Best Weapon Opinions

[Harbertown]

My favorite weapon so far is the Double Axe. I like how you do more damage with lumber jacking, plus I love the specials of Whirlwind attack and Double strike.

What do you guys prefer and why?

[Tredin]

Generally there are only four weapons that people at the end game level prefer to use.

For ranged weapons nearly everyone chooses the Yumi. It has Armor Pierce and Double Shot. Armor piece is a nice high damage special and double shot gives the opportunity for all your spell hits to hit twice per shot. It also has very high damage making this the most popular choice for ranged.

For melee weapons there are three different options to chose from

Double Axe, War Hammer and Ornate Axe.

The Double Axe has a somewhat high damage range and benefits from LJ to make it almost in the damage range of the War Hammers and Ornate Axe. With Whirlwind and Double Attack it is very versatile being good for both groups of critters and single targets. The Double Attack works just like double shot giving your spell hits the chance to hit twice. The more SDI you have the better Double Attack gets.

The War Hammer has a higher damage ratio but doesn't benefit from LJ putting is damage only slightly higher for a regular single target swing. It comes with Crushing Blow and Whirlwind making it versatile as well. Crushing Blow is regarded as the best single target melee attack around assuming you can spam it continuously.

Then there are Ornate Axes, they have very high damage and Crushing Blow as well. They also have the added benefit of already being a one handed weapon. The other 3 require a relayer deed to make them one handed. You can spend 2/5ths the ED with a weapon change deed assuming the weapon you have is not already one of the more popular types and you don't mind it staying 2h.

That about sums things up. Halberds aren't terrible but they aren't quite in the range of the others listed above. I've also been drinking a little bit so I am a bit fuzzy on the details of the Ornate Axe but I believe my info is accurate.

[Iltar]

Generally there are only four weapons that people at the end game level prefer to use.

For ranged weapons nearly everyone chooses the Yumi. It has Armor Pierce and Double Shot. Armor piece is a nice high damage special and double shot gives the opportunity for all your spell hits to hit twice per shot. It also has very high damage making this the most popular choice for ranged.

While yumis are good for high base damage, I choose a looted bow because it is possible to put more spell hits on it with 5 points per level, which is already decent with a bit of SDI, and will be better as you stack more SDI. Also I'm lazy to spam weapon specials for long fights, though Composite bows have ok specials(Armor Ignore and Moving Shot).

[Gaara]

Then there are Ornate Axes, they have very high damage and Crushing Blow as well. They also have the added benefit of already being a one handed weapon. The other 3 require a relayer deed to make them one handed. You can spend 2/5ths the ED with a weapon change deed assuming the weapon you have is not already one of the more popular types and you don't mind it staying 2h.

Ornate Axes are 2 handed

[Tredin]

Lol, yeah drunk post... the rest should be accurate though

[Tredin]

While yumis are good for high base damage, I choose a looted bow because it is possible to put more spell hits on it with 5 points per level, which is already decent with a bit of SDI, and will be better as you stack more SDI. Also I'm lazy to spam weapon specials for long fights, though Composite bows have ok specials(Armor Ignore and Moving Shot).

I was speaking of the end game level though. Most people at this point usually find a weapon and type change it to a yumi so they still get the 5 points per level. My Yumi for example started out its life as a war fork and I type changed it to a yumi. Also there are several EUO Scripts that will spam your specials for you making it the better choice in the long run.

[Iltar]

Yes, I've seen people using weapons changed to yumis. I'd though prefer if emphasis of value of the weapon was not on levelling it, but on getting right weapon. So I'd remove weapon type change deeds but balance weapon loads, making ranged weapons more common. I critisize everything even in General Discussion lol , but sorry I like critisizing.

[Iltar]

I want to elaborate my last post. Weapon type change deed really feels like just a fix to the issue of imbalance of low ranged weapon loading percent, because demand on yumis is nearly a half of all needed weapons, Most weapons which load are neither whirlwind nor ranged, and that could be changed by making bows/crossbows/whirlwind weapons more common in loot.
For weapon levelling I think it would be better if it took actually more time then it is now (30 hours in fel deceit), but if it was possible to gradually level weapon in the process of gameplay, perhaps by making some changing to normal hunting process and selecting rarely used dungeons. So it would be a month or two of semi-normal hunting. Now when dragons give same or less exp as ghoul, weapon levelling feel like routine rather than exciting part of gameplay.

[Styx]

Tredin has hit the nail on the head. I would say normally look at the difference in price and investment you have to apply to a weapon for it to be 'good' or your 'favourite' type of weapon.

For example you can pick up decent stat player made yumi and level that to a decent mid-tier weapon. Which doesn't require any alteration deeds. = Cheap.

However if you pick up a 4x58 dagger you will need it changing to a more viable weapon (as much as i do love shadow strike) which costs a fair amount of money.

Finally I prefer having a different weapon for different scenarios.

a BoD Halberd w/ all area attack hits for aoe clearing.
a Warhammer w/ hit individual/leechs for single target melee (Doubles up as aoe clearing when in places such as halloween dungeon where hit area effects are disabled)
a Yumi w/ worse stats than the wh solely for clearing hard monsters from a distance.
a looted composite bow w/ all area attack hits, for lazy aoe clearing. (spam momentum)
a two handed axe/dagger/club ect. Before having an invis cloak Shadow strike is a life saver if you need to reset aggro.

[Tredin]

Iltar people don't just use the weapon type changes to make Yumi's its also needed to remove the artifact tag from artifact weapons making them useful for leveling and it is useful for turning other weapons into War Hammers, Ornate Axes and Double Axes. My Double Axe started as a Hammer Pick and my War Hammer Started as something else as well.

I suspect you might be newer and the thought of spending large amounts of ED's makes you cringe but if these things were to easy it would take a lot of value from the game. You could say it is about fixing a balancing issue with weapons but you have to remember that here where you can have every skill things are quite different from the base format of UO where you had to pick only 7 and choose your weapons accordingly. I'm going to show you a picture of the 4 most common weapons I use and only one of them actually started off as the type it is today.

weapons.jpg (342.97 KiB) Viewed 11309 times

Only the blaze has remained the same and these are only 4 of the 8 or so weapons I carry. This shard is all about customization and the weapon type changes exist for that reason, it doesn't have anything to do with balancing things. The disparity you speak of exists because when you can be the best at everything you get to choose the best things to use as well.

[Iltar]

Value of deed is not the reason while I suggest removing deed, I clearly understand that it worth the thing, though it's true that atm I have better things to spend 10 mil on. The only real reason to change weapon type is because useless weapon load too often. If more looted weapons were bows/halberds/high damage weapons, there would be no need to change weapon type and you would just pay more for weapon when you buy it from player instead of paying for weapon change deed. Also that deed is hard t imagine from role-playing perspective. Well for relayers you can think that its putting of weapon "forces" to an armor/cloth, and relayers are great, but weapon change type deed is just a fix, somewhat artificial. Arti tag could be removed but some special "arti tag remove deed".

[Jistuason]

I agree with you Harbertown i also using double axe, I really like the performance of this double axe the the skills the damage the whirl wind attack and the double strike is really impressive,, that's way i choose this weapon..

[Pariah]

Also that deed is hard t imagine from role-playing perspective.

This is where you lost me. You can imagine a relayer but can't imagine breaking and reforging a weapon as part of roleplaying?
That's silly...

As far as for the original topic. This one is about opinions and Tredin summarized the facts pretty well. I personally love War Hammers. I level them instead of halberds when it comes to BCs and such. Why? Because of the combo of whirlwind and crushing blow. I can get the benefit of fast leveling from whirlwind with the bonus of crushing blow for mobs that take more than one hit. It actually improves leveling speed for me over a hally because it allows me to hunt in more spots. I also like this for my champing/oint farming wep. I actually changed it from a hally to a war hammer because of the versatility. I was tired of having to switch weapons in certain places with lots of spawn and say a powerful balron. Instead, I just change the wep special I'm spamming. On average, it's just a few percentage points of damage lower than my ornate axe (which is my preferred one on one direct damage dealer) so at most it's an extra swing or two to down a tough mob, but usually not even that. I use a yumi for very specific use cases (mobs that have very high phys resist and therefore benefit from the added spells on double strike, insta kill fire breath mobs, etc.).

[Asmodean]

The only real reason to change weapon type is because useless weapon load too often. If more looted weapons were bows/halberds/high damage weapons, there would be no need to change weapon type and you would just pay more for weapon when you buy it from player instead of paying for weapon change deed.

I'm not sure I understand your logic. If they increased drop rates of "good" weapons, it would only make sense to decrease the amount of "good stats" on weapons, to keep them just as rare, or rarer than they are now. So in the end, it's a wash. Also, congrats for finding that 5x58 dagger, that would be near worthless with no way to change it into something people actually want.

Not to mention decreasing donations / gold(ED) sinks in place.

"Good" weapons need to maintain their rarity to keep both their value, and to make the market not get saturated, or over-saturated. If everybody has it, its not fun when you find it, or otherwise acquire it.

[Iltar]

My point is that too many deeds hurt realism: you can't really reforge a bow to an axe. One solution could be tweaking range/whirlwind weapon load rate to make it better without making such weapon too common.
Real problem though is that many weapon types are currently useless. As I understand(maybe I'm wrong), the biggest reason to this is that fleeing mobs are hard to kill without a bow. I don't really think that fleeing mobs add anything valuable to the gameplay, while mobs fleeing make meleeing with bow the only solution, which is also unrealistic(knights never meleed with bows or crossbows). So mobs fleeing could be disabled on server, some penalty to using bows in melee added, and maybe some defensive bonus for fencing weapons. This would make all weapon types usefull as it was in middle-ages, which is better than "meleeing with bow" situation.