Refinement? I thought this would have been a hot topic?

[RazicGL]

Morning guys and Gals of the craftwolrd of Ultima. I have been stocking up on maps for the lst seeral days... after 4millionGP worth of Miasma I have an impressive stock! I have hundreds of fel level 6 maps so tonight, as its friday, I will be digging, fightin,looting my way to a supply of refinement ingerdiants! I will do some testing of my own where I can but what have you guys been refining so far? I am thinking that a maxed out uber DCI suit for my sampire will be my first usage of the refinement set.

I know my stuff when it comes to imbuing, I take a heck of a time painstakingly crafting the perfect base pieces and always reforge, powder, imbue and enhance for the most I can get out of the pieces.

Questions for the masters out there.

At what stage do I apply the refinement? is it once completed or at the start of the process?
Does refining the piece, if done before imbuing, eat up item weight? I have a couple of wonderful shame pieces that have insane resists, high DCI and mana inc and stamina inc on them, Plate chest and plate tunic. Can these be refined? if so would it matter if I id it before enhancing?

Fnal question. The trade off between resist and DCI in this situation seems to be pretty neglagable. i mean 5 less on each resist for what 70+DCI? I am guessing the ammount of damage I will negate with my parry sampire will offset the extra damage I will take.

What are your thoughts on the whole refinement system and how will you be using it?

Thanks for reading.

 

[Gorbs]

Refinements below 'Invulnerability' are worthless for your plan. Can you post the distribution of materials you get from the chests (# of each defense, protection, hardening, fort, and invuln)?

I'm wondering how much damage the offset will really be. Isn't going from 45 to 70 DCI effectively the same thing as running HLA on your weapon? I suppose if you add HLA, parry, and 70 DCI you shouldn't take much melee damage.

 

[DJAd]

What are your thoughts on the whole refinement system and how will you be using it?

I have no idea. I'm waiting for them (the devs) to add it to the player guide to help people understand better.....

 

[TheLetterQ]

Refinements below 'Invulnerability' are worthless for your plan. Can you post the distribution of materials you get from the chests (# of each defense, protection, hardening, fort, and invuln)?

I'm wondering how much damage the offset will really be. Isn't going from 45 to 70 DCI effectively the same thing as running HLA on your weapon? I suppose if you add HLA, parry, and 70 DCI you shouldn't take much melee damage.

I completely disagree. Lets say I'm on my trust Sampire and doing the DH. I really want Physical and Poison resists at max. I could use both enhancements to lower my non-critcal resist and either increase my desired resists, or increase the DCI. Maxing out the resists the the DH deal and maximizing the DCI together ought to really increase the power of the suits. In addition with the armor revamp I won't be wasting various imbuings on the resist which gives me additional options for other stuff.

So I'm going to take my general purpose suit to get a few sets of keys, and then pop on the boss killer suit to kill the boss with increased efficiency.

Q

 

[swroberts]

Well I just verified you can refine an imbued item and imbue a refined item, with no change to weight. So it doesn't seem to matter at what point in the process to apply the refinement. The screw job is that when you use a refinement (hardening as and example-applies 3 levels) , it doesn't let you select the same resist twice. So you can't design a suit for DH, only reducing the Energy resists by 24-30. Kind of unfortunate. So the question really is, will the damage done by losing the resists be counteracted by the DCI...and if you use Studded leather or Hides, the increase in LMC.

As an example, Exodus, hits me for 20(what I remember seeing) with an all 70's suit. This doesn't count the extra BS he throws at you....
so if 30% is getting through he is hitting me for 66.66pts....

So if I use a fully invulnerable suit(getting the 5th option each time), 5 pieces studded leather (each 1 dropping 1 point max resists across the board) and plate mail helmet (same)I roll in with:
64's in all resists, 75DCI, 56%LMC (40 from imbuing, 15 from the 5 studded pieces, 1 from the helmet)

So now 36% Damage is getting through, and he is now hitting me for 23.3 points, a net increase of 3.3pts, gaining 30% more DCI. And if I use a HLA weapon....it will be really hard for him to hit me(feel free to poke me in the eye if I have a conceptual error here)...

So it seems like a easy decision.....But wait a minute...To get the max DCI, you need to wear the stupid refined suit(where you cannot imbue DCI)...so you have use imbue slots/artifacts on
Weapons - 15
Rings - 15
Braclet - 15
Slither(in you are lucky) - 10
Cloak of power - 3
Spell Focusing Sash - 5
Tangle - 5
For a grand total of 68DCI......So you can never reach that mythical 75 DCI....

And if you are rolling with that much DCI, your HCI will take a huge hit and I would rather have HLA or slayer, rather than DCI, on my weapon (besides SSI, DI, ML, SL)...so that takes me down to 53% DCI(and I am still losing HCI)....So if you go the DCI route, you lose on resists and you lose something to make room for DCI on the rings/Bracelet. A double loss for a max gain you cannot achieve.

So unless they allow DCI to be imbued on a suit or just give the DCI(like the LMC) or allow for the same resist to be chosen during refinement....I can't see the advantage right now.

 

[Silverbird]

I havent played around much with refining yet, but ...

It was said, that the lowest cap for max resist is at 65%. The maximum cap is 70 DCI. Overcapping of 25 DCI could be done with 5 refinements, which leaves you with 1 additional armour slot. Which should give you 15-20 extra dci (folded steel glasses or fey leggings maybe). With shame loot dci can go up to 20 per each jewelry piece. Same goes for shields. (I know, I am sometimes silly. But my rp-sense tells me, that someone with a shield should be harder to hit than someone without. Especially when it comes to stuff like increased dci caps. *g* ) Not to mention that you could get dci with reforging onto crafted armour parts.

And yes, imho there should be some sort of trade off for an increased dci cap. (Not only in max resists, but maybe also when it comes to the number of other stats on your armour parts.)

UO players like to go into extrems. If you could put more than one decrease in one resist type on a single armour piece, ppl would want to put ALL decreases into the same resist. That way they could 'pay' -5 max in one resist (capped at 65) to get the full + 25 dci cap.

One of the few usefull trade offs imho would be, giving the elves +5 bonus cap to energy away to get +5 dci cap on them.

 

[Gorbs]

I completely disagree...

That's great, but he wants 70 DCI cap on his suit. This requires +5 DCI refinements. Invulnerability grants +4 with a chance at +5.

I can understand some people might want a 55 DCI cap or some such.

 

[RazicGL]

With regards to the DCI reaching the cap... its totally doable I miscalculated though, will only be able to hit 60 DCI as I wear Animated tinker legs and Mace and shield glasses. you can still reforge DCI onto the armour pieces. I have made some woodland pieces last night and they are as follows. ring / brace give 30% HI / DCI - corguls sash 5% DCI, Quiver 5% and then I reforged DCI onto the 4 pieces taking me to 60%, piece of cake. As for the HCI i get 30% from my jewels and as I have SSI on my suit and mega stamina I don't need SSI on my weps so just have 15% HCI on there hitting my HCI cap. I tested him out last night and I must say the drop in resist values and the extra damage i took is not worth mentioning. I use an armoured swamp drag anyway to reduce the incoming damage and with 120 parry/bushido and 60% DCI i didn't get hit often, I also just for fun made a wep with HLA on it and it was very effective. I am going to do a solo run tonight on Stygian dragon and see what happens, a big hitter like that will be a nice test. I have made a nice leaf blade and I have a good feeling that I will drop him without much of an issue.

Adding the DCI onto the suit still left me able to have HPI 5 STAM 8 INT 8 on 4 pieces and I was fotunate enough to get heartwood mods of DI on each piece, its a very nice suit (if i do say so myself) and if I carve the dragon a new one tonight it will seal the deal! in PVP this change might be a big balance issue (for mages at least) but we shall see if they decide to let it get added to non med armour also lol.