Androdion

We've all been there my friend.

As long as some pants drops as a reward, right?!

Side effects of my daily medication and a memory lapse. What's hardcoded is the range and not the visible circle, so you change the visible circle in options.txt to match it (the 230 value). My drugged up brain added an unneeded and uncalled for step by putting everything upside down. As far as I'm aware, there's no need for an optionscustom.txt, as changing that single value to 230 in options.txt makes it work, as is stated in the patch notes for CM 1.60. And answering you @SLD, after reading it with less drugged up eyes, I actually have no idea what this does. Sorry for the confusion with the hardcoded comment, that was on me. On a different note, "Keep it calm, and play Sacred".

Yeah, I think the visible circle is hardcoded. I'm not 100% sure though.

Hi The options.txt file path is something like this: "C:\Users\'user name'\AppData\Local\Ascaron Entertainment\Sacred 2. Plus, AppData is a hidden folder, so you have to enable that on your OS. It's also recommended to edit the file with Notepad++, for compatibility sake.

I don't think that'd be the end result. If you take a look at the Darksiders franchise, THQ did the remastering job on the first two titles as a sort of reboot for then releasing the third title. After they did this the older versions of the games became unavailable on the Steam Store, so they basically took down the older versions and presented their reboots with what, a slight graphics polish? In my honest opinion, and if I were to guess, if the Sacred franchise was to be touched by them it'd get a similar treatment. We could expect bug fixing to some extent, but I don't see them integrating mods, though I wouldn't be surprised if they'd make Sacred games compatible with the Steam Workshop system. All in all, I don't have much expectations about this. Remastered, rebranded and for sale again with a big bang, only to be only marginally different from the original game.

Without going into details, I'm just going to say that this has been the company's apparent way of doing things for a long time. I've had a similar interaction in a distant past, pre-merger but during rebranding. So yeah, it really doesn't surprise me to be honest. I honestly don't understand what the goals for that company are in terms of their portfolio. What does this mean for the future of Sacred? Beats me. I think that this community, with the mods and improvements that people around here have been doing for years, is the way to go forward.

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!