Llama8

Ash, were you able to get your icons to appear in-game? I added them to the skin.zip file (with Winrar since Windows keeps corrupting the zip file) as well as re-creating the folder structure (as czevak suggested), but I can't see the new icons in-game...

Thanks mate, I'm not too fussed about the speed, as long as I get it.

####! My skin.zip pak file's become corrupt, could someone either upload a copy or mail me one. Unfortunatley it's ~24 meg...

Yeah, % LL is pretty overpowered, almost brokenly so. Anything that makes the final bosses that easy to kill is owerpowered IMO. Though it is useful for hunting for items for bosses.

I gues the answer to that depends on whether you would prefer the immunity reduction from Ancient Magic mastery, the 20% regen reduction from CD (not sure off the top of my head if that's on top of every other regen reduction or not) or the additional chance to weaken/slow/fire DoT from Damage Lore (and additional damage from DL mastery). One thought is that if you go for the weapon lore/damage lore route, you'll find it easier to hit with weapons & at a higher speed, thereby getting more regen per hit over a given time period. This would also allow you to have your CAs at a higher level, giving more damage & more effects from the mods (eg, chance to stun from Furious Emblazer, slow from Amp Discharge, damage mitigation, melee reflect & RpH/healing from Jolting Touch).

And that's fine for Campaign mode, but if I'm playing in Free mode, I just want to play with my mates, not play with those of my mates who happen to be logged in with the same alignment character as I'm on with. There was an aweful lot of complaining in-game & on the SIF about this early on & I think that this is one case where "realism" (for want of a better term) should be trumped by playability & the "fun" factor of being able to play with my friends, rather than a subset of my friends. I also think that the Light & Shadow campaigns should have been more different, IMO they were both slightly different shades of grey rather than Light & Shadow.

I think that this is one of the differences between an aRPG & an MMO. aRPGs are all about the player (or a few players) taking on large numbers of monsters in a fairly short time frame, therefore it's more offensively focussed, since you need to kill a lot of (comparatively) low-ish HP monsters fairly quickly, so you end up with characters with fairly high damage/offense & comparatively low hp/defenses. In MMOs, the combat is more geared towards longer fights with smaller numbers of opponents, so characters are more defensively focussed than in an aRPG, it also allows the possibility of support classes like healers & buffers. I've played Lotro as well & the combat there is quite different to Sacred & other aRPGs. For a start there are areas that can't be completed (or sometimes even attempted) with a single character, yet aRPGs often have an offline SP mode which means that all (or the vast majority) of the content has to be attemptable (not necessarily easy) by a single character. I think the four main game modes which the Sacred series has had work well, SP, LAN, Open & Closed. Though I'd like to see the MP aspect tweaked to make it more focused on players joining parties & gaming together, rather than having several players in a single server each on their bit of the map, or worse, several people in their own locked servers. The problem is doing that without unbalancing the game (either giving parties too much of a bonus to XP/MF/etc, or single players too little XP/MF/etc). And Sacred 2's MP restrictions on who can party up with who in a free game were an abomination & really did not help create a community...

I thought Plat was level 100-200? The simplest way to get your shoppers into Niobium would probably be to edit the balance.txt so that the min level for Niobium is 0 (or 1).

I posted here & re-installed my gfx drivers which fixed the problem. Only now it's still an issue, after running the AV this morning (booting up for the AV run & the login screen was as it should be), a subsequent boot & the login screen's black again.

I tried running MalwareBytes Antimalware & Avira AV (run most mornings) & neither of them came up with any issues. I also looked through that thread (I've seen it before) & tried running through post #8 (I assume this is the one you're refering to), but when I get to this bit: There aren't any users/groups which consist of a string of numbers, there's 5 users/permission entries (Administrators, system, users & 2 authenticated users), so I'm slightly wary of doing the "take ownership" bit (on the other hand, #### it!). I've also tried the "OEM background" thing but that's not worked either.

Ok, the login screen is "there", it's just black. If I wait a reasonable amount of time for Win7 to finish churning away, the cursor flickers/disappears & if I then type in my password it logs in to Windows properly, it's just the login screen is black, so it's a bit difficult to tell when it's finished booting Windows & has got to the login screen...

Which would at least explain why it seems to be installing updates each evening. What bothers me & makes me think that there's an issue is that there's no "configuring updates" screen inbetween the swirly-windows screen & the login screen anymore. At least if there's a screen which says that it's running some stuff & is x% through I know that it's ok, rather than just displaying a black screen while it churns away in the background. If I can get back into windows, I might roll back all of the updates from yesterday & today & then apply them one by one to see if there are any issues with any specific updates. Which is what I was expecting from XP.

Of course it would, just like having the save files on your PC means it's possible to edit them & cheat, that's a)not a good reason for not supporting SP/Open & b)doesn't mean that many people will actually do it. Doing that on Closed is quite a bit different, since the core/important files (Balance.txt, Spells.txt, Blueprint.txt, etc) used are on the server & you can't access them. Also, if you've modified your files you can't log in to Closed (IIRC).

Yeah, I think that's what's happening, it took 7-8 mins to get to the login screen this morning, but it hasn't come up with the "configuring updates" screen for a few days. It then installed a few more updates this morning (including IE9) & after a quick reboot ~15-20 mins later it still hadn't got back to the login screen. Does boot logging cover the configuring updates stage? I don't mind it doing updates, it just seems to do them almost everyday & then it takes a conciderable amount of time to boot afterwards.

Source Warden might have issues with bosses, since you'd have to use Primal Mutation (probably modded for fire damage) to kill bosses, in conjunction with the fire resist reduction from Fiery Ember, and Fiery Ember/Icy Evanesence + Charged Grid for mobs, and Untouchable Force moded for stun/debuffs.

Start up Sacred (switch to windowed mode & lower the gfx settings if necessary) & create a LAN campaign game with your level 1/2 shopper character. Start up a second instance/copy of Sacred 2 (click the shortcut, or however you start Sacred, again) & enter the LAN game with a second, high level character (high level so that it won't have any problems killing the monsters & if it's high enough you can "just" run through ignoring all of the monsters) & use that character to run the shopper. I've done the same in Closed MP, so you can definitely have two copies of Sacred 2 running on the same PC at the same time as long as your PC is beefy enough to copy with it. When you've got both characters in-game, keep your shopper character in-game & on the starter isle, then alt-tab to the high level character & run through the campaign. Repeat for Gold, Plat & Niobium. There are two ways of unlocking subsequent difficulties, by character level or by completing the previous campaign, hence if you have another character run your character through the campaign, they get to access the next difficulty regardless of level. Yes, bargaining does skew the merchant "drops" (armour, anyway, the jewellery & weapons tabs are unaffected) towards the class that's shopping, which is annoying if you're looking for equipment for a different class, but useful if you're looking for same-class gear. You have a choice, you can either create several different shoppers with different classes at different levels (ie, a High Elf & seraphim shoppers at level 10, a TG & High Elf at level 50, etc), or you can have one shopper character at each level that you want & put up with having to shop for much longer to get not only armour for the class that you want but decent armour. By far the easiest way of shopping is to do it in an MP server, start on the isle, then use the map to travel to a different portal, then as the map is "disappearing" (but before you actually port off the isle) hit whatever key you have bound to "port to island" (can't remember if it's F12 or F8 as default), this will immediately teleport you back to the island, but Sacred 2 thinks that you've left the island so it resets the merchants' inventories... Sounds a bit complex, but it's really simple, though you do have to be fairly quick on hitting the port-back-to-the-island key after you select the other portal...

Yes, creating a shopper network is almost as easy in SP as it is in MP (with the possible exception of lower XP due to not having anyone in-game with you & it may not be possible to get the shopper run up into Niobium at a very low level & the mods on niobium gear are noticeably better than any other difficulty). Additionally, since the character files are on your pc, you can make a copy of your bargainer at whatever levels you want to have a shopper as you level him/her up, that way you only have to level up a shopper once... If you're creating a shopper, then yes, you should always keep Bargaining at character level & upgrade your trading suit every so often. One thing that you "should" do (if possible), is to run your trader through into Niobium as soon as possible, this is easier in MP since you can have a friend run you through, but you should (I think) be able to do it yourself in a LAN game if you start up a second copy of Sacred 2 (which you can do as long as your PC can copy with it) & have a high level character (a blank level 200 character would be good for this if you don't have a high level char already) run your trader through each difficulty.

Ok, apparently it was just taking forever (~10 mins or so) to start up & since I didn't see a "Windows is installing/running some update" screen, I assumed that it'd fallen over... Edit: 'Cause that's what windows has taught me over the past few years, if it doesn't boot up, it's probably fallen over. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions & handholding.

The version I installed includes SP1, so that's not it. There's HD activity for a few mins but then it tails off. The startup restore said that I'd connected & removed some hardware (a camera) recently, but other than that all it's tests came up ok... I think that my options at the moment are either trying to find these updates that it installed yesterday & getting rid of them, if that's the issue (but if it was, wouldn't it not have booted up this morning?), or re-installing windows. Or give it ~20-30 mins while I'm having dinner to see if it'll start up...

Windows is now refusing to boot (it boots into safe mode fine, I'm going to try the startup restore in a sec). It shut down fine last night (as far as I'm aware) & installed some updates (not sure, but how could I find out what these are & remove them if necessary?). Booted up fine this morning & ran the AV & then turned off automatically. Now it refuses to boot up properly & my wife's not used it during the day. Edit: Oh yeah, I tried enabling the boot log, but that only keeps a log for the most recent boot, ie, into safe mode, not from the previous attempted boot... Edit #2: And by "doesn't boot", it does the swirly windows thing, but instead of going to the login screen, I get a black screen with a mouse pointer (which does move), but nothing else.

Lost Fusion should be do-able, Jolting Touch for bosses (slow, but low risk), Amp Damage/Furious Emblazer ofr mobs.

Yup, there's a hell for people like him...

A marvel of German engineering I'm sure!

There's at least ~6 hours where the sun's beneath the horizon & he can work on them then Gogo, why does he need to sleep?

I thought of Eritrea...