Ultima Online (PC) - How to Avoid and Defend Against Player Killers

MMORPG > PC > Ultima Online > How to Avoid and Defend Against Player Killers

Posted: October 25th, 2009
Last Updated: October 25th, 2009

An honest look into the player killer mentality and how to distance yourself from it. This guide has been generalized so that it may work on a lot of free shards and OSI alike.

Obscurity

Avoid high traffic areas and dungeons, take the less beaten path, delve deeper into dungeons rather than staying near the start. This is the single most important tactic to avoiding PKs; however, the odd few PKs that exhaust their normal search might try looking for victims in more obscure settings and places. You should not rely on this tactic explicitly.

Protection

Most PKs use some form of magic, and for the odd few that use speed and poison, the answer is more or less the same for both. You need magic resistance, a means to heal and cure (bandages, greater hea/cure potions, heal/cure spell), a high-speed, non laggy connection, and hotkeys and macros set for healing and curing (and possibly your hiding tactic). Those four or so things will help you last longer in battle, or in most cases, make you last longer while running away from the PK.

Run & Hide

Don't be fooled into thinking running is being "lame" or a "noob", it's a good tactic to gauge how good the PK is. If after some time of him or her chasing you and they still haven't managed to kill you, it might be possible that you are in fact better than him or her, or they they just aren't that great. If you are sure that you cannot beat them, your best bet is to keep running and with luck, you may be able to catch enough ground that you may hide yourself using the Hiding skill or an item that hides you as you rarely have time to cast Invisibility before they would be able to catch up. Hopefully they bought the trick and keep running past you.

If they didn't buy it and see them casting Reveal in your relative area, as soon as you see this, begin running again, this will buy you a precious second from their spell casting delay. Or if you see them casting any spell at all, it's a good idea to start running as they are most likely pre-casting a spell so after they use the Detect Hidden skill they can cast instantly on to you.

Repeat this process of running and hiding until you can either lose them or run into a guarded area, at which point you may want to make your calling guards macro is ready to go in case you might be able to catch them off guard (pun) and guard kill them inadvertently as they may not realized they entered a guarded area. This is the best opportunity to exact revenge, as now their corpse is free to loot, cut their corpse, take their head. For an extra effect, spread their loot all over the ground. Try not to respond to their messages of being "lame" or a "noob" for getting them guard whacked. Not responding will only enrage them more.

Plan to Die

As morbid as it sounds, always be prepared to die. Don't assume you will survive a PK incursion, for all you know, five player killers are searching in a pack for a victim like you. Preparing to die means you already know where the nearest healer is, have friends online to help you if you die.

Dying

If you did, don't bother trying to get resurrected by the PK, in most cases, they won't do it for you. Asking for it, and them denying it only gives them more satisfaction, the more you interact and beg and/or swear at them, the more sadistic happiness they gain. Instead, use this time to find a healer or ask a friend(s) to help you either kill the PK near your corpse or come resurrect you. It's not a good idea to try to run back to your corpse after resurrecting either, many PKs wait near it hidden to try to kill you again.

Ask yourself:
1) Do I really need a couple items that may or may not be on the corpse?
2) Can I risk paying more insurance if I die once again? Are the possible things worth more than the insurance I would pay?

If you need to absolutely find out if the PK left anything, it would be best to go back to your corpse near the end before it decays (after it has turned to bones). Hopefully the PK got bored and left. Another tactic is slowly approaching the corpse after stealthing several screens away and seeing if they are still around; however they might be hiding so using detect hidden or tracking might be beneficial as well.

Loot Prevention

Need to carry something on you that is no insurable but don't want to be looted? Is it really possible to prevent a PK from looting items? Well somewhat, let me explain...

The average PK will loot through all bags and item and quickly hover over armor and weapons to get to the sense of worth; however, they will skim fast over a bag full of low level armors, scrolls and gems (a typical loot bag for a PVM character). You can use this to your advantage by putting things in this same bag like reagents, bags of sending, high-level potions and other things. I have seen many PKs skip over 20+ charge bags of sending just because it was in a bag full of "junk". If they don't have a script to grab all the reagents from a bag, they might miss a couple piles of reagents too if the bag is fairly cluttered. In closing, if you want to optimize your loot prevention, carry lots of big items that clutter your pack, and more so, a lot of low levels things that other players would not bother with.