wasnt designed to work together with bs and change its mechanics. Bushido was added with that in mind.

There is no use compairing apples to bananas mate.

[NewPlayer241]

I can understand balancing, however even with the change 2-handed weapons still have the higher block rate to make them shine in specific situations such as Evade, where other situations the stat boost from a shield may be better.

It's just it seems counter productive to force people to choose on a shard where we are supposed to train every skill. Training magery doesn't lower your chance to hit with a weapon. Training talioring doesn't mean you are less effective at smithing. Training macing doesn't make you less effective with swords. Why would training bushido make you less effective at using a shield?

I find this quite funny. The thing you dont see here is that you arent forced to use bushido nor train it.

We are not supposed to train every skill, we have the possibility, although it is up to us which skills we do want. Like in every other aspect you have to choose which route to go.
If you go 2handed you have better innate avoidance/defense chance and if you go 1h+shield you get more stats to use.

For the other part, thats just ridicolous. Tailoring wasnt designed to work together with bs and change its mechanics. Bushido was added with that in mind.

There is no use compairing apples to bananas mate.

While I definitely agree with you that no one is forced to train bushido. I myself find it a huge pain to page a GM (sometimes waiting up to 6 hours for a reply) in order to set the bushido skill back to 0 if I do want to switch from my Sword of the Stampede to my Artic Death Dealer and Shield.

As for the second point I am not looking at it from a game mechanics perspective, but rather a common sense perspective. If learning how to sew doesn't make you any less apt at forging, why should learning how to block with a weapon make you any less apt at blocking with a shield? Not to mention that blocking doesn't raise bushido to start with, so it's strange how the two are so linked together other then the fact that a three bushido abilities trigger off parrys.

[Rune]

another way out of this could be to add soulstones

nice and simple

[TheWatcher]

Maybe make soulstones craftable? Using tinkering and blacsmithy using lesser ores? Kill two birds.

[Haskar]

I have to agree that the Bushido shield penalty ought to go. On a shard where someone can theoretically be a 30xGM tamer/archer/mage/bard/necro/ninja with 100 in every stat, it's hard for me to take seriously the idea that being able to parry with a shield while having Bushido will really imbalance anything.

**EDIT**

Okay I've thought about this further, and it occurs to me that there is one glaring balance issue. As it currently stands on this shard, there is no reason to ever use a shield. You are always better off with a two-hander and Bushido. Always.

"But Haskar, shields can have nice stats on them!"

Unless your shield has stats better than every single benefit of the Bushido skill, it's not worth equipping. For one, Lightning Strike grants max HCI, can cause critical hits, and costs effectively zero mana. That alone is better than anything you'll find on a shield. Pile on all the other benefits of the skill and it's no contest.

"But Haskar, why do people still use shields on OSI then?"

Because going without Bushido saves them 100 skill points they can spend elsewhere. But on a shard with no skill cap, that's not a concern. The Bushido user can take all the same skills as the non-user, while enjoying the benefits of Bushido. So NewPlayer241, if you're tired of paging a GM, just throw away your shield I guess.

There's no real choice to be made. Everyone who's using a shield is gimping themselves. Unless maybe they're using a really sweet mage book plus a shield and have no intention of engaging in melee. But that's about it.

[fingers]

I don't want to be the trouble maker, but the last time i checked, some of the bushido spells didnt work at all (evasion) as well as some special moves that requires bushido (nerve strike). I reported this on the boards more than a year ago ( http://www.uoex.net/forum/viewtopic.php ... sion#p4027 ). So if devs don't have time to fix the core of bushido, let alone them doing some fine tuning imo. The same could be said about the magical short bow and the long elven bow, wich both special moves don't work.

[NewPlayer241]

On the subject of evasion from what I have grasped looking at the block code it seems it does work, but it works differently then on OSI.

// Evasion grants a variable bonus post ML. 50% prior.
if( Evasion.IsEvading( defender ) )
chance *= Evasion.GetParryScalar( defender );

So as you can see by the current evasion code your block chance is increased if Evasion is active, it does not however look to add any special characteristics to block breath attacks or spells since chance is a double variable and therefore can only hold the one number which is the block chance.

As for how much the block chance is increased by Evasion I would need to see the Evasion class in full for that.

I’d still rather have Confidence on then Evasion since it gives life gain while not having to spam Chivalries’ fury for stamina recovery when dealing with hard hitting peerless monsters since they take out about 10-50 stamina a hit. I also have to agree that lightning strike and momentum strike can be amazing in the right situations, the skills make Bushido nearly essential for meleeing in the late game.

As for the other special moves if I had the code for them I could definitely attempt a fix for them. From what I’ve seen RunUOs code is pretty straight forward and very clearly written, especially if there is only a single target involved.

[Haskar]

I'm with this dude. Aesthetically I prefer using a shield, but under the existing circumstances there's no way I cam justify it to myself.

[Rune]

also lightning strike still doesnt have sound effect

[madhatter]

FYI Most OSI Players use -20 mage weps with the ring that gives +20 Magery so they can Chug Pots and still hit/block with one handed weps but this is beside the point