SLD

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

No I will not poison myself, life is bad enough already. It's also quite an odd idea to claim a game can't be easy because dead people can't beat it. The game does not require you to play "hardcore". You can die as often as you want. I'm also pretty sure that more than 90% of all characters ever created, never reached niobium. Those characters though weren't abandoned because they could no longer make any progress at all. They were abandoned because it got boring or too tedious to progress. Yet the players of those characters probably did not feel like they missed out on something, that there was something they couldn't reach, but wanted to. As the game looks the same in all difficulties, there's nothing new to experience in niobium. I have never played the niobium campaign and I have never reached maximum level either. I always got sidetracked, starting a new character or playing a different game. I don't feel like I haven't beaten the game, that there is still something I have to achieve. I know the game won't suddenly change in the last 30 lvls when it hasn't changed the previous 100 lvls. The character is decked out in 400% bonus xp yet I still can't be bothered to continue, as the feeling of progress is just gone. When I say the game is easy and that creates room for all kinds of crappy builds, I mean there is nothing forcing you to restart with a better character. You aren't forced to play the campaign, there is no necessary goal to reach at a certain character level or in a certain timeframe or on limited resources. And the minimum requirement to still make progress, to level your character, gather loot, or finish a quest is so low that with a character that can barely beat one goblin at a time(yes a bit exaggerated) it is still not impossible to continue making progress. The guy that for some odd reason decided his character had to be a purgatory battle mage isn't excluded from seeing all content the game has to offer. It will take him a while but it's still doable. Imagine if the game was "difficult" and you needed a character of a certain quality, like your trapper to continue the campaign past a certain point. Some kind of brick wall like enemies regenerating life faster than you can kill them etc. Mr purgatory would have to abandon his mage for something that actually works to see the end of the campaign or to find out that higher difficulties look just like the lower ones as you have to reach them first to find out. You wouldn't consider the game as having a lot of space for creativity in your character design, if the journeys of purgatory man and the likes of him would end at porto vallum. The game would be "hard", as you would have to learn how to play it, what works well and what doesn't etc., or you would be excluded from the rest of the content. Sacred is "easy" because purgatory man can get through the campaign even if he decides to make a melee hybrid out of his "build"(there's always a way to make it worse ). He might even make it all the way to niobium if he wanted to and wasn't entirely clueless. Won't be a fast build, won't be a strong build, but because the game difficulty allows it, it's gonna be a trash build that made it all the way. And then he's gonna write a guide on the amazing melee/purgatory hybrid battle mage. And that's where we get to see what kinds of odd stuff people play and that there's a "creative array of builds". If Sacred where a "hard" game you'd only see a few "good" build guides and lots of people on the forum complaining that the game was impossible to beat because their throwing blades gladiator went bankrupt after accidentally throwing too many expensive weapons into the ocean... I hope that clarifies a bit what I was thinking there. You certainly wrote an impressive essay, sadly I lack the capabilities of understanding and remembering it's contents properly. THe language barrier doesn't make it easier either. I feel like I understand it when I read it, but when I ask myself what the paragraph I just read was about I'm unable to find the answer Have been rereading certain parts over and over and am slowly starting to see some of it stick... You have some amazingly well structured thoughts there... there are certainly games that I can complete and games that I can't. That doesn't cause any bankruptcies because I am neither the only potential customer nor am I capable to perfectly distinguish these two types of games before I try(buy) them. There may also be people intentionally chosing to engage with games they can't complete for various reasons that may or may not be related to their ability to complete them. Long before there were video games, we already had countless board and card games that skipped the excel sheet and went directly to the trivial manifestation. As a disabled person I who may not have the ability to follow the common advice "l2p"/"git gud", I certainly like the presence of games like sacred that don't demand that much skill from the player I must admit, I never thought about the possibility that someone could find joy in intentionally failing I consider sacred easy because it's not impossible for purgatory man to complete it. I may have a lot more knowledge about the game mechanics but that knowledge is not required. The opposite would be something like poe where I can have as much knowledge as I want and still won't beat it as the developers actively push that skill requirement in there that I might not be capable of overcoming. I also don't have infinite amounts of time to rise to the challenge as the game gets replaced by a new one every couple of months. Both the knowledge from before and progress you have made in the past may just turn to worthless dust when the next patch hits. So we got time constraint, the need for knowledge and having that, not being enough, compared to sacred's do whatever you want and you'll be fine. Interestingly both games have a creative array of builds. Now that I think of it they are quite similar, as when you increase the difficulty most trashy sacred builds would disappear, but it would be exactly the same in poe. There's just a seemingly higher minimum requirement for poe builds... As for the superfluous character configurations in your hypothetical, from my perspective we already have superfluous combat arts like "throwing blades"... well usually I would start by asking myself wether it could be better when I did include a special move or spell. I can only come up with one case of a build where the answer wouldn't be an obvious "yes". You can use the full Icon set in conjunction with a full fadalmar set. That basically requires no combat arts to successfully level up etc. What would I do about the gear? Well I don't need any regen boni so I can go for the next thing I would want. Some leech is required but other than that I'd guess it's +xp because I'm impatient or +mf when I'm curious about what else could drop... Maybe there are modifiers that can scale the fadalmar fireballs, that is one piece of knowledge I'm missing right now, but if I knew something that helped the built I might consider it here. I enjoy trying to make the best builds and those are obviously subjective as things like fun are part of that as well. I only very rarely try to make something work of which I know it is "bad". If I come upon an Idea of something I havent tried that might be good/interesting, I try it. I might miss out on build options that I misjudge but I can't just play everything and I'm certainly not motivated to play a build that I expect to be crap all the way to endgame just to prove that it is. I am usually challenged enough by trying to make my character the best for a certain purpose. I don't often feel the need to confine myself first and then make the best under those restraints. Seems like I remain stuck in the finding the meta phase and never get so bored by it that I move on to maken odd stuff work. most of those ships probably didn't, but they still happily sailed across ancaria. yes of course, we were just discussing how fast your executioner can throw blades at Gogo uff this one took me almost 5 hours. I hope it was worth it.

I hate hidden things. I want to know the rules so I can decide how to play around them. I don't like the need for finding the right bug by accident. Ok bugs will always be there and at least they're unintentional. But intentionally hidden mechanics are just so annoying. The devs could just have told us the details but no, someone has to put in countless hours of testing to figure it out. hmm, to me the itemization always feels like this: does it use special moves? -> everything has to have +reg special move does it use spells? -> everything has to have +spell regen Never felt very versatile there. as for the creative array of builds, that is being allowed by the game being extraordinarily easy to beat. This allows for enormous inefficiencies in your build without causing you to fail. But when you examine some builds that weren't put together because the skills "looked cool" you quickly see a pattern of odd bugs and other unexpected irregularities being at work to make them imba. I prefer some creative freedom over an inflexible/uncomplicated game as well. And the Sacred devs certainly hit their goal in making a fun and successful game. But I do want to know what made them decide stuff like that a character's gold amount should be stored in a signed integer. With no protection from overflowing either. One moment you are the richest guy in ancaria, your pockets stuffed with 2 billion gold, the next you're 2 billion in debt. Did some actual thought go into this? Was there a plan to use negative gold coins for something?

No I can't see anything detailed about what you put in those slots. Did I miss something? yes. The mechanic that as long as you keep up with them the fireballs have infinite range is a really cool thing. But other than that fire ball seems very uninteresting to me. It only hits one enemy at a time and it doesn't cast THAT fast to make up for it. I was more disappointed by them not flying in a straight line.

I thought your Executioner was supposed to use "Fist of the Gods" not "Throwing Blades" I agree on that such basic guides are usually quite useless. But that's the interesting part. I was wondering why this slowing down mechanic felt so common sense to me in the Sacred universe. Had a hunch, so I unburied the manual. Turns out I was right, it does introduce the basic idea of this. You're right as well that it is confusing naive and in this case even contradictory with itself claiming on one page that the speed penalty on armour could be reduced by agility(which is wrong) and on another page tells us the correct skill is Armor lore. I guess both might have made sense so it could have changed during developement. Interesting fact here is that agility would have been availible to all classes while armor lore is missing on the battle mage forcing him to crawl or ride a horse. I woder whether the developers originally thought of that I understand. You thought the skill might not just have a speed bonus but also a hidden "maximum speed" bonus. I just thought the game is so weird it could be generally ignoring the cap on the skills speed bonus. Skills(not CA's) in Sacred 1 don't have any mastery unlock mods and the Sacred 2 one's unlock new mods and a different scaling function at 75 but other than that there is nothing I like that that I know about. Your line of thought however is more correct than you give yourself credit for. If you were looking at CA's(not skills) there are lots of examples of things that only change at certain breakpoints like mages getting an extra meteor or another ice shard. So expecting a similar behaviour from an invisible mod on cataract doesn't seem so far off. I agree that there should be more to this skill assuming the developers have put any thought into it at all. According to the wiki it gives more than 400% speed bonus at level 200 which would put a capped out one at over 1000% speed bonus. In a game that caps speed at 220. But there are many things like that in the game, which just lead me to believe my assumption must be wrong I'm not sure they did. After all, they also designed a whole Gladiator CA around throwing away your weapon.

that is correct. I'm pretty sure the EP skill only shows the values that the wiki lists in an unmodded game. Wether whoever added another line there actually knew what they ere doing is unknown to me. I suspect the same as you, as the mastery specifically states it works on chests etc. If one could mod this skill to absurd values testing could be done to see if it works at all and on what it works. Wether the effect matches the numbers or how it interacts with ctfv from other sources like gear,we'll probably never know as there is no reasonable way to test it. We could only prove wether one source overrides another. My memory assumes the same though I don't know if it was tested back then. Achieving 100% doesn't need modified items, Silala's ring is your friend. It should also be easily noticeable even without modding armor values. If that download button on the wiki works you can just get the ring that way, dump 6 copies on a highlvl char and test spells with it, no editing neccessary.

and sometimes right click is also attack speed according to the source I linked above. At least we know now that the right click left click confusion was just a mistake. So far my explanation seems the most coherent here and xeyp's data turned out just as expected. I'm stlill baffled by the fact that noone here knew their way around this basic mechanic. I just checked, the original Sacred handbook basically says the same thing I said above. Higher level stuff slows you down unless you're properly trained. I guess there are some downsides to the new age of digital copies. No box, no handbook, no clue about the game no we don't I don't know how you got to the "level dependant" idea here but I agree that the game is strange enough for anything to be possible. Btw. with Quick as a Flash there's another speed combat art like that, this time for the woodelf.

Hmm, never knew you could cheat around the ca regen that way. But now that I do I still wouldn't use it. Far too much effort for far to little value. Switching slots like once a second or more... Sacred was mechanically never a good game for playing with others. There are benefits for a certain number of players in a game and there may have been an mf boost for being partied but fighting in the same spot didn't make you faster and gave everyone less xp(Same xp but shared). Sacred 2 was the same in that regard. The efficient multiplayer always meant going separate ways. MAybe it's just the difference between people spending time with other people deciding to play a video game and people like me, playing a video game and accidentally stumbling upon other people

Oh boy, what's going on here? Almost nothing in this thread makes sense. So to answer the original question: Every weapon and every armor piece in Sacred has an Item level and a required level to wear it. The required level is 20% lower and another flat 2 down example Level 10 items need level 6 to wear(11->7, 20->14 etc.). Items that have a higher item Level than your character impose a speed penalty when worn. Armours reduce movement speed, weapons reduce attack speed. The closer your character level gets to the item level the smaller the penalty until it disappears at equal level. There is no benefit for being higher level than your item only a penalty for being lower. This penalty can be reduced by putting points in armor lore(for armor pieces) and the appropriate weapon lore(for weapons). For the "hack" in question points in sword lore would help. The weapon lore and armor lore basically increase your character level for the calculation of this speed penalty meaning it can be brought down to no penalty this way. The same mechanics apply to sacred 2 as well with the exception that the required level is only (Itemlevel*20%+1) lower. I have no clue what all this crap is about. Left clicks make your character do basic attacks with their weapon. Right clicks use the currently active combat art. Combat art regeneration has absolutely nothing to do with attack speed. Combat art execution of weapon based combat arts can be effected by attack speed. Wether it is depends on the combat art. (see link below) The different weapon types have different anymations for all characters and on horseback/in flying demon form. These anymation determine a basic attack rate with that type of weapon. This attack rate is then increased or reduced by your characters attack speed value. You find the current attack speed value when you hover the mouse over your resists in the inventory. There is no information on the different base attack rates visible ingame. This post gives some more details on this and also on the combat arts that are effected by attack speed: https://nightwolfe.proboards.com/thread/2343/attack-speed-info-guide-characters Gogo what happened to you? Since when do you no longer know the difference between attack speed and combat art regenerations? Combat art regeneration time formulas are known and listed on the wiki here: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred:CA_and_Spell_Regeneration_Formulae_(%2B_Base_Value),_by_Telenochek_and_Covenant_and_edited_by_Myles_(Part_1) I hope this clears up most of the misinformation here and most importantly, answers the SilverStreak's question. If any of Gogo's crazy ramblings are in fact true I'd love to hear more about that but so far these claims seem so outlandish that I just assume they are wrong. In case someone wants to test them, I'm talking about attack speed penalties supposedly making combat arts execute faster, or regenerate faster or attack speed effecting regeneration times at all.

well, wearing many items with "+1 to all skills" never results in an extra point beyond that, therefore the value shown is also the value applied. The decimal part does however matter if you socket an item with "+1 to all skills" into a silver/gold socket. Those sockets increase the modifier values by a small percentage that for "large enough +1s" can reach +2. never had any of the codes. I wonder how they were originally distributed, or wether they ever were...

Of course we do. My dumb ideas always inspire to greatness

It does one "blast" every second for 50 seconds. I have no clue what that ca switching part is about, please elaborate I also have no clue why you think sacred 2 would bge slow compared to sacred underworld. I recently played UW and it's so clunky... Did you know you can interrupt a ranged multi-hit with itself? You always have to click once, wait for arrows, then click again. If you click again too early, no arrows at all. In Sacred 2 you just hold down left and right mouse button to run automatically, the moment something ends uo under the curser it gets obliterated and you move on. In Sacred 2 you also get auto pickup and can sell on the way. So much time wasted in UW picking up single items... To me Sacred 2 feels a lot faster and smoother to play. Well 150k on poison mist is nowhere near "maxed out". With testosterone it is easily possible to do more than 600k. The dwarven "cannon" skills all run against the skill damage cap that was introduced to prevent an overflow that could once occur. Some capped skills have tooltips that wrap around like bfg others like the dwarf ones claim to do higher damage but they don't. They're all capped at ~65535 per damage type and that is afterwards multiplied with the SB damage bonus so a possible total of around 98k per damage type, the dwarven mortar reaches cap with two and therefore gets to somewhere below 200k. I don't know if poison mist is capped as it usually doesn't reach that high a number on either of its damage types, but what I do know for sure is that the bonus from testosterone does not get capped and thereby poison mist can hit for far more damage in a single hit than basically every other non weapon damage based CA. for the landing demon we're dealing with a weapon based CA. And I guess with the help of hellpower it should take the throne on maximum single hit damage in the game, otherwise its either Fist of the Gods or a darkelf with testosterone and hard hit. The demon however has to get off the ground first which will carry a significant regen time, even with a lvl1 ca in a combo and than do the landing so it takes a lot of time and is not as freely available. The poison mist you compared it to sports a regen time of far below 2 seconds fpr a level 510 CA so it is basically always ready. It also stays around so that if a new one isn't ready you can pull enemies through the old one. Poison mist is also definitely king of damage per CA as you have to multiply its damage by its 50s duration. It's also king in singletarget dps as you can stack more than 30 on top of each other reaching like 20 million dps, not that that would ever matter in this game Why the combo? It's barely faster than throwing the 4 poison mists seperately but then it has like an infinite regen time unless you drink a potion, of which you can't fit that many into that tiny inventory.

I just created a new lvl 1 gladiator to test this a bit. went in bronze over the bridge an and let one of those thugs kill me... he took a few hits until my hp were down to basically 0(or1) nad then Gladiator gets "stunned" instead of dying is immune for a short period of time after which the next hit killed him. So you seem to be closer to the truth than I thought and the SB garbage can basically be excluded as the new gladiator had none. Next I sent the gladiator into a niiobium game to repeat the same test. He gets one-shot keels over immediately, slides away yet lies "stunned" on the ground this time. Enemy ignores him, he gets back up only to be instantly knocked over again. He gets up a second time, one-shot a third time and this time he actually dies. I retried this with multiple thugs again and they all ignore him while he's flat on the ground and again he gets knocked unconcious twice before getting killed. Even though these tests don't give enough data to know anything for certain, I'd guess that the threshold has nothing to do with it at all. Wether he got killed slowly or absolutely obliterated he always cheated death the first time. Interesting however is the fact that the one-shot overkills had a "more severe" animation and that this one could occur twice in a row before he actually died. My guess is that the relative amount of overkill somehow factors in here. At least my 3 suicide attempts are further evidence for there to be no "chance" involved. I did no testing wether one is actually damage immune during that time of being stunned. Your dragonfire example suggests that, but I remember it being possible to get killed in this game and some of the more deadly stuff like the poison spit attack from a "tarantula mortis" that could hit you multiple times in a row also have the poison dot afterwards. Maybe there are some things that might buggedly bypass this safety net. Maybe the death safety was only introduced to the game at a later time like with the underworld expansion or sth. Just some ideas... Also want to add the information here, that no testing has been done towards wether all character classes behave the same way when "cheating death". I can only say for sure that a similar mechanic does exist on dwarves. I'm not in the mood of suiciding with all character classes now. Thanks for sharing your experiences that sparked this expedition to shine some more light onto this odd mechanic. If anyone wants to do further testing on this all I can say is "knock yourself out"

Never heard this explanation for the odd "1hp self stun slide-away". I once read somewhere that it's a chance to cheat death based on your survival bonus, basically a reward for surviving making it easier to keep your bonus if you've already reached a high amount. That one seemed like a logical explanation, though I have no clue where I read that. How did you come to your explanation? Was there any kind of testing involved or did you hear it from someone else somewhere. I'm so curious now that I have read two differnent explanations. Especially as your version sounds potentially exploitable as the warning_level can be changed in settings.cfg. If you can be onehot from above warning level you'd set it to 99% and if you can't be oneshot that way you'd set it to 1% as you'd only need very little recovery to get back above the threshold to be unkillable again.

I'm surprised by the fact that you don't need sleep, but I think the SP version of this might work with the game running in background, so you can do something else on the computer while farming SB...

Thanks for testing and proving that everything works as expected. So at some point someone claimed "freaky behaviour" on the wiki and noone ever challenged it. Now all that reamins is that someone corrects that entry on the wiki... That's why I love your work so much. We know how the data was acquired. When we look at that statement from the wiki there's no way of knowing how it came to be. Could have been high quality science or just a gut feeling. It was certainly worded in a way that one would never suspect it could be wrong.

It's SLD not SDL and certainly not DSL or LSD either. If you can facetank a weak enemy like a wolf in bronze, you can just let it chew on you and go afk to increase SB. If you do it in a SP game you won't drop, in multiplayer you have to but something heavy on a key like a book corner on Ctrl, to prevent disconnect due to "inactivity" Just drop the items in a campaign game and save it if you want to mule something anywhere. The "stash" characters can acquire and distribute items that way independant from game difficulty.

thanks for the high praise. Sadly SLD is almost blind and it takes a lot of time for him to read and write posts. Since the appearence of Maneus I've been spending multiple hours per day trying to keep up with whats going on but I certainly will have to dial that down again soon. It's also a bug abuse so it gives op items at low levels but doesn't neccessarily add more fun to the game. Just like you can dupe items by dropping them in a campaign save and repeatedly reloading it etc... If you're trying to make a character as perfect as possible these are shortcuts for getting there. If you want to enjoy the journey things like that will ruin it for you. Levelling in this game looks the same at level 50, 100, 150 and 200 so if you take away most of the other stuff that changes along the way the game can become quite boring. I have already answered that. To clarify: The 471 I pulled out of my arse. There is a maximum from bonus points somewhere around 250 my guess is 255 and points actually spent are added on top even though the inventory screen can't show a number higher than 255. As you can put a maximum of 216 hard points in I added 216 and my guess of 255 and I'm getting 471. Its inaccurate and there have been no precise measurements made for this. Back when I played sacred 1 more I didn't know about this at all which is why I have never pursued more accurate data. There's a unique amulet that gives easily more than 50 points to trading so yes you can basically cap the skill with a weapon swap. But the skill would still only go to around level 256 as the amount of bonus you can apply is capped, see the paragraph above and the post you were answering to. So if you want macimum effect of the trading skill assuming that trading skill above 255 does something (which we don't know as trading skil has no numbers on it) you have to put in hard points. Well all reasonable builds take 1. Constitution to prevent being killed before the next Leech instance fills you back up. 2. All builds that have Armor Lore take it to reduce movement penalty and increase resist same thought as with constitution. Battle Mage is the only class that doesn't have armor lore. 3. Every character takes either magic lore or weapon lore. They increase damage multiplicatively. You should never take both. Hybrid builds are always worse than at least one of their halves. 4. Almost every character takes at least one skill that lowers regeneration times for whatever they are using. Even Hellpower demons will chose at least one to get the hellpower regen down giving more space on items for other mods. The only exception are ranged characters that aren't woodelves using multi hit or hard hit combat arts. These are bugged with ranged weapons and unaffected by concentration. These skills also don't increase in regne time no matter how many runes you eat. Example would be the famous crossbow gladiator. There's a guide for it though the writer of that guide had no clue about these things and never understood why his build was so op So now we are basically down to only 4 skills to chose. Among those are agility and parrying as only other defensive choices, weapon focus skills, trading, forge lore for dwarves and extra combat art regenration skills. And then there are the useless skills riding and disarming. "Sacred:skills" has a nice categorized list for all of those btw. For the question wether there is always room for trading the short answer is usually yes in some cases you have to dump parrying or agility but ther are certainly exceptions like attack based dwarves that want smithing another regen skill for stuff like dwarven steel and a weapon focus skill they'd lose both parrying and agility. Bold all elemental battle mages are might also be in that category. I hope that helps putting into perspective which skills trading would have to compete with, how little diversity buids crafted for perfection actually have etc. Trading is extremely powerful if you don't already have gear muled don't dupe jewelry for socketing etc. Wether the quality of traded items can exceed the possible quality of drops in the wild is unknown to me yet it is certainly far easier/faster to buy a lot of good stuff than to find it. Good luck beating my 140% reg special moves darkelf chest armor with 4 sockets Another thng to consider however is that by chosing trade you will be standing in town for a lot of time instead of actually playing the game. It also kinda devalues drops as you will basically never find something better than what you've bought. So in the long run it's quite an anti-fun mechanic as well. The "guides" of those people landed there the same way yours did. The build guides were mostly written by people that like to write their journey down and share it, not neccessarily people that know much about the game mechanics(see the crossbow gladiator). Mechanics guides are a bit higher quality usually but even the attack speed guide from wolfe's Lair measures speed from "very slow" to "very fast"... What kind of metric is that? The standard unit for scientific accuracy is "1 Maneus" and most of the information that we have on the sacred games doesn't even reach a tenth of that. That's why it's so exciting for me to see Maneus do his thing. Everything he touches creates new infornation the sacred community did not have before. He has the holy word, but so far only for Sacred 2 damage calculations.

Are you sure about that? I could swear the tech lore should be a multiplicative effect on the enhancement mods before they are added to your base damage. So if you had tactics lore they would afterwards multiply by each other or using archangel's wrath tech lore would multiply with itself. At least that has been the expectation so far and the reason why bfg seras take tech lore at all. Your numbers however suggest the opposite, please investigate the effects of tech lore here. It's the shadow warrior buff that gives all that willpower. It is already very powerful when used normally but with the socketing method and a low level lightsaber it can be quite op. For example in D2F(careful higher attribute effect) you can easily get more than 6.5k damage bonus from willpower on a 2 socketed lvl 10 lightsaber. Yes that is 6.5k BASE DMG so I guess it's not a bad strategy wielding the damage of more than 11 normal standard one handed weapons at once Have taken a look and surprisingly there is allegedly one damage effecting difference to them (combat discipline) so calling them hybrid damage is not as much off as I thought before. It's a confusing way of thought as they're just off-lore weapon based CAs but according to the wiki you're right to assume that their damage calculation may be different as with the aforementioned combat discipline there might be more differences about them so testing dmg formulas on them is warranted. Never noticed anything like that. Have my doubts about it. As far as I know ALL Combat arts use casting speed for their execution speed and only casting speed. Attack speed, like the mod from items, doesn't affect any combat art, only left click attacks. The weapon lores however do give both attack and cast speed with the weapon type equipped(USED to be precise) and the attack speed malus for wearing a too high level weapon also effects both attack and cast speed with that weapon being used. Clarification to "used" as opposed to just "equipped" because it only affects weapon based combat arts not spell ones and not the hybrid ones that are spells with a weapon based damage. As this stands in opposition to what I just said please double check with attack speed item mods. That is an interesting piece of information. So the base animation depends on weapon type here. Though I kinda already know the opposite "benefit" where dual wielding causes spectral hand to take longer but still only hit once. Not that useful here

I share in your beliefs And the difference is so huge that I doubt it's just in our heads. As with the half question, we don't have metrics to measure this accurately but if you ever equip one of your gold level chars with about +40 to trading above its character level you will probably notice the amount of high quality items etc to be nowhere near the lvl 1 dwarf. Again a feeling but afaik we don't have anything better. I can't come up with anything better than your dwarf's approach. If no +trading/+">1 to all skills" items can be bought that's probably it. It should help to do the shopping in 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). For exceeding skill lvl 255 it seems that it actually works more like the combat art levels. Though the Skill never shows a higher number than 255 you can have ~255 bonus points to a skill(but not more) that add to whatever actual skill level you have from hard points. meaning the actual cap is around 471 as you can only put in points up to your level. That the effects scale beyond 255 can be proven for skills like weapon lore that do state numbers. Does it work on trading? All we can do is guess. What I can say with almost absolute certainty is that you will never beat the lvl1 dwarf trading "ratio". That now already covered question 3 as well. (the"~255" bonus points I haven't measured accurately enough, could be 250 or 254 but they're certainly capped around that point and as combat arts can get exactly 255 bonus points I just guess it's the same with skills)

In D2F that is correct. I doubt it's any different with only the CM Patch. All weapon types also seem to use the same numbers here so the amount of damage a weapon has to deal to get a specific amount of damage bonus per attribute point is the same on all weapon types. At least I never stumbled on measurable exceptions. Caveat remains that there was no exhaustive test so this information is not Maneus-Level and it comes from D2F. I don't think there are any hybrid damage based combat arts in the game. Combat arts either use the Weapon to base their damage on or don't use the weapon damage at all. Magic Coup has no damage of it's own, so it's a pure weapon damage based CA. And weapon based ones that "add" a damage bonus through a mod option like frenzied rampage's bonus poison damage add this damage to the weapon damage calculation. Where exactly? That's a question for Maneus I think it's added like a ring so no effect on the attribute bonuses. I know that according to tooltips(which we know like to lie) it does not double dip tactics lore. So the damage appears to be added unmodified like an extra damage ring and then multiplied with all damage bonuses from gear and the combat art itself. I'm sure Maneus will soon have more reliable data on this... Magic Coup is however special in a different way. It ignores the weapon when calculating it's animation speed. So yes it's kinda hybrid but not in terms of damage. I can't give accurate numbers as reading them is almost impossible with my eyesight. Depends a bit on the background etc. but it's definitely not a thing I have the energy for. I had no knowledge about the spell calculation's, so there's nothing to compare there and so far your weapon damage formulas haven't been in conflict with my expectations except for crit not affecting the attribute bonus. Now that I think of it, you haven't tested the deathblow property yet, right? It would be expected to be a separate multiplier like crit. Then there's damage conversion, but other than that I don't think there's much more affecting damage than you've already tested and to be honest, your results are already more accurate after a couple weeks work than what the community had in decades. I don't think we need more data on what you've already tested. Should someone knowing about this thread stumble upon conflicting data it's certainly gonna end up here. From my perspective your "Damage Theory" is about as solid as it can be.

Well I admit, that sounds like a good reason. I just love how you already squeezed a "yet" in there

Well this month is gonna be a busy one for me anyway. Next week is the start of a new d3 season that I'll be checking out for a bit and then poe will reveal a new patch as well that I will at least have to process. I made new characters when playing v14, v15b and v15c. It makes no sense for me to keep anything from a previous version. As long as I am enjoying the new version, I'm sure I'll be stumbling upon some bugs along the way. I'm certainly not worried someone else might find the last bugs before me. I doubt there's gonna be much competition. At least not unless chattius suddenly unveils a secret legion of granddaughters

Why not just ask for the "Focus Skill"-level and Calculate the after penalty value automatically? You already have char level and base CA level before penalty. Would remove one more potential inaccuracy as you said: Just an Idea for further improvement... You could also add a function to import the numbers from a specific spells.txt and balance.txt so we only have to be able to select the correct spell. An ability we already need to fetch the numbers ourselves. Would be compatible with every mod as well... I know I'm dreaming again Thank you for all the work in figuring out the complex nature of Sacred 2 damage calculations and now sharing a tool so we don't have to run those calculations ourselves.

Now I'm really worried about that final version. When I first looked at the Addendum, I thought it was really bold to take on things like the item tiers and drastically change the balance with capping mitigation etc. It certainly looked very different from the D2F/EE approach. When I tried it out I found it certainly deserved that "Beta" tag. There is impressive stuff like -spawning on your mount and riding into caves. Objectively a great change. -Capping mitigation certainly makes it a bit more challenging to create a playable character. Not neccessarily a bad thing. -%Leech based on current Life? Not sure if it works but it certainly remains king of all damage mods. -Giving spells a chance to apply special mods that ususally only work with attacks? Good thought but still not balanced. Spells still suck, reliability would probably have been better than a chance. -Splitting SP/MP chars so they can't "farm" the other campaign's quests for attribute/skill points, yet recognizing the value of an "endgame" option to further scale your char and implementing a repeatable quest in "Pandemonium" mode? Good thought but horrible execution. The quest requires you to find and kill 130+ Bosses in the world and that would take many hours to finish while at the same time loading basically every tileset. The game is guaranteed to crash long before that happens. There's also a bug where Shadow Campaign characters only have to kill one of the bosses on that list... well that ain't balanced either. -Allowing CAs to eventually take all upgrades. A bit more Imba for some CAs than others but generally I like it. -Reducing the number of item tiers? Well first I thought maybe he knows what he's doing. Sounded not that bad... playtesting revealed all kinds of odd stuff. The recreation of "random" uniques aka rares that you have to confirm you want to sell. And later in the game almost every trash item requires that kind of confirmation. That is not a good thing. The same unique rings popping up hundreds of times because they somehow end up the go to uniques the game likes the most. First I thought it was due to low level. It seemed all the other items had higher minimum levels so that it took some time till sets and other uniques could drop. But even at far higher levels the 2 go to unique rings spawn at a sickening rate compared to other unique and set pieces. Oh and the special "Magical Glimmer" loot hiding places you can open by walking over now spawn lots of unique stuff but show a significant difference in Number of items they spawn between different character classes etc... The loot system overhaul has definitely not been tested enough to be implemented into anything but a "beta". Thats just the stuff I remember right now, haven't played it in a while. Also this is not meant to be bashing the addendum beta. For how boldly it tackles things noone has ever touched before it works remarkably well and it's still a beta, right? But when you start thinking about applying some of it's changes to D2F's final version, I hope you chose those wisely. As I see you mention the SP/MP split I hope you don't kill the repeatable hellfire arena as an endgame grind. It is the better version of the addendum's pandemonium quest. It puts all the bosses in one place, creates a challenge as you have to fight multiple at once and only takes around half an hour to an hour to finish so the game client can actually finish it with a good non-crash rate. The existence of the Hellfire arena grind also means one has to build characters in a way that they can beat it reliably and as fast as possible. An interesting challenge and a very Diablo 2 kind of endgame, farming Bosses for loot and power While we're all waiting for Dimitrius to return, why don't you release the current version as a "beta" just in case your current buglist is incomplete. I'm sure I'd find some time to take a look at it and your buglist certainly doesn't make it seem any worse than the current release version. As a comparison: Conviction has a messed up tooltip that's showing as flat value instead of percent. -> Currently there are certainly many things with messed up tooltips like that. eg the weapon lore skills actually grant additive attack rating not %. A tooltip mess up from the CMPatch that fixed other skill tooltips but broke these... Confuse: Factions don't reset after duration expires, so enemies keep attacking each other forever. -> Noone uses these Kind of CAs anyway as enemy dmg is so low compared to their hp and the players dps, they can hit each other for ages. All conversion skills are too weak to matter. So I guess "fixing" this bug would only make it worse... Rainbow Facet jewel: "physical to best" damage conversion is not working. -> well currently they just don't have this mod so they're fine. But I guess if they now say they should do this and don't, I agree this is actually worse than current release Can still enter singleplayer with a multiplayer character (they are meant to be exclusive now). -> same as current release Werewolf/Werebear have broken attack animations, only using one animation instead of two. -> currently changing forms stacks certain buff mods quickly granting max attack speed and infinite %attack damage bonus to both the forms and the not shapeshifted druid... Assassin's idle "deactivating sounds" play constantly, even when he's just standing around. -> well that could be annoying as hell... Not sure how current release performs here... But if you at least fixed the broken splash damage on Dragonflight I guess it still would be better than current release Cloak of Shadows - even melee attacks don't break the effect anymore, so it's essentially broken and OP. -> There was always something that didn't break cloak so it was always broken and OP... I wouldn't consider that much worse than current release If your buglist is anywhere near complete this version would be really awesome already. Please consider letting us test this just in case there are more bugs in there that you could still fix without dimitrius' help.