SLD

No worries, we all make mistakes. I fully agree with your revised statement. (hardcoded -> actual radius, options.txt -> visible radius) Just tested this and you are correct. I'll get to that later... Yes, that's what we've got these for Nope He actually got more... he got affirmation and a hug Nope nope. "affirmation and a hug" are not "answers" for(to?) his question. They are just other things he also got here. I was intentionally referring to answers as my post then listed those and their differences etc. I have to strongly say no! to that one. I don't like putting words into other people's mouths. Read again: He thanks the three of you and at the end say "thanks for all" but he never specifies in any detail what exactly he was grateful for. So I'd rather consider that as still unknown than "assume" how he feels about any specific thing we offered. The only thing we know for a fact is, that he only considered you, Androdion and Hooyaah as thankworthy. Maybe he really doesn't like me but that would be conjecture again. There are many possibilities and the only one who actually knows more about this is JhinKhada. Sorry I had to be so hard on that one but I hate to be misrepresented and therefore I also have to fight the misrepresentation of others. People come here because it is the only place left. It is the only place left because of people like you bouncing word associations back and forth and other unrelated stuff. You've built a community that would stick together even if Sacred completely disappeared. Darkmatters is also the only place still around because it had you and schot make the sacrifice of keeping it going, and you found some others to financially support this endeavour. The official forums disappeared with the company and other fansites disappeared with declining ad revenue. You cared about it, that's why darkmatters is still around. Communities also need these people that glue them together and from all the posts ever made on this forum more than 13% come from you. I think that's also one of the reasons darkmatters is still around. You're right about the fact that "affirmation and a hug" is an important part of a community seemingly even more important than accurate information The entry "WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" was too long for my spreadsheet, now everything crashed. You evil I'm not sure how those would be created though I guess it requires certain talents I lack. The cow just spoke to me, not necessarily because it was dancing just because it's a nice cow. Shortly after I lost most of my eyesight and color contrast I got a stuffed animal cow as a gift. The Idea behind that was that with its black and white colors there was no way my damaged eyesight could diminish the joy and beauty of that lovely cow. They were right and I've found a new love for all kinds of cows. The cow concept just made it deep into my soul To be precise, that only goes for fictional cows. Real ones often don't look that great or are like those generic brown versions... bah. But my love spread to all kinds of things, even those where the question of wether it actually falls into the category "cow" is still not answered like this one, seemingly inspired by a mispronounciation of the Mutalisk from StarCraft: https://x.com/chumazing/status/1381083420898390019/photo/1 Well yes the old posts refer to dealing with issues from a time where there were no GOG versions and Sacred 2's original game and addon releases couldn't ship with a cm_patch because it didn't exist at that time. It's interesting that new releases like your GOG version already come with a community patch applied. But maybe that was just the laziest option for them to make it work on modern operating systems. I don't disagree with any of that. Though you again refused to answer the question what your suggested change to balance.txt "RangePickupLoot" would do. I had some spare time so I tested it myself. Changing that line seems to have no effect on the autopickup at all. Neither the visible portion nor the actual effect. I guess it was originally supposed to affect the actual pickup range but the hardcoded value(that Androdion and I believe in) overwrites whatever you put in there. The CM Patch just somehow managed to raise that hardcoded value to 230. Back to happy things

@Sethi22 I just had this nightmare of what would happen if the forum had a quicksave/quickload function. Your cheated permanently necroed threads would start raising other conversations from the grave all on their own, which would spiral out of control into an army of laggy undead threads that could only be stopped by you turning into a cyber vampire (through drinking your pc's liquid cooling water) and then returning back to human form by stepping outside into the sunlight. I'm definitely spending too much time on this forum...

Well, my rituals are pretty simple, and I think most people would think I'm missing something in the head (which is true, by the way...:braintumoremoji:...) I never play singleplayer, I always start in bronze, and most importantly: I do almost none of the quests! With my eyesight I always feel like I'm blindfolded, I think. I repeat those few quests that I know and get runes from them and farming enemies. That's the only acceptable way for me to get them, I never dupe them (any more, like in my younger days...) it's doing the monsters and getting rewarded (in the right way!) And when going to the combo master, I always put in four. This way, I have absolutely no clue in my head now, as to how many runes I'll find till the end and I never make it till the end of Niobium though I plan my combat arts. And If I die in any way, I restore a copy of my character. Sort of "hardcore", although if I die, I still might export the "corpse" and give the items to myself. And that's it. Stealing from Sethi22 for comedic purposes. Not very creative, I know. But it is, what is is. This is Sacred for me, the whole process is sacred, ignoring the campaign, the few select quests, the never saving and reloading part... everything is sacred! And it will remain like this till I end. I've heard "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" though I must admit in my attempt of "Imitation" I felt everything but "sincere". I got the dumb idea when you said you're missing something in the head (same for me) and than went on about singleplayer and quests, which sounded like the exact opposite of me so it felt like the perfect template

Yes I am still there, though seemingly NOONE else is. Your entire post missed my point A quick summary: 0. It all started a long time ago with the cm patch. On the download page under "1.60 Full Change Log" it says among other things: "Autocollect pickup range increased. To make the graphical circle match the new coded pickup radius, change the line "autoCollectRadius" to a value of "230" in options.txt (not required, but recommended)." 1. Trying to do this caused "JhinKhada" to search for the options.txt file. He couldn't find it so he asked here. 2. As always Gogo comes right after and starts connecting people... 3. In comes Androdion answering JhinKhada's question by telling hime where exactly the options.txt is located. 4. Gogo thanks Androdion. 5. Hooyaah(=you) suggests to "go to: C:\Sacred 2 Gold\scripts\server and open the file "Balance." Search for the line: RangePickupLoot and set the value to 1800." 6. Gogo thanks Hooyaah. 7. SLD(=me) notices the thread and the 2 different answers to JhinKhada's question. -SLD quotes Androdion adding Androdions answer is the one JhinKhada was looking for. -SLD quotes Hooyah and asks: "Looking at the value that is usually there I guess this would make you autopickup everything even offscreen and it would not change the visible pickup circle at all. Am I wrong?" 8. JhinKhada thanks Gogo, Androdion and Hooyaah. He also states, that he's got the information he wanted and is happy now. 9. Androdion quotes SLD's question about the change in Balance.txt that was originally suggested by Hooyaah. Androdion suggests that the visible pickup circle that everyone and their mom has been changing since the dawn of time might be hardcoded and unchangeable. (No clue why, as he has just helped JhinKhada do the now suddenly impossible.) 10. SLD quotes Androdion and states his confusion. SLD tries to explain it all, from what the cm patch tells people to do (changing visible pickupradius in options.txt), to Hooyaah's odd suggestion to change the Balance.txt file instead. SLD thereby tries to explain his original question about wether Hooyaah's solution would change the actual pickup radius not the visible one. 11. Hooyaah posts an in depth explanation for how to change the visible radius via the options.txt/optionscustom.txt and adds some other detailed and accurate information related to the options.txt file. Sadly none of it was currently needed by anyone assuming that JhinKhada was actually successful at around step "8." of this list. and here we are at 12. SLD realizing that after Androdion already talking past him now Hooyaah is also completely misunderstanding SLD's question and following "confusion". SLD gets angry that noone seems to actually read what he's saying. SLD starts third person summary to calm down and hopefully bring everyone back on the same page. back to the current time: JhinKhada got 2 answers for his question. -the first about changing options.txt which we all know what it does and what he actually asked for. -and the second answer suggesting a change to "balance.txt": "Search for the line: RangePickupLoot and set the value to 1800." I asked about what the second answer would actually do, guessing that it would change the actual pickup radius, not the visible one. (and guessing the value of 1800 would make it huge comparing it to the value I had found checking my own balance.txt) I asked to make sure JhinKhada had all the information needed to make an educated decision on which one of the two suggestions to follow. And to satisfy my curiosity, of course. By now we know JhinKhada used Androdion's help to change the options. We know what that does so he's safe. That now technically only leaves my curiosity. And of course the benefit of everyone who might read this thread in the future. After all, the answers can be read and followed without being the person who originally asked the question, so others might still be in potential danger of accidentally massively modding their game. I hope I helped create understanding. If I misunderstood something or misrepresented a post in my 12 point summary please tell me. Otherwise my question remains, what that specific balance.txt change would actually do. And to finish this I have to drop in this emoji: I recently fell in love with it and it definitely makes every post so much better.

Thats what I'm here for. I'm glad I didn't send you down there in vain. As always, thank you for doing all the hard work for us!

now I am confused. As far as I understand it the CM Patch changed the actual range and they told people to edit the visible circle (so that it matches their change) in the options file. The file you yourself pointed JhimKhada towards. Yet Hooyaah's suggestion to edit the Server Balance.txt sounded more like the place to change the actual pickup range, the one the cm patch has probably changed. Thats why I asked.

yes no "cheating" at all somehow... I wonder, how exactly would you accomplish such a feat?

I only ever rode horses for the speed. And max speed horses don't have a riding requirement so I never bothered with that skill

And I just wanted to say that even though chattius and I are both from Germany doesn't mean we've met. Germany is big there's lots of space and there are probably a lot of and all kinds of other things between us. Of course we all want you to hang... err I mean we'd all want to meet you and learn what conviviality means

can the dot instances crit on their own? please check blazing tempest. That one is odd as the aspect lore somehow manages to double dip or at least be applied multiplicative to the dot portion. Thats why in an unmodded game the "hit" damage starts out scaling more flat value per CA-LVL but later in the game the DOT gets more flat value per level. There is so far no exact explanation for this as spell scaling should be linear and both hit and dot are affected by the same mods. The flip can only be seen when taking the lore skill otherwise the hit always does more damage than 1 second of the dot. It gives me such joy to see, that you think of that at all

You'll have to ask chattius for the whereabouts of his firehall. I mean I guess he's posted enough information over the years that I might be able to track it down, but I would consider it quite some grade A stalker behaviour so I don't even want to try. Edit: I just realised what might have mislead you. The "Done" was referring to "defining massive".

Just pop in something like that: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred:Sneaking_Ring_of_the_Dead

So I guess it's gonna take a bit more time before they can test D2F for bugs Well google says the ball would be called a shuttlecock so you could say you're passing one of those back and forth to describe the "game". But as long as the english natives don't enlighten us, that's the best I can come up with. As always your picture says more than a thousand words and seeing your opponent makes it immediately clear, that you would stand no chance against her in competitive badminton done

This one answers the question asked by JhinKhada. Looking at the value that is usually there I guess this would make you autopickup everything even offscreen and it would not change the visible pickup circle at all. Am I wrong?

Neither does anyone else. All sources I know of claim it's only lvl 1 but tested in game it's your current HC level even upgrades on the fly when you eat another rune. Yes it can stack, but no not in a fun way. You can't activate HC while you have HC, meaning you have to take off one set piece cast HC and then reequip the set piece to get two HCs at the same time, until the casted one runs out of duration and then you're back to only the one from the set. Attack and defense stack additively meaning if you get 1000% bonus from one HC you'll get 2000% from two. I would want that too. Sadly it would only be worth it in a build that doesn't lose more from wearing the set than it gains. In which of these categories this build would fall probably depends heavily on available gear and some player choices. I just remember that even though I wanted the blood damage I usually did not end up using it. I mean do whatever you like, it's just Sacred, it certainly won't brick your build. And at least the blood damage looks cool

I wouldn't go with any full set. Mixing the pieces and potentially good rares as well should yield way better results unless you want to use the double heroic courage thing. The two pieces I mentioned, my stopming gladiators usually wore them both. Thats where you get all those bonus points to stomping from that you'll need. If you find tons of lorgar amulets or dupe them they are certainly a good choice for socketing. Yes you could make different weapon sets for different damage types. What I was trying to say is, it's not worth it. As you already wanted to use Fadalmar and took axe lore over trading for that, I would just pair Thain's with that and leave it at that. Thain's also has three sockets, according to the wiki, some split which is nice for levelling and a chunk of weapon lore. As long as you're doing good damage per hit the damage type shouldn't matter nuch, because of the way damage reduction through resistances is calculated. I might be wrong about this but luckily you have the perfect test character, your cannon dwarf. Shooting CB at targets with and without dwarven steel should give you an idea what the difference would be like at high lvl play assuming you reach around 100k dmg with stomping jump. I guess you should be able to reach that amount at some point. Should you test that please add that to the educational report From the "Epox the Cobra" guide: "Basicly this De like The trickster has no weakness because Cobra can stun all monster bosses magic monsters and so on (not sure about Dragons have not tested yet )" so now it has been tested not sure what he meant with "bosses" and "magic monsters" but I guess he means the two randomly appearing varieties of "especially powerful enemy". The ones you can also stun with stomping jump. Now I wonder... I'm pretty sure you can stun the valley sakkara demons, but what about the campaign boss version? And what about other campaign bosses. Anducar etc. Are dragons a special exception here or is it all kinds of big bosses? Looks like your educational report could contain some more information on that as well, should you continue playing through the campaign

I wouldn't bet on my reflexes being better than yours. Unless you have some undisclosed illness or are very old, you should have a significant advantage here. As I said before, I have no player skill all I have is knowledge of the game mechanics and I got to admit Sacred might be one of those games where that may not be enough at the end. Thats why I like Sacred 2 and its D2F mod where I can make invulnerable characters You are describing exactly what I meant as well. There is a difficulty bump from platinum valley to niobium valley, but there is not much difference between a lvl 150 hellgolem and a lvl 180 or lvl 210 hellgolem. Thats a smooth scaling that your character usually outpaces. The difficulty bumps are basically there to help the monsters catch up. Maybe that is the problem. Assuming your character would still outpace the enemies levelling you might have an easier time if you managed to level to 190-200 before approaching the valley or something. We have no clue what level the developers were trying to balance those places around. Of course levelling to such a high level would take forever, so I can understand that dying might at some point feel like the better choice

I wouldn't be able to tell if you did make any mistakes, but all the gamefile stuff basically only matters for modders anyway. Don't worry, as all you post is of such high quality, I'm certain that if you did make any mistakes, they would be high quality mistakes

I'm pretty sure it does not have anything to do with that. There are more damage capped skills and they show no double hit behaviour at least not that I know of. The double hits are probably some freak bug with the fact that this cannon projectile is supposed to hit something with damage but also knock back stuff without doing damage. I guess they messed up something in the tracking where the projectile hits portion instead giving it a time frame to hit before it no longer can deal damage and that sometimes allows it to hit again before that time is over. How a single target can be double hit by a single projectile can be experienced with those piercing spitballs of a tarantula mortis. They can also multi hit you and as far as I know 2 is not the limit there. As the single projectile hitting same target multiple times thing is an already "known" behaviour, I guess the Cannon Blast is supposed to be somehow "disarmed" and that they used such an odd mechanism to do so that it turns out to be completely random when it double hits and when it doesn't. That part you did get right. You shouldn't be able to go past ~98K, and you could "prove" that there's a cap if you had a way to substantially lower or increase your damage. As long as the number on the Combat Art Symbol is above ~65535(or ~98K in the inventory screen with close to 100%Survival Bonus) your damage dealt should not change at all. Should you go below that threshold however you should see the expected drop in damage. Oh and for the dwarven steel stuff, if you want to test on enemies with low armor just "cheat" your character into a bronze game via the method I recently posted somewhere here. "niob difficulty which you can reach by joining a dedicated gameserver but not pressing start yet and then changing the difficulty to niob on the gameserver(gameserver.exe in the sacred underworld folder)." Works for getting high lvl chars into bronze as well. You can also load a MP campaign savegame. It snapshots the level of nearby enemies at the time its saved, so you create it with a level 1 char at for example the starting town bridge and the three thugs will be as low as it gets. Both those methods combined should result in enemies with basically no armor resistances at all. Just so you can be sure it's not that

Usually it's called badminton. Though that is more of a competitive sport like tennis etc. I don't know if english native speakers would use that word for such casual fun with your granddaughter. I just saw this and had to answer as I just recently made a joke over at the d2f forum about you coming with a bunch of granddaughters for testing the final version/finding all the bugs. Just extrapolating from all the stuff you posted about your daughters doing this or that. Never knowing you actually had a granddaughter already Gute Besserung!

I took a look at his guide. Only skimmed over it as I already just dumped the longest post ever so I wanna get done for the day. Skills seem fine both his choice and yours(Trade->Axe). Attribute both choices are valid, though strength isn't good on its own only when paired with items that make use of it, which is also what the guide suggests. The CA pool is useless sticking with stomping jump and heroic courage should do. The weapon damage, if I didn't miss anything, he came to the conclusion switching damage types is dumb. If I read that right I agree. Stick with a big number it will break through all armor in the game just make the hit big. Hisdescription of the stomping jump mechanics seems pretty accurate though I'm not sure about the hit cap of 6. Also him claiming he barely ever misses might be a misconception due to the fact that he might not have known how many hit attempts were made due to the area thing. For the number of hits I always guessed it attempts to hit the target once for everything that was stunned, which is also probably a bug and those hits should go like one to each stunned enemy not all to the one directly targeted. All conjecture though. Don't know what he did, I would suggest trying to get by with only eating one, but I'm not sure how possible that is. If you have good gear sources, the red set boots and the legs from the perma heroic courage set(too lazy to look up both their english names but I think they're listed in the guide) both give stomping jump bonus and can help a lot. At the start socketing runes should work for a while. Without trading it could however be a problem later in the game if you need more levels in that skill and can't get rings to socket more. Don't know about that but I would try without, you can always read runes later. For Heroic Courage I would maybe eat one relatively early but if you want to eat more I would first start hoarding runes in the chest where they don't prevent more runes from dropping, convert them into Heroic Courage and gather as many as possiblebefore starting to eat some. Of course that would only matter as long as you don't have a rune supply from other characters or duping or whatever... Just some hints here... For the stomping jump stun chance I don't think it works on bosses or dragons at all. There is a formula for CA-LVL required to get 100% stun chance. Not sure if and where you can find that formula, but it is a really simple one like 5monster levels per CA lvl or something like that maybe with an offset like MLVL=2+5xCALVL or something. The skill tooltip always shows chance to stun a normal enemy at your character level. So you can find the formula by testing around with a char lvl around 10 or something. Just look at what charlvls stomping jump lvl 1 or 2 show full 100% and you can guess the rest of the formula from there it is not more complicated than that, I just don't know the exact numbers or a source. For "champion" kind of monsters the fornula works the same it's however a bit worse like MLVL=3xCALVL. Again for 100% stun chance. This one is not as easy to test so maybe researching the formula might be worth it if you are interested. You should aim to always have 100% but if you don't I guess you'd notice. Keeping the regen time lower than the stun time is a nobrainer, right? Same formula once you figured it out. It doesn't matter wether they are higher level than you you just need the 100% stun chance for THEIR level not yours. Sakkara demons, hell golems those brain things all of it can be stunned. sorry I don't know the source for the crowd control formula but I'm sure it was some kind of official information like the underworld handbook, the official forum/patch notes or maybe even an ingame loading screen tip. I don't know. All I know it was the same for all crowd control skills and it was a change that happened at some point though I have no clue how it worked before that change either. Ok, just checked it was not the uw handbook and as it was a change it can't be in the original one. A quick google search found neither the formula nor a compendium of patch notes from all the different versions. The Sacred Underworld folder contains a readme folder with a file on all the UW patch changes, Though I couldn't find anything helpful in there either, I'm a blind guy and wouldn't know how to translate crowd control into my own language. I mean I have no clue how they would have called it in the patch notes so I could only search for guesses. No clue if the information is in there but I doubt it. Maybe it was before UW and an old Sacred pre UW installation might contain that information in a similar file. I don't think that formula is important for playing stomping jump. With the assumption that you'll need around CAlvl 40-80 to stun everything in endgame I'd just aim for at least 80 and be done with it. I hope this helped somewhat.

Fun is a fully subjective thing and therefore a useless metric. It also doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the game. Back in the day people had lots of fun playing "Ogreball" or competing in the InSacred Marathon (stuff like who gets to Khorad Nur first in a multiplayer game). Yes you can write a guide on how to most effectively combat kick goblins over the lawn but its not reasonable to compare that to guides for playing the actual game. And before you ask what that means: I'm thinking of levelling characters, farming loot achieving certain campaign/quest completions, map exploration etc. Good build guides would include all needed information for their goals and help you achieve your goals with ease or speed. Good build guides can also be start like: "Melee mages are a bad idea, but if you really want to beat that challenge, here is my approach and some hints on how to deal with different problems along the way". The main part here is that it puts the build in perspective. When I think of "bad" builds, I think of: "This build combines CA1 and CA2 and is absolutely amazing", which turns out to have only been tested up to gold difficulty(yet doesn't say so). It explains basic game concepts it uses(only to prove that the guide-writer didn't understand those concepts) and it doesn't tell you that focusing on either CA1 or CA2 would already create a "better" build, meaning faster/smoother combat without any downsides to that. Our most beloved Sacred Hybrid builds, stick two builds into one making both worse. Maybe that is all my subjective problem, that I value the "power" of my characters too much, that I want to learn from guides about new strategies I haven't come up with and mechanics I never understood before. Maybe I don't value the emotional "I had fun with this so you might aswell" kind of guide enough. As for the fun stuff, I recently learned that cows walk away from your character. Of course I started pushing them around a bit and did not stop before I had brought one of them all the way into the farmer's house. Who doesn't want a cow in his living room? I can share the fact, that cows can be "pushed" with others. But I wouldn't write a guide about it. Because for a guide I would first want to cover all the questions I could come up with. It should contain, where in the game world cows can be found, are they a random spawn or always same numbers same spots. Do npc sove cows as well, do cows shove each other away? Do cows have any travel restrictions? Can they cross bridges, walk through shallow water etc. I'm pretty sure they can't enter caves as enemies can't either but I should test that before claiming it as fact in my guide, right? Are cows any different in behaviour from the undead cows in the swamp? Will normal cows also be attacked by the spiders? Does anything else in the game that usually wouldn't come into contact with them interact with cows? Can they die from untargeted stuff like dragon fire? Do they drop loot? Can they "block" your path? Or can multiple cows be stacked on top of each other? Is there a random component in how they get pushed or is it deterministic, which would especially matter if cows could be stacked on top of each other, as otherwise they could no longer be unstacked.... Does A guide always have to answer all questions? Certainly not. But a couple minutes on cow pushing already show how much knowledge there could be and I would consider it a let down in my guide if I didn't at least share the questions and edit the guide when someone found the answer to one of them. Enough of that bull... Well I have played Niob to at least past clvl 170, but It has been a long time ago. To me it felt no different at all back then. Wether less powerful builds would feel the differnence more I don't know. Sethi22 claims that the last 30 levels change things but also hasn't answered wether he ever reached them at all. My guess that they wouldn't change anything was based on the second to last and third to last 30 levels not changing anything either. And to be precise I don't mean the numbers don't go up, they definitely do, but they don't change the way the game has to be played. Their numbers go up slowly and so do yours. The difficulties are the only breakpoints here and usually it tends to then go better and better for you at which point you hit the next difficulty. That is basically their purpose to reset the monsters to a new power level as you have outgrown the ones on the lower difficulty setting. Less efficient is bad. The character oneshotting goblins and the fireball mage that does 1 damage per cast to a 1000hp goblin with a 3minute regen time that runs in circles while he waits for the next fireball are not comparable builds. Was the example extreme? Of course, but what can I do when purgatory hybrid isn't extreme enough for you to get it. You are right about different builds that are close to each other offering different benefits, but when the builds are far enough apart saying "it works" is quite a stretch. Again, yes purgatory-hybrid man is a valid (fun?) choice for someone who has done everything in the game and who wants to show the world his uber skill. The ultimate middle finger towards the balance team, "I made the worst build imaginable and still beat the game" mentality. It will take longer to achieve your goals it will be harder to achieve your goals, it mikght work, but it's still stupid I finished the campaign once, not because I thought I could fail, but because I wanted to know the rest of the story. I usually play characters to find out where my build goes in terms of power, how things work etc. It's often rather a curiosity thing than a achievement thing. The other way around is also true. I'm now curious to see wether Purgatory-hybrid man can actually go all the way to niob but I don't want to suffer thorugh the process of getting there so I will never know. So failure would be possible but it doesn't motivate me at all. I know with certainty that I CAN take a shower... it happens when you focus the action side of arpg. I would actually not be able to stand it the other way around, the full rpg of making quest choices with permanent consequences or starting your character by chosing a detailed lineage and basically writing a book about their background story. Btw. Poe did not start out that fast. Like everything it grew driven by human greed. And everyone would still want the double pace or triple pace league I disagree on beating=completing=experiencing every possible build combination etc. From my perspective games like poe have "content" like the campaign, endgame maps, uber bosses etc. "Beating" the game from my perspective, means engaging successfully with all "content" of the game, or at least all content you are interested in. Should you have succeeded in beating the current content you can still do so with different builds etc so the "beaten game" is not over or anything like that. Again thismight just be a linguistic or philosophical difference here. I understand the concept of setting a goal for yourself and then achieving it. It is usually something that happens more along the way of improving my character like trying to get certain gear pieces etc. Not sure if I would understand the example, depends on what game it comes from, but maybe you can give me a hint. Usually in a game that doesn't change the perspective doesn't change, just as "throwing blades" suddenly becoming meta seems quite unlikely I don't "negate" the thought experiment. I know all the ways damage(and defenses) can bes scaled. Removing combat arts doesn't suddenly make new alternative options pop up. It's just gonna be a combat art character that leaves out the combat art and thereby gimps its damage. It gets even worse, as besides damage, useful combat arts ususally either hit quickly or multiple targets at once making them a guaranteed upgrade. Think of it this way lets set the no CA characters stats to magical lalaland values and give it infinite damage per hit. That would certainly qualify as an upper boundary. What is the best build we can get now? Well woodelf's multishot isn't allowed, so the only thing that can kill more than one enemy per attack is the Egill crossbow set with pierce. The fastest attack animation would be on a flying demon but that's a combat art again so we're stuck with the gladiator. So either piercing crossbow gladiator or some kind of single kill per shot bow woodelf or a fast melee weapon on any character... Would I play that? Maybe, but we still have infinite lalaland damage. If we take that away these characters don't look too great anymore. But they will suddenly all improve by adding a combat art. The crossbow gladiator and woodelf both improve with multi-hit and the any melee weapon character would be moved to a demon as base class for hellpower etc. It's not like I skipped your thought experiment, I just can't come up with anything new to think about. Oh and of course you kinda dismissed the one result for "character build without CAs" I did come up with(which proves me not negating the thought experiment) even though you adressed it right after. You think you caught me, he? Wrong! Both Fadalmar and Orla-Aisling get a 35% chance to cast a spell when you hit something. In the case of Fadalmar that is a single fireball that still does quite some damage in endgame and only under very weird circumstances can hit more than once. So form one original damage source you have a chance below 1 to spawn a fireball, that might hit once and then has the same chance to spawn another fireball etc. These fireball chains end very quickly because of their chance being significantly below 1. The build now usually revolves around making lots of hits and starting lots of potential fireball chains simultaneously. This may create a lot of fireballs bit also ends with the enemies dying and that doesn't take to long because of that still effective damage I stated earlier. Now lets move on to Orla-Aisling. It has a 35% chance on hit to cast a version of the energy demons charged bolts. This spell casts multiple projectiles capable of hitting one target each. I don't know the exact number of projectiles Orla-Aisling produces per cast but it is significantly more than three. That is important. The other important thing to know is that each individual hit does a lot less damage than fadalmar fireballs in endgame. Now you might know resistances effect lower damage more than higher damage making the approach of many small damage hits even worse compared to one big hit. So now we trigger our Orla-Aisling chain it shoots of a bunch of projectiles each having a 35% chance of starting another cast assuming they hit something and each doing almost no damage at all. The problem here is that this creates an on average never ending chain of growing projectile amounts that do almost no damage each. Standing close to an enemy can ensure that enough of these projectiles hit that enemy. It also removes the flight time before the next hit occurs. So the reason I didn't consider Orla-Aisling is not an oversight. It's because I have personally witnessed the test result of an endgame character hitting an endgame enemy with the Orla-Aisling set once. And that single hit created an infinite amount of tiny hits that crashed the game client in less than a second. If those lightning projectiles did at least Fadalmar amounts of damage maybe the enemy would die and thereby end the chain before the client crashes. But even then it would create a massive lag spike for sure and the leftover projectiles could still fly on and hit something else, at least this time with a delayed ramp up as there is distance between you and enemy number 2. The enemy that caused the crash chain btw was one of those champion brain things that line the border of the anducar fight. I called it "endgame" though I have no clue about the level and game difficulty that happened on. Therefore I don't know how tanky an enemy has to be for this problem to spiral out of control, but it was obvious that the infinite loop woild cause problems at some point. Is there hope yet? Actually I have to admit, you did catch me here. A way to scale the damage of orla-aisling could potentially solve the problem and make it even far better than fadalmar. And I have to admit that I have no clue how the damage of those two is calculated and what could be used to scale it. Sadly I do not know everything Well wether someone finds the scaling options or not. Either way one of them will be significantly better than the other and you can't have both at the same time as one of them is a two-hander. Weapon swapping here would create another one of those dumb hybrid builds as sticking to one of those weapons would be superior in every case. You are mistaken about me here. I do not "stick" to what works and min-max on top of it. For the min-maxing part, I don't think it is rewarding in a game like Sacred. Having a tiny bit more dps or something doesn't matter once you kinda have "enough". But testing a hypothesis is that might be worth my time would require me to come up with something that has potential AND that I haven't tested before. Especially the second part here gets more and more difficult to natch. I have around a hundred characters that I still have access to and who knows how many more I've played. Many things can also be tested without making a new character. And while I'm at it, yes I ate a ton of purgatory runes once to test wether it moves faster at higher levels. No it doesn't and therefore I wouldn't play it even if the damage was infinite. I've been playing this game less and less, but I played it alot when I first bought it. Sacred came out in 2004 and I bought my copy either in march or april, so it's been more than 20 years of testing hypotheses. There's not much left to do. Nowadays I just play every couple of months or years, for the nostalgia and all those memories. I return to it less than some other games though as the loss of almost all my vision makes more problems in Sacred than it does in other games. There's nothing wrong about sharing build ideas that might not work as long as you make your victims aware of that Same, I just wish for that magical hug that lets us exchange all our thoughts in an instant so that we don't have to put so much work into this tedious and imprecise form of communiction. In Sacred UW it's only available in SinglePlayer games and I don't like campaign games... It is also a lot worse in filtering. Picking up everything is far too much and only unique would be not enough I guess, as you might want rares too. Also the interaction with the Sacred UW inventory is a big problem for me. Because of the transparency I have to mouseover sweep the entire inventory to find things in there sometimes etc. Just imagine a giant polearm stuck in the middle of your inventory but you can't see it. That is about as bad as it gets, but I guess you can imagine sight problems like that leading to all kinds of problems in video games. I fully agree with xeyp the wise My "master thesis" comment was less about the length and more about it's quality of content and well structured approach. Also, the more thorough you explain your thoughts the less likely they are misunderstood. ah so the leech shield is no actual "shield" item, you meant leeching with an ability that does so periodically to help keep your life up. I would also consider those some of the most dangerous areas in the game. Thank you, but much of that knowledge I did not come up with myself. I just have been around someone with an amazing brain I did just play it a couple of weeks ago, the only sad part is that I can't see it as well and enjoy it as much anymore as I once could. Yes that also goes back to that amazing brain I just told you about. So no, there is no source about that elsewhere that I know about. no. The recent resurgence of forum activity is already almost impossible for me to keep up with. Reading and writing stuff is definitely not my strength. That topic would need a lot of detailed information that I don't actually have, so lots of ingame testing would be required. Someone would basically have to do for Sacred Underworld what Maneus did for the Sacred 2 damage calculations. That is a lot of work, worth a lot more respect than my lazy ass popping in telling people I might know something. Should a volunteer be found I'd happily look at their work and point out flaws or other details to investigate. All I can say is, I won't do it myself. Too much work. The forum alone is already threatening tp become a fulltime job I'm sorry, that I can't be for you, what you would want me to.

And I had hoped I'd learn something new at least tell me what you meant with that "crappy leech shield" Neither am I. I love it how your suggested path to raising the challenge takes all the way to step number three to consider "not duping runes" As xeyp the wise has stated in his master's thesis, to beat the game might mean anything from finishing the bronze campaign to fulfilling your dream of bathing in niobium anducar's blood. I mentioned lack of difficulty as reason for the "creative array of builds" because I was certain that while many of these characters may have been able to finish the bronze campaign, almost none of them ever bathed at all.

According to the wiki neither characters have a combat art called "lightning strike". They do however both have a combat art that could be described as a "lightning strike", which is also a possible reason for why they could have ended up in wrong loot tables. Battle Mages have "Chain Lightning", the Seraphim has "Lightning bolt". I have no more insight to offer which is why I originally decided not to answer your first post.

Is that based on actual experience going from a lvl 186 char to a lvl 216 char? that woulld certainly happen long before lvl 186 right? there are no really tanky chars. The game has "defense rating", life, armour resistances, and some chars have CA with a "blocking" mechanic. As defense and blocking are chances that never reach 100% protection, they just make the inevitable less likely to happen. Relying on those, a streak of bad luck will still kill you if you played long enough. Obviously high enough values here could put the required playtime assuming you're not uberly unlucky way past your lifespan. But it remains a defense based on luck. Life and resists have certain boundaries. You can't have infinite values here yet a kinda "tanky" character might have more than another. All those mechanics basically do the same thing, they increase the time you get to react to being attacked before you are dead. And in that timeframe you have to refill your life pool by either doing something that causes enough leech or drink a health potion. Those are the only two reasonable reactions to taking damage. Higher level enemies and higher level players, the numbers might change around, but the core game remains the same. You can try to reduce the amount of damage you take with "strategy", using crowd control skills or preparing traps beforehand using the shape of the environment to your advantage and pulling only low numbers of enemies at once. All valid choices to prevent the more dangerous encounter that might kill you. Advancing in the other direction might sometimes also be a wise choice. Did I miss some part of the defensive game mechanics you wish to add here? I think UW added some kind of spell resist mod though I have to admit I have no clue how it works. What you're talking about squishy characters that have no defensive skills apart from a "crappy leech shield", I don't understand that one. All characters have access to constitution agility and parrying. Everyone that isn't a battle mage gets the "armor" skill, battle mage has spells that give resist bonuses for a duration. The real differneces start with the base life pool: The character classes base attributes make a lot of difference here and the question wether your build allows you to put your attribute points into strength/PhyReg. Beyond that it's just the characters combat arts. Gladiators can scale defense rating Seraphims get missile block dwarves can scale defense and resists demons can scale defense or resists Battle mages can scale resists and all kinds of block Vampiresses and Wood Elves get nothing and Dark Elves get evrything except resists. Everything beyond that is gear choices that may or may not fit in your build. Did I miss something here? And please explain what you meant by the "crappy leech shield". Well I have played "real" hardcore characters back in closed net times. Dying usually happened when over confidence set in. Nowadays you are right. It might be impossible for me to beat anything more difficult now that it is already difficult to find the items inside my inventory. At least being drunk is an affliction that may pass, my disabilities will not. So you're right, I have absolutely no "player skill" and wether I can build a character that will beat the game for me, I do not know right now. That depends on the exact metrics of the number scaling stuff etc. Niobium might be too difficult. I'm not sure wether I will ever find out, because that would require a lot of boring levelling through the lower difficulties and I'm just not committed enough to getting there. There's also the problem that the game has very little qol and picking up items looking through the inventory stuff like that can be kinda painful. Who designedthat dumb transperent inventory? Sacred 2 is a lot more "no-skill" friendly. Auto pickup, the ability of making invulnerable characters etc. makes it just so much more accessible. But even there the boring gameplay loop keeps me from reaching max level. I just start playing something else One last thought for your hardcore endeavors. We just recently discovered that there is another "reliable" defense mechanic in the game. Should it actually be true, that there is no exception for the "cheat death" mechanic that makes you invulnerable for a few seconds instead of letting you die immediately, it would trivialise "hardcore". You will already be building a character that only rarely gets into this situation and the moment you die, I mean don't die, you just leave the game. There should be enough invulnerability time to do so. I just had that weird metaphor pop in my head. Imagine you're a soccer player. You have a lot of current game experience, you know how it's played... Then I am a guy in a wheelchhair, I have distant memories of playing it, now all I can do is bump my chair into the ball. I still know the ball is round and the grass should be green, but I wouldn't notice if someone spraypainted the grass blue. And yes, the wheelchair thing is an exaggeration(as I can still somewhat play sacred) but the grass thing is not. Told you it was weird