Siege Perilous | Lum’s Guide to Siege Perilous

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Lum’s Guide To Siege Perilous v1.03 — Surviving and Thriving on The Hard Shard

“Siege Tedious? I’d never play there, man. Who wants to be a perma-newbie?”

Siege Perilous is wildly misunderstood. Most folks who play on the “standard shards”, when thinking of Siege, think

• it’s too hard, character development takes forever and requires you to be on 24 hours a day
• the place is overrun with PKs
• it’s empty, you won’t find anyone else on

All of these are wrong. And in this short guide, I will explain to you the following:

• How to create both a character that can survive independently (well, as independently as you can be on Siege; one thing
  you won’t get past is the need to actually interact with other people) and a character that can fill a needed role within a guild
• Where the Siege Perilous community exists (yes, there is one) and what guilds are looking for YOU to join up (and most of them aren’t PK guilds)
• How to manage your skill gain so that you can create a Master/Grandmaster level character in a fraction of
  the time required on other shards, WITHOUT tedious macroing
• Before reading this, check UOHerald’s pages on Siege if you haven’t already. They detail the changes made to the basic UO game system. Learn them, love them, live them.

CHARACTER CREATION

The first thing to understand on Siege is that you have ONE character. No mules for you! So before you create your character, it’s a good idea to think about what you want to do with it, because you’re stuck with your choice for at least a week (the character I’m playing now is the third character I’ve created on Siege, just as a reference).

To PvP or Not To PvP – Is There Really A Question?

One of the first questions you need to ask yourself is if you plan on engaging in PvP (player vs player) combat.
Well, no matter what you will at some point be attacked, but whether or not you plan on being involved in PvP (almost
always within a guild) will drive the direction of your character development.

If you do plan on being a PvPer, you really only have two choices for your character’s eventual growth, just like elsewhere in UO – Archmage or Dex Monkey. You can be a newbie on Siege, but I wouldn’t recommend learning PvP on Siege. The best PvPers are all on Siege now for the most part, and you will die early and often.

You don’t have to be a PvPer to play on Siege, although you will need to learn how to defend yourself. Many players on Siege have made quite a niche for themselves as merchants and adventurers while staying out of the fray (or in some cases, getting fairly rich off of the proceeds).

And remember, although PKers are PvPers, not all PvPers are PKers.

Guilds

In some cases, the guild you’d like to join will decide how you create your character. Check the guild’s website; if there are  requirements, most will have them clearly posted.

Most guilds however will accept any well-developed character as created below. Depending on the guild, some will be be
more valued than others – one guild may be looking for a smith, another may be short on PvP mages. Check with the guild’s members, post on their messageboards. You’ll be spending a lot of time with these folks; find out what they need.

More details on how guilds work on Siege can be found in the section on guilds.

Following are some character types to consider when creating your character.

The Bunny Basher

If you just want to kill things, I’d recommend the following:

50 Healing 50 Swordsmanship

This will get you well on your way to happy orc bashing. You will want to get Anatomy and Tactics up as soon as possible.
Tactics will go up fairly quickly on its own; my recommendation is to create an Anatomy macro in UOA and use it on everyone you fight, once. You should gain .1 every time until you get to 35-40 Anatomy. By this time you should be able to heal yourself using bandages.
Most vendors carry cloth bolts as almost every non-mage on Siege has healing, or you can keep your eyes open for unshorn sheep while bashing bunnies.

This character will be fairly effective for learning Siege and how RoT works. It will be completely useless in PvP unless you have a completely GM level character and a VERY fast connection. Another problem is that bunny bashing is not a very good way of making money, unless you are very patient or very good. Dungeons such as Shame and Decieit are NOT the easy money magnets they are on other shards, since very powerful PK guilds may be stationed there on a regular basis.

The Miner Guy

You may want to have some way of making money besides running up to Trolls and Ogres and thwacking them. Mining is a good way to do this. There are many smiths on Siege and they all need ingots. Even if they mine themselves, no one can have too many ingots.  If you want to start mining out of the gate, start with the following:

50 Mining 50 Magery

Ideally, you want to be able to gate so that you can more easily frogmarch that pile of ore to a nearby friendly forge.
It will require about 30,000 gp worth of regs to get your magery from 50 to 80. This means you will need to mine and sell about 6 to 7 thousand ingots. Popular mining spots include Delucia, Britain and Minoc. Making friends with guilds that operate in your mining area is highly recommended.

This character will make an excellent PvP combatant once you start raking in the money and your magery begins to go up. If you have a slow/modem connection Magery is pretty much the only way to go.

The Dragon Lord

Animal taming is far more popular on Siege than other shards; some guilds consist of nothing BUT tamers.  Start with any skill besides Taming, since taming itself is easy enough to raise on bunnies and cats, there’s no need to waste your initial skill  allocation on it. You may want to decide if you’re going to be a Mage Dragon Lord or a Melee Dragon Lord (or even an Archer Dragon Lord, I’ve seen those as well) and pick your initial skills accordingly; you can work on them while finding things to tame.

Stratics has a good essay
on taming including what to tame and when for skill gain.

The Spoony Bard

(That’s a Final Fantasy reference, by the way. If you didn’t get it, don’t worry about it.)

A pretty useful way of getting cash, especially as a new player. Start with 50 Provocation 50 Musicianship Be sure to have  friends that can supply you with barding instruments, or prepare to buy them for a hefty price at the local NPC vendor.

The Adventuring Rogue (That’s “thief” To You, Guv)

(Many thanks to the many who submitted detailed information for this section. Special thanks to Carmen the Rogue, the Treasure Huntress Heather, Magnifico Giganticus, Chest Looter Extraordinare, and Thunderlips, the Ultimate Male, on whose work this section is largely based.)

Rogues are much closer to the “thief” archetype then on other shards, because the loot from treasure chests requires your unique skills. For more on how to create a Rogue, let’s talk to that shady fellow in the shadows over there…

Siege implements perfectly what OSI has had in mind all along for Roguery.  Why?  Because it is actually  perilous and worthwhile to go to a dungeon and look for locked, trapped chests.  They actually have loot, and the better ones require a high level rogue to open.

Unless you plan to train yourself as a fighter up to 100 strength before you begin your roguery career, you will need Remove Traps.  But since you can’t start with Remove Traps unless you have 50 Lockpicking and 50 Detect Hidden, I recommend starting with the following:

50 Detect Hidden 50 Lockpicking

Key Point: put your newbie lockpicks in the bank and don’t use them till you reach 90+ lockpicking.  They will be invaluable later if you should die on a trapped chest.

Once you begin, buy a locked chest from a friendly tinker and practice lock/unlock while you are walking around town, escorting, or doing other things.  In my experience, it doesn’t matter if the chest is GM made or new, as  you will gain skill all the way up to 100. Until you get to 80+ Lockpicking, you will need lots of lockpicks as they
wear out quickly.  Make friends with a Tinker quick.
The best dungeon chests need 80+ Lockpicking, so keep at it.

Train Remove Trap on the barrels that you find on decks in most cities.  Find a group of barrels near a healer’s, as you will go boom often.  Train it till you get to a point where you occasionally don’t go boom.

Once you’re ready, go to Destard.  Destard is best because the treasure spawning chests are near the entrance.
If you can’t chase a healer to the entrance, then just go the shrine in back to resurrect.  You’ll be an expert at running from dragons in no time.  Go the middle of the front room and wait for the chests to spawn.
Each will contain 300 to 500 gp.  Other chests in Destard will give you scrolls and other stuff.  Over time you’ll have an almost full spellbook, lots of armor, weapons, and some magic items as well.

Important point: since all chests are trapped, you don’t need to use Detect Hidden on them.  You only need 50 Detect Hidden so that you can buy your Remove Trap.
Never use it again unless you like revealing hiders at the bank (more on that in a moment).

So, once a chest spawns near you, Remove Trap on it. Do this first.  Why?  Because if you go boom, you can go get resurrected.  I discovered that if I lockpicked first and then went boom, someone else would loot my chest.
If you go boom, the trap is removed, and you can go get ressed and come back to lockpick and loot the chest.
Most non-Rogues cannot lockpick, so your treasure is safe, except for those few enterprising mages and fighters that have trained only lockpicking and simply take the damage from the trap and heal/cure themselves.  But we all know they are not true rogues like us.

One important tip if you are working alone: Hide a bag nearby (behind a pillar in the dungeon or a tree in the
woods) with extra lockpicks and your loot in it.
Since you will go boom often, other players with the title of “noble” will loot you.  If you hide it nearby, it will not decay on the ground for several minutes and you can come back to get your stuff. Obviously, don’t trust other players nearby and only drop something on the ground if you’re sure you’re safe.

Now, after a week of opening traps in Destard, you’ll have 50k in the bank. Two weeks and you’ll have your  house.
Now all you need is find an empty spot to place it. Good luck on that one!

On the original Siege (the one they wiped), I managed to train my Stealth up to 100.  This was awesome, because I could walk to the bottom of any dungeon and loot chests. I could hang out hidden with the Ancient Wyrm or the Lord of the Abyss and loot their chests while they wandered into the other rooms. Alas, it will take a long time to train up to 100, but it may be worth a try.  100 Stealth is also good for the PvP thief.

If you want to be a PvP thief after you’ve made your fortune, then find a friend and start practicing.
The formula for gaining stealing is simple: steal an item whose weight is one-tenth of your stealing skill (round
up).  This will gain you a point most often. It will take time, but it may be worth it.  Since everything is overvalued on Siege, there are lots of targets.
Believe it or not, but at the bank you will find people who carry their wealth with them.  A good thief can Detect Hidden on them if they should Hide and steal their belongings.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stolen a Vanquishing weapon from some poor soul at the bank.  General rule: the average UO player is not too bright.  Take advantage of that as a thief.

Bottom line: there’s always a place for thieves in UO, especially on Siege, even with all the attempts to nerf thievery.  With Siege, EA has perfected (unintentionally) the “Adventuring Rogue.”  If that’s your style, then
have fun and make a few bucks. Whatever you do, give us thieves a good name and earn us some respect.

Carmen the Rogue

Magnifico Giganticus has some other recommendations:

Start with 50 Detect Hidden and 50 Tinkering. Lockpicking
is very easy to raise, especially if you make your own picks. If need be, you can use your starting money to buy several shovels or ingots from a player, then quickly mine your own ingots to make lockpicks/money with.

Once you have some lockpicks (about 20), get yourself 8 logs/boards and a carpentry tool, then give them to
a friend that has 0 carpentry and 0 tinkering skill. Have said friend make a small wooden crate (it takes 0 skill
to make, and since it requires only 0 skill, your friend’s chances at getting a LOCKABLE wooden crate are about 100% even with no tinker skill). You now have a lockable wooden crate with a lockpicking difficulty of 0. Set up a macro that locks the crate, and then uses the lockpicks on the crate.

Work your lockpicking up until your 0 difficulty crate does you no more good (about 50 skill or so), then make
a new crate using your own 0 carpentry/ 50 tinker skill… and repeat the process again. Eventually you’ll need to
get a high-level tinker to make you a difficult small crate to unlock… and that’ll get you all the way to GM lockpicking with the use of very few lockpicks.

Once you hit the 50 lockpicking mark, it’s time to buy 30 remove trap skill. (Get ready to die… a LOT.) Work your remove trap skill up to about 55 skill on trapped chests/crates/barrels in town (near a healer). At 55 remove trap/ 85 lockpicking (or higher) you’re ready to tackle the many chests that spawn in t2a (orc/lizard/rat/brigand camps)…  you’ll die often still, so be very sneaky with your loot (I recommend stashing the loot then attempting to disarm the trap, if you die you get ressed and come back to your stashed loot… or bring a friend with 80+healing/anatomy).

Once you get to 75 remove trap, you’ll never fail again… and you’ll quickly become one of the richest bastards
in the land. (especially with hiding/stealth… you can make the best pk’s look like impoverished fools living
off of mere crumbs when compared to your magnificent wealth).
=]

And Heather the Treasure Huntress has this to add:

I am a Treasure Huntress on SP and have some of the skills a thief would need to open boxes, so I know most of this from experience, and the rest because my husband has a GM thief on GL.

You should start with 50 stealing and 50 detect hidden.
Stealing is one of the harder skills to raise and joining the thieves guild is very expensive.  Detect you have to raise by first detecting persons that are hidden (up to 50 is preferable) then move to trapped containers.

The Skills you will eventually need as a Thief are Stealing, Hiding, Stealth, Detect Hidden, Lockpicking, Remove Trap.
You should take full advantage of stat locks to avoid having 100 dex and 100 int at the end, leaving you VERY
weak. You will need friends to protect you and you wont be able to carry much loot.

You can buy lockpicks and a lockable box from other players. Contrary to popular belief you CAN GM lockpicking on a box made by a newbie tinkerer, I am living proof:
I started with 50 tinkering and cut some wood and made a box with 50 tinker and 0 carpentry.  I mined and made my own lockpicks — less than 500 will get you to GM — I made GM in about 3 days of standing around
locking and picking the box I made while chatting with folks in Cove and Vesper and doing some detect hidden
around the forge both for skill and to keep ore thieves away. No unattended macroing was necessary.

Once I hit 50 lockpicking I bought my remove trap skill up to about 29 from the Thief Guildmistress at Cove.
I escorted about 3 npcs to get the gold.  I then went off to Vesper to work on remove trap skill.
The traps on spawn crates and barrels in town are much deadlier than regular shards and your skill moves well.
You are pretty safe to remove traps on spawn containers at about 55-60 skill. Treasure chests are much harder.

The easiest and fastest way to raise stealing that I know of is to steal from guildmembers.  You have to first make friends with a guild (preferably one with a private house).  Then steal bags from guildmembers, progressively heavier, full fishsteaks or something else that you can control the weight.

Hiding and Stealth are fairly easy to raise if you use them all the time, and I mean ALL the time. At the higher
levels it helps to wear some ring and/or chain armor to raise stealth higher.

With all this information, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have your castle deed very shortly. Just as an aside, the
first house placed on Siege Perilous was placed by Thunderlips, who, using these guidelines, generated much more wealth
than anyone else during that same period. (He also had collected the shard’s premiere collection of rare items in the process.)
His words on the subject:

49 Lockpicking 50 Detect Hidden 1 Wrestling (for newbie leather gloves)

First do a few escorts, buy Remove Traps up to 25-30.
Now build/buy a lockable box. Buy lockpicks w/a little escorting and lockpick for 2-3 days on that lockable box
you just made.  Also practice remove traps around town. Everything is trapped so its easy to raise. the newbie gloves will help you raise the skill. In 3 days you should look something like this if you play hard.

100 Lockpicking 50 Detect Hidden 40-50 Remove Traps

Hiding maybe useful too. Now its time to hit the dungeons (Destard,Cov, Des), simply pick the chest locks, remove traps and voila.  Endless supply of Gold, Armor, scrolls etc…  In 6 days I bought a house, had a vendor which sold the items I found.  Later you can pick up magery to speed the process up with Gate.

The best thing about this combo is that you can walk in nude with a lockpick and walk out with 5k in gold, full plate set and 20 scrolls. the starting cost are negligible as well. If you want cash, this is a good place to start.

The Archer

Archery is only really useful to newbies and those who hunt monsters exclusively. In a PvP combat situation archery is almost useless. If you do want to hunt monsters, however, archery is the way to go. Start with 20 Lumberjacking 30 Bowcrafting 50 Tactics

so that you can make your own raw materials. Go forth and shoot things; your Archery skill will raise pretty quickly.
You can practice on tamed bears to get to GM quickly. It’s been noted that Archery is actually useful in PvP when using the Hero/Evil system on Siege, since among the powers available are the ability to make them holy/vile for extra damage. (Note:
The Hero/Evil system is only active for players in factions)

The Pure Mage

If you’re going to go into PvP Magery is the way to go.
However it is very difficult for a Mage to develop themselves without substantial outside help. It’s possible, it’s just very difficult. Start with 50 Magery 50 Resist Magic Your problem will be money; you’ll need a lot of it, and you are going to be utterly useless in combat in your current newbie state. Really your only option is to escort (see below for details on how to escort). You’ll need about 30k in gold to afford to get your magery up to e-bolt/gate levels, and each escort gives you around 400 gold. That sounds pretty easy, but since you can’t gate, you have to walk each escort to a moongate which can take a while. Once you DO get the ability to gate, moneymaking becomes considerably easier as you can grab the “island escorts” (people wanting to go to Ocllo and Nujel’m) that others leave behind and, of course, not having to do the whole moongate thing.

If you have good access to a LOT of gate scrolls, you can quickly raise your magery without reagents while escorting by using them, which will take you from 45 to 70 magery without a single reagent. Of course you may pay just as much for all those scrolls, but your escorting should help here.

The Rich Guy

If you REALLY want to make money, become a merchant. Everyone will need your stuff, even if they don’t know it yet. Start
with 50 Tinkering 50 YourFavoriteTradeSkill Tinkering is a REQUIREMENT for a merchant since tools will wear out. Not only will you be able to replace your own tools, you can sell to other, less well prepared merchants.
(You’ll need to buy ingots from a miner, or if you’re really hung up on the whole self-sufficiency thing mine them yourself.)
Good trade skills to have include Blacksmithing, Bowcrafting, and Alchemy. (With Alchemy you’ll need to have a source
of income to pay for the reagents needed; however there are almost NO alchemists on Siege so the payoff is great.)
You’ll be selling to other players; until you can afford a house with a vendor hang out near banks or forges and hawk your wares the old fashioned way. Fishing is another unappreciated skill; although it’s not the insane money source it is on other shards every PvPer needs food and you can make a limited but pretty steady income just off selling fish steaks.

MAKE MONEY FAST!

One thing you’ll notice is that money on Siege is not nearly as easy to obtain as on other shards. You have to work for your gold. Here’s some proven methods:

Mining. Ingots are always needed. You can advertise in person at the Britain and Minoc forges, or on the trading message
boards once you get a few thousand.

Treasure Chests. Treasure hunting is just as lucrative on Siege. If you’re an adventuring rogue, this can be a profitable sideline. Trolls and ogres often carry level 1 maps and are pretty easy to kill.

Monster Bashing. Somewhat risky since monsters tend to fight back.

Escorting. This is the quickest and least hazardous way to make money without dedicating skill points to the task (although magery obviously helps). It’s boring, but you can get around 400 a pop for your trouble.

You are limited to 1 escort every 5 minutes. You also can only collect one escort at a time. If you don’t have magery, just lead
them through the moongates to their destination the old fashioned way. If you do have magery or gate scrolls, your task obviously becomes somewhat easier (although you may cool your heels some waiting for the 5 minute timer to expire.)

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REVISION HISTORY

v1.04 – 07/15/09 – updated with multiple publish changes – by Petra Fyde.

v1.03 – 08/28/02 – Updated guide with various pub 16 changes
– by Asmodeus

v1.02 – 10/14/99 – Added guilds, changed Eggtimer link

v1.01 – 10/13/99 – Addition of “Make Money Fast!” section
(accidentally left out of initial release), Addition of
Rogue archetype and guides, changes to Archer, Tamer and
Pure Mage archetypes, guilds added/removed, notes on using
an Anatomy macro without UOA. RoT figures tweaked somewhat.
Linked to Adrick’s RoT guide.

v1.00 – 10/12/99 – Initial release