For once, I have brought about positive change in the world! It's a fake world, true enough, but it counts. I haven't had much time for UO lately thanks to classes, but I do still frequent the boards so one day recently, in a fit of procrastination, I posted on the boards that bards needed to be fixed by adding the 160 barding difficulty cap. I wasn't as nice as I should've been about it, but eh, I was in an argumentative mood and I've posted about poor bards before so I didn't expect anything to come of it.
Imagine my surprise when it was done. Like nothing. Like instantly. Mind = Blown.
This is effing magical. All that time and touble (and money) that went into getting my Discordance to 120 is now completely effing worth it. Despite being 115/120, I now have a 15% (25% Slayer) chance to Discord anything that can be Discorded. Sure, at that point it's "only" a 14% cut to skills and resists, but as you might recall from my posts about dealing with Ancient Dragons, cutting something from 85% resist to 70% resist is a pretty big difference. Now those 85% resist creatures are going to be 56% resist creatures versus Fire and Poison and 71% versus Energy. That's a massive difference, especially when things have thousands of HP.
Even better, Discord doesn't wear off unless you break line of sight for more than 11 seconds. This also means lower Resising Spells, which means longer Corpse Skins in general, potentially raises the value of many Necro spells like Pain Spike, and makes Curse more viable. My "Super Curse" macro may see a lot more use in the future.
I'm going to need more hotkeys for Slayer Instruments. Also Blessed Bags.
Even better, or worse depending on your point of view, anyone with 120/120 Peacemaking, a Kenshin Cloak, and a Slayer instrument will have a 60% chance of Peacemaking a 160 BD target, 50% with an exceptional instrument. That's clearly a massive advantage and is tempting me towards giving in and just using the stupid cloak.
Farming gold just got a whole lot easier. If we're lucky, some of those boss creatures won't be bard immune either. I wonder how much time one could save killing Slasher with him at 56% Fire resist and 14% lower skills...
