idbeholdME

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.

I'm afraid it' a built-in issue with how the AI works in the game. Enemies sometimes suffer from it too. Especially if an NPC is trying to attack a moving target. You can somewhat get around it by commanding the summons to attack manually, but you're out of luck on console.

If I remember, it's not a grave per se, just a generally ruined outside area.

I'm going to list suspect quests from vanilla game. I assume those are untouched in the CM Patch. Can't help with any new quests though: - Bandits - Act 1, you have to cross a bridge where a couple bandits will try to extort money from you. Triggers only when you walk across the bridge. - Unique God quests - every God you can pick your character to worship has a couple unique quests throughout the game. Namely one in Act 2, two in Act 7 and one in Act 9. One of the Act 7 ones is in a hidden Temple of the Gods to the north. - Ephrahim's Nightmare - Act 2 - triggered by killing a couple spiders attacking cows near Skook's Corner - The Fat Rat - Act 3 - the later parts of this quest do not give you a quest marker and you have to find the target destination without it. - Differing Opinions + Dowry - Act 7 - after you complete The Kidnapping quest with Ayshe, her father swears revenge. You have to walk into 3 very specific spots to spawn groups of assassins and ultimately go and kill the father the complete the quest. The quest has a marker, but can't be selected if you ever change the active quest in the quest log, making it very easy to miss. - Djinn - Act 7 - you have to break a specific vase near Dar Al Badja. - The Ghost Banquet - Act 9 - you have to walk near a grave in a ruin to spawn a ghost that starts the quest. Other than the specific quests, there are a ton that are exclusive either to the Shadow or Light campaign, or have a different version for each. So at least 2 diligent playthroughs are required to see most of the quests. Then there are of course class quests. Yes, Ancient Magic Mastery will break immunities on enemies and even lower any existing resistances the enemies might have. Has no effect on non-resistant enemies though.

Depends a lot on how you're playing the game. CM Patch? PFP? Another mod? If we're talking vanilla conditions, I can already think of some easily missable ones off the top of my head. Will post them later today as I'm not at my PC at the moment, so wouldn't be able to provide the specific quest names.

Ebergy Shield characters are the ones where I usually forego Constitution. Especially TG as his shield absorbs 60% of the damage by default. Only 40% going into health means you don't really need that much HP; as long as you make sure the shield doesn't drop. The 50:50 split on the Seraphim is more questionable. There, I would strive for the HP and Shield to always have the same values. If you want to be safe, Constitution is worth it. But on the TG, I feel like it's an unnecessary overkill. Although it would be mandatory on a shield-less Guardian. Combat Reflexes is very easily supplemented with gear. Later on, you can get 40+% chance to evade from a single gear piece. And it only works against melee and ranged. Don't think I've ever picked it so far. Spell Resistance is far superior in every regard and has one of the most powerful Mastery bonuses in the game.

I'd say DGF and WEL is mandatory on pretty much every TG. Too much survivability is provided by T-Energy Shroud just by picking these 2 skills. The mods on the Shroud are also extremely impactful, so you want at least 3 mod points to get those. As a bonus, you also get to have spare mod points for Combat Alert. It's also a big thing that makes the class unique, along with the Seraphim. When playing a shield class, I'd say there is no reason not to use it. As for Concentration, it depends on the build. But if you're not a pure melee Devout Guardian, you will generally want it to keep the regen times low. Doubly so if you plan on running Shroud along with Untouchable Force or modded Combat Alert.

Ah, a utility character. Then I understand the lack of skill slots. My utility character (Smith + Bargainer) is also a TG, but a pure Devout Guardian left click build and not a caster, so I had a lot of free skill slots. In that case, I'd personally go with Ancient Magic. The extra damage from CD over AM is not that big of a deal, depends on if you want the extra regen from CD, but it should not be necessary if you are focusing purely on one aspect, you need to be sure it can handle everything. And combos with 2 Arts should be enough for you in that case. AM will allow you to easily kill everything with just the Source Warden kit, even resistant/immune enemies. AM will negate a part of their resist and then Icy or Fiery will apply. You could probably bring any formerly immune enemy into negative resistance Fire or Ice values. As for Mastering all skills, yes, it's possible, but it will happen at level 167 at the soonest. You will also probably want to keep Bargaining and Smithing at character level, so even later. But to be able to work max level items, you don't really have to push a smither that high. Mine stopped at level 120. With a dedicated smith suit, you can push the max workable item level to 230+

Without mods, Temple Guardian does not have access to Ancient Magic, so the choice is clear there. If you have both available, it depends. Combat Discipline will give you more raw damage and regeneration time reduction. Ancient Magic will give slightly less damage, no regen time reduction, but will negate enemy immunities at Mastery. Usually, AM would probably be the safer choice for a caster, but Source Warden is an exception in my opinion. Because it already has built-in resistance reduction, in massive amounts, through Fiery Ember and Icy Evanescence. Combined with charged grid, you have 3 sources of damage to use against otherwise resistant enemies. There are very few bosses in the game, that are immune to multiple elements and even for those, you can break 2 of those with FE and IE. The 2 elements being Ice and Fire is also great, because fire immune enemies are usually already vulnerable to Ice and vice versa. Just pick the right tool for the job. There are only very few exceptions to that rule, namely a couple side bosses (Poison Lord and Banshee). My Source Warden/Lost Fusion hybrid was one of the more fun builds I played in this game. EDIT: Bonus question - why not both? If you are focusing only on Source Warden, surely you can squeeze them in

LIMIT must be the increase of the attack speed cap then, if it's used by Frenetic Fervor.

The only way to increase mount speed is through Riding Mastery. It is intended that the standard movement speed bonuses don't work on them. Not sure if it's possible to mod the mount speeds in any way though. Yes, you can see the values for the speeds in creatureinfo, but changing them alone does nothing, as you found out. As for mount speeds, this wiki page lists them all at the bottom of the page, compared to regular character movement speeds: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Mounts Seraphim on a Tiger is equivalent to a Seraphim with 40% bonus movement speed on foot. One of the slower class mounts, but still miles better than the Inquisitor.

So it has been present in the code, but just not functioning? I am mainly wondering about whether this is a bug fix, or a modification.

Good job on the wing effect. Got it to work with the PFP easily enough: I am wondering though - was the effect always supposed to be there in the PC version, but was just broken in some way, or was it an entirely new thing in the console versions and this mod just retroactively adds it to the PC version?

From my testing, the change is in s2logic.dll. When I used the vanilla spell definitions + the vanilla .dll file, these 2 spells started behaving as they were originally. However, there are a TON of changes made in this dll and using the vanilla one could reintroduce a lot of the vanilla game's problems. It would also likely cause issues with existing saves. I did some tests here: But the conclusion basically is, that restoring the original behavior would be probably impossible without reverting the .dll file change. Eternal Fire: Viperish Disease: Just replace the definitions of both spells in spells.txt in scripts/shared. That should bring back at least the functional CM behavior.

Yes. The problem with Viperish Disease and Eternal Flame has been worsened with PFP 1.4. It reverted the spell definitions to vanilla state in an attempt to restore their vanilla behavior but sadly they were functionally changed on the .dll level when the project started, using the .dll and .exe files taken from the CM Patch. Chances of a fix are minimal, as manipulating the .dll and .exe files is nigh on impossible and PFP 1.4 is most likely final. Your best bet is to revert the spell definitions of VD and EF back to what they, were in PFP 1.3. They will not function like in vanilla, but like they do in the CM Patch. But at least they will be usable. If you don't have the definitions on hand, I can post them later.

Yes. I gave the Scarabs in the desert dangerclass of 9 so that they'd drop boss amounts of loot and to make them able of dropping Legendaries in the first place, gave Magisil 20000 weidghtedprob and put ZRareExpectation15 to 500 or so, which combined with Enhanced Perception made it so that every Scarab kill would roll a tier 15 item. Result was only Magisil whenever a Legendary item dropped. For my personal use, I manually edited the weightedprob of all tier 15 and 14 items to be much, much higher than those of tier 13 (most sets and legendaries) to ensure that when the game rolls ZRareExpectation14 or 15, it actually gives me an item of that rarity. The game rolling 15 only means that it can generate up to rarity tier 15, not that it will drop. It still determines the item to drop by the weightedprob, So even if you score ZRareExpectation15 but there is 1 Legendary and 15 normal uniques with the same weightedprob in the drop list, you still have only 1/16 chance of getting the Legendary. I can give you my modded drop.txt if you want to see. In game, I noticed quite a bump in the drop rates of rarity tiers 14 and 15 without touching the ZRareExpectation.