Ultima Online Anatomy - what it adds to damage and to every bandage

What Anatomy actually does

uo.com says Anatomy “has two distinct functions”. It is more useful to count three, splitting out the target-reading that uo.com folds in with the rest:

• Damage. (Anatomy ÷ 2), plus a flat 5% once Anatomy reaches 100, added to the same additive damage pool as Tactics, Strength and item Damage Increase.
• Healing. Anatomy ÷ 6 added to both the minimum and the maximum of every bandage you apply, and the gate on two of the three things Healing can do.
• Reading a target. An active use: target a player, animal or monster and you are told its Strength and Dexterity as a descriptive tier.

[!] uo.com publishes the damage bonus as a flat formula with no roll involved. An unpublished description has it instead as a passive Anatomy check made on every successful weapon hit, adding up to 65% damage by skill level when it succeeds. If there is such a check, its chance is unpublished. The formula below is uo.com’s.

The damage bonus, point by point

Worked through point by point, the curve is worth reading rather than calculating, because of what happens between 90 and 100:

Anatomy	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100	110	120
Damage bonus	5%	10%	15%	20%	25%	30%	35%	40%	45%	55%	60%	65%

Ninety to a hundred is worth ten points of damage bonus, not five, because of the flat +5% that lands at 100. That single step is the best ten points of Anatomy you will ever train, and it is the reason a 90 Anatomy warrior is not “nearly there”.

Anatomy is on the Power Scroll list, so the ceiling is 120 with a Legendary Scroll of Power, for 65%. It does not stack with itself in any other way; it simply adds into the pool:

• Tactics ÷ 1.6, plus 6.25% at 100
• Anatomy ÷ 2, plus 5% at 100
• Strength × 0.3, plus 5% at 100
• Lumberjacking ÷ 5, plus 10% at 100 — axes only, and Lumberjacking has no Power Scroll, so 100 is its ceiling

Those sum with item Damage Increase, which uo.com caps at 100%, into Final Damage = Base Damage + ( Base Damage × Final Damage Bonus% ), with the total bonus capped at 300%. Anatomy at 120 is therefore just under a quarter of everything a character can bring to that pool, and it applies to Swordsmanship, Fencing, Mace Fighting, Archery, Throwing and Wrestling alike.

What it does to a bandage

The bandage formula [!] is not published by uo.com, but Anatomy appears in both halves of it:

Minimum healed = ( Anatomy ÷ 6 ) + ( Healing ÷ 6 ) + 3

Maximum healed = ( Anatomy ÷ 6 ) + ( Healing ÷ 3 ) + 10

So Anatomy is worth 20 points of heal at 120, on both ends, to somebody who already has Healing. In practical terms 120 Healing with no Anatomy heals 23–30 [!] a bandage; 120 Healing with 120 Anatomy heals 43–70 [!]. Carrying the partner skill roughly doubles the top end.

Two abilities are gated on having both skills, at the same level, in real points:

• 60 Healing and 60 Anatomy — bandages can cure poison. uo.com is explicit: “you must have BOTH skills at this level”.
• 80 Healing and 80 Anatomy — bandages can resurrect a player ghost, and a self-bandage additionally tries to strip poison and bleed at half the heal duration. That chance is [!] ( ( Healing + Anatomy − 120 ) × 25 ) ÷ ( Poison Strength × 20 ), with a bleed counted as a level 3 poison — a formula in which Anatomy and Healing are interchangeable, so the pair total is what matters.

Unarmed defence, with Evaluating Intelligence

A character with no weapon skill is hit almost at will, because the defender’s weapon skill is the denominator of the hit-chance formula. Anatomy and Evaluating Intelligence together stand in for it. The value [!] is:

Unarmed defensive ability = ( Evaluating Intelligence + Anatomy + 20 ) ÷ 2, capped at 120 [!]

Put plainly, the two skills must total 220 [!] before they defend as well as 120 weapon skill. A mage at 100 Eval and 100 Anatomy defends as though holding 110 [!] weapon skill. This is why Anatomy turns up on templates that never swing a weapon, and it is the direct competitor to spending those points on Wrestling instead.

[!] Anatomy is also given an Evasion bonus at 100.0 Anatomy or higher, which is unpublished. Which Evasion it means and how large the bonus is are not published either.

Reading a target

The active use costs nothing and reports a tier rather than a number. The descriptor tables [!] are not published by uo.com:

Value	Strength reads as	Dexterity reads as
0–9	Trouble lifting small objects	Barely manages to stay standing
10–19	Rather feeble	Very clumsy
20–29	Somewhat weak	Somewhat uncoordinated
30–39	Of normal strength	Moderately dextrous
40–49	Somewhat strong	Somewhat agile
50–59	Very strong	Very agile
60–69	Extremely strong	Extremely agile
70–79	Extraordinarily strong	Extraordinarily agile
80–89	Strong as an ox	Moves like quicksilver
90–99	One of the strongest people you have ever seen	One of the fastest people you have ever seen
100+	Superhumanly strong	Superhumanly agile

[!] Unpublished: from 65 Anatomy a target’s stamina is reported as a percentage. uo.com does not mention it, and whether it is a skill check, and whether it still behaves that way on current shards, is unpublished.

In PvP

• Every swing hits harder. 65% of base damage at 120, on a bonus that is already the largest block a template can assemble from skills. It does not miss, it does not have a cooldown, and it cannot be dispelled.
• It pays for the bandage. Anatomy ÷ 6 on both ends of every heal means Anatomy decides whether a mid-fight bandage outruns the damage coming in.
• It unlocks the answers to poison. The 60/60 cure and the 80/80 half-duration poison and bleed strip are what let a warrior handle a poisoner or a Bleed Attack without a mage standing behind him.
• It resurrects. At 80 with 80 Healing, a bandage puts a teammate back on his feet in the field.
• It defends the unarmed. With Evaluating Intelligence, the value above replaces a weapon skill outright.
• It reads the enemy. Strength and Dexterity tiers on demand, and, unpublished, a stamina percentage from 65 [!] — the quickest way to tell whether the target you are chasing has been drained dry.

Against monsters

• The damage bonus is identical. Anatomy 120 with Tactics 120 is the largest pair of skill contributions available to the damage pool, at 65% and 81.25% respectively on uo.com’s figures.
• It feeds bandage healing, which is how a warrior with no Magery and no Chivalry survives a long fight.
• Targeting a monster reports its Strength and Dexterity tier, which is a rough read on how hard it hits and how fast it swings before you commit.

No mastery of its own, but it feeds four

Anatomy has no Skill Mastery. uo.com’s mastery list does not include it: Anatomy, Healing and Focus are the combat skills without one. It does, however, scale four mastery abilities belonging to other skills:

• Wrestling’s Rampage — scales with Wrestling, Evaluating Intelligence or Anatomy, and mastery level.
• Wrestling’s Fists of Fury — duration scales with Wrestling and Anatomy or Evaluating Intelligence.
• Poisoning’s Potency, a passive — scales with Poisoning, Anatomy and mastery level.
• Poisoning’s Injected Strike — duration is based on Poisoning, Anatomy and mastery level.

Caps, stats and training

Anatomy is on the Power Scroll list: base cap 100, raised to 105, 110, 115 or 120 by a Wondrous, Exalted, Mythical or Legendary Scroll of Power. It counts against the 720 total skill cap like everything else.

Its stats are the thing people get wrong. Anatomy’s primary stat is Intelligence and its secondary is Strength — so training a warrior skill raises the warrior’s Intelligence three times out of four. Stat gains fire on roughly 1 in 20 skill gains, going to the primary stat 75% of the time and the secondary 25%.

Training: Andreas Vesalius in New Haven is the Anatomy instructor, and the New Player Quests accelerate the first fifty points. After that it rises passively while you hit things with a weapon and while you use Healing, and actively if you macro the skill button onto a nearby creature.

[!] uo.com does not publish an Anatomy gain rate or difficulty curve — only the general skill-gain rules that apply to everything.

Where these come from

uo.com Melee Fighting · uo.com Melee Damage Increase · uo.com Healing · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.