Ultima Online Item Identification - a skill uo.com does not document at all

What is left of it

The skill has one line of purpose: it tells you what an item is worth to an NPC and which imbuing ingredients it will unravel into. That is two functions, and only one of them is interesting.

• It estimates an item’s gold value to an NPC vendor. That is all that is known about it — no accuracy figure, no margin, no statement of how skill changes the estimate.
• It predicts what an item will unravel into for Imbuing: Magical Residue, Enchanted Essence or Relic Fragment. This is the only function that touches a live system.

The second and third of those unravel results are tied to Imbuing skill above 45.0 and above 90.0. Those numbers check out against uo.com — its Imbuing page publishes “Enchanted Essence, obtainable from 45.1 skill” and “Relic Fragments, obtainable from 90.1 skill”, with item intensity bands of below 199, 200–449 and 450+.

[!] But note carefully what that cross-check does and does not establish. uo.com’s Imbuing page does not mention Item Identification at all. The thresholds are real and published; the claim that Item Identification is how you predict them is unpublished. uo.com does not connect the two skills.

[!] No skill threshold is published for Item Identification itself. The 45.0 and 90.0 figures above are Imbuing thresholds, not Item Identification thresholds, and it would be easy to read them as the latter. There is no published level at which the unravel prediction becomes reliable, or at which the value estimate becomes accurate.

What it used to do

The name is a fossil. Before the Age of Shadows expansion the skill did what it says: it revealed weapon and armour properties such as damage bonuses and armour ratings on items that did not otherwise show them. Identification Wands did the same job, which is why they existed.

The reason it no longer does so is a complete one: the skill does not reveal hidden magical properties any more, because those properties are now visible to any player who clicks the item. The function was not nerfed so much as made redundant by the interface.

[!] There is no publish number and no date for when that happened. All that is known is that it was before the Age of Shadows expansion, with no patch reference; uo.com, having no page for the skill, gives nothing at all. A skill lost its entire original purpose at some point and uo.com does not record when.

[!] No developer statement on the skill’s future is published either. The closest thing on uo.com is a 2013 Ask & Answer thread that mentions “Item ID” once, inside a list of skills submitted by a player, with no developer comment about the skill itself.

Historically it shared territory with Arms Lore, which also read weapon and armour condition. [!] No mechanical interaction between the two is published today — the overlap is a historical one only.

Caps, stats, mastery

It stops at 100. Item Identification does not appear on uo.com’s Scrolls of Power list. There is no 105, no 110, no 120. It counts in full against the 720 total skill cap.

Primary stat Int, secondary Dex, from the stat table that is the skill’s only appearance on uo.com. No mastery — it is not among the 19 skills on uo.com’s Skill Masteries page.

No published PvP use of any kind. No published PvM use in the combat sense either; valuing loot and predicting unravel yield before items go to a soulforge is the whole of it.

Training

The method is one sentence: use the skill and target items, and every attempt is a chance to gain.

There is one genuine mechanic worth knowing, and it is an anti-macro one. The skill prevents repeated gains on the same item until other items have been successfully identified — so pointing at one object in a loop does not work. You need a spread of items, and to cycle through them.

NPC trainers: Gambler, Gypsy, Jeweler, Merchant Guildmaster, Miner Guildmaster.

The Guaranteed Gain System applies as it does to every skill — a mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window, which is 27.0 hours at 95.0–99.9 on a 700-point character — and a Scroll of Alacrity raises each check from 0.1 to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

For this skill the list is longer than the article, which is the point of the page:

• [!] uo.com does not document this skill at all. No page exists, the skills index omits it, and the expected URL 404s. One row in a stat table is its entire record on uo.com.
• [!] No formula for how accurately the skill estimates NPC value, and no accuracy-by-skill figures.
• [!] No skill threshold at which the unravel prediction becomes reliable.
• [!] No publish number or date for when the identification function was retired — only “before the Age of Shadows expansion”.
• [!] No uo.com statement connecting Item Identification to Imbuing, even though that connection is the skill’s only modern purpose.
• [!] No developer statement on the skill’s future.

Taken together those add up to a clear answer to the question most people actually have. If you are deciding whether to spend 100 of your 720 points here: uo.com has not published a sentence about this skill in years, and the one function it still performs is unpublished.

Where these come from

uo.com Skills index · uo.com Imbuing · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Skill Gain Systems · uo.com Ask & Answer No. 16. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.