idbeholdME

If I remember correctly, this acts as a multiplier on all the values of the item (damage, bonuses). Meaning a tier 13 rare will have 29% higher values, than a same level tier 1 white item.

7.5% for silver sockets, 15% for gold sockets. For All Skills, yes, you have to break through the next whole number for the bonus to increase, so 7.99 will still give you only 7 to All Skills. Always important to check the bonus value in silver vs gold sockets to maximize gains and not waste a gold slot for basically nothing. Regarding CtfV, I'd be interested in: 1) Why at Mastery, it's shown as 2 values. 2) I suspect the lower value is general CtfV, which works on everything while the (4 or 5, can't check at the moment) times higher value only works on lootable containers and not enemy kills. Because it they were both the general CtfV, it would improve loot quality from kills much more noticeably. There are also some notes regarding this skill in the script files, where it does say something specifically about lootable containers IIRC. Another thing that I've been wondering about: Chance to bypass armor. I always assumed it only worked on weapon attacks and CAs, but not spells. Never actually got around to testing it. Could probably be done by using an item with the stat (preferably unique) and massively increasing the value in blueprint.txt do that it's 100%+ while giving a specific enemy ludicrous amounts of armor and just testing it.

With Gladiator, those two are luckily taken care for by Heroic Courage and yes, the main layer of defense comes from the extremely high defense rating it provides. Enemies hitting me are actually chunking me quite badly, but the 35% chance of getting hit does a lot. The most dangerous enemies were actually Nuk-Nuk chieftains IIRC. They have an extremely quick ranged attack that can basically two shot me. Not enough to be unplayable, but a couple quick hits can quickly send me down if I don't quickly leech it back or just perma stun them with the jump. Also the fact that many enemies deal a majority of non-physical damage (like the screen shotted Hell Golem) and non-physical armor is extremely hard to get in reasonable numbers in Sacred 1. Whenever enemies use special attacks (some of which can be multi-hit, like 3 times in a row) every hit does like 12K or more damage to me. Defense works well enough against normal hits, that enemies do most of the time, but their CAs also get a massive built-in attack boos, like the player characters' do, so I have to always pay close attention either way. As for attack, Heroic Courage gives me 6000% extra Attack Rating and Hard Hit CA for example, another extra 1700%, so CA's hit most of the time. The 67% is for normal attacks. I honestly can't imagine playing a weapon character that does not have a built-in CA to boost the rating (like Heroic Courage). Seems it'd be impossible to reach reasonable hit chances for weapons in late Niobium without at least a couple thousand % bonus to it. For reference, these are the stats without Heroic Courage on: Not exactly sure what the mechanism for the death prevention is, but there definitely is one. A single instance of damage can't kill you outright and once you reach a certain health level, like 10% or so hitpoints (no idea what the exact value is), you won't die for like the next second or two no matter what. For example, let a late game Niobium dragon breathe on you and stand in the fire. Your health will basically instantly drop the the minimum level and only after a short bit, you will keel over dead. A single tic of damage chunks like 50% of my HP, so should die pretty much instantly. But I was pretty much always able to run out of it even if I made a mistake in my kiting. The effect also has a cooldown. Seems to be either a certain time period or having to heal to full HP for the effect to "recharge". Probably the former, I always just stood back for a bit whenever that happened. But it definitely can't be exploited by "juggling health" around the threshold constantly. But it is guaranteed, not a chance. I counted on it many times and it has never failed. Was also playing a fully unmodded game too.

Nope. The full Fallen Angel. Czech Republic and Slovakia to an extent used to be bastions of covermount games. I have tons of full games from gaming magazines, be it LEVEL or Score. From late nineties to mid 2010s. As for the other question, the main thing that stood out for me was the save system. Being able to save to numerous slots, at any place and loading in exactly where you saved instead of in some hub is super convenient. Also felt that there were a bit too many playable characters, which led to loot dillution. The balance also seemed honestly terrible in most aspects, especially in late Niobium. In the expansion area, I mostly had to spam the Gladiator jump because it stuns enemies. Armor seems basically useless compared to the damage enemies do, which they do so much of anyway that you are going to be playing around death safety feature (you can't be killed for a couple of seconds once you get the low health warning) all the time. Split was a pretty interesting mechanic, although can't say I miss it. Definitely intended as just a power-farming thing. Extremely disappointing final boss, a bit better in Underworld. I also found the main story quite uninteresting. Can't honestly remember much from it. I did pretty much everything possible on the Gladiator. He's at level 167, sitting in Niobium Valley of Tears, where I power-farmed since like level 150 before dropping the game. Might come back to it at some later point. I was just at the point of starting to close the gap with enemy levels (who were all in the 200+ range since forever).

Well, as for me, my first contact with the series was Sacred 2. A covermount version from a gaming magazine called LEVEL that came out in December 2011: https://archive.org/details/czlevel211dvd Only played it for a bit initially as a Shadow Warrior (stopped at around level 40 or so) but came back to the game in 2013 or 14 and it was then Sacred captured me. My main character was a Pyromancer High Elf. This was all with just Fallen Angel. Then another long break until like 2019-20. Now with the PFP, I have extensively played all characters besides the Dryad and Dragon Mage and have probably several thousand hours on the game. On the other hand, I only played Sacred 1 for the first time a couple years ago. Just ran a Gladiator into Niobium, finished it and... never really came back. Tried Seraphim for a bit but dropped her after a couple dozen hours and that was it. Not really feeling the urge to play S1 when Sacred 2 exists.

That all depends on animation timings. Weapons, CAs and their combinations have different looking and fast animations. Daggers happen to be a very fast weapon most of the time and some CAs just use a regular weapon swing with some weapons which happens to be very fast. You can check everything in animation.txt. IIRC, the Hybrid CAs all use just a regular weapon swing and don't have custom animations. So the faster the weapon, the higher the theoretical maximum attacks per second (if regen time is shorter than animation length at capped attack speed, or using regen per hit).

Turns out it indeed is. Finally had some time for tests. 6 normal hits, 8 crit hits. Before: 684 STR, 347 bonus Double bonus, so 1365 (closest possible due to SB). 695 bonus. Achieved by dumping 516 points into STR, 684 STR: Normal - 17034, 18966, 17661, 20243, 17346, 17638: average 18148 Crits - 23748, 25070, 23245, 23879, 23943, 24598, 25124, 24537: average 24268 1365 STR Normal - 26735, 26806, 23642, 24932, 26799, 24044: average 25493 Crits - 29669, 30012, 30861, 31563, 29147, 28765, 28617, 30675: average 29913 Conclusion - dumping 516 points into STR, more than is available in the entire 200 levels your character can gain (401) netted a 40% (probably too high due to small sample size) increase in left click attacks and 26% increase in critical hits. Seemed about 20 or so % for Pelting Strike hits. Not as worthless as previously thought, but still extremely lackluster. EDIT: Larger sample size: 684 STR, 347 bonus: Normal - 20221, 19805, 22191, 18318, 19807, 21029, 17125, 20810, 16770, 16746, 17450, 21324, 20574, 19917, 16397, 20393, 17115, 20081, 21108, 20101 - 19364.2 average Crits - 24036, 24347, 24556, 24236, 24394, 25242, 23419, 24062, 25313, 24023, 25402, 24155, 23810, 24676, 24029, 24275, 24107, 24853, 23405, 23809 - 24307.45 average (Interesting note - for some reason, Critical Hits have a much tighter spread than normal hits. It would seem like a Critical Hit actually causes a bias to the damage roll, so that values closer to the maximum damage of the weapon are picked more often) 1365 STR, 695 bonus Normal - 25319, 26810, 24278, 24932, 27420, 24935, 26789, 26818, 23341, 24186, 22635, 26533, 27198, 22070, 26848, 22413, 23737, 25660, 24551, 25505 - 25098.95 average Crits - 30776, 29354, 30503, 31119, 29540, 30866, 31873, 28607, 29910, 29831, 30049, 29982, 28971, 29901, 29525, 29391, 28990, 30366, 30012, 29556 - 29956.1 average Doubling Strength bonus led to an increase of 29.6% for normal hits (higher most likely due to better armor penetration) and 23.2% for Critical Hits. Didn't do an extensive test for Pelting Strikes, but seemed to be about a ~20% increase by eye. The entire escapade required dumping 516 points into strength. Still will never put a point into STR or DEX unless I increase the attrWdam_fact value in balance.txt.

Assuming we do have to use the runes read = BaseCombatArtLevel, which in the previous example would have been 125, we get a result (6723) that is further off from the tooltip in-game (6751). The original discrepancy is also maybe caused due to having a fractional CA level. The game is also finnicky when it comes to rounding those. It could easily be either 125.81 or 125.89. Simply in-the-field experience. At later levels with high level weapons, the damage increases from STR and DEX are basically meaningless, with the base value of attrWdam_fact being as low as it is. Try it yourself with the character editor. Give yourself 500 free points, pump strength and see how slowly the damage goes up when you have a character with level 150+ and have a 175+ level weapon. The lower level weapons actually do gain much higher attribute bonuses. As can be seen from the table, a level 1 weapon will get roughly 12 times more effective increase in damage from the relevant attribute than a level 200 one. Even then, due to the very low value of attrWdam_fact, the increases are still irrelevant. A single flat damage ring will give you the damage equal to a couple hundred strength points. There is no realistic scenario where putting that point into vitality, stamina or even willpower won't give incomparably more to your character. Here is a video from a level 200 character with a level 242 weapon (shown at the end of the video), where I dump over 100 points into strength. Strength goes up from 684 to 868 and the tooltip bonus goes up from 347 to 441 and the minimum damage of basic weapon attack goes up by a mere 78 points. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/w83l5zmsuz81w6wvqu0y4/Sacred-2-Ice-Blood-2024-06-25-22-03-17.mp4?rlkey=7sf2n3udm33559qtnolnbtt6o&st=qp4vgjb6&dl=0 Even tried removing the converter to check whether Strength only increases the physical damage or something but no, the damage increases at the same speed even without the converter. As for STR and DEX bonuses not being multipled by extra damage, performed a very easy check - Battle Stance with the Aggression mod, which currently gives my character +453.8% extra damage. The value of the STR bonus did not change before and after activating it. So no, they do not scale with % bonuses and are just added additively to the final result, not even the base weapon damage like rings, but just a flat + after all other calculations are done. Meaning irrelevant in the later stages of the game. This is at least how it works with the PFP. One of 2 things was done in Ice & Blood: 1) Either they disabled the attribute bonus scaling with % bonuses (most likely) 2) They somehow changed the formula for it. Either way, it used to be viable to put points into STR and DEX before Ice & Blood release and you could meaningfully increase damage with them. So much so in fact, that it was deemed worth nerfing (into oblivion) in the expansion.

Don't have a video on hand. But it doesn't even have to be high level. If you play with CM Patch, just get enough Regen per Hit to fully reset Pelting Strikes, max your attack speed and just spam the button. You can get a nearly endless stream of projectiles. As for fun, not really. Maybe for a while, but the game just turns into "everything just dies instantly", which can get boring quick. Shadow Warrior with ranged Scything Sweep can also double as a shotgun. Particularly fun with the hurl enemies mod + it has a knockback by default. And it's a bit more balanced, as it can fire at most 3 projectiles, given there are at least 3 targets. Meaning you can't just hose down singular enemies like bosses.

Depends on the patch/mod you play really. In Vanilla and PFP for example, Pelting Strikes only fires 2 projectiles per execution with ranged weapons. In CM Patch and probably a couple other mods, it's like 4 IIRC.

Whatever you do, make sure you play in a window. For whatever reason, the fade in/out transitions to/from black, like on loading screens, tend to get stuck on the display for 10+ seconds when the game is running in fullscreen, even if the loading is long finished and the game is already running in the background. Seems to be some screen refreshing issue tied to the engine behavior. This goes completely away if you play in a window. That should solve the vast majority of critical issues (other than the occasional crashes of course).

Seems to check out. An advanced example from my character with big numbers with a multi-element spell: 171 character level, 125.8 Cobalt Strike level (125 runes used), with the Heavy Damage bronze mod (increased magic damage) +241.6% bonus Physical and Magic damage, Combat Discipline +271.8%, Delphic Arcania Lore +398.2% Intelligence = 1409 1 + SumPercentageBonuses = 10.116 BaseSpellDamage = 20846,7999 (15190.6914 for the Magic portion, 5656.1085 for the Physical portion) Magic portion - (940 + (470*125.8)) / 40 = 15190.6914 Physical portion - (350 + (175*125.8)) / 40 = 5656.1085 1409*20846*334*0.00004 = 392 410 392 410 / (57 + 1) = 6765.69 Intelligence bonus displayed in-game: 6751 vs 6765 from the formula. Probably within the internal rounding error margin. The formula number is roughly 0.2% higher than what is displayed on the tooltip. With very high survival bonus and attribute values, the bonus increases the attributes at somewhat irregular chunks. The discrepancy is most likely caused by that. The internal rounding the game performs in the background will forever remain a mystery, but it also means that any and all calculations in the game are subject to at least some margin of error. Either way, Intelligence is not subject to diminishing returns like Strength and Dexterity are because of item levels. So it is actually pretty good at boosting spell damage, unlike the other two attributes, which only keep losing effectiveness the higher your weapon level is.

Now this is breaking some new ground. Don't think it was ever specifically documented, how the various balance.txt parameters affected the weapon and attribute damage calculations. Looking at the itemLevelMultiplier table, it's no wonder attribute scaling does next to nothing in the late game. IIRC, in vanilla Sacred 2, without Ice & Blood, the attribute scaling was much better in general. Could probably be interesting to compare the values of these parameters between the versions. I think the itemLevelMultiplier was not present at all before, so it was probably 1 for all item levels. Or the values got massively lower in I&B due to some formula change.

Character editor. Also, the effectiveness of the attributes on weapons should be adjustable in balance.txt with attrWdam_fact, which is what the mods which increased the effect of attributes did IIRC.

Just the tooltip. Couldn't really do mild tests because because it was on my fully built level 200 character. So wouldn't really notice a difference between 60K damage and 60.3K damage with the big weapon spread. But it seems like it'd be pretty easy to test. Just pump Strength to ridiculous levels through character editor, equip some % damage bonuses and then check whether the damage went up by the difference on the attribute tooltip or a lot more. Also, there is a hidden level scaling for the effectiveness of the attribute bonus based on the weapon level. The higher the weapon level, the less effective the damage bonus from the attribute. Theoretically, if you equipped 2 weapons which were exactly the same other than item level, the higher level item would get lower damage bonus from the attribute. IIRC, this change was introduced in Ice & Blood. In vanilla Sacred 2, the attribute bonuses to weapon damage did actually scale. It is also possible that the PFP adjusted some weapon calculation logic when it comes to the tooltips and the tooltips actually show the correct values. I know for certain that putting points into Strength or Dexterity for the purposes of weapon damage has next to no effect on the overall damage, even with massive damage bonuses equipped, which made me pretty sure the bonus is just flatly added after all calculations.