Colorless Green

This is actually one of the things I've been trying to find. Is there any collection of information available anywhere on what modifiers will affect which categories of attacks? (Weapon-based Combat Art's vs Non-weapon based Combat Art's, Ranged vs Melee) Sadly, I'm in console-land, so I don't get to play with any of the AddOn stuff. I'm holding out hope that it'll still be released for consoles at some point, but oh well. And, the set-only modifiers you mentioned are the one place I've identified where my current argument really completely fails. Some of these mods appear to offer substantial advantage over what's available on rares. However, based on my (limited) looking through the wiki/my stashes, it's seeming like a lot of the time, those mods aren't set bonuses so much as mods on specific pieces of gear, meaning it'd be easy to just pick out only the necessary pieces and use rares elsewhere. I'm quite sure there are exceptions to this where wearing the full set is the way to go, though. (a) This is another of the things I've been trying to find. Is there any collection of information about what modifiers offer what kind of diminishing returns? (b) I tried out a bfg seraphim until about level 15 or something like that. It was fun and I'll likely continue with it at some later date. However, I've got a quite large collection of 3-4 star weapons (console, rememeber, so I guess they're uniques and legendaries, maybe with a set thrown in? Haven't really looked in that great of detail,) so I've had no problems keeping good weapons available on any of my chars so far making the constant-free-weapons bonus of the bfg seraphim less appealing. My DW seraphim was swayed by the dual boneslicer article and has the sword weapons skill, so she's got weapons on demand for the rest of her career if I ever hit a point where I fail to find other interesting things via drops. Speaking of my seraphim, I haven't bothered with divine protection for her yet - she's built pretty defensively and I've never really needed it. Is it really as worthwhile as you say? I might have to look into it if anything ever starts injuring me. © Thank you, this is all very useful information. I'm quite used to having access to lots of wealth - in my D2 days I literally had access to anything I could desire, so when I'm trying to plan things out I tend to plan assuming I have everything, and if I don't have it yet I sit down and try to get it (either farming X indefinitely or trading if necessary.) But, even assuming infinite wealth, it still looks to me like there's better alternatives to (at least some) sets. Take, for example, the Pyromancer high elf set (I keep using this as an example set because my Pyromancer elf has gotten the most hours of playtime from me so far, so I've studied that set as an option the most.) Using the stats screenshots from the wiki (level 210 set), each item has exactly 5 mods (counting sockets as mods.) Based on what I've read, the max that can be obtained by rares is 4 mods, so looking at it like this, the set would win. However, the set actually has less sockets than rares potentially would. By counting from the screenshots, I'm seeing 3 bronze, 5 silver, 2 gold (even though the wiki says there's only 4 silver total...), for a total of 10 sockets over seven slots. Rares can have up to two of their mods be (gold) sockets, for a total of 14 sockets over seven slots. Now, let's take into consideration that, assuming you're socketing rare rings/ammys, you get two mods per socket. I'll spare you doing all the math, but this brings us to a total of 49 mods over the seven slots while using the set (counting the set bonuses), and 42 mods over the seven slots while using rares. The set is still winning, but the margin is much narrower. However, 9-10 of the mods on the set (depending on whether you count 'aspect:Pyromancer', which technically qualifies but realistically is almost as good as 'all combat arts') are inferior versions of mods that could be guaranteed on rares (e.g. +X incendiary shower rather than +X all combat arts, or +X Pyromancer focus rather than +X all skills.) A single "all combat arts +X" mod would take the place of five of the single combat art boost mods on the full set, and a single "all skills +X" mod would take the place of four of the remaining single skill boost or categorical skill boost mods. Subtracting these differences out takes us down to exactly 42 mods apiece (by taking the nine aforementioned set mods and replacing them with the two all-channel boosts). Suddenly, there's no more advantage to using the set in terms of available mods - we're exactly equal. And, lastly, rares (assuming infinite wealth, or infinite time with a shopper) mean that you get to choose exactly what those 42 mods are and at what levels, so you're not forced into using your mods on things like damage mitigation:fire (unless you particularly need more fire mitigation on a Pyromancer elf...) Unfortunately, there's two things that my analysis doesn't consider. First, this assumes infinite wealth. I'm guessing it's going to be a lot easier to put together the seven pieces of Pyromancer elf gear than it is to put together the seven exact rares. Second, and more importantly, I have no idea what the individual values of the mods available are, I.e. whether a mod on the set piece is worth more than a mod on a rare due to being able to get higher +skills or whatnot. Does anyone know if this information exists anywhere? Thanks for all the replies, everyone. I already understand the general equipment opinions substantially more than I did from my last few weeks of lurking. -CG

That's more what I was hoping - it seems like the better option on paper, but it doesn't seem to reflect most of what I've been reading in guides and such. So, assuming things besides the most obvious set are viable options, do you tend to focus on 1-2 stats to the exclusion of others (e.g. deathblow sets,) or do you go for more balanced sets (e.g. bit of evade, bit of mitigation, bit of deathblow, etc.)? What mods do you like for melee-offense, ranged-offense, defense, casters, etc.? I haven't been able to find any hard data on how quite a lot of the mods work and what they work with (in terms of weapon based Combat Art's, non-weapon based Combat Art's, melee, ranged) so it's hard to tell whether I'd rather have "opponent's chance to evade -20%" or "chance opponent cannot evade +20%" or just skip it and take "damage +20%" or "attack value +20%". -CG

So, I've read a solid majority of the guides hosted on this site and quite a bit of the other random build-related discussion, but the subject of equipment doesn't seem to come up nearly as often as I'm used to, so I'd like to see if I can clarify a few things. (For the following section, I'm talking exclusively about armor. Weapons/jewelry/relics aren't included.) In general, what I'm taking from this is that the general guidelines for armor are: -Run (insert boss/miniboss) for a while. -Put on whichever aspect-specific set matches your main aspect. - -Profit. I've seen a few exceptions in cases where complete sets aren't necessary for full set bonuses switching in one or two other specific pieces of set equipment, but I see very little about using rares with the notable exception of stacked mitigation for the 2-3 slots that can have it. Is this an accurate reflection of how people actually play? Is the optimum equipment build really 90+% sets 90+% of the time? If so, what do people do before they have these completed sets? Do people use, say, a level 20 set over level 70 rares? Do people just go online and begz0r itamz from anyone willing to listen? Is the usable equipment pool this static based on analyzing the rares and realizing they are categorically inferior, or just out of ease? If not (which I'm hoping is the case,) what do people like to use (which I realize is an extremely broad question the answer to which necessarily begins with "For ___ build,"?) Is there any sort of repository containing information about what mods (and mod combinations) can spawn at what values at what levels? Granted, I'm not (yet) running 180+ level chars in niob with hundreds of set items (though actually I think my set collection is in the triple digits at this point,) so I'm well aware I haven't seen everything yet and there might be more of a disparity between sets and rares later on, but based on what I've seen so far in the ~60 level range (comparing level 60-75 sets to level 60-75 rares), it looks to me like there'd be viable shoppable alternatives to even the really obvious set choices (say, Pyromancer elf, which everyone seems to basically agree should use the Pyromancer set.) Given patience, you can guarantee four mods (including sockets) per rare directly tailored to your char, while most of the sets seem to (at least at these levels) come in at below 4 average, even after factoring in sockets and set bonuses. What am I missing? -CG

I'd imagine there's quite a bit of overlap between the D2 crowd and the Sacred 2 crowd - I know that Sacred 1/2 was mentioned with relative frequency on my old D2 forums, which was actually a contributing factor to my deciding to pick up Sacred 2 after getting bored with D2. I've also recognized a couple names from the SIF who were also D2 people. I'm somewhat surprised I haven't recognized any names here on DM from my D2 forum. This seems like a good candidate for the place they'd wind up. Strangely, I'm probably one of a tiny minority of fans of this genre who isn't excited about D3 - I have a strong premonition that Blizzard has learned a lot of incorrect lessons from their wild WoW success that they seem to be applying to the development of D3. This combined with the fact that (IIRC) none of the original D2 team is involved in the development makes me rather apprehensive. We'll see what happens. -CG

Hi, everybody. I'm new here to DM. I picked up Sacred 2 for PS3 a month-ish ago and have been playing pretty consistently since then. I have a good deal of appreciation for this particular genre - I played Diablo 2 pretty much from launch until fairly recently (with a couple breaks,) but I reached the point where I had effectively nothing left to do. I'll refrain from posting my entire D2-related resume, but believe me, it's quite extensive even as compared to other long term D2 addicts. So, running out of ways to occupy myself in D2 combined with a general frustration with PC gaming in general (not enough PC games of interest come out within a given hardware upgrade cycle to justify the costs of upgrades, and much of what comes out is just a port of something designed to be played on a console anyways) has caused me to start in with the Sacred2 on the PS3. I'm quite enjoying myself so far. I've been playing solo mainly because (a) I didn't really want to burden other online players with my newbness while figuring the game out from scratch, (b) I'm not keen on corrupting my main account, which I gather happens a lot easier while playing online, and © my local friends who I'd be playing with haven't gotten around to getting online at a convenient time. I'm probably going to start playing online in the pretty near future, particularly if I wind up finding people either here or locally to coordinate a game with, because I much prefer that sort of multiplayer to the general nobody-knows-each-other that exists in public, uncoordinated MP servers. Anyways, I'm currently running a DW seraphim at ~66 somewhere in the middle of platinum and a Pyromancer elf at ~60 somewhere in the middle of gold. Both of them are working quite effectively - the seraphim will eventually exist primarily to run the orc cave (though she's currently messing around doing side quests and exploring), while the elf spends most of her time running, well, really whatever I feel like at the time. She does well enough against pretty much everything I've tried her against. I might run her up to plat sometime soon, but she is completely failing to find any useful quantity of the Pyromancer set (I think the Pyromancer set represents about 5% of my elf set itamz and includes duplicate pieces of the same slots,) and I'd really like to get at least a bit of that put together at some point here. So, I think I'm starting to ramble here, so I'll try to cut it short. I've been lurking at DM for at least a couple weeks now and I'm quite pleased with what I've seen so far, particularly the initiative and dedication involved in putting together the wiki. I'm a big fan of the deep, strategically analytical aspect of this genre, and this, from what I've seen, appears to be the place to be for that sort of thing. I'm looking forward to becoming part of this community. To any of you in the US, happy Thanksgiving. To any of you outside the US, happy.. Wednesday, I guess. -CG