nokka

Oh, coffee with cream, of course! ;P Ben & Jerry's OR Baskin (&) Robbins ?

I'm not sure if the rules forbid this (as it is not Danish and I have made no prior contributions to the thread -- mainly because both puzzles have been solved ^^), but If I may: "Schlag mich Baby noch ein Mal!" Have fun! nat

I was busy at some point trying to find another way through to the human region (hoping we'd been lied to about Dragonmaw Pass ^^) when I reached the "Old(?) Dwarven Pass", the farthest north I could get in the Elf region (in range of the trader symbol at Prisoner's Camp). I entered the cave at the end of the pass, and inside the compact room right in the middle was a switch gleaming its interactive shine but unable to be switched. What prerequisites (if any) are there for that switch? And (more importantly) what in the name of [CENSORED] does it do? I googled the location and came up with 3 hits, so I'm not expecting a flood of answers. In fact I'm curious as to whether anyone knows at all. ^^ Greets to all, nat

A lot may have changed in three years, but my BlacksmithSkillForDiff reads completely differently from yours, Ayeso. My BSFD tuple reads {1,20,60,105,150} and I'll bet those are level thresholds for forging items from the respective difficulties (e.g. BSlvl 60+ to work gold diff. items). I'm also pretty sure that the following values are not percentages but levels or level differences: Spawn_OffsetLow = {0,0,40,70,110}, Spawn_OffsetHigh = {0,35,80,120,175}, RuneLevel = {1,1,20,35,50}, (item level value of runes, I.e. Niob rune is a level 50 item) LevelCapDiff = {60,100,140,180,200}, (upper border for difficulties applied to player) BlacksmithSkillForDiff = {1,20,60,105,150}, (see above) LevelMinForDiff = {1,1,60,100,140}, (lower border for difficulties applied to player) AllEnemy_lvl = {1,10,20,200,250}, As for the other three (offsets and allenemy), I have no concrete ideas. For the Offsets, the numbers look *almost* like opponent level caps. (the OSLow, I'd believe, but not OSHigh.) And AllEnemy_lvl is a bit beyond my imagination at this point... I'd be really interested (and grateful) to hear what people have to say on this. I'm toying around with the balance to try and 'extend' the difficulties (Bronze~Gold, ... Niob~Niob+2) and it could help a lot to understand better what it is I'm changing. Also, it would kinda bite to start a bronze game full of level 10 or level 35 monsters. Greets to all, Nat

I read around a bit. r00ster and Llama8 say that the skills (Spell Resistance and Combat Reflexes) work, and that the benefits of skills in general aren't shown in the sigma tool-tip. So, that's what they say, you say at mastery SR makes all the difference... So I took it. I guess it's a little better (4 pts hard, 23 pts soft). Thanks for the advice, can't wait for mastery. ^^ Only one skill slot left now! I'm between Concentration and Shield Lore I think I'll decide once I hit Niobium. I don't know right now whether I'll need another defensive skill or whether I'll be able to spare the slot for an aggressive one... I think I'll wait for Armor Lore, Toughness, SR and Constitution to hit Mastery before making any rash decisions. I'll write up / post screenshots of a summary once I hit 75. nat

I've always been reluctant to take Spell Resistance because I've heard it was buggy - or at least some aspect of it was. Is that wrong or has the problem been fixed? nat ps: Furian, thanks for the advice. I'm trying to get to niobium asap, so I can see how and what I need to skill.

Well, he's 66 now, just defeated the Carnach in Gold, and has two skills he has no idea how to pick. He needs nothing... I must say, though, with only two attacks gameplay itself is a bit . . . Regen is great: 1sec Mind Blast, 1sec Energy Blaze Resi is great: 5000+ phys, 2500 relic resistance, 800 other HP is great: 8000+ mounted, 6500+ on foot Damage is OK: 2000+ gross for Mind Blast (1000+ net), ~1000 + 400/hit gross (~500 + 200/hit net) for Energy Blaze. But he's holding up just as well as in silver, killing mobs at a moderate pace, bosses more slowly. I'll get to platinum as soon as possible.

Thank you for the inquiry! I was starting to think no one cared! *sniff* I've had to take a break (university y'know ^^), but I've just begun playing again and he's 64 still in Gold and still steady as a rock. I've decided to level a bit in the Seraphim Only Hunting Zone to up my "damage against ...: +XX.X%"'s Will work more on the build and I'll keep you up to date! nokka

Is anyone else as tickled by that name as I am?

Small update: My Mentalist is now level 60, just having entered Gold after a very boring and tedious end-stretch from Silver. In the end, all the bosses I've fought killed me just as slowly as I killed them. There were even some where I didn't need a single health potion (thank god for runes of protection!). Safety-wise, he seems stable enough: I could stand inside a mob (of almost any kind) and clean up my inventory leaving only half my attention on the mob. I swear to God, he has way too much physical resistance and way too much block... I can easily say, the fight situation where I was most on edge was with the last guardian (not the other three): He hit hard even through RoP and I was always concerned with one thing: "If he hits me 9 times in rapid succession, I'm dead." But even with him I could just stand there and take it and didn't need to kite him... In short, he's 3:1 Defense:Offense, and (given enough time) can stand his ground well enough against just about anyone --so far. I'd like to be able to keep it that way. I guess for HC it's okay to stress safety to the point of absurdity and consider killspeed a luxury. As long as he gets the job done, he's okay in my book. ^^ On through Gold to Platinum! (can you rush difficulties in Closed?)

hrhr.. First off, I can't believe I get to be the first to answer a question once in a while! RpH: Regeneration per Hit (measured in sec), meaning - if you don't already know - every successful weapon hit makes your regen timers jump by however many sec's of RpH you have. Means if you have 0.5s of RpH and two successful hits per second, a Combat Art that would normally need 14s to reload (not cool down) would regenerate 1s faster per second, so twice as fast, so 7s. Hope that helped, if you didn't already know what it was. . . Maybe my always being too late on scene to attempt an explanation is a good thing. v.v As for a HE with all three aspects, ..., If I had to choose one, I'd take Focus over Lore, as you could take Ancient Magic and Combat Discipline for damage and try, I guess, to find enough +Crit and +CastSpeed items to compensate ... But there are no items for +SpellLvlWithoutPenalty in Sacred2 now are there? (or did I miss something in Ice and Blood?! ) Although, frankly, I'd wait for other people to answer this question as well, as any advice from a player who has yet to see MaxLevel should be taken with a grain of salt... ;P

Added formula paragraphs to 'Breakpoints' section of all skills for all bonuses except: Damage Lore (Effect chance), ~Weapons (Double Hit chance), Warding Energy Lore (Damage Absorption), Bargaining (Special offer chance) Pacifism, and Constitution (I need testing for high levels and to check if there's a mastery switch) Now I'ma turn off my head and watch anime with coffee! ^^

Finally added all formulas I was comfortable adding to the wiki. Only ones missing are: Damage Lore (Effect chance), ~Weapons (Double Hit chance), Warding Energy Lore (Damage Absorption), Bargaining (Special offer chance) Pacifism, and Constitution (I need testing for high levels and to check if there's a mastery switch) and (strangely) Combat Discipline.

Sorry for the loss of momentum with the wiki updates... I've known for about 10 days now that this particular week(end) would be packed. Don't give up hope, though! I'll be back to finish the work over the next work-week! ^^ nathaniel

I've added the example for lvl75. As for how I got the numbers 3000 and 4500 I didn't read them off of any file - if you know which file btw pleeease tell me! The short version is "curve fitting tool" The long version: I assumed the function to be of the form a*(x+b)/(x+c), then copied in the full chart data to let a curve fitting tool run on the problem, expecting relatively round numbers. When I saw the values were very close to 3000 and 4500, I assumed Ascaron wouldn't be so masochistic as to take a value like 2997.5 to be their limit and called it 3000. I let the curve fit run again with the variable replaced by 3000 and wrote down the values you see in the fraction (by the way, that 100 is actually a 100.1 for example). I hope this answers your question.

I've added a small paragraph on the Combat Discipline page, where I give the two formulas. I didn't want to ramble on about the way the formula works, so as a) to keep the information concise, and b) to not scare away readers with a degree of explanation that I find to be unnecessary on the wiki page. I think the best way to incorporate this information into the wiki would be to add to every skill page a small paragraph like I did on the CD page. It'd be a lot of copy-paste-copy-paste work, but it wouldn't really take too long. I'll do it just as soon as I can make sure the paragraph is worth the trouble, so if you guys could take a look and tell me if I said too much or haven't said enough, I'll edit it and as soon as you're happy with the content and the form... copy-paste-copy-paste it is!

Done! Your wish is my command!

Possible, yes, but bothersome nonetheless, even for those who care... I'll go ahead and add a table. I guess 25% 50% 75% 90% 95% 98% 99% should do, right? Edit: List added with the above values. AND I noticed that Munera already translated my addition of less than an hour ago! Man, the people here are fast!

So lemme get this straight: In SacredUW the 50% value was 2h. For Sacred 2, they raised it to 3h. And now? In Ice and Blood? They set it to 6h:) Cold... Just.. Cold. On a slightly different note, I've added a short mention of the formula on the SacredWiki. Please tell me what you guys think of it. Too confusing, too bookish, too.. blah.. I appreciate feedback! ;D Also, if you've got a formula, you don't actually need a table.

There is no wiki page yet for SB in scared 2, right?

Sadly, I must admit I haven't played this build for a long time now. v.v So I don't really know. Sorry. But hey, welcome to darkmatters!

Sadly no. No infinity. v.v I went into the .txt file and changed UBmean to 999 (orig. 500) so that after 6h of gameplay I'd have 99.9% and looked at a char with 8.2h alive time. It did say his SB was 100.0% - which surprised me at first - but then I just figured they rounded up. The way I see it, they have the function SB(T)=T/(b+T) and a point through which this curve passes: (UBpivot,UBmean) I.e. SB(UBpivot)=UBmean Then they give b depending on UBpivot and UBmean. But still, no matter how you manipulate it (I even tried UBmean=110%) they won't let you go over 100%. Although, irrelevant math bit, if they had allowed 110% as a pivot value, the limit still would have been 100%, meaning my SB would decrease to 100% with time. And sometime around 1963.64sec, my SB would have been undetermined (infinite either way), but up until this time, it would be negative - more and more so as it approached these 1964 sec. So I say it's a lot less crazy, given the circumstances, to cap it at 100%. ^^

For the sake of legibility, I'll call UBpivot 'Tp' and SB < 1: SB = T/(T+Tp) so T = Tp*SB/(1-SB) Some key values: SB=50.0% --> T=6h (this is the pivot value: 21600s=6*3600s=6h) SB=75.0% --> T=18h SB=90.0% --> T=54h SB=98.0% --> T=294h (for Spunky) SB=99.0% --> T=594h (=34.75d) SB=99.9% --> T=5994h (=249.75d) and lastly, SB=99.99% --> T=59994h (=6y10mo) SB=100.0% --> T=infinity (sorry, Antitrust. ;P) If people get numbers larger than these, remember to consider T is Alive Time (if your chars are saved on your PC you can look these numbers up in your save .txt and it's actually called "Alive Time"), so don't forget to consider the time's in the city, the times there're no opponents, and afk times. Because the pivot time is exactly 6h, would it be better to change the formula to: "SB = T/(T+6), where T is your Alive Time in hours"? Also, small side note about the modifier "SB increase": Because the function flattens out for large times, the higher your Alive Time is, the less use this modifier is to you: Examples with a modifier of 50% faster SB increase: SB=50.0% --> SB=60.0% SB=75.0% --> SB=81.8% SB=90.0% --> SB=93.1%

Thank you, Antitrust! That hint you gave me with what 'pivot' means made the formula exact! I've made the changes in the original post. What I figure it means, is that the SB at time UBpivot is UBmean. Here, after 21600sec Alive Time, your SB is 50%. It makes me happy to have an exact formula in my post. Thanks a lot.

Thank you, Slevin, for pointing out the mistakes/misunderstandings in Blacksmith, Bargaining and Constitution. At the time, I used L to mean 'Level' which could be interpreted as both. I forgot to change the L in Blacksmith to an x, and I even wrote out the L in Bargaining as charlvl ... As far as Constitution goes, that last sentence didn't make sense, so I replaced it with a different 'but' and added an explanation for vitality. However, Bargaining's values seem to be right: I checked with my bargaining char, and she said level 198 has 19.8 which is the wiki table value. I still don't get why I wrote charlvl... Sometimes people do stupid things... Now, having looked at what I've only seen refered to as "a certain file" and would for this reason have called *******.txt, I could only find 3 values possibly concerning Survival Bonus: UBmean = 500, UBpivot = 21600, UBquot_attr = 3000 UB being Überlebensbonus in German. I haven't worked around with those values yet to see what they are, but I'm pretty sure of two things now: 1. UBquot_attr = 3000 is the attribute bonus (30%) when SB = 100% (so, never. ;P) 2. How the SB increase works. I'll be including this in an edit, but I'll say it here once as well: Indeed, it is not as the modifier claims it is. It does in fact raise the SB immediately, which I failed to notice. Thank you, Slevin. Here is how it works: (and how lots of other stuff works, by the way, which involve percentages exclusively <100%, e.g. Deathblow) A number p < 1 (=100%) corresponds to a number x < infinity, by the function p = x/(1+x) or equivalently x = p/(1-p). What Sacred needs to do a lot is to increase/decrease percentages by an absolute amount or a factor (relative amount). But it can't allow a 'p' to grow over 1, because >1 doesn't make sense in these cases. In these cases it does the following: It modifies x, and uses the p corresponding to the modified x. In short: (take x = p/(1-p), y = q/(1-q), and 'a' to be your multiplication factor) Addition: p "+" q = (x+y)/(1 + (x+y)) Multiplication: a "*" p = (a*x)/(1 + (a*x)) So the idea in the original post wasn't wrong at all, as I just now realise. I just forgot to consider the alteration of 'a' raises your SB retroactively.