Would boxing gloves be a good idea?

RockRock Posts: 567
edited May 2018 in General Discussions
I'm sitting here running my 10-repeat EC training macro.  It occurs to me there are 3 spells Dame Death cannot use.
  1. Curse Weapon (Necromancy)
  2. Enchant (Mysticism)
  3. Immolating Weapon (Spell Weaving)
Her template includes 100 Wrestling, but those 3 skills require a weapon to be armed.  So one thing I'm thinking about is to have her forgo Wrestling and pursue Mace Fighting instead.

... But the other thing I'm thinking is why not add boxing gloves to the game as a Wrestling "weapon"?   They would simultaneously act as both a weapon and hand armor.  Brainstorming, these might be the relevant points:
  1. tailor-crafted (maybe 2 leather 4 cloth, and 2 bark fragments).  Since this would be the only weapon craftable by tailors, exceptional quality would add 15 points of random resists, not damage increase.  Arms Lore would add its normal 5 random resists (or less, depending on skill).  Using colored leather would add the resist properties of each leather, and spined leather would add its typical 40 Luck as well.  The base resists for boxing gloves would be 2/4/3/3/3, the same as normal leather gloves. They would be meddable just as leather and cloth armor are.
  2. Boxing gloves would not spawn as loot.  They must be crafted.
  3. Boxing gloves could be imbued with the normal set of available weapon properties.
  4. A character wearing boxing gloves would have all his resist caps increased by 5, but those points above the normal cap must be present on the gloves. E.g., if your character had 73 fire resist from everything else, that cap would remain at 70.  Only what fire resist is present on the gloves could be counted beyond 70.
  5. They would be disarm-able in battle. A disarmed character would continue to Wrestle unabated; he just wouldn't be wearing the gloves. Of course part of his damage resistance will be lost as well, but that would be a trade-off for using something simultaneously as weapon and armor.
  6. Since they are a wrestling "weapon", boxing glove special moves would remain Disarm and Paralyzing Blow.
  7. reduce normal Wrestling damage by 20% (i.e. Damage Increase (DI) of -20%), although a hit would still do at least one point of damage.  This reduction would not affect the extra damage from Immolating Weapon and Enchant, nor from any other special attacks (from other spell books and special moves).  Also the life drain from Curse Weapon would continue to be scaled to damage done.  The UO Wiki lists base wrestling damage as 1-6 normal, and 5-15 for the necro Horrific Beast form.  The -20% applies to both. Horrific Beasters may wish to have their gloves imbued with +20% DI, undoing the nerf.  Imbued DI for gloves would be capped at 20%, to prevent gloves from doing more than normal damage, although DI from other sources (rings, etc) would still count.
  8. The slight damage reduction would help make them good sparring weapons.
  9. Spell books and boxing gloves could not be simultaneously armed. (The same as any other weapon.) Gloves and a shield would be mutually exclusive as well.  (The same as any other 2-handed weapon.)
These points end up extending the usefulness of boxing gloves above what I first envisioned.  I do not believer they would cause a game imbalance.  They would in fact contribute to the frequent call to give mages and other magic users a buff, bringing them just a little bit closer in effectiveness to a sampire build.  (Nothing would prevent even sampires from using wrestling gloves, except their life sapping is based on damage done, and they wouldn't be doing a whole lot of damage.)

What do you-all think? Any additional or counter ideas?
Rock (formerly Imperterritus VXt, Baja)
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