Meleeus Maximus

[Ruewyn]

I wanted to start this thread to chat about some more advanced melee skills and tactics. I'm not talking about Enemy of One, Consecrate Weapon, Disco..kill kill kill here, but more about the less used but potentially very useful spells and abilities, including weapon choices, pets, and any other tactic you can think of.

Here's my latest thought on the topic: Pets to hunt with: Sometimes you just need or want a pet out in order to help do damage. Obviously you could throw your pack of normal pets out there for a ton of damage, but this is a fighter thread, not a tamer one. My first thought was a hiryu/lesser hiryu. They are gonna do some nice damage, ridable, and most importantly they will decrease the targets physical resists. To argue that, with Consecrate weapon up, their physical resists might not matter at all. Next off, we got rune beatles. Not ridable (a huge pain) but awesome poison and Immunity i do believe... and their special attack corruption "should" (i've yet to test this) drop ALL targets resists by half. That would help enormously to a fighter.

[Elijah Ray]

I like this topic. I am excited to see some of the ideas and tactics that will be shared. I have recently stopped running with pets (I used to have a noble and 2 maxed nightmares) in favor of a different approach. I decided I wanted a new challenge and so because I have never been much for melee fighting I trained up some skills, added a few power scrolls/skill essences, and made the switch. I always liked axes so I am currently armed with a nice double axe.
I am in no way an expert when it comes to melee or this type of fighting so I am just getting my feet wet. I am finding that I like to cast consecrate weapon, the bushido evasion spell, and holy light when engaged in a fight. if things get too hairy i always have peacemaking to fall back on when going toe to toe with a greater foe.
So far I have been having a blast and hope to keep increasing the toughness of creatures I am facing.

Have hope others will have some good ideas and tactics to share so can learn and ponder new things as well.


Keep having fun!

[fingers]

I love to melee too. One of my weapons is a leveled titan hammer. With its whirlwind attack, and its 100% energy area damage, i see tons of red numbers over the heads of the foes i fight, especially when they are in pack. This great, especially at a spawn. But it is not wise to use it when very dangerous foes, yet not agressive (rend in labyrinth for an example) are near.

Axes are great, especially with the bonus damage from lumberjacking. With enemy of one and crushing blow, the damage it deals is just great!

I would say that the best spell for a melee character is vampire embrace. It greatly lowers your fire resistance, but it is easy to compensate with high fire armor peices. The benefits of vampire embrace are unbeleivable: you resists to all poisons cept for the highest one and you leech life everytime you hit your ennemi.

I like to melee some very very hard monsters, such as monstrous grizzle and slaarion. For that I use a high hit point suit (275 hp) and i use enchanted grove spell. Grizzle can easily hit armor ignores for 195 hit points while casting other nasty things. So trees come in handy. But for easyer monsters, such as Netopir, I just take out my axe and go toe to toe with him. Te leech from vamiric embrace is suffuicient to keep me alive, as long as i have alot of mana leech on my weapon in order to chain crushing blow.

That's about it. I sure would like if certain special moves would work on the latest weapons introduced in UO, such as lightning arrow and serpent arrow on the bows.

Hope this has been helpfull.

Polar Bear

[Oromis]

Loving the direction this post is going, seeing more people running about using melee weapons would give a little of the old feel back ^_^. Not real familiar with this combat system yet, since the one I used when I last played is ancient now ><. But, there is one technique that still works as good now as it did then. Have a high damage weapon with a slow swing rate? Don't stand there and let the mob rip out your guts, move! A bow may be useless when moving (now :p) but a melee weapon can be used to joust opponents easily. Count the time between your swings, hit once, move away, count down, run through them, count down, run through them. This works great on heavy/fast hitters but not so great on mages, of course healing is only a screen away ^_-. Good luck, and keep moving ^_^.

[Ruewyn]

Oh that reminds me of another very important point! Aye do try and get a slow/high damage weapon. Get your Dex up and a good amount of SSI, and you will be swinging as fast as a dagger! Not only is it more pure damage, think about all those hit weapon proc's going off soo many more times.

Also, that will allow you to not waste so many points on your leveled weapon, if you are hitting under 2sec a swing, do you really need Hit Lower Defense and Hit Lower Attack to be 50%? I have seen different numbers how long that stays active, but generally seems to run 5-8 seconds. So I'm try to keep my HLA and HLD to around 30%. In theory! it should still be active most of the time.