idbeholdME

Very well put together with detailed calculations. About Intelligence, from observation, it seems that the spell CAs have some hardcoded, invisible INT coefficient that varies from spell to spell. Cobalt Strike for example scales extremely well with Intelligence, while something like Radiant Pillar gets much less bonus from it. The coefficients could probably be dug out from some .dll file by some code magician. But INT is worth pumping for any spellcaster anyway simply due to the Crit Chance and Spell Intensity bonuses. About Strength and Dexterity, also correct. If they worked the same as INT and the damage bonus got multiplied by the % bonuses and basically acted as an extra source of flat damage like damage rings do, they'd be much more appealing. Then again, as the Weapon CAs already multiply the base weapon damage innately, it would probably be a bit too much if it also got multiplied. And regarding Tactics Lore or Combat Discipline, as with pretty much any ARPG, you main goal is to evenly increase the numbers in all the "multiplication buckets". Focusing on one exclusively is not desired. Instead of a 100 base damage and +1000% increased damage (1100), it's much better to get a 150 base damage and 800% increased damage (1350). So in the end-game, the main appeal of Tactics Lore eventually becomes the extra crit chance, which becomes an extra x1.2 multiplier to the total damage whenever it procs. When you've already got a ton of flat damage and % bonus, the 20% total bonus becomes very noticeable. Direct Damage % is also another big multiplier to the overall damage and of course Double Hit.

Yep, that's the way it should be. The familiarity bonus is just another bit of damage added together with all the other damage bonuses for weapon attacks. Great job with the specific tests and numbers.

They are busy with Titan Quest 2 at the moment, so I doubt they are going to dabble in a remake /sequel of a direct competitor. Sacred was a lot less popular overall, so I wouldn't get my hopes up, sadly :/

Hello and welcome. As for the bindings, it's nothing special for me. W,S - forward/backwards movement Middle mouse - camera control and therefore character turning. Left mouse - normal attack and occasionally character movement (hard terrain or sharp turns which would take longer by just turning the camera) Right mouse - Combat Art 1,2,3,4,5 - Combar Art selection/combos F1,F2,F3,F4,F5 - weapon selection (I don't use it all that often). Space - healing potion F - recovery potion I - inventory C - attributes and skills E - combat arts Q - autocollect

Another easy method. 1000 is base cooldown. Before any bonuses, it's 1000/1000 = 1 = 100% coldown. The token adds a bonus to the 2nd number. So if you add this token: entry6 = {"et_regThisCool", 500, 10, 2, 8 }, to the base cooldown calculation when CA level is 15, you get 1000/1000 + 500 + (15*10). So 1000/1650, which gets you 0.606, or 60.6% of the base cooldown. Dust devil cooldown: 45 seconds * the cooldown modifier from the above formula is 45*.0606 = 27.27 seconds. The description for the CA mods on the wiki can be misleading. I fixed most of the classes' CAs to reflect actual numbers instead of the token numbers, but as I've yet to play the Dryad and Dragon Mage extensively, haven't yet gotten to that. Might do it later this week. It just requires checking what token the mods use and some time.

Even if you manage to make them equippable, the biggest problem yet awaits you: Those two characters have no animations for 2 handed weapons. You could try re-using them from a different character, but it would most likely end up looking distorted in some way.

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.

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.