Luck

[Steel DarKnight]

Noticed this on a UO "news-sight" I review occasionally. Credit to "Orion" for researching this issue.

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So, in my previous post I thought going out and killing a couple hundred liches would solve the question about luck. Guess what I did today? I went out and did just that.

Wearing gold armour that increased my luck to 338 I went out and slayed 100 liches. Those 100 liches gave me 36 enhanced items, 1 lvl 3 tmap, and 21,265gp.

Wearing a mix match set of armour (to get high energy and fire resist) that gave me no luck, I again went out and slayed 100 liches. These liches gave me 36 enhanced items, 2 lvl 3 tmaps, and 22,873gp.

I sure didn't expect exactly the same number of items dropping (ignoring tmaps), but it sure helped make a point. As I killed each list I made a note of what it dropped, such as "Chainmail Tunic - HP Increase 1, Luck 47" and "Basicnet - Mana Increase 4, Mana Regen 1, Luck 60, Lower Reagent Cost 11%".

From that information I can quickly see that the items dropped while I had 338 luck, had in general higher modifier properties, than those that dropped while I had 0 luck.

I'm putting all the information from the 200 kills into a table right now, and then I'll be using a basic formula I came up with to assign a base value to each set of items, in hopes to see just how much luck increases the 'phat lewt'.

So to summarize this information.

1. Luck just increases the modifiers on items dropped by monsters.

2. Luck does not increase the frequency or the number of items dropped by monsters.

3. Luck does not increase the amount of gold dropped by monsters.

4. Apparently it does not help you stay alive to the torrent of flamestrikes from five liches (even with 49 fire resist!).

I hope this helps everyone understand a bit more on how luck works in UO.

Update: Just a couple more points.

5. Luck doesn't seem to increase the drop of tmaps on monsters.

6. Luck does not increase the items given, or their properties found in treasure chests from either Treasure Maps or SOS's.

Update 2: And another point.

7. Luck is spread out in a group. So if you have a group of two guys, one with 900 luck, and one with 0, the game would treat it as if they each had 450 luck (more or less). In otherwords, it takes the middle ground (thanks Mitar).