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Soaring Daemon: is "Hard Hit" crossbow-only?


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I'm a newbie to the game, but from playing a few levels it seems to me that in the Soaring form, using the skill again does the Descent finisher, and the normal attack becomes Hard Hit, correct? Now, first off Hard Hit has a regen time. That's confusing since the animation is just the standard pew pew pew of the regular crossbow attack. I'm not sure if Hard Hit is being mixed in with regular attacks, it always does a Hard Hit every time, or I need to trigger it somehow, perhaps with the mysterious "CTRL+Right Click" listed in the manual as "Attack or Special Move". 

I also notice that the icon only changes to Hard Hit when I have a crossbow equipped. If I switch to sword and shield the icon goes back to Descent. Is that correct? Boy does this game have a lot of undocumented mechanics!

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4 hours ago, Hal900x said:

I'm a newbie to the game, but from playing a few levels it seems to me that in the Soaring form, using the skill again does the Descent finisher, and the normal attack becomes Hard Hit, correct? Now, first off Hard Hit has a regen time. That's confusing since the animation is just the standard pew pew pew of the regular crossbow attack. I'm not sure if Hard Hit is being mixed in with regular attacks, it always does a Hard Hit every time, or I need to trigger it somehow, perhaps with the mysterious "CTRL+Right Click" listed in the manual as "Attack or Special Move". 

I also notice that the icon only changes to Hard Hit when I have a crossbow equipped. If I switch to sword and shield the icon goes back to Descent. Is that correct? Boy does this game have a lot of undocumented mechanics!

Hi Hal, and welcome to Darkmatters!

Yes, there is a ton of undocumented mechanics in the game. It's sublimely complex and very rewarding to master. Unfortunately the winged Daemon wasn't one of the builds I used, preferring mostly for Daemon   Desm's suggestion of the wiki is a great start, and there's also a few players here with great knowledge of the Sacred's mechanics, who I'm sure if they see this can help as well.

So happy to see you've come up on this little gem of a game which was the seed of this community

Welcome to DarkMatters~

 

:)

 

gogo

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Thank you. I believe I have read the entirety of the wiki that's applicable, but didn't find the answers I am looking for. I also read the Daemon guide on Gamefaqs, which was informative but didn't answer this one. In fact, there seems to be very little on how Attack, Multi-hit and Hard Hit figure into the Daemon...only that they do, at least some of them. I will continue my search.

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Daemons don't have hard hit - the combat art you are referring to after using soaring daemon is descent. The only hard hit type attack the daemon has is assail whilst in battle daemon form (its quite slow from what I remember)

EDIT - was wrong HH gives a bonus to Soaring daemons descent damage.

 

http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred:Daemon_Combat_Arts

When you use soaring demon there is a regen time before you can use descent. So any right clicks you use when the combat art is greyed out are just gonna be normal attacks. I think you just mixed up descent as hard hit.

Going from memory Ctrl + right click just does a special attack without targeting anything. 

From your other thread -

"Regarding combos: Are the regen times changed or removed between moves in the combos? If not, what point do you drink the potion that quarters them?
Before, during or after activating it?"

There is no change to regen between combos - it comes after. Casting speed is the same. Drink yellow potions AFTER combos.

 

Merchants - items get reset when you go another merchant (not smith or runemaster), or use a portal. You can get 2 merchants side to side at Braverock and Porto vallum. This is good when using trading to buy good items.

 

"What is the percentage gain on bonuses from slotted runes in silver/gold slots in sacred gold?"

for runes - nothing. A vampire rune socketed for +3% lifeleech will do the same at any difficulty. But the blacksmith enhances increase by diifficulty level. e.g Attack/defence bonus is much higher in niobium than say silver.

 

Portals - yes there are a few small portals that just teleport you to another part of the game. The main portals will show you other locations. 

http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred:Underworld_Map_of_Ancaria

 

 

 

Edited by Augmint
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Just linking to the guide above. One trick for soaring daemon is to make a combo of one rune.  Just one. Have a high level soaring daemon and descent in another combat art slot. You then use descent as it becomes available from the higher level slot. If you use a high CA Soaring daemon to start flying there is a longer wait to use descent.

Played this build past level 100 - its very strong and straight forward to use. Find Arrnams, Pump up infernal power.

 

   

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13 minutes ago, Augmint said:

Daemons don't have hard hit - the combat art you are referring to after using soaring daemon is descent. The only hard hit type attack the daemon has is assail whilst in battle daemon form (its quite slow from what I remember)

There is no change to regen between combos - it comes after. Casting speed is the same. Drink yellow potions AFTER combos.

 

Thank you Augmint. I just this moment discovered the first point. The reason I was confused is that while in Soaring Form, the description of Descent actually changes to "Hard Hit". And it is in fact boosted by any +Hard Hit items, just as Assail is boosted by "Attack" runes, including those of other classes with a different name but identical function. EDIT: I should note that the former is from my experience, the latter is heresay from a guide.

Could you elaborate on the combo reply? Example: I have two different spells in a combo, each with a different regen timer. The first regen is 9 seconds, the second is 7. When I use the combo, does the game wait 7 seconds and then cast the second spell in the combo, or is the 9 regen skipped and the second spell fired immediately? That is what I'm trying to determine. From your description, it sounds as if the potion is used to fire a second combo immediately, but I'm still not clear about the timing within a single combo, or what exactly the point of a combo is, other then collecting a bunch of gear with boosts to spells and creating a combo that uses more powerful spells than I can normally use without eating runes. 

Edited by Hal900x
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PS: I really appreciate the replies given that this is a dead game. Is there a version of Sacred that is still popular? Perhaps I should move on to 2, 3 or wait for the upcoming new one. I hadn't realized how seemingly abandoned the game is, unlike some other ARPGs I play like Titan Quest. But the mechanics are very deep and that really attracts me to a game like this.

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"is the 9 regen skipped and the second spell fired immediately?"

Yes

 

When you use a combo it won't pause - so if you use a battlemage and use a combo of ring of ice x4 it will cast them one after the other (you can interupt them with a normal attack or moving). So it won't wait 4 or 5 seconds after you cast the first one. Regen times are added up, so in your example of 7 and 9 they are added up. I can't test it now but I think the regen times in that example might even be a little higher than 16. Which is why you wanna have a stack of yellows ready to drink. Also drinking another yellow after the first has no impact iirc. Same as mentor potions not stacking.

 

In terms of popularity Sacred 2 CM patch is probably the most popular. No-one plays sacred 3 and very few play Sacred.

 

 

 

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14 minutes ago, Augmint said:

"is the 9 regen skipped and the second spell fired immediately?"

Yes

 

When you use a combo it won't pause - so if you use a battlemage and use a combo of ring of ice x4 it will cast them one after the other (you can interupt them with a normal attack or moving). So it won't wait 4 or 5 seconds after you cast the first one. Regen times are added up, so in your example of 7 and 9 they are added up. I can't test it now but I think the regen times in that example might even be a little higher than 16. Which is why you wanna have a stack of yellows ready to drink. Also drinking another yellow after the first has no impact iirc. Same as mentor potions not stacking.

 

In terms of popularity Sacred 2 CM patch is probably the most popular. No-one plays sacred 3 and very few play Sacred.

 

 

 

Fantastic. Thanks again. So the individual regen times are added together and the sum is applied at the end of the combo, hence the potions. Huzzah!

Are the mechanics nearly the same in 2? I might skip to that for the fact that I suffer from a lot of machine-independent lag and, despite having tweaked for hours, still cannot get Sacred to run in any format that can be alt-tabbed out without major probs. Not to mention certain keys simply fail to activate intermittently, especially the loot button

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My bad. You are correct about Soaring daemon and hard hit sharing the same properties.

From the Death from Above guide

"Use whatver weapons fit the build best at the moment. If you think Regeneration Times are too high, use something with Regeneration Special Moves +xx% bonus or Physical Regeneration +x or Soaring Demon/Hard Hit +x (that increases Soaring Demon, CA increases by Bonus add a little less to Regeneration Time)"

Keep in mind I haven't played with the Daemon for quite a few months. I did briefly look on the wiki to check but it didn't mention it under soaring daemons description.

There are alot of ways to increase damage with the build I linked to. Weapon Lore/Soaring daemon/HH/Infernal power/Base damage on weapon/Strength/Call of death/

Infernal power is > HH or soaring daemon in that it doesn't add to descents regen. Never went looking for HH bonuses when I played tbh. Once I got Aarnums sword things were breezy.

 

You are correct in that there are alot of mechanics not fully understood - one example was mental regen from items not boosting spell damage. Wasn't discovered for a long time.

 

As for Sacred 2 - there is more micro managing IMO with things like buffs and regen. In Sacred you can find mid level items with no sockets with great bonuses including % regen special move. It is easier to jump back into Sacred if you haven't played for a while in comparison to sacred 2. Much easier to find set items in Sacred 2 as well and if you play single player you can share a chest unlike Sacred.

EDIT - the mechanics are similar but you need to know what mods to take and how important focus skills are to regen. It has deeper mechanics than the first Sacred for sure.

 

Sorry to hear about the lag. I had a few issues when I first installed Sacred 2 with PhysX.

 

Edited by Augmint
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OK now I'm really baffled. I thought I had combos figured out, in that the regen times were summed. They are not. A combo with regen times adding up to ~22 secs gives a combo regen time of 74 seconds. That isn't even multiplicative, it's some hidden formula I guess. Just when I thought I had a mechanic that actually worked...frankly that is kind of infuriating. So apparently combos are pretty pointless without a potion, unless the displayed regen time is incorrect. About to test it.

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Something you could give a try

http://pctalk.info/Games/Sacred2/Wolfes.Lair/SacredUnderworld/Pages/GameBasics-KeyboardHotkeys.html

Those who have an ALT + TAB issue, you can:
- go to Settings
- uncheck "Full-screen"
Now you can jump to any window and go back to the game without actually minimizing it, which often causes the game to crash.

 

btw Wolfes Lair has more info on Sacred than Dark Matters. Just a heads up - Forum is no longer available

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I will check it out, thx. Yeah I have done every screen tweak in the book. Windowed is all well and good, except it's locked at 1024x768, which is tiny. Sacred is very primitive in it's video mode, a "forced" resolution that cannot be altered. "borderless gaming" 3rd party app works pretty well, except it seems to increase the lag. It gives you a borderless fullscreen window, the best of both worlds but yeah, more lag. Dxvoodoo 2 is also helpful in reducing the lag, using a Glide or DirectX wrapper that allows a number of tweaks. Supposedly the latter can force higher resolutions, but I think that is a myth...I tried it without success. You can combine both mods and get a decent lag reduction along with borderless windowed mode, but then textures shimmer a lot. In the end I suck it up and run fullscreen, and save and quit when I want to check the web. Sacred is simply one of those games with graphical limitations that were out of date even when it was released.

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The guy who made the build, Therion x was one of the best mechanics for Sacred Daemon at the time...he produced many jaw dropping builds with the Deamon, and you can all see them here on his Youtube page with that Soaring Daemon in action as well. 

 

He goes by Racer X nic on Youtube:

here's a link to his channel... 

https://www.youtube.com/user/CoWRacerX

Sacred can do anything!

:)

 

gogo

 

 

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Hal, I'm no expert at computers but my easy fix for playing sacred underworld in full screen with no issues, and I tell this to everyone, was to save an old HD/partition a new HD, with win XP32, solely for older games that are no longer updated. I also have the original cd's not steam or download. For whatever reason I never had any issue with neither of the sacred games or their expansions like other people do. 

Unless thats not probable or viable for you. Just my experience. 

Edited by Veracious
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