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How effective are Damage Eaters?

sirion

Sage
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
According to UOGuide: "Eaters are charged over time provided you don't get damaged during that time." Does it mean that as long as you dont get damaged/interrupted during the waiting period, you will get healed by the eater, correct?

So my question is: Just how effective are Damage Eaters, especially when you are in the heat of battle with many mobs? As a melee in a spawn or boss fight, you are constantly fighting with mobs. You wont get any window to recovery from eaters, yes?
 

Tuan

Slightly Crazed
Stratics Veteran
You were involved in a thread on this exact same topic in May of 2012, and you're asking essentially the same question now as you were asking then. Said thread is the #2 search result if you Bing "UO damage eater" - which is what I did when attempting to see if I could find any better info than what is on UOG.

This may be a silly question, but why not just head over to TC and try it out? I bet you could have your answer in under an hour over there experimenting, 2 hours tops.

Seems like a more reasonable way to go about it than to wait another 2.5 years...
 

Lord GOD(GOD)

Certifiable
Stratics Veteran
A lot of people seem to bother with them in PvP these days, though I suspect that's more just because they can, not necessarily that it's hugely beneficial. I tested it out myself with max fire eater vs a fire breath and that looked worth while, I can't imagine it being much more than a few hp from the constant peppering of spells in every other scenario.
 

sirion

Sage
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Hmm, I did search but did not find any answer. And after some years out of the game, I certainly dont remember. It is amazing that some people do background checks on these things. And I did test things out with my gear. Unfortunately many info seem incorrect. That's the problem.
 

Tuan

Slightly Crazed
Stratics Veteran
I didn't do a background check, so to speak, it just happens that the other thread with your post in it was 2nd in the list and I looked at it to see if there was some good info in there.

I believe that eaters are useless for many small attacks. My understanding of how DE and Soul Charge works is that every X seconds, if you get hit with the appropriate damage, then Y (Y may = X, but I'm not 100% sure on this) seconds later you'll have some HP restored, provided you're still alive.

Therefore, if you've got 18% damage eater, then you need to get hit with at least 8 or 10 damage before you'd really see any effect from the eater's restoring... provided you weren't healed back to full anyway.

I think that, as long as your eater has some internal charges, you'll trigger the effect every 3 seconds as you're getting hit. I think that if you don't get hit for 3 seconds, the item can regenerate a charge.

In none of my testing did I consistently get hit long enough that my eater or soul charge might have run out of charges. For that you'd probably need a friend to cast an EB on you every few seconds to see if eventually you run out of charges somehow.
 

Lord Taliesin

Seasoned Veteran
Stratics Veteran
UNLEASHED
I managed to squeeze 12% damage eater onto my main dexxer suit and my experience has been that it doesn't make a difference most of the time in pvm but it has saved me on a number of occasions fighting high end casters. Basically if you're cutting it really close on hp and have to run to heal the few points it restores while you're running can mean the difference of not eating dirt if you get hit with a delayed damage spell or tic of poison.
 
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