Budget Sampire

[Cirno]

I've been going through something of a UO renaissance, moving house, sorting out my stuff, and polishing off my characters.
Among other things, I moved taming onto another character, leaving me with a spare character slot, which could happily house a little neck-biter.
My problem has two roots. One is that I spent most of my gold on scrolling up my new bard/tamer, and the other is that I'm a bit undriven when it comes to soloing the game.

So, my question is, what would be a good sampire build, within the following constraints.

1. No skill above 100, 110 at the very most.
2. Stat cap of around 240-ish.
3. Total equipment not going over, say a million.

My general hope is to be able to fight the overland spawn in Ter Mur, for imbuing ingredients. although I understand things like Lava Elementals are likely to tear through me.

 

[Klapauc]

Start with
110 swords
100 bushido
100 parry
100 tactics
100 anatomy
99 necro
70 chiv
Get a soul seeker .Nice chest pieces are Violet Courage or Heart of the Lion.
For head use Aegis of Grace or Ancient Samurai Helm.If you can get your hands at a stormgrip,use it.If you decide to go elf,you could also use the cheaper elf version of the Fey Leggings.You may face some problems with your fire resists if you use all these arties at once.
With that low weapon skill,you should try to maximize your Defence Chance Increase first.Then comes Damage Increase and as much stamina as you can get.
To make a bit money,go down to the abyss and do the goblin and ratmen spawns for ingredients and sell them.Invest in power scrolls and equipment,get a 115 swords as fast as possible.
Lava Elementals go down very fast if you got a flame slayer talisman.
Also use greater agility/strength potions for a nice stat boost and carry some greater heal and total refreshment,make hotkeys for them.
Imbued equipment makes things really easy today,especially imbued weapons are very cheap to make.I assume you do not have Mace&Shield Glasses,so for the beginning a good weapon should have hld,hml,hsl and ssi if needed plus either di or slayer.

 

[Cirno]

Thanks for the answer

I have a Violet Courage or two kicking around, Ancient Samurai Helm I have (or I can use a heritage token), and I have a Stormgrip. So, it's looking hopeful, so far.

Ratmen is the Cavern of the discarded, I assume.
Is there a goblin spawn down there, too, or do you mean the underworld ones?

 

[Klapauc]

There is a goblin spawn down in the abyss.http://uo.stratics.com/php-bin/show_content.php?content=31085 .You can also get a goblin slayer talisman in the underworld from the escort quest there.
Oh and dont forget to ride an exceptionally armored swamp dragon for the damage reduction.

 

[Cirno]

Will the Goblin and Repond Slayer stack, to bring me near enough to the DI cap to mean I don't need to shoot myself in the foot with Enemy of One?

 

[Klapauc]

I did not try this.Goblin Slayer is enough .They have a low amount of hitpoints ,just sometimes insane high wrestling,so be a bit careful,but they do only little damage.But it happened that i whiffed 4 times in a row with 120 weapon and 34 hci .

 

[Stupid Miner]

I did not try this.Goblin Slayer is enough .They have a low amount of hitpoints ,just sometimes insane high wrestling,so be a bit careful,but they do only little damage.But it happened that i whiffed 4 times in a row with 120 weapon and 34 hci .

Actually, more likely they have DCI or something similar.

 

[Gellor]

Klapauc pretty much nailed it on skills.

On my sampire, I've only got three skills over 100: 120 swords, 120 bushido, and 120 parry. These three are the "critical" skills for a sampire. I swap 100 anatomy and 100 resist depending upon what I'm hunting.

I bulked up my sampire with DCI and DI along with hp increase. I will eventually get around to tweaking my suit for 45 hci also

My chest piece is a rune beetle carapace. My legs are fey legs.

My ring and bracelet are DI and DCI heavy. (23dci and 44 di)

My talisman switches between primer of arms and conjurer's trinket. Usually conjurer's trinket unless I'm hunting repond monsters. Granted these aren't in the under 1M budget, but maybe you have one hanging around. But it might be worth looking for a vermin slaying talisman and going after vermin to get money

The thing I will grant you is my sampire is in factions and those items above that can be factions ARE faction. But they started life as regular ones

 

[WalterRuether]

Heres one i have fun with

Arch 110
tactic 110
necro 100
bush 110
music 110
disco 110
Chiv 70

I know, I know everyone hates to train disco. But there is nothing you cant kill outside a peerless. It requires no special armor. Go 120 music and disco one day. You will own everything overland and as long as you have it disco'd anything UW. Disco and Honor make a ruthless combination. I also run a disco swordsman.

 

[Cirno]

I'm currently training discordance on my tamer, and although I've found a nice method to it, I'm not in a hurry to train it twice
Although it is a tempting looking template.

One of my main concerns is that the lower parry and weapon skills will severely put a dent in survivability in melee.
If I avoid swarms of monsters, would archery be a better option for a non-legendary template?

 

[Mark Knotts]

May I ask what shard you're on? If it's Catskills I'm sure I can help out. Let me know.

 

[Cirno]

I'm sorry for not replying in the last few days.
The sampire will be on Europa, when I get around to creating it, which probably won't be until some time into the new year.

There's three reasons for the budget idea behind this sampire.
Firstly, I don't have an overwhelming amount of gold, which puts a cieling on what I can spend.
Secondly, I'm not fully sold on the sampire idea. So I don't really want to drop a ton of gold on a template I might drop.
Thirdly, it's just more interesting to do it this way. At the end, if I love the sampire, then it might end up with a fairly generic template. But until then, it's more of a journey than a destination.

 

[Heimi]

On Europa I sell complete sampire suits (minus weapon and talisman) for 5m if you're interested now or in the future

 

[Cirno]

On Europa I sell complete sampire suits (minus weapon and talisman) for 5m if you're interested now or in the future

I can't afford it at the moment, but I'm curious what the total stats of the suit are.

All-70s with vamp form, is all I can think of as must-haves for a suit.
I might just mean I'm unimaginative, though

 

[Farsight]

I wound up spending less then a million gold on my Europa-sampire suit (including scrolling up to 115).

I started with bottom-of-the-line marties like Heart of the Lion, Fey Leggings (elf version) or Aegis of grace (I used only two of those, not sure which as I have another version on Drachenfels with the same arties) and found a cheap radiant scimitar with only mana leech, SSI and hit lower defense. It isn't as good as the full-fledged version of the Sampire, but it serves its purpose. And when I get around to it, it'll be great for collecting imbuing ingredients to get my dream jewelry set.

Of course, I bought my suit pre-imbuing, and now it's harder to find the right pieces since a great many of the crafters are taking the "junk" pieces which are gold to me and turning them into essences for imbuing. So the same suit will likely cost me 2 million or more in today's UO.

 

[Cirno]

A victim of my own whims...
I borrowed a disused 70-physical suit from someone, and went to harass the Troglodytes with a soulseeker. It was going well, until someone told me they could drop the DI on my Darkened Sky to 30, and add Repond slayer to it.
I've always loved the Kama, so I thought I could just as easily take fencing instead of swords. So, I gave over my Darkened Sky, and they ran out of relic fragments

Which gives me time to ask. Would fencing, or indeed macing, be a significantly worse choice than swords?
Everyone talks about swords, but the first video I saw of Shimering Effusion solo'd, it was with Winds Edge.

 

[Connor_Graham]

It's up to the player really. There is no good or bad wep skill. Swords just happens to have more options for various situations.

 

[Farsight]

Swords = hardest hitting melee weapon (ornate axe), best all around whirlwind weapon (radiant scimitar), very decent "feint" weapon (daisho)
Maces = cheapest overall (few people use it), hardest hitting whirlwind weapon (war hammer), hardest hitting one handed weapon (diamond mace)
Fencing = one handed "feint" weapon (leafblade), most weapons with swing speed of less than 3 (less need for SSI on weapon)

What you saw with the wind's edge can be done as fast or faster with a leafblade or daisho using the same tactic.

And with today's age of imbuing, your weapon choice amounts to "six in one hand, half dozen in the other"

 

[Cirno]

This does not an easy decision make

I think I'll stick with fencing, with two more immediate questions.
First off, during the faction influenced city invasions, I was doing a number on the swarms on a fairly vanilla fighter, with a leeching warhammer and whirlwind (which was great until members of warred guilds showed up). The amount leeched is obviously based on damage done, but if I had Hit Area Cold damage like on one of the other warhammers I was using, is that based off weapon damage, or a flat amount?
Secondly, is it worth modifying the Darkened Sky (60% hit lightning, 50% DI, 25% SSI) for slayer, or would it be better to just create an imbued one from scratch?

 

[Farsight]

Create an imbued slayer. I don't think that the slayer damage happens when the lightning damage happens. At least it was that way once upon a time. I haven't tested that "bug" lately.

But if that's still the case (can anyone verify that?), then having a hit spell with a slayer is a waste of a mod.

 

[law696]

i just bought a slightly modified version of one of Risso's suits, was 5m, i provided my own m/s glasses and quiver of infinity.

mods are:

all 70's in vamp form

45 dci
20 hci
40 di
15 dex
10 str
32 stamina inc
21 mana inc
15 hp inc
30 HLD
chivalry +13

with conjourers totem, its at 60% di, weapon will add another 40% for the 100 cap. and the totem will raise hci to 30%.

those stats include mace and shield reading glasses. his usual suits have imbued helms with si/mi/hpi as needed.

the 13 chiv on bracelet means i have 73 skill with items, so i dont fail so much on EoO.

 

[Silverbird]

I suppose all spell effects from weapons to be flat (modified by targets armour resists). Slayer effects normally shouldn't affect spell effects. (Otherwise slayer talismans should naturally work for spells too.)

I am still not shure about what can trigger a spell effect on a weapon. From my own trys I would say only the original target can trigger a weapons effect but I never had a Titans Hammer for better testing (and was too lazy for trieing on TC.) But by the idea a weapon with whirlwind attack and 100% hit area spell affect should be able to kill multiple targets with one whirlwind. (If the hit area spell gets triggered multiple times in one attack.)
Leech effects are getting triggered by every target. Thats makes whirling attacks with leeching weapons so strong. But you dont leech from triggered spells. (At least as far as I know you dont do.)

 

[Connor_Graham]

Slayer effects normally shouldn't affect spell effects. (Otherwise slayer talismans should naturally work for spells too.)

Slayer's don't affect hit spell damage, but if a hit spell goes off on a slayer weapon it negates the slayer DI. This is a bug that has been around for as long as I can remember.

 

[Cirno]

This is as interesting as it is confusing to me, which is a lot.

Do I understand it correctly that, if I put a slayer on my Darkened Sky, with 60% hit lightning, then the 60% of the time the lightning happens, then the actual hit of the weapon won't get the slayer Damage Increase?
I'm getting a little turned around with what damages people are talking about.
If my understanding is correct, does a "Hit Area" going off also make the slayer Damage Increase not happen?

 

[Connor_Graham]

That's the gist of it, yeah.