idbeholdME

When exchanging runes at a Combo Master, I suddenly got this as a result: Couldn't find any information about it anywhere. Does it have any use? The "Wrong Character Class" message seems strange as no other runes have it. EDIT: Managed to dig out an ancient thread mentioning it: Seems it is of no use unfortunately.

Dragon's Flight was randomly playing occasionally along with all the other combat music when enemies were not such a high level above me. It was not that bad when at least 7 or so tracks cycled around but now, the only thing the game ever plays in combat for me is this: It doesn't even really sound like combat music :/ Tried starting a new character and the music cycles normally. Meaning it is 99% caused by facing enemies at a too high level. Which means that once it starts happening, it is never going to change unless you reset your survival bonus to bring enemy levels closer to yours... Which nobody sane is going to do so the options are either removing the track for silence during combat, or replacing it with something more listenable.

Just a short summary. In the game music files, there are 10 combat music tracks (MUSIC_FIGHT01-10) that play randomly whenever in combat. The game always randomly picked one and started playing it when combat started. However, ever since my Survival Bonus increased the enemy levels into the 10+ territory over my character (currently at about 13 with 92% SB), it switched to only playing one different music track (MUSIC_WRONGLEVEL) and no other music ever gets played anymore in combat. The name of the track checks out too (that it plays when facing overleveled enemies) but as you can imagine, constantly hearing the same loop, or even worse, the same couple starting seconds of the same music over and over can get annoying pretty quickly. I assume this happens to everyone. Has anyone ever tried modding this? I'll probably end up removing the MUSIC_WRONGLEVEL track because I pretty much hate it at this point after having to hear it for hours on end :D. Or replace it with something less annoying.

Thanks. Then I will do the Bounty Hunt as I am going through the difficulties (no reason not to) and leave Underworld until later as you have to play through pretty much tne entirety of it to get all the bonus points. Got them all on Silver.

Found one more thing I'd like to ask about. There are some quests that award skill/attribute points. I'm currently running through Gold and been wondering, whether these quests are repeatable. There is the Bounty Hunt in the main game and several quests in Underworld. How do they work exactly? Can you get the points in every playthrough? Can you farm them infinitely if you just keep restarting the campaign? Or can every character only do them once and they don't award attribute/skill points on subsequent completions? Or once per difficulty? Should I return to Bronze and do these quests there too? Just been wondering whether I should bother doing those quests again or just continue my rush to Niobium.

It's true that the games were probably a little bit more buggy than they should have been (especially Sacred 2), but as far as Sacred 1 goes and the quests I listed above, at least you can get around the bugs if you know in advance. Still sucks for the first playthrough though.

So, just finished the main game on Silver and before moving to Underworld, I will drop here a list of quests that have bugged for me in any way, shape or form in my pretty diligent playthrough. Main Game Magical Thistle (Braverock Castle) - The quest NPC (Merchant) might disappear for unknown reasons. Solution - First, make sure that he is there when starting the quest and once you accept it, finish ASAP to see if you can close it out. He is the NPC that ends the quest so if he disappears, you can't end it. The Scroll of Mhic 'Dar-Mon (Khurad Nur) - Impossible to finish if you visit the quest dungeon where the quest item is before accepting the quest. If you do, the locked door will not unlock even if you have the key from the Shaman. Solution - Do no enter the dungeon before accepting the quest. Special Flavor (Moorbrook) - the quest items that drop from the spiders have no name, so they don't show up when holding ALT. They still drop, are visible as yellow dots on the minimap and can still be picked up though. Took me a while to realize. Whiskey Supplier (Moorbrook) - You have to complete this quest before picking up the Whiskey barrels during another quest: Pure Water. If you don't finish it before that, you won't be able to hand in the quest to the Barman, because he will only keep buying Whiskey from you and the quest completion dialogue will no longer show up. The Spider Monster of Moorbrook - Same thing as the scroll quest above. Impossible to finish with the good outcome if you enter the cellar next to the mage before retrieving the spider quest item and getting the prison key from killing the mage first. The door won't open even if you have the key. Jacquaire's Battle Uniform - I was having a problem with getting him to move to the Blackrock tavern. He stayed at the edge of the forest for the longest time. After finishing act 3, I decided to check up on him one last time and he suddenly was not there any longer. And he won't move until you get close to him at the edge of the forest and the game realizes he should spawn elsewhere. I went: 1) Blackrock tavern. Jacquaire was not there. 2) Went to the edge of the forest - Jacquaire was not there either. 3) Went back to the tavern - Jacquaire was finally there. That's it for the base game. Will update this thread with bugged quests from Underworld, if there are any. EDIT: Underworld New potions (Pirate Islands) - same issue as the Special Flavor quest from the main game. The quest items (skulls) that drop from the skeletons have no name and so don't show up when holding ALT. But they still drop, can be picked up and the quest finished. The Book of Wisdom (Valley of Tears) - I read about this quest after finishing it and apparently, you can bug out the quest script if you kill multiple guardians at once, potentially erroneously giving you the reward 2 (killing one and the last 2 in the same attack) or 3 (killing all 3 in the same attack) times. Loaded an older save just to try, and it works. The script obviously works in a way where upon killing a guardian, it checks whether it was the last one and if that is true, then give the reward. But it was not prepared for the edge case of 2 or 3 of them dying at the exact same time, which results in 3 checks at the same time, all resulting in "Yes, this is the last one as no others are alive, give reward", granting a total of 6 attribute points and skill points instead of just 2. So if you want to get only the intended reward out of this quest, make sure you don't kill the guardians in the same attack. Glad I was not using Fist of the Gods so I don't have to replay the ending segment of Underworld again to get rid of the glitched points. Tried it many times in the previous save file and even just Multi-Hit is often enough to score 4 attribute and skill points (never managed 6 with it though). So check your points after killing them to make sure you got 2.

I'll try, although I remember some stuff breaking when I used the vanilla file with the CM Patch. But that might have been because I did it on an existing character. IIRC, I was testing it on the BFG Seraphim. When I used the vanilla file after playing for a long time with the CM, the BFG refused to fire at all. But when I created a new Seraphim, she could shoot just fine. So it will hopefully be fine when I use it from the start.

I noticed that. On the 1st load, some items will usually be missing but on the 2nd load, they show up correctly. So it does give bonuses, but only to the main damage/resistance values. That might be why I didn't notice as I was always looking whether the other values increased. Thanks.

I am aware of the LAN game saves (I'm stashing all the sets, uniques and good rare items I find for other characters while playing the Gladiator) but I don't really want to duplicate items or bypass intended systems. And is there even a way to get items from saved LAN games back into a single-player game in progress? So far, it seems that the only way to get to those items is exporting the single player character, picking the items up and starting single player again. Meaning that you can only get the items into single player when starting a new difficulty. Or is there some way I am not aware of? I was thinking about making a smithing dwarf but it would honestly be pointless when I could only forge those items in-between difficulties. Also, when I found an area that said Jason laid out in stones, I finally looked at the secrets video and found out that there are supposed to be items there. I've found all the secret areas from the video, but the only thing I got were the shades. Neither Thane's Axe, nor the Jason mask and machette spawned in my game. Or I got close enough to the items on the map so that the game spawned them but before I got to the actual secret area, they already despawned. I was very close to the Jason area a long time ago when I checked out the cave that connects the starting grasslands with the Swamp (where the Arogarn quest is) and was also very close to the Thane's Axe some time before entering the actual secret area. Either way, Silver is lost. Will try them again when I'm rushing through Gold and Plat into Niob. And one other random question: It seems that the quality of the sockets on items (bronze, silver, gold) is irrelevant in the first Sacred. In 2, amulets could only be put in gold slots and rings into silver and gold. The silver and gold sockets also gave a small bonus to all the stats. None of that seems present in Sacred 1. Does the quality of the socket affect anything at all here? Or is the quantity of them the only thing that matters?

Yeah, turns out that the best counter to the poison DoT is to actually have some poison resist. I had none (like 60) for the longest time (60+ levels) and the slow would last like 15 seconds and drop my movement and attack speed to the lowest possible value (100). Now I have 300 poison resist and the poison DoTs last only a couple seconds at most and don't slow me down so drastically. The other thread I created about this can probably be deleted. About socketing, I am currently always doing one ring/amulet and the rest blacksmith upgrades. As I can remove only one item from the sockets, I don't want to lose my good rings and amulets when swapping gear. The exception is my trading set. And I definitely noticed that yellows can have much better stats than sets and Uniques. I am currently using just a couple random set pieces for their rare mods (life steal, magic find, increased XP per kill or +%Strength weapon damage) and using yellows for the rest. I am, although I have to say that even in Silver, it is noticeable when an enemy has high physical resistance. It definitely cuts down on the damage output. My hard hit currently hits for about 25K, but dragons take maybe half of that. Same for enemies. When I was fighting the Ice Elves for example, I definitely noticed my lack of Magical Resistance while I shrug off Physical hits like nothing. Thanks, appreciate it. I don't think I'll be having many more questions but if I do stumble upon something new or unclear, I'll ask.

This list is exactly what I meant. Thanks. One other thing I also found was a Seraphim only shield that looked more like an energy barrier than a regular shield. Beginner tips are not really needed as I have a ton of experience from Sacred 2 and most of the things are the same or at least very similar here. And it will take some time for me to start a different character. As this is my first time playing the game, I plan on uncovering as much of the map as possible on my first playthrough (to see everything in the game) on Silver. Even though the world discovered % does not increase magic find in this game unlike in Sacred 2, I want to see everything there is in the world at least once. Definitely will not be as meticulous about exploration on the future characters. Bosses are still manageable. Killed 3 Dragons already and at worst, they hit me for about 1-1.5K HP per hit (the 30% of the time they actually manage to hit me through defense), which my 7-8K HP pool can take quite comfortably. And their breath is easily avoided. The most annoying at the moment are enemies that inflict poison due to the massive slow. As for strength vs. Physical Regen, I find Strength doing just fine for damage due to the %Strength as physical damage that the heavy hitting weapons have. And the bonus damage from Strength compensates keeping the CAs a couple levels lower than if I pumped Phys Regen. Will keep putting points into Strength at least until level 100, then will probably start putting them into Physical Regen to finally end up with about a 50/50 split in the end. And a final observation on weapons. It seems that one handed swords of the same level tend to deal more damage than Axes/Maces, but it is inverse for the 2-handed versions, where Axe damage seems to dominate.

Specifically the massive slow associated with it. The damage is not the problem and you can always just chug healing potions, which makes the anti-posion potion quite redundant, seeing as it only seems to reduce the damage from the DoT and not the slow. But the slow from big posion hits brings the character to a crawl for an annoyingly long time (both attack and movement speed). Is there any way or an item affix that helps deal with this? Luckily, I'm playing a Gladiator so can just jump around when I get slowed but it has forced me to kill heavy poison hitters with a Crossbow due to the sheer annoyance factor. Can't imagine how bad it's gonna be with a character that has limited mobility skills. I assume there is nothing to do about this as I've seen nothing so far in my 65 levels on Silver, but just asking to make sure.

Ended up taking Axe Lore. Also was immediately rewarded by finding a Dalmar's Judge so currently pivoted away from shields and mowing everything down with this puppy. But my initial reasoning was that my future character plans are: Hybrid Seraphim with Long-Handled Weapons Sword Vampiress Dual-Wielding Dark Elf or Demoness Bow/ranged Wood Elf Pure caster Battle Mage So that left Gladiator for the Axes/Maces, which honestly fits better on him than Swords. I don't have an unarmed character planned (Gladiator would probably be the best for that due to Gauntlets), but I'm not really interested in unarmed anyway. I also noticed that there seem to be a lot of weapon types, that can have weapons exclusive to some class. I've seen Vampiress only swords, Seraphim only Long-Handled weapons and swords, Gladiator only 2-handed axes etc. Is there a list somewhere of weapons in weapon classes that are only usable by one character?

Was doing this quest but ran into a group of enemies spawned in from another quest and the guy I was escorting died before I even reached Captain Bergonix, which resulted in this text in the quest log, which is not documented on the wiki. You can then just report to Bergonix that the guy is dead. Honestly the best outcome to this quest xD

Thanks. Not really looking into mods right now. This is my first time playing the first Sacred but after spending hundreds of hours on Sacred 2 and as the mechanics are pretty much the same, I know my way around. But I want to play vanilla first with at least several characters. Just found it quite strange that the stun duration would be that long. 40+ seconds of complete paralysis seems a bit overkill. As I have ruled out using the jump in normal combat because of that, I'm keeping it at a very low level and just use it to bounce quickly around the map. Even ignores rooting spells from enemies. Who needs mounts anyway

Yes. No mods or anything. Just dinged level 50, killed 2 boss Dragons so far, encountered my first bugged quest, was about to head south in act II, the usual. But I really see no other way out than to pick something to get to Parrying and Trading. Shame. I mainly wanted to know if there was some method to scroll down the skill list but I assume I would have been able to find that if it were possible. That probably means Axe Lore or Sword Lore for a shield user. Although I generally hate being restricted to one weapon type, the only options I have currently available with 3 unpicked skills are 5 weapon lore skills, Dual-Wielding, Riding and Disarming. Don't want to dual-wield, not using mounts much and Disarming seems bad and would require dumping a ton of points into it to have a usable chance. Which weapons would be more suited for 1-handed + shield Gladiator? So far, I generally keep finding better one-handed swords than axes but Axes look cooler. Can't really decide.... Might start a hybrid Seraphim instead No threat of getting skill blocked there. One extra question: Does the % of world discovered increase magic find like it does in Sacred 2? Just to know whether I should try to hit those map squares.

Every time I use it on an enemy and they survive it, they cease to attack forever. They just stand there and do nothing. It is as if this skill disables their regular attacks or aggro logic forever. I assume it has something to do with the associated stun chance that the Stomping Jump has but honestly, it feels like I am exploiting the game. It even disables stuff like elites, champions and quest bosses. I tested it, waited for a bit to see if the enemy starts behaving normally again, but no. I even have a companion ATM and they are not attacking the bugged enemy either. Is this behavior normal? EDIT: The enemies seem to come back online after more than 40 seconds... Was the stun duration always this massive? Will probably stop using Stomping Jump for combat and keep it strictly to navigating around the map then because it removes all challenge. EDIT 2: The difficulty seems to be affecting the stun duration. While it was over 40 seconds on Silver, now the enemies come back online after about 5 or so seconds in Platinum.

Currently playing through the game for the first time and encountered a problem. Playing as a Gladiator, I got Weapon Lore, Concentration, Constitution, Armor and Agility. Wanted to avoid picking any weapon specialization to not be bound to anything yet and don't want to dual-wield (playing with a shield) but when I reached level 30 and wanted to get Parrying, there is problem that there are too many skills unlocked and when selecting a new skill, Parrying does not show up due to the list being full. I have 2 skills to select now (skipped the one at level 20) and only after I select one other skill does it show up. Is this the expected behavior? Do I have to select one other skill first to progress down the list? No way to manually scroll it? My plan was to get Parrying and Trading and decide later down the line what the last skill would be.

Considering that there are no alternatives, I have to agree as we can't separate most changes/fixes. Although I would have preferred CAs to remain mostly untouched from vanilla behavior. All the other changes in this patch just fix bugs or replace non-functional or broken stuff. But this change fundamentally augments the performance of the 2 affected CAs. But the one main thing I had hoped would be possible with this patch was the original animation blending speed. Will probably try playing with the vanilla s2renderer.dll and see how that turns out.

Sorry for the delay, couldn't quite get back to this thread in the past week. Yeah, I know they are just extremely sped up but the result is that they might as well not be there. I was honestly always amazed by how fluid the animations like when the character started/stopped running/walking looked in Sacred 2. I knew something felt "off" when I first started playing with the CM patch and it took me a while to realize what it was, but once I noticed it, I tried switching back to vanilla for a moment and the difference was jarringly noticeable. Can also confirm from my testing back then that these changes are unfortunately baked into one of the 2 big files (s2renderer.dll and s2logic.dll) together with a multitude of other changes. Meaning that if the base are the files from CM, it will definitely be hard to separate. True. Again, an unfortunate consequence of going the route of removing changes from the CM files instead of implementing only the desired changes on the vanilla files. But I am afraid that ship has sailed a long time ago.... A note about the balance: I felt that the 2 shots were pretty well justified considering how powerful regeneration and other on hit effects are. The very last char I played before I stopped playing was actually a ranged Shadow Warrior and it was when I saw the Frenzied Rampage behavior with bows (shortly after starting act 2) and how it was effortlessly mowing down anything I encountered that I actually started looking into how exactly CM changed these CAs and incidentally found out that the change also affected the BFG. Melee having 4 strikes requires you to get close to the enemy and the animation actually takes some time, making you a sitting target. The almost instant spray with the ranged CAs in the CM patch really made me feel very OP. Not only does this basically double the damage potential of the skill, but also the number of procs or even the Succession or Double Attack skill mods (20% chance for a double hit, triggering all the other procs even more often), which IMO was an unforeseen side-effect, allowing ridiculous stuff like Pelting Strikes with 15 second cooldown to be effortlessly spammed non-stop even with minimal amount of regen per hit. In melee, even if you fully regen the CA before the animation finishes, you can't start another one until it does finish. The nature of the new ranged animation allows for non-stop machine gun spam that melts even bosses faster than anything else in the game. Ahh, true. To be honest, I don't have that much experience with the Ice and Blood content (think I actually went through it only once, was on just the base game for many years). But if there are actually no portals there, then I agree that this is a good change. I've never even seen those code items but if you say they are well balanced, then I guess they might as well be able to drop. But making it an option would be the ideal solution IMO as it will make farming specific items (especially swords) much harder than it originally was, especially since all of them are uniques.

First of all, huge thanks for doing this. I stopped playing the game a couple of years ago when I eventually started to look into what the CM Patch did in detail, and landed on the conclusion, that the game felt a bit too different from what I remembered. This might just be what makes me start playing the game again. Anyway, going through the changelog, a couple notes for a few things. MAJOR: 1) Pelting Strikes: Now has improved Ranged Weapon animations with an appropriate amount of projectiles. Frenzied Rampage: Now has improved Ranged Weapon animations with an appropriate amount of projectiles. IIRC, these 2 skills originally had only 2 projectiles with ranged weapons, right?. The CM Patch changed it to like 4 I think, which made the skills extremely overpowered for several reasons: A) It killed any and all reason to ever use anything else on ranged Seraphim/Shadow Warrior, like the single shot but more powerful skills (Soul Hammer, Demonic blow). The total damage of the 4 shots was simply way too high to ever use anything else (was playing BFG Seraphim before I quit, so got ample experience with that). B) Extremely large number of on hit procs (regeneration, life etc.). Every projectile triggers it, once again, making these skills horribly OP with ranged weapons compared to anything else. Especially with cooldown where you could just spam them non-stop because the projectile spray eliminated any and all cooldowns. Just walk to melee range and non-stop spam machine gun everything to death the moment you get any cooldown per hit. It simply made these 2 skills way too powerful I feel. 2) Animation blending speeds improved so that projectiles from ranged weapons are no longer fired into the ground sometimes. I assume this is also linked to number 1), but the removal of the transitional animations due to the insanely upped blending speeds was one of my main dislikes about the CM Patch. They add a lot of character to the game IMO and while they could disrupt ranged attacks when stutter-stepping too intensely, the game lost a lot of charm to me because of that. Does this change do the same? Speed up the animations to the point they might as well not be there? 3) Removed Knockback effect from all enemy attacks because of a serious bug where the player could become perma-stunned until reload. I don't think I've ever encountered this bug. Was probably because I mostly played ranged characters though. Too bad the knockback can't just be fixed but outright removed.... Sad to see it go but I can understand this change. MINOR: 1) PhysX performance has been enhanced. Should no longer cause performance loss and CTD's. I hope this truly means enhanced and not straight up removed like in the CM Patch. I know the change could be reverted in the CM Patch, but would like to know what "enhanced" means in this case and if the difference is in any way visible in the game. I've honestly never had an issue with the PhysX in this game. I remember reading loads about it from other people though. Either way, I assume that any change will still be reversible by using the original files like in the CM Patch. 2) For consistency, Ship Ports and Hot Air Balloons now work the same as Portals. After activation, they may be accessed from the world map at any time. More of a personal thing but I felt it always made sense to only be able to teleport between actual teleports and not everywhere willy-nilly. It added to the sense of adventure for me but then again, one can choose to just ignore this and still use only teleports. But the temptation to take the shortcut will always be there now 3) Scarabs are no longer missing damage and armor values. Elites will now attack the player instead of standing still. Regarding Scarabs, I remember there being a discrepancy in XP for Elite Scarabs. They were granting the same amount of XP as the regular Scarabs, and that was even with the CM Patch installed. I even remember manually fixing this myself. Not sure if it's still there, but might be worth checking out. 4) Spider poison spit now does poison/poison DOT instead of physical damage. Definitely a good change. Are the damage values the same as the ones they had for the physical damage? And how strong is the DOT? I remember that originally, they were insanely OP due to how spammy they were with the spit and the insanely high physical damage compared to anything else in the game. 5) Ephrahim's Nightmare/Heavy Burden quest. I don't see anything about fixing this quest in the log, but I remember there being a bug after finishing the quest. It would not complete in the quest log and the quest circle would point into a middle of the sea, where a dummy creature was standing. The situation is described in this thread I created back then: http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23430-heavy-burden-quest-annoyance/ Is this quest fixed? UNSURE: 1) 34 "Unlock" items will now drop normally. On one hand there is probably no reason not to add them since they originally were in the game but on the other hand, not sure if polluting the loot drop pool with them is a good idea. I have no idea how it originally worked (where you would put the code, if it was repeatable, what level would the item you get be etc.) but can't really say if this is good or bad. 2) The Olm cave in the Swamps no longer plays jazz music from the Desert Cantina. Don't know if it's just me, but I loved the absolute randomness of it. A definite Holy Hannah! moment when this music suddenly starts blasting in a random Swamp cave :D. I remember going there specifically to listen to it because it was closer than the cantina... Kinda stupid I know, but I would personally leave this one in. 3) I also remember that the CM Patch removed the golden shimmer effect from elite enemies. Kinda missed that, because it made the Elites always easily identifiable in a crowd. Not sure if any of the FX changes touched any of that, but I would like this effect to remain. Otherwise, as for input from my side, most of the changes are great, no issues there (things I did not list here). Only reasonable restoration and bugfixes. Love it. If points 1) and 2) in the MAJOR section are not subject to change. Out of all the things I listed, those 2 would be a deal-breaker to me. Not sure how others feel (I might be the weird one in this case), then I would at least greatly appreciate a guide on how to revert this in the final version. Once again, thanks for the effort. Looking forward to my comeback into Ancaria

Just accidentally stumbled upon this thread. I felt that something about the animations was off especially whenever I pressed shift when I started playing again recently. Now I know what it was. Just tested the difference and WOW. I probably didn't notice at first as it was 6 years since I had played the original game but the difference in smoothness is jarring. Same as cerrec, I didn't notice anything in the original that would require such a drastic change. Completely cutting the transition animations seems a bit harsh of a solution. With some file swapping, I was able to restore the transition animations. Just replace the s2logic.dll and s2render.dll in the system folder by the original ones. But the changes that stem from these files in 1.60 are reverted. The ones I noticed are that the shimmer around elite enemies is back and that stackable items now again stack only to 20. Also, one of my previous characters is now unplayable. BFG on my BFG Seraphim refuses to fire but if I make a new seraphim character, it works fine. My 2-handed Shadow Warrior seems unaffected. I will accept that though as the visual difference is worth it at least for me. The movement is much more natural looking. Who cares if ranged weapons fire a bit earlier than they should. So if cerrec is still here, you can use 1.6 CM Patch, just install it and replace the 2 files I mentioned with the ones from a clean install. I haven't tested this extensively yet but it seems to work so far (I.e. no game-breaking issues yet).

Not a bug, just an inconsistency I noticed. First is the elite scarab (beetle in the creatures.txt) in the desert. It gives much more than double the experience of the regular one (almost triple). The other is one of the new slave outcast variants that spawn in the CM Patch. The one that can be seen in the screenshot always gives double experience as if he was a champion (so exactly double of all other outcasts). He has both a ranged and melee weapon available and a tattoo on his face. If I encounter any more, I will add them to this thread as I play through the game.

Yeah, 2-handed hafted are weapons only the SW can use so it's probably now or never. Axes seem to do comparable damage to Pole Arms but Hammers are a bit lower it seems. Thanks for the thorough explanation on Shadow Veil. A few final questions about it: I assume left click melee attacks always make you visible, correct? Can Shadow Veil reach a state where melee CAs (Scything Sweep, Frenzied Rampage etc.) would be castable while staying invisible? I also assume that spells fall into the same category as ranged attacks? E.g. complete invisibility once the chance to stay cloaked reaches 100%?