Androdion

True that. I guess that with projectiles being locked behind Staff Lore mastery these kind of situations were so damn specific that you just couldn't get to the core of its implications, whereas when the behaviour change in staves was made to have them shoot projectiles without the Lore skill mastery, that became all too evident. I understand why it was done, and I know that at the time both Flix and Dimitry had to compromise to it in order to solve the "shoot everything on and off screen" exploit. And trust me when I say that they tried their best to have it be as balanced as they could, namely testing different attack ranges, type of projectiles, animations, etc. I know that because I was testing CM 1.60 implementations as they were making them, and that patch was anything but consensual. I don't think that anyone feels like Viperish Disease and Eternal Fire weren't heavily nerfed, to the point of kind of loosing their own appeal, but there were things that just couldn't be made to work in any other way. Staves were just another victim of the source code's limitations, and with having to choose between a game breaking exploit and a class specific exploit, I can understand the choice that was made. Lesser of two evils if you will. I'm very partial to enjoying "mega-projectile" staves though, but I guess that it's due to testing it so much that I started enjoying that machine gun-like behaviour. It's just fun stuff, which wouldn't be as fun if the game had an active build meta, because that'd become the standard for fast grinding. But considering how the game has just a few hardcore longtime players, who have hundreds or thousands of hours spent in the game, I guess that choosing to be OP in some particular cases isn't that big of a deal. Like you say, it goes down to each of us to choose what and how we do with it. Much like using Char Editor for respecing, or to create blank templates to avoid climbing up to mastery level (guilty!), or using non-vanilla XP gains, etc. It's all cool because there's no meta, just hardcore players having fun.

Good advice, considering that I'm running PFP myself. I remember that trying to micromanage two different sets of weapons while dual-wielding, with each set pairing different elemental damage types, was very hard due to not being able to have similar stats on different weapons. The easiest way to do so was with a build that had Bargaining and that could fish for specific modifiers on rare weapons on vendors, and considering that you can fish for weapons with forging slots like that, and more importantly for Deathblow bonuses, it can work. It's still a lot of work, and I'm not sure if the gains are that visible. However, with melee builds not having a way to reduce armour resistances like casters have with Ancient Magic, using a set of weapons with a single element against a single element heavy armour boss in higher difficulties can be an issue. I actually use the Staff weapon lore on my Magic Coup High Elf for the attack value bonus alone, but that's mostly because I had a spare skill to burn. I know that staves being ranged, even with a short range, isn't vanilla behaviour per se, but the way it was implemented made way for a completely different way of playing the game when using them. My MC build for instance, it focuses on Crystal Skin and Shield Lore for durability, Shadow Step for evasion/stun/damage, and then uses a one-handed staff to be able to hit mobs without having to be head to head with them. And since HE are squishy as melee it actually brings in an interesting dynamic, as opposed to the the more typical Incandescent Skin/Pole Arms template. I agree that a Malevolent Champion SW with dual-wield staves can be a bit OP, especially with an off-hand weapon with %LL and stacking RpH, but that's an archetype that didn't exist and that wasn't exactly balanced, so I'll give you that. I guess that a good middle ground is running an Inquisitor with a Ruthless Mutilation/Callous Execution combo, which despite still throwing more than a few projectiles is much more controlled, I.e. fair/balanced. Frenzied Rampage with the two double hit mods and dual-wield staves is OP, I have to agree, and even if the lower base damage of staves tends to balance it somewhat, the amount of stacking modifiers and huge amount of projectiles thrown at a single time just ramp it out of control. It's fun though, if you want a fast boss melting build that isn't a Glacial Thorns build.

Ah yes, dual wield does have some associated shenanigans, as both of you explained so well. There's another interesting mechanic that happens post CM 1.60, and by extension on PFP as well, and it has to do with the new behaviour of mage staves. If you dual wield a staff with any other melee weapon, and you use the staff as your main weapon, the attack will actually be... ranged! Since staves were changed to shoot projectiles even without its relevant weapon mastery, but still count as melee weapons, you can dual wield one with any other melee weapon. This can result in some really wild results if you run with a Malevolent Champion SW and modify Frenzied Rampage twice for double hits. Want to see something fun? Try it, it's a blast. One-handed staves don't have %LL, but if your secondary weapon does, you can then throw a barrage of projectiles and each will proc it. RpH gets pretty crazy as well, so you can get your CA's cooldown really high and it'll reset very easily. As for DoT builds, they do seem to be more effective with LMB attacks if even multi-element CAs can only proc one effect per hit. It's probably possible to theorycraft a build that relies more on CAs as support instead of using them as a constant means to attack, in order to maximise DoTs. I remember that there was this crazy Spectral Hand build back then with Damage Lore maxed out, and the guy who ran it used to farm the Guardians with it. It looked like it was a lot of fun, there's probably still its forum post around here somewhere.

Looking forward to your results, and thanks a lot for the explanation!

As a long, long, long time player of Sacred 2, and also as a recently returned one to the game, this thing right here is pretty much amazing! It's a visual mod that just makes the game a lot fresher and more eye friendly than it ever was.

So in short, if you're playing with a DoT build, let's say a dual-wielder with Fire/Poison weapons and maxed out Damage Lore, is it better to maximise damage conversion on each weapon or is it irrelevant damage wise for applying DoTs? Sorry for the inane question, but my brain isn't collaborating today.

It's good to know that my memory isn't hopelessly lost. Thanks for the tips!

Yeah, that was what I was talking before. Editing the SP value gets freaky very fast if you level up from level 1 onwards, because you start getting a lot of XP early on and you climb more than one level at a time, so a few years back I tried several times to find a playable value there but I just gave up with trying to balance it properly. Considering that I'm starting at level 75 though, that may be the easiest way to avoid having to grind too hard from then on, since getting from level 75 to 76 already requires nearly 2,5 million XP, and the most that veterans give at that point is around 10K. I may need to test this on my next build, with and without the XP penalty, to see just how much it ramps up and how much faster levelling gets. Since each save game has an internal clock on how many hours you play, it should be very easy to compare build level vs time played. Thanks! Indeed, changing the SP value on the "MP_experience" line is something easy to do and that doesn't break anything, assuming that you don't ramp it up way too much. Like I mentioned above, it's very hard to properly make it work from level 1 onwards without overlevelling in early Acts, but it should be fine for post-mastery levels, or post-100 levels. It doesn't change XP from quests does it? You mention that it dictates mob kill XP, and from what I recall that is exactly that. If memory serves there's another line in balance.txt that rules the amount of quest XP, with one value per difficulty level to a total of five, am I right? Regarding ExpLS, I never did try to put a value above 1000 (100%), and I understand what you're saying about causing an overflow. It's possible that it may happen, and I too have no idea how the game will interpret a value above 1000 there. In theory, going from the formula in the Wiki, and with my limited math knowledge, adding a 0,1% each 25 levels would probably be reasonable (1001, 1002, 1003, 1004). I've tried calculating the inverted values from 98,5% into 101,5% and so on, but the end result at near level cap was more than 19 times as much XP! That is, assuming I calculated it correctly. You're probably right when you say that turning that penalty into a bonification may do more harm than good. I don't really want to be playing the same build for 8 years, ha ha. But I get what you meant. It must've been fun back then to play in teams online and levelling up next to your buddies. I agree that solo levelling in SP can become tedious, as the motivation to keep it going depends solely on your own perseverance to keep grinding. I guess that that's why I'm trying to find a way to try to get to level cap without breaking both my mind and the game's XP balance.

Thanks a lot for the lengthy post, I appreciate it! So it seems that some mobs retained some non-vanilla bonuses, but I really don't want to go nitpicking through the game files just because of a few occurrences. Regarding the XP penalty past level 100, that does seem to be the main issue with levelling to 200. I think that the highest I ever went was somewhere between 110 and 120, but it was a few years ago so I can't really remember the exact figure. I do remember that it was really slow to level up, and like you say, even with the penalty removed it's not that fast. I'm not sure if I want to dabble into "vanilla turtle grind to 200", probably not to be honest, but I think I'll try a full clear in Niob with my current build and see how far it goes like that. If I feel like it gets me nowhere fast I may remove the penalty on subsequent runs, or even turn that negative penalty into a positive one as to increase XP gain past 100 instead of diminishing it. Time will tell. Now, for legit levelling I assume that it's better to leave the I&B regions for last then? Clear every region from 1 to 10, follow the main campaign and do all the quests in the middle, and then go for the Crystal Planes and Blood Forest? Eh, I always leave those for last anyway. And assuming I want to turn the negative penalty past level 100 into a positive one, does anyone know which values would be reasonable enough as to not increment it way too much? I've tried several times to adjust the XP gain in single player by editing the first value on the "MP_experience = {1000,1150,1325,1550,1825}" line, but the multiplier ramps up exponentially and it gets freaky very fast, so I gave up on trying to balance that for 1-200. If I could however balance an increase in XP gain from level 100 onwards, turning the "ExpLS100, ExpLS125, ExpLS150, ExpLS175" values from "985, 980, 975, 970" into something slightly above 1000, but in a way that it wouldn't ramp up too heavily, it'd be an interesting way to play a build up to 200. It certainly would be much more fun than running around killing stuff for an hour in order to climb one level. Any ideas on this?

Always an uphill battle! Yeah, I figured that it'd probably be possible, yet a royal pain to do it. Guess I was right.

Hello folks! Not that I'm not into lengthy posts, but basically, title?! I've recently gone back to slaying Kobolds here Kobolds there (Kobolds are everywhere!), and since I'm playing with PFP I'm with vanilla XP gain. And even though I've started at level 75 (thank you Char Editor), with all difficulties unlocked, I began at Gold because I actually went in "undressed". So basically I ran the entirety of the MC for gearing up, and without side-questing I defeated the Guardians and started Platinum at a measly level 82. That means that running MC alone in Gold netted me just 7 levels post-mastery, which seems really low. I know that XP gain from Platinum up starts getting better with questing, and not as good with mob killing, but since I intend to leave questing mainly for Niobium, where I plan to do all quests and exploration, is it really possible to reach max level? I know that there's a lot of quests, but that's also a lot of levelling up! Even if I end Platinum at level 100, given the XP penalty from then on, just how far should I be able to get? Asking it in a different way, is reaching level 200 only possible if you go heavy on questing on both Platinum and Niob? If not, just how much XP can Niob quests alone net a player?

The optimal way would probably be to use the weapon slots for this, so gear with CAR+X% (vrum vrum, muhaha) on a slot for general use with BT, and then another slot with a different itemisation for using IS for bosses. Sounds about right. I do remember old discussions about this issue with IS, and Hooyaah is right on the money, you do want to focalize your meteors into a small radius for boss killing. The Wiki entry for the CA has a few tips.

Nah bro, Delphic melee High Elf. I haven't played that one in a hot minute!

It's good to be back! My health is finally allowing me to focus on and do things that I haven't been able to do for a while, including coming back to the world of Ancaria again. Three tries as to what archetype I'm currently playing (yet again!)...

Hello there! Long time since I've posted here, but I had to come and pay my respects to this awesome endeavour. I've only ran the game for a few hours so far, but it's clear to me that the work Vishanka did with this mod is incredible. The game looks fresher than ever, less cartoonish in a way, and definitely easier on the eyes. Looking at the sands of the Bengaresh desert and not being blinded by the constant flare is refreshing. I think that I'm going to have fun rediscovering the game's areas, and with it all the little details that have eluded me for years. Thank you so much for this Vishanka, you have my respect!