Parrying

Parrying

The Parry skill is checked during combat to determine whether an attack can be fully blocked. Melee and archery attacks can be fully parried if the defender is using a Shield or Melee weapon. On a successful parry, the attacker will miss completely.

Formulas:

• Base % Chance of Blocking with a shield = Parrying Skill * 0.3
• Base % Chance of Blocking with a melee weapon = Parrying Skill * 0.15

Enhanced Parry System

Thanks to our wonderful developers, we have what is perhaps the largest change to UO Combat since Age of Shadows, our new Enhanced Parry System. It was put in place in order to address a few issues with the shard having no skill caps, which allowed people to use a wider range of abilities and templates.

Until now, players had the same ability to hit a lowly mongbat as they did a greater dragon, and in PvP the concerns were even worse! With no skillcap and the augment system things had gotten a bit out of hand, and the developers stepped in to create a brand new system that would better balance the server. In order to understand the way the new system works, I’ll first need to explain the old system.

Chance to Hit: This portion is fairly straight-forward and the formula was as follows: Hit Chance% = ( ( [Attacker's Combat Ability + 20] * [100% + Attacker's Hit Chance Increase] ) divided by ( [Defender's Combat Ability + 20] * [100% + Defender's Defense Chance Increase] * 2 ) ) * 100 Which boils down to this, equally footed opponents have a 50% chance to be hit.

Chance to Block: This is where it gets a bit tricky, because there are 3 different types of blocking Using a Shield uses this formula:

((Parrying - Bushido)/4) + (5% if Parry or Bushido is over 100)

So assuming with our server, a player had 300 parry (Very possible) they would have an 80% chance to parry an incoming attack, this combined with having only a 50% base hit chance made it very unlikely for a player to be hit in combat.

This caused the first issue. If you had both Parry and Bushido they actively worked against each other the very same character with 80% parry with just 100 Bushido would reduce his parry chance to 55% effectively penalizing them for having a skill trained.

It gets even trickier with not wearing a shield

Using a 2-handed Weapon (including a Bow) with no shield equipped ((Parry * 10)(Bushido * 10))/48000 (+5% if above 100)

Now let’s look at our 300 Parry individual again, he has made it to 120 bushido and has given up shields.

This gives us (3000 * 1200)/48000 (+5%) and he is magically back to 80% parry! And he gets the benefit of being able to use Perfection as well as Lightning Strike and Confidence and Evasion, and if he were to push bushido up just a small amount higher (via magical clothing or certain pieces of gear) just 20 more points of Bushido puts him at 92.5% parry chance!

UO Evolution spent a large amount of time setting up a system that would still scale well and provide tangible benefits to increasing your gear, without breaking the game and forcing the development to travel down an “Evade everything, or you get one-shot” mindset, while also allowing everyone to enjoy using Bushido without penalties to your abilities.

New System:

Full values are not currently known as Kane is still making small changes to the system to tune it for the shard, however the formulas are as follows and replace the chance to hit and chance to block formulas above.

(n represents a currently hidden number and all values of n are not necessarily equal)

Attackers have a Base Attack Score and Defenders have a Base Defense Score

BAS = (Combat Skill * n%) + (Anatomy * n%) + (Tactics * n%) + (Focus * n%)

BDS (Parry) = (Parry * ShieldArmorRating * n%) + (Tactics * n%) + (Focus * n%)

BDS (Bushido) = (Bushido * WeaponTypeScore * n%) + (Tactics * n%) + (Focus * n%)

ShieldArmorRating is the old AoS armor score for shields. Based on the base type of shield equipped (e.g. Mirror Shield is a Bronze Shield) and WeaponTypeScore merely decides between one-handed and two-handed weapons for Bushido.

Thanks to the new system, it no longer matters which skills you have, the score that is used is determined by what you have equipped. If you have a shield equipped it will always use the Parry formula, if you have a one-handed or two-handed melee weapon equipped it will use the Bushido formula. Do note, however, that if you are unarmed or have a ranged weapon equipped without a shield, you will have a defense score of zero.

Did I also mention that he was able to do all this while keeping the power level of the players relatively untouched?

This will allow the shard to move forward and have more engaging events and encounters, and help combat the “power creep” that plagues most free shards today, while still rewarding characters for achieving incremental upgrades in their gear and skill. Now all players can utilize the powerful and useful Bushido abilities without taking drastic penalties to their ability to block and/or parry, as well as new players can use Bushido to assist in their survivability until they can obtain one-handed deeds and migrate to the Parry system.