I know just what Scratch is talking about and empathize with him.
I did some in-depth testing of hit chance on test center a few months ago to see if it even worked right because in the field on my archer it feels wrong to miss so often. I used a 45 HCI archer in my testing against a no-parry 45 DCI dexer. I used a sample size of hundreds of arrows.
I found that the archer hit exactly 50% of the time, and this is what their own formulas do say it should be. Whether or not this is a nice way to design it (considering mage-type classes don't necessarily have 50% of their spells fizzled) depends upon other things.
Something that felt bad about it though, both in testing and in the field, is that the pattern of hits and misses was so crappy. I saw long strings of misses and long strings of hits. Archery is comparatively slow in terms of swing speed and missing like 8 or more times in a row is basically not fair, yet thats what I saw. I wish I had kept the data that showed the patterns, but I didn't.
After that, I felt like something should be implemented to break up these long strings of misses (and, well, the hits too). In a fight that lasts all of 10 shots, 10 misses isn't fair (and 10 hits would also not be fair). 5 should hit 5 should miss and the way the hit chance percentage is being applied appears to be frustrating for all sides.
Parry....... is, well. It appears that it is simply not intended to use a dexer to be able to kill someone who has both high parry and maxed dci and especially when the Bushido comes into effect....
I have one of those 120 parry high bushido max DCI fencers and my friend has a similar swordsman, and one day we tried to kill one another. It was not possible. After several failed attempts to hit, one guy disarms the other one and then the disarmed guy gallops around a bit until he can rearm, and otherwise occasionally a hit might land, but anyway.
I have also used my archer against his swordsman (as well as against more realistic PVP parry dexer templates without bush), and the outcome of that makes me believe that parry and high DCI is intended by the UO people to make someone basically unkillable to archers. Archers cannot disarm someone but the parry dexer can, so in a real PVP situation it's just a matter of time until the archer gets stuck on something and gets disarmed and gets chopped apart like nothing at all. A parry mage would be in a similar situation except the mage can't disarm the archer, but when the archer cannot hit, it means that the mage will not be interrupted, so it ends up skewed the same way.
So, since the UO people seem to have intended parry to be this way, I've not given it further thought. When I have to fight a parry mage or a parry dexer on my archer, I just try to occupy him till someone who can kill him comes. All the while that person may be making fun of me and so on, not grasping that it's a deliberate template design thing from above (not their personal, huge PVPness).
I don't like this whole business where the implementation doesn't give dexers what feels like their fair 50% hit chance in smaller samples of shots. This is the reason:
When a string of 10 misses kicks in, it affords a mage 100% spell casting chance during that time - - - however, when a string of 10 hits kicks in, mages will be able to cast to some extent, it's not zero. It doesn't feel right.
I think that the unpredictability of hit chance in real world fights contributes to why this thing works kinda like Mages Online (it's one thing among a number, really). When you are on a mage, you know that when you cast a spell, you can move your timing around to affect whether or not you will be interrupted. An archer doesn't get to make fine adjustments to his hit chance like that.
So yeah... they got a ton of stuff going on right now
(Transfers?!?
"That cannot be seen" happening left and right, making tamers who fight in crappy terrain miserable - - how about a revert on that part of the code until you can fix the line of sight issues instead of torturing us like this??????????).
So who knows what will happen with this.
In general I think that Scratch is making a legitimate complaint. Something that should help is that they should consider making the hit chance implementation realize its intended hit percentages more accurately within smaller samplings of shots.
