Upgrade Changes

Paradise Found recently did a full shard upgrade to enable all current content. Naturally, this has add some things and changed a few standard PF rules on skills and abilities. Overall, I'm glad for the change because it does allow for a lot more expansion of the shard and gives me new things to collect. The real perks that impact mages:

- Mana and Life Leech via spells: Vampire and Wraith forms now leech for spells the way they're supposed to, so a need for mana potions and/or firm mana management is greatly relaxed. Mana is really only a problem against bosses, custom bosses, and in champ spawns anyway, but this largely eliminates those issues as well. This does add to the value of an Ethy as well since toggling between Vamp and Wraith will dismount you; riding a pet that you don't intend to attack with, like an Ostard, should only be done when you know you won't be needing Wraith form.

- New Items: Chiefly, Talisman and a few clothing artifacts. These generally fill equipment slots that weren't in use before, meaning everything you get from them is a gain. Hitting the 300 Int cap is now a realistic goal, as we potentially gain another +20 Int from filling empty spaces with these items. Sadly, the Killer and Slayer bonuses on Talisman do not work for spells. Curse Removal could be useful to those of us with low karma since we miss out on Chiv's Remove Curse. Ward Removal is also somewhat interesting if you want a quick wipe of your Protect and Vamp so you can heal pets more effectively, but that's generally overkill.

- The Final Spellweaving spells: At last! Arcane Empowerment, Drayd's Charm, Attunement, and Immolating Weapon are implemented. Of the bunch, Attunement is probably the most useful. These spells are now detailed in this post.

- Mysticism: A whole new set of spells to play with, some of which have potential to fill big gaps in the Mage style. Namely, Bombard might fill the void of Physical damage for mages. Once I have a full spellbook and manage to GM Mystic, I'll go over these spells in greater detail.

- New Pets: As of this moment, it appears only the Skree and Stone Silth are spawning, but others are on the way as the bugs get worked out. Its doubtful any of them will match the power of the PF Custom creatures, but I'm a big fan of new pets anyway.

- Mini-Champs: PF has its own way of running full Champs, so assuming that mini-champs are left to run as they do on UO Standard this will give us something else to do when we don't have a full Champ team. Some of the interesting Artifacts also drop via Mini-Champs.

- New Bosses: Slasher, Navery, and Stygian Dragon to name a few. Most of them are solo-able for we PF players thanks to the lack of Skill caps and far more powerful items, but they retain a fair amount of difficulty nonetheless. They also drop some of the better artifacts. I have yet to challenge SD, but both Slasher and Navery are very manageable solo.

- Gargoyles: We don't have them just yet, but they're currently in the works and in testing. Their items are dropping all over the place, so the gear will also be there as soon as Gargs are in. I'm somewhat interested and may get a 3rd account to try them out. Most of my disinterest is due to the fact that PF nullifies most of their racial benefits. Flying, Berserk, and the HCI bonus are interesting benefits to say the least, but the HCI isn't going to make that big of a difference and Berserk may not even come into play most of the time. The faux-Mysticism bonus is pointless on a shard with no skill cap, and Imbuing is only going to be Eval for Mystic on PF, which ruins the racial crafting benefit for them. Elves and Humans are going to come out on top generally because resource gathering is a big enough racial benefit to trump Flight everytime.


A few notes about previous notes since the upgrade:

As of this moment, I still recommend play Elf. The mana bonus is still better than what you get from Human and potentially Garg. If the Garg's Berserk ability is an outside SDI bonus, *then* we might have something.

If you can get your hands on a Curse Removal talisman or a certain Mysticism spell, I think Chiv and high karma lose a bit of their draw over Necro. Most of the other Chiv spells work with low karma and I don't think they have anything worth giving up Corpse Skin and limitless Lethal for.

If you can regularly get your hands on a +6 Focus, Arcane Empowerment might be reliable enough to relax your SDI needs on your suit, freeing you from Mondain's Staff even sooner. The duration without a focus is *horrible*, so if you're not in a big guild then you're likely out of luck on that point.

Attunement is definitely worth a hotkey, even if you don't have a focus. Likewise, I've recently learned that Dispel Evil is kind of fun and might be worth a hotkey.