Making useless skills useful.

I'm all for keeping this shard as true to OSI used to be. I love that the skill cap is 700, that spells require reagents, that there isn't Blaze ore (though, I personally wouldn't mind a few more normal colours), that there are no skill stones, etc.

I, personally, feel that there are a couple skills that could be tweaked a little bit to make them useful. I have some ideas for some, but others, I'm at a loss to.

I'll list the skills I think are useless in current form, and the ones I think I have ideas for I'll put beside the skill.

Arms Lore: It has little use as is. I was thinking of adding a secondary ability to it, and maybe changing the name of the skill to something like Surveying or something. The secondary property of the skill would be something like increasing the amount of ore/lumber yielded when mining/chopping. Maybe even up the amount harvested from farming. Any other suggestions are welcome, just keep in mind that skills should be balanced so that they are not REQUIRED by certain templates, but could be worth giving 100 skill points to.

Begging: Make a passive ability to this one as well. Make it so you recieve more gold from monsters you kill, and maybe (I don't know if it'd be balanced if added) give a small chance for an extra magic item.

Cooking: Make it so that food can boost stats/skills temporarily for a while, and give certain advantages PvM wise. Make food made by chefs also more useful to Pets, so that their stats can be boosted as well.

Forensics: I was thinking of a passive ability along the lines of Arms Lore (or Surveying, if it does get edited) except for carving corpses for raw resources.

Herding: I think this can be used to up the available follower slots and stable space. Not sure what else...

Item ID: Maybe change this skills so that theres a chance that things are passively IDed when you first see them. I really don't know much use for this skill, besides that.

Camping: Make it so that when a camp is set up, you regenerate your health/mana/stam faster (as long as no combat is going on, of course) and the stats of all those in your party as well. Maybe make a very slight boost to normal regeneration at high levels (master/GM). That way, for PvMers, healing wouldn't be as required, and would have alternatives.

Detect Hidden: ? No ideas. :/

Taste ID: Maybe bonuses to other potions besides explosion; G-Heal does more, G-Cure has a better chance of curing, Night Sight lasts longer maybe makes you better able to see hidden people or what not, STR and AGI pots last longer, Refresh keeps you at full Stam for a short burst. Maybe allow it to craft some new potions; AR boosting potion, Regen potion... I'm up for hearing ideas on this too...

Wrestling: I've always wanted gauntlets to do wrestling damage. I don't know if this really needs to be tweaked, but meh.

Discordance: I really think this music skill could be tweaked to help parties out a lot when monster hunting, maybe make any party members harder to hit, etc.

That's about all I have at the moment, please feel free to add.

~Niniux

Almost forgot: anyone have any ideas for Spirit Speak?

i dont think this is for raist to change, if anyone, its for RUO devs

Begging--- Thats just silly. Lol. "PLEASE! PLEASE GIVE ME MORE GOLD, OR I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL BE NICE! HONEST! i WONT KILL YOU IF YOU JUST GIVE ME MORE GOLD!! *Monster gives more gold* *Player swipes a blade a few times, kills him, then rides away* THANK YOU!

Cooking-- Hmm... well you could make it kinda like fishing... when you make bread for example, theres a certain chance you could make some rare bread... like the small fish you can fish up from the sea, or even big fish. That's actually a damn good idea. Im surprised no one thought of that sooner.

Forsenics-- Hmm.. You could pair it with the anatomy skill, and if you have 95.0 - 100.0 in both skills, there's a chance you could carve up more meat and hides from the corpse you cut up, but only a chance.

Camping -- Yeah something like that would be cool... could be used in PvP wars too actually, even though Acropolis doesn't have many of those. :P

Taste ID-- Yeah, either that, or make the food you eat fill you up more.

Wrestling-- You would have to go over the hardcode and make a new weapon skill for the script. Definently not an easy thing to do, and even if it were considered by Majere, I doubt you'll see it anytime soon.

Well, I was thinking of ways to make the skills more useful. I mean, sure, Begging obviously wouldn't work on a monster, but I just thought it could have a passive bonus like luck. Or maybe, Beggars would be able to find more of value on a corpse, than the average warrior.

Making food fill you up more really isn't that useful. And the wrestling part, I don't really care about, I just think that it sucks as is. If we were going to make a new weapon skill, I'd say change it so all the pole arms are in one weapon skill, and so that swords are just swords. But I don't think that's a good idea to do to this shard.

Name changes for some of the skills could be appropriate too, if the use of the skill changes drastically.

What your askin is that the game be turned into UO: Age of Shadows. I too agree with you that some skills should get a significant boost in their use, but nothing to do with temporarily increased stats or loot of monsters...

But the difference between what I want and what AoS is is the emphasis is placed on players skills still, rather than items. It's not items that add these advantages, it's the skills you actually have to use in your template.

The game becoming item based is what ruined AoS.

Trust me, I am probably one of the most vehemently against AoS here, since it pretty much f-ed my favourite game up.

Most of these ideas are very possible for ME to do. I will look over it more soon as I get more time. I do like SOME of what I read so far and might even use some of these ideas, but I will be keeping everything balanced and close to UO:R. No promises!

Thanks a lot for looking this over. I know you have a lot on your plate as is

Hell I'll help him chew it if it's a steak