Flix

Daemon Chronicles, Part 4 (Into the Desert) Syanna is venturing to the arid wastes of Khorad-Nur and the Plains of Urkuk. You know, I never noticed that you had the very RPG-ish choice of helping the Orcs by fighting the Undead Dragon, but it's totally optional. You can reject helping them and carry out the main quest that way. I chose to fight the Undead, naturally. At this point I've got all five CA slots open on the interface, and I stuck Dread in the fifth slot, though I don't use it all that often. Dread creates a static pentagram shape on the ground. Any enemies standing within its influence have drastically reduced attack and defense. I haven't really needed it, but sometimes if I'm really swarmed I'll use Dread to keep from getting hit too much. Fighting D'Cay, Lady of the Orcus (AKA the Undead Dragon) was my first real challenge in Sacred Reborn, and also my first death - though I just reloaded the save so as not to lose that sweet Survival Bonus. So why was it so challenging, when my Daemon can clean up regular mobs and even elites with no trouble? Well, Dragons got a big boost in Sacred Reborn. Here's the relevant part of the change log: "Greatly increased physical resistance, experience gained, health, movement speed and meteor storm damage. Now each dragon has one weak resistance, one middle, and one extremely high, for example: The D’Cay is vulnerable to fire, medium protected from magic and extremely resistant to poison." So fortunately this Dragon is very vulnerable to fire, my strongest damage type. Unfortunately, I don't have very good Poison resistance, and Dragons are now FAST. I remembered Dragons being big lumbering things that slowly plodded after you. Now, the Undead Dragon was so fast I literally couldn't run away from her when I ran out of health potions. So while I was licking my wounds, I took a second to reflect on how I'd built my Daemon thus far: Sets: I'm still at the point where I'm not picky, I'm just grateful for whatever set items drop. Luck has given me lots of pieces of Pandora's Box. I also have all the rings from Aarnum's Regalia. I'm hoping madly for the sword to drop so I can get that full set bonus! Attributes: I split my attribute points equally between Strength and Physical Regeneration. The Daemon already has really good Mental Regeneration without even investing any points. I may want to invest in more Endurance in the future to boost elemental resistances. Skills: I've added Armor Lore to the lineup to increase overall resistances and also to boost my movement speed while wearing heavy armor. I've only got 1 skill slot left, and I'm planning to learn Agility when I hit level 50. It think it's also providing that Physical Resistance +15% in my set bonus list (see Armor Glow on the Wiki, another really cool feature that was lost in Sacred 2). So, after reloading, here was my strategy against the Undead Dragon: Use Fire Daemon instead of Battle Daemon - no way am I able to face tank her or even use my weapon. I'll have to kite and rely on fire spells to wear her down. Fill up the inventory to the brim with health potions. Socket several amulets with poison resistance into my armor. Create a combo with 4x Blazing Disk. I totally forgot about combos! They follow such different rules than Sacred 2. With this combo I can summon 4 blazing disks at once, and then regenerate the combo with Concentration potions and be ready to summon more! Overall this strategy worked. Her poison breath still hurt but not as much as before. I cast Fire Wall on the ground and then kited to avoid her swipes and keep the flames constantly underneath her. Meanwhile the 4 Blazing Disks are constantly wailing on her. I had to spam health potions like crazy but I finally wore her down! I couldn't get any pics because it was too frantic, but here's the proof: And... wow! The change log wasn't kidding, Dragons are much stronger now. But that experience gain was huge as well. I gained three full levels from the kill! The Orcs are pleased I helped them and let me into the city. My time in the Desert is over for now. Time to head to Braverock Castle.

Yes, wishes come true here. Let me hear your ideas.

Daemon Chronicles, part 3 At this point I'm starting to settle into a groove. I cast my shapeshifted form (either Battle or Fire, or Soaring if traveling fast), then Internal Power, then set out for battle. When I encounter a mob, I cast two more spells that I've added to my repertoire: Call of Death and Blazing Disk. Call of Death increases damage dealt with each enemy killed. Although it is nerfed from vanilla, it lasts 1 minute, and Syanna can rack up a huge damage boost in that time. Blazing Disk (also with fixed 1 min. duration) is useful as sort of companion that seeks out enemies to hit with fire and physical damage. The damage is greatly buffed in Sacred Reborn. There is an obvious synergy between Infernal Power and all the Daemon's fire spells, including the Fire Daemon form. So I will typically use Fire Daemon unless the enemies are particularly fire-resistant, in which case I opt for Battle Daemon instead, for the physical damage. The secondary combat arts that each grants are pretty great, except for the slow animations. The Battle Daemon uses Assail, which is a nice multi-hit attack, and the Fire Daemon gets Fire Wall, which sets the ground on fire. It's a little slow and hard to target though. Left click attacks are enough for most fights. At this point I've taken Sword Lore as my weapon skill. I had considered Dual Wield but really disliked the run animation (a weird prancing tiptoe) and Ranged Weapons is not available to the Daemon. Then I checked the Wiki, and saw that all the weapons in the Daemon's sets are swords. So, swords it is. I'm not planning on taking the shield skill Parrying, because I'd like the option to switch between using a 1h sword+ shield or a 2h sword. So far it's worked well, because my attack speed is already maxed out, I just pick whichever sword gives me the best damage. I have also learned the Magic Lore skill, which boosts all her spell damage. Blazing Disk is now more than capable of finishing off basic trash mobs on its own, so it's a bit like having a companion creature. I ran across the Unknown Warrior in the western forests. Chain quests in Sacred 1 are a rare and special thing, so I wanted to make sure I helped him to safety, since he'll be showing up again. BUGFIX: Sacred Reborn fixes the crummy bug in which you could not complete The Unknown Warrior quest if you already completed "Riddles in the Desert." Advancing the main quest after rescuing the Baroness Vilya. The main campaign quest companions are much stronger now, and very useful to have with you, since they're not falling dead constantly. However, the basic escort quests are still a bit of a headache, since they can easily die, especially since mages in Sacred Reborn have more powerful spells that do more damage. I've failed a few escort quests due to a Sakkara Priest or Goblin Shaman deciding to target my escort. A single spell is enough to drop some of these fragile escorts. Here's a great change in Sacred Reborn that has helped me a lot. The Blacksmith forging arts are powered up and more useful. The Defensive bonus has greater Defense % and an addition Physical Regeneration bonus. The Offensive bonus has greater Attack % and additional Wounds Increase Damage Dealt. And the magical bonus has significantly increased Mental Regeneration, over double the original values.

Assassin changes in D2F v12 Of all 7 characters, the Assassin has been the one most fraught with difficulties during development. It's no easy thing to try to recreate a dual-wielding female ninja using a robot dog man with one arm. It took years but I finally got him to a good state. He's recognizable as the character class he's meant to represent and has several viable builds. v12 sees a few more CA tweaks and a completely rewritten personal quest. Fists of Fire: VFX changed to more accurately depict its area of effect. The old "fire smash" fx was nice but was way too big for the semi-circle area of effect. Now the Assassin's fists actually become fiery as he attacks enemies in a small semi-circle in front of him. Mind Blast: Bronze mod "Amnesia" replaced with "Crushing Blow." This is because penalizing enemy CA regeneration doesn't work, so I gave a much more appealing mod. Burst of Speed: Tooltip no longer mentions breaking existing roots as this was non-functioning. Shadow Master: No longer makes comments after kills. This wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't after every single kill. He's now a silent assassin. Class quest "Rust" now drops Dura's Cell as reward instead of two lesser health potions. This early standalone Assassin quest requires you to kill a boss. If you already killed Gahanka, you have to go kill him again. It deserves a better reward than couple potions. Class quest "Lock and Key" now drops Bartuc's Cuthroat as reward. This reward is about the midway point of the new Assassin's chain quest. Like the other characters, he now gets an appropriate reward at the midpoint. More about the Assassin's chain quest: Much like the Dragon Mage, the Temple Guardian's quest had to be completely rewritten, since it just made no sense when applied to the new D2F lore. The Assassin's lore was a bit lacking in the game until now, because unlike the other 6 characters the Assassin doesn't have a patron deity, so there were no god statues, divine gifts, or "Lore of the Nephalem" books to flesh things out. So I've used every opportunity to work the lore of the Viz-Jaq'taar, or the order of Mage Slayers, into the game. Assassins were created to hunt down rogue sorcerers or anyone who tried demonic magic. There will be plenty of investigations into suspicious mages and many battles. Assassins were designed to use non-magical means as a way of avoiding corruption and countering spells. The old quest material about the Dragon Wars and the magical serum weapon is all removed. The Assassin will be hunting down rogue mages, receiving orders via hologram from his order, and investigating intrigue. But that's not all. The order of Assassins has split into two sects. One group is aligned with the Light Path, and is trying to drain T-Energy from the world by shutting off the Great Machine. They view T-Energy as being just as corrupting and dangerous as demonic magic. The Shadow-aligned renegade sect of Assassins is the Khral-Harzhek, and they wish to harness T-Energy to become living weapons capable of eradicating all magic-users and controlling the world. I took this opportunity to transform all the generic Temple Guardians left in the game into true Assassins who are named as such. Some of the unique quest-related ones will have proper names now and unique appearances to make them stand out. An Easter Egg bonus is that all the named Assassins are named after assassins from my favorite fantasy books and games.

Haha what an awesome find. I now think it's probably just a LotR easter egg, but I'll keep my eyes open for anything Tolkienish to the east. This was around Faeries' Crossing, so like half the game map is to the east.

I'm sure old school LAN parties would still work as well, if you've got your buddies physically with you to join your LAN. For connecting with friends in foreign countries, something Tunngle or Hamachi should work, but I haven't tried those options yet. Daemon Chronicles, part 2 Here are Syanna's first steps in Silver. It's a notable difficulty increase from Bronze, where every mob was dying with one hit. Here are her skills at level 6: By default a brand-new Daemon has already learned Weapon Lore and Magic Lore, which is fine, but I always alter my options.txt to allow me to freely choose my characters' starting skills. So I started Syanna with Weapon Lore, because I know I want her to proficient with some kind of melee weapon, and Hellpower, because I'm going to be casting her spells for support, and I want to keep the regeneration times and casting speed low. My next choices were Concentration, to keep the regeneration time of her special forms and combat arts low, and Constitution, because I remembered my old Daemon had a big problem with survivability. Here is Syanna rescuing the imprisoned Seraphim, her polar opposite. Nevertheless, the Seraphim is grateful. I wonder if she calls everyone "Child of Darkness and Light" or just the Daemon? I forgot that this "quest" is basically a secret and not actually in the logbook, though there is a hint in another quest, "Abducted" where a kidnapped novice mentions a rumor about a Seraphim. Resistances are good and will continue to be good when I learn the Armor skill, with the exception of Poison! The Daemon has very low Charisma, and no skills boost Poison armor, so I suspect she will struggle with resisting this element. For now I am socketing amulets with Poison Resistance. This is shortly after picking up Infernal Power and Soaring Daemon. Infernal Power is a must-have buff that thankfully has a nice beefy 3 minute duration now. I keep it up and running at all time. I like to use Soaring Daemon for quickly traveling distances between quest targets and quest givers, for instance. I can't remember which quests are timed, but I know there are many quests that you can fail if you take too long. I bought a cheap horse, but there's really not much point; in Sacred Reborn, the Soaring Daemon becomes faster than a horse! She also can't use her special shifted combat arts from horseback. So I haven't really been bothering with mounted combat or buying horse equipment. I love using Soaring Daemon to get from point A to point B so much quicker. No fences, bushes, rivers, lakes, canyons, can stop her, even cliffsides can't bar her way when she's flying. It's so liberating to zip around in the air. Here I am shortly after recruiting Wilbur in main campaign. Companions in Sacred Reborn are much more robust and hearty, they should no longer fall dead all the time. Another much-needed change. I sure do love all the pre-rendered 2D landscapes and backgrounds. It lends a really quaint a charming look to the game. I still wish for a remastered version like the Infinity Engine games got that allows higher resolutions, but even the Overlookers Clan couldn't pull this off. There are some failed screenshots on their site. Here's a mysterious hint about a strange village to the east. I wonder if it's referring to the easter egg recreation of Tristram, the town from Diablo? I could not tell if the language is a clue or just a made up phrase, More on how Syanna is progressing next time!

All is well. I just haven't posted in this thread because I haven't had anything new to add. I'm currently on the road at a hotel so I've been away from my "work" computer (by that I mean my gaming PC that I develop mods on) and I tend to only get verbose when I'm posting about Sacred or other games. So if I seem curt or terse it's nothing personal. You personality is quite mild and warm, so I can't imagine being offended or upset by you. I just don't converse that much outside of game-specific posts. Rest assured, I'm confident I will be back to this thread soon enough with some new updates.

Sacred Reborn is a new development by a Russian modding team called the Overlookers Clan. Their site is here: https://vk.com/overlookers (It's in Russian, use Google translate if necessary). Why this mod is a big deal As described in this post, mods for the first Sacred installment are very rare. This is due to the inherent difficulty in modding the game files and a strong anti-modding stance by the developers when they still held the rights to the game. Sacred Reborn is the most expansive mod ever made for Sacred 1. Enemies, items, and combat arts are all rebalanced. Some bugs are also fixed and optimizations are made that improve performance. This file is like a mod and patch all in one. It breathes new life into this game. This is the new loading screen for the game: Changelog Highlights There are too many changes to list all at once, but here are some of my favorites changes with my comments. Run multiple instances of Sacred 1 on your PC. There's no shared stash in Sacred 1. This meant if you found an awesome Dark Elf set item with your Gladiator, you may as well just sell it. Now you can run the game twice, join a LAN game with both characters, and trade items between them. Wooo! Temporary Buffs all have standardized (long) durations, between 1-3 minutes. This was on my wishlist since forever! It was soooo frustrating casting a buff only to get a few seconds of benefit. Weak spells and combat arts are powered up, a select few of the OP ones are nerfed. Player abilities were very imbalanced, meaning there were some "must have" CA's for power builds, and some that were never touched. Now, almost any combination of combat arts and spells can be used to create a viable build, if enough care is taken. Rune drops are regularized and more frequent as a result. The vanilla game had this sadistic system where the more runes you read, the fewer runes dropped. This led to all kinds of neurotic player behavior such as only using gear and socketed runes to gain levels, confusing advice to newbies to "never read runes!" and even having dedicated characters just for rune hunting so as not to spoil your "real" characters. This was thankfully done away with in Sacred 2, and now Sacred Reborn has a similar system where every 25th kill drops a rune. Item rarity increased 5 times. This means that unique, set and rare items will drop 5 times more often. Now it's actually viable for a single-player to sustain him/herself without relying on trading or cheats. The full changelog is HERE. There's so much more awesome content in this mod, but let's get to the Daemon stuff. My Daemon: Syanna I am having so much fun making a Daemon with Sacred Reborn. My first Daemon under vanilla Sacred Underworld was an abysmal failure. This was a hard pill to swallow after making very successful Battle Mage and Wood Elf characters. I followed guides, but could not get the character off the ground. Now she has a second chance, and I finally know: the Daemon is awesome! As always I made my first training steps in Bronze, just to get back in the feel of things. Bronze was quite easy for her, so at level 6 I felt confident in moving up to Silver. Here she is freshly imported from Bronze into Silver: At first I just used Battle Daemon/Assail for the attack and physical damage boost, and Abysmal Choir for some ranged spell damage and the slowing effect. The Daemon's special forms all have a bit of a flaw: the shapeshifting animation is a bit long and can't be sped up. But now, it's not so bad, because the forms actually last for 2 minutes instead of 20 seconds. Your Battle Daemon really feels ready for battle, your Fire Daemon really feels made of flames. And here's a great new perk for Soaring Daemon: it now has a very short regeneration time, because you "lose" the form whenever you cast its special attack "Descent." Now you can resume Soaring Daemon shortly after using Descent. I will post more about how Syanna is developing next time! The Sacred Reborn mod is also available here on DarkMatters:

This is fixed in Community Patch 1.60. All sources of XP per Kill stack now.

Much appreciated. Looks like I will have to find 3DSMax again. I've come to use Blender for most projects but it never worked for Sacred 2.

I can't take too much credit for the designs. The models and textures were done by my mod collaborators Pesmontis and SX255 for our mod Diablo 2 Fallen. I just did the scripting to bring them into the game. Neither is active around here any more, but I'm sure they would be warmed to hear their creations are bringing delight to people. To start with, I'll have to replace one of the other characters. This I could probably do over a weekend sometime this month. It won't be an eighth additional character, since the game only recognizes the original 7 characters. I'd have to replace the High Elf with the Huntress. Armor would probably not look right either. It would be more for just the fun of running around the game world in a "different skin". The combat arts and skills I could do, but that would be a lot more work. It would be something I could possibly get to after my current projects list.

Which one do you like better?

Nice ideas! I can probably put something together. It might be a couple weeks since I'm out of town on a business trip all next week. I'll post some concept pics later tonight.

Community Patch does not make vanilla items unusable, even after uninstalling. However if an item was added by the Community Patch, it will cease to exist after uninstalling. Some random items will have their stats re-rolled after installing/uninstalling. The main pitfall is quest progress. It's important not to load a character with active quests when installing or uninstalling. Many quests may become broken or have unexpected behavior in the logbook. If you're ready to switch the character to a new difficulty, that's a good time to install/uninstall, because all the quest progress is wiped clean when switching difficulties.

Small update for v12: Redemption's initial range is lower but scales better as it levels up. It was starting out gigantic, now there's more of a sense of it growing as it levels up.