Weapons

Every melee and ranged weapon on UO Sagas belongs to one of four combat skills — Swordsmanship, Mace Fighting, Fencing or Archery. This page explains how damage, swing speed and hit chance are calculated, and lists the stats of every obtainable weapon. For how skills and stats fit together, see Skills Overview; for the perk trees built on top of the combat skills, see Skill Masteries.

How damage works

Each swing rolls the weapon's damage dice: a fixed base plus a handful of dice. A Longsword, for example, rolls 6 + 4d5 — a base of 6 plus four five-sided dice — for 10 to 26 damage ("4d5" means four dice with faces 1–5). Because several dice are added together, results cluster around the middle of the range: the extremes are rare, the average is dependable.

Every weapon is tuned to a shared damage-per-minute budget for its class (measured at 100 Stamina, before skill modifiers): one-handers land about 555 damage per minute, two-handers about 600, ranged weapons about 530, and utility side-arms (knives, tools, wands, crooks and the dagger) about 250. Fast weapons hit more often for less, slow weapons less often for more — pick the rhythm, not the raw number.

The base roll is then modified by your skills and stats:

Tactics and Anatomy gain passively while you fight — every hit is a chance to improve them.

Trade-skill damage bonuses

Four groups of weapons reward a matching trade skill with bonus damage:

• Lumberjacking — all axe-type weapons, including the hatchet and pickaxe. The war axe is the exception: despite the name it counts as a bashing weapon and takes the Mining bonus instead.
• Fletching — the regular bow only (not crossbows).
• Carpentry — wooden mace weapons: club, quarterstaff, gnarled staff, black staff, and the shepherd's and tamer's crooks.
• Mining — war axe and hammer pick.

How armor absorbs damage

The defender's suit blocks a share of every physical hit: the total armor rating is roughly the percentage of the damage absorbed (a 30-armor suit stops about 30% of each blow). Two limits apply:

• A single blow can never be absorbed by more points than the armor's rating — truly huge hits punch through even heavy plate.
• Total damage reduction is capped at 90%.

The Protection spell adds up to +10 armor at GM Magery (full duration against monsters, 60 seconds against players); it cannot be combined with Reactive Armor or Magic Reflect.

For what every armor line is worth, the dexterity and meditation costs, and shield stats, see Armor and Shields.

PvP damage

Against other players, weapon damage is reduced: the rolled damage is multiplied by 0.70, the trade-skill bonuses above are halved, and magic damage levels are halved. See PvP for the full picture.

Swing speed

Every weapon has a Speed rating (higher = faster). Your swing delay in seconds is:

delay = 15000 ÷ ((Stamina + 100) × Speed)

At 100 Stamina that works out to 75 ÷ Speed seconds — a Kryss (Speed 56) swings every ~1.3 seconds, a Halberd (Speed 24) every ~3.1 seconds. Keeping your Stamina up matters: the lower your Stamina drops, the slower you swing. Slow, hard-hitting weapons lose less from missing (each miss wastes a whole swing), while fast weapons apply poison and interrupt spellcasters more reliably.

Arms Lore swing bonus

The Arms Lore skill itself — no mastery required — passively speeds up your swings with every weapon, melee and ranged, against any opponent (PvM and PvP alike): the swing delay is reduced by 5% at 100 skill, scaling linearly from 0 up to 6% at 120.

Hit chance

Whether a swing lands is a contest between your weapon skill and the defender's:

chance = (your skill + 50) ÷ ((their skill + 50) × 2)

Two equally skilled fighters hit each other 50% of the time; a Grandmaster never misses a completely unskilled defender and still hits a half-trained one about 75% of the time. Creatures defend with Wrestling. Magic weapons with an accuracy modifier (Accurate up to Supremely Accurate) raise your hit chance by +2% to +10%.

Special weapon properties

• Mace weapons drain stamina — every mace-class hit drains 3–5 Stamina from the target, slowing their swings in return.
• Poisonable weapons — only the dagger, kryss and war fork can carry poison from the Poisoning skill. Each hit may consume a poison charge, with a chance to infect the target based on your Poisoning skill.
• Two-handed PvP specials — in PvP combat only, fighters with 75+ Dexterity and 80+ Anatomy have a chance at special blows with two-handed weapons: concussion blow (axes), crushing blow (maces, +50% damage) and paralyzing blow (spears). These never trigger against monsters.

Archery rules

• You must stand still for one second before you can fire — there is no shooting on the move.
• Shots consume arrows (bows) or bolts (crossbows) from your backpack or quiver.
• When you hit a monster, there is a 40% chance the ammunition survives and can be looted back from the corpse.
• Bows shoot up to 10 tiles, crossbows up to 8 tiles.

Weapon tables

Damage is the per-hit base roll before the modifiers above; Roll shows the dice behind it. Speed: higher = faster. Str is the Strength required to equip. Weapons marked utility are side-arms on the low (~250) damage-per-minute budget — tools and backup blades, not main weapons. All values are current live-server values.

Swordsmanship

	Weapon	Damage	Roll	Speed	Str	Hands	Crafted by	Notes
	Katana	7–19	4 + 3d5	54	10	1	Blacksmith
	Cutlass	9–18	6 + 3d4	52	10	1	Blacksmith
	Scimitar	9–18	6 + 3d4	52	10	1	Blacksmith
	Broadsword	10–22	7 + 3d5	43	25	1	Blacksmith
	Viking Sword	9–25	5 + 4d5	41	40	1	Blacksmith
	Thin Longsword	10–25	7 + 3d6	40	25	1	—	Not craftable — a rare find
	Longsword	10–26	6 + 4d5	39	25	1	Blacksmith
	Butcher Knife	5–11	3 + 2d4	40	5	1	Tinker	Utility
	Cleaver	5–11	3 + 2d4	40	10	1	Tinker	Utility
	Skinning Knife	5–11	3 + 2d4	40	5	1	Tinker	Utility
	Hatchet	5–11	3 + 2d4	40	15	2	Tinker	Utility; Lumberjacking bonus
	Battle Axe	11–27	7 + 4d5	40	40	2	Blacksmith	Lumberjacking bonus
	Executioner's Axe	12–27	9 + 3d6	38	35	2	Blacksmith	Lumberjacking bonus
	Two Handed Axe	12–27	9 + 3d6	38	35	2	Blacksmith	Lumberjacking bonus
	Double Axe	13–28	10 + 3d6	37	45	2	Blacksmith	Lumberjacking bonus
	Large Battle Axe	11–31	7 + 4d6	36	40	2	Blacksmith	Lumberjacking bonus
	Axe	11–32	8 + 3d8	35	35	2	Blacksmith	Lumberjacking bonus
	Bardiche	15–43	11 + 4d8	26	40	2	Blacksmith
	Halberd	18–45	15 + 3d10	24	45	2	Blacksmith	Biggest single hit in the game

Mace Fighting

	Weapon	Damage	Roll	Speed	Str	Hands	Crafted by	Notes
	Club	7–22	2 + 5d4	48	10	1	Carpenter	Carpentry bonus
	Mace	9–21	5 + 4d4	46	20	1	Blacksmith
	War Axe	8–23	3 + 5d4	45	35	1	Blacksmith	Mining bonus
	Maul	8–23	3 + 5d4	45	20	1	Blacksmith
	Hammer Pick	9–23	2 + 7d3	44	35	1	Blacksmith	Mining bonus
	War Mace	9–24	4 + 5d4	42	30	1	Blacksmith
	Magic Wand	4–11	3 + 1d8	42	—	1	—	Utility; magic loot
	Pickaxe	5–11	3 + 2d4	40	25	1	Tinker	Utility; mining tool; Lumberjacking bonus
	Quarterstaff	12–27	7 + 5d4	38	30	2	Carpenter	Carpentry bonus
	Black Staff	13–28	8 + 5d4	37	35	2	Carpenter	Carpentry bonus
	Gnarled Staff	11–32	4 + 7d4	35	20	2	Carpenter	Carpentry bonus
	Shepherd's / Tamer's Crook	6–15	5 + 1d10	30	10	1	Carpenter	Utility; herding tool; Carpentry bonus
	War Hammer	14–38	8 + 6d5	29	40	2	Blacksmith

All mace weapons drain 3–5 Stamina from the target on every hit.

Fencing

	Weapon	Damage	Roll	Speed	Str	Hands	Crafted by	Notes
	Kryss	5–20	2 + 3d6	56	10	1	Blacksmith	Poisonable
	Dagger	3–8	2 + 1d6	55	1	1	Blacksmith	Utility; poisonable
	War Fork	9–21	6 + 3d5	47	35	1	Blacksmith	Poisonable
	Short Spear	9–23	7 + 2d8	44	15	2	Blacksmith
	Tribal Spear	10–26	8 + 2d9	42	30	2	—	Savage loot — a spear sidegrade
	Pitchfork	11–26	8 + 3d6	41	15	2	Blacksmith
	Spear	11–27	9 + 2d9	40	30	2	Blacksmith

Archery

	Weapon	Damage	Roll	Speed	Str	Hands	Range	Crafted by	Notes
	Bow	12–27	9 + 3d6	34	20	2	10	Bowyer	Fletching bonus
	Tribal Bow	13–28	10 + 3d6	32	20	2	10	—	Savage loot — a bow sidegrade
	Crossbow	14–35	11 + 3d8	27	30	2	8	Bowyer
	Heavy Crossbow	16–44	12 + 4d8	22	40	2	8	Bowyer

The Tribal Spear and Tribal Bow are not upgrades — they are sidegrades with their own stats, looted from the savage tribes.

Getting and keeping weapons

Craftable weapons come from crafting — exceptional versions hit 10% harder, and colored-metal or special-wood versions carry material bonuses. Magic weapons (accuracy, damage level, slayer properties) drop as monster loot. Weapons wear out with use and can be fixed by a crafter — see Repairing.