I don't know if this is the right place to post this longer thread, plz feel free to move it anywhere (and if it is not apropriate here or elsewhere just delete it).
I thought I would write down my experience using the “Deluxe Starter Package” from UO store. My aim was to build up skills on new characters on a new shard. My home is Germany, and back in 1999 I started on Drachenfels. I moved then to shard Europa where I was located for my whole intensity-UO-playing period (ended about 2011/12). Then I build up a complete new character panel on Atlantic, since to me it was the only shard populated enough to play seriously. However, besides a definitely not optimal internet con, the time zone issue meant that I will never be able to play on “peak times”, and therefore don’t find groups to do the roof or be part of any uo event that is done. So I decided to give Drachenfels a try; maybe a real thin community, but maybe also a possibility to take part in events or to enjoy a small but reliable community where I can join on peak times.
That said, it was clear to me that I will never go the “good old hard uo way” in skill building again. I am simply too old, and maybe too exhausted; I want to play uo and not grind skills forever to do the things ingame I want to do. UO store gives me two possibilities: First the well-known “Mythic Character Token”, that allows a given character to choose five skills that can be set to be 90 skill level; or the so-called “Deluxe Starter Package”, with the following content: A token for a one week period of accelerated skill gain (corresponding to the accelerated skill gain you get in New Haven or with a scroll of alacrity for 15 minutes: The rate of skill gains remains the same, but instead getting a mere 0,1 percent gain, you will note a random number between 0,2 to 0,5 skill gain at one skill gain event); a full medable “armor of the journeyman”, blessed, with especially nice mods for spell casting (100% lrc, full 70 resist, 30 lmc, stat boost etc.); two runic atlas’ with important land marks; a token for 100 Blackthorn Dungeon points (= getting a Crimson Cincture or a Conjurer’s Garb or two Mace and Shield Reading Glasses for free!); a token for 500 000 community points (for either Britain library, Moonglow zoo or Vesper museum, that is only 50 000 points behind usefull rewards) and other goodies (full set of full spellbooks, except for spellweaving, and others). It costs 2000 souvereigns. The mythic character token, on the other hand, costs 2500 souvereigns, and although it allows you to instantly set five skills to 90, you get nothing on your hand to start right away (what can you do with a naked char with five 90 skills?). Therefore, to start completely new on a shard, you will also need a character transfer (costs 2000 souvereigns) to be really able to do something. Since the flexibility was best with the “Deluxe Starter Package”, I decided to give it try, although I have a “normal” live with a demanding job, family etc., so I had to face the fact that I most probably would not get all I might get out of a 24/7 playing otherwise.
What I did in preparation was the following: I would try to build up as many skills I find a “must have” as possible. Since the “room for skills” on a char is limited to 720 skill points, I needed toons that had to take over skills; to do so, I needed a soulstone to switch skills between toons. You can get one by using veteran reward points, but I decided that these are too precious and chose to take a soulstone from UO store for another 1000 souvereigns. Then my “skill capture toons” should not only take already worked skills; instead, they should come with two good skills set to 50 already. I would switch them to my skill-building toon and work them further. Concerning other skills you can buy most skills in New Haven to 40 to start with. Another very important helper is “UO Assist” (I play CC) for macro building, and you should be familiar with the “Satyr trick” (Satyr is found in Despise Tram or Twisted Weald, Ilshenar). If you search stratics for “Satyr trick” you will find it. And, of course, you should know all those skill building guides they offer on various pages! This is most important, since you have to know how to build a certain skill. Furthermore, you should make up your mind concerning getting the skill limit to a certain level with power scrolls. If you want to switch them between toons, both toons need the same scroll; transferring a 110 skill to a toon with only 100 skill limit will not be possible.
Now what skills should be chosen to work? Obviously, there are “good” skills for this setup, and also bad ones.
Starting with the bad ones, there are the “crafter skills”, since they consume resources you either have to grind or to buy in large amounts. Since you only get 100 000 gold on your account in the start, buying resources is not an option, and you don’t have the time to farm them or to farm the gold to buy them. Therefore I decided that the classic crafter skills blacksmithing, tailoring, carpentry, alchemy and bowcrafting would not be my aim.
However, there are “good” crafting skills that do not consume many resources: tinkering, for example, since you can build it by crafting items that consume merely 1 ingot (and on a failed attempt even nothing). Also inscription and cartography (if you want to name it a crafting skill), since they just use blank scrolls you can purchase for low amounts of money. Furthermore, tinkering is a core skill in uo: If you want to train lockpicking, you not only need hundreds of lockpicks that you have to craft with tinkering, you need also crates with locks of a certain difficulty to lockpick them. If you take 30 carpentry and have 90 tinkering and build a crate, this crate will come with a lock of a difficulty of 90 (regarding lockpicking), so to build up your lockpick skill, you also have to choose your steps wisely in making crates during building up your tinker skill (I had a 60, 70, 80 and 90 tinkering skill crate in advance of lockpicking). Also, any other tool you need is crafted with tinkering (e.g. shovel à mining, you need the ingots!; saw à carpentry: you need the crates!; map makers pen etc. etc.). And furthermore, you can build the good ole golem as a tinker! Also, like the locks of the crates, the skill level of the golem is related to the tinker skill of his maker. I made a golem with 90 tinker skill what seemed to be a good choice later on.
Concerning the remaining “bad skills” not to choose to build up were all those who need targets and/or are time consuming (e.g. animal taming or discordance). “Good” skills are those that can be easily macroed (all spell casting stuff). A “bad skill” might also be spellweaving, since you have to do a time consuming quest and get the spells needed for casting by either buying them or hunting ML monsters like troglodytes (with a bad drop chance for a spell scroll). Also weapon skills are difficult; since you will not be able to use the “standard powergaming protocols” like bashing arctic ogre lords (you need spellweaving to do so) or wolf spiders (you need taming and animal lore skill to control them if you can buy them, if they are not for sale you have to tame them yourself with even more demand for fully developed characters), the only way would be to raise the skill by hunting mobs what is very time consuming. So weapon skills in this context might be a bad choice either.
Furthermore, the question “good/bad skills” is related to your playstyle and what types of characters you want to have in the end.
Most usefull templates (besides of pure mules) to my consideration are the following ones:
- Sampire: weapon skill, tacs, bushido, parry, resist spells, anatomy, chivalry, necro) – just the list of skills you will find in most Sampire builds.
- Tamer: taming, animal lore, vet, magery, and some other skills: eval int, med, bard skills (music and disco, or maybe music and peace), spellweaving, chivalry
- Mages: Pure or preferable mixed with mysticism (120 myst/120 focus) and/or spellweaving (120)
- Treasure hunter with core skills cartography and lockpicking, also mining
- Stealth char with hiding, stealth, ninjitsu, magery
This gave the list I tried to work up in one week.
With the accelerated skill gain, you should always aim at working more than one skill at a time. You can do macros that e.g. combine lockpicking and spellcasting. Magery, eval int and meditation raise together (remember that you can accelerate magery gains further by equipping a spell channel/mage weapon like wands you find in low level treasure chests, e.g. found in banks). I got the following results after finishing my week, assuming that if you would chose more cleverly or combine things better you might get even better results. Another disclaimer concerns Drachenfels as a shard: You don’t get power scrolls there! No wrestling, focus, magery, eval int, magic resist, parry, meditation, not even 110 ones! The only 120 scroll I found was a musicianship scroll. Also no spellweaving spell scrolls. The latter circumstance lead to a frustrated adventurer beating trogs, however in hours of lost gameplay not getting a single spell scroll.
But coming to results: After one week I had
- Magery: 3 x 100 (starting from 40), not possible to raise further, due to the lack of power scrolls
- Meditation: 3 x 100 (starting from 0)
- Eval Int: 2 x 100 (starting from 40)
- Animal Taming: 1 x 90 (starting from 50) (couldn’t resist, I love tamers! 90 skill is sufficient for control chances since you can add 2 + 15 jewels to get to 120 fully scrolled, but also 110 taming and lore will give you 99% chance controlling a cu/greater dragon etc.; furthermore, at 90 real skill you can use the taming mastery for much easier skill gains)
- Animal Lore: 1 x 110 (starting from 0)
- Mining: 92 (starting from about 30)
- Tinkering: 96 (starting from 50)
- Cartography 88 (starting from 50)
- Lockpicking 100 (starting from 50)
- Wrestling: 1x 100 (starting from 40, worked all with a tinkered golem at 90 tinker skill; concerning the golem: you need gears (buy at a tinker NPC), clockwork assembly and power crystals (get them as loot from Exodus Overseer or Exodus Minions in Ilshenar doing the spellweaving quest “patience”), iron and bronze ingots (get them from working your mining skill) to build it; also, since you damage your golem with wrestling, you will need to have bronze ingots/tinker toolkit in your backpack and high tinker skill to repair the golem from time to time)
- Parry: 1 x 100
- Magic resist: 2 x 100
- Bushido: 1 x 105
- Hiding: 1 x 100
- Stealth: 1 x 80 (sufficient for a stealth char in full leather)
- Ninjitsu: 1 x 90 (sufficient for animal form and shadow jump)
- Musicianship: 1 x 110
- Necro: 1 x 100
- Spirit Speak: 1 x 100
- Mysticism: 1 x 110 (luckily got a power scroll in this case)
- Focus: 1 x 100
- Spellweaving: 1 x 68 (no further skillgain possible since I didn’t have the spells, found a single “reaper form” on a vendor)
- Sword: 75 (needed weapon skill to train bushido with lightning strike)
- Cooking: 55
- Fishing: 50
Resume:
I find it to be a very rewarding list allowing a lot of functional templates even at this stage: Tamer can bond and control cu sidhe and other high level pets; Mages (with the exception of spellweaving) are functional if relying on mysticism as major skill (Magery with 100 is not functional at all!); with some effort and the help of Satyrs I will get cartography to 100 and therefore can do any treasure map; and for a sampire I have a nice “starter kit” of 100 parry, 100 magic resist, 105 bushido, 100 necro, and 75 sword. Overall, I got a free “crimson”
. The only thing that might be buffed is the amount of gold you get to start. In these days, 100 000 gp are nothing, and it doesn’t relate to the 100 blackthorn points you get (value on Atlantic 30 Million gp). I would suggest 1 Mio gp for your start on a shard, since you are in real demand for anything: Power Scrolls, Spellcasting stuff, new armor and jewels, weapons, and above all resources.
So, to me, this is a good and fair product that helped me a lot. With some more preparation I would have decided to GM peacemaking, since this would allow you to do the bard mastery quest and get the books of masteries (none available from vendors on Drachenfels). Please feel free to add any comment or recommendation you may have.
Regards, Fizzle
I thought I would write down my experience using the “Deluxe Starter Package” from UO store. My aim was to build up skills on new characters on a new shard. My home is Germany, and back in 1999 I started on Drachenfels. I moved then to shard Europa where I was located for my whole intensity-UO-playing period (ended about 2011/12). Then I build up a complete new character panel on Atlantic, since to me it was the only shard populated enough to play seriously. However, besides a definitely not optimal internet con, the time zone issue meant that I will never be able to play on “peak times”, and therefore don’t find groups to do the roof or be part of any uo event that is done. So I decided to give Drachenfels a try; maybe a real thin community, but maybe also a possibility to take part in events or to enjoy a small but reliable community where I can join on peak times.
That said, it was clear to me that I will never go the “good old hard uo way” in skill building again. I am simply too old, and maybe too exhausted; I want to play uo and not grind skills forever to do the things ingame I want to do. UO store gives me two possibilities: First the well-known “Mythic Character Token”, that allows a given character to choose five skills that can be set to be 90 skill level; or the so-called “Deluxe Starter Package”, with the following content: A token for a one week period of accelerated skill gain (corresponding to the accelerated skill gain you get in New Haven or with a scroll of alacrity for 15 minutes: The rate of skill gains remains the same, but instead getting a mere 0,1 percent gain, you will note a random number between 0,2 to 0,5 skill gain at one skill gain event); a full medable “armor of the journeyman”, blessed, with especially nice mods for spell casting (100% lrc, full 70 resist, 30 lmc, stat boost etc.); two runic atlas’ with important land marks; a token for 100 Blackthorn Dungeon points (= getting a Crimson Cincture or a Conjurer’s Garb or two Mace and Shield Reading Glasses for free!); a token for 500 000 community points (for either Britain library, Moonglow zoo or Vesper museum, that is only 50 000 points behind usefull rewards) and other goodies (full set of full spellbooks, except for spellweaving, and others). It costs 2000 souvereigns. The mythic character token, on the other hand, costs 2500 souvereigns, and although it allows you to instantly set five skills to 90, you get nothing on your hand to start right away (what can you do with a naked char with five 90 skills?). Therefore, to start completely new on a shard, you will also need a character transfer (costs 2000 souvereigns) to be really able to do something. Since the flexibility was best with the “Deluxe Starter Package”, I decided to give it try, although I have a “normal” live with a demanding job, family etc., so I had to face the fact that I most probably would not get all I might get out of a 24/7 playing otherwise.
What I did in preparation was the following: I would try to build up as many skills I find a “must have” as possible. Since the “room for skills” on a char is limited to 720 skill points, I needed toons that had to take over skills; to do so, I needed a soulstone to switch skills between toons. You can get one by using veteran reward points, but I decided that these are too precious and chose to take a soulstone from UO store for another 1000 souvereigns. Then my “skill capture toons” should not only take already worked skills; instead, they should come with two good skills set to 50 already. I would switch them to my skill-building toon and work them further. Concerning other skills you can buy most skills in New Haven to 40 to start with. Another very important helper is “UO Assist” (I play CC) for macro building, and you should be familiar with the “Satyr trick” (Satyr is found in Despise Tram or Twisted Weald, Ilshenar). If you search stratics for “Satyr trick” you will find it. And, of course, you should know all those skill building guides they offer on various pages! This is most important, since you have to know how to build a certain skill. Furthermore, you should make up your mind concerning getting the skill limit to a certain level with power scrolls. If you want to switch them between toons, both toons need the same scroll; transferring a 110 skill to a toon with only 100 skill limit will not be possible.
Now what skills should be chosen to work? Obviously, there are “good” skills for this setup, and also bad ones.
Starting with the bad ones, there are the “crafter skills”, since they consume resources you either have to grind or to buy in large amounts. Since you only get 100 000 gold on your account in the start, buying resources is not an option, and you don’t have the time to farm them or to farm the gold to buy them. Therefore I decided that the classic crafter skills blacksmithing, tailoring, carpentry, alchemy and bowcrafting would not be my aim.
However, there are “good” crafting skills that do not consume many resources: tinkering, for example, since you can build it by crafting items that consume merely 1 ingot (and on a failed attempt even nothing). Also inscription and cartography (if you want to name it a crafting skill), since they just use blank scrolls you can purchase for low amounts of money. Furthermore, tinkering is a core skill in uo: If you want to train lockpicking, you not only need hundreds of lockpicks that you have to craft with tinkering, you need also crates with locks of a certain difficulty to lockpick them. If you take 30 carpentry and have 90 tinkering and build a crate, this crate will come with a lock of a difficulty of 90 (regarding lockpicking), so to build up your lockpick skill, you also have to choose your steps wisely in making crates during building up your tinker skill (I had a 60, 70, 80 and 90 tinkering skill crate in advance of lockpicking). Also, any other tool you need is crafted with tinkering (e.g. shovel à mining, you need the ingots!; saw à carpentry: you need the crates!; map makers pen etc. etc.). And furthermore, you can build the good ole golem as a tinker! Also, like the locks of the crates, the skill level of the golem is related to the tinker skill of his maker. I made a golem with 90 tinker skill what seemed to be a good choice later on.
Concerning the remaining “bad skills” not to choose to build up were all those who need targets and/or are time consuming (e.g. animal taming or discordance). “Good” skills are those that can be easily macroed (all spell casting stuff). A “bad skill” might also be spellweaving, since you have to do a time consuming quest and get the spells needed for casting by either buying them or hunting ML monsters like troglodytes (with a bad drop chance for a spell scroll). Also weapon skills are difficult; since you will not be able to use the “standard powergaming protocols” like bashing arctic ogre lords (you need spellweaving to do so) or wolf spiders (you need taming and animal lore skill to control them if you can buy them, if they are not for sale you have to tame them yourself with even more demand for fully developed characters), the only way would be to raise the skill by hunting mobs what is very time consuming. So weapon skills in this context might be a bad choice either.
Furthermore, the question “good/bad skills” is related to your playstyle and what types of characters you want to have in the end.
Most usefull templates (besides of pure mules) to my consideration are the following ones:
- Sampire: weapon skill, tacs, bushido, parry, resist spells, anatomy, chivalry, necro) – just the list of skills you will find in most Sampire builds.
- Tamer: taming, animal lore, vet, magery, and some other skills: eval int, med, bard skills (music and disco, or maybe music and peace), spellweaving, chivalry
- Mages: Pure or preferable mixed with mysticism (120 myst/120 focus) and/or spellweaving (120)
- Treasure hunter with core skills cartography and lockpicking, also mining
- Stealth char with hiding, stealth, ninjitsu, magery
This gave the list I tried to work up in one week.
With the accelerated skill gain, you should always aim at working more than one skill at a time. You can do macros that e.g. combine lockpicking and spellcasting. Magery, eval int and meditation raise together (remember that you can accelerate magery gains further by equipping a spell channel/mage weapon like wands you find in low level treasure chests, e.g. found in banks). I got the following results after finishing my week, assuming that if you would chose more cleverly or combine things better you might get even better results. Another disclaimer concerns Drachenfels as a shard: You don’t get power scrolls there! No wrestling, focus, magery, eval int, magic resist, parry, meditation, not even 110 ones! The only 120 scroll I found was a musicianship scroll. Also no spellweaving spell scrolls. The latter circumstance lead to a frustrated adventurer beating trogs, however in hours of lost gameplay not getting a single spell scroll.
But coming to results: After one week I had
- Magery: 3 x 100 (starting from 40), not possible to raise further, due to the lack of power scrolls
- Meditation: 3 x 100 (starting from 0)
- Eval Int: 2 x 100 (starting from 40)
- Animal Taming: 1 x 90 (starting from 50) (couldn’t resist, I love tamers! 90 skill is sufficient for control chances since you can add 2 + 15 jewels to get to 120 fully scrolled, but also 110 taming and lore will give you 99% chance controlling a cu/greater dragon etc.; furthermore, at 90 real skill you can use the taming mastery for much easier skill gains)
- Animal Lore: 1 x 110 (starting from 0)
- Mining: 92 (starting from about 30)
- Tinkering: 96 (starting from 50)
- Cartography 88 (starting from 50)
- Lockpicking 100 (starting from 50)
- Wrestling: 1x 100 (starting from 40, worked all with a tinkered golem at 90 tinker skill; concerning the golem: you need gears (buy at a tinker NPC), clockwork assembly and power crystals (get them as loot from Exodus Overseer or Exodus Minions in Ilshenar doing the spellweaving quest “patience”), iron and bronze ingots (get them from working your mining skill) to build it; also, since you damage your golem with wrestling, you will need to have bronze ingots/tinker toolkit in your backpack and high tinker skill to repair the golem from time to time)
- Parry: 1 x 100
- Magic resist: 2 x 100
- Bushido: 1 x 105
- Hiding: 1 x 100
- Stealth: 1 x 80 (sufficient for a stealth char in full leather)
- Ninjitsu: 1 x 90 (sufficient for animal form and shadow jump)
- Musicianship: 1 x 110
- Necro: 1 x 100
- Spirit Speak: 1 x 100
- Mysticism: 1 x 110 (luckily got a power scroll in this case)
- Focus: 1 x 100
- Spellweaving: 1 x 68 (no further skillgain possible since I didn’t have the spells, found a single “reaper form” on a vendor)
- Sword: 75 (needed weapon skill to train bushido with lightning strike)
- Cooking: 55
- Fishing: 50
Resume:
I find it to be a very rewarding list allowing a lot of functional templates even at this stage: Tamer can bond and control cu sidhe and other high level pets; Mages (with the exception of spellweaving) are functional if relying on mysticism as major skill (Magery with 100 is not functional at all!); with some effort and the help of Satyrs I will get cartography to 100 and therefore can do any treasure map; and for a sampire I have a nice “starter kit” of 100 parry, 100 magic resist, 105 bushido, 100 necro, and 75 sword. Overall, I got a free “crimson”
. The only thing that might be buffed is the amount of gold you get to start. In these days, 100 000 gp are nothing, and it doesn’t relate to the 100 blackthorn points you get (value on Atlantic 30 Million gp). I would suggest 1 Mio gp for your start on a shard, since you are in real demand for anything: Power Scrolls, Spellcasting stuff, new armor and jewels, weapons, and above all resources.So, to me, this is a good and fair product that helped me a lot. With some more preparation I would have decided to GM peacemaking, since this would allow you to do the bard mastery quest and get the books of masteries (none available from vendors on Drachenfels). Please feel free to add any comment or recommendation you may have.
Regards, Fizzle
