UOAlive Reporter Y
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Welcome to Odd Builds. This is by no means a fully formed build or the best of the best but is here to help me remember what I'm doing and hopefully inspire you all to make your own weird builds or improve on mine. It will also be a cheap build so good for new players to start building gold before moving onto anything more expensive or tough to play. I'm also not claiming these builds to be my own; other players have probably done much better versions, I'm simply making these guides so they can be found easily.
Horrific Beast Wrestler
The idea of this is to make use of the HP regen from the Horrific Beast form in necromancy. HP Regen is capped at 18 in UO but Horrific Beast gives 20 HP regen so you can ignore that on your gear. You can go two ways with this build; full melee or spellcaster. The beauty of being a necromancer is that you can also use wraith form to cast recall with 0 magery skill. The basics of the build are as below:Horrific Beast Wrestler
Wrestling, anatomy and tactics are of course there as your damage dealing skills. Wrestling is the ideal "weapon" skill for this build as Horrific Beast gives both a +25% melee damage increase and also increased base hand damage (5- 15 instead of 1 - 6). You can substitute another weapon skill here if you like as you will be gaining more properties on a weapon but the joy of this build is seeing a giant blue monster punching things into oblivion. Another thing to bear in mind is that holding a spellbook in your hand can give attributes but still counts as wrestling. This is also the case with fishing rods I believe (potentially anything without a weapon skill attached?) so although they would be less powerful than a fully imbued weapon, it can still add to your build.
Healing has been put on as an extra safety net in case the HP regen isn't enough. This is particularly the case against fast, hard hitting monsters.
Necromancy is of course required for turning into a Horrific Beast. It has a minimum skill of 40 so you may only want to take it to that if you're going down the melee route. If you're going the spellcasting route you'll want to take it higher and also put in spirit speak. Spirit speak is not required if you're going full melee.
Before I go into the two different paths, I need to explain one unique factor; magic focus. This is different to casting focus. Magic focus means you only have skills relating to one 'magic' school. It's a little off as parrying and taming count as 'magic' for these purposes. Full details can be found here. Basically though, if you are a focused necromancer with no of the conflicting skills listed on that page, you can cast necromancy spells whilst transformed into a Horrific Beast, something you can't usually do.
Melee
If you're going down the melee route you may wish to drop necro to 40 and keep some jewels on hand with +necro so you don't fizzle too much when transforming. Any of the melee skills you may take (Parry, Bushido, Chivalry, Ninjitsu) will take your build away from being focused so you will no longer be able to cast anything while transformed. Note you can carry a shield even if you don't take parry and still get the extra stats from it, you just won't get the parry chance. I haven't tried it yet but am tempted to give ninjitsu a go as I can imagine it will be quite fun to see a huge blue beast suddenly disappear then pop up behind an unsuspecting mob and punch it from behind! If you go the melee route you can drop Spirit Speak.
Spellcaster
Spellcaster route means keeping 100 necro and 100 spirit speak to take advantage of your other necro spells. Wither can be spammed while your HP regen keeps you alive and spirit speak is yet another healing safety net. Inscription can give you some extra SDI or you could take meditation to help with your mana regen. Again, remember you can equip your spellbook and still be classed as wrestling so make sure you to get one with good properties to increase your spell damage and mana management. If you're going this route remember to lock your karma at an ankh so you don't gain when killing things. Lower karma will make your necromancy skills more powerful.
Other
If you don't wish to take extra melee or spellcasting skills you could add in alchemy and poisoning (still a focused build), barding skills (no longer a focused build), animal taming and lore (no longer focused) or anything else that takes your fancy. Or you can take the skills higher than 100.
Mastery
Take whichever mastery you fancy, however I personally like the Wrestling mastery. Might as well stick with a theme! First of all it gives a passive that gives a further damage increase to each hit based on your mastery level. You also have the following active skills:
Rampage - you continually attempt to hit your opponent and if successful gain a bonus to HP regen (not needed here), stamina regen, casting focus and swing speed increase. This is based on wrestling skill, anatomy or evaluating intelligence skill and mastery level. If you miss, your attack is parried or your spell fizzles the bonus is lost.
Fists of Fury - Attempt to land 3 hits in rapid succession to the next target that damages you within a 2 tile radius. If successful the third hit will deal direct damage based on your mastery level. The duration of this ability is based on wrestling skill and anatomy or evaluating intelligence skill.
Gear
Gear will be a personal preference for most and of course depend on which build you're going for. While playing as more of a spellcaster I favoured lower reagent cost, lower mana cost, HP increase and full resists. I also put stamina increase on to help with swing speed. I use a shield even though I have no parrying to gain a few extra bonuses (defence chance increase and reflect damage on my current one). My jewellery has dexterity, hit chance increase, damage increase, defence chance increase and faster casting on. You may wish to put some faster casting recovery on there. I also invested in Corgul's Handbook on the Undead.
For a melee version you can probably drop lower reagent cost. You'll only need reagents to transform which will only occasionally be on log in or if you die. If you've dropped your necro down to 40 you may wish to carry some rings that have +necro which you can equip when you wish to transform to mimise fizzling; these rings could also have lower reagent cost if you're happy to try a few times before it catches.
Personally for both builds I've gone for studded leather armour as it provides the maximum 'hidden' lower mana cost whilst still giving decent protection from stamina dropping when being hit. Again though this is personal choice.
Stats
Again very personal but you'll probably want to aim for max swing speed so dexterity will want to be high. Dexterity will also help with your healing speed. With my gear I currently have 128 dex which gives me 1.25 swing speed and the fastest healing possible.
Strength will also be quite important as it increase your hit points but you may wish to drop or lower this based on your gear and your skill. Mine is at 88 but with my gear I have 149hp.
Intelligence will be more important if you're going down the spellcaster route and may need to be higher than a standard melee character as well due to no mana leech weapon. That said, mine is only at 40 with 60 mana.
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