The Harvester Blade is a tool that just sits in your backpack. Not some deco for your home to display. Or a weapon plus armor to strut around Luna bank with. Sure it can be imbued and used but a GM piece can be imbued better for a dexer if they desire that weapon type. And if some mage mule wants to use it. They wont be tackling anything big. And what they would kill for gathering their blue beetle could do faster.
I agree with keeping deco,weapons and armor rare. There is enough other chioces out there or crafted items that noone is left out. The Harvest Blade is a usefull tool period. The extra few leather,meat and feathers wont tilt the game. I have a load of blades and will see what they go for on vendors and under cut those prices to open locks. The only reason I have so many was a byproduct of trying to get one Harrow. Didn't happen oh well hope the blades balance the cost.
For those that only read U.Hall, and don't know what the tool does, that Warpig is talking about... A repost from UO Craftsman...
The Harvester's Blade is a 2-handed weapon gained from turning in a plucked turkey (random rare turkey kill, or destruction of giant turkey egg, drop) to a butcher in any of the Trammel cities (possibly other facets - not tested).
- The weapon in all respects appears to be a specially-colored Elven Spellblade (fencing weapon, STR requirement 35, two-handed, weight 5 stone).
- The weapon has Spell Channeling with no Faster Casting penalty, but no other mods. They can be imbued with other mods, nut are best used as a tool in your backpack.
- For its "Harvester" role, it can be kept in the backpack - it does not need to be Wielded (just like the Butcher's War Cleaver - The Skinning Knife has to be wielded to be used for cutting corpse for cut leather).
- With the coding of the Harvester's Blade, the long standing "63 item" and "350-ish stone weight" bugs that left cut leather in corpses from the Butcher's War Cleaver and Skinning Knife were finally fixed as well - however, this means you can now put yourself overweight using these tools.
- Unlike the other tools, it harvests ALL of the following, if present from carving the corpse: Meat (ribs, raw birds, etc. not yet tested on fish), Dragon Blood, Scales, Feathers, Leather (as cut leather).
- Not only does it gather all of these directly into your pack, it also gives a 10% bonus to the amount for ALL items harvested - not just the leather. This means that a dragon will give 8 scales, 22 leather (if the blade user is an Elf or Gargoyle), and 10% more Dragon's blood and meat.
- Humans get that bonus on top of their normal bonus, which means that the bonus can be greater than a simple +20% (+10% from being human, +10% from the blade), for the following reason...
---The 10% bonus for humans is +1 leather per 10 leather, or fraction thereof (be it 1, 9 or anything in between). So, 10 becomes 11, 12 becomes 14, etc.
---The 10% bonus from the blade works the same way.
---In the hands of a human, the blade actually uses the HUMAN base for the blade's 10% bonus, so that a Greater Dragon (which gives a base 30 leather) gives 37 leather, not 36. 30 gets +3 from being human, then +4 (+3 from the 30, and +1 more from the 3) from the blade.
Needless to say, this reinforces previous determinations that leather-gathering characters should be human (from the bonus, plus the Strong Back weight allowance), as not only will humans get even more of an edge, the Strong Back attribute will provide better safety margins when dealing with the usually unwanted meat popping into the pack (not to mention Dragon's blood, which you may need for a Mysticism caster, but typically you won't be after when hunting for leather).