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Your Opponent’s Habits

Although there are technical spell combos, timing, and muscle memory you should build from practicing dueling and emulating other good duelers, learning a player’s habits can be the true best way to defeat specific duelers.

Examples of this might be:

Going Nox into EB if your opponent normally always casts Cure reactively after being poisoned, or maybe at specific levels of their health you notice they go for a GH compared to a Cure right after being poisoned and so you can decide whether to follow a Poison with a Harm or an EB based on their pattern.

There might be certain times in their defense after a specific combo or point of a cycle where you notice they always panic MH spam and you can load a free EB. 

They might hit you with a halberd and drop their pre-casted EB even if the halberd does as low as 12 damage… in that case, you can burn their cycles/mana faster by GH baiting and self disrupting because it’s less likely they are going to kill you with low front-end damage and now you just took back a mana advantage.

They might always run towards you when you go MA-EB in a cycle, thus putting you in a position to get a potential weapon timer + EB cursor before they can GH.

Defensively, same kind of thing, you may see them accidentally mess a cycle up at the same place or forget to swing a weapon if they are interrupted on insert-spell-here.

There’s all sorts of situations like this to learn from watching your opponents. The fun part about it is that you can start winning duels off of mind games to force your opponent into these habits (or become the victim of the same fucking thing).

Sudden Death Strategy

Sudden Death happens after a duel extends over 10 minutes. It increases damage by 25% every minute.

Sudden Death mode can be pretty ridiculous and I would say it has a very limited strategy. Do not consider a win or loss in Sudden Death to be very meaningful, they often are dictated by whoever gets consistent absurd damage rolls first and are usually just the result of a stalemate duel needing to end.  Is this true of dueling in general? Yes, it can be, but since healing isn't scaling upward like damage is, it becomes even more dice based.

That said, there are absolutely some tactics to keep in mind if your match is in Sudden Death.

Firstly, you want to be conserving mana, if possible, when you start to see the warnings getting down to 1-2 minutes prior to SD mode activating. You will not always be in the best position to do this if you happen to be mana locked at this point and your opponent is aware of it. You need to be conscious and a bit more conservative ahead of time, when possible.

The first minute of SD does NOT increase damage, it starts at the 11th minute. One mistake I sometimes see is that the moment a player hears the drum sounds that SD mode began, they just start dumping mana mindlessly. In most cases, if the defender just gets through that playing normally since there won’t be a noticeable increase in damage taken, they will likely be at an advantage with more mana and then the real damage increase starts soon after. 

If you are low mana getting into SD mode, it is what it is, you have to do your best to try to disrupt offensive casts and pick off damage, but If you have a decent amount of mana, I think it is worth disrupting any 6th level spell your opponent loads going into the 2nd minute or further of SD. It’s too risky to allow them to hit you with a near 50+hp halberd followed by a potential 40+hp EB. Try to push your opponent into needing to cast a defensive spell such as GH, MH, or Cure, and then you can attempt your own 6th level spell to get on the other side of this. Feeble and MA are good options to cast to keep a person from casting a sixth levelin SD.

If you get deep into the 12th minute, I usually rely on smaller cycle spells and faster weapons instead of waiting for a potential huge halberd hit (unless I am somehow situationally in the position where I have that timer ready), because even a katana or viking sword can do huge damage and get opponent going defensive and the more swings I can go for the better. 

Note that the longer you go into SD, the more viable it actually is to kill an opponent with two LITs or even two fast Harms that eventually do 10-20hp per drop. At 3+ minutes into SD, the potential for lower damage range spells and weapons to dictate a match ending becomes much higher.

With two smarter players trying to keep each other’s offensive spells down, it’s honestly mostly up to the heavy dice rolls in SD, but you do have some opportunities to work with that RNG more effectively by using the above tips.

Don't Overvalue Winning or Losing 

Winning or losing tournaments does not (necessarily) mean someone played well or better than a person who lost a tournament. (This actually goes for PvP in general in this UO server's mechanics.)

A couple examples of what I mean by this:

I had a streak of winning four or five 1v1 tournaments in a row. In most of those tournaments, I had an extremely good hit rate in the final matches, and/or my killing cycle included a streak of absurdly high damage hits. There were also ‘upsets’, where the other “top” players were knocked out in earlier matches/brackets so my final rounds were against arguably more mid-tier players. I don’t think I played amazingly in those tournaments, I think I mixed a bit of skill with a ton of good luck.

I then had another streak of four tournament wins in a row on a different character, months later. In those tournaments, I had to work my way out of terrible RNG, constant mana traps, and grueling long duels against some of the best active duelers. It took a considerably higher effort while taking advantage of every little mistake my different opponents made, and overall I had to play more cautiously and thoughtfully.

No spectator or opponent was analyzing the difference between these two scenarios, because why the fuck would they keep track or be thinking about it in that detail? It’s likely only you can tell the difference in these situations if you choose to be objective. 

Don’t listen to a spectator’s view or even most duelers when they react to duels or tournaments. Most don’t know what they are actually watching or analyzing. It’s the same players who might say someone had a “CrAzy FaST ReAcTIon Time” after just watching a guy get a super high hit streak in a row after doing burst damage or huge halberd hits. 

Most people see “winning” or "losing" and don’t always know what they actually watched.

Win/Loss Rate(s) or ELO

I think it’s true you can probably get a fast sense of a dueler’s abilities by looking at their seasonal/lifetime win rates for both matches and tournaments, however if you are looking to improve, do not get caught up in thinking those numbers matter or have any real meaning.

For example, I have seen motivated new players who want to duel only really good duelers in order to get better faster, and due to this they will suffer a ton of losses, but that lower win rate is not at all related to their skill level compared to someone who might only duel lesser skilled or equal skilled players to appear more successful. 

Even for “top” players, their summarized win rates also don’t necessarily reveal who they dueled for regular matches, who was in their tournaments, when they dueled in comparison to the meta, what class of weapons they were using and so on. On the character I use now, I sometimes rotated to archery/fencing/macing to mix it up (all in which I think are secondary to swords burst meta)  and my tournament win rate is lower than a different character that only used swords, obviously. 

You might mix up your 2v2s with players you do well with or join up with random players who need a partner, which would also effect those stats.

Judge yourself by your overall personal performance in comparison to past seasons, knowing everyone around you is potentially also getting better, too. I’ve seen some useless arguments in Discord from players about their win rates, when the player with the lower win rate was many times a better technical dueler.

There are players who make new characters/names and enter matches or tournaments hoping to do well so they can reveal their identity if they win, but if they lose they will delete and make new characters again. Eventually, if that new character starts to look equally as successful as other players that they believe they are better than, they again start to worry about perception and repeat this process. 

As far as the ELO system... it's broken, less so in the regular duel matches but definitely in tournament ladders. It may give some base sense of who's performing well or be accurate in small periods, but it generally just favor(s) the latest tournament/match winner and disregards overall performance. A player who loses 6 tournaments in a season and wins 1, might be ranked higher seasonal (or even lifetime) ELO than a player who lost 1 tournaments but won 6, only because that first player beat the second player most recently. ELO doesn't boost from the tournament win, but just the matches themselves, so it basically sways way too much ELO while being heavily weighted towards the most recent winner.

At one point, ELO was used for seeding tournaments, but that is now removed due to complaints of lower tier players having to fight higher tier players. I personally think a better solution would be to have some days be seeded and others not, but since ELO isn't really accurate a percentage of the time, that might not be preferred either. Right now, ELO is just used to determine Bye rounds, preferring the highest lifetime ELO for who gets a BYE match in uneven numbers of players for tournament rounds.

The Long Game

If you nail out 10 regular duels a day between someone in a similar skill level to you, you will sometimes find some days go seemingly different without any super obvious reason. That’s normal.  Some days or weeks you are just out of it and don't play as well, too.

If you are in the intermediate stages, you could make it to semi-finals in a tournament 3 times in a row, and then lose the first round for the next 3 tournaments, and all throughout this you were actually technically improving.

If you are in mid-tier stages, you could compete in 5 tournaments and the one that you won you actually played the worst in, technically.

At a higher tier level, it can really be anyone's game. 

Have the expectation that any player has a chance and sometimes will win against any player, always, including you.

The constant idea here is that once you know all of the above are a possibility, then you can focus again on your process and not the outcome. Then, in the long term over a few months, if you are heading in the right direction, you will see an increased level of win consistency.

Arena to Field

It’s probably true that there are insecure players who are unable to accept that someone they dislike for personal reasons, whether in the field or Arena, is actually objectively a good player.

A lot of times you’ll see this when someone tries to offer a grudge match to someone in the pits, and the person being challenged whines that “Arena skills don’t translate to the field, bro”.

I personally have never seen a great Arena player who isn’t arguably a great fielder. Conversely, I have never seen a great fielder who isn’t arguably a great dueler. Whether someone prefers one thing over the other or dedicates their time and interest to it is a different story. The arguments usually come from players who are not necessarily standout in either, and wanting to be acknowledged as “better” than the other in the community’s perception. It’s asinine and hopeless. 

There have been several kills or heals on the field that came from throwing in a timed cycle or knowing what spells the opponent was holding. For fielding, you will need to be more conscious of positioning, tile range, LOS, and so forth, but if anyone tries to convince you these extremely basic concepts don’t come with the territory of a generally good UO PvPer already, they are lying to themselves. 

Ping

Ping is important, and experiencing a lag hiccup during a crucial part of your dueling cycle or healing that offsets your timing can cost you a match. If you are far from the server - it’s impactful.

Taking that in mind, it is almost always the players complaining about their own lag and ping being “the reason” they can’t compete that make the most noticeable mistakes in their gameplay having nothing to do with their connection speed. They might be cycling wrong, swinging on the wrong part of their cycles, getting too greedy when their life is low at the same time as the opponent, and so on. 

On that note, there are some really great duelers who deal with 100-200+ ping and no one would ever realize it if they didn't communicate it. Could those great duelers be better at 30 ping? I don’t doubt it, but the select few who blame their ping solely are normally finding an easy justification to why they aren’t improving instead of practicing or changing their methods.

Spell Macros & aReNa sCrIPtS?

The decision making in duels and their high APM amounts to different reactions in different situations based on factors including you and your opponent's health and mana. There is no sort of automation will be more effective than manual play, in my opinion. 

Re: Macros:

Use in game hotkeys for your spell macros. This is faster than using Razor to cast spells. It is barely faster, but enough to prefer in game macros. As far as your hotkeys layout, I like doing my targeting on the mouse wheel and spells/weapons on the qwerty, asdfg, and zxcvb keys. 

Re: sCrIpTs:

There are not current active top duelers that I have seen using some type of specific 1337 script automation to gain any actual meaningful advantage within Arena. 

However, I see this misconception come from two types of players:

A) The type of elitists who are skilled players but assign a ton of value to winning and losing, so when the latter happens they have to justify their reasoning even though at higher levels it is often is just a wash who wins based on several elements of mechanics and RNG.

B) Lower tier players who feel they can't compete and create a conspiracy around why they aren't improving with time.

The two things I think that create this tin foil hat are when good duelers do the MH or GH "Tap" method when being swung on which I explain in this guide (under Defense), which even though means a Heal is casted whether an opponent hits or misses, some players apparently only notice the *hit* scenarios, therefore it looks like a Heal casted at the same time damage is being taken. You will see just about every top dueler do this.  As I also explained in that section - if you are on the offensive side, you can counter this by holding your hit until a beat after you are on the adjacent tile.

The other thing I think people talk about is immediately swapping to another weapon without object delay, which you don't need a script for. You just hit two keys in succession (another spell key if you have one loaded which will unequip current weapon, and then the desired alternate equip dress key). There might be one Razor checkmark needed for this. Can you script that? Sure, but if you think that's going to be a determining factor in winning more duels, go ahead and do 20 matches before and after with a good dueler and see how a negligible of an edge this provides when you factor in what ends duels, which is normally related to multiple successive interrupts combined with higher RNG within a window of time. 

Take in mind, there are people who think manually tabbing is some ancient skill, as if we hadn't been spamming our pinky or ring finger on tab mindlessly for decades.  If the developers ever do remove scripts from PvP as planned, you will see virtually no difference in who is performing well in Arena, but the goal post will move to another complaint, I'm sure.

Anyone Can Cook

My opinion, whatever this dueling meta really even is now, is that it’s defined enough where any name thrown around in the “Top 5-10” or a player who is semi-competent in cycling has a decent or arguably equal chance of winning any match or tournament, and throughout a season you’ll see the same names rotate wins if they are active, or streak back and forth. 

Good players have enough consistent data over the course of hundreds of matches or many tournaments to have 1v1 or 2v2 win/loss rates that stand out in comparison to others. There are other good players who might believe they can outrank someone in either mode, and of course that can be true, but they just aren't really consistently showing up enough to prove it. (Which is sometimes is the excuse, too).

Although there are key players that usually have the most wins, I personally think if the "best" 8 players had to duel each other 20 times each, 5 days a week, you would find that the player who edges another one out could potentially change by the day, or that it’s too close to measure at times, and at other times it would be lop-sided in either player's direction. This is probably true with the best 2v2 teams, as well. That’s a good thing for being more dynamic but also means we could use a meta change to raise the skill ceiling now. 

The other thing you could potentially find is a single certain player’s style might edge out another player’s style due to some habit that one player has that the other's cycle tactics take advantage of, whether consciously or not, but that won’t necessarily translate to tournament wins, yet would do well in a league type of system. 

There also not a previous era years ago where duelers were "more skilled". Mechanics may have differed, but this is the most "figured out" any meta has been on any UO server, because it is the longest lasting, highest populated server, and everyone is older with their entire history of the game behind them. I wouldn't say that the overall ceiling got too much higher, I would just say that the bottom raised up more. Nostalgia is a deceiver.

So yeah, there's actually a decent amount of good duelers who can surprise anyone on any given day.

Old Habits (Still) Die Hard

I notice it’s easier for players who are younger or newer to UO to try new stuff than the median player because they don’t have two decades of habits or hotkey patterns behind them.

I have tried to help a couple players who really want to improve by pointing out in high detail or clarity what some of their main mistakes or misplays are. They will understand completely in the moment, sometimes even reiterating the mistakes back to me to be sure of what they should work on… and then the next week, I’ll see them in a duel doing the exact same thing wrong. Over and over. It’s sometimes mind boggling, but I have done the exact same thing, it’s difficult to consciously change deeply ingrained habits, just do your best. 

All that to say it is possible to actually improve, even if you haven’t for months, by being deliberate throughout a match of doing one key thing different at a time. You’ll maybe be terrible at it for a while, then eventually it becomes more natural. You have to go into the match reminding yourself in which situation you are going to make the specific new singular change, be watching for it closely, and then start training the new habit.

Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

I was helping a player who had a terrible streak of low RNG in multiple tournaments in a row. It was substantial, and contributed to their losses. They complained about how unfair it felt, and I told them it sucks and just happens that way sometimes. However, I reminded them that it’s only statistically a matter of time until luck reverses, that’s just how it works.

Unsurprisingly, in his next tournament he led the first opponent by a huge gap of 24% higher hit rate over the course of a 10+ minute duel (which I would say is extremely rare)…  and… he still lost. 

Although his loss was technically in Sudden Death mode, the thing to notice is that although the bad RNG did play a role in his previous tournament losses, and although better RNG may have meant he wouldn’t have lost all of those matches, his real issue was in “finishing” an opponent and making the right plays when he does get them to low life without panicking and rushing cycles, and that issue remained whether he had low or high hit RNG. 

Duelers to Duel

If you want to get better, duel other duelers. Here is a list of some (not sure if all are active). 

This is clearly NOT a ranking list or in any specific order or based on technical skill, it may just be people I think are fun to duel.

Limousine/Thunk Sound (idiot), Oug, Spooj, Trenbolone, PAXIMUS PRIME, pipewalla (Flube), King Laric IV, Chappey, marm uh lade (genesis), Grey/Montesquieu, The Great, Inkathurg, Ted Bundtcake, DJ Flex, Prozac, KILLYOU, Methson, Ray DeDuelist, American Bushtit (Luther), NeverStopSwing, not why (Wizzy), Shill De Blasio (Weezy), P', Andeddu, Soupy, yayah (bugei) Drakeon, Spy, T o s h i, vexxoR, Mantequillas, H O M I C I D E, mynameisepic, Bugenhagen.

There are several other good duelers that I may not have played against or have definitely stupidly forgotten and can add later.