NEWS Live Interview with Producer Greg "Kyronix" Havlusch on 3/20/25!

[Lokea]

With respect to specializations, it makes me think of character advancement in Elder Scrolls and how you're mages can effectively specialize in a particular damage type and focus on spell lines with that particular damage type in mind. The issue with UO is that while there are ton of Fire damage spells, a few Energy spells... Cold, Poison and Physical have rather slim options. So a specialization would either have to combine them - OR - do something like allow you to use the Mysticism spells that cast Chaos damage and instead transform them into a particular elemental damage type. I'm just spit-balling ideas here obviously... but the idea of specialization that encourages new character creation is something I think alot of folks would enjoy. My hope is that this is something they are actively working on somewhere out there and not just happy words. We'll see.

I'm not sure how to make it work, but it would be interesting if you could specialize in a healing role. Of course, the response would be "just play a healer", but maybe if you are a mage who also has high healing and anatomy, etc. and you'd get some kind of bonus for the healing/anatomy side.

If you tossed in vet and animal lore, you'd be maxed out on skills with magery, eval int, meditation, healing, anatomy, vet, animal lore. If you have those skills, maybe a slight boost when you are healing people or pets.

 

[Keven2002]

The challenging part for the team is that at this point, with all the mechanics of the game, making a change to something like magic specialization is that even a small change could have a major impact on game play (ie making it too overpowered) but if they do something that isn't quite enough then people will say it's a waste.

A potential for this specialization might be something as simple as allow the Death Ray (mage) mastery to have a selectable damage output (like Tribulation). That would give a useful impact without being overly OP (imo).

I'm largely in favor of things that will continue to give options to gameplay while also making them mean something (ie doing things that are beyond just appearance or decoration). Perfect example of where I think they nailed it recently was the paladin weapons (hammer / fork). I like the idea of the paladin armor, but think they fell short by making the inherent LMC be strictly plate.

As some might have seen, I started looking at my Garg thrower the last few days and trying some of the new items on him to see what works well. One of my hopes in the near future is giving the Garg race some items that help improve their situation (only 3 weapons for a thrower & still -1 on the armor slot & no bonus from armored mount). From a warrior standpoint, they are kind of pigeonholed into being a thrower and takes a massive amount of money to build a top end suit and even then options are lacking (at least for the earrings).Fingers crossed!