

SLD
DarkMatters Sacred Specialist Modder-
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An easy character for a returning Sacred 2 player?
SLD replied to Jacek's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
So, while I'm still waiting for Jacek to tell us his exact choice of Game Version, today has so far been a slow day in forum activity and I haven't had to spend hours on other threads already, I have decided to go for the next round of general guide stuff, this time focusing on what can be done with(to? ) a new character. As we already have a nice table of contents here, let us begin with something that isn't on there Character creation: None of the things you chose here can be changed later. You get to chose: -A Character Class -A Character Name -Slightly varying by character class there are some options to change the appearance of your character and the chest imp. Has no effect on gameplay. -Hardcore or not? I don't think this flag does anything other than that the character turns into some kind of unplayable corpse when you die ingame. Though I have not thoroughly tested this. Maybe you do get some kind of reward for playing the risky game mode. So far I don't know of any benefits to this. -Difficulty, Bronze or Silver? This one is also a nobrainer. It does not force you to play Silver if you chose Silver, neither on SP chars nor on MP chars. All that it does is unlock access to the Silver campaign if you chose Silver. I am not aware of any downside to choosing Silver here. -Expert's touch? Always on. Normally active Combat arts of different aspects only send their own aspect's combat art on regen when used. With Expert's touch all aspects' combat arts are placed on regen when any combat art is used, yet in return all regen times are lowered. As most effective builds repeatedly use the same combat art Expert's Touch will be the better choice. In case of multiple combat arts that are always used in a fixed order, you would use a combo for that and as the combo just inherits the highest regen among it's components Expert's Touch again comes out on top. Only quickly manually switching between combat arts from different aspects would be "better" without, but that build choice will basically never be "good". If you manage to come up with a build that represents an exception to this rule, you sure no longer need a guide to tell you what to do -Campaign, Light or Shadow? Two different main quest lines, some side quests are only available to characters of a specific side, ork region enemy allegiances are slightly different and who knows what else. Important to note is, this choice affects all game modes not just campaign games. So a light campaign specific side quest can never be done by a shadow campaign character, not even in multiplayer free play mode. This can be important to access certain quest rewards. Seraphim are always stuck with Light campaign, inquisitprs are always forced to play shadow campaign. I do not know much about campaigns, so the question wether one is easier than the other or can be finished with less time investment, has to be answered by someone else. In the german client the campaign choice also effects your monster kill counter, light characters count "collateral damage" while shadow characters count "victims". As far as I know the english client always counts "kills". This is purely cosmetic and should have no effect on anything other than your characters concience The campaign choice also directly effects the available gods to chose. -Gods are the most powerless beings in ancaria. Your character has to choose one of the six gods to laugh at. Arranged in two rows, Seraphims can only choose from the top row, Inquisitors can only choose from the bottom row, shadow campaign characters can't choose the first god, light campaign characters can't choose the last. The god of your choice bestows upon you a divine gift, a special combat art that you will use every time you accidentally hit its hotkey, default is "G". The divine gifts come with a godly regeneration time of 15-30 minutes depending on which one you chose. This regeneration time can only be lowered by wasting a skill slot for "divine devotion". Even with that skill the regeneration will never be lower than 15% of the starting value, meaning it will always take at least 2 minutes to regenerate. None of these divine gift combat arts last long enough to reach a reasonable uptime. It was obviously designed to be a special oh-:eek: button, but if you need an oh-:eek: button that is stronger than your health potion you will have already died. It is also not usable as an oh-:eek: button because the divine gift has a cast time. So it's actually at best a oh-future-:eek: button that you can use before combat to help you for a short period of time. I won't go into detail about every single divine gift. The only reasonable one that can be used for defense at the start of a boss fight is Forens' inspiration. It gives a high chance to reflect basically everything. All characters that aren't inquisitors can choose it. Inquisitors have to choose between a short term summon that turns on him, a crowd control skill that makes a crowd uncontrollable and Testa's odd "Will-o-wisp"s that are supposed to do something beneficial. I would go with Testa on Inquisitors and Forens in all other cases. I also would suggest never to waste a skill slot on Divine devotion. The divine gift should only be used in special cases where you, for whatever reason, need to deal with something that you aren't strong enough to deal with safely, so lowering regen from 15 to 2 minutes shouldn't make a difference. You can't use it in the same fight twice anyway and if you plan using it in multiple fights in succession you can basically just wait those 15 minutes. That is still a better choice than wasting a skill slot or even skill points on that. Now that we do have a character we can talk about things a new character can do. Runes: There are two ways a new character can get runes. 1. Kill enemies. That one shouldn't come as a big surprise. 2. The rune chest. Every charcter has near their singleplayer campaign starting location a chest with a special beam of light shining down on it. It's a starting chest that contains one piece of equipment and a rune. I think in the base game it is only one rune, certain popular mods may increase it to up to three and it is never a random rune always a specific rune. In multiplayer campaign games you start at the MP island so this chest, if it exists at all in MP would be quite a distance away. Multiplayer characters can however repetably start Singleplayer campaigns and farm the starter chest for runes. Singleplayer characters should at least be able to open it once per difficulty (haven't tried it though so I might be wrong). No matter how you acquired your first runes, if your build needs other runes than the ones you got you need to enlist the help of combomaster. And that guy wants gold. Gold: How does a new character get Gold? You'll notice a pattern here, as again killing enemies is an option. But there are alternative ways that aren't as dangerous. NO matter wether a character is SP or MP it can enter a MP free play game. And there you can open chests repeatably. So with many chests reachable withoutt the need for combat you can technically already farm an infinite amount of gold at level 1. Obviously that would be enormously inefficient. There are however a few "strategies" to improve the yield. Option 1, Safe and legit: You can just start a mp free game on silver difficulty, there are some "magic hiding places" on the starting island and a lot of chests inside the town of Sloeford. Fountains also always drop a health potion so you can pick those up while you're at it. If you have at least the cm-patch installed you will also be able to directly teleport towards unlocked harbours and balloons. This allows adding the chest and crystals inside the Seraphim camp of the crystal region to the run. All in all this run does not make you super rich, but it allows you to easily farm up enough gold for whatever else you might need to get started. Option 2, Risky but kinda legit: Items and gold amounts from chests are actually not dependent on your characters level but the level of the enemies in the area. So sneaking your lvl 1 char into an area where the enemies don't scale down to level 1 would allow you to snatch some higher level items that can be worth significantly more gold. With the CM-patch option of travelling directly to any open harbour without needing to reach a harbour first, you can technically at the start of the game teleport directly to the dryad region. The town there is "safe" and has multiple loot containers to open so if you manage to reach the portal there once you can farm items of around lvl 20. Sadly between the boat and the safe part of town is a spot where one or even multiple turtles can spawn. Lvl 20 turtles... You can get lucky with a no turtle run, or manage to run past a turtle before it reacts. As you are kinda in town and enemies are supposed to stop fighting and leave town when they get pulled in to close it is not as dangerous as it sounds but there is certainly a risk of dying here. However, as your character does only need to accomplish the run once and then go via the portal, it is kinda safe to do even for hardcore characters as you can just start a new character until you get it right. In the end this method helps with creating early game gold faster for other things you might want to do before going into combat. Option 3, as risky as option 2 but nowhere near as legit : Now we start exploiting. It's not just gear pieces that you can acquire at a higher level. Even things like health potions, that don't change with level, have kind of a level attached to them. A health potion from the dryad island will have a significantly higher gold value than one from a sloeford fountain. But they still stack. So how does the game keep track of the stack value if every potion has its own value? It doesn't, at least not as long as you only have the cm-patch installed. Other mods beyond that might fix this already. But without such mods the game just treats a full stack as multiples of the "first" item of the stack. So if you have no health potion in your inventory you can pick up an "expensive" health potion dropped from a chest in the dryad coast town(quite a common drop) and then go and get "cheap" potions from sloeford that will automatically stack on top and turn into expensive ones. You can also just buy potions from merchants for ~4 gold a pop. Once you got a few potions stacked you can just split the stack(shift+left click is the correct combo, I think) separating one expensive potion and selling the rest as a stack for like a thousand gold each... not quite sure what the exact value it is that ypu would get there but I think its somewhere in that ballpark so basically you can go to a merchant and buy dozens of bottles of "1000 free gold coins" and when you reset the merchant, by teleporting away and back, you can do it again... This method should quickly solve any starting gold requirements you might have, but it does abuse a bug. Option 4, for mods like D2F where you can enter any difficulty right from the start: You can get the equivalent benefits of a supercharged option 2 or 3 by using option 1 in a hgher difficulty. For example, loot from the crystal region camp will be around lvl 70+ on the highest difficulty in D2F. Selling that can yield tons of gold and directly dropped gold at that level is even more insane. Starting Gear: Now that our lvl 1 character has gold, we can put this to good use. Again we go to the highest difficulty setting our game allows us to and we teleport back and forth between sloeford and the starting island to reset the vendors on the starting island in a free play multiplayer game. Our target is to get gear pieces for every slot. First priority is a socket, then as high as possible physical armor on the better armor pieces like chest helmet and potentially a shield. Movement speed on boots and potentially on pants as well can also be quite nice to have. Bracers can give a nice amount of +%damage bonus. For many characters buying a bow or energy staff as the first weapon can be a wise choice as the range gives extra defense without measurably losing anything in offense. Rings can give you either flat damage or flat attack rating, Amulets should be used for hp-regen. Socketing: Once you have all your gear pieces with sockets you go to the blacksmith. Fill the sockets with the "Anneal" and "Whet" blacksmith arts. These are Really op in mods where you can access higher difficulties, quite strong in standard game versions and crap wherever dimitrius has his way, currently that would be the addendum. Usually I would go with at least 3 or 4 anneals. In the weapon you can also consider socketing a "+flat damage" ring and a damage converter, I would suggest converting to magic damage. Bonus skill/attribute points: Since the CM-Patch invented quests that reward skill and attribute points you can get some extra power for your fresh character from those as well. The main one here is the Ancaria Airlines quest: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Ancaria_Airlines You can reach it in Sloeford and finish it without any combat involved, rewarding one skill and attribute point. The points are only rewarded after leaving the current game session and starting a new one. Legitimately every lvl 1 char can do this quest once in bronze and once in silver difficulty, but as always, this side quest can technically be exploited by infinite repetition in free play mode. Once properly geared with hp regen somewhere you could also improve your lvl 1 char with some Survival Bonus by getting a wolf near the Sloeford portal to chew on you. You should be capable to get tanky enough so that a wolf on bronze can chew on you forever, allowing for afk farming survival bonus. So this should cover all the points from the outline I quoted above. Another chunk of guide knowledge delivered Back to grazing I guess -
How is Sacred 2 Weapon Damage Calculated
SLD replied to chattius's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
don't have a clean CMPatch install lying around right now and didn't want to mess anything up that I wouldn't notice because I'm not playing it at this time, but if I understand the GME correctly, in its backup/scripts folder the "Creatures.txt.MODTHATREPLACESIT" file should be the one from the CM Patch. That file also has advanced=0 in both cases(500,501). -
An easy character for a returning Sacred 2 player?
SLD replied to Jacek's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
So the forum has a "damage cap" as well and I'm causing so much "damage"... Before Gogo flips out, this misquote was intentional, I just couldnt resist it -
How is Sacred 2 Weapon Damage Calculated
SLD replied to chattius's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
Not even I would have had the audacity to suggest, you could test everything in all the potential mod combinations as well. -
So I see you have your genocidal plans all figured out
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Well you use Shadow Veil: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Shadow_Veil The linked wiki page tells you everything you need to know. Just mod with "Creep", "Fade" and "Sinister Pact". Other than that you can usually use any combat art(even melee ones) without turning visible. You can supposedly even left click attack with ranged weapons just don't left click attack with melee weapons and you'll stay invisible forever. So any shadow warrior build you like that can fit in either astral lord lore or focus for the upgrade points should be able to be playable as invisible. I suggest taking the focus as you need the buff to reach lvl 25 and the focus will let you achieve this easier/earlier. As the wiki page states minions and escort quests are a bad idea with an invisible character. Also remember that some quests might be brickable like guardians not properly waking up when they can't see you. Don't try this in too advanced mods, I'm sure some of them might have "balanced it out". The CM-Patch should be fine, but I don't know about EE, addendum...
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An easy character for a returning Sacred 2 player?
SLD replied to Jacek's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
The problem is, that it never will be perfect. I am quite a noob after all. I have little experience actually playing characters and basically no experience playing the campaign... I expect my guide to be garbage... It's just that when I look at all the other guides, writing my own doesn't feel so bad anymore Well since I've learned a female moose is a cow and connie sounds female enough I will happily accept the power- Thank you! And as I said it has happend in this same thread before where Jacek "misquoted" me and I answered with "No I absolutely did not say any of that" I gotta admit I don't really "build" for those occasions... I mean, don't get me wrong, I tried, but that just creates a planned buffless character. It just ends up bad in every other situation. For the Griffon specifically you can just shoot it from too far away, so he can't fight back. You also don't have to do that quest at all... If I can farm guardians the griffon sure doesn't feel worth it, but thats of course my non-campaigny view What about other debuff enemies? Well there are two more things to note: 1. This one is not "thoroughly" tested, but as I ran a lot of hellfire arenas in D2F and there are debuff monsters among those I have had some experiences that were quite weird. The Buff removed seems to be always the first buff. Not the first to be turned on, not the first in your buff selection to the bottom right. It's the first in your Combat Art panel. So with a 3 buff bfg sera that would be battle stance... Also I noticed that characters with spell block/reflection seem to get hit by this far less, suggesting that if the spell doesn't "hit" it doesn't disable a buff... but as I said this is only guesswork here. 2. The far more reliable answer to all debuff situations is of course divine protection. The duration should basically always be long enough to kill a boss so even before the possibility of permanent uptime you should be able to solve every debuff situation that way. Ok, there are two leech mods +leech and %leech. Both do unmitigatable damage, but they do eat part of your energy shield pool just like any other damage. So energy can protect against it just not reduce the amount of damage taken. +leech is just a flat amount, the more pool you have the more of it you need to get killed. Afaik It does appear on quite a few enemies, but the values are usually quite low, so you don't need excessive pool to prevent getting killed. %leech works the same as +leech with the exception of its damage being calculated of the victims maximum life(!). So when an enemy hits you with 50% leech you will be dead after two hits. Unless you have a pool greater than those 100% life, by having energy shield. So in cases where you have a high amount of the damage put on your energy shield instead of life (via the correct item mods or divine prot up to 100% of it) you actually want lower max life, as every %leech hit would thereby do lower damage. So for example: Enemy does 50%leech, you have perfect 100% damage taken form energy shield first however that mod is called with 1000 life you take 2 hits to die with 1000 life and 1000 energy shield you take 4 hits to die but with only 500 life and 1000 energy shield you would take 6 hits to die and with 100 life and 1000 energy shield it would take 22 hits... Thats how constitution kind of benefits enemies with %leech. Don't worry those are quite rare and 50% is an insane amount, but what I mentioned in the other thread, was one very nasty "bugged" thing. The champion versions of the demon casters in the desolation have some kind of lightning spell that in niobium endgame will drain 66% of your life. It's not a spammable skill and those casters don't come in giant groups or something so this would not be that big of a problem... But that spell has the (probably bugged) potential to hit you twice Taking 2x66%=132% of your maximum life at once is guaranteed to oneshot every character... unless of course you have energy shield at least the size of 33% of your life. Of course spell block and reflect are luck based alternatives for the poor characters that don't have energy shields. So two character classes have energy shields, two can at least be temporarily invisible and Dryad, Dragon Mages and Inquisitors can try to kill the guy from range (sadly there are some fix spawned at cave entrance/exits so range isn't always an option) maybe you could try upping your chances with having a very heroic pet with you No don't look at my cow like that And don't you dare touch the power-cow Just go get some sheep , they'll follow you anywhere and Ike isn't around to complain anymore Sacred 2 is an easy game. You don't need perfect characters to beat it. And technically it is possible that taking constitution along the way makes the journey easier. I usually look at my characters from the perspective of "where will I end up?". I don't skill for the character I have, I skill for the character I want to have And I don't want to, at the end of my levelling, look back and wonder what could have been. I do not want to make skill choices that I eventually come to regret. Every Sacred 2 character knows, there are no do-overs in Sacred 2. No respec options, no skill resets. If you take the wrong skill your player will just discard you. You will be stripped of all your valuable gear, your runes, sometimes even your potions. All of it will be gobbled up by the shared stash and you will be replaced with a new version of yourself almost the same but still no longer you. Remember those that have come before you, learn from their mistakes and make sure not to fail me so you will not have to share their fate my beloved, "BFG-Sera 6". That rofl emoji probably just depicts what every dead poet is currently doing in their grave, turning, left and right and some contorsonist freaks even both ways at the same time -
An easy character for a returning Sacred 2 player?
SLD replied to Jacek's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
I understand what you wanted to say, but why did you put it in a quote that claimed that I said it? Well I don't think there is a good guide to link to. I also looked at every single guide that was linked here and found none of them optimal. First Hooyaah linked an invisible shadow warrior that for whatever reason doesn't use a proper offense. I also would not have recommended invisibility to a "newb" because it might be possible to brick main quest progression with it. But in general, yes you can make invisible SWs but why would you ever use that garbage totem... Then Gogo came by and linked a build for Sacred Underworld deamons... well he got around to talking about a blowgun dryad later but had no guide to link for that... Gogo returned to link an Ice Elf build which in general is nice, but then the guide suggests using multiple active combat arts and a questionable lineup of skill choices. Taking armor lore late just to get things like combat discipline earlier? And why take Spell resist? Its like the worst skill since the removal of pacifism... So the basic build Idea again is an acceptable choice but I wouldn't recommend following that guide in detail... And that is the point where you link a bfg-sera guide. Again some of it is correct but starting on armor lore and pushing tech lore all the way back to lvl 25? And supposedly using the Energy shield buff and divine protection combined with toughness yet still picking constitution... why? It actually makes you more vulnerable as %leech will do more damage to your shield... On top of that the guide suggests using flaring nova and even claiming that there might be situations where you "need" it. The guid claims crit is great for damage even though it is only a factor of 1.2. It claims soul hammer would be a good boss killer even though it is worse than both archangels wrath and pelting strikes. It also claims that pelting strikes would fire at multiple enemies which it absolutely does not and never has... Also the idea to mod battle stance with more attack rating to hit niobium bosses... You get ~100% chance opponents cannot evade from your bfg alone and you think attack rating is gonna change something here? This guide is sometimes spot on and sometimes so clueless... I can't recommend something like that to another player especially one who doesn't have the experience to take only the good advice and discard the rest... So far noone has linked a guide that would satisfy me. That is why I would have to write guides for him. They just don't exist yet. That is nice to hear Please no! Don't rip up another thread. The contents could however be copied and rearranged to make them easier to find and read. For now we wait for Jacek's return to figure out what he needs and then I'll continue with the writing. -
An easy character for a returning Sacred 2 player?
SLD replied to Jacek's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
This is now the second time in this thread that someone misuses the quote function and puts words into my mouth that were never there. In neither case the defamation seems intentional so I wonder, is there a bug or something thats causing this? It is not. You get the regular install version. GOG provides the version of Ice & Blood with the latest official patch. Nothing is pre-installed and you can freely choose what you go with, be it CM Patch, PFP, EE or anything else. So that means we now need information from Jacek to find out what patch version he choses to use. My prior assumption of cm patch 160hf has lost its basis. Unless you are playing a triple aspect build, which is entirely possible. Not being able to use CAs instantly from various trees because using one triggers a mini cooldown on all your other trees too can be quite detrimental. But I doubt the OP is going to go a triple-aspect build I intentionally left out a statement about the reasoning to not confuse further, but now I have to amend my explanation to: "Always on, unless you are playing a build that frequently uses active skills from different aspects in quick succession and outside a combo. In that case however you are playing a bad build therefore turning on expert's touch and choosing a different build would still have been the better choice." "Always on" was just the shortened version for that. Map exploration shows its mf bonus ingame(exploration/4). Is there a source for the other two having any effect on mf? Even after a while to calm down, this still just makes me feel angry and frustrated. Why am I writing guides here at all? It doesn't feel worth it. I will wait for another word from @Jacek before I continue with the guides. I want to first know what version will be played and wether he still wants me to continue writing the guides based on the outline I posted a few days back: -
An easy character for a returning Sacred 2 player?
SLD replied to Jacek's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
So the dreaded guide marathon is here. I know I can only ever finish if I get started at some point... I will just go over everything I come up with in no specific order, so I don't have another thing holding me back... General stuff about Combat art/Buff usage: Active combat arts have a regen time. You wanna make sure you can use them often, basically you want to get to a point where you use combat arts exclusively and you don't want to slow your attack/combat art speed down with your regen time. Having to "wait" for a combat art should not be a thing. At the start of the game this is absolutely impossible to reach of course. Regen times are what they are and you can work on lowering them but you will always be better off not trying to use combat arts exclusively here. You start with auto attacks and transition towards exclusive combat art usage once that becomes the better choice. So how do we deal with regen times? We get skills and item mods etc. to lower regen times, builds should cover that. Melee builds can use the "regen per hit" modifier to basically subtract a flat amount from their combat art regen. Make sure, that a single hit and the time it takes to make that hit is "enough" to recover the regeneration and if possible use combat arts that can hit more than once. Also don't get too gready, a 40second regen frenzied rampage with 10seconds regen per hit can still oneshot a single enemy and then suck for half a minute... a dualwielding demonic blow might miss with both hit attempts. So stacking this mod to raise a melee combat art beyond a couple seconds cooldown is probably not a good idea. But a "couple seconds" still allows more investment into a combat art that otherwise would need 0.x seconds cooldown to utilize full attack speed. Ranged attack builds can also use "regen per hit" to help, but as they have to wait for their projectile to hit this is only really effective when shooting at melee range. The only exception to this is the blowgun that instantly hits and can therefore follow the melee build rules. As a result of this normal ranged builds usually want a 0.x second cooldown on their combat art and usually end up with a level 1 combat art for a very long time. Caster builds are screwed as they can't use "regen per hit". They also can't leave their combat art at level 1 because the base damage of their combat art comes from its level. So they usually invest a lot into keeping that regen low while at the same time getting the calvl high enough for it to be effective. They tend to spend a lot of time with exclusively using their spell even though they can't get it to low enough regen to spam it at maximum rate. Especially the casters are therefore also using the bonus mechanic. When you eat a rune the regen time increases but when you get bonus levels to a combat art(from gear) the regen time only increases by half that much. Because of this casters usually for very long times, depending on build up to all the way to level 200, only eat one rune into their attack spell. The rest is from gear bonus, socketing runes etc. Same applies to ranged attack builds. Another thing is at a certain point, determined by your character level and the relevant focus skill, the calvl gets a malus. One more eaten rune or added calvl bonus from gear no longer results in a full level higher combat art. For example a level 1 character eating 200 levels into fireball will have a fireball lvl of 3.9. That fireball does the damage of a level 3.9 fireball and behaves entirely like a level 3.9 fireball but it would have the full(!!) regen time of a level 200 fireball. So while you get less and less by scaling a combat art into the "inefficient" level region the regen time scales on normally making it a very bad idea to go there. Only ever scale a combat art that is actively used into this inefficient area when the regen time increase does not matter. For most of the game time that would only happen with temporary buffs as they have tiny regen times and long durations so you can usually eat 200 of those at some point and even have gear bonuses on top without the regen time becoming a problem. So why all the yapping about the inefficient region? It's the transition to my buff segment: Permanent Buffs are different. They don't have a regen time but a "buff weight" that slows regeneration for all the active combat arts. That weight again increases with the level of the buff, but unlike the active combat arts regen time this buff weight is based on the effective level of the buff. So a level 1 character with 200 runes eaten in a buff will have an effective buff level of 3.9 and that buff only has the weight of a level 3.9 buff. Yes, that weight may be quite high depending on the buff it might be more than doubling your regen times but that buff also has a permanent effect and most buffs you would bother using are worth that weight. As a result it is basically always correct to eat buff runes for buffs you are using all the way to the cap of 200. So why did I want to talk about all the rune related stuff? Because it shows that while buffs are always a good way to improve a characters performance active combat art levels are not that easy to scale a character with. Runes are an abundant resource. They don't drop from normal chests but enemies can always drop runes. As long as you kill stuff you are provided with ruines. When you don't get the ones you want the Combomaster can get them for you(for a gold fee). But both gold and runes are guaranteed abundant resources. No matter how bad your luck you can always count on getting those two things. Also rune drops don't decrease with the number of eaten runes as in Sacred 1. In Sacred 2 you always get lots of runes. Enough to easily eat all your 15 combat arts to the maximum of 200 if you wanted to and certainly enough to eat everything that makes sense eating all the way to 200. So what effect does all this have? It gives an advantage to characters with strong buffs. The BeeEffGee Seraphim for example will always have a great weapon because you may never find a specific set item you want but you are always guaranteed to get your buff maxed out. It is also a process that starts early. After the first few enemies are killed you will already have gathered a bunch of runes and can start scaling your buffs. It is also not very well balanced so that you can have "good" buffs at far too high levels far too early trivializing large parts of the game. On the other hand builds that have no buffs that greatly scale their offense, defense, or even both will lack all these benefits. This played an important part in the two builds I suggested. Buffs are strong rng-free power and those builds are the absolute buff kings(/queens?). How does attribute damage work: I will only go into detail on weapon based characters here as that is what will be relevant for the guides should I ever get to writing them When you attack with a weapon or use a combat art which calculates its damage based on the weapon damage you also deal bonus damage based on an attribute. Which attribute that is depends on the type of weapon. -Strength for most big melee weapons -Dexterity for small melee weapons like short swords and daggers and also for all standard "ranged weapons" -Intelligence for staves the non standard "ranged weapon" -Willpower since CM-Patch for Lightsabers -Stamina and Vitality have no matching weapons Every single weapon falls into exactly one of those categories and gets bonus damage from that specific attribute and only from that one. The attributes bonus to weapon damage will be shown on the attribute's tooltip. That is a base value like on a +damage ring that is then effectively multiplied by damage increases like tactics lore r combat arts like demonic blow etc. The inventory tooltip however will not show these increase effects for the attribute damage and will make its effect always look misleadingly small. The inventory tooltip is wrong! Don't let it fool you. The damage numbers that pop up when you hit something, those are the real ones. How much damage the attribute adds is determined by the stats of your weapon. The game has an expected weapon damage value for every item level. You can't see that but it goes up with weapon level. Your weapon has a damage range. The comparison between those two values results in an attribute effectiveness. For example(using random non real values): a level 10 dagger might do ~50 damage a 1h sword ~70 damage and a big two handed hammer 120 damage. The game would now compare that to its expected value for a level 10 weapon for example 100 damage. In this case the dagger would get 50/100=0.5 added damage per attribute point, the sword would get 70/100=0.7 dmg per attr point and the 2h Hammer would get 120/100=1.2 dmg per attr point. So in this example with fictional values you would say getting 0.5 to 1.2 damage per attribute point sounds ok, what happens with level 20 weapons? well the weapons will do higher base damage and the expected value will also be higher and you will end up with still getting around 0.5 to 1.2 damage per attribute point. That doesn't sound very exploitable yet, right? So the same amount of attribute ends up basically always giving you the same amount of damage added and it's relative to the "size" of your weapon. So in the endgame where weapons can have like 500 to 1000 base damage you would need like 1000 attribute points to get about as much damage added as your weapon does. Ok so now you're kinda wearing 2 weapons instead of one. Not bad but also not that extreme, right? Well how can we increase the "value" of our attribute? It's simple, we need a weapon that does sick amounts of damage for its level. And there are two ways to achieve this. Method one, the BeeEffGee: It's already a weapon with good damage for its level but the buff has mods with "added damage" that are then added onto the weapon if cast while selecting an empty weapon slot. The BeeEffGee scales to a maximum level of 200 but while normal weapons there may have a realistical damage value of ~1000 tops the BeeEffGee reaches, because of the buff bonuses, easily 3000+ damage. In this case you will also get 3 times the benefit from your attribute. In relative terms your attribute did not get any more relevant however. Per the example above you're still like wearing two weapons, those just happen to be two absurdly op ones Method two, socketing: This one is a lot more creative. You can socket a ring with +damage into your weapon and it will increase the "weapon damage". So per the example above you could socket your level 10 sword with two level 10 ring with 10 damage each and you would now get 0.9 dmg/attr instead of 0.7. Nice. (Rings elsewhere don't affect the attribute bonus at all only the "weapon damage" matters). So how can that be exploited? Well, what happens if you socket 2 level 200 rings with 100 bonus damage each into this weapon? The weapon then shows a level requirement of 200 of course but the "expected damage" the game compares it to is still that of a level 10 weapon. So now your sword gets 270/100=2.7 damage per attribute point. You might notice: but wait a level 200 sword would usually do like 600 damage not 270 so do I really get a win out of this and the answer would be: It depends on how many points you have in that attribute. In this particular case: 600+0.7*attr<270+2.7*attr 330<2*attr 165<attr So in this extreme case having only 166 points in the attribute would be enough to make the socketed low level weapon better than the high level sword. And at 1000 points in the attribute that low level sword now is not like wearing two endgame weapons but more like wearing 6. These are the mechanics a lightsaber shadow warrior uses. First he has like 2000+ extra willpower making him already rock like multiple endgame weapons worth of extra damage but when exploiting a socketed low level lightsaber this number skyrockets to values that would make General Grievous seethe with jealusy Something short on damage types: In Sacred 2 there are 5 damage types. The 4 elemental ones already bring a secondary effect with them. Doing one of those 4 weapon types brings an automatic chance to cause the associated secondary effect based on the portion of your damage that is of that type. The larger the part of your damage is fire damage the higher your chance to cause the enemy to burn for example. Enemies can resist or even mitigate certain damage types all the way to being completely immune to it(very rare, like the elemental lord bosses to their elements etc.), they can also be specifically vulnerable to a damage type. For all but the rare cases of immunity I would not bother adapting my damage type but all weapon users can either by socketing their weapon with a converter or wearing gloves with a damage conversion mod. As the immune ones are all large bosses weapon damage users will later kill them with %leech anyway so no adapting required there either. Casters are, as always, screwed (damage conversion doesn't work on spells...) So if I don't chose my damage type based on the enemy the secondary effects might play a role. Fire and poison damage lead to a useless tiny dot effect. Ice damage can slow enemies a bit and magic damage can cause a weaken effect. From my experience if at all the weaken effect would be the only one worth pursuing. While I'm already at damage types I'll make a quick note on resistances and the relic holder. When dealing with bosses always make sure to pop in 3 relics of the matching type. As long as you don't have really good defenses/mitigation this will help a lot. For general roaming the lands I usually chose a set of 3 different colours that are most likely to cause trouble. That should be enough. Also in case your build has enhanced perception make sure you equip relics that boost it(unless of course you are already using legendary relics) Something on Survival Bonus: You get this bonus for "time spent in combat". It is reset to 0% on death, I could never have guessed that one... Time spent in combat doesn't necessarily mean that you need to fight back so being chewed on by a wolf for a couple hours while having enough hp regen from items/buffs that the wolf can never finish his meal is a great way to increase survival bonus. It can be done afk, even with Sacred 2 in background so you can still be productive elsewhere. Survival Bonus increases your attributes by up to 33% but doesn't work on bonus attributes from gear or buffs. It is still a valuable thing to have just for that. It also increases the level of enemies you encounter. That may at first be seen as detrimental as higher level enemies are harder to defeat but in the long run they also give higher level loot and more experience, all things that make your character stronger as well. Long story short, you always want SB to be as high as possible and therefore you don't want to die. While we are at the topic of dying: There are worse things in life than death. You can for example end up with a corrupted savegame or a bugged unsolvable main quest can stop your progression indefinately. Luckily the Lord has provided you with the power to back up your character savegames. Use this power at least once a day when you have made progress. Making a copy of the shared stash might also be wise. You can use these backups when death or anything worse has come upon you. They can also be used to try out things and reverse these decisions when they turn out bad. To save yourself from losing progress when a simple client crash occurs you should also frequently use the special power of the F7 key that will save your current game/character without the need to leave the game. It is wise to do this at least whenever you made some interesting progress like finding a rare and useful item or having gained a lot of experience... I have no clue when I started writing this but I'm at least nearing the 3 hour mark again so I guess it's time to take a break. I managed to at least cover everything I had put into the "general guides" section of my list and some extra that I came up with that wasn't on the list. I know this isn't very well formatted, worded and punctuation is not my friend either. I won't be working on improving this but if someone else want's to turn this into readable material I will happily take a look at the results to make sure the information contained did not accidentally degrade in the process. Edit: I found out it took actually more than 4 and a half hours -
I have no clue how to make that one happen... how about a compromise? You make a permanently invisible shadow warrior. The enemies are still there but they can't see you so you can travel witout fighting and enjoy the scenery including the beautiful fauna don't look down on them. I'm sure to them you look just as ugly as they do to you. And they are important for the ecosystem. You can't live without them. Where else are you gonna get loot and levels from?
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How is Sacred 2 Weapon Damage Calculated
SLD replied to chattius's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
I thought about that for a bit. But I can't come up with any weapon specific modifiers other than its damage range and the conversion from a socketed converter item. And of course all the weapon type stuff like what animations to use, is it ranged/melee, type of projectile, number of hands it fills, is it dual wieldable at all etc. The only thing from this freak catergory that would matter in a dual wield setup is the magic staff projectile crap... it's not really melee but also not really ranged allows for dual wielding with another staff or a real melee weapon and leads to all kinds of bs behaviour but afaik in most cases here the mainhand behaviour "wins" and affects both weapons whatever that might lead to... just thought I'd spill my knowledge here as it came up when thinking about weapon specific effects... If you have no other ideas I guess this is the "very short list" There ma also be some derivative effects that are specific to the weapon like the weapon damage types leading to a chance for secondary effects that would then be specific to that weapon. That is universal behaviour for all weapon based combat arts. Let's just call that a theory so you don't have to run an exhaustive test... -
Wow, I first thought you might have followed up on my "I knew he had to be somewhere in the center of the screen" by editing the screenshot and moving the character... I noticed the 2 guys below but managed to exclude them because all your weapon slots have a shield and they don't... After some examination I thnk your active weapon slot is slot 3 with the waterform set? Well looking at it for a while I can see there is something in the middle of the screen At least my sight is better than that of your enemies yes, tentacling with a Gladi, baah!
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Even though I knew he had to be somewhere in the center of the screen it took me a bit to find him... So much for my ability to participate in this game Good luck finding someone who has both the necessary game knowledge and interest in playing this game.
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Sadly I know nothing about Linux so I can't help with alternatives here... Also can't find much on people playing Sacred on Linux. Most helpful I could find was this guy making the pureHD mod work on Linux: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72318-sacred-downloads-purehd-mod-for-sacred/#comment-7137518
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An easy character for a returning Sacred 2 player?
SLD replied to Jacek's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
I read that guide. Didn't like it at all and wouldn't recommend following it But that guide writer probably knows a lot more about playing campaigns than I do and many liked his build so I guess you could get through the game with that. It would be absolutely nothing in comparison because it is all about the willpower bonus damage as Sethi22 already explained. no, for the same reason. Lightsabers themselves are really bad weapons. But the attribute damage bonus is a really strong thing and willpower is the only reasonable attribute to scale. The only other properly scaleable attribute that is linked to a weapon type is intelligence. It increases Staff damage but staves have been absolutely destroyed by the cm-patch and are mechanically utter garbage. On top of that the character that gets a lot of int from a oermanent buff is the dragon mage and dms don't have any weapon combat arts... well actually you shouldn't be dualwielding lightsabers. In any later game situation you will be purely using combat arts and combat arts calculate their damage solely on the main hand weapon(even if they look like swinging both). That turns your off-hand weapon into a stat stick and there is a super valuable stat (%leech) that doesn't roll on lightsabers but can be acquired on other one handed weapons. So dual wield, yes, dual lightsaber, no. Well blazing tempest can kill a lot of stuff. Against normal enemies it does well and the aspect lore is applied squared on the dot effect so it's scaling really well. But it is really situational can get stopped by rocks, water puddles and whatever else so depending on the area it might be somewhat frustrating to use and it is not a good choice for single targets. As a fire based character the only bosskill solution is the meteor. So now you somehow need two combat arts. For a caster to be strong you need high level combat arts with as low as possible regen times. CaLvl bonuses from gear raise the regen time by only half as nuch as eating the runes meaning purely relying on bonuses can lead up to twice as high spell combat arts. While this is reasonable to do with one spell having gear bonuses for two skills is not very realistic. In the endgame a high elf gets enough regeneration speed to just eat all the spells but at the start this will be a problem. Fire high elves are also not very tanky characters, grand invigoration will give some recovery but other than that fire high elves have practically no defenses. So the fire high elf can be played but especially given your criteria I would not have recommended such a build. If it had to be a caster Gogo has linked an Ice Elf build, I would rather go with something like that. Only one combat art against everything (Glacial thorns), more defensive buff with crystal skin and the potential to use cascading shroud for certain boss fights to play around the fact that you're still not a tank. Though the basic build idea is nice, I , as always, don't like the details of that build guide either and wouldn't recommend exactly following that one either. How does fire elf compare to lightsaber sw? -Well in a limited skill point situation the sw will be faaaaar better off as he has one of the lowest skill point requirements of the game. This will play a role for the first 100+ levels... -Also, while the fire elf can kill a lot of enemies with blazing tempest's large area, in Sacred 2 there are no large groups of enemies. if the map was filled to the brim that would be a win for the fire elf but it isn't. As gathering groups is the only way to make use of that large area you will be walking from enemy to enemy to drag them into a pack and then kill them while the sw will be walking from enemy to enemy, killing them without dragging them along into a pack. -Casters have regen time problems for a very long time, fighters have regen per hit... -the sw is a lot tankier than the high elf both at the start of the game and at the end. -the only main downside of the sw compared to a caster is that attack based characters need hit chance, usually achieved by gear with "-% opponents chance to evade" and/or "chance opponents cannot evade" mods. The latter is hard to come by/unavailable at the start the former starts appearing on gear somewhere around level 5-8 and in that level region the sw would have to shop for a few items with that mod or he'd be missing swings all the time. He will also have to up these stats as he continues through the levels. -the sw can just walk around holding down left and right mouse button and will just kill everything that lands under your mouse cursor, the fire elf will have to aim and cast manually... -the sw could easily adjust his elemental damage type the fire elf is stuck with fire. Not that that would matter at all... There's probably a ton more stuff that I could compare here. But I'm running out of ideas so that would be it for now... at least that one is easy to answer. Always on. The sw doesn't replace his weapon either. He farms up one double socket lightsaber at exactly level 10 and afterwards it's only being resocketed every now and then. The bfg needs "less" because it also solves the hit chance problem with the accuracy mod. Oh man I've been on this thread for almost 3 hours again and haven't even started writing a guide yet I'll go catch up with the rest of the forum again. I don't want to turn this into a fulltime dayjob so that'll be it for today but I'll throw in a short list of things I want to explain when I get to it: -general guides: --Combat art/Buff usage --How attribute damage works --maybe something on damage type usefulness --maybe something on Survival bonus --Game start: ---starting runes ---starting gold ---starting gear ---starting socketing ---starting bonus skill points --later socket options --maybe also something on important item mods: hit chance stuff, mitigation, dot reduction, leech%, --Bfg Sera ---proper casting bfg in an empty slot ---attribute choices ---skill choices ---combat art upgrades ---something about gear ---maybe something on gameplay ----shooting far ----special behaviour of an archangel's wrath combo ---different variants pure tech/ tech+exalted warrior --Lightsaber SW ---getting a lightsaber ---attribute choices ---skill choices ---combat art ugrades ---something about gear ---maybe something on gameplay ----left/right click ---different variants pure death warrior/ death warrior and malevolent/ death warrior and astral? That list looks like it could take weeks and that's only what I just came up with from the top of my head, there's probably a lot more to know... -
How is Sacred 2 Weapon Damage Calculated
SLD replied to chattius's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
Yes, Magic Coup was already covered by your previous rules as that is just weapon damage. And it has a conversion mod, so we already knew this result. You just technically didn't look at spell damage like ancestral fireball, that's why I asked. And now we know that one as well. Well ok, technically we now also know that gloves work like rings. Lets just say I'm satisfied You could slap a conversion item mod in here to learn more about the order of operations. We know in what order the different conversion sources happen but not at what point added damage from a CA is added. So it might be possible that it happens after the conversion from items etc... While we're at the measuring the obvious stage, I don't think you have tested that, but the weapon damage converter only applies to hits with "that weapon" in dual wield cases, right? Just another technicality to knock over... Currently not having any more ideas doesn't say anything about the future. Don't worry, it's just the calm before the storm -
An easy character for a returning Sacred 2 player?
SLD replied to Jacek's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
Do you have that version or where does this information come from? I just googled my ass off and couldn't find any mention of that however lots of evidence that it did not contain the cm-patch for a very long time and until quite recently(couple years...). That's why I'm asking what makes you so sure about this? What started the confusion was the PFP thread stating both -that the GoG version is compatible with pfp -and your own experience with accidentally installing the cm-patch before the pfp leading to problems Therefore the two should not be compatible if GoG already comes with cm-patch... Something is obviously wrong and I'm trying to cover all the bases now. I don't know how GoG versions work, so I consider it possible that a recent(past three years) change to the GoG version included the cm-patch. -
How is Sacred 2 Weapon Damage Calculated
SLD replied to chattius's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
I just had 2 unrelated ideas pop into my head today The first was about the damage conversion item mod. From Gloves: Afaik it doesn't apply to spells but the tooltip once claimed that it did... You checked the mod only for weapon based combat so there might be a quick test that would confirm my "knowledge". After all my knowledge is worthless compared to things that have been properly tested.. The second is about added flat damage from weapon based combat arts. I can't remember that having being looked into already. I might be wrong but looking through all the posts would probably eat up the entire day... Maybe you have a better memory than I have... I remember you looked at bfg for the added damage and the effects on attribute bonus etc., but I don't think you ever checked the behaviour of directly added damage through weapon based combat arts like the +poison damage on a mod for frenzied rampage. Just wanted to post that stuff before I forget about it again. -
I know nothing about tech, but for this ingame problem it might help to know, that the mouse cursor "lights up" when the chosen CA is ready. If that "light up" is visible it might help. From a gameplay perspective I however can't really come up with reasonable scenarios where knowing when a combat art is ready would matter at all. I hope someone comes along who can help you with the general underlying graphics problem. It might also help looking into different versions of the game. There is an unofficial patch 2.29 and an hd mod/patch that each might make the game more compatible with modern hardware etc.
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Sounds like you should play D2F then I heard a new beta version was coming out by the end of july... oh wait in 2hrs it's september here? So I guess no new beta version... But there's always a good reason to play D2F
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An easy character for a returning Sacred 2 player?
SLD replied to Jacek's topic in Sacred 2 General Discussion
No I absolutely did not say any of that not sure what "s/b" would mean, but following the context I would guess "sword&board". Sacred 2 has no possibility to "use" a shield actively. It would always end up a "stat stick". ranged does not necessarily mean kiting. Int this game there is no direct defensive benefit for a melee character therefor a ranged one could be just as tanky. Don't worry, the best way to play this game is to more or less chose one skill and always use that. There are a few permanent buffs you turn on and forget about and there may be useful temporary buffs for some characters but generally you have one skill put on your right click and when you see something you wanna kill you use that skill. There are people who like builds where you use one skill and then another etc but in almost all of those cases one of those skills will just be better than the other so using the better one twice would basically always yield better results. There is no point in making complicated skill combinations in this game. Can't help you with the drop modifications, but I would also guess you won't impress your daugther by cheating to do higher difficulties After all you can change those txt files to enemies do no damage and you do a lot of it etc... There is no limit there... So instead I would rather focus on a build that doesn't need much to do well. For someone who has little time I can at least make one good suggestion: Don't use Bargaining. There is a skill called bargaining and it allows you to buy better stuff from merchants. That in and of itself sounds great but it needs high investment to be good. So you have to "waste" a lot of skill points on bargaining, then teleport to and from a merchant to reset his trade inventory over and over again. While doing this you want to have even more bargaining which is why you would create a full suit of items that have "+bargaining", "+all skills" or "+general skills". So basicall you -waste skillpoints -spam merchant for hours to buy better bargaining bonus items -then spam merchant for hours to buy gear you actually want to use for fighting -play a little bit - spam merchant again as the bargaining suit needs to be kept "up to date". Bargaining is only really good if you get the skill's level to like twice or more times your character level So basically if you go the bargaining route you will spend a lot of time at merchants instead of doing quests or killing monsters. You basically end up never playing the game and always "playing the shop"... For someone who doesn't want to play forever and perfect their gear this is probably not the right approach. Without bargaining however, you will not be able to buy any high quality items from the merchants and will mostly rely on things you find. There is one other potentially very valuable "special" skill. Blacksmithing. It is a really odd one as you would never want that skill on your character but you do want to use it So an experienced player "starting from scratch" would make a character that can fit the blacksmith skill in first, and then use that characters skill to socket items for futujre characters. The main benefit of this skill is that you can socket rings into bronze quality sockets and amulets into silver quality ones, which allows you to make far better use of sockets on your items. Before the CM Patch only characters that were "real men" could get the blacksmith skill, so no dryads, seraphim, high elves or dragon mages The CM patch allows all characters to learn the blacksmith skill. Again, as you have little time for min-maxing your characters gear blacksmithing should probably not be a priority. I assume you did "clarify by omission" (is that a thing? ) that you will play with CM-Patch and no other mods. You can't change the difficulty setting during a campaign. You can start at either bronze or silver difficulty. So if you don't want to spend all your time at the easiest difficulty I suggest starting with Silver. If doing a campaign on silver and maybe repeating the campaign on gold etc is the goal a singleplayer character would probably be the better choice. Though singleplayer characters can only start a higher difficulty campaign when the lower one has been completed, I think singleplayer is better at "keeping" a campaign state, making leaving/ continuing less of a problem. Such a singleplayer character would still have access to multiplayer's "free game" mode if repeatedly farming a side quest or some bosses is something you might want to do at some point. I do have to admit here however, that I do not have much experience especially no recent experience with campaign mode. I just don't like playing the campaign and am mostly used to the freedom from campaign restrictions. So summarizing the restrictions: -Game Version: CM-Patch 1.60 -Singleplayer Campaign (not bronze!) -no bargaining -no external blacksmith and -no cheating/hacking/duping bug exploiting, repeated quest grind exploiting etc. so that your achievement cannot be denied on the basis of: "but, you cheated!" I have thought a bit about two possible builds I would consider. -A dual wield lightsaber shadow warrior. Would be tanky, would be melee, but does "need" some multiplayer quest grind to get the lightsaber and also needs a bit more merchant visiting and socketing etc to get the offense functioning. -A BeeEffGee seraphim. Would not be tanky(at least not for quite a while), would be ramged (so the one thing you don't want). In return she would probably need far less on the gear side of things and merchant visits. She'd be a glass cannon for quite while but not much of a "kiting" one. More like oneshotting everything that isn't a boss almost immediately from the start. Both should be easily capable of doing the campaign, though at the start you might have to farm a bit on the levels to get a boss capable build. I'm not used to the boss problem as I usually don't play campaign, so I don't have to kill bosses early. Also none of them is a noob trap, meaning they can both go all the way to niobium content and kill everything the game has to offer. I have been writing on this answer now for about 2 hours so I wont post 2 full build guides now as well... I want to take a look at the rest of the forum now If you want the build guides I will of course write them up for you. But I'll wait for your next response first. Please tell me if you can already veto either build beforehand as in such a case I would only have to write one guide