Ultima Online Discordance - the debuff percentages, the 160 halving, and what it strips in PvP

What the debuff is, and how far it scales

A percentage taken off the target creature’s resistances and skills, scaled on the bard’s Discordance. The published scaling:

Discordance skill	Resist / skill loss applied
50.0	12.5%
100.0	25% — see the note below
120.0	28%

Note the shape of the curve: the first fifty points buy 12.5 percentage points, the next fifty buy another 12.5, and the twenty after that buy three. Discordance is a skill whose bulk value arrives early and whose Power Scroll is a refinement rather than a transformation — though three points off every resist on a boss is not nothing.

A discorded creature shows sparkles while the effect is running, so the state is visible.

[!] Which resistances and which skills are reduced is not published individually. uo.com says only “resist and skill loss”, and there is no published breakdown.

The Grandmaster number, and an unpublished lower one

uo.com gives 25% at 100.0 — uo.com Bardic Skills. That is the figure this page uses in the table above.

There is also an unpublished figure of up to 20% [!] at Grandmaster, with up to 28% at Legendary. The 28% matches uo.com at 120, so the difference is only at Grandmaster, not across the whole curve. It is recorded here rather than quietly dropped, but the 20% is unpublished and uo.com’s 25% is the number to use.

Barding difficulty 160 halves it

The hardest creatures in the game are protected from bards by design. Against a creature of barding difficulty 160, the Discordance effect is halved. uo.com’s own worked example: a 120 Discordance that would normally debuff 28% debuffs only 14%.

Barding difficulty itself is the general bard mechanic underneath this skill:

• It is the skill level at which the bard has a 50% chance of success against the creature.
• 25.0 below [!] the difficulty, you have no chance at all. 25.0 above [!] it, success is guaranteed — and no further skill gain is possible against that target.
• The usual success formula is 50 + 2 × ( Bard Skill − Resulting Difficulty ) [!].
• Barding difficulty is capped at 160 [!]. Creatures that cannot be barded at all display --- in the Animal Lore window, and some are immune to every bard skill effect, no matter how high your skills are.

[!] uo.com publishes no creature barding difficulty table. Read the number out of the Animal Lore window instead.

It is the opener, because it lowers the difficulty of everything after it

The effect that most changes how a bard plays is not the resist reduction — it is that discording a creature lowers that creature’s own barding difficulty, making a following Provocation or targeted Peacemaking easier to land.

An unpublished wording gives the modifiers as difficulty reductions, while uo.com expresses the instrument bonuses as success percentages instead. The two are not the same statement, and only the uo.com column is published, so both are given:

Modifier	Unpublished difficulty wording [!]	uo.com wording
Exceptional player-crafted instrument	−5 to base difficulty	+10% success chance
Aligned slayer instrument	−10 to base difficulty	+20% success chance
Opposed slayer instrument	+10 to base difficulty	−20% success chance
Musicianship above 100	( Skill − 100 ) ÷ 2 subtracted from difficulty	+1% success per point above 100
Using Provocation	−5 from base difficulty	(not stated)
Using Discordance or targeted Peacemaking	−10 from base difficulty	(not stated)

Discordance uses the same difficulty computations as Provocation — it is a difficulty-based skill, unlike the Musicianship check that precedes it.

The effect ends when the target dies, the bard dies, the target moves out of range, the target hides, or the bard hides. [!] There is no published duration for the PvM discord effect — uo.com lists only the conditions that end it.

Range, and a published rule that does not reconcile

uo.com’s range rule covers all bard abilities, Discordance included: “The base range of all bard abilities is 8 tiles, with each 15 points of skill in the ability being used increasing this range by one tile.” The bard must be inside that range to start the ability and must stay inside it, or the effect ends.

[!] uo.com also publishes a maximum of 18 tiles at 120 Musicianship / 120 Peacemaking The two statements do not obviously reconcile — 8 tiles plus one per 15 points does not plainly produce 18 at those values. Both figures are published by uo.com, both are recorded here, and no replacement number has been computed for either. Treat the rule and the stated maximum as two published facts that have not been squared with each other.

The mastery - Tribulation and Despair

Discordance is one of the three bard skills with a mastery. Its two spellsongs are Tribulation and Despair, unlocked by the quest “Wielding the Sonic Blade” from Sir Berran the Song Wielder at the Conservatory of Music in Britain, on both facets. The quest requires “master level in both the specific skill and musicianship”; the task is to discord 5 goats, and the reward is a full Book of Bardic Masteries.

Spellsong	Words of power	Cast mana	Upkeep mana
Tribulation	in jux hur rel	30	16
Despair	kal des mani tym	30	18

Tribulation reduces the target’s hit chance and spell damage by a minimum of 5% and a maximum of 32% at 4 × 120 bard skills. It triggers bonus damage equal to 20–60% of damage taken, as physical, at most once per second. The trigger chance runs 15–60% baseline and up to 84% at 4 × 120, and is Musicianship-based. Slayer instrument modifier 1.5×.

Despair reduces Strength from 4 minimum to 22 maximum at 4 × 120, and deals periodic damage from 9 minimum to 48 maximum at 4 × 120. It scales with Discordance and Musicianship, carries a PvM bonus of 1.5× against NPCs and 3× with a slayer instrument, is affected by the target’s magic resistance, and its damage type is selectable from a context menu.

The general bard mastery rules: the quest must be completed before the abilities work, after which use costs only skill and mana; party members must stay in range to benefit; damage interrupts abilities and ends the effect; abilities do not stack with themselves; upkeep scales with the number of targets affected; criminal flagging is not checked; and spellcasting does not interrupt bard songs. A mastery grants a 5% success bonus to any bard skill and 10% to the mastery focus skill. Base bard skill timeout is 8 seconds; a mastery reduces it by 1 second, or 2 seconds for the focus skill. Secondary bard skills above Grandmaster slightly reduce mana upkeep.

[!] The published text is in tension with itself on how many masteries can be active. The masteries page says “Only one ability active per bard at a time” and also that “Provocation and Peacemaking masteries can both be active simultaneously”; separately, the spellsong quest page says “only one ‘mastery’ can be held at any time. Mastering a second ‘song’ negates the first mastery.” All of it is published; none of it is reconciled here.

[!] No mastery level (1/2/3) requirements are published for Tribulation or Despair. uo.com gives effect ranges “at 4 × 120 skills” and no per-tier table.

In PvP

Discordance is the one bard skill with an explicit, published function against players, and it is a severe one.

• It removes all item skill bonuses from the target. Every point of skill the target is wearing rather than owning simply stops counting.
• Duration: “up to 5 seconds or 8 seconds if the Bard is Focused Spec on players.” [!] uo.com uses the term Focused Spec here and never defines it — the Skill Masteries page does not define “focused spec” or “combat spec” at all. The 8-second figure therefore has a condition attached that uo.com does not explain.
• One player at a time. “A Bard can only discord one player target at a time.” It is a single-target tool in a group fight.
• Discording another player’s pet is a hostile act. It is not a free poke at a tamer.
• The mastery is throttled by magic resistance. Discordance mastery effects are reduced by the target’s magic resistance in PvP, which puts Resisting Spells on the other side of the equation.

Five seconds of no item skill bonuses is short, single-target and conditional — but against a template leaning on +60 in items, it is five seconds of a different character.

In PvM

• It is the core group debuff. Stripping a percentage of a creature’s resistances raises everyone’s damage against it, and stripping its skills lowers its own output. One bard improves the whole party’s numbers.
• It is the standard opener. Because it lowers the creature’s barding difficulty, discording first makes a following Provocation or targeted Peacemaking materially easier to land on a hard target.
• It is blunted where it would matter most. Anything at barding difficulty 160 takes half the debuff — 14% from a 120 bard instead of 28%.
• Despair is real damage. Up to 48 periodic damage at 4 × 120, multiplied 3× by a slayer instrument against NPCs, with a selectable damage type.
• Tamers pair it with pets routinely — a discorded creature is both easier for the pet to kill and less dangerous to it.

Caps, stats and training

Discordance is on the Power Scroll list: 105 / 110 / 115 / 120 via Wondrous, Exalted, Mythical and Legendary scrolls, which are not cumulative, and every point above 100.0 still counts against the 720 total skill cap. Primary stat Int, secondary Dex.

Training follows the barding difficulty rule rather than a creature ladder: Discordance uses the same success formula as Provocation, so pick targets whose barding difficulty sits inside the ±25 [!] gain window. No gain is possible against a target more than 25.0 below your skill, which is the trap — comfortable targets stop teaching you anything.

One shortcut worth knowing: after 90.0 [!] and completion of “Wielding the Sonic Blade”, a player can reach 120 by repeatedly casting Tribulation on themselves.

Exceptional player-crafted instruments are worth the trouble at every stage — +10% success in uo.com’s wording, or −5 [!] difficulty in the unpublished wording. Non-exceptional, NPC-bought and magical instruments carry roughly 400 uses; exceptional player-made ones carry 700–900.

What is not published

• [!] Which resistances and which skills are reduced, individually.
• [!] Any duration for the PvM discord effect — only the conditions that end it.
• [!] Any creature barding difficulty table.
• [!] Any definition of Focused Spec, despite it being the condition on the 8-second PvP duration.
• [!] Mastery level (1/2/3) requirements for Tribulation or Despair.
• [!] Whether the “one mastery at a time” rule or the “Provocation and Peacemaking simultaneously” rule governs — uo.com publishes both.

Where these come from

uo.com Bardic Skills · uo.com Bard Masteries · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Bardic Spellsongs quest · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Publish 96 notes. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.