Ultima Online Provocation - averaged barding difficulty, Inspire and Invigorate

How a provoke resolves

uo.com publishes the sequence in three steps, and the third one is the one that hurts:

1. Use the skill and select the first target.
2. On a successful attempt you are prompted for the second creature.
3. On a failed attempt, the creature’s anger is directed at the bard instead.

So a missed provoke does not simply waste a few seconds, the way a missed peace does. It hands you the creature you were trying to aim somewhere else. Everything below about raising success chance should be read with that in mind.

Once it lands, the two creatures fight “until the provoking bard leaves their line of sight or one is killed”. uo.com adds the part that makes the skill a livelihood rather than a trick: “Damage assignment and credit will be correctly handled for both creatures involved.” The bard gets the loot rights and the fame and karma even though the creatures did the killing, and there is no need to re-provoke in the reverse order to claim it.

A bard can also have several provocation fights running at once, as long as each still satisfies the range and other restrictions. That is the difference between provocation as a fight-winner and provocation as a farm.

The difficulty is the average of the two creatures

This is the piece of Provocation that has no equivalent in the other bard skills. Peacemaking and Discordance check you against one creature. Provocation checks you against a blend of two.

uo.com publishes three facts about how that number is built:

• Each creature carries a dynamically computed difficulty score.
• That score varies within ±2% of the average for its creature type — so two identical-looking creatures are not identical targets.
• The base provocation difficulty is the average of the two creatures’ difficulties.

One more is unpublished: using Provocation itself subtracts 5 [!] from the base difficulty, before any instrument modifier.

The practical consequence of averaging is that the second target is a lever. Pairing a hard creature with a soft one pulls the average down into range, which is exactly how a bard punches above their skill — and why a provoker’s first question about any spawn is what else is standing nearby.

Barding difficulty, and the table that does not exist

Barding difficulty is the skill level at which the bard has a 50% chance of success against the creature. The window around it [!]:

• 25.0 below the difficulty — no chance of success.
• Equal — 50%.
• 25.0 above — guaranteed success, and no further skill gain at that target.

The unpublished formula is Chance = 50 + 2 × ( Bard Skill − Resulting Difficulty ) [!]. Difficulty was capped at 160 [!], an unbardable creature shows --- in the Animal Lore window rather than a number, and some creatures are immune to every bard skill effect, no matter how high your skills are.

[!] No creature barding difficulty table is officially published. That is the single largest documentation gap in the bard skills: the rule is known, the inputs are not. Any difficulty number for a named monster is unpublished.

What exists instead is a handful of unpublished worked examples and threshold claims:

Unpublished figure [!]
120.0 skill with a dragon slayer instrument — roughly 60% against an Ancient Wyrm
100.0 skill with the same instrument — roughly 20%
100 Musicianship with 80 Provocation — about 80% success
100.0 Musicianship — always passes the first skill check when provoking
120.0 Provocation with Grandmaster Musicianship — always succeeds in provoking two dragons

Musicianship first, then the instrument

Every provoke is really two checks. uo.com: an attempt at a bard skill “is preceded by a non-difficulty based check” against Musicianship, and if that fails the Provocation check never happens at all. At 100.0 [!] Musicianship that first check always passes.

Above 100, Musicianship keeps earning — +1% success per point on the provoke itself. That is usually the cheapest success chance on the template, because it is bought once and applied to Discordance and targeted Peacemaking too.

The instrument modifiers are given in two units that do not translate into each other, and only the uo.com column is official:

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 converts between them. The difficulty wording lowers the creature’s difficulty number; uo.com adds to your success percentage. This page records both rather than silently merging them into one — uo.com.

Put in success terms: NPC-bought instruments give no bonus, a GM Carpenter instrument gives +10%, a matching slayer +20%, and a non-matching slayer −20%.

That last one is not a mistake in the table. A deliberately wrong slayer instrument raises the difficulty, and that is the point of it — it drags an easy creature back up into the 25-point gain window when you have outgrown everything available to you.

Range follows the universal bard rule: 8 tiles base, +1 tile per 15 points of Provocation, and the bard must stay inside it. Instruments run to roughly 400 uses, or 700–900 if exceptional and player-made; the default instrument is whichever you last double-clicked.

Indoctrination of a Battle Rouser - Inspire and Invigorate

The Provocation mastery is the reason most groups want a bard at all. The quest is Indoctrination of a Battle Rouser, from Sir Hareus the Battle Rouser at the Conservatory of Music in Britain, on both facets, requiring “master level in both the specific skill and musicianship” — an unpublished 90 [!] Musicianship plus the barding skill. The task is to incite rabbits into battle with 5 wandering healers; the reward is “a full Book of Bardic Masteries”.

Spellsong	Words of power	Cast mana	Upkeep
Inspire	uus por	30	8
Invigorate	an zu	30	8

Inspire is the party damage song, and it is generous:

• Hit Chance Increase from 4% baseline to 22% at four bard skills at 120.
• Damage increase 20–40% baseline, rising +3% per 10 bard skill points above Grandmaster, to 58% at 4 × 120.
• Spell Damage Increase 4–16 baseline, +1% per 10 points above Grandmaster, to 22% at 4 × 120 — capped at 15 in PvP.
• A bonus damage modifier of 1–15%, applying to all damage types and counted above the weapon damage caps.

That last clause is the one worth rereading. A weapon character who is already at their damage ceiling still gains from Inspire, because this component is counted on top of it.

Invigorate is the survivability half:

• +20 hit points baseline, +2 per bard skill at 120, to 26 at 4 × 120.
• Healing of 4–16 baseline, to 22 HP at 4 × 120, every 4 seconds.
• +8 Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence baseline, +2 per bard skill at 120, to 14 at 4 × 120.

The general bard mastery rules apply: party members must stay in range, damage interrupts and ends an ability, abilities do not stack with themselves, upkeep scales with the number of targets, criminal flagging is not checked, and spellcasting does not interrupt a bard song. Holding a mastery grants 5% success at any bard skill and 10% at its own focus skill, and reduces the 8 second base bard timeout by 1 second, or 2 seconds for the focus skill.

[!] uo.com’s masteries page states that “Provocation and Peacemaking masteries can both be active simultaneously” while also stating “Only one ability active per bard at a time”, and the spellsong quest page says flatly that “Mastering a second ‘song’ negates the first mastery.” The three statements are official and cannot be reconciled from what is published — uo.com Bard Masteries, uo.com Bardic Spellsongs.

[!] No mastery level 1 / 2 / 3 numbers are published for Inspire or Invigorate — only the baseline and the 4 × 120 ceiling.

In PvM

• It is the original solo farm. Two creatures fight, one dies, the bard takes the loot — and uo.com confirms the loot rights, fame and karma are correctly credited to the provoker rather than to the surviving monster.
• Several fights at once. A bard working a spawn is not running one duel; they are running a set of them, limited only by range and the other restrictions.
• It is a safe way to train something else. The standard trick is provoking two creatures and then attacking one of them — the fight is already happening, and your character is not the one being focused.
• It works on top of Peacemaking. Peaced creatures simply sit there until you provoke them. Peace first to stop the fight, provoke second to choose a new one.
• Discord first on anything hard. Discordance lowers the target’s own barding difficulty, by an unpublished −10 [!], which is the standard opener before a provoke you cannot otherwise land.
• The masteries are the group contribution. Inspire’s damage increase to 58% and spell damage to 22%, plus Invigorate’s 22 HP every 4 seconds, are what a provocation bard brings to a boss fight where nothing is provocable.

In PvP

Provocation is a creature skill. uo.com describes it only as instigating fights “between creatures”. What reaches players is the mastery, and the published PvP detail is a single number:

• Inspire’s Spell Damage Increase is capped at 15 in PvP, against a PvM ceiling of 22% at 4 × 120. That is the only PvP-specific Provocation figure published anywhere.
• The rest of Inspire — hit chance, damage increase, the above-cap bonus damage — carries no published PvP cap, which is not the same as there being none.
• Mastery abilities do not check criminal flagging.

In practice a provocation bard in a PvP fight is a support character: Inspire and Invigorate on the team, and no offensive use of the skill itself.

Caps, and the training ladder

Provocation is on the Power Scroll list: base 100, raised to 105 / 110 / 115 / 120 by a Wondrous, Exalted, Mythical or Legendary Scroll of Power, not cumulative, and counting in full against the 720 total skill cap. Primary stat Int, secondary Dex.

There is an unusually complete unpublished route — two of them, in fact. The boat method:

Range [!]	Targets
0–30	NPC training, or low-level wildlife
30–40	Farm animals — cows, sheep
40–65	Bulls, scorpions, polar bears
65–90	Giant beetles — the best gains in the range
90–100	Hiryus
100–110	Cu sidhes

And the dungeon path [!]: 50–60 on wraiths, spectres and orc camps; 90–100 in Despise, Wind and the Fire Temple; 100–120 on Destard dragons, Blood Dungeon daemons and advanced undead.

Both ladders are really the same instruction dressed twice: keep the target inside the 25-point window. Below it you cannot succeed; above it you succeed every time and learn nothing. When the world runs out of appropriate creatures, the non-matching slayer instrument at −20% is the way to make an easy one hard again.

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 51.0 hours at 115.0–120.0 — and a Scroll of Alacrity raises each check from 0.1 to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

None of the following is published, so none of it is asserted here:

• [!] Any creature barding difficulty table. The formula needs a number per creature and nothing published supplies one.
• [!] What a provoked creature does to its opponent. No damage figures, no modifier, nothing on whether a provoked creature fights differently from a normally aggroed one.
• [!] Any duration for a provoked fight beyond lasting until the bard leaves their line of sight or one of them is killed.
• [!] The delay between provocation attempts. Peacemaking has published 5 and 10 second timers; Provocation has only a mention of a small delay, with no figure.
• [!] Mastery level requirements and per-level values for Inspire and Invigorate.

Note also where this page’s numbers come from. The skill cap, Power Scroll and PvM and PvP material come from uo.com. The training ladder and several of the success figures are unpublished, and are marked [!] where they appear.

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.