General

Peacemaking is a versatile skill available to bards that allows you to prevent creatures and players from attacking. It has become the skill of choice for many people who focus on fighting monsters or training dangerous creatures. There are two uses of this skill, referred to here as Target Peace and Area (or Self) Peace. Target Peace occurs when you use your skill and target a specific monster or NPC. Area Peace occurs when you use your skill and target yourself. Area Peace affects all creatures in a radius around you.

Target Peace is an extremely powerful effect that allows you to completely disable the affected monster. They will not fight or cast spells when Target Peaced. In fact the only thing that some can do in self-defence is auto-dispel. Things that you have used Target Peace on will now see you as their greatest threat. Magic using monsters will regain mana during this time. Be prepared for a mana dump if you fail to catch them breaking the Peace.

Area Peace is a less focused effect that kicks everything on screen, except you, out of War mode. Creatures will take 2-10 seconds to retarget you. Important Note: Target Peace does NOT cause wear on your instruments. Area Peace does. Another note: Players can simply go back into war mode if they choose too.

In order to use this skill you must have an instrument (more on these later) and you'll want GM or better Musicianship. Double-click the instrument to select it and you'll hear the bard song play. As with any bard skill, when you attempt to Peacemake you will first have to successfully play your song. This is done passively and is checked against your Musicianship skill.

Notes: You must stay within the line of sight of the creatures that are peaced. Going invisible or leaving the area for too long breaks the affect. The time limit you can leave the area or become invisible is approximately 10-12 seconds. At 120/120 Musicianship and Peacemaking, the range is 18 tiles (you have to stay a maximum of 18 tiles away to keep the creatures peaced).

The time a creature remains peaced varies. A Balron could remained peaced the whole time before you kill him, or break the effect quickly.

Peacemaking is now a difficulty based skill. Although, thankfully, getting skill gains is not. At lower levels you are going to fail peacemaking on many dangerous creatures, and when you do succeed your effect won't last long. However, it is fairly easy to train up to 100+ so it's not a major concern. At 100 skill and higher, this skill become amazing. You can Target Peace a Lich, and then french kiss him if you like. To figure out what your chance of Peaceing something is, I recommend this barding calculator.

Note: 07/02/03- Since Publish 19, Peacemaking has changed. When you Peacemake a creature, it cannot be attacked via melee or by tamed creatures. This includes warriors and summons like Energy Vortex. Your tamed creatures cannot hurt it via melee nor through their breath weapons. Attacking it directly with magery spells and archery will still hurt the creature. Whether or not these changes are 'intended' remain to be seen.

Skill Training

The easiest way to train Peacemaking, like Musicianship, is to 8x8. Get yourself a boat, the smaller, the better. Also, pick up several instruments. Store bought should be fine, but if you have difficulty later, exceptional instruments may help.

Go train up your Music first. You'll want to get into at least the 90's. From there you can train your music while working Peace. You'll want to follow normal guides for 8x8ing on your shard, as many shards are different. Set up a macro to Area Peace. I recommend one in UO that's:

Use Skill(Peace)
Wait for cursor
Target Self

Hop off your mount and start sailing forward slowly ("slow forward") while repeatedly Area Peaceing to find your gain lines. Some people report that this technique does not work well for llamas. Horse, ridgebacks and beetles appear to work fine. If you work on a difficult shard, you may wish to record a UOA macro that is:

Use Item Type (instrument)
Use Skill (Peace)
Wait 1000
Target (self)
Wait 5000

This will help you if you're going through instruments quickly. With luck, you can GM both Music and Peace within 6-8hrs of hardcore 8x8ing. On difficult shards, this may take a couple of days. If you could afford them in advance, using a couple of low-end Peace and/or Music scrolls would be helpful, as you won't need to do anything differently above 100 in the skill. If you have difficulty finding gains, try having more targets on your boat. Pets and summoned creatures work well.

Now you should be ready to go. I recommend 110 Peace for Demons and Blood Elementals. 115+ for Dragons and Balrons, unless you have slayer instruments and don't mind getting eaten occasionally.

Tips & Tricks

• Once things have been Target Peaced, they may continue moving. But once they stop, they'll remain in place and will not change facing untill they break out of the effect.
  
  
• There is a delay timer after attempting to Target Peace something. However, once something has already been Peaced and your delay timer is up, you can attempt on it again. If it is still Peaced, you'll get a message saying, 'That has already been Peaced.' This does not cause you skill lag, and you can immediately reattempt. Repeatedly doing this to one target is refered to as 'spamming' a target.
  
  
• Discordance lowers the barding difficulty of it's victums, as well as their resists and skills. Used together, Peace and Discord are a powerful one-two punch in PvM.
  
  
• In spawns (or dungeon crawls) Area Peace can be effectively used to drag things off to where you want them. Even though they've been kicked out of War mode, they auto-retarget the Peacer, so they'll follow him/her. And when they retarget, it's the normal kind of monster targeting, instead of resulting in the mana dump seen when targeted Peace gets broken. Some Bards will drag screens worth of spawn to one spot for the kill.
  
  
• Area peace is an effective way to ensure you'll get a spell off without forcing you to have Protection up, as the length of the area peace is usually about the same as the casting time for most spells. GH, EQ, EV, etc.
  
  
• Area peace appears to have an impact on the likelihood of a monster auto-dispelling. And since it effect multiple targets, I've seen some high level Peacers with slayer instruments destroy several dragons at once.
  
  
• Area peace DOES work vs players at GM+ levels. Not nearly as well as it used to, but it could save you in a pinch.

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Version 1.0: 05/22/03 -Initial Draft.
Version 1.1: 06/10/03 -Edited for grammar and typos.
Version 1.5: 07/02/03 -Added Publish 19 Nerf information.

Information Gathered from: A UOPG Reader (I deleted your email! Let me know who you are!).