How to Max Your Melee Skills in Ultima Online: Get Legendary Swordsmanship, Mace Fighting, Fencing, Parry and Tactics Fast

Gone are the days when one would spend a year trying to get a single grandmaster fighting skill, with the right strategy you can get to 120 in any melee skill in Ultima Online in days not years. There are three major methods of raising your fighting skills that you can choose to suit your play style. Explorer players may want to take their time and delve into dungeons and see the game as they become legendary warriors.

Power gamers may want to use the golem method to effortlessly reach legendary warrior status. Social and role-players tend to enjoy sparring and dueling with friends as they advance in skill. Whatever your play style is, this guide will help you maximize your skills by explaining each method in detail, showing you what equipment is best and where to find what you need.

Make sure that you have less than 350 skill points to take full advantage of the guaranteed gain system. Also, if you use a power scroll it changes the bell curve for skill gains and creatures will stay in the range you need to raise skill longer and more often.

The Hunter Method

Hunters must seek out prey that is close to the character's fighting skill in order to gain. A good rule of thumb is that a monster should be no more than 10 points higher or lower than the character in order to get good gains. Many players enjoy raising skill by hunting monsters because they can get loot and have fun while raising skills.

0-30 Buy skill

30-50 Undead in New Haven

50-60 Boglings in New Haven

60-70 Lizardmen, Ettins, Trolls and Ogres in Despise

70-110 Earth Elementals in the Yomotzu Mines

110-120 Yomotzu Warriors, Troglodytes in the Yomotzu Mines and Painted Caves

The Golem Method

The benefit to the golem method is that it is an easy way to get 120 skill without having to move around, take damage or hunt for prey. Once you have gotten to 60 skill fighting in New Haven, you are ready to start sparring with a tinker crafted golem.

To get a tinker crafted golem, you will need to have a tinker with at least 70 skill in tinkering create one for you, most charge about 50,000 gold for components. The components you need are: 1 clockwork assembly, 1 power crystal, 50 iron ingots, 50 bronze ingots and 5 gears. The clockwork assembly and power crystal are found on golems and clockwork monsters in Ilshenar near Blackthorn's Castle or the Exodus Dungeon.

What makes the golem method work is using a 100% poison damage weapon. Golems are immune to poison so a 100% poison damage weapon does no damage to them. You must be in a guild for the golem method to work.

Once you have your golem and 100% poison weapon ready, command the golem to guard, stop and stay. Watch and make sure that the golem is not attacking you back because if it does you will be die. After you give the commands your golem should stand there like a punching bag and let you beat it up without hitting you back. You can also set up a macro to tell your golem to stop, guard and stay so that it stays green and allows you to continuously gain skill.

The Buddy System

Use a second account or spar with a friend or guild mate of equal skill and train both characters up at the same time. The benefit to this method is that you will have a partner to work with who is at your skill level without having to hunt monsters down and someone to hang out with. The con, is that your friend may not be online when you want to train. If you spar with a friend, make sure you do so outside of a house so you can gain skill. When training using the buddy system always pick fast low damage weapons to minimize healing and accidents. Choose butcher knife, skinning knife (swordsmanship), magic wand (mace) and dagger (fencing). You can buy good sparring weapons off the NPC blacksmith in any town and just dispose of them when they wear out.

The Set up

To train melee skills quickly and easily you will need: 70 physical resist suit with self-repair, 10 hit point regeneration and a self-repair weapon. By having 70 physical resist suit you will take minimal damage as you train, self-repairing items, repair according to the intensity on the item whenever they are hit and would otherwise take durability loss. The best training armor is a set of virtue armor because it's cheap, you will have full resistance and it's blessed so you can't lose it and won't have to pay insurance while training your character's skill.

When choosing a weapon, always try to get the fastest base speed and SSI (swing speed increase) because more hits mean more checks for skill gain and faster training. For example, if you are training swordsmanship your much better sparring with a butcher's knife with 2.25 swing speed than a halberd with 4.25 swing speed becaue you will hit twice as often.

The benefit of having self-repair on your armor is that you can relax and train your skill without losing items or having to frequently repair. If you are fighting large numbers of monsters to gain parry, your armor can be destroyed very quickly if It is not self-repairing. Crafters also make self-repairing armor when using runic kits and it's very easy to come by armor with this property on it.

Self-Repairing Armor

Virtue Armor Set, Ancient Samurai Helm, Aegis of Grace, Aegis and Royal Leggings of Embers

Self-Repairing training Weapons

Peasant's Bokuto (swordsmanship), The Holy Sword (Swordsmanship), Evocaricus set (Swordsmanship), Bonesmasher (Mace Fighting), Cavorting Club (Mace Fighting), Shamino's Best Crossbow (Archery) and the Dryad Bow (Archery)

Hit Point Regeneration

Hit point regeneration means that your character will automatically heal without you having to heal them, although you may also wish to train anatomy and healing on your melee character, it is really beneficial to have hit point regeneration if you are fighting multiple monsters to gain parry. If you are human you will have 2 hit point regeneration automatically.

If you have the ninjitsu skill you can also turn into a dog or cat to regenerate hit points equal to your ninjitsu skill. Fighters with necromancy can use the transformation spell horrific beast to gain significant hit point regeneration, or vampiric embrace spell and steal hit points directly from their target. If you are training Bushido, you can also use the Confidence spell to regenerate your hit points while you train.

Hit Point Regeneration Items

Crimson Cincture (2), Primer of Arms Removal (2), Bracelet of Health (10) Resilient Bracer (2) and randomly on crafted armor

Wrestling

The wrestling melee skill can be worked from 50-100 off of boglings in New Haven; as incredible as this sounds it's true. With wrestling your character will do a very low amount of damage and you can switch back and forth between the two boglings that spawn there without killing them, allowing the monster to also gain skills and allow you to continuously raise your skill without seeking out new monsters. This method also works for tactics and parry.

Parrying

Make sure parry is set to increase and equip a shield, use the hunter or buddy method to raise your other combat skills. Parry will gain naturally every time you get hit in combat. If you want to raise parry to 120 skill in under an hour it is possible to do that in New Haven by rounding up about 15 undead monsters and letting them beat on you without hitting them back. You can also raise magic resist to 120 at the same time.