idbeholdME

Loading tip says SB has an effect on it. Not visible in game. As for difficulty levels, it's mostly observation. I always notice a marked increase in rare drops. Or it could be that higher level enemies have an intrinsic bonus to drop rates. So say a level 1 enemy has a 0.5% chance to drop a yellow item, which can go up to say 1.5% on a level 150 enemy. Used example numbers, but you get the gist. One of the two is definitely happening. Generally, the further your character is along the enemy level/difficulty curve, the better the drops seem to get.

It is not. You get the regular install version. GOG provides the version of Ice & Blood with the latest official patch. Nothing is pre-installed and you can freely choose what you go with, be it CM Patch, PFP, EE or anything else. Unless you are playing a triple aspect build, which is entirely possible. Not being able to use CAs instantly from various trees because using one triggers a mini cooldown on all your other trees too can be quite detrimental. But I doubt the OP is going to go a triple-aspect build Easily done in balance.txt. Open it and find this: ZRareExpectation15 = 2, ZRareExpectation14 = 6, ZRareExpectation13 = 14, ZRareExpectation12 = 16, ZRareExpectation11 = 24, ZRareExpectation10 = 34, ZRareExpectation09 = 46, ZRareExpectation08 = 58, ZRareExpectation07 = 72, ZRareExpectation06 = 88, ZRareExpectation05 = 106, ZRareExpectation04 = 124, ZRareExpectation03 = 144, ZRareExpectation02 = 166, ZRareExpectation01 = 456, ZRareExpectation00 = 1000, Those are the drop rates for various rarities. 15 is legendary, 14 is rarer sets and uniques, 13 is most sets and uniques. The numbers represent a % chance of the rarity dropping. The list goes sequentially. So it first checks "Did rarity 15 (0.2% chance) roll? If not, proceed to 14. Did rarity 14 (0.6% chance) roll? If not, proceed to 13" and so on. The 1000 for 00 is just a safeguard for when all previous rolls fail, the game gives you a trash (grey) item. You will pretty much stop seeing these as you get Chance to Find Valuables for Survival Bonus, Map Explored % and going up difficulties. However, there is a hardcoded limitation on legendary drops (rarity 15) - only enemies with dangerclass 9 or 10 can drop them. This pretty much includes only bosses. Anything below 15 however, is fair game from most enemies. Chance to Find Valuables increases these numbers. Don't go too overboard, because if you consistently succeed rolls for rarities 15 or 14, you will stop seeing blue or even yellow items completely and be flooded only with sets and uniques. And finally, as for a good starting char, can't go wrong with High Elf. Just pick Fire or Ice, support it with Delphic Arcania and you should be able to steamroll pretty much everything. Fire is more offensive and easy to use, Ice is more defensive and requires good positioning and spell placement/targetting to play to its full potential. High Elf also has the only CA in the game, that has absolutely no drawbacks in pumping to 200 runes as soon as possible, it being Grand Invigoration. Plus you get to look at a scantily clad and lean elven lady Bonus points for picking the Shadow campaign - the snark levels are through the roof

The spawns can be tweaked for each sector of the map, but it has to be done manually, is quite time consuming and won't happen on the fly. I don't think there is a way to do what you describe. You'd have to clear an area in the game and once you quit, go the the sector definitions (denoted by coordinates) which correspond to the area you just cleared (an area can have dozens of them, the entire map is mechanically split into squares), adjust the spawns (completely remove them or reduce them) and only then resume the game. And you'd have to do this each time for every character and for every area while also juggling numerous spawn.txt files based on your progress through the game. The spawn delay in balance.txt just makes it so that enemies won't respawn in the same session, but they will of course be back when you quit and re-enter the game.

Oh, missed that one. That's what I get for responding on a phone. Especially quoting gets quite cumbersome on a phone on these forums.

Sorry for the hiatus. RL got in the way. For Spell Resistance, I only tested enemy DoTs vs player skill. The moment I mastered it on a character, DoTs started to get reduced. As for enemy skill levels, I always based it off of enemies with Ancient Magic. Who seemingly start penetrating a huge chunk of damage mitigation long before 225 and assumed all enemy skill levels thus behave the same. Should be pretty easy to test with the small red dragons in the dragon caves that shoot homing fireballs and a character with very high fire mitigation. Those have Ancient Magic (not the green ones). The only other option besides a couple bosses is near the end of the game, with the Elite Temple Guardians that throw Fire Traps, no other regular enemies have it. Wounds used to work the same as other secondary damage effects in the vanilla Sacred 2 if I remember correctly. However, with Ice & Blood, Wounds can only happen if given either through a Combat Art mod, or by bonuses from gear. It can't happen simply by dealing physical damage anymore. Wiki used to say that it was the same as all others, but I went over the relevant sections a while back and added that Wound effects work differently. Indeed. This always bothered me. They were able to make normal attacks cycle weapons, but not Combat Arts. Which also causes visual confusion, because the animations do perform hits with both weapons visually. Meaning that my originally planned Damage Lore focused Inquisitor build was relegated to mostly a left-click build in order to apply poison and fire damage secondary effects regularly. Ended up working quite well, but a lot of power was lost due to CAs only using the main weapon. Always had to use a CA to apply the main weapon one and then left click to apply the off-hand effect, which was considerably weaker because of that. And as for the triple attack animation - the chance for it to happen increases as you put points into the relevant weapon lore skill. ----- As for the conversion stuff, never toyed around with non-weapon conversions much. Damage conversion gloves are quite rare in the first place and never really found a good use for them. Either way, some very interesting reading on the topic

I think that might be correct. A lot of the game's math uses 1000 as base and adds any bonuses to that base. Combine 1000 physical and 500 poison portions and out of that total, you get exactly one third poison damage. The game uses this method in places where it doesn't want you to reach 100% values, e.g. diminishing returns, like for cooldown reductions. The only real exception to this is damage mitigation, which always stacks additively up to and over 100% (for the purposes of interacting with Ancient Magic Mastery). I assume that if the conversion token value was 1000, it'd result in 50% conversion. 2000 would result in 66.6% conversion. 3000 in 75% conversion and so on. Wiki used to be full of this. Someone looked at the token, saw 500 and wrote absolute 50%, when in reality, it's 33% relative. Fixed that for most Shadow Warrior and Seraphim CAs when I was playing them.

Still unconvinced by this, because enemies with Ancient Magic do get the mitigation penetration bonus from Mastery at high levels. The small red dragons with homing Fireballs and Elite Temple Guardians that throw fire traps are extremely deadly in late Niobium because of that, even if you have heavily stacked mitigation. So it either works diffeferently for different skills or once again, is a change caused by the PFP.

Well, I am sure that's not the case in PFP. If my character has 40% damage mitigation against poison for example, it will make the DoT of the spitting spiders tick less times. As for Willpower, it only reduces actual spell damage (not DoTs), by increasing spell resistance and making it more likely you get the reduction from that. The exact functioning of the Spell Intensity vs Spell Resistance check is still a mystery. We only know that if it succeeds, it reduces the damage and if it fails, it does nothing. Most likely another hidden formula and it's a % chance, not simply comparing intensity vs resistance. Willpower however does reduce DoTs in the form of secondary damage effects. Easily testable on bosses, who have insane amounts of it. Even on characters with Damage Lore and like 400% extra duration, bosses get rid of the secondary damage effect very quickly and it only ticks 1 or 2 times. The graphs here seems to mostly check out from my observations when I was playing with Damage Lore. Ignore the sentence where it says only secondary damage effects from spells, it also applies to weapons and weapon CAs: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Willpower Spell Resistance Mastery does cut the duration of all negative effects, including DoTs, Debuffs and basically anything negative with a duration. Having a 60% reduction from SR Mastery and 50% Damage mitigation will make all DoTs last only 20% of their original duration, at least in the PFP. This part, I tested extensively a while ago. As for enemies, there are only very, very few who could have mastered Spell Resistance and if you test on enemies < level 75, they won't have any skills mastered even if they have the skill itself, as skill values for monsters = monster level. But there could easily be some differences in behavior for various things between vanilla and PFP. While the PFP uses the original script files it also took several of the modified .dll files from the Community Patch, and those do contain some irreversible changes to some of the inner workings of the game. As the list of those had never been made, anything is possible.

Just a note: A lot of things are hardcoded in the .dll files and can't be changed in the script files. Things like spell classes, what tokens can be applied to what or even the behavior of the tokens themselves. So it seems that the magic and poison DoTs were programmed differently than the other elements. Also regarding DoTs, they are unaffected by armor, can't crit or cause secondary effects and are not subject to the Spell Intensity/Spell Resistance check. They are affected by damage mitigation, which reduces the total duration, but not tick damage, besides the final one (50% reduction will cause 2 full damage ticks and one half tick). And as far as I can tell, Willpower has no effect on built-in spell DoTs, only actual secondary damage effects.

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.

The level difference bonus depends mostly on the color of the circle the enemies have under them. The paler the circle, the higher the damage bonus, reaching max when it becomes fully white. Same the other direction and deep purple. The acutal levels for the min and max vary depending on character level. As for attribute bonuses, do a test with weapons. I wouldn't be surprised if fists were a special case scenario and the behavior was different for actual weapons. I am 99% sure it's just additive. Even just tested. Pumped 100 points into Strength, the Weapon damage bonus increased by 68 and the tooltip damages went up by basically the same amount. Slightly more for Pelting Strikes, so if anything, Strength bonus gets multiplied by the et_mult_weapondamage of a given CA. Definitely not % bonuses, because I tested on a character with nearly a 1000% bonus to damage. Although..... I'm on the PFP patch. If you arrive at a different conclusion in the full vanilla game, then it's yet another thing that is different. Eagerly awaiting results.