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 ↑ top

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 ↑ top

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 ↑ top

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 ↑ top

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 ↑ top

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.

Slayer armor (2026-08) counts for more against its own family: every worn piece whose slayer matches the attacking creature enters the total at 150% of its rating, piece by piece, so a full matched suit absorbs dramatically more in its chosen dungeon. Only monsters trigger it — the armor rating shown on your status bar and the absorption in PvP are unchanged.

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 ↑ top

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 ↑ top

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 ↑ top

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 ↑ top

• 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