SLD

yes, I did miss that. I always use the "what's new" button, showing "all forum activity". But that one doesn't actually show all activity. It doesn't show edits at all. So if you edit something after I have already started dealing with the original I probably will never notice that. For once I completely agree with you I have absolutely no clue how the offensive and defensive values interact to lead to a hit chance. I also don't know if the value shown in the "last enemy" section underneath your skills is accurate. I've always used that one as reference to see wether I need more hit chance or not. You can skip through the last 10 enemies there. Bosses tend to need a lot more investment for a reasonable hit chance so don't think you have enough just because you get 300% on a "trap" I am pretty sure I said so at least at one spot among the guides that tell you to get it early. But here we go again: I think it spawns from somewhere like item lvl 5 or 6 onward but certainly can be found on items level 8 onward. The mod likes to spawn on weapons, bracers, boots, gloves and rings. You'll need to refresh the merchant a couple of times to see this mod, it isn't the most common one. Mod color is blue. The crappy items you can buy without bargaining skill are good enough to roll this mod. The one we are talking about is this one: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Opponent's_chance_to_evade Though the information on that wiki page is totally useless. Later in the game the other mod that is useful for hitchance becomes available: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Chance_that_opponents_cannot_evade_attacks The wiki article again doesn't tell us much. This chance isn't flat added either... This mod does not roll on crappy items, can therefore only be bought with bargaining or found as loot. Following my suggestion of using those item mods to get your hitchance up you'll easily hit everything with 100% chance soon. So the attack value is useless. Other than that the Dual wield skill only gives some tiny amount of attack speed per skillpoint. And you don't have skillpoints. So in a scenario without infinite exploit skillpoints the only reason to put a few skilloints into that skill would be to make the downside of an overleveled weapon go away. I don't see any measurable benefit in levelling this early game. I usually do plan on getting infinite skillpoints so I don't have much recent experience without that option. But in a limited skillpoint build you'd never raise dual wield beyond 75, that is for sure. It might however be possible that putting any more than the first point into it could already be wrong. Technically all it does after unlocking the use of a second weapon is give you attack speed(and cast speed for CAs). So you basically free some sockets in the endgame. I know both my guides are lacking this for the reason I already touched on above. I rarely play with limited skill points so for me the answer is "someday I'll max everything". That usually doesn't happen though as farming those skillpoints still takes a lot of time and I am lazy, so I do have priorities for leveling skills and plan on having to work with limited skill points. That is also why I started in both builds with a "minimalistic" option and what one can add to that. Both the BFG Sera and the Shadow Warrior list many options in one guide, it is less "one pure plan" more an "inspiration". Giving my order of choice for all these things would take a lot of time and cause even more confusion. Let us take the SW and look at the example variant I had thrown together in the guide: I already stated the order isn't fixed and I would certainly be unhappy with waiting for EP till lvl 50 but let's assume we stick with this one. So we have all our starting gear from "General Guides Part 2" and we're ready for our first kobolds to farm runes. Currently all we're eating is "Grm Resilience" and "Reflective Emanation" and up to level 1 into everything else we want to use at some point. All other runes are combo mastered into Grim Resilience. While this rune hunting starts/goes on we will get to level 2 and that gives us DW Focus. We really want this skill to get mod points on grim resilience, lower our regen times and up our grim resilience level. So this skill is definitely kept at character level till at least 75 now. At level 3 we pick tactics lore. Now we can postpone some of the points in DW Focus to get this thing to level 5 at level 5 so we actually can pick Dual Wield at level 5. Otherwise we might have to wait a bit longer for that. I'm not gonna calculate the skillpoints now to find out if that is still a problem if we did the airlines, I know without it this order here would be screwed if we actually kept DW Focus at char level... We would be chosing our level 5 skill later than level 5 but still before level 8 so no matter what we can continue. Also while we do this there's absolutely no danger to be expected from the common kobolds and champions. We have nice armor pieces and Grim Resilience gives HP regen. The only possible problem might be Gahanka so I guess we just keep away from him So we are nearing level 8 getting annoyed that our hitchance sucks and have DW Focus on char level and some extra points in Tactics Lore to unlock Dual Wield. The way this outline is presented I guess I would dump the points that can't go into DW Focus into Tactics Lore.At least if we assume we don't plan on "overlevelling" a skill to early mastery. Now we hit level 8 take concentration turn on the second buff and hit the merchants for the sorely needed hit chance mods. Some more kobolds till we hit level 10 skillpoints beyond DW Focus are still either dumped on Tactics Lore or kept for later. At level 10 we boldly run through the orc region and farm our lightsaber via the quest. This is of course assuming we don't have it already are playing a light campaign char etc. Running past the orcs should be survivable as we have a fully modded grim resilience and at least a partially modded reflective emanation. Don't try killing the orcs just run. To not get stuck due to dumbness mapping the belligerent vault CA can help Once you have your lightsaber you equip it and potentially a second one as we are still far from perma CA usage. Your damage should now be huge. Back to the kobolds for level 12 and armor lore. This skill also wants some points that we probably don't have yet. At this point it depends on how hard the game is for us we could either continue levelling on kobolds or try levelling on orcs or maybe go pick up the mount. For me that is kinda hard to tell without actually trying so lets assume we play it safe and continue with kobolds and no mount either. So we get a lot of oneshot-able victims, lot's of loot, we are probably tanky enough to just facetank Gahanka if we want to, maybe sidestep the rockthrow if necessary. In our loot among upgrades for our armour pieces we start hoping for regen per hit. Not sure from what level on that can appear. Once we get to around level 15 the first set items could appear. A bit of luck always helps So we get to level 18 we pick up MC Focus. By now we could also have raised armor lore to level 5. (Planning for the later pick of toughness and helping with potential set items slowing us down.) Are we orc ready yet? If we are we beat up those (I'm pretty sure we are) otherwise kobolds can scale up to ~level 40 in silver so if slowly levelling is not a problem, they're always there for you The outline only plans Toughness Blacksmith and EP from here so lets break up this handholding section and look more towards the goals: -Blacksmith stays at lvl 1 forever. No actually you have to raise it to level 5 to pick ep. But it stays there. -EP doesn't make you strong. It eats lots of points. People like me can't live without it but if "starved" for points this is not where you should put them. -Dual Wield isn't really necessary either so we shove it back and leave it at 1 for a long time. -Concentration would be really great for regen reduction, but we can live without it. Regen per hit should be a reasonable alternative even if we might need 3 or 4 sources of it. Early game the easiest spot for it would be the second weapon as this mod tends to roll higher values there and once you get one or two mods of regen per hit on your gear you'll mostly use combat arts anyway so the lost second lightsaber for left click attacks doesn't matter that much anymore. That leaves us with the two Focus skills Armor, Toughness and Tactics Lore. Till level ~78 I think we can master 4 skills from our raw point amounts (excluding bonus points). So which one gets the shaft? I would probably stop tactics lore at level 20 or 25, max at least Armor lore for the linked mitigation mods on armor pieces and DW Focus for Grim Resilience. In a build where we have taken the second buff and MC focus we would definitely want to use those properly so we want points in there and we already have points in tactics lore so we probably need a few levels higher than 78 to reach four masteries and then at least 15 more levels if we leave everything at 75 for the fifth... I'm not sure what the right order would be here, I'd probably prioritize MC Focus and toughness first. Eventually these are the first 5 mastered skills you want no matter what. Beyond that we still have Dual wield, Concentration, EP and the unspecified last skill that we might want to master at some point, but we also might want to reach higher levels in the first 4 mastered skills. Tactics Lore should not go higher than 75 in a limited skillpoint scenario. What would I want in the end for that build? DW Focus - more Tactics Lore - 75 Dual Wield - 75 Concentration - 1 or 75 Armor Lore - more MC Focus - more Toughness - more Blacksmith - 5 Enhanced Perception - inf We get a bit over 900 points and then some bonus points on top so going conservative with 75 on tactics dual wield concentration and EP we'd have around 600+ points left, 4 skills that want "more" points and a mysterious tenth skill that we still don't know. So I guess we spend like 150 on armour, toughness and the Focus skills each? My thought here being that we need to reach 250 armor lore to cap out linked mitigation mods like the one on Kanka's chest, we want a lot of toughness for more mitigation as well and the Focus skills are important to reach high CA levels with the buffs and to potentially also allow high attack combat arts in lategame. Would I do it that way in a limited skillpoint situation? maybe, but I really want more points in ep etc so maybe I could try dumping the second aspect: Blacksmith 5 EP 200 DW Focus 200 Tactics Lore 75 Dual WIeld 75 Arnor Lore 200 Toughness 200 that would be 955 skipping concentration and MC focus. Not sure if we get enough points for it but it might be close Sadly this build couldn't use frenzied rampage and would be forced into demonic blow. I remember doing something similar with a D2F Barbarian, where this can be done even more efficiently and without the loss of "frenzy" As I said these were basically 2 example options but there are obviously far more possibilities around. For example if you don't plan on using frenzied rampage but still go dual buff you might not need to scale reflective emanation to the maximum and could therefore divert some post mastery points to other skills etc. So, putting hard numbers on these is a bit much, but I guess the information on what to master when and why could have been a bit more detailed... None of these questions were idiotic. All you do is test the guide for holes, things that are missing either because I forgot putting them in there or because I didn't realize the potential for not knowing certain things. I also get lazy after many hours of writing on a guide so thats what happened to the SW skills section just linking the Sera guide We are basically putting these guides together as a team. Every time you poke me about something, more knowledge oozes out as I try to explain these things in more detail. You're basically milking the power-cow And there you edited again... I think the General Guide Part 1 already tells you that buffs are always eaten to full 200 runes. In this case Grim Resilience at first and later add in the other one once you can use that one as well. So you mostly eat Grim' than after mac focus you aim the two at around similar levels so don't go 200 in one and 0 in the other. The directly found buff runes for those two you just eat and at the start you combomaster other runes toward Grim later, once you can use both buffs you aim to even out the eaten runes in both. Always aim to get grim past the penalty and later just shove both to level 200. Sacred 2 has no rune drop penalty form eating runes so you'll be swimming in those.

Ok, I tried to find the answer in my guide and have to admit, you found a hole again First, there is the part starting your confusion that you already quoted. And a hint at an answer is here: But you might think that has something to do with Demonic Blow specifically, which it does not. Another hint was there: But no definitive answer was in that guide. So I went and looked at General Guides Part 1 thinking maybe I explained it there? Nope. Eventually I did find the answer. It was in this thread but on page 1 before the Guide Part 1. Here: That was the piece of information you where missing. The game does not utilize the second weapon for any combat art, so its damage is irrelevant. No, the level of the second weapon is irrelevant. Its damage is irrelevant. A socketed damage converter in the second weapon will do nothing. Everything else on it works like a shield or other piece of equipment. It may look like you are swinging both weapons but only left clicks actually alternate between the weapons. Combat arts always hit with the first weapon, so once you exclusively use combat arts the second weapon only gives bonus stats to the first weapon. With the damage calculation only using the first weapon the second one does no longer need to be a lightsaber and lightsabers are actually really bad weapons. The only thing good about them is that their damage is scaled by willpower of which we have a lot. Well there is one thing you can roll on a stat stick lightsaber that would allow kind of a middle ground between the dual wield and the shield version of the build. In some versions of the game(not sure if in all) lightsabers can roll all channel %mitigation. So it would be a defensive choice that still retains the offensive benefit of the combat arts using their dual wield animations. A secondary weapon can give lots of useful stuff including high values of "regen per hit", the two hitchance mods I always talk about, chance to ignore armor, many sockets for all kinds of utility... But in the endgame the most powerful stat a one handed weapon can have remains %leech. And that mod sadly will never roll on a rare lightsaber and there are no unique or legendary ones with that mod either. The primary lightsaber, the double socketed level 10 one, might actually not be perfect. But lower level ones can't have two sockets and a triple socketed one would only be good if you could get it without significantly increasing the level. Three socketed lightsabers can provenly exist in some mod versions but I havent seen that happen in the recent past... Also don't know what minimum level you need to roll that. I certainly tried to get a 3 socketed one at certain points. But when your inventory is completely filled with lightsabers and you still don't have it, the motivation to try again shrinks a bit That is also why I recommend aiming for a 2 socketed one at level 10. It is definitely the sweet spot of effort and reward and works in every game version compatible with the build.

So I post another little Guide Summary: General Guides Part 1 covering: -Combat art/Buff usage -How attribute damage works -something on damage type usefulness -Survival bonus https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/#comment-7145889 General Guides Part 2 covering: -Character creation -Runes -Gold -Starting gear -Socketing -Bonus skill points https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/2/#comment-7145948 General Guides Part 3 covering: -later socket options -something on item mods https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/2/#comment-7146118 Some information on where to get damage mitigation from: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/2/#comment-7146138 The BFG-Seraphim Guide: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/2/#comment-7146200 This one also includes a General Guide on overlevelling skills. Questions answered, about the BFG-Seraphim in particular but also some general stuff again: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/2/#comment-7146208 And a follow-up on that here: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/3/#comment-7146213 The Lightsaber Shadow Warrior Guide: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/3/#comment-7146220 Why dual wield only needs one Lightsaber and some more info about off hand weapons: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/3/#comment-7146230 Some extra information on hitchance mods as well as the priority for skillpoints/masteries and buff Runes based on examples for the Lightsaber Shadow warrior: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/3/#comment-7146232 More detailed hitchance explanations: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/3/#comment-7146267 More questions answered about the SW Guide: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/3/#comment-7146276 Acomparison on some defensive mechanics of the BFG Sera and the SW: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/4/#comment-7146402 And a full playthrough of the BFG Sera in a self found HC SP ruleset: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/5/#comment-7146718 So far that is all the important guide related stuff I could find in this thread linked together in one post with some info on what content to expect where.

Lemme guess, the number shown is unsigned but the one used overflows to the negative as Sacred 2 dumps the other 3 digits behind the decimal point? And when you get hit it checks the current value sees <=0 and removes the shield. The "nose" is at it again... That is the normal cow. The power-cow is this one . Blame Gogo for it

So in multiplayer you should always have an Energy shield. Nice find "Not a natural occurrence"... When has that ever stopped you before? Did you think dexterity values of "609040" where occuring naturally? Oh boy, did I have to search for that one... It's on page 4. With your track record, I'm sure you'll soon find out that death doesn't always occur at 0 life. No, don't worry, that was just a joke, not another hint by the infallible nose . Though there was a bug like that in Sacred 1 where enemy healthbars didn't show their actual health and could show "empty" long before the enemy was dead...

So I guess it's time to listen to the Force-cow and meditate on its wisdom SACRED 2 IT IS A PERIOD OF UNCIVILIZED SLAUGHTER. REBEL SHADOW WARRIORS, STRIKING FROM A HIDDEN ATTRIBUTE BASE, HAVE WON THEIR FIRST VICTORY AGAINST THE EVIL ANCARIAN INQUISITION. DURING THE BATTLE, REBEL SHADOW WARRIORS MANAGED TO STEAL THE SECRET PLANS TO THE INQUISITION'S ULTIMATE WEAPON, THE LIGHTSABER BUILD, A COMMUNITY PATCH CHANGE WITH ENOUGH POWER TO DESTROY AN ENTIRE GAME'S BALANCE. Or something like that At least that's how "Episode IV" would have started in the Ancarian movie theaters. I mean they have cars and a submarine so there must be some T-Energy powered movie theaters around, right? A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.... ... the members of the community patch team's high council thought it was a wise decision to change the lightsaber's bonus damage attribute to "willpower". Thematically that may have made sense, the game balance of Sacred 2 however was not ready for this change. In Sacred 2 all weapon attack get bonus damage from an attribute. Most melee and ranged weapons either use strength or dexterity for this bonus. Magic Staves get bonus damage from intelligence and post CM-Patch lighsabers get bonus damage from willpower. There was never an easy way to get a lot of strength and dexterity, there was a temporary dryad buff giving a lot of intelligence and a permanent dragon mage buff also granting a lot of intelligence. So technically the problem of a high attribute bonus creating an overpowered attack build already existed, but playing around a temporary buff sucks and attacking with a dragon mage that has no attack based combat arts sucked as well. On top of that, magic staves are just not cool enough to be used and from the CM-Patch onwards are even permanently screwed with their clunky projectile attack to fix a bug with them being able to melee hit everything on and beyond the screen So staves where never that great then op bugged and now kinda unusable. Having the potential to get high intelligence for staves always came at that cost. But what about Willpower? The original game design had no reason to limit access to this attribute as no weapons would be gaining any bonus damage from it and its other effects(Spell Resist and Energy shield amount) are rather pathetic, especially on characters that don't have an energy shield. Both the dragon mage's "Familiar" and the shadow warrior's "Grim Resilience" are permanent buffs that give 15 points of willpower per CA level. That is huge. The Familiar has the downside of making you a dragon mage again, just like the staff situation before, but the "Grim Resilience" is for shadow warriors and shadow warriors actually know how to use a weapon and have combat arts to use with them. And that's why we now have Lightsaber Shadow Warriors. It's not just that lightsabers look cool, or that they are "an elegant weapon for a more civilized age", they are also the one weapon type that can get its bonus damage from an attribute that can be easily scaled to far higher values than you normally would have access to, while still being usable with combat arts like any other more "crude" one handed melee weapon. This elegant weapon is therefore also only specifically interesting in the more civilized age of the CM-Patch and onward through EE and D2F, but while the willpower link remains in the Addendum, Dimitrius has aimed for a "balance in the force" and significantly reduced the buff willpower bonuses there, so it is no longer worth building around the lightsaber. I did not find any indication on what the Purist Fix Pack did about Lightsabers so I guess for purity reasons this "disturbance in the force" never made it in and they aren't aligned to willpower there. Also, while D2F may have willpower lightsabers and willpower granting buffs it does not have a Shadow Warrior. So while the same thoughts may apply to a Barbarian there, this build was not specifically written for the case of the Barbarian. getting a lightsaber: There are many ways of getting a lightsaber post CM-Patch. There are also two handed lightsabers now which are usually far more common/easier to get, but I would not recommend building around using one of those as they don't have the potential to spawn with %leech and therefore are not worth sacreificing the option of dual wielding or a using a shield. One handed Lightsabers are extremely rare. They originally could only be bought with bargaining and even then only with sick levels of that skill. Luckily there are other ways to get them as well. The simplest one being the quest: "A simple case of Nerves". It is Light Campaign exclusive. As there is no wiki description yet, I will quote an explanation by Hooyaah made here: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23099-mandatory-quests/#comment-6994124 "The quest giver is downstairs in the same building as Tribal Elder Nubbutz the quest giver of the main (Light) quest Among_Orcs who asks you to kill trolls and bring him their teeth as proof so that he can make a necklace out of them. A case of nerves has you escorting the tribal leader's son as you encounter enemies, thereby battle-hardening him. Accepting the quest grants a special light-saber." The "special lightsaber" is just a random rare lightsaber on current character level. The important part here, is that the quest does not need to be finished, just accepted and for a light campaign character there are also no hostile orcs between the "Entruag" Portal and the quest giver. It is a sidequest infinitely repeatable in multiplayer and gives a random lightsaber each time, so if you don't want to create some crazy bargaining character, but you want a good lightsaber, this is the way to get it. The fact that this quest creates a lightsaber at your exact character level also makes it very easy to create a lightsaber on a specific level. My guide on attribute damage found here: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/#comment-7145889 explains why we want a low level weapon with lots of sockets. Lightsabers below level 10 are really bad so the sweet spot lies at level 10 where 2 socketed lightsabers become available. Every level above this will make the weapon worse. So to get these level 10 lightsabers you have to get a level 10 Light Campaign character to the Entruag portal. Remember that this does not necessarily have to be the shadow warrior you want to play, as the shared stash is a thing. To get to the entruag portal your level 10 light campaign character of choice would go into a multiplayer free play game, chose the correct portal in the starting islands portal cave(I think it's the first or second one on the left, the one with the totem poles ) and then close your eyes and pray, I mean run east, run! Health potions are your friend here. I am not certain if the lightsabers can already spawn with 2 sockets on bronze difficulty, so to be "safe" I would do it on silver. WIth a fully equipped level 10 character especially if you chose to do it with a shadow warrior that already has some levels in Grim Resilience this should not be hard. Alternatively, if you happen to have a higher level character that has the portal you can just open two game clients, multiplayer with yourself, use the portal on the higher level char and teleport onto this "friend" by I think it's Ctrl+left click on their portrait. Once you have used that quest to farm a 2 socketed lightsaber, blade colour doesn't matter(other than for the looks of course), socket colour gold is preferred, silver is good, bronze is bad but still not the end of the world, you will never again have to replace that weapon. This level 10 double socketed lightsaber is all you need and will always outclass any higher level lightsaber you could find. You also only need one of them even for dual wield builds unless the aesthetics are more important to you than the actual strength of your character, of course In that case also remember that real men(like Samuel L. Jackson) want a purple lightsaber. attribute choices: "Attack rating" from "Strength", "Attack and Defense" from "Dexterity" and "nothing" from "Intelligence" all don't sound worth spending points on. Vitality's effect is smaller in relation as Grim Resilience already comes with a large bonus to your hitpoints. Stamina's value is also lessened by the fact that melee characters can use "regen per hit" so they are not that dependent on lowering their regen times via attributes. Which leaves Willpower, of which we are already getting more than 2000 extra points from Grim Resilience, so again it seems inefficient to put our points into that. Assuming your baseline(modified by SB) and buff get you to more than 3K willpower already the tiny (401+quest points again modified by SB) amount of attribute points we can spend would increase the Willpower by 20% or less. Willpower is the source of most but not exactly all our base damage so the effect on overall damage would be around that as well. Is 20% damage increase worth it? (Willpower) Do we rather lower regen times by a bit so we don't need as much regen per hit? (Stamina) Or do we go for a chunk of extra life pool?(Vitality) I'm probably one of those people who'd have all attribute points still unspent when I reach level 200 just because I couldn't decide. If I can't decide for myself I better leave this decision open for you. My thoughts here are just: Stamina can become useless if the endgame regen times aren't changed enough that at least a single roll of regen per hit can be removed from gear as a result. So while this may help a lot in early game it might do nothing in the end. Vitality might become quite useless once 100% damage mitigation is reached, only giving an unnecessary extra health pool against the occasional leech damage or enemies that cause vulnerability/ have ancient magic mastery to bypass our immunity. Willpower basically would only become completely useless when we oneshot absolutely everything. (Technically it's a bit more complicated as it only has an effect when it lowers the number of hits we need to kill something...) But the oneshotting "problem" especially on bosses, is not a thing that is gonna happen and the enemies hp are different enough that the damage bonus might not change the amount of hits one specific monster needs, it will change it on another. So willpower is probably the only thing with a "guaranteed" value in endgame. The choice is yours. skill choices: Lightsaber shadow warriors want willpower from grim resilience, therefore we need "Death Warrior Focus". We want "Toughness" for mitigation and "Armor Lore" for regen times, resist, but mostly for getting rid of the movespeed penalty and unlocking mitigation mods linked to "Armor Lore Mastery". Technically the most minimalistic approach might be doable with only those 3 skills chosen. Reasonable additions would be: -either "Dual Wield" or "Shield Lore", obviously never both. -"Tactics Lore" to increase your damage and get more CA mod points, obviously never a bad choice. When you choose "Dual WIeld" you need an "offensive skill" on the left side anyway and this one would be the only one there that makes sense. -"Concentration" to allow for the use of a second buff. The regen time reduction is also welcome. Though I always say melee chars can use "regen per hit" to solve regen problems that is meant for the point where you end up with like 5 seconds instead of 0.2 or something like that. You don't want your char ending up with 40 seconds regen times being forced into using one of these with a nicely displaced decimal point: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Signet_Of_Thunder So you don't need all the regen you can get but having some is still a good idea. -"Malevolent Champion Focus" to support the "Reflective Emanation" buff and for builds that want to use "Frenzied Rampage" as their main attack combat art. -"Astral Lord Focus" for making an invisible build variant via Shadow Veil or for using "Spectral Hand" as main attack combat art. I wouldn't recommend going into this aspect, but if I mention one I have to mention the other Now there are still a few skillslots left and many things to choose from. I already wrote detailed thoughts on most available skills in my BFG-Sera guide here: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/2/#comment-7146200 Most of the reasoning will stay the same here: Combat Art Skills: Astral Lord Lore? Only for using "Spectral Hand" which I would not recommend. Ancient Magic? No, we don't use spells.(Edit: Though the Mastery actually effects weapons as well, I still wouldn't use that) Combat Discipline? Regen time and damage effect are small and not really worth it. Offensive Skills: There are no Hafted, Polearm or Ranged Lightsabers. When you are going with dual wield Hafted and Sword would only matter for unlocking mods on the offhand weapon and the lightsaber you use. The latter should not have a mod worth unlocking and for the former, I have never seen any mod worth unlocking either. I wouldn't recommend choosing one of those. When you don't choose dual wield the Sword Weapons skill can be used to increase attack speed. [ I think that the attack speed penalty for an overleveled weapon would not take effect as you wear a low level sword and the socketed rings should not slow it down further but while I'm writing this I start doubting my memory so I'll call that a theory for now ] Speed Lore? Too weak. See Sera. Damage Lore? Wouldn't recommend it. Reasoning should be same as with Sera. Defensive Skills: Pacifism? I don't play pvp. Do you? Spell Resist? Probably not worth it, check Sera for details. Combat Reflexes? Probably not worth it, check Sera for details. Constitution? Probably even worse than for Sera as we already have great hp pool and regen from Grim Resilience Shield Lore? I already mentioned it as a potential dual wield alternative. The main point here is that going with a shield allows us to get extra %mitigation from a "Glacial Defender" or "KIra's Wall". But when we do so our attacks will be slowed by overleveled shields which only this skill can fix. The other benefit of this skill is unlocking the huge linked block modifiers on shields that can allow us to avoid annoying side effects from getting hit like "stuns" and "damage" and "leech" etc. Especially the mastery effect of Shield Lore is, according to the wiki, added melee block chance and thereby able to reach 100% melee block. Against melee hits that would be even more OP than 100% mitigation as there is nothing that lowers block chances and it would also work against leech etc. The obvious downside of going with a shield is that you lose the dual wield potential of wearing a weapon in your off hand that can give %leech and the benefits dual wield has with the used attack combat arts like Demonic Blow striking twice and Frenzied Rampage getting a lot more hits in as well(and a more efficient animation). General Skills: Divine Devotion? This is still crap, believe me. Riding? Just as it is for Sera but this time the regen benefits aren't important either so I guess this makes it even worse. Blacksmith? Shadow Warriors are really great for smithing because their only other way of reaching EP, Alchemy or Bargaining is by picking one of the first three skills and as Riding and Divine Devotion are not that great and you need a smith anyway chosing it on a Shadow Warrior solves both problems at once. Enhanced Perception? MF is always nice. Details on Sera. Bargaining? CM patch allows the Shadow Warrior to choose it. Details on Sera. Alchemy? Again not that great without duping. Maybe there are more details on Sera. It makes sense to break with the outline again and pull the variants up here: different variants pure death warrior/ death warrior and malevolent/ death warrior and astral? Every Lightsaber Shadow Warrior already needs Death Warrior Focus for the Grim Resilience buff. Death Warrior also already comes with two potentially usable attack skills, Demonic Blow and Scything Sweep. Scything Sweep can hit multiple things, but you are melee and Scything Sweep has knockback. That sucks. Demonic Blow can be modded for area damage and swings twice when dual wielding. Remember even though it doesn't look like that you hit twice with your mainhand weapon not once with each weapon. Demonic Blow is a good solid choice for an attack skill and allows for the most minimalistic build choice, going with only one aspect. Adding a second aspect to the build can help a lot. Adding Malevolent Champion Focus and concentration would allow us to use Reflective Emanation as a second buff. Reflective Emanation is a great random chance defense skill that basically gives reflect chance against everything, attacks and spells. It will still retain defensive benefits even if you reach 100% mitigation as it will still work against leech and other side effects of spells and attacks, potentially(though untested) even giving a chance to not be effected by an enemy debuff skill. As such a skill would always strip Grim Resilience reducing the chance for that to happen might be worth it on its own, but all the annoying stun and root effects or the time in the game where you are not at 100% mitigation make this buff worth it no matter what, so when you add this aspect you absolutely should add Reflective Emanation as well. Malevolent Champion also provides us with the Frenzied Rampage skill. An alternate option for the main attack CA especially nice with Dual Wield. It cant do area damage but it hits often and has quite some "range" at acquiring new targets when the first one dies. Against bosses it can however be a bad idea as it locks you into a longer attack animation, so if there still is something you might need to dodge I wouldn't recommend using this skill. Later in the game this shouldn't be a problem, especially in EE with the speed caps raised to 450... Malevolent Champion and Death Warrior are an especially superb and efficient aspect combo as with tactics lore they share the same lore skill for modification points and damage bonuses. Adding Astral Lord Focus and concentration allows the use of Shadow Veil. Becoming completely invisible this would technically remove the need for the toughness skill and any other defense. You can however still be hit by accident when an enemy casts a skill or ranged attack on a third entity. There is also the possibility that the CM-Patch or EE add or change some monsters to be able to see or even reveal you. As far as I know the base game does not have any of these dangers and I know of no such instances in these mods either. I just want to warn you about the possibility as I haven't tested an invisible character in these mods. The Astral Lord aspect also has an attack skill, Spectral Hand. That one however would scale it's damage with Astral Lord Lore instead of Tactics Lore and also suck when dual wielding as it will make a longer dual attack animation but still only hit once. I wouldn't recommend using an invisible shadow warrior, you can be quite a tank when visible and going invisible can cause all kinds of problems from escort quests to guardians not wanting to become damageable and who knows what else in between. Should you go the invisible route anyway, remember not to ever use a basic left click attack as with melee weapons that would make you visible again. Using combat arts is fine no matter which one you choose to use. As I don't recommend invisibility I also don't recommend using Spectral Hand. It is enourmously inefficient, basically needing both Astral Focus and Lore, having to go with a shield and kinda still wanting tactics lore for grim resilience's hp and hp regen bonuses and wanting the MC Focus for Refelctive Emanation as now you are visible... Too many skills no real value other than that spectral hand has range. Triple aspect options are just too inefficient to make sense, so just don't make invisible shadow warriors with frenzied rampage or visible ones with spectral hand. While there are many options here, I would recommend using a Death Warrior/Malevolent Champion combo. That allows for both Demonic Blow and Frenzied Rampage to be used whenever you like, gives the most solid buff combo and all that with the most efficient skill slot usage in the game as you still only need one Lore skill. I also don't think that the defensive benefit's from a shield lore version would be necessary for normal CM-Patch gameplay. So that would make the recommended version DW Focus Tactics Lore Dual Wield Concentration for second buff Armor Lore MC Focus Toughness Blacksmith Enhanced Perception and whatever you want Order isn't particularly strict. At the start you probably won't have enough points for both Focus skills and you should absolutely start with DW Focus. Putting some points in Tactics Lore can help with getting CA mod points earlier and access to dual wield. Be aware that when going dual wield before you can actually permanently use CAs the left click attacks do alternate weapons so for that short period you would need a second lightsaber to fully utilize the build. On the other hand having dual wield increases the number of hits per combat art helping to get to pure CA usage once you have your first regen per hit item. I didn't want to shove armor Lore too far back etc so this is a reasonable outline but I've also made characters starting with blacksmith->EP so don't worry too much Grim Resilience giving life and life regen, phys mitigation and, as soon as you have your first lightsaber, damage will carry your build for a long time. combat art ugrades: Demonic Blow: Bronze mod: Vehemence for area damage especially as the open wound alternative is useless. Silver mod: Poisoning does very little poison damage, Frailty reduces physical armor, which becomes obsolete in cases of 100% chance to ignore armor or when converting most of your damage away from physical. I would go with Poisoning. Gold mod: Trauma's deep wound lowers enemy max hp. Not good, not bad either. Life Leech gives a nice flat bonus of leech. I would choose Life Leech. Grim Resilience: Bronze mod: Fortify's more Life versus Rejuvenation's higher life regeneration? For a long time Rejuvenation is definitely the better choice. Fortify would basically only make sense if you could otherwise be oneshot. I don't see that happening so I choose Rejuvenation. Higher recovery rate would also help in 100% mitigation endgame against leech... Silver mod: Readiness gives defense. Discipline lowers regen penalty. As we are melee and don't need that much regen I would go for the defense slightly lowering the amount of attack hits getting through. Remember stuff like Ogres can stun with attacks that connect... Annoying even when invulnerable Gold mod: Safeguard gives a massive amount of physical mitigation. Reflex gives evade chance. This is one of the few mods where I recommend taking the option that might later turn obsolete. Safeguard allows for far earlier 100% phys mitigation and basically ensures 100% phys mitigation even with bad or odd gear choices. The mod is strong all the way until full 100% all channel mitigation is reached which might take somewhere between very long and forever. Go Safeguard! Reflective Emanation: Bronze and Silver mod: Backlash and Antimagic based on the assumption that attacks/spells reflected also don't cause stuns/roots and therefore would be kinda covered as well. Otherwise the other 2 mods might be worth it in endgame scenarios where you don't care about the damage taken again assuming that those 2 mods work at all(I wouldn't be so sure of that). Gold mod: Riposte increases the melee reflect chance even though it says something about damage... Idol only affects others. I don't care about others. Do you? Frenzied Rampage: Bronze and Silver mods: Double Attack and Double Strike for more hits with damage and %leech. And because the alternatives give useless open wounds and crit chance. Neither help our damage much as open wounds would get replaced by consecutive hits without doing any damage at all and crits don't affect the attribute bonus damage which is almost all of our damage. Gold mod: Envenom gives low amounts of poison damage, Vampire gives low amounts of flat leech. I would choose the leech as it ignores armour and gives some extra baseline recovery against small enemies. It shouldn't matter much either way. Belligerent Vault: Can be used to get across rivers etc. Mods don't matter much. Shadow Veil: "Creep"-"Fade"-"Sinister Pact" Spectral Hand: "Clout"-"Chill"-"Double Attack" You might have noticed that I left out all temporary buffs like "Rousing Command", "Killing Spree" or "Augmenting Guidon". I don't like temporary buffs and the ones available usually aren't worth using. Basically all three of them only help with hit chances and I'd rather have good hit chances all the time instead of sometimes. If you want to use "Ruinous Onslaught" while mounted for the invincible perma charge go read the wiki page. If you want to use "Skeletal Fortification", "Rallied Souls" or "Neither Allegiance" get out of here before I feed you to my cow! something about gear: Early game level 8+ you should buy a lot of rings from the merchant with the "-%opponents chance to evade" mod, to wear and socket. You'll need a lot of those to get good hit chances. Don't try to raise Dual Wield or a potential Sword Lore to get attack rating bonuses. These skills are only for the attack speed they give you and should only be increased at later levels. Attack rating on items can theoretically help, so can "whet" blacksmith arts. But your main source will be the "-%opponents chance to evade" mod. Late game gear to go for: Weapon 1: still the level 10 lightsaber... Weapon 2: Anything one handed melee with %leech, base game has Kal'dur's Legacy. CM patch adds rare fist weapons and potentially a lot more unique and legendary options. Tom Felde's Thunderous Voice can be created at character level once per character per difficulty via a promo unlock code. Wiki page on unlock items: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Unlock_Items The code itself has not been published there or on this forum as there have been quite some quarrels with the devs about that. But nowadays you can google for it. It's out there, believe me How about I link some totally unrelated Sacred GoG Forum stuff now, that would be ok right? https://www.gog.com/forum/sacred_series/unlocks_in_the_game If that isn't ok, I'm sure @gogoblender will make it disappear soon. Shield in shield variants: Glacial Defender < Kira's Wall Armor: To get the most much mitigation you'd go with Akarim's Legacy unique belt Rare mitigation or double mitigation shoulders Double mitigation Chest or Kanka's chest armor For a more offensive approach you go with a full Kanka's set for %leech Jewellery: Get the "Tooth and Nail" set for more %leech. Don't socket it or it won't count for set bonuses. Socketing: Aim for hitchance first via the "-%opponent's chance to evade" and "+%chance opponents cannot evade" mods. Lategame get bonuses to cast speed to get to the cap, especially in EE and or add Unique Jewellery with +%mitigation, chance to ignore armor. In midgame some amulets with high amounts of +armor lore(like "vox principis") or toughness can help with significantly increasing %mitigation values from linked armor pieces and directly, respectively. Early/Midgame you can socket Seraphim runes with +% phys mitigation to reach 100% if you want to. If you are having trouble with dot effects a few sources of -%dot damage from enemies would work nicely. It is however a seperate multiplier to %damage mitigation so both at 50% would reduce dots by 75% not 100%. The Lightsaber should always be socketed with the highest flat damage rings you can get, "Jotun's Maw" is probably the strongest option but generally just bying some phys damage rings every now and then from the merchant should do nicely. As damage converter I would suggest magic, as the weaken effect actually kinda does something useful. Also make sure to get some regen per hit somewhere. That is also the way you get started on a pure CA using version of your build. maybe something on gameplay: Not much to say here, just hit things and watch them die. A nice mechanic is that holding down both right and left click simultaneously will prioritize attacking with the CA but if it isn't available use basic attacks and if no target is there it will move your character. To set this up however the method must start with an attack not a move order. So left or right click an enemy then add the other mouse button while keeping the first one pressed, then keep both pressed and the character should kill that first target and then move around until you cursor hits an enemy again at which point you will automatically go back to attacking. I'm actually not sure if I described that correctly, but it's become such an intuitive way to play the game that I just can't say with certainty what the details are to make it work. Just try and you'll figure it out. It's certainly the most chill way to cruise around with a melee character. I think that is all the outline had planned here, might have missed some important details because it got so enormously long. Let's just say the Force-cow has spoken. And for those that really want to build a tanky shield version because they are afraid of incoming damage, remembe this quote by the wise master Mooda : "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering." Just kidding guys, we'll all be fine, as long as noone gives emergency powers to... the butcher?!?

Wow, I genuinely had no idea that disarming could cause anything to drop other than weapons. Very interesting. Are these special non weapon drops only happening with the BM spell or also with the normal disarm character skill? Thanks for the list!

I answered your questions yesterday. I basically did nothing else yesterday. That is how I do it. Looking at the "what's new" page I can see I liked a post at "7:04 am" local time and posted the answer to your questions at "12:50 pm". I got interrupted twice yesterday each time for about an hour+ that still leaves around 3 hours for the post. I'm not necessarily very slow at typing but I am very slow at creating text. Also for the guide, not so much for the answers, I also do some "research" e.g. looking up the correct english names for the skills on the wiki, for your answer I had to find and copy the link from xeyp's thread and look up the divine protection wiki article etc. Writing when I know exactly what to write word by word would not take that long at all, but I still have to write in a foreign language and am not very skilled in "writing things that make sense to others" And the shortest and ,most important answer is probably "I don't play campaign". I don't directily try to avoid this. I use this option to find out wether I'm ready to kill that boss yet/ ready to switch to that region etc. I could play in a more careful way. It would just also take more time and I am far too greedy for that Playing hardcore just requires all the knowledge that you'd gather when playing through the same game version often. In Sacred 1 you already know enough so that you don't get surprised like Timotheus anymore(from his sig): " ~ Thylysium Cemetary: Timotheus Level 100 Dark Elf He was stunned to be unexpectedly frazzled in Hell's Ridge." Once you have played Sacred 2 as much as Sacred 1 you'll know that teleporting to the orc region shouldn't be done before you can handle level 13/14+ orcs because you'd know they don't go lower in level I recently underestimated the fire caves and got destroyed with a bold and underleveled TG, who just wanted to get to cheesing the carnach really early The addendum was a lot less forgiving there than the base game would have been, I guess. But guessing is all I can do here because I don't have all that experience to know all the details for all the mod versions... Basically hardcore requires "know a lot" and "be aware and react quickly when something goes wrong". I'm really bad at both. I may know the game's mechanics but I don't know their exact stats and then calculate wether I stand a chance against them beforehand. I make a guess and if I die, I try again later. Playing the campaign for me would mean either dying often to things I didn't know about, or really outlevelling the stuff going level 40+ on kobolds and very carefully moving on then. There are 2 ways to improve. The build and the player. Improving the build takes a basic understanding of the game and a lot of mechanical knowledge. Improving the player beyond a certain point takes a lot of time and work and at some point probably talent as well. I improve the build so I can get away with being a crappy player. Those who enjoy the journey of improving themselves (=the player) at some time might end up even intentionally playing bad builds to show off their achievement in their player kung fu If you like playing hardcore, slamming your face against the ever increasing difficulty of the game and trying to get further with every attempt you must at least have some alignment with category 2 I guess No, that one is not obvious I checked the wiki: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Map_Icons What I was talking about is referred to a "Soulstone/Active Soulstone"(literal translation) in the german version. But the english game version(according to the wiki) calls it a "Monolith". The most ridiculous part of it is that "Monolith" would have worked well in the german version, too. Why the devs chose differently I have no clue. And yes, calling that thing a "Soulstone" was confusing back when Sacred 2 came out, for the same reason it confused you here as in german you'd also first thing of the Diablo thing yup. turned out super short (~1hr) What takes all that time? I think it's actually all the stuff that doesn't make it into the post, that I think through anyway, like examples and explanations for how I play and when I die etc. I basically talk these things through to see how I feel about this imaginary conversation. It's not a real conversation so I get an unlimited amount of do-overs. But obviously I don't put all of that in writing. Some things I try in a different order, some things I cut entirely. That's probably the most time consuming part. That I don't exactly know what to say and retry a couple of times in my head until I'm happy with something that still ain't great poetry, but at least it's better than nothing

I currently don't have a normal game version or only CM patch version lying around and I haven't played either in many years, so making a testrun of this isn't possible right now. I don't leave out Constitution or Warding Energy Lore because they do nothing at the start. I leave them out because I always plan my build for the result not the journey. I don't want to waste hundreds of hours of gameplay to reach 100% mitigation and then have skills that no longer do anything for my character, because I'm the kind of guy that would start over at that point to make a character with a better skill in that slot. Ok let's imagine the New Character experience and we try to not exploit anything at all. We go to my new char section. We make a sera, get both bronze and silver airlines, get some gold from chest buy a full set of gear smith some blacksmith arts and then we start killing kobolds in silver. Until we can get a bfg rune we shoot with a bow. Once we get runes we dump them in bfg and another buff. Assuming the game isn't EE's challenge mode or the Addendum, I don't think I need to go with the Warding Energy buff, but if I'm wrong I'll find out soon Once I have the option to use a second buff via the runes I'll pick up one level in concentration. The rest of the skillpoints go into Tech lore and focus. I'll pick up ranged lore at some point because it helps with hit chance and gets the annoying attack speed reduction out of the way. Whatever order I choose to pick these 4 skills I'll be done by level 8 and probably get armor lore at 12. All this time I'd be basically oneshotting kobolds, farming runes. My mod points go into BFG first, so that one is done by like level 5 or something. The kobolds I kill are basically repeated runs of the Kobold Chieftain quest with all its nice handplaced champion kobolds and lots of chests for some extra loot. If I really had to, I know I could use this strategy all the way to around level 40. Obviously this would be super slow levelling so I'd rather want to move on to the orc region at some point. I don't like shopping at all but after the level 1 stuff I would try to buy some hit chance rings. For other gear upgrades I'd probably stick with what I find. Set Items for the higher socket numbers are the main goal here. I could socket some sera runes for ohys mitigation but I don't think I would need it in the base game or CMpatch versions. And now the main "breakpoint" I'm aiming for is somehow getting strong enough to kill a "real" boss. My go to guy is the Carnach as if you can make it through to his cave level once, which is only a short portion through the caves, you can pick up the soulstone on the lower level where there is nothing else in the way. The Carnach can be cheesed at range or if that is too exploity for this thought experiment I guess I would level a while longer at the kobolds for better gear or try the Gar Colossus as that one can easily be perma kited. Once any boss can be killed quickly and reliably, I farm them for all the loot that I feel I need. If gear is good enough I level in the orc region or the island with the poison lord. So by level 75 I will have farmed hundreds of bosses because I don't play campaign and I will have survived all the dangerous areas by not going there, because I don't ülay campaign. Could this bfg sera make it through the campaign? Probably, but it would need some skill knowing what is dangerous and how to play around it. Playing a ranged character carefully should get you through the campaign with ease. If you need more defence go with the warding energy buff as the second one and postpone battle stance for it. How do I get mitigation going? Well once I get set items with mitigation bonuses I would wear them, as having some is already better than having none and it combines well with toughness. For the all channel stuff I wouldn't think about it much because in the base game it shouldn't be necessary and you won't reach it prior to level 100++. You can go for 100% phys mitigation with the help of sera runes but that's mostly for if you have access to higher difficulty ones. Niobium runes give 5.5% each and have a min level requirement of 39. The BFG Sera is a ranged character with high damage, being super tanky is usually not required. The flat mitigation from the energy shield can be used to lower the enemy hit damage to 0 if your %mitigation and armor resistance get the original value low enough, so if you want to tank something it's possible that way and the warding energy buff gets also scaled with tech skills so you don't need extra skillpoints to use this defensive option. For enemy dot damage use the dot reduction mods on amulets/gear. So how do you eventually rach 100% mitigation? To give you an idea let's do some window shopping at the wiki I suggested Endijian's Wings, wiki says: 18.6% at item level 225. (Technically you could get a level 240 version at the end) I suggested the Revelation of the Seraphim set, wiki says: 18.6% from chest 17.7% from shoulders, both lvl 225 again. The wiki states a level 200 toughness skill would give us 25.1%. This skill can go beyond level 200 but at least we know from the wiki's fromula that it won't exceed 30% mitigation. So 25.1%+18.6%+18.6%+17.7% would already be 80%. Because the BFG takes away the shield slot and we don't have a buff with % mitigation, if we want to have 100% we need to do it the hard way. The wiki lists a level 199 "Tanit's Collar" amulet at 3.7% and a level 199 "Darwargon's Circlet"amulet at 2.9%. Those amulets do actually drop and they can also go above level 199 but given just what the wiki shows us we'd need ~6 "Tanit's" to become immune. Now silver and gold sockets increase the values here so actually 5 can be enough. But that is at like max level?!? Yes and if you want to make it earlier you need a lot of bonus to the toughness skill and more than 5 of the amulets, or a build with a shield, or you use the mitigation from the divine protection CA or you pluck the hole in your %mitigation with the flat mitigation from the "warding energy" buff or you accept only having full immunity for physical damage or, or, or... Oh I totally forgot that you could replace the set shoulders and chest with rare double modded ones. That would also help a lot if you don't absolutely want that %leech set bonus. 100% mitigation is for many character's a "chase" goal that you won't reach early, but eventually it should be possible for every character to achieve this. The bigger question is wether it is worth investing all those sockets into it. For characters like the BFG sera that only need like 5 or 6 of those amulets I would say yes for characters without toughness or a shield or both etc I would guess it's not worth it. So you want to blindly afk between the guardians with a hardcore character while you sit on the toilet... Dude, in the lategame mitigation is the only way to make this possible. In the early game you pick a character with a life regen buff like shadow warrior or highelf or a dryad with bark and scale that buff through the roof, that'll make you look invulnerable, but it caps out at like 5k life per second. Again regen and mitigation can obviously be combined, but in this guide I was talking about a Seraphim and therefore a life regen buff was not an option. The best alternative you have here is getting the warding energy flat mitigation high enough to not take any damage, but I don't think that can realistically be achieved against Orc champions. I think those orcs can also spawn with elemental weapons so the rune phys mitigation variant wouldn't cut it either. So what's the plan then? Well I'd like to hear what other defense that is not mitigation woud allow you to stay in combat indefinitely. Theoretically maxing constitution gives some good regen and combat reflexes and armor can then be used to get hit less and take less damage per hit, then you might be able to reach an equilibrium where the 4 orc champions don't get you killed but that strategy probably won't last you till niobium level 200. I have never played real hardcore. I play a softcore char that I restore from a backup when I manage to get it killed, so I don't have to farm survival bonus again. If you want to play hardcore in any game you need to know exactly where the dangers are and how strong your char needs to be to overcome them. A good Sacred 2 player might know all this stuff but I don't, so when I think I'm ready to take on some danger I try, fail and restore my char From my perspective going for constitution(pre mastery) just gives some extra hp. In this game that seems to be the worst defense unless you are stuck in a constant health pot spamming situation where it would also raise your recovery. Maybe eating health pots is a normal thing for you, but I try to build my chars in a way I don't need those. Remember, I'm almost blind, I usually can't see my current HP amount at all so I "need" a build that takes care of that on its own most of the time. Warding energy lore increases the shield size, but shields can't even drink potions at all so the main benefit from this skill is the flat mitigation bonus which is tiny compared to the one the buff already gives you. If I would have to do this hardcore playthrough I would fail because I don't know enough about the different game situations and am almost blind so I see the danger far too late. But I would certainly use the warding energy buff as second buff to get more tanky and I wouldn't rule out warding energy lore later when I have skillpoints for that, but only for the extra flat mitigation. What I don't get is where you find all those skillpoints to raise constitution and warding energy lore etc. Without a bargaining character you won't be swimming in +all skills jewellery or something like that. By level 75 you can master ~4 skills. Those are tech lore and focus, armor lore and toughness and if you wanted EP for some MF you'd already be screwed and I didn't even mention concentration for the third buff the EW focus for that buff and tactics lore for a pelting strikes build... btw the ninth skill would be ranged lore that doesn't need to be mastere, but that also would only leave a single skill slot left for your odd defensive choices, but if you don't have a seperate smith you would maybe want that... In an infinite skillpoint and skillslot situation I would consider some of the things with lower priority but those are odd rules and the only mod raising the number of skills so far is the Addendum. Yes Xeyp has made a nice thread that contains some info on these mods, the mods also all have their own threads where you can learn more about what they might change. I don't know all the details either. I played the standard game first, obviously and then moved on to the cm patch at some point. After I got bored with that I played the D2F mod but I haven't mentioned it in my sera guide as it doesn't contain a BFG or a Seraphim character class . After D2F I checked out EE for a short time and then moved on to look at the addendum, which is also what I have currently on my pc. In my guide portions I sometimes commented on these other mods because they are more or less just slightly other flavors of the same base game mechanics. The only mod that actually limits %mitigation for example is the addendum(90%max). In all other mods going 100% mitigation is a solid choice, the easiest 100% being a "barbarian" in D2F that can reach it before level 100 Xeyp's thread: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72692-sacred-2-questions-from-a-newreturning-player-setup-and-installation-cp-ee-pfp-differences-help-a-newcomer-understand-where-to-start/ From the wiki: "The Capacity modification's increase of duration scales with Combat Art level. The Boost modification's decrease of cooldown does not. With both of these modifications, it would theoretically be possible to maintain Divine Protection indefinitely, but the CA level would have to be 134+ for the duration to start exceeding the cooldown." Now I'm not sure if those numbers are actually correct but the ballpark fits. The main problem is to get the duration longer than the cooldown. The "regen time" is actually quite low and eating 200 runes shouldn't be a problem at those kind of levels so there is need for the focus but no need to invest in stamina etc. I never had a seraphim high enough to reach that point and on top of that I despise the need to regularly recast that thing but technically it is the best defense in the game so I had to mention it in the guide. So before it has 100% uptime you already basically used it correctly, I.e. when there is danger like a boss that does damage. Should your character and focus skill get high enough and you took the suggested mods the downtime between two uses will just slowly decrease all the way to nothing and beyond(short overlap between old and new shield). That just happens when it happens and it does so on its own. I wouldn't "chase" that with socketing or anything I'd just eat those 200 runes at some point and then wait for the magic to happen at the later stages of the game. A divine protection always starts full it's kind of a recovery tool and it comes with a huge chunk of %mitigation on top of that. They both would increase the Shield amount and the lore would give a tiny flat mitigation as well, but the point is that you'll get the full shield every time you cast it and according to the wiki it comes with 20%+0.2% per level mitigation, so the supposed lvl 134+ that you need for full uptime would also come with a 46.8%+ all channel mitigation! If you invested in mitigation elsewhere and got toughness etc. that shield can't be damaged by anything but leech effects and the few supposedly existing enemies with ancient magic mastery. You don't need a larger shield amount for that thing when it can't take damage, right? Well I usually don't use divine protection at all, but if I had to encounter dangerous things I would certainly consider using it in the early and mid game to pluck the %mitigation hole and get some extra shield pool on demand that doesn't require me to brick my build with a skill that will later become unwanted/useless. Warding Enrgy Lore is not a "take it if you must, noob!" but more a question about endgame goals. If you plan on not having 100% mitigation and don't want to use Divine Protection either, than it adds a bit to the flat mitigation from the warfding energy buff and also increasing the shield amount relative to the life amount helps against %leech from enemies. It's something you can do. But it's certainly not a skill every bfg sera has to take like the tech focus. I think the answer is yes Yeah I know that wasn't very helpful, but I'm absolutely certain that there is at least one mod that "fixed" this interaction. The only possible options would be EE and the Addendum. I fear it may only be the latter and that one does a lot of other things to this game. I wouldn't recommend the addendum to someone who doesn't know a lot about Sacred 2 already, because it will give a wrong impression on what "Sacred 2" is like. I'll go back to grazing for now

I think the power-cow is sufficiently recharged. I'm supposed to continue with: So as is tradition I will start with something that isn't on that list, that I remembered might be useful for some happy exploiters Over-levelling skills: You can put skill points that you have available into skills that are at least one level below your character level. Once they reach the same level as your character the option to put in more points will go away. But as always the devs didn't think of everything. Back in the day, enough lag could allow you to spam click more than one point into a skill making it exceed your character level by quite a bit. Exploiting this to the brim with multiple macro buttons etc could easily result in 10 or more points spent at once. I haven't seen this lag based exploit happen in many years so I guess modern machines are just to fast, but don't worry, anything the community touches gets more exploitable At some point an option to add 10 skill points at once by shift-clicking was added, that basically allowed to overshoot your current character level by 9 points. For this one I think the original devs are to blame. But the community doubled err I mean quintupled down on that one and implemented Ctrl-clicking for 50 points at once. With that option you can for example get a skill mastered as early as level 26 as long as you can get enough bonus points from somewhere. Generally early masteries and early bonus modification points are the most useful ways to utilize this overshoot skill point exploit. It might also be possible to put in more than 200 hard points into one skill by using this method at a high level, but I haven't tested that yet. As always exploit at your own risk, some fun might be lost this way. Also remember that you would need to have these skill points and that getting one skill to mastery early might create a serious lack of skill points for your other skills. Also, the "10 at once" and "50 at once" are actually "up to 10/50 at once" so if you happen to have less than 10/50 skill points it will just put in all that you have. Now lets get to BFG Seras: proper casting bfg in an empty slot: A BFG Seraphim uses the "BeeEffGee" buff and thereby created weapon. Vital to it's OP power are the two "Enhancement" modifications that add a lot of physical damage to your weapon damage via the buff. Usually to maximize the effect of a buff you would cast it while wearing a weapon set that adds to combat art level or increases the relevant focus skill etc. In case of the BFG you don't do that. The BFG buff when casted from a filled weapon slot will still add the Enhancement-damage to your inventory tooltip but not to the weapon itself, when casted on an empty weapon slot however the created weapon itself will have this massive amount of physical damage added. The difference here is that the bonus damage your dexterity attribute gives you is based on the damage of the weapon in your hand therefore the empty-slot-casted BFG will get a lot more damage from dexterity. This by far outscales any benefits a higher BFG buff level could get you, so always make sure to cast your BFG with an empty slot selected. Also, don't let the inventory screen fool you, attribute damage is not properly multiplied with damage increases before it's being added to the inventory tooltip so the difference may look small while in fact it is not. attribute choices: There are six attributes to choose from. For the BFG-Sera, Strength would only give relatively useless atttack value and Intelligence does nothing at all. Vitality and Willpower would give increased life/shield amount. Willpower would also increase Spell Resistance. All these defensive benefits are relatively small and I would generally not suggest putting points into these two attributes either. That leaves Dexterity and Stamina. Dexterity gives a small bonus to Attack and Defense Values and a significant amount of Weapon Damage bonus. It is a solid choice. Stamina reduces the regen times of combat arts, which for a ranged character is quite valuable as "regen per hit" only happens when the projectiles hit and therefore only allow you to shoot in quick succession when you're in melee range. Having really low regen times can be quite hard especially with heavy buffs like BFG and investing in Stamina can help solve this problem. So Dexterity or Stamina? In situations with infinite attribute points I'd put some in both and in all other cases I'd probably go with stamina as lots of damage may be nice, but you already have a lot of damage and casting your combat art is the main build enabling thing so in the end regen times are more important than raw damage. skill choices: In general you get to choose up to 10 skills in Sacred 2. For a BFG Seraphim you always want: Armor Lore, as it reduces regen times let's you not be slowed down by higher level armor and gives %bonus to armor. All characters want that one. With mastery it can also allow for some linked mitigation mods on rare chest armors and shoulder pieces. Those can be quite useful and tanky for midgame purposes. Toughness, as it gives mitigation and mitigation is the king of defense in this game. The extra resists are also nice when you're not at 100% mitigation. Revered Technology Focus, as it allows for higher levels of the BFG buff to be used. Revered Techology Lore, as it directly increases the values of the BFG buff's "enhancement" and "accuracy" modifiers. Concentration, as regen times are important and the ability to have more than one buff active is also something we don't want to miss. For the most minimalistic build option these 5 skills are already enough. Let's take a look at all the other skills and which ones make sense to take under which circumstances. General Skills: Divine Devotion? Don't use that one it'll never be worth it. Alchemy? Can be nice if you have infinite access to things you want to eat. Basically potions while playing with the Addendum, or when you're duping four-leaf clovers. Otherwise I don't think it's worth taking. Riding? A must have with Addendum as mastery will unlock mitigation on mount trinkets, otherwise it's kinda useless. It does reduce reg times while on mount but outside of the Addendum mounts are unreliable, not allowed in caves until EE and then you still can't directly enter caves while on the mount etc. Also the tiger isn't very fast and with certain gear you can potentially run faster without it. It does increase your hp pool but also your hitbox against things like meteor shower so wether you win or loose here depends on the situation. So wether/when you use the tiger is still up to you but usually taking the riding skill is not worth it. Enhanced Perception? If you want to farm for loot, extra mf is never wrong. Depemding on the game version, just putting in one point to enable the use of relics with a bonus to EP can already be quite helpful. Bargaining? If you like spending more time with the merchant than playing the game this skill is for you. Remember that utmost investment is necessary, maxing this skill and creating a full suit of gear with bonus points to it. At later levels the really high quality wares tend to be unshoppable due to insane unreachable bargaining requirements, but it is still the most reasonable source for good jewellery to socket, so If you like the merchant go for it As always the Addendum is special allowing you to buy set and unique items... Blacksmith? With the CM patch a Seraphim can become a real man and learn blacksmithing. If you don't have another character that can socket things for her, this might be worth taking. The main purpose here is socketing bronze/silver sockets with rings/amulets. Never put more than one point into this. Make a gearset with some skill bonuses and save the otherwise entirely wasted points. The "lucky removal" chance will never be good enough to rely on so don't go for mastery either. Again the Addendum makes changes that make this skill more valuable but the rule "another char can do it for you" remains. Defensive Skills: Pacifism? Only if you want to write a guide on how to find the one other player on the planet that wants to play Sacred 2 pvp. Shield Lore? Our BFG is two-handed so no use for shields. Even if you like using a throwing star at certain circumstances, this skill is only worth choosing when you use a shield full time and then you're no longer a proper BFG Sera. Constitution? More Life and HP-regen? Can be useful if you don't want to use shields and don't plan on becoming damage immune via mitigation. I wouldn't recommend using this. Warding Energy Lore? Shields are usually sizeable enough and you don't get much flat mitigation from it but in certain more challenging mods that bit of flat mitigation can help a lot. Obviously only use with energy shields and then only in cases where again a full 100% mitigation is not planned. Combat Reflexes? The defense against critical hits is irrelevant as critical hits are only a factor of 1.2 (or 1.5 in certain mods). The evade chances only help with attacks and on top of that can never really result in good evade chances against enemies where it might be useful, so this skill basically works best against normal mobs, where you should not need it. I would not recommend it. Spell Resistance? Crits are same as above. The "Spell Resistance" effect can at best make you win the "spell intensity"-check, which would supposedly lower the damage from a spell to 66%. Though I can't find a source for the exact calculations here, I'll just assume wherever I got that number from is correct and therefore this would also be a rather weak defence. [Edit Maneus has revealed it's actually lowered to 70%(determined by the parameter SpellResistFactor in balance.txt.) so it's even worse.] Also it only works on spells. That leaves the mastery bonus. This one might be doing something valuable, but again only for characters that don't have 100% mitigation or 100% dot damage reduction from their gear already. Though it might also help against slow effects I would usually choose one of the named mitigation options to solve dot problems and then spell resist seems to be quite underwhelming. As of my current point of knowledge I wouldn't recommend taking this one. Offensive Skills: Sword Weapons, Pole Arms and Magic Staffs are of no use to a BFG Sera. Dual wield? could only be used for Bargaining or Buff sets and for shooting Archangel's wrath with two weapons with %leech. All things to consider but usually you would only consider this when you don't need anything else anymore. If bargaining or Buff sets would benefit from dual wielding (over a shield) might depend on the game version/available items. If you choose dual wield, one point is enough. Damage Lore? If used with something that converts damage to poison or fire (e.g. Archangel's wrath or rare gloves) it can prolong and intensify the burning/poison damage. I wouldn't recommend using it at all but if you do always go for mastery. Damage Lore without mastery is useless. Speed Lore? Sadly doesn't give enough "speed" to be worth anything. The attack and defense values aren't worth pursuing either. Ranged Weapons? The speed bonuses only affect left-click attacks and the Exalted Warrior CAs. The attack rating will always take effect even on Archangel's Wrath. As the BFG buff gives a large amount of bonus points to this skill I would recommend taking this no matter what, but if you play a pure Archangel's Wrath version of the BFG Sera you could technically leave it out. More than one point here would probably be wasted again as you get such an enormous amount of bonus points. Tactics Lore? Like the speed from "ranged weapons" tactics lore only effects left-click attacks and EW CAs. Archangel's Wrath instead uses "Revered Technology Lore" for these stats(execution speed, damage and crit chance). Therefore a pure Archangel's Wrath BFG Sera can leave out tactics lore. Otherwise this is quite a potent damage buff and gives mod points for the EW Aspect. Combat Art Skills: Celstial Magic Lore/Focus? I see no point in this aspect. Technically celestial light can bundle up enemies, but why not just shoot them instead? Don't waste points here. Ancient Magic? BFG Seras don't do spell damage so this has no effect. (Edit: Actually, the mastery effect does work with weapon attacks, but for the few immunity cases I still would rather use %leech) Exalted Warrior Focus? For all non pure Tech versions of the BFG Sera this is a must have to allow higher levels of Battle Stance and mod points. Obviously it's also need if you want to use EW CAs as main attack. Combat Discipline? Provides a relatively low damage bonus and reduces reg times in combos by 10%/20%(/with mastery). As so many other skills it does "something" so if you really need nothing else you can take it but otherwise it's pretty weak and I wouldn't recommend it. Also, dumping 74 hard points for mastery just to get the 20% reg reduction instead of 10% is probably quite a dumb idea as well. So after the mandatory 5 skills: tech lore and focus, concentration, armor lore and toughness, the most useful additions are -Ranged Weapons (to utilize all the free bonus points, mandatory if using EW CAs for damage) -EW Focus (for Battle Stance) -Tactics Lore (only if using EW CAs for damage) -Some of the lesser Defensive skills -whatever general skills you fancy (Bargaining, EP, Blacksmith, Riding, Alchemy and not Divine Devotion ) At this point it makes sense to rip up the outline again and talk about build variants first. different variants pure tech/ tech+exalted warrior: The BFG Seraphim always uses BFG so the Tech Lore and Focus are already there. The Seraphim has three combat arts she can use with her BFG. -Soul Hammer: One shot per use, big damage, bad mods. I wouldn't use that one. -Pelting Strikes: Two shots with normal game, four with CM Patch and modable for more with EE. This skill is ok in the base game but all the community changes make it outstanding in both applying normal damage and %leech if you happen to have that on your gear. So especially from CM Patch onwards you would want to use this CA. -Archangel's Wrath: This one is a very special alternative. It only shoots once, moddable for a second shot, prevents pierce from the bfg but can be modded for splash in return. It's main benefit is that it is on the Revered Technology aspect, therefore uses tech lore for damage and cast speed and doesn't get slowed by a "too heavy" weapon. It allows to ditch tactics lore, ranged lore and even the EW focus if you really don't want some or all of those and also has far less problems with the limited amount of skill points especially in early game. The only downsides are that using Archangel's Wrath needs more tech mod points and that in CM Patch and beyond the projectile count of Pelting Strikes will outclass it offensively. This choice basically determines a range of builds from the minimalistic "pure tech Archangel's Wrath" version over "adding Battle Stance to it" to "full Pelting Strikes". Another choice all these builds can make is wether they want to use the permanent shield "Warding Energy" buff. It helps with defense early on but also weighs heavy on the regen times, so I would only use it if I feel it's necessary. A lategame option that isn't really compatible with Warding Energy would be reusing Divine Protection. That would be the defensive non plus ultra but deactivates Warding Energy all the time. So if you like the active recasting of Divine Protection you'll have no use for warding energy later in the game anyway. combat art upgrades: You get CA modification points for spending hard points on the aspect's skills, that would be Tech lore and focus for the tech skills and EW Focus and Tactics Lore for the EW skills. Obviously you only need to modify CAs that you plan on using. Pelting Strikes: Bronze mod "Succession" supposedly doesn't work at all pre EE so you might want to pick "Thrust" in that case. Silver mod should be "Focus" for the regen reduction. Gold mod both are bad. Reducing opponents armor doesn't do much in lategame should you go for a lot of the "chance to ignore enemy armor" mod on gear. Crits generally don't do much either. I'd probably go with "Precision" for the crit chance. Battle Stance: Bronze mod "Aggression" for more damage Silver mod "Drill" can help with regen times, though picking "Flexibility" for the evade chance won't ruin the build either as the effect of "Drill" isn't that impactful. Gold mod "Retaliation" because "Idol" would only help others and who cares about others Dashing Alacrity: If you really wanna use this go Sprint-Delay-Impatience Assailing Somersault: I'd only use this to cross rivers etc. For that either Bronze mod makes some sense "more range" or "less regen". In the end it doesn't matter. Neither do the Silver and Gold mods. Archangel's Wrath: Bronze mod "Salvo" doubles on hit effects like %leech. Silver mod "Explosive" and "lock" are both nice but I'd go with the area damage of "Explosive". Gold mod "Vulnerable" because the other one is useless. If you scale the burning effect with Damage Lore you don't need the chance increase from "Greek Fire". Otherwise the burning effect won't be worth increasing its chance. Divine Protection: Capacity and Boost are necessary to reach 100% uptime. The Gold mod either reflects projectile attacks or spells. I would go with spells as they are usually the more nasty stuff both damage wise and other side effect wise. On top of that ranged attacks can be evaded so you're always more vulnerable to spells than ranged attacks. Warding Energy: Projectile Reflection-Magic Mirror-Block Should you plan on being a 100% mitigation tank that uses Warding Energy purely to fend off leeching hits you can of course replace "block" with "resource" BeeEffGee: Enhancement-Enhancement-Accuracy Doing damage is always good and the ability to scale the "Accuracy" mod with Tech Lore is just absurdly op. Beware some mods may "fix" this interaction. something about gear: Weapon: BFG... that one was easy. For casting non BFG buffs creating a weapon set that improves them might be worth it. For early boss killing a %leech throwing star might help for later boss shredder bs a Khral's sceptre might be nice for killing the "egg"(T-Energy Hub thingy at the end) in multiplayer games you can use Archangel's Wrath to hit it twice per shot with any kind of leech weapon, if you don't have any faster way yet. Even works with melee weapons. For the armor pieces you'd usually go for set items with lots of sockets to fill with whatever you need. Rare mitigation Chest and Shoulder pieces might be worth using though the ultimate plan would probably be to squeeze in 8 pieces of the "Revelation of the Seraphim" set for leech% combined with Endijian's wings and post CM patch also the "Tooth and Nail" set for %leech again. Depending on the game version these ideas may be unrealistic as some mods for example significantly reduce the damage mitigation of the suggested set pieces making them defensively a very bad choice. Well you see a pattern here, mitigation as defence and leech% as offence. Early socketing should contain some -% opponent's chance to evade to make sure you reach 100% hit chance against everything. In EE onwards if you later want to aim for maximum firing rate remember to stack "cast speed" and not "attack speed" as all combat arts use the first one. something on gameplay: First of all what to expect: Eat lots of buff runes. Don't expect to have low enough regen times to use your chosen attack CA much in the first 50++ levels. Don't eat runes in those CAs unless your character has super high level and your regen time remains low. Low regen time means faaaar below one second especially in mods like EE where your firing rate can go through the roof. The mid game solution for regen times is socketing some regen per hit and fighting enemies at very close range. The early game is just left click attacks that still oneshot almost everything Get the concentration skill early to use a second buff. Use your first skill points on Tech Lore and Focus to get mod points for BFG. If you go for a pelting strike variant still prioritize tech first as it will take forever till you can properly use pelting strikes. Also don't waste early points on tactics lore, taking the skill is fine just don't put points in, as you get bonus points from the BFG weapon itself. The Focus skill(s) concentration and armor lore are your main drivers for regen times should you ever want to use your combat arts these are important. Should you choose to use a mount get one that reduces regen times for the active combat art you are using, tech tiger for archangel's wrath and warrior tiger for pelting strikes. Shooting far: Should you ever want to shoot a boss without that one retaliating you can use this simple trick. Holding both Ctrl and Left click allows you to shoot at the ground. While you keep those buttons pressed you can move the mouse to shoot at different spots on the ground. And if you aim far away it will allow you to shoot all the way to the horizon as energy weapons don't actually have a range limit. Knowing all this all you have to do is get close enough to a boss to spawn it, you can then even back a little bit off just make sure that the boss is still visible in the distance. Now you shoot at the ground, change aim for the boss and wait until it's dead. The boss can't see far enough so It won't react at all. Works on basically everything where you have enough space like the Carnach or the Octagolamus. In the end you can only do this with left click attacks so you would want to transition away from this tactic, but if you want to get in some early boss kills while you can't tank their damage or kill them fast enough to not have to tank their damage this might be a useful trick. Archangel's Wrath in a Combo: Achangel's Wrath performs really weird when it is put in a combo. To be precise, it can kinda aim for you and make the most lazy playstyle possible. You hold down left click and when you now right click for the combo it will only fire if something is in range and automatically target that. If nothing is in range the right click won't interrupt the movement. Not sure why this skill performs differently than other ones and only in a combo I guess it has something to do with it's ability t get a "homing projectile" mod even though taking the mod is not required for the odd behaviour. Just one nice and relaxing gameplay method I encountered by accident Well, everything I had in the outline is covered so I guess the power-cow can go back to recharging for the SW build guide.

So it's the time of the year where everyone pretends to be @Flix again? I have already un-captured, I mean freed myself of the seasonal theme. I'm glad that was possible. I guess I just don't like change And while we're at it: I have already accepted the power-cow , as a female moose is a "cow" even though I had to find out later that this would be one very special "cow" as a female moose usually doesn't come with antlers!? Now, don't you dare try to sell me the eight-legged "Arachno-cow" , or the "Yak-O-Lantern" next. Though I have to admit there are some funny things you can find googling "arachnid cow" and "Yak-O-Lantern" Yes, chocolate bars save important jobs.

I just thought it was funny you made sure to exclude the energy shield blocking more damage than it's size and the potential for taking negative damage Sacred 2 going out of its way to make the bs number bigger eventually even ditching the sign(+/-)

@Maneus thanks for starting to put all of your great science into the wiki. The only sad thing is that on the player contributed guides page, there is nothing that makes your work stand out. It looks like everything else on that page. I think you should at least always link the source on the forum on how these things were discovered. I mean currently the wiki still claims on the Sacred 2:Tokens page: "et_physical_to_poison 1-1/(1+(x+y*calvl)/10) percent of physical damage converted to poison damage" which you have proven wrong. But statements like these that don't say where they come from are abundant on the wiki and right now your "correct" information on all things sacred 2 looks just the same. The source forum thread is currently the only thing that can tell us the difference between high quality peer-reviewed Sacred 2 science and something someone pulled out of their butt... I just love your work too much to see it sink into the mud of the wiki. I've joined this forum more than 6 years ago but until june I had written only 18 posts here. Then your science suddenly pulled me into this forum... Now I'm writing post nr 292... That's like 3 per day since your arrival. You must have been a hell of an inspiration... holy power-cow So, Professor Maneus should fill a teaching position now as well? I don't think he'd like that, he's been quite unhappy with that unteachable skeleton over in his classroom. And other than him, noone here is qualified to teach that degree. And he's probably learned it from the "architect" of the Great Machine himself. After all he understands the "Blueprints(.txt)" and he also knows the "Floorplan": "AttributeBaseDamage = FLOOR(FLOOR(WeaponDamage * (1 + SumPercentageBonuses / 1000)) * (CombatArtMultiplier / 1000))" "DamageReduction = FLOOR3(Damage / (FinalArmor + Damage))" Compared to his work all I ever said was moo...

I guess that's how you spell "common sense" in "math"

Characters with hidden bonuses... how evil

So far I just use this thread to lay down my thoughts. It was originally all meant to help Jacek after all. Once all the pieces are there, we can think about how to best structure this stuff and make it more accessible. Sethi already told us that talking about mitigation without saying where you can get it is kinda incomplete. There may be more that should be changed before it gets into a more final form. For now al of this belongs here as this is the thread where first Jacek and now Sethi as well have asked for this information. It's also where Jacek would go looking for it should he still need it. It'll still take a while until I'm done here. The two character builds are coming up next, when I think the power-cow has been sufficiently recharged.

Bratwurst -> Weißwurst (white sausage, bavarian specialty) I call your barbarians and raise you "ba(r)varians"

All channel Damage mitigation is available as two kinds of modifiers. Normal "%mitigation" and "%mitigation unlocked and based on armor mastery". Normal mitigation is the mod on most set and unique items that have mitigation. The "linked mitigation" can usually only appear on rare items and very rarely on unique or set items, in the base game I think the only instance on a unique would be the shadow warrior's unique belt. Also as this mitigation is linked to armor mastery it will only ever appear on items lvl 75 and above. Rare Shoulder and chest armour pieces can be found/shopped with normal mitigation, linked mitigation or rarely even both. At least in later mods (D2F, EE, addendum) rare lightsabers can roll normal mitigation as well. Other than that there should be no rare sources for mitigation. For unique/set pieces you already mentioned the glacial defender for normal all channel mitigation, the other item in this slot is the Kira's set shield(really rare but has a higher value of that mod). Some classes have set pieces on the not shoulder/chest armour slots like the seraphim with endijian wings. There are also set leg plates for the temple guardian. And beyond these things there are a few unique amulets like "tanit's collar" that have all damage type mitigation that can at endgame levels reach like 3 or 4 % so with enough of these and a lot of sockets obviously everyone can reach 100%. In general all classes can wear a chest armour. Everyone except for inquisitors and temple guardians can chose to wear a shield, while those two both get a buff with mitigation. Many classes can wear shoulder pieces, but not all... Some classes can use the toughness skill to help. Some classes have extra set items and the shadow warrior gets an extra unique belt with a linked version of the mod. With CM patch shadow warriors get a super charged linked version on the kanka chest armour... Some mods significantly lower the values on some set pieces for balance reasons etc. So it depends on how easy/possible it is to reach 100%. In the base game seraphim, temple guardian and shadow warrior are probably among the easiest. They might make it without socketing, otherwise "some" to "heavy" socketing might be required. If you really want an easy way for 100% mitigation play a barbarian in D2F, that guy gets a sick buff, combined with toughness you'll have made it more than half the way already... Or you play the base game to a high enough level that a seraphim can constantly keep up her divine protection. That thing can also give a sick amount... For all the set items with mitigation mods there may not be a seperate list but you can look at all the normal and cm-patch sets on the wiki pages of each character. As always mod content may differ and don't try reaching 100% mitigation in the addendum as it's supposedly capped at 90% there(At least that is the intention, I haven't tested if it's working yet). So far there is no guide only a lot of unstructured general information that I originally thought could help jacek who seems to now have moved on anyway. Should there ever be enough to make proper guides out of this, than some copy and paste will solve all this. And so that those pieces don't get lost my last post already summarized and linked all the other stuff together. You also made clear that for a guide that mentions mitigation it might also be a good idea to include sources for that mod. He will return many months from now. He will have forgotten all about this thread and create a new one, ask some build questions etc. He will then again ask "And what about Expert's Touch?".... Just look at his post history All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again... So say we all?

Ok, some recap where all the other guide stuff I already wrote is located... This is here: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/#comment-7145889 This, amended with a "---character creation" part on top, is here: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72710-an-easy-character-for-a-returning-sacred-2-player/page/2/#comment-7145948 From my earlier outline, I should continue with: Later socket options: From "only smithing arts and maybe runes", you transition to "one ring/amulet + Snithing arts/runes", so the "valuable" jewellery piece can still be recovered, to "basically only jewellery" in endgame. Stats that can be useful to socket are: +all skills +% damage mitigation (there are some unique amulets with this mod) -% dot damage, this is its own multiplier and can easily be stacked to 100% with a bunch of sockets, if you can't reach 100% mitigation yet. Afterwards it's kinda superflous. -% opponent's chance to evade, and +% chance opponents cannot evade, these are for attack based builds to make sure they always hit; mixing both seems to give best results. +%opponent's level for deathblow, and +% chance to disregard armour might be nice for attack based builds +% cast speed, only really useful on EE,D2F,Addendum etc where the action speed cap has been increased to 450 a value you can basically only reach with lots of socketing. +% experience and +% chance to find valuables for when you need nothing else... for casters -% regen -%aspect regen and +% chance for half regen might help, also + specific/all combat arts etc. to utilize the lower increase of regen from bonus combat art levels. In early/midgame runes with "life gain on hit" can be used to help with life recovery on certain builds that otherwise would lack it and the seraphim runes with +% physical damage mitigation can be used to reach full physical immunity early, which can, in the easier parts of the game, nullify almost everything. Also in everything pre addendum, socketed set jewellery doesn't count as "worn" for the set bonus. So don't make that mistake Something on item mods: For the hitchance stuff, spells always hit, attacks can use "attack value"(ok) and the "-% opponent's chance to evade" and "+%opponents cannot evade" mods(better). Havibg a mixture of all the option seems to yield the best results. I wouldn't actively pursue "attack value" as it usually does the least. Attack based combat arts usually come with a built in bonus for attack rating that can't be seen anywhere in game, so your actual hit chance with a combat art will most likely be higher than the one shown on the "last ten enemies"-section of the skill tab. 100%(or more) hit chance is a reasonable goal and every attack based character should aim to reach that asap. "-% opponent's chance to evade" on rings boots, gloves and bracers can appear in stores somewhere around level 5 I think at least by level 8 it should be quite possible to buy. It is a kind of trash level mod so it does not need bargaining at all. Buying a lot of gear/rings and socketing this stuff is the main way for attack based characters to reach good hit chance at early levels. Mitigation and Dot Reduction: Both add with themselves and multiply with each other. Stacking 100% dot reduction will basically negate every damage over time effect on you. Stacking 100% damaage mitigation will do the same and also negate the damage from every hit you take. Sounds super OP? It is. Though there are a few things to remember: Vulnerability(from enemy spells) is the same as -%mitigation so your 100% immunity might turn out far less impressive should a monster have this effect. Also, monsters with "ancient magic mastery" can also penetrate some of that mitigation. Both of these cases are usually super rare and/or require high level enemies. Usually a 100% mitigation character should do quite well. Lifeleech effects from enemies attacks or spells don't do "damage" in the usual way. This special damage can't be mitigated so this can still hurt. It is however only encountered in some areas of the game. The main downside of going 100% mitigation is, that it is really hard to get. There are not that many sources for this mod and reaching 100% can take quite a while depending on what mod/version of the game one is playing. Under normal circumstances you should not expect reaching 100% all channel mitigation before hitting level 100. But even in cases where you can't reach 100%, damage mitigation remains one of if not the most valuable defensive stat in the game. For those that don't or don't yet reach 100% mitgation the dot reduction stat might be a useful way to deal with many of the most damaging annoyances in the game and this stat is far easier to max out, but again is already worth it without reaching max. Lifeleech%: From the most broken defensive stat in the game we move to the most broken offensive stat in the game, that at the same time is also the most broken recovery stat in the game. The %LL bonus, as everything that's cool, only works with attacks(except maybe in the addendum it can apply to spells with a chance...). It takes the % value of the opponents maxmum hitpoints(or current in the addendum) as basis for a massive chunk of extra damage on said opponent and healing for you. Especially on bosses this amount often outscales all other damage you can come up with and heal you by more than your maximum life every time you hit them. As an example, endgame bosses in niobium can have like 4 million hitpoints so a single %lifeleech would add 40k damage and self heal to every hit you do to them. While 40k may sound like an achievable number of damage with a good build, you are not limited to 1%LL and your character can still do normal damage on top. So it should be obvious that this mod is super op and of course it is agein quite limited in the available sources. In the base game you only get it on Two handed melee weapons, throwing stars, and very few unique/legendary one handed melee weapons and one legendary energy staff. On top of that there are some full set bonuses with it and that's basically it. The CM patch and some other mods drastically alter this availability mostly leading to higher maximum values being achievable in the end. Against non boss enemies this mod is of course nowhere near as effective and having a good baseline of "normal" damage is always a good thing, but it still provides good recovery in these situations. LL% is a "must have" for all attack based builds, and if it can't be combined with good normal damage it could at least be stuck in a weapon swap. This odd mod also does its damage per hit, so one should always aim for as many hits per time to shorten the boss shredder process To give an example of where this mod can go, with CM-Patch you can make a shadow warrior with kanka set(should be around 4%LL+), a jewellery set with ~2%LL and dual wielding something like Kal'Dur's legacy or rare fist weapons ~3%each leading to 12%LL+... If you get it to 12.5% or have enough normal damage one use of "frenzied rampage" would kill the boss even without rolling a single "double hit". You could also go with a Khral's sceptre(~4%LL) and shoot 4x10%LL with the same combat art. This would execute a lot faster though you'd have to use it a few times in a row... When you now "upgrade" your game to EE and use the full 450 attack/cast speed cap the question of "how many seconds does it take to kill a boss?" starts to shift more towards "how many bosses can I kill in a second"... That was now all the stuff my original list contained besides the two builds. Especially the mods and socketing stuff may be lacking other important things so if you like socketing something else and wonder why it's not on the list it might just be an oversight. I did not go through a list of all the mods, this is just what I came up with right now. For the mod stuff it's even worse than the socketing half, as here I didn't think at all and just wrote about the stuff I came up with in the original outline. I'm sure there's more that should end up in this category. This turned into quite a lot, so I guess it's time to recharge the power-cow

I just tried to google what you were talking about and found nothing Luckily you said you posted something and via your post history I could find the answer... And yes, that dragon was known back in the day. The problem with the internet is, that for things you want it to forget, it never does, but for things you don't want it to forget its memory quickly turns into swiss cheese. Loosing many Sacred fansites and all official forums just killed a lot of knowledge... Thank you!

Checked your changes and am very impressed. I never heard of the "saddle" possibility before I knew you were doing a lot on the wiki, but so far never bothered to check its quality. You definitely know your stuff. Thank you for putting in all that work just to share your knowledge with us. On the question of removing an obsolete "guide" page, I'm more on the cautious side, like gogo, keeping the memories intact, but maybe marking the player created guide as "outdated" and linking to the canon page. I don't think we should start giving credit to people on the canon pages. If you want to mention him, do it like a "real" wiki and cite his guide as a "source". Otherwise you might be creating an "I knew it first"-problem on all kinds of content that ends up on the wiki, as you can't really credit two people but you can cite two sources with similar/identical content. Maybe that's just a "me"-problem or a linguistical failure of mine. To me giving credit means building a pedestal for someone and then also crediting someone who copied the first one's work would be like defiling the first one's pedestal, while citing a "corroborating source" basically never directly lifts one "work" up and therefore isn't as harmful when the state is shared with copies of the original work. It probably won't matter at all and I'm overthinking stuff again...

So the search for extra terrestrial life is over now... SET(h)I has went to every place where "Alf" has been

As Jacek doesn't seem to return, the priority of writing these guides has shifted quite a lot. Currently I think you are the only one who's waiting and you're not playing Sacred 2 right now, becauseyou're busy chasing screenshots in Sacred Underworld. On my end, I currently don't have the time to write those guides. But I know you won't let me forget about them

Well it's mastery kinda "increases" the in combat reg...

That would also make the battery quite a superflous item as it can no longer be used. Not that anyone ever wanted to use that before as it was never a properly supported playstyle. Just saying that when it's no longer usable as a weapon,maybe it should be reworked to do something else. Forget this statement, as I just remembered people could still fist-fight to enable the battery... Well people will always farm fixed quest rewards if they are good, so you use fixed quest rewards only to give a certain controllable baseline. For example in D2F there are no rare weapons with LL% and there is a quest that gives a LL% unique throwing star. The quest basically ensures that you can have this mod "early" wether you got lucky with other loot or not. It creates a reliable baseline you can plan your character around. For the quests you mentioned, especially the epic office quest, a fixed reward will always suck. Either it is enormously OP and you can't play without it, or it will never be worth to do this enormous quest and will just be ignored. I'm not sure if you can specify a high number of high quality random rewards for such quests, but balanced with the workload to complete these quests, that is the only idea for a reward I have. If you can't give a specified number of high quality random rewards directly, a quest could also spawn some loot Pinata enemies at the end that solve this as a workaround... If you really want to prevent quest-farming in general you have to go the addendum route of removing all quests from free play modes and make Sp and MP campaigns exclusive to the corresponding character types. That way people can finally go back to duping the quest rewards through the shared stash...