Melee on Sanctum adds an additional level of diversity and control to combat.
Melee Mechanics:
The Violent Swing:
Melee players may execute a “violent swing” that if it lands will deliver additional damage to the opponent. It consumes 20 stamina to utilize and has a scaling cooldown dependent upon the user’s intelligence. The higher the player’s intelligence, the longer the cooldown.
In-Game Command: [violentswing
Note: Requires minimum of 50 anatomy and tactics to utilize.
The Toxic Strike:
Players with the poisoning skill are able to execute a “toxic strike” that enables the next melee hit that lands upon an opponent to guarantee poison is discharged from their weapon if that weapon has poison charges remaining on the blade. The higher a player’s poisoning skill, the more frequently they are able to use the ability.
In-Game Command: [toxicstrike
Note: Requires minimum of 20 poisoning to utilize.
Weapon Types:
Archery:
- The rate at which a player is able to fire a bow or crossbow upon equipping or stopping movement is dependent upon their dexterity; the higher a player’s dexterity, the more rapidly they can fire. Conversely, the lower their dexterity the more notable the delay before firing will be.
- Bows and crossbows deal significant damage but are unable to execute violent swing damage boosts.
- New to Sanctum is something called “armor drain” that is primarily executed by various macing weapon types.Various macing weapons will exert temporary decreases to an opponent’s armor that are able to stack. As a fight progresses, a macers opponent will progressively take more damage with less armor to protect them.
- Certain weapons, such as the war mace and war hammer are able to drain more armor per swing than others. This is in addition to their unique property of draining additional stamina against opponents.
- Note: Armor drain will “expire” and armor will return to it’s full armor value after a short period of time without sustaining any other armor-draining blows. Armor still possesses durability values and will break over time after sustaining enough damage.
- Fencing weapons on Sanctum are quick and unpredictable. They carry the widest variance in damage output.
- They also carry unique benefits with regards to poison; they have an increase chance to discharge poisons from their blades if they have been poisoned and all fencing weapon types are able to be poisoned.
- Swords are the jack-of-all-trades when it comes to weapon classes. They continue to posses the heaviest hitting of all melee weapons in the halberd, a strong and steady one-hander in the broadsword and the fast, lethal and reliable katana. All of their one handed blades can also have poisons applied to them for added potency.
Armor and Damage Mitigation:
Previously in Ultima Online, damage mitigation was calculated based upon where your hit would randomly land (eg. arms, gorget, chest, etc.) and be based upon that piece. Our code has been restructured to simply consider your overall armor; we’ve made armor more useful and improved the ability for the player to determine how effective their armor is by simply glancing at their armor rating.
Note: Armor durability is however still determined and decreased based upon a random piece being “hit”.
Parrying:
Parrying no longer determines variation on a shield’s armor rating. The armor rating is static and will provide the same boost to anyone. Shields with greater armor ratings will have heavier dexterity loss consequences, and vice versa.
- Parrying skill now determines the chance for a player to parry a blow. Parrying a blow decreases the damage that blow inflicts.
- Players with parrying may also mitigate some of the damage done by spells against monsters.
Weapon Changes:
Ultima Online, in player vs. player combat, has traditionally only utilized a handful of weapons. The problem was that none of the other weapons had the same speed with damage output ratio as the others; there was a specified sweet-spot of sorts and nothing else would be as effective.
To compensate for this we’ve adjusted the values of all of these previously “useless” weapons to match that of their effective counterparts. If you’ve always wanted to utilize a scimitar or a club but didn’t want to handicap yourself, that time is over. The scimitar will be no different from a katana beyond the aesthetics; the club will be like the war axe.
Full list of weapon pairings:
