Ultima Online Meditation - the armour rule, the regeneration numbers, and the open armour question

The armour rule - and the open question that decides your whole suit

uo.com: “Some armor types impede active meditation unless it has the magic property ‘Mage Armor’.” The two published lists:

Medable armour	Non-medable armour
Leather armour, human or gargoyle	Studded leather
Leaf Armor	Bone armour
Gargoyle Cloth Armor	Hide Armor
	Ringmail
	Chainmail
	Platemail, human or gargoyle
	Dragon Armor
	Woodland Armor
	Gargoyle Stone Armor

[!] How far the penalty goes is not settled, and it is not a small difference.

• uo.com says non-medable armour “impede[s] active meditation”. On that reading, a mage in platemail still gets the full passive regeneration and loses only the doubled active mode.
• An unpublished reading [!] is that non-medable armour without the Mage Armor property gives neither passive nor active Meditation bonus. On that reading, the skill is worth nothing at all in the wrong suit.

That is the difference between Meditation being a partial loss in plate and being a dead skill in plate. It decides whether a caster can wear a real armour suit at all. uo.com states only the active penalty and does not say passive regeneration is affected.

If you have to build a suit today and cannot wait for it to be settled, the conservative reading is the stricter one — assume non-medable armour costs you everything, because a suit built on that assumption is correct under both readings and a suit built on uo.com’s is only correct under one.

Mage Armor is the escape hatch: “This property allows normally non-medable armor types to allow active meditation as if they were a medable armor type.” And here is the part that shapes the economy of mage gear — Mage Armor cannot be imbued. Its Imbue Weight cell on uo.com’s Magic Item Properties table reads “No”. You find it, or you reforge for it, or you wear leather. See Imbuing for what a soulforge can and cannot do.

Passive and active

uo.com draws the line between the two skills here: “Focus is a totally passive skill, unlike meditation which can be passive or active.”

• Passive — the bonus applies at any skill level with no activation. Nothing to press.
• Active — invoked directly: your overall regeneration rate doubles [!] until you do anything other than party or guild chat, or are attacked. Invoking it while hidden or invisible reveals you.

Read that break condition carefully, because it is what makes active meditation a between-fights tool rather than a combat one. Any action ends it. Being attacked ends it. Party and guild chat are the sole published exceptions.

[!] The active-meditation success chance is not published — how Meditation skill affects your chance of entering the meditative state at all. Only the effect is on record, not a formula. [!] Nor is how long active meditation lasts before it ends on its own.

The numbers - one official figure, one unpublished formula

uo.com publishes no mana regeneration formula for Meditation. It publishes exactly one combined outcome:

“With 120 medi/int and 120 focus, you will have 2.1 passive mana regen.”

That is a combined Meditation-plus-Focus number, and it must not be read as Meditation’s own output. The only formula is unpublished:

Condition	Unpublished formula [!]
Below Grandmaster	Rate from Med & Int = 2 + ( Meditation × 3 + Intelligence ) ÷ 40
100+ Meditation	GM Rate = 2 + ( 1.1 × ( Meditation × 3 + Intelligence ) ÷ 40 )

Two things to notice. The formula takes the Intelligence stat as a direct input alongside the skill — Intelligence is not just the size of the pool, it is a term in the refill rate. And the 1.1 [!] multiplier at 100+ is a Grandmaster bonus, which means the hundredth point of Meditation is worth more than the ninety-ninth.

The official figure and the unpublished formula cannot be checked against one another: uo.com’s figure includes Focus, and the formula does not model Focus at all. [!] How Meditation and Focus combine arithmetically is not published. uo.com says only that they “stack” and gives that one worked total.

Mana Regeneration on items, and why more is not more

uo.com on the item property: mana regeneration “is not capped however it is subject to diminishing returns. For example the difference between 0 MR and 3 MR is substantially greater than the difference between 15 MR and 18 MR.”

That sentence is doing real work on a suit. The first few points of Mana Regeneration are the valuable ones, and weight spent chasing high MR on later pieces buys progressively less. The imbuable range is only 1–2 per piece at weight 1.0 anyway, so most large MR totals come from loot rather than a forge.

[!] The diminishing-returns curve itself is not published. uo.com gives the qualitative comparison above and no numbers, so no per-point MR value is given here.

Meditation against Focus - and the 30% SDI trap

uo.com: “Traditionally mages use meditation and warriors use focus, however the two skills do stack. Some mages will train both skills to give them the extra ‘fire power’.” The temptation is obvious and there is a published reason to resist it.

“Pvp mages wishing to benefit from the single casting school sdi cap of 30% will want to avoid adding Focus skill to their template as the skill is grouped with Mysticism and is therefore part of a second casting school.”

So stacking the two is not free. Taking Focus alongside Magery costs a PvP mage the single-school Spell Damage Increase cap of 30%, because Focus counts as Mysticism’s school. That is a damage decision dressed up as a regeneration decision.

The other half of the comparison is armour. uo.com’s Mysticism page says Focus regenerates more slowly than Meditation but “focus is unaffected by your choice of armor”. Focus also returns stamina, which Meditation does not address at all. So:

• Meditation — faster, armour-restricted, can be actively doubled, no school problem.
• Focus — slower, works in any armour, purely passive, also returns stamina, and drags a second casting school onto a PvP template.

[!] “Slower than meditation” is as precise as uo.com gets. No page publishes the two rates in the same units, so there is no published way to say how much slower.

In PvP

• It decides how long you can keep casting. Mana is the real ammunition in a mage fight, and Meditation is the resupply. uo.com’s only worked figure is 2.1 passive regen at 120 Meditation, 120 Intelligence and 120 Focus.
• Active meditation is nearly useless mid-fight. It ends on any action and on being attacked, and it reveals a hidden character. Its PvP value is in the gaps between engagements, not inside one.
• The armour rule is the defining constraint on a mage’s suit. Leather, Leaf, Gargoyle Cloth — or Mage Armor on the piece, which cannot be imbued. This is the published reason PvP mage suits are assembled from loot and reforged pieces rather than built at a forge.
• Do not add Focus casually. The 30% single-school SDI cap is worth more than the extra regeneration to most PvP mages.
• Item Mana Regeneration is the supplement, not the replacement — uncapped, but with the heavy diminishing returns uo.com describes.

In PvM

• Active meditation is genuinely usable here. Between pulls, out of combat, with nothing attacking you, the doubled rate is real. This is the mode PvM gets and PvP largely does not.
• It pays for the expensive spells. The eighth-circle summons cost 50 mana each and Flamestrike and Chain Lightning cost 40 — a sustained rotation is a mana-regeneration problem before it is anything else.
• Warriors can take it too, and a Chivalry or Bushido character may prefer it to Focus — but they are far more likely to be wearing exactly the armour that blocks it, which is usually how that argument ends.
• Elves get +20 mana, which enlarges the pool Meditation refills.

No mastery of its own

Meditation has no Skill Mastery. It is not on uo.com’s list of the nineteen. It appears in the mastery system only as a scaling input to someone else’s ability: the Spellweaving mastery’s Summon Reaper has a “stationary summon duration based on spellweaving/meditation”. Note that masteries count real skill only — item bonuses are excluded — so a Meditation ring does not lengthen a Reaper.

Caps, stats and training

Meditation has Power Scrolls: 105 / 110 / 115 / 120, from Felucca champion spawns, non-cumulative, against the 720 total skill cap. Primary stat Intelligence, secondary Strength — and Intelligence is doubly useful here, since it is both the size of the mana pool and a direct term in the unpublished regeneration formula. The Mana Regeneration item property is explicitly not capped.

Meditation sits in jewellery Group 3 for the Skill Bonus property, with Discordance, Parrying, Focus, Animal Lore and Stealth — one skill per group per piece, and a second overwrites the first. It imbues at +1 to +15 at weight 1.4, or up to +20 found on loot.

Training has one good trick in it. Passive gain chances occur each time 1 mana is regenerated [!], so it works best to keep your mana constantly below maximum, and movement is unnecessary. The practical consequence is that Meditation trains itself while you train Magery — every spell you cast to raise one skill opens a gap for the other to fill. Active gain chances occur each time the skill is invoked by macro or button.

The accelerated-gain quest is “Stopping the World”, from Gustar in the New Haven mage area. [!] The skill range it covers is not published. Behind it sits the Guaranteed Gain System’s mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window, and a Scroll of Alacrity lifting each check from 0.1 to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

• [!] Whether non-medable armour blocks passive regeneration as well as active. uo.com says active; an unpublished reading says both. The single most important open question about this skill.
• [!] Any mana regeneration formula on uo.com. The only official figure is the combined 2.1, and the formula above is unpublished.
• [!] How Meditation and Focus combine arithmetically.
• [!] The active-meditation success chance, and how skill affects it.
• [!] How long active meditation lasts before ending on its own.
• [!] The diminishing-returns curve for the Mana Regeneration item property.
• [!] The skill range covered by “Stopping the World”.
• [!] Any Meditation Skill Mastery. There is none.

Where these come from

uo.com Magery, Evaluate Intelligence and Meditation · uo.com An Introduction to Spellcasting · uo.com Magery Spells · uo.com Mysticism · uo.com Magic Item Properties · uo.com Imbuing · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Accelerated Gains for New Characters · uo.com Skill Gain Systems. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.