Ultima Online Peacemaking - area peace, targeted peace, and the two masteries

Two abilities, chosen by what you target

There is no menu and no toggle. What you click decides which ability you used.

	Area Peace	Targeted Peace
You target	Yourself	One specific creature
What happens	Every creature in range other than you is thrown out of war mode	That creature stops fighting
Players	Affected too, but only once the bard is Grandmaster or above	“Targeted Peace will not work on characters (PC or NPC).”
How it ends	Creatures “will take only 2–10 seconds to retarget”; players must manually re-engage	It reactivates the instant the creature is attacked, and repeated attacks break it however skilled the bard and however weak the creature [!]
Difficulty	Not described as a difficulty check by uo.com	A check of the creature’s Barding Difficulty against the bard’s combined Musicianship and Peacemaking [!]

Targeted Peacemaking dates from Publish 16 [!] — it is not part of the original skill, which was an area ability and nothing else.

Three more conditions apply to the targeted version. The effect breaks if the bard loses line of sight for more than 10 seconds [!]. uo.com: the bard must remain alive, visible and in range or the effect ends — hiding cancels your own song. And you may only peace another player’s pet if that pet is freely aggressive [!].

Barding difficulty, and the 25-point window

Every bardable creature carries a Barding Difficulty value, read from the Animal Lore window. It is defined as the skill level at which the bard has a 50% chance of success against the creature [!].

From that definition the whole system follows [!]:

• Bard skill 25.0 below the difficulty — no chance of success at all.
• Bard skill equal to the difficulty — 50%.
• Bard skill 25.0 above the difficulty — guaranteed success, and no further skill gain is possible against that target.

The formula in between is Chance = 50 + 2 × ( Bard Skill − Resulting Difficulty ) [!]. That 50-point band is the entire training window as well as the entire usable range: too far below and you cannot touch it, too far above and it no longer teaches you anything.

Two more rules at the top end. Barding Difficulty was capped at 160 [!], and creatures that cannot be barded at all display --- in the Animal Lore window instead of a number. Separately, some creatures are completely immune to every bard skill effect, however high your skills are [!].

[!] No creature barding difficulty table is published. Beyond what the Animal Lore window shows in game, any difficulty number for a specific monster is unpublished. That gap sits underneath every success figure on this page.

The concrete figures are unpublished worked examples: at 120.0 skill with a dragon slayer instrument, roughly 60% [!] success against an Ancient Wyrm; at 100.0 with the same instrument, roughly 20% [!]. Two more — 50 Musicianship with 50 Peacemaking is about 25% [!] success, and 100 Musicianship with 80 Provocation about 80% [!]. Balrons and Ancient Wyrms are the usual examples of creatures that need extremely high Peacemaking for exactly this reason.

The modifiers, published in two different units

Before any of that resolves, Musicianship gates the attempt. uo.com: every use of a bard skill “is preceded by a non-difficulty based check”, and if that check fails the Peacemaking check never happens. Above 100, Musicianship then adds +1% success per point — to targeted Peacemaking specifically, not to Area Peace.

The rest of the modifiers come in two different units — an unpublished difficulty wording and uo.com’s success wording:

Modifier	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)

They are the same bonuses described twice, in two incompatible units, and nothing published converts between them. The difficulty wording reduces the creature’s difficulty number; uo.com adds to your success percentage. This page records both wordings rather than silently merging them into one — uo.com.

One of them is worth planning around either way: discording a creature first, or landing a targeted peace on it, counts as −10 [!] to its difficulty for the next attempt. Discordance is the standard opener on anything hard for this reason.

Timers, range, and the instrument in your hand

The timers are published and they are asymmetric, which matters more than it sounds:

• 5 seconds delay after a successful attempt.
• 10 seconds delay after a failed one.

A failure costs you double. That is the practical argument for the instrument bonuses above rather than a purely mathematical one — every point of success chance is also a halving of your downtime.

Range. uo.com publishes the rule for all bard abilities: “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 stay inside that range or the effect ends.

[!] uo.com also states a maximum of 18 tiles at 120 Musicianship and 120 Peacemaking. The two published figures do not obviously agree with each other — 8 tiles plus one per 15 points does not arrive at 18 at 120. Both are recorded here as published; neither is quietly replaced with a computed number — uo.com.

Instruments. Non-exceptional player-made, NPC-bought and magical instruments run to roughly 400 uses; exceptional player-made ones to 700–900. The default instrument is whichever you last double-clicked, and you switch by double-clicking another. Carpentry supplies the exceptional ones.

The Beacon of Harmony - the Peacemaking mastery

Bards do not buy mastery primers the way weapon skills do. The Peacemaking mastery is unlocked by a quest: The Beacon of Harmony, from Sir Falean the Spirit Soother at the Conservatory of Music in Britain, on both facets. It requires “master level in both the specific skill and musicianship”, the task is to calm 5 mongbats, and the reward is “a full Book of Bardic Masteries”. In numbers that works out to 90 [!] Musicianship plus the barding skill.

Spellsong	Words of power	Cast mana	Upkeep
Resilience	kal mani tym	30	8
Perseverance	uus jux sanct	30	8

Resilience is the anti-debuff song. It increases poison resistance; it reduces Mortal, Bleed and Curse durations by 10–40% baseline, up to 60% at four bard skills at 120; and it adds +2 to +16 hit point, mana and stamina regeneration, rising +2 per 10 points in each barding skill above Grandmaster, to a maximum of 22 at 4 × 120.

Perseverance is the flat mitigation song. It increases defense chance; it reduces damage taken by 2–24% baseline, up to 30% at 4 × 120; and it grants 1–4% casting focus, up to 6% at 4 × 120.

The general bard mastery rules apply to both. Party members must stay in range to benefit. Damage interrupts an ability and ends the effect. Abilities do not stack with themselves. Upkeep scales with the number of targets affected. Criminal flagging is not checked. Spellcasting does not interrupt a bard song, so a caster can hold one up while working. Holding a mastery also grants a 5% bonus to success at any bard skill and 10% at the mastery’s own focus skill, and cuts the 8 second base bard timeout by 1 second, or 2 seconds for the focus skill. Bard secondary skills above Grandmaster reduce mana upkeep slightly.

[!] uo.com’s own pages contradict each other on how many masteries you can hold. uo.com’s masteries page says “Only one ability active per bard at a time” and, in the same document, that “Provocation and Peacemaking masteries can both be active simultaneously”. uo.com’s spellsong quest page says something different again: “only one ‘mastery’ can be held at any time. Mastering a second ‘song’ negates the first mastery.” All three statements are official and they are not reconcilable from what is published — uo.com Bard Masteries, uo.com Bardic Spellsongs.

[!] No per-level numbers are published for either spellsong. uo.com gives ranges “at 4 × 120 skills” and no tier 1 / 2 / 3 table, so there is no published way to know what Resilience does at mastery level 1.

In PvM

• Area Peace is the panic button. A bad pull, a spawn that turned, a resurrection that needs four seconds of nobody hitting you — everything in range drops war mode and needs 2–10 seconds to retarget. That is not long, and it is usually enough.
• Targeted Peace removes one creature from the fight indefinitely, for as long as nothing attacks it and you stay in range and in sight. On a mixed pull this is how you make a three-creature fight into a one-creature fight.
• It is a taming skill. Animal Taming is one of the two main applications: a peaced animal is not mauling you through the taming attempt. Animal Lore and Veterinary round out that template.
• It is a treasure hunting skill. The other named application, alongside Cartography, Lockpicking, Remove Trap and Detecting Hidden — a chest spawn arrives all at once and Area Peace is the answer to all of it at once.
• It sets up Provocation. From the provoker’s side of the pairing: peaced creatures simply sit there until you provoke them.
• Resilience and Perseverance are group survivability. Up to 30% damage reduction and 60% off Mortal, Bleed and Curse durations is what a peace bard is brought to a boss fight to provide, not the peace itself.

In PvP

Peacemaking is the one bard skill whose area form reaches players, and the published detail is narrow.

• Area Peace affects players once the bard is Grandmaster or above, throwing them out of war mode. They must then manually re-engage. uo.com states this.
• Targeted Peace does not work on characters at all, player or NPC. There is no skill level at which that changes.
• The masteries are party buffs, not weapons. Damage reduction, curse-duration reduction, casting focus and regeneration all point at keeping your own side alive. Unlike Discordance, Peacemaking has no published offensive PvP function.

[!] No duration is published for a player caught by Area Peace. The 2–10 second retarget figure is stated for creatures. What it does to a player, and for how long, is not published anywhere.

What is not published

Peacemaking is better documented than most of its neighbours, and there are still five real holes in it. None of the following is published:

• [!] How much damage breaks a targeted peace. Repeated attacks eventually break it [!]; there is no published threshold, per-hit rule or dependence on skill.
• [!] Any duration for targeted peace. The conditions that end it are published; a clock is not.
• [!] Any duration for Area Peace on players. See above.
• [!] Any creature barding difficulty table, which is the number the whole success calculation depends on.
• [!] Mastery level 1 / 2 / 3 values for Resilience or Perseverance.

Caps, stats and training

Peacemaking is on the Power Scroll list: base 100, raised to 105 / 110 / 115 / 120 by a Wondrous, Exalted, Mythical or Legendary Scroll of Power. The scrolls are not cumulative, and every point above 100 still counts against the 720 total skill cap. Primary stat Int, secondary Dex.

Training is the least complicated part of the skill, and the whole method fits in three sentences. Get a few dozen musical instruments, from a carpenter or an NPC. Use Peacemaking and target yourself (Area Peacemaking). Repeat until you reach the level you want. Area Peace on yourself is not difficulty-gated the way a targeted attempt is, which is why it is the training method and not the harder one.

The 25-point window still governs anything you train by targeting: no gain against a creature more than 25.0 below your skill, and no chance at all more than 25.0 above it. Underneath, the Guaranteed Gain System awards a mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window — 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.

Where these come from

uo.com Bardic Skills · uo.com Bard Masteries · uo.com Bardic Spellsongs · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Scrolls of Power · 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.