Ultima Online Five on Friday Q&A

EA’s Jeremy Dalberg has posted another one of his “Five on Friday” Q&A features on the official Ultima Online website.

“How are the various Chivalry spells’ duration determined?”

There are three spells in Chivalry that have a variable duration – Enemy of One, Divine Fury, and Consecrate Weapon. Turns out they use very nearly the same formula. (Warning, math ahead!)

The base formula is as follows: duration in seconds = (square root(karma + 20000 + (Chivalry*100)) / divisor) The “divisor” part is the bit that varies from skill to skill – for EoO it is 1, for Divine Fury it is 10, and for Consecrate Weapon it is 20. “Karma” can be anything from -20000 to 20000. Chivalry can, obviously, be anything from 0 to 120. It’s also all converted to an integer, so fractions are dropped.

As for the actual results, for people who don’t want to play with spreadsheets:

Enemy of One: 109 seconds at -20000 karma, 178 seconds at 0 karma, 228 seconds at 20000 karma
Divine Fury: 10 seconds at -20000 karma, 17 seconds at 0 karma, 22 seconds at 20000 karma
Consecrate Weapon: 5 seconds at -20000 karma, 8 seconds at 0 karma, 11 seconds at 20000 karma