Weapon Damage

Every melee and ranged hit on UO Sagas is a dice roll pushed through a fixed pipeline — your skills scale it, masteries add their own packet beside it, and the target's armor takes its cut at the end. This page walks the whole pipeline; the stats of every weapon live on the Weapons page.

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.

The order things happen in

Every modifier above touches the hit at a fixed point in a fixed order, and a few of them truncate to a whole number on the way. This is the complete pipeline of a single swing:

Only players get stage 4 at all — a monster swings its own flat damage range with no skill scaling. And because stage 4 is one added-up multiplier, +30% Tactics and +30% Anatomy make +60%, not ×1.3 × 1.3.

Here is one real swing, end to end — a GM fighter (100 Tactics, Strength and Anatomy), an exceptional Longsword rolling its average, both mastery damage tracks at level 8, against a monster with 30 armor:

The same swing, PvM vs PvP

Give that fighter a Vanquishing Longsword and Tactics scrolled to 120, and follow the same average roll against a monster and against a player — five rules pull the two columns apart:

The fifth divergence is not in this picture because the Longsword has no trade skill: the trade-skill bonus is halved against players (+0.1% per point instead of +0.2%) — and unlike the combat skills, its scrolled points above 100 do still count while flagged.

In short: against other players the rolled damage is multiplied by 0.70 (whenever both attacker and defender are players — a pet or summon hitting a player is not reduced by it), the trade-skill bonuses and magic damage levels are halved, and masteries switch off entirely. See PvP for the full picture.

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%.

Two details worth knowing: the ±10% swing sits inside the point cap, so a single blow can never lose more than AR points to armor — and mastery damage bypasses the armor stage entirely, so against heavily armored monsters the perks make up an outsized share of what actually lands.

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.

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%.

Parry does not block hits on UO Sagas. A shield never makes an incoming swing miss — the Parrying skill contributes through the shield's armor rating instead (Parry × shield AR ÷ 200 + 1), quietly absorbing part of every hit rather than stopping some outright. See Armor and Shields.

Related

• Weapons — every weapon's dice, speed and requirements, plus the special properties
• Weapon Damage Simulator — this pipeline, live, with your build
• Armor and Shields — the defender's half of the equation
• Skill Masteries — how the mastery packet works
• PvP Overview — insta hit, Deep Wound, special blows and the flag