SLD

I understand now. Yes you can't "return" to a sp campaign. I basically cheat by using copies/extra exports to restore multiplayer characters that died. But I don't really play campaign or any dangerous content.

Single swings never double hit. She always swings left and right and that creates two hits. Are you sure we're not somehow talking past each other again? I'm confused. That makes absolutely no sense at all. Especially a connection to attack speed only suggests you're misreading the numbers here. I am aware of the fact that we have different version numbers but so far we have never seen any different results. I think we are far too early into this to condsider the game version difference as a reason. So far I'm still quite sure we haven't even fully figured out yet how to understand each others experience. So then "double-double"s are no special mechanic at all and just two single doubles in a row. I was confused because the question of a possible quadruple hit was reasonable: One handed weapon -> double hit dual wield -> quadruple hit? But if I understand you correctly now, we both answered that question with "no!" Sorry I really can't do this right now but I already had written this post. I don't want to throw it away now... I'll take a look at the first post again tomorrow... That whole day server downtime put me massively off-schedule... Edit: also missed the long holding the weapon section of your previous post. I'll get back to that tomorrow as well...

Maybe if SB is involved it is also linked to character level or other things. My earlier test indicated it worked with 0 SB but I tested with a lvl 1 character. Could be that a higher character needs more SB for it to work which would explain your experience. Could also be the Idea of a limit per game instance or it shutting off when you "loose" SB implemented as SB being lower than at game start meaning my tests might have benn 0%->0% =not lower... A lot of interesting stuff about a mechanic I'd never want to rely on I can't figure out what you're trying to tell me with this portion here. The first half(until "lol") seems to be a comment on you dying multiple times because you didn't update your gear and tried to finish/[rush for] the campaign ending. But I don't get what the export stuff would have to do with this. Please explain what you are thinking here. With like 10 active people around "one person's experience" is quite a lot. And I don't want your "mountain of salt", you deserve to be "salty" after multiple consecutive deaths

Nice to hear that you've managed to find a way to "feel" the progress you've made. I'm a bit worried about you changing the past though. Meddling with the timeline, turning this into a non linear thread... Don't forget you had to go to that place to get to this one

Is this just a joke or is there actually a connection with the reading of all books and what seems to be some kind of weapon slot bug?

yes it was. It's possible that one dead enemy spawns "multiple arms" as you say and the other option of it somehow including a portion the enemies life are all possibilities. You can test and look at actual numbers. With the test chars that is quite a lot of work as they don't survive anything difficult without proper gear therefore my testing was done in the starting town where the enemies are below my level and don't "follow"/"aggro" properly so pulling them into tentacles would take a lot of tries. Feel free to test it for us though! Sorry for your loss... I just tested the same thing with same conclusion today while the site was down...(btw) Lindors lvl 216 test characters have 255 of each rune eaten already. In my case hp regen did keep me alive (with 200+ in vampirism though) but I got to like less than 3% of life till it did. The cap however remains a joke here Now you say it I remember something similar. Still nobody would ever use it oh, that's why your profile pic is wearing a hood... Don't talk to Sethi22 about this or he'll tell you how to cheat an infinite everlastin army again... @xeyp: Told you so what's the rsm used for here? Transformation is the one skill in the game with long enough duration that it outscales its own combo regen. It already belongs in a combo so you can transform immediately after turning back into knight. Well as the site was down all day I'm a bit late. But I can't miss an offtopic conversation, can I now?

I missed writing here all day... Now there's so much to catch up on but my day should be over now Edit: only measured <2 secs now. So you already made it better...

same here... I think I earned the title of number one thread derailer

I have posted a lot recently, but in my head I did not link the delays to the site. Yes sometimes there are like 5-10 second delays on posting or opening a post but so far nothing has failed and it did not impact me much. I thought it was on my end. Can also not say how long this has been happening... you're welcome Edit: This took around 4.5 seconds to post (I measured it)

found some source for that here: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/71919-enemy-resistances-impact/ I pulled the quotes out so you don't have to read the whole thread: This depends on your Survival Bonus. The higher your survival bonus, the more often you can get "killed" without actually dying. Interesting. I'm currently sitting at 95% and any unforeseen incidents so far have been saved by this. It helps that the enemies stop attacking you as long as the effect remains above your head. So the higher the SB, the less of a cooldown it has? Or is it just a higher chance? So @Lindor was the culprit linking it to Survival Bonus. Though there is no further information telling us whether he was right or where he got that information from.

On totally unrelated research I stumbled across this older thread: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/71919-enemy-resistances-impact/ that explains some about the damage cap but also a lot about resistance calculations for attacks etc. (Don't get sidetracked by the guy with the videos as he uses dwarven steel in every instance bypassing resists and completely missing the topic...) Just wanted to suggest that thread to @Sethi22 and @xeyp and everyone else who is currently playing around with s1 builds. @idbeholdME's final conclusion over there may be important knowledge that afaik is nowhere else to be found yet.

I just did some testing into this and have to say, I was wrong. The low damage alone is not the problem of Orla-Aisling. I actually think its damage would be high enough. I think the crash comes more from the fact that the massive amount of projectiles don't properly dissappear. When they hit walls etc they stick around for a while. That way you can easily crash the game in valley even at quite a distance to enemies. It seems to work fine in the bellevue area but I don't think scaling damage would have a chance at solving this one. Accidentally found a different non CA build however. It doesn't even need a skill. The Icon set doesn't turn off the darkelf's waterform set bonus. So he remains invisible while doing Icon damage. Icons do mostly physical damage and maybe some tiny bit fire. They can be scaled with +%phys/all dmg, Strength and widd but not +%spelldmg or weapon lore magic lore etc. It took quite a while to kill endgame niobium mobs with it but I had no proper widd so it could get from "super-slow" to "slow"... at least it's immortal btw phys demon can scale it well but won't be immortal.... Just wanted to slap this info here where we already talked about such stuff... Off topic madness for the win

you want to turn it into dungeon siege? How does "cracking and copying" prevent the possibility for player made content? Because giving more tools to change the game makes it easier to "crack and copy"? hmm, maybe. But I still think we're lucky that Sacred was done in a time before "cracking and copying" led to always online garbage... Otherwise we wouldn't be able to play it at all anymore since the company that made it is long gone. Sacred will outlast any modern title because it comes from that time. Nostalgia, such a great thing

That would be an enormously dangerous thing to do. I wouldn't do that. It all starts with our arrogance thinking we know better now, but even with hindsight we are not all-knowing. I for example first had to loose a large part of my colour vision to understand that the fact that all the colourful sacred loot, the runes, the nice green set items etc. might have been an important part of my enjoyment of the game. I would have never guessed that was important before that point. We don't really understand our brains, we are just stuck inside of them. Always remember that most game developers did not "predict" their success but arrived there by accident. Like the original Diablo devs deciding to speed up their "turn based game" to "real time", accidentally creating the arpg genre... I'm almost certain you would wish for the exact opposite if you had had it your way. We always want things we don't have. With all this annoying screaming, having the darkelves constantly say "poison mist" and the woodelves "multi hit"... We'd be playing cota woodelves just to get that minute of silence before whe hear it again... I just imagined the most extreme option of this change: Imagine your Fadalmar character screaming "icon" with every step and "Fireball" every time one triggers that Also for those who want to change a lot, remember that it is not just about how you are effected by those changes, but also about others. After all the effect sacred had on some specific people led to the fact that we had a sacred 2 and to the specifics of what that sacred 2 looked like... Changing things in the past is usually not a good idea and I certainly sleep better knowing that most of you don't have that kind of power. If a change had to be made I think Lindor's "Full Modding Support" is the wisest solution, allowing all our different ideas of how the game should have been in parallel instead of overwriting history. Hindsight may be great for things that actually did happen but for things that did not it is just as blind as our sight ahead.

And you always claim your head is empty... Dude you are our quest expert. As far as I can tell noone here knows anywhere near as much about quests as you do. All hail the quest master!

Ok, I did some testing of me own now. I could not find any differences in the daemon walking animation. I did gather a bunch of testing weapons: small 2 space axe and mace, claws like the daemon starter weapon a bunch of different daggers and a few two-handed boxing gloves. I did not manage to get brass knuckles though and as it turned out my "small axe" doesn't seem to be the kind of hatchet you were talking about. Here are my results: The axe, mace and one of my daggers(the 3 pronged one) did standard one swing attack animations each resulting in one hit. The other daggers the claws the boxing gloves and empty handed fists throw a punch combo animation striking once with each hand resulting in two hits. The claw and the boxing gloves cut the damage numbers in the inventory tooltip by half. The actual damage does not seem to reflect that. At least when using infernal power the bonus damage(being a lot larger then the normal weapon damage) is definitely not cut in half. Wether the weapons own damage is cut in half I can't say for sure but I doubt it. So far we have established boxing animation hits twice and inventory tooltip is sometimes erroneously half of what it should be. So boxing basically doubles dps. I added a shield and can tell it has no effect on the hits. Now we get to dual wielding. This one is very interesting. Dual wielding swings each weapon once. As I had no significantly different weapons I can't tell what happens to their base damage. Either they are both added up and then halved or you actually hit with each of them once. The two hits each do full damage ~equal the size of a hit with one of the weapons. But added damage (from infernal power or rings etc) is cut in half, adding one half to each hit. So you effectively "double up" on the weapon damage but not on bonus damage. The tooltip in this case seems correct, showing half bonus damage. Now I tested all the weapons I had in all possible dual wield combinations(including duping the claw). I could not find ANY odd behaviour here. There were no "quadruple" or triple hits. I'm not saying your results were wrong here just that I could not recreate them. So as conclusion from my testing I found: -Shields don't effect attacks. There are: -normal weapons that do single hits -"Fist fighting" weapons that do double hits Items with the same inventory picture seem to always land in the same category though classifications like "dagger" can contain some from the first and some from the second category -some of the fist fighting weapons erroneously claim to do half damage -Dual Wield has it's own damage rules(as explained above) and always hits twice Now I went to a gladiator, as you claimed there were demon specific mechanics at work... Muling the same testing weapons I repeated all the tests. I could not find ANY difference to the above conclusions. Everything works the same. So at this point the double hits seem bugged in the sense that they most likely were supposed to do half damage in return but dont. If they did half damage they would basically work like dual wielding and that would make a lot of sense. If you should be "boxing" with claws is a design question, for daggers "knife boxing" actually is a thing. If the claimed boxing hatchets exist which I fully believe they might, I would believe them to be bugged. They just have the flag for the wrong fighting category. I remember there was the medusa's staff that could be acquired with disarm etc. That one also used boxing animations was giant sized(multiple character sizes in length) and when you dual wielded them(yes they are one handed of course) one was equipped backwards So there is definitively precedent for wrongly flagged weapons. I think the Medusa staff at some point got a fix for its inventory size but afaik it is otherwise still as broken as before. Triple or Quadruple hits don't make any sense at all and if they truly exist(where I have my doubts) they are almost certainly a bug as they can't be "explained" by the animation. So you mentioned the damage numbers popping up at the sides as your last picture shows, but that picture also shows 5 hits meaning you did more than one attack in a row. You already connected this to gust of wind another instance of many numbers "at once"/"in short succession". My point here is that numbers being displaced to the sides was correctly identified by you as a mechanic that starts happening when too many pop up in a short amount of time so that they don't fit in a single column. But my testing showed that constant attacks can be fast enough to just always result in that. Are you absolutely sure that your alledged more than double hits actually did create more than two numbers in one double swing animation? Can you maybe test the double-double under non-constant attack meaning "single click" experiments? I only did "single click" measurements as with my sight the screen otherwise fills up with too many numbers for me to tell how many were "new". So what I want to figure out here is which one is it: -I didn't have a double-double capable weapon combo -Double-double can only happen in a longer attack sequence not on a single click -You got confused by the side numbers and erroneously claimed double-doubles Not sure if all my reasoning is in there somewhere and all my thoughts were fully finished. If not I know you'll find and point them out, I already know you're good at this. Please also gather everything this didn't cover from your first two posts that I should still comment on. I'm just confused by so much text and though I read it once I did not go through it again for a step by step answer as I had to lay out my own research and picking up the quotes from above would have taken me forever.

Can't wait to hear what you've come up with there. On to niobium with you!

Oh cool. I didn't know about that method at all. In original online and lan play the overspawn just happened by hopping in and out of a cave. No task suspension needed. I could however never reproduce this on modern machines.

There would be a possibility of a request based early release. Meaning only people that directly contact you get access and those would be more likely to have read more about the state of development etc. That way noone that was disconnected from the mods development would get their hands onto it. With the current size of the community it could however also end up hurting you, when almost no requests come in... Absolutely standalone. That way you have the option for adding your own "modules" and no questions of compatibility.

well you can do that but from the attack speed "source" you already know that there are some kinda random different animations involved etc. I wouldn't try to measure each in super detail and then try to count their likelihood etc... I would just hit one thing many times in a row and calculate an average. The more hits you do the more accurate it gets. At that point stopping the time by hand might also be "accurate enough". No I'm sure it's not something demon specific to "help with attack speed" etc. Also you completely neglect the point about the half damage here. I'll wait for that thread then... Yes "slow", "medium" and "fast" are also quite "generalized". I only linked it to inform you about that "anomalous weapons" section etc. It's the best info we currently have on base attack peeds. The "same level characters without inherent attack speed boosts" can be downloaded from Lindor. Can't blame you not wanting to do this mountain of a task. I don't want to do it either. And in the end the results will most likely only impact builds that noone plays, like attack builds without combat arts. Wait, I think I remember someone playing that... what was his name again?

well technically it's still a readable portion, but it's not nice and highlighting it makes it completely invisible so I think there may be better ways to separate the less relevant stuff... I'm sorry, maybe my long sentences without reasonable punctuation(my greates weakness ) made you see the emphasis on the wrong words. I'm not against debate, but against debating a large amount of different topics in parallel on the same thread. My first answer took me half the day. I was worried(!) the whole time that someone else could answer in between... I think, if there are multiple things to discuss the "new player" should have an overview thread to look at, that just contains links to "single topic" debate threads (whith a general description of the linked topic). As opposed to this possible 40 page monster of lots of people discussing random unrelated stuff in chaotic manner... yes I may be dreaming to think that others would hop onto this thread and start talking about the vast variety of things you started with, but if that dream came true it just would end in a nightmare. Which is why I said we might "have to rip this thread apart" should there be lively debate on multiple of those questions. As I said, killing here is a "relative" thing. Spells don't get worse but attacks get better. EE and D2F as well raise the attack and cast speed cap from the base game's 150% to 450%. Now at first that sounds like "triple attack speed!", nice buff. But then you realize combat arts have a regen time. To make use of triple speed you now need triple regen... For attacks you can use the modifier "regen per hit" especially for melee attacks but also for ranged attacks at very close range or with an instant hitting blowgun. So basically attack characters get "triple speed" = "triple dps" or however you want to look at it. Spell caster can't use regen per hit and they also can't just use a "lower level CA" because that's where their base damage comes from. So they could only access the triple speed when they somehow also manage to regen their skill three times as fast... A tiny change that causes massive imbalance... Superspawn is probably one of Flix's inventions and afaik it's just a modified game file with duplicate(I think x4) monster spawn entries. It's a very "crude" implementation as mosters can't just spawn in unlimited numbers unlike the overspawning of caves in uw, the sacred 2 mobs need "space" around them. This also leads to superspawn often interfering with special placed mobs that "want" a lot of space no longer spawning at all etc. That was at least originally a problem with the "Forest Guardian" but I think that might have already been "f(l)ixed" somehow. Yes it's great for xp and "if you can handle it" should not be a problem. Please elaborate what you mean by "alt-tabbing" and "suspend process". I can link neither of these things to "Superspawn" or "Overspawn".

Can't help you here. To me everything "looks weird". From the pictures I can't find a large enough Impact that would make me believe that either way would make the game measurably less playable. Though I can't tell much from the pictures in general. The third one under "really nice and realistic looking qualities", I first thought the bottom half was snow. Had to deduct from the vegetation that it's far more likely to be sand. So much for me viewing pictures

Yes your formulas already show that. What I tried to point out was, that previously we had no knowledge at all, what the direct damage modifier actually did. So basically you released new information hidden inside that first formula I just translated this hidden information into words... There's also https://sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Opponent's_armor:_Physical . I'll look into it too. There are more things from https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Damage to explore. All in good time I mentioned it as it is a summary and the ignore armor mod has already been tested by you so that info absolutely belongs there... same with the mentioned creature type bonus. Just edit it in. I just see that post as quite a comprehensive list regarding weapon damage calculations. If you continue discovering more there may someday be a new summary or other things like spells added to that but you would basically just copy this summary post and add the new changes to it. And should it ever end up on the wiki this is also a great template to start with, right? That's why I thought those things that we already know should be in there. And yes of course there are also things we don't know yet, but that's what we got you for, right?

First of all I have to protest against the use of invisible ink. Second I fear that this thread can't work. If there is any debate on some of these questions, there are so many of them, the thread will be derailed in so many directions. So should we have any community engagement here we probably have to rip this apart somehow. Now for the answers: 1, 1a and 1a-1: A yes to 1a. General info: Sacred 2 has 3 Game modes on multiplayer servers and one on singleplayer. MP and SP use afaik the same client server system so SP isn't mechanically that much different from MP. The three modes all save the character data on leaving a game and at certain points in time/certain actions ongame/pressing F7. "Campaign" and "Quest" progress is only saved in Campaign games of the corresponding type (at the same time as char data). MP characters save MP campaign game progress yet don't save SP campaign progress and vice versa for SP characters. The characters can enter each campaign mode but the "wrong" one will always start at the beginning. There is no "save/load" feature like in s1 therefore every campaign quest step is permanent for that character for campaign games of that type and difficulty once it is saved. In multiplayer there are also FreeGame and Playerkiller modes that contain all the no-main quests to complete as often as you like. These two modes only save char data and differ only in the obvious "playerkiller" feature of being able to attack other players. In single player a difficulty setting beyond silver can only be chosen if the main quest line of the previous campaign has been completed by that character. For all multiplayer games reaching a certain lvl can also allow a higher difficulty but both methods are usable here. Another thing aboutcampaigns. Unlike S1 the campaigns here only save quest states. Nothing about monsters or items on the ground. And as a reminder all of this is for unmodded games and not using glitches to bypass some restrictions here. 1b) no. 1c-1) yes 1c-2) yes, or you can stick stuff in the chest and overwrite the character. Whatever is more convenient 2) Special mounts are not campaign specific. There is a vendor that unlocks after a quest chain but it's not linked to the main quest line so you can get special mounts in freegame mode etc... 5a) The most common configuration is not playing at all... Sry, but I don't think there "is" much of a community other than the few people on this forum and there are probably even less people interested in playing "multiplayer" as both Sacred titles are not very multiplayer friendly. Mechanically there are arguments for having more than one person in a game but basically none for having two players in close proximity. So only the "roleplaying" and "fun" crowd would actually want to play together. You can probably mod the game and change the mechanics but currently I haven't seen anyone attempt that. 5b) The pfp is probably the closest to a fixed vanilla game, as that was it's purpose. I've never tested it but you already linked info telling me that the goal of the pfp was also slightly missed with the f*ed up xp values. I have no clue what the cm-patch + vanilla drops combo would do in comparison. But those would probably be the two most vanilla options beside actually playing vanilla. 5b-1) The good, bad and ugly of sacred 2 are present in all mod combinations and also in the addendum and D2F. Everything I've seen so far was "sacred 2" sometimes more bad or more ugly also some more good here and there. I feel like there is neither the place to put all the mechanical nuances here nor does it seem worth it trying to explain those to soemone who knows little about sacred 2's game mechanics in general. I can only say that sacred 2 is not a "well balanced" game, and none of the mods/ combinations mentioned objectively purely move it closer to that. They all have up and downsides, things better and worse. For the question wether it is "worth" playing a specific mod combo over another or something as close to vanilla as possible first depends on what you want. If you want the "perspective" of the modders having played vanilla first might help understand the common ground on all mods and their differences better. I can't say for sure what it would feel like jumping into a mod first and then trying others, as I already played the game before the mods existed. But I can say that I've played without cm patch, with cm patch, with D2F, with EE and with the addendum each and in that order and I have never felt it wasn't "worth" looking at all the different options. You know me already so it probably comes as no surprise, that I found the same mechanics to pidgeonhole me into similar strategies across all those mods. They're all different but they're also all still Sacred 2. If I had the opportunity to play the pfp that is basically the one thing I haven't tried yet I'm certain I would. The reason why I can't doesn't make sense to include here either but I just wanted to say, I would consider that "worth" a look at even though I've basically already seen everything including vanilla and pre expansion stuff. You quoting @Flix's opinion on EE and pfp is basically as good as it gets given that he created both. Subjectively calling cm patch, ee and even the alternate spells module "not a radical departure" feels odd. You know me I always get stuck on game mechanics and they all srew around with those to massive amounts. From my perspective, EE for example basically kills all spell based builds(making them significantly worse compared to other builds)... but again details make no sense here. "- Community Patch + Enhanced Edition + Vanilla Drops for Community Patch (does that configuration even work?" I don't know. 6a) Reaching max level takes a lot of commitment. It also did so in Sacred 1. There is nothing new to it and the linked thread contains all the info towards it. The D2F mod massively rebalances that making it a lot easier to reach higher levels. The other mods may do some things effecting experience gain like adding different monsters into the standard mix etc. There are also sometimes "superspawn" versions with more mob density etc. I have never reached max level in any sacred game or mod so far as I'm more of a build hopper that stops playing when it gets to stale but I don't think my gameplay experience would have been any better if I had reached max level. Journey>Destination I guess... 6b) I would agree with chattius conclusion there. But I would never go without experts touch as I would never find a reason to fulfill the condition of "use single combat arts of several aspects in a random order." For what expert's touch does: Normally a combat art only shares regen times with it's own aspect. With Wxpert's touch all CA's are set to regen no matter which one you use but in return there's a generelly lower regen time on everything. That regen buff is properly shown ingame so you can just make one char with and one without to take a look at what it does. With that I mean I'm not aware of any regen time related bugs in the game. I can't help with: 3) 4) would be nice if someone else with experience there could address those.

So now we know that "DirectDamage" is just another %more damage multiplier. Nice You could add to the armormultiplier section that rolling "ignores armor" would set that value to one but otherwise I didn't find anything to improve here. This is also a very good summary in general. maybe list the creature type damage here as well as it's not from equipment, a combat art or a skill. And as always, thank you for doing all this work. The sacred community certainly never had anything done at such a high level of quality.