Is a manaless warrior playable now?

Rock

I started playing when the only magic was Magery. A warrior typically had a 7x GM build (700 was the overall skill cap, and 100 the cap for individual skills). Six of the skills were pretty-much boilerplate:

100: <weapon>, tactics
100: anatomy, healing
100: parry, resist

This left 100 points for some flexibility.  An archer, for example, might go 60 Lumberjacking + 40 Fletching so that he could source his own arrows and bolts. Or if he was patient and felt the need to Recall, 30 Lumberjacking + 30 Fletching + 40 magery.  "Tank mages" also marrying a mage build with a warrior one. For that, Anatomy and Healing would generally be replaced with Magery and Eval, with Meditation filling in the 7th slot. (Focus did not exist at the time).

Back to the now, how playable would that boilerplate be as a 6x 120 build? You're intelligence could be quite low. I think weapon special moves require between 20 to 40 mana, so one could get away with 30 Int and depend on int-bonus jewelry, etc to got to 40 or more.

Are runebooks charged with Recall scrolls be used by non-humans? With JOAT, humans have an effective magery of 20 even with 0 actual skill.  IIRC, the reason charged runebooks worked, depended on this JOAT benefit plus using a scroll lowered the magery requirements of a spell by 20. I'm guessing this has been changed now so that any race, even with no magery, can use charges in their spell books. (This question is a cheat I think, because in the really old days, rune books could not be charged. I cannot remember if charged runebooks came first, or JOAT-less elves.)

Deraj

It may depend on what you want to do with a character, but when it comes to PvM special moves are essential for being effective. Even if you were to dump everything into damage increase and damage modifier and have a wide assortment of elemental weapons, you will still miss out on a ton of damage from not using moves like armor ignore or double strike.

Regarding runebooks, magery is no longer required to use a charge.

Rock

Deraj, thank you.  It occurs to me that archers and throwers don't need Parry.  They could maintain a magicless build, but replace that skill with Focus. True, it would no longer be a manaless build, but he'd have a steady supply of power for special moves. And the power for those moves would not be competing with Chivalry or Bushido.

Deraj

Yes, it is possible to have a template without bushido or chivalry and be effective, it's just a little harder because you would need slayers to improve your damage modifier to be the most effective (this is where bushido and chivalry help generally). But even without slayers, you can expect to pull out around 50 or so damage per hit roughly with armor ignore, and maybe more with double strike if the enemy has low resist.

I would recommend against having focus on a warrior, it's not really worth 100 points and the benefits it provides can easily be gained from armor. What you should look at especially for a non-magic warrior build are certain skills that will lower the mana cost of special moves, if they suit you. From the UO Wiki:

The Mana Cost of each special move can be reduced if the warrior’s skills are high enough. Add up the skill points for Swords, Mace Fighting, Fencing, Archery, Parrying, Lumberjacking, Stealth, Poisoning, Bushido and Ninjitsu. If the total lies between 200 and 299, subtract 5 from the Mana Cost. If the total is 300 or more, subtract 10 from the Mana Cost.

Bruce

I play my ninja in dog form most of the time, and in that form he's not allowed to use imagery, or taming, or special moves. But, he has got crazy amounts of health regeneration, so my gear for him is built around that.

I generally use a slayer dagger, and pin prick everything to death while tanking whatever damage my opponent puts out.

He's got high parrying and resist also.