idbeholdME

Yeah, the main problem is, that 1 handed staves use the same animations as one handed melee weapons. Which was perfectly fine in original Sacred 2 as they were melee only, but with the change in Ice&Blood, Ascaron didn't really think about the far reaching consequences of it. It was a nice idea, trying to make staves unique and different from normal weapons, but they probably didn't have the budget/time to either implement a new set of animations for it, test it properly or separate them from normal melee weapons. I feel like the main idea behind it was to give caster builds an option to have a viable weapon attack, but the problem is that especially with dual-wield, it led to many potential bugs/exploits. So it basically depends on the player if he wants to engage with these buggy behaviors.

You can use CAs. It will produce a more powerful instance of the DoT (at least in the PFP) corresponding to the element of your main hand weapon as CAs do more damage than normal attacks. Just make sure to mix in normal attacks occasionally to also proc the off-hand DoT on tougher enemies, where having multiple DoTs running is worth it. Another option would be to have 2 pairs of weapons, one for applying burn, the other poison and use only CAs. You can then have the 2 weapons in the set both focused on maximizing the respective DoT. But it requires a lot of APM and maintaining 2 sets of main weapons, which can get bothersome. As for staves, I will sadly not touch them with dual wield again since the Ice&Blood change already broke a lot of things back then and the subsequent community fix of always making them ranged without the skill to fix one of the most egregious bugs didn't really help other than that. Not to mention it made the Staff weapon lore utterly irrelevant again.

Then the behavior has been changed in CM Patch, as the amount of elemental damage does matter for the power of the DoT in PFP. And yes, your observations regarding CAs are correct. When dual-wielding, it only ever uses the main weapon. The off-hand is purely a stat stick for everything other than left click normal attacks. This is the reason why I ran an Inquisitor build focused on just left clicks with Damage Lore, so that both hands can apply DoTs (burn and poison). In the PFP, the off-hand weapon is considered individually for left click attacks and inflicts a DoT based on the actual damage you deal with it, not the total of both. And another yes, Damage Lore will help counteract the DoT duration reduction the enemies get from Willpower at higher levels. Very noticeable on bosses, who without Damage Lore, by late Niobium usually only take one tick of DoT damage before it expiring, due to their excessive Willpower.

Yes, QuestExplow = {20,25,30,40,50}, and QuestExpmax = {4020,5025,6030,8040,10050}, Can be adjusted to whatever you like. Basically, the low number is the reward for 1 star quests and the max numbers are for 5 star quests. It's base values, which then get multiplied, depending on character level in some unknown formula. Just make sure you never make the low number higher than the max number. If you do, it will cause an overflow and give you like 2 billion XP the moment you turn in a quest.

Can't comment on CM Patch, but in the PFP, the DoT absolutely does correspond to the amount of damage inflicted. Just did a quick test where I simply tried two differently powerful Lava Chunks. This attack results in a 21152 fire damage per tick from burn: And this attack results in a 16570 fire damage per tick from burn: Both attacks performed on the same enemy. Regarding multi-elemental weapons, yes, they can inflict all the secondary effects as long as you don't use a converter. If you use a converter, it changes the damage type of all other elements to that of the converter along with the stated % of the Physical damage. And about the visual effects, I am 99% sure that was one of the community fixes, so that you are able to see multiple effects on the same enemy.

If you want to min-max, you should optimally turn in quests as late as possible, because the XP from quests scales with character level. You can probably complete 1 and 2 stars right away, those don't give that much XP either way, but keeping 3+ stars for later turn ins might be viable for maximizing XP gain. And yes, as Blood Forest is pretty much exclusively 3+ star quests (the designer for that area didn't really bother assigning proper difficulty ratings to them unlike the rest of the game), it is best saved for last as far as XP goes. As for the experience penalty, here is a graph: from here: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Experience As you can see, the penalty ramps up very quickly, with very noticeable jumps every 25 levels above 100. As Hooyah said, adjusting the first number in MP_experience should be safe. The numbers say how much XP you get from kills, depending on the number of players in the game. 1000 is 100% for 1 player, 1150 is 115% for 2 players and so on. So by increasing the first number, you can easily tweak how much of an XP multiplier you want from kills. The XP penalty above level 100 will still apply though, so in later stages, even if you put like 4000 there, you will only be getting 40% of the kill XP at level 175. As for ExpLS, I can't confirm that increasing them above 1000 is safe. It can very likely break some internal math as those are exponential multipliers and I honestly have not tested how numbers higher than 1000 behave. If you do try it, be absolutely sure to backup your save first as it might cause an overflow or something like that and cap your level instantly. But simply removing the penalty does wonders for smooth levelling without requiring excessive amount of grinding. Up until the 160+ range or so. Then you have to grind either way. You might also run into a problem where monsters in some areas will start hitting their level caps, effectively reducing farming effectiveness in that area. This is caused mostly by Survival Bonus, which can bump enemies 20-30+ levels above you once you are very high level, so that they start hitting area level caps. You can change the limits by raising the numbers for Spawn_OffsetHigh in balance.txt. It has 5 values, 1 for each difficulty respectively, so raising the last number will increase the max possible levels for monsters on Niobium. But this won't be a problem until the last stretch (level 180+ or so). Also, don't put that number too high, or monster levels will start overflowing back to 1, if the maximum area level surpasses 252.

Oh. Right. I missed the note above that. The bug was present until patch 2.40. So the base game with Ice & Blood has the bug fixed already and you don't even need any community fixes.

It is possible, but if you are going for it with the vanilla experience penalties past level 100? Oh, are you in for a grind. Past level 150, killing enemies basically becomes pointless and you have to constantly spam-farm high star quests to even meaningfully move the experience. The only reason that works is because the experience penalty does not work on quest rewards. And we are talking hundreds, probably thousands, of purely running the same quests over and over. Due to how quests have been lazily designed in the expansion in the Blood Forest, every little minute movement forward through the quest chain gives a 4 star reward of XP. So that was what everyone was running back then if you wanted to reach 200 "legit". Although you were exploiting the lazy quest design of whoever did the Blood Forest quests. 4 and 5 star quests are pretty rare in the game overall and someone just willy-nilly slapped that on everything in the Blood Forest area. At level 150, you will only be gaining 28% of the experience for killing stuff. This goes down to 10% at level 175 and ultimately, at level 199, you will only be gaining less than 5% XP per kill. However, killing stuff maintains somewhat of a relevance until the 150 breakpoint. When the XP from kills starts losing relevancy is purely bound to your level, not to difficulty or anything else. Also keep in mind, that by level 167, you will have gathered only half of the total XP (946,471,400) required for level 200 (1,889,443,000). Even with the experience penalty removed, I pretty much never play characters past level 175 and have only ever brought one character to the 200 cap. The XP requirements for levelups go up by several hundred thousand for every level near the end. With the penalty, the highest I ever got was in the 125+ range, before I usually got bored. I think the penalty was one of those "Diablo 2 did it, so we are going to do it too" things, that got put in purely to slow down peoples' progress in multiplayer. Lastly, some enemies have experience bonuses attached in the PFP, that were not present in the vanilla. Refer to the last post in this thread: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72563-how-to-adjust-the-experience-a-specific-monster-gives-when-killed/ You can either remove that bonus to have vanilla conditions, or farm those specifically as they give egregiously high XP in PFP compared to anything else. IIRC, Flix said it was a leftover from some other mod that made its way into PFP.

No. If you are using any of the bigger community fixes (CM, EE or PFP), this is fixed and CAs in a combo correctly use their relevant speed. My High Elf has 68% attack speed, yet still casts combos at the 150% execution speed cap. You can easily check in game by hovering over the selected combo on the inventory page: This screen shows info about the normal weapon attack: And this screen shows info about the selected combo (Frost Flare + Raging Nimbus in this case): If you combine multiple aspects for which you have different execution speeds, each CA in the combo will get executed with its appropriate speed, as if you cast them manually in sequence, one by one. In general, any CA, be it alone or on a combo, has its speed determined by execution speed. Attack Speed only ever matters for basic, non CA attacks. However, there is one special case: for Weapon based CAs - the Attack Speed from the relevant Weapon Lore also doubles as execution speed for these CAs. But any Attack Speed on gear and such will only ever increase non-CA attack speed. The wiki refers to the vanilla state of the game, 99% of the time, unless it specifically mentions something relates only to a specific community mod/patch. Pretty much every major bug the wiki might mention is fixed in most community releases.

Are you playing vanilla/console? Because that is a vanilla bug that got fixed in pretty much any community mod (PFP, CM Patch, etc.). Either way, you can always increase the CA level to increase power/cooldown.

Arrant Pyromancer was my first character back then. From what I remember, BT only ever hits once. Doesn't matter how you cast it. So no reason not go for full circles most of the time. Probably the best CA for farming in the game. Just run into a horde, kite for a while, then send a Tempest behind you to kill everything with the fire DoT. Fireball was great for single targets and enemies that tend to move a lot. Packs a punch and the homing makes it very usable. With 2 Area of Effect damage dealing, homing fireballs, it can easily work as your main CA. Not to mention it's basically your only option when terrain is not in your favor for BT. Similarly, I found the Frost Flare for Ice Elf very useful too, be it the massive slow or stacking DoTs. Incendiary Shower is the boss killer of course, able to perma-stun bosses. I only used it against tough/large enemies/bosses,but it's damn good at what it does. Personally found it much safer to use than Glacial Thorns, which requires the enemy to be still and can be very problematic to cast correctly, especially against large bosses like the dragons. Combat Art range is good, but absolutely not necessary on a fire Elf, even potentially counterproductive with the Shower. Much more useful on the Ice and Arcania elves.

Use W to squeeze yourself as close as possible to the edge of normally walkable area. Dismount and stop moving, swap to a movement ability and use it on the out of bounds area. The game should let you do that. Works pretty much anywhere. Keep in mind though, that you will cheatily give yourself extra chance to find valuables, as you will be getting yourself extra map revealed % by going into out of bounds areas, if you explore regions far off from the normally navigable areas. You can prevent this by ALT+F4'ing out of the game instead of exiting normally when you decide to go "void exploring"

The counter stuff is for Sacred 1. It required killing a certain number of enemies in a region to spawn a "region boss" (usually just several bosses spawned in a group). When you open the minimap in Sacred 1, it's the numbers next to the region name X/Y. X is the current number of kills, Y is the required number of kills to trigger the boss spawn. You are basically not going to encounter this in single player unless you spend hours and hours grinding the constantly slowly respawning enemies. Here is a video I found of someone showing the region boss thing: https://youtu.be/FjVzorkY-y4?si=AysGDIvpDQsNMM1Q&t=855 There was also "region pacified/at peace" mechanic or something like that in Sacred 1 when you completed most of the quests in a region. Not sure if that had any effect on anything, but I think not. Just an indication that you did all/most of the things in a region. For Sacred 2, you can view # of completed quests in the character stats (not sure those are viewable on console, requires a mouse hover over character name in inventory) but it has no effect on overall drop rates, other than that it occasionally gives you a set item after you complete a couple quests in a single session. The chance goes up every finished quest and resets when it gives you the bonus set item. What does give an actual bonus to finding valuables is % of map explored. 4% of map explored = 1% of Chance to Find Valuables. I usually try to reach ~150% on my end game characters for a free 37.5% CtFV.

Make sure you are in Niobium and spam farm merchants for Visibility Range gear. You don't need bargaining for that, VR can spawn on blue rings. Then find gear with the most sockets (mostly set/unique items) and jam the jewelry in. Also keep a lookout for rare gear that has 2 slots and an innate VR bonus. Once you have your exploration set ready, go to a low difficulty (so you can ignore enemies) and basically just run through the entire game, always hugging the edges, both the surface and the dungeons. Level 2 dungeons are especially valuable for map explored (dungeons within dungeons). It's an entirely separate 3rd map layer and entering those with a couple hundred +VR% can net you 0.5-1% of map revealed just for entering.

Yep. If any NPC attacks something for a longer period without moving (say 5 seconds or longer, the AI is quite likely to drop whatever it's doing and just idle around for a few seconds, before starting acting again. For summons, standing still is definitely better, because then the AI only has to bother about attacking targets in range. If you are moving, it also has to constantly ensure it is within the leash range of your character (customizable on PC) and moving into the leash range if it is not, preventing it from attacking. If I remember correctly the finer summon controls where you can tell it what to attack, were introduced in Ice&Blood.