I'm not sure which era you're most familiar with
I played in the beta test, I played the initial release, I played for a couple months after the Trammel/Felucca split, and then after a long hiatus I played for probably six months during samurai empire.
mages, have a significantly easier time than non-mages
Are you guys talking about private servers with custom rulesets? Because I played exclusively on Origin servers until ancorp.
This is how I remember the pre-age-of-shadows UO solo-player mage experience:
* Needing to make a melee main to support the mage because the mage burned through 1000 gold worth reagents every 20 minutes. Meanwhile, melee can spend ten minutes shearing sheep every few days to keep supplied in bandages.
* Needing to camp reagent vendors at obscure hours of the the night, ready to click on them on the half hour mark when they restock, because every reagent vendor in the world was attended by macroers who recall in and buy everything with 10 seconds of a restock. And if you don't beat them, your options are either to spend ~3000 gold instead of 1000 every 20 minutes buying reagents from the player owned vendors belonging to those macroers, or simply being unable to play because not having reagents means being unable to cast. Who here remembers 5 gold each blood moss and 6 gold each black pearl, and that was on the cheaper vendors.
* Needing to constantly visually monitor my inventory to make sure I had every one of all eight reagents, because running out of any one could mean being suddenly unable to do something important, like cure poison, or recall out. Meanwhile melee can very easily keep a bag open and watch their bandages. And often don't even need to. When playing in parties it's common for running out of bandages to never be a problem, whereas mages will run of reagents regardless of who is taking damage. And you're far more likely to have somebody hand you 50 bandages if you run out than hand you 50 of three different types of reagent if you run out.
Granted, these previous three are less of an issue on this server where reagents are 1 gold with expanded supply, and we have a third party razor toolbar that shows reagents and pops up bright red warnings when we run low. Because even the "mages are OP!" crowd acknowledges that these "era authentic" problems were thoroughly obnoxious. I spent a lot of nights spending hours at a time camping reagent vendors hidden to buy up enough reagents for a couple days worth of play because each vendor only restocked 100 of each reagent every half hour. And I remember watching the macroers recall in and me frantically trying to buy all the reagents I could before they dissappeared off the vendor.
Does nobody else remember that?
* Spending tens of thousands of gold over months of real time to train magery while melee can simply buy a couple 5 gold butcher knives and wooden shields and go afk for a couple hours at a time with a sparring partner and have triple GM swordsman/tactics/parry in a few days.
* Trying to heal myself with a 2 second cast spell against melee that interuppts spells every 1.5 seconds as part of their normal damage dealing.
* Fighting against poisoners who in addition to applying damage+spell interupt every 1.5 seconds, apply a DoT with every swing that does 25% of total health damage every 5 seconds, and also interupts spells and renders healing impossible without first succesfully curing the poison. And incidentally that poison couldn't always be cured even by arch cure at GM levels, so sometiems even if they apply it then stopped attacking ust to laugh at you, you'd still die anyway, because you needed to wait until immediately after a poison tick to start your cast so the poison damage tick didn't interuppt it, and if it didn't succeed in curing the poison, by the time the next tick happened you'd lost 50% of your total health from poison.
* Only being able to do any one at a time of: heal, cure poison, do damage, or run, against melee that can do all four of those things at once by mouse moving and pressing a simple one button macro every few seconds. This is still in the game. Melee can heal, cure, attack and run all at once. A mage has to stop doing damage and stop running away to separately cure and heal, meanwhile melee continues its ever-present run towards you to interupt your spells, and simultaneously heals itself up to full while you do.
* Tedious keyboard/mouse micromanagement manually activating every spell, manually clicking unstackable, un-macroable potions, fighting against melee that automatically attacks on a timer with no user input simply by standing near you. The game interface heavily favors melee. As a mage, you need four separate spells imply to heal yourself: cure, arch cure, heal and greater heal, depending on how much time you have and what you need healed. If you macro all that, that's four separate buttons. Melee can use the same button for all of those things. Potions? Yes, but melee can use potions too.
* Basically being completely helpless in pvp because all actions of any kind required standing motionless while somehow not being hit...against melee that move/cure/heal while hitting you.
* In pve, any time more than one monster was on the screen having to run around like a madman trying to get far enough away to get my spells off, often aggroing more mobs an having to run out. Meanwhile, melee can very easily grab one at a time and remain stationary so as to not attract more mobs.
* Eventually giving completely up on trying to cure/heal during combat, and taking up alchemy, introducing mouse juggling un-macroable potions quaffs against melee who can simply use the mouse to always move towards you while pressing a single button every few seconds to heal themselves for 40-80% of their total health.
* Dying regularly, and making corpse runs always to discover that everybody loots reagents, meaning that 1000 gold/20 minutes routinely became 1000 gold for 5 minutes and the rest going to somebody else. Meanwhile melee can mass produce weapons in bulk because while almost everyone has a mining/crafting alt, the only source of reagents in the game is npc vendors. If melee doesn't die, that 500 gold weapon you bought will last a long time. 500 gold lasts a mage about 10 minutes. Again, OSI live server economy, where reagents cost between 3 and 9 gold each resulting in individual spells that cost betwen 6 and 30 gold each, plus that burn reagents even when spellcasts fails. Yet another "era accurate" mage penalty that ancorp doesn't replicate. Click your spell, fail. Click your spell, fail. Click your spell, success! You just spent 70 gold. Anyone other than me remember that? Dexxer weapons were nothing compared to mage reagent costs. When you die and get looted once or twice an hour, there was no point on buying "best of the best" super expensive gear. But mages had to buy reagents, and there was no way around it.
* When playing in parties with a wall of melee to hide behind and therefore not constantly having to run and be interrupted all the tiome, running out of mana any time a battle lasts more than a few minutes thereby being reduced to basically sitting around waiting because there are no mana potions in the game, whereas melee can fight forever because they don't depend on a mana pool.
* Despite all the obvious faillings of mages, nevertheless listening to people constantly whine and complain that "mages are OP!" because groups of murderers ambush smaller groups, and focus fire on individuals resulting in instant kills.
* Eventually giving up and taking up melee, and suddenly everything being vastly easier, and then getting my first pvp kill. Against a mage.
* Talking to that mage afterwards and listening to him tell me at great length about all the complicated strategies he was attempting to employ, whereas all I did was double click on him and hold down a mouse button until he died.
mages, have a significantly easier time
How? What is easier for mages?
If you're talking about massive wars with 20 people on the screen at a time or if you're a group of murderers ambushing people, using focused fire to instant-kill people before they can react, yes there's a huge advantage to that. But is that really
mages having an easier time, or is it coordinated groups having an easier time? As a solo mage, be it in pve or pvp, what exactly is easier?
I kind of wonder if maybe some people have rosy view of how it used to be, or have been playing private servers with custom rulesets. There are reasons mages received buffs in later expansions and melee was made to be interuptible. And why ancorp has interface upgrades, reduced reagent costs, etc.
it's not a coincidence that the population of active PvPers strongly favors a magery focused template.
I'm guessing at least 9 out of ten of those "magery focused" templates have at least one and possibly two melee skills, plus tactics, and if you watch any "how to pvp as a tank mage" video, probably the first thing they'll talk about is how to juggle the weapon swing timer. If you're not standing in a group or behind other melee, most of the damage those "magery focused" characters are doing is coming from a halbard.
Or, hey...maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's all different now. Playing a mage certainly became easier in later expansions, and being able to buy reagents for 1-3 gold on this server instead of the 3-9 gold of an old Origin server certainly makes trying it out less daunting. But it looks to me like a lot of the same basic mechanics that favor melee are still in play: melee can run/cure/heal/dps all at once, mages can only do any one of those at a time. Spells can be interupted, melee swings can't. Etc.
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Topic: Ultima Online An Corp Freeshard (Read 18523 times)