Patch 9 - 10/30/14 - Halloween Update

[Jack]

Halloween

The dead are rising from their graves and have been spotted in various places around Britannia, these are no ordinary monsters!

These monsters will prove a challenge for all character types, it will be no easier for a tamer or bard to down these creatures than it is for a warrior. Band together and fight the evil!

The respawn on these creatures is quite long, so you'll have to move around the world to find them. There are over 50 spawners - hint: they generally don't spawn in the lost lands.

The monsters will drop a special type of coin that is limited time. These coins will be removed from the world on November 5, so don't bother trying to save them! There will be a direct exchange rate from Holiday Coins to Gold, for those who need to exchange their last few coins.

Expect something special on Halloween!

A list of Halloween items will be found in the next comment of this post.

Housing

• The interior decoration tool will no longer function. They have been removed from vendors.
  
• You can now insta log when you have been aggressed. The 2 minute combat delay only applies to being an aggressor.
  
• Containers that are locked down, but not secure, can now be accessed by anyone.
  
• Fixed a problem with locking down containers that were full of items. Locking down a container no longer checks the total lockdown count against what is inside the container.
  
• When you destroy an add-on in your house, it will no longer return to your pack as a deed.
  

Loot

• The amount of reagents in treasure chests has been lowered.
  
• Ophidian avengers, ophidian matriarchs, terathan matriarchs and dragons now have better gold drops.
  

• Shipwrecked items should now give the correct description, for example: "a pillow recovered from a shipwreck". All previously fished up shipwrecked items will be automatically updated. Not all items pulled up from a shipwreck have this property.
  
• Various item descriptions fixed. Will have to take a closer look later.
  
• The max charges on clothing/jewelry has been reduced. Invisibility items will drop less often.
  
• Gnarled stave drops have been tweaked, they were dropping ID a bit too often.
  
• A more thorough look at what is dropping will be coming up. Loot tables in regards to vanquishing, etc, will likely be buffed.
  
• Fixed a bug with protection items giving a permanent boost to armor. Protection items will now only apply their effect if the virtual armor mod is 0. Jewellery overall needs a bit further looking into - fix the bouncing stats issue, add a cooldown to ring invis charges, etc.
  

AI Behaviour

• Monsters almost never cast heal now. They will only do it below 10% health. The fix last time was partially broken.
  
• Fixed a bug with tamed fire breathers not processing their attack target correctly.
  
• The chance for an tamed fire breather to acquire a target has been lowered slightly.
  
• Monsters will pick direct damage spells more often than before.
  
• The Evil Mage Lord will now immediately cast spells when it has a valid target.
  
• Giving a pet or hire a neutral order, will no longer have any effect on its combatant status. If the pet/hire is in combat, it will remain in combat.
  

Skills, Spells and Combat

• Your swing state can no longer advance when you do not have a combatant. eg: You can not go from "unable to swing" to "able to swing" unless you attack something. Although that may seem pointless (since you need a combatant to be able to swing), you receive a full delay on arming a weapon if you are unable to swing. Thus, it is a good idea to consider this while in combat.
  
• It is now a bit easier to get away with stealing things and not being noticed. The new calculation is based on the same factors as before, just a different calculation. The absolute minimum chance to not be noticed is roughly 75% with GM stealing (stealing 0-1 stones with nobody else around except the target). The chance to be caught also considers your stealing skill.
  

• Stealing can be witnessed by any human (player or NPC) within 10 tiles of the crime. The chance for someone who is not the target to notice, is one quarter that of the target's chance. The witness must be in LOS to notice, but LOS is not necessary to call guards. The range of the witness does not yet play a role (it will later). Any human within 10 tiles simply gives another check to be caught. This is non compounding, so even with 100 humans in range, you would still have an extremely small chance to not be noticed.
  
• A bug has been fixed with the curse spell. It now correctly applies when casted by a monster.
  
• Removed a debug message from meditation that was left in during panic after a server crash.
  

Misc

• An option has been added to the MOTD to disable it on login.
  
• Removed poison immunity messages from blade spirits and energy vortexes. They still trigger poison immunity messages on other mobs.
  
• The Ancient Wyrm occasionally reflects spells back at the caster.
  
• The messages you receive when asking NPCs to train you, are now a lot tidier.
  
• When you add items to player vendors, the item description should now be correct.
  
• Dismounting a horse or opening your paperdoll now count as an action. Yipee!
  

[Jack]

Obtainable with Holiday Coins:

Convert to Platinum

You can convert holiday coins to platinum. 100 coins buys one platinum.

Convert to Gold

You can convert holiday coins to gold. 1 coin buys 50 gold.

Hair Restyle Deed

Get a haircut. You can restyle to any hair you wish. The deed does not need to be used immediately and can be saved. Costs 500 holiday coins.

Clothing Bless Deed

You can bless an item of clothing with a clothing bless deed. It is single use only. You do not have to use the deed immediately. Clothing bless deeds cost 750 holiday coins.

Single Use Sandal Dyes

You can dye your sandals a special colour. These use the "special dye tub" hues, not the bright colours that come with regular dye tubs. The tub will be deleted after use. If you wish to see what the colours look like before committing to a particular colour, I can help you out. Single Use Sandal Dyes cost 2000 holiday coins.

You can cash these coins in through the Reward Stone, which is through the moongate in the guard tower by West Britain Bank.

[Talia]

Nice, tyvm!

[Blaise]

Nice work on the patch. For future reference, I would think some more variety in the holiday spawn would be more accommodating to actual UO players, not just Razor-macro-trained vets. Especially considering the majority of characters on the shard right now should be newbies.


I had a kind fellow help me with one of the mobs but it's really pointless for me to even consider any of the holiday items a goal if I'm going to need babysitters for every mob.

[Baron]

Here is a tool you can use to view the special dye tub hues on sandals:

Outfit Creator

Violet 1230-1235

Tan 1501-1508

Brown 2012-2017

Dark Blue 1303-1308

Forest Green 1420-1426

Pink 1619-1626

Red 1640-1644

Olive 2001-2005

[Blaise]

I caved. Creager set me up like a boss so now the machine has taken over and I'm training up while I work....I mean "work".





Thanks all and look forward to more good times this evening perhaps.

[Jack]

Blaise: Duly noted. I spent the entire time thinking of the event from an established character's perspective and how balancing how many coins could be made per hour by what character type... that was already established. In future I will try my best to make the holiday fun accessible to all.

[Grimoric]

Voilet




Brown




Olive




Red




Tan




Dark Blue




Forest Green




Pink

[Jack]

Thanks Grim, that's great


The top linked picture has an error, it says that uoguide does not allow external linking. It may not appear that way to you if you have it cached. I uploaded the original image to imgur and changed the link.