Flix

THQ Nordic bought them and that's potentially a good sign. They did right by the longtime fans of Titan Quest by remastering the game and including all the bug fixes from the fan patch, as well as releasing more expansion content. And that game is older than Sacred 2 by a couple years.

I can't really request any features beyond the odds and ends I've already mentioned. As a modder I will likely do all merging by hand. Users would probably want things to be as simple, streamlined, and foolproof as possible. I think you can trust your own judgment on that front. I don't quite follow the "having to append 10mb to a 2kb download everytime" part, but 10MB is not so much in this day and age.

I was a 1.09d veteran myself. Then took a break and came back and spent several months on 1.11 IIRC. What other games have you worked on?

That's ok, I took a look at the golem's Energy Shield buff itself and found some parameters to adjust. It sends 100% of incoming damage to the shield (+1% per level, so I wonder if it is overcapped somehow), and it furthermore grants 70% damage mitigation against all damage types, in addition to also using "Block Warding Energy" (flat damping) at 1.5 + 0.5 damage per level. I'm going to set the Absorption Warding Energy to 100% and remove the scaling. At worst it won't do anything, at best it might make AWE:O -X% more useful. I'm also going to lower the damage mitigation to 35%. Oh, and the golem does have a spell that recharges his energy shield ("boss_golem_erdbeben") but I don't think there's any way to interrupt him. Only by coincidence. It was Silver Fox's idea originally, for a single sword he made for CM 1.50. I'd say "et_debuff_CA_regen" and "et_energy_anihilation" are probably the Sacred 2 equivalents of mana drain and mana burn, respectively. But they're not much fun to work with, since they can only be used against the player, as NPC's don't honor the regeneration times on their own spells. In Diablo 2? I'm surprised no one ever fixed it with a mod.

Alright I just started over from scratch with Gar'Colossus. I believe the biggest problem was that I added a lot of raw physical melee damage to him. The only differences between vanilla and EE 2.3 will now be: slight Physical Damage Mitigation (about half of 2.2 value; he had none in vanilla), a moderate Chance Opponents Cannot Evade Attacks (like every other boss and most elites have in the mod), and moderately increased movement speed. He also he has double attack that was restored in CM 1.60 (uses standard melee damage), but the cooldown is increased from 2s to 4s. His Energy Shield and Willpower bonuses were never touched, and I'm reluctant to reduce them below vanilla values since I can't ever recall having a hard time cutting through it. The trump card could be the modifier Absorption Warding Energy: Opponent -X%. In D2F I made this modifier capable of cutting through an energy shield in 1-2 hits. I can't recall if I did the same in EE. Will look into it.

The only thing I think it could possibly be is his twister-like attack ("boss_fog_spruehnebel"). I reduced the damage down considerably and also restricted this spell to being used only by the "real" boss at the end of the act. So the "easy" version that keeps popping up on the Light path doesn't have it. I also got reports on the Nexus that the mutated giant spiders are one-shotting players so the damage is reduced quite a bit on them. Enough reports have come in about Gahanka and Gar'Colossus soaking up way too much damage so their vitality and physical resistance is decreased. I also noticed that the Octogolamus and the Nameless Guardians have stun attacks with 100% chance; the chance to stun is now fixed at 50%.

I'll review the Mist of Miasma for 2.3. I don't believe I changed him in the mod but CM 1.60 did see the reactivation of all his buffs/spells that never worked before, and I just left the values as they were set by the devs. It could be too much damage assigned to the spells or even stats too high on the creature itself, which never manifested before since it never did anything but float around aimlessly.

Many thanks for looking into it!

Still only getting Expanded View in the "What's New" feed, no matter what I select. Definitely wasn't the Christmas skin to blame. Is it just me?

I'd always thought the same.

Negative. It's not showing any editing timestamp on it.

options_readme.txt just instructs the user not to edit optionsDefault.txt and to use a custom file in the AppData folder instead. Despite this, optionsDefault.txt can be edited to force changes out at the mod-level instead of relying on each individual user to hunt down and make edits to a file in their AppData folder.

Making My Peace with Sacred 3 - A long-time fan's perspective So, I have a dirty confession: over the holiday break, not only did I play Sacred 3, I actually enjoyed it enough to play it all the way through completion, including the DLC. It's not that bad of a game. The only real problem with it is that it pretends to be a sequel to the Sacred franchise. Had it been released with some other name, and not used place and character names from Sacred 1, I think it would have been much better received. I joined pretty much every other Sacred fan in existence in panning Sacred 3 as soon as trailers and game details were released. Where was my complex RPG with endless customization and nuanced character builds? Where was my huge, seamless open world with hidden secrets begging to be explored? Where was my awesome loot piñatas? Where were any of the things I wanted from a Sacred game? Even so, it's just been sitting there in my library all these years, unplayed. So I decided to give a shot before I deleted it from my PC forever. I started a new game with the Seraphim character. And surprisingly, as each day passed, I found myself looking forward to firing it up more and more. The gameplay is fast, slick and console-like. I needed to plug a controller into my PC to properly play it. There was lots of action, as expected from an arcade beat 'em up. You feel powerful, while also being challenged. Controls are snappy and responsive. Graphics look really good. Your character does progress, in terms of combat arts and gear, though it is incredibly shallow compared to S1 or Sacred 2. There is something else though beyond these surface elements, that I appreciate from a fan's perspective. I really feel like the development team tried to make this game take place in Ancaria. They did some homework. This is not like Dungeon Siege III, which had a few familiar names thrown into an otherwise strange and unfamiliar world. In Sacred 3, many levels, characters, and pieces of lore call back directly to Sacred 1. They even had all the graveyard have headstones with silly inscriptions. Sacred 1 is the only game that's referenced though. It is as if Sacred 2 never existed, but that kind of makes sense, since Sacred 2 was meant to be a prequel set in the distant past, and Sacred 3 continues on after the events of Sacred 1. I think another reason they didn't include much from Sacred 2 is because of how those characters were directly ripped from movies: Stargate (Temple Guardian/Anubis Guard), Star Wars (Inquisitor/Palpatine), Spawn (classic Seraphim/Angela), Gladiator (Shadow Warrior/Russell Crowe in Gladiator), etc. The big callbacks to Sacred 1 are the "Weapon Spirits." These are basically passive buffs that you unlock, that also accompany your character in the form of voiceovers that make commentary periodically. Each Weapon Spirit has a buff and penalty, and they will make comments throughout the missions for flavor. The Sacred series was known for humor and not taking itself too seriously. Sacred 3 really embraces this but honestly takes it way too far. Everything everyone says is basically a dirty joke, a sarcastic comment, or a fourth-wall breaking gag. So... yeah. Sacred 3 is shallow and simple, and not what you're looking for if you want more of what Sacred 1 and 2 offered. I doubt I will ever replay it with one of the other characters. It's very easy to see its referencing of past heroes and places in a totally different context as something insulting. But the game has its charms. I'm glad I played through the whole thing, if only to lay it to rest.

I use the same one, with behaviour moved under the shared section.

The Nestle brewing machine thing is actually at my office. They supplied some pods when we first got it that lasted for a few months, but now we have to buy our own. I don't mind, as the dark roast is so much better than the free "break room" coffee that we always have. I actually get a lot of Sacred-related stuff done at the office (don't tell my boss). The nature of my job is to fix IT problems, and some days everything is running smoothly, the daily maintenance is done, there's no fires to put out, so I just tinker with Sacred for the afternoon. I obviously don't play it at work, but having the scripts open or even a Wiki page to edit is perfectly cryptic and "work-looking" to the passerby.