idbeholdME

Ancient Magic is a must for builds that focus only on 1 damage type, to deal with highly resistant/immune enemies to that damage type. Cobalt Strike will be the go-to against stuff like Ice Elementals or enemies in the Seraphim Hunting grounds. And even then, most of the CAs in Mystic Stormite deal a split of Ice and Physical. Ancient Magic Mastery only reduces enemy damage mitigation values and the game doesn't really have that many enemies who have it in high amounts, besides elementals. The most frequent one the enemies have is Fire and Physical. And the damage bonus from Ancient Magic is the lowest of the bunch, compared to Lore skills or Combat Discipline, which also offer other bonuses on top of the damage. Well, any character can theoretically reach 100% mitigation, but you of course have to find a sufficient amount of Darwagon's/Gruma's talismans and of course dedicate all your slots to it. I have like 3 or 4 Darwagons over hundreds of hours of play time and only one Gruma. Immortality is cool and all, but also kind of boring. And there is a grand total of 2 enemies in the game that can pierce 100% Damage Mitigation. One thing I've been wondering about Expulse Magic - how important is the banishing power? Specifically, will the CA still be able to negate spells from stuff like bosses 20 levels above your character without taking the Bronze Strength mod? I have no idea how the banishing power of Expulse Magic is used in the calculation of whether or not it will work. From what I could tell when fighting stuff like the Dark Prince who uses Expulse Magic against you, it doesn't always negate everything. It usually disabled like 2 of my 3 buffs and any active buffs I had going at the time (like Dashing Alacrity). No idea whether the one buff that remained active was levelled enough so the Prince could not disable it or if it's just a random chance and the higher the banishing power, the more likely it will work. And as for general skills, they can of course always be replaced with better skills and those two would 100% be the ones I'd pick if I wanted the most optimal build. But Riding is the main point of this build and the reason I dropped Spell Resistance for Enhanced Perception is that I'm hoping the Grand Invigoration gold mod will cover it not fully, but sufficiently. I can always supplement it with some Detrimental Effect Reduction or Damage over time -X% on gear but CtFV is really hard to get without gimping yourself pretty hard. And finding rarity tier 14 and 15 items without Enhanced Perception is extremely unlikely. Really need to expand my collection of things like Excalibrian or the Unique armor pieces for the various classes. I've found like 3 rarity tier 14 items with my Inquisitor at about 80 hours of playtime, 2 of which were The Wayfarer boots (which is lucky since those are the ones I'm using), but you won't really expand your rarity 14 collection without Enhanced Perception. Lastly, as for Shield Lore, the main advantage of the skill is the Mastery bonus. Combined with other sources like from a buff or some from gear, it can allow you to reach 100% melee attack block chance. Not to mention that the best shield in the game, Kira's Wall, becomes ever more godly with the skill.

After thinking hard about which class to roll with mastering Riding by level 75, I think I've landed on a High Elf. Feels like she might be the character to benefit the most from a very fast mounted speed in order to avoid getting hit. The idea is to combine the Ice attacks from Mystic Stormite to slow enemies and further increasing this movement speed gap by doing it from the back of the Wind Serpent with Riding Mastery. The Wind Serpent has a decent speed (only 5% slower than the fastest mounts, Hellhound and Mobiculum). Inquisitor's and Seraphim's mounts are painfully slow and I feel like they wouldn't squeeze full value out of the Riding Mastery. The outline of the build so far: Mystic Stormite Lore Mystic Stormite Focus Concentration Delphic Arcania Lore Armor Lore Riding Constitution Delphic Arcania Focus Enhanced Perception Combat Discipline Spell Resistance instead of Enhanced Perception would be objectively better, but I really wanted to squeeze EP in. Hoping that modding Grand Invigoration with Resilience will be enough in that department, basically serving as a weaker substitute for Spell Resistance Mastery. Not taking Ancient Magic as I hope any needs for an alternate damage source for Ice resistant/immune enemies will be covered by Cobalt Strike. Attributes would be spent mostly in Intelligence, maybe with some Vitality sprinkled in. As for CAs, the plan would be: Frost Flare Freeze - Frost - Icy Circle Glacial Thorns Frost - Pierce - Fussilade Raging Nimbus Hurricane - Momentum - Extended Nimbus Cascading Shroud Mist - Intangible - Steam Crystal Skin Glacial Mirror - Focalize - Frosty Breeze Cobalt Strike Heavy Damage - Chain Reaction - Explosion Magic Coup NOT MODDED Shadow Step Phase Shift - Sanctuary - Mend Expulse Magic Expansion - Pentagram - Protection Grand Invigoration Mystic Stormite Expertise - Life Energy - Resilience. The mod choices mostly reflect the planned playstyle - slowing enemies with Ice and basically never getting hit by manoeuvring around any and all enemies on the mount with mastered Riding. Could be a bit rough in caves on foot though... Also don't really want to dabble in Arrant Pyromancer at all, as I already played that over 10 years ago Anyone any suggestions/changes to the build? Will this be able to live through Niobium with only 2 defensive skills? Will probably get this character rolling in like a month, once I wrap up the Inquisitor I'm currently playing.

Thanks. As far as I know, there is no limit. You can have all the temporary potions and trophies going on at once. But there is no way to tell when they start wearing off, as the only indication is the swirly circles around your character. But multiples of the same don't stack, only refresh duration. I haven't done extensive testing, but I'd assume it works the same for spells. They absolutely do have a base chance to inflict a secondary effect based on the amount of damage of a specific element they do, like weapons but you can't see that chance anywhere. An enemy can burn simply from being thwacked by an unmodded Ancestral Fireball and Damage Lore should increase the chance/damage of this burn effect too. One interesting thing about CD is that it still scales very well after Mastery. The diminishing returns for this skill are very low. You get 135.6% damage at level 75 and 244.7% at level 150. Every point is nearly equally valuable, unlike some other skills that pretty much stop scaling past level 100. I take it often and a caster Temple Guardian pretty much has to because he doesn't have access to Ancient Magic (in the unmodded game). I personally take WEL every single time I play a character that utilizes shields. The increase in shield capacity is simply too massive to pass and the flat absorption is just a cherry on top. Attack vs Defense 100% works in the PFP. As for overrated skills, I absolutely agree with Combat Reflexes. Works only against weapon attacks and evasion chance can easily be gotten from other sources. Waste of a slot. Speed Lore is not really overrated but probably even worse than Combat Reflexes.

Updated the main table, added a couple notes. Haven't updated the full table yet, just added a note that it contains old Fallen Angel Values. Might update it later, but not sure Yep, that confirms it was increased by 33%. Quite the buff

The values for the Toughness skill on the wiki are much lower than what they actually are in-game. The values are either wrong, or the skill got buffed in Ice & Blood but the wiki was not updated. https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Toughness I just checked with a fresh character and the values are wrong all the way from level 1. Here are the data points: Level 1 - 0.4% vs 0.3% on the wiki Level 10 - 2% vs 1.5% on the wiki Level 20 - 3.5% vs 2.5% on the wiki Level 30 - 4.8% vs 3.5% on the wiki Level 40 - 5.9% vs 4.4% on the wiki Level 50 - 6.8% vs 5% on the wiki Level 60 - 7.5% vs 5.6% on the wiki Level 70 - 8.3% vs 6.3% on the wiki Level 74 - 8.6% vs 6.5% on the wiki Level 75 - 12% vs 9% on the wiki Level 80 - 13% vs 9.6% on the wiki Level 90 - 14.6% vs 11% on the wiki Level 100 - 16.2% vs 12.1% on the wiki and so on. From this data, it is obvious that the real game values are exactly 33.3% or 1/3rd higher than what is listed on the wiki. Goes for both the armor and mitigation value. Some very high level examples: @Flix I assume the skills weren't touched in any way in the PFP? Would you be able to check some of the Toughness values in the Fallen Angel, whether they correspond to the current wiki numbers? If it was indeed changed with Ice & Blood, I'll update the wiki with correct values.

Long time no see, but found another report-worthy thing. The animation of dual wield Callous Execution on the Spider mount is completely broken. The Inquisitor becomes a dismantled lego figurine for the duration of it Seems that the only thing that animates correctly is the robe itself. All the limbs and the belt just stay in the default position during the animation. Other attacks seem fine, it's just the dual wield Callous Execution that is doing this. Even Callous Execution with other weapon types is fine.

So, after playing a couple characters that took Damage Lore, I have to say that it is actually quite powerful once Mastered. IF you are using mainly Fire/Poison attacks that is. It increases exclusively duration for the Ice and Magic effects and that doesn't really mean much. But for Fire and Poison, once you pump Damage Lore Mastery to around 400% bonus damage/duration, it's actually massive. Especially with weapon attacks and powerful converters. You hit an enemy once and then he takes several ticks of damage, dealing the same damage as the original hit, passively. You can just attack most enemies once, move on to another and things will just die on their own while you move on to the next enemies. The chance to trigger secondary effects from the skills is additive, meaning it just gets flatly added on top of the existing chance. So at high levels, you are pretty much guaranteed to trigger them with every hit. I rarely see this skill suggested, but if you are using mainly Fire or Poison damage, squeezing this skill in can do wonders. But the reason I don't see it mentioned often is probably the Mastery requirement. Without it, the skill is mediocre at best. Another skill that I feel is often looked over is Spell Resistance. It doesn't really do much initially, but the impact once Mastered is one of the strongest in the game. It works against every negative effect inflicted on you that has a duration. From damage over time, to roots, debuffs like magic damage secondary effect or Olm blinds, slows... Everything is reduced to a fraction of its original duration and does absolute wonders for survivability. The only thing it doesn't work against are stuns. Immediately at level 75, you instantly gain the equivalent of 65% "Detrimental Effect Reduction", which can be pushed to 75-80% with enough skill points. Absolutely massive, frees up a ton of defensive slots/bonuses that you'd have to get from gear otherwise. Not to mention that the base bonuses of the skill, the extra Spell Resistance and reduction of spell criticals can also be quite noticeable at higher levels. I came to appreciate this skill a lot, on par with things like Constitution or Toughness. My Seraphim has this skill + extra Detrimental Effect Reduction on gear and all negative effects last 1-2 seconds max. Damage over time effects like the infamous Spider Spit does a single tick of damage instead of 4. Some negative effects drop so fast the game bugs out. I had a Weaken effect get stuck on me after walking through T-Energy, constantly getting turned on and off because the duration was so short. That's how you know a skill is broken Again, the main negative of the skill is the Mastery requirement. Somewhat mediocre without it. Alchemy. Unlike the other two, this one can be left at 1 point and let gear do the rest. This is a skill with one of the least impactful Masteries in the game. All it does is is provide a mediocre bump in the value. Nothing special happens if you master it. Got it on my Seraphim for testing purposes and with all the skill bonuses, having Mentor potions last 2+ minutes in Niobium is a joy. Not to mention the various trophies and effect on other potions. Health potions become instant full heals and Alchemy even works to counteract the penalty for spamming potions too quickly, meaning that 2 or even 3 consecutive potions can still full heal you even when the diminishing returns kick in. Also, just from bringing one character with Alchemy into late Niobium, I now have 1000+ Strong Mentor potions in the bank for other characters because thanks to the increased duration from Alchemy, the supply far outdoes the demand. For Trophies, both duration and effect increase. Things like Iron Ore, Skull or 4 leaf Clover can become extremely powerful with enough Alchemy points. Here are some numbers from my Seraphim that has only 145 soft points in Alchemy (219.5%) and Niob trophies: Strong Mentor Potion duration - 158.9 seconds Base trophy duration - 20 seconds, becomes ~44 seconds. Four leaf clover Trophy - +215.6% Chance to Find Valuables. Easily the most powerful source of CtFV in the game. Save these for farming Guardians and it works wonders, especially if you can kill all 4 plus the machine in the duration of one trophy. Combine with Enhanced Perception, high survival bonus and map explored % for ludicrous results. Troll Tooth - + 620.4% Attack Value. Yes, you read that correctly. Branch Trophy - Block Root 85.8%. Can be a great help in root heavy areas. Iron Ore Trophy - +1798 Physical Armor, which then further gets multiplied by any armor bonuses you have. My character goes from 10176 Physical armor to 19717 just by popping an Iron Ore Trophy, almost doubling it. Skull Trophy - +23.6% Critical Chance Harpy Feather Trophy - 77.8% Chance to Block ranged attacks Construction Plan Trophy - 77.8% Chance to Block Spells. Use this and laugh at everything, including the dragons in dragon caves or eyes in the Blood Forest. Talisman Trophy - 32.1% Chance to Evade. If I Mastered the skill with another 74 points, it would only move from 219.5% to something like 295%. Truly one of the worst Masteries in the game. BUT, it would probably bring all those high % chances very close to 100%. The only other skill that I'm not sure about yet is Riding. Wondering how much of a difference Mastery will make in the speed. Will probably try running a Riding character soon to find out, Speaking of which, does anybody know if the Mastery speed bonus from Riding is flat or relative? Wondering if it means you get +15% at level 75, or 15% from the base. Inquisitor has 130% movement speed on the spider and I'm not sure if it'd become 145% or 149.5%.

One more location with a bridge, building and a waterfall that is not visible on the main map in the human region that I forgot about until now. South-west of the Wargfels portal. Probably not it, but just listing it here as an option to eliminate. Pretty sure there are no other options for the human region now that would fit the original description.

After futilely trying to farm a Legendary item from the Banshee, even with augmented drop rates, I checked the creatures.txt and it is the only boss/side-boss in the game that has a dangerclass of only 8, meaning Banshee is unable to drop Legendary items as they only drop from enemies with dangerclass 9 or above. Kinda wondering if it was an oversight of the original devs, but I'm going to bump it to 9 for myself. There is basically no valid reason for this inconsistency to exist, especially considering the Banshee is one of the more dangerous side-bosses, compared to some others. So just a general info to anyone who would feel inclined to farm the Banshee.

In that case, it could probably be toyed with by creating duplicate spell entries of the Inquisitor's CAs, linking those to the Doppelganger so it doesn't affect that player character and giving them varying cooldowns so that he somewhat cycles through them. Will see if I want to experiment with it... The way I currently have it with the silver mod workaround is sufficient for my needs. Purifying Chastisement, Frenetic Fervor whenever off cooldown and spamming Callous Execution. But his behavior probably had to have been changed with the Ice & Blood release, considering what most of the internet (including the wiki) says on the topic.

Unfortunately did nothing. Just brought back the original behavior where the DP only spams Ruthless Mutilation constantly. Will stick with my workaround where he uses at least 3 out of the 5 CAs from the aspect.

Thanks for the info. So I could essentially do it and revert if I were to play a Dragon Mage with Protectors. Will probably get to try it sometime next week then.

True. In creatures.txt, there is not that many entities that use it, only Ker Demon, Dryad summons and DM's Protector. But there is no way to tell what else uses that behavior through the hardcoded way. SW's Skeletons or resurrected enemies? Destroyers? Inquisitor's minions from Subjugation? I'll probably try it as an experiment but won't stick with it as it would probably break more things in the background... Although, speaking of Ker Demon, I just noticed it has 2 spells defined in creatures.txt: spells = { entry0 = { "enemy_area_meteor" }, entry1 = { "enemy_feuerball_homing" }, }, I am currently playing a Ker Inquisitor, but whenever I summon the Demon, all it does it smack enemies with its fists. Never seen it cast either of those spells. Nevermind, wrong creature. The god power demon only has double hit.

Ah, thanks. So nothing I'd be able to change myself then. Or... could I theoretically get around that by changing the definition of Hireling_brave_ex to be the same as Hireling_mage_no_defense in behavior.txt, create a new replacement, say "Hireling_brave_ex2", copy the original's definition and change all the creatures that used the original into the new one? I would not be editting the link (beyond my abilities), but getting around it purely in behavior.txt?

Thanks for the insight. Although I am not sure what you mean by the second behavior. I assume you don't mean the behavior the Doppelganger has assigned in creatures.txt, correct? This is what it looks like in my creatures.txt: Ignore the mixed up spell order, it's how I have it set up at the moment so he uses some more spells than 1 by default. The behavior here is what I tried changing, mostly tested around with Hireling_brave.

Well, I tried giving the Doppelganger different AI behaviors, but didn't seem to do much. It uses "Invalid" by default. One could probably define a custom AI in behavior.txt with custom conditions, triggers etc, but my attempts a couple months ago didn't result in anything. But the buff recasting is not the main issue. When entering an area transition, just remember to recast him and he resumes using the spells. The main problem is that he is only able to use spells at slots 0,1 and 5,6 and that is ONLY if you activate both his silver mod aspects at once. And it has to be 3 non-attack CAs +1 attack CA. Never got him to use multiple different attacks. My initial suspicion was because the attack CAs have no cooldown, so he just repeated the same one over and over. But even if I modified Ruthless Mutilation to have a 10 second base CD, he just used Ruthless Mutilation once and then used normal attack until the cooldown ran its course, never using spells at entries 2,3 or 4. The main reason I'm looking into this is because the internet is claiming he was able to use pretty much everything in the past, even the Nefarious Netherworld CAs with the proper gear, which I've been unable to replicate.

@Flix @dimitrius154 @Lindor Older thread, but I'd still like to ask the experienced modders now. Has any deep dive ever been done into the Doppelganger's behavior? Is there any way to control his behavior or make him use spells at entries other than 1,2,5 and 6? From what the internet is saying, he seems to have been able to use pretty much everything in his spell list in the past, but that's no longer the case. Comparing with the pre Ice & Blood version of the game would probably bring some insight into this mystery. As said in the above post, I've tried pretty much everything I could think of.

Yep, only single player. Also, another mod vs vanilla thing: You can freely teleport only to actual teleporters in the unmodded game. The ability to also freely teleport to any ship travel point or hot air baloon was added by mods. But it depends on how puristic you want to be.

Well, the game requires you to complete all the main quests and as far as I know, there are no bugs/glitches you can abuse. You can get out of bounds in the game and walk straight through the ocean for example, but not sure it'd allow saving time in the campaign compared to doing it normally. Maybe getting to the guy you have to poison once you arrive to the Dryad island. Probably the only thing you can do is map out your path, which monolith to activate so you can use it as a teleport point to save time, teleport at the right moments during quests to save the time walking etc. In a similar vein, also make use of your F7 save to use as a backtracking point. For example, make an F7 point on the island with Mer-Kil, go kill Carnach, quit the game and resume to instantly appear on the island. Also definitely play a character that has access to a movement speed buff, like Killing Spree for the Shadow Warrior or Frenetic Fervor for the Inquisitor. Maxing movement speed early is pretty much impossible otherwise. Getting a horse ASAP is also bound to help. Although keep in mind that in vanilla Sacred 2, mounts could not be used in the caves at all. But pretty much every mod out there allows them to be summoned in caves. So if you want to follow vanilla rules, you should not be horsing around in the dungeons. Also make sure you play the Shadow Campaign. It is generally much shorter than the Light Campaign. For example, you only have to fight the Mist boss once or you can just walk through the Dryad forest without even having to enter their capital.

You can't do it in the Campaign. Any projectiles that hit the machine in Campaign will only bounce off. Only when you create a Free Play game is it destructible, which you'll be doing anyway if you want to farm the Guardians.

For the original Bargaining breakpoints, refer to here: https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Item_quality_levels_vs_Enhanced_Perception_-_Magic_Find_-_Bargaining The higher your character level, the harder it is to access the higher rarity tiers. By level 200, having access to tier 11-12 at merchants is not feasible. 10 can be reached with a dedicated Bargaining set and relics. Meanwhile, access up to tier 12 can be feasibly maintained until about character level ~110-120. And as you level further, you won't be able to reach 11 either even if you pump Bargaining as much as possible. Overkilling Bargaining by a lot compared to your character level will cause rare items to spawn almost exclusively at merchants. If you don't reach the breakpoint for at least tier 8 items, you'll see no rares at merchants. Although I'm not sure how merchant levels come into play in all this. This is the first time I've heard about that being a thing. Also, it's apparently been changed in the addendum, so take the link above as just a reference.

Hmmm, one more potential area I can think of would be Crag Rock and the dungeon leading to it. But probably not it.... The fact that you say it's not normally accessible and you have to parkour it makes identifying it somewhat difficult, if you remember a view from a place that's not normally reachable. There are also waterfalls in the Dryad capital. But other than that, we're running out of waterfall options

Thanks. Now that's interesting. I only played through the non-Final Cut VH 1 and 2 twice and VH 3 once. Been meaning to do an FC playthrough soon-ish, but might just wait in that case. What's the scope of the content/changes?

One more thing that came to mind @Flix Do you still have your test bench at hand? I'd be interested in knowing whether Chance to Bypass Armor works on spells, or if it works at all (for weapon attacks). I'd played a ranged Shadow Warrior in the past with about 60% chance to bypass, but honestly didn't notice much of a difference in damage dealt. And also, whether it only works on physical damage or all elements, melee/ranged etc. Can summons proc it? Or something like the Dryad Totem or SW tower? Could be very relevant to the OP if Destroyers could make use of it. This bonus could be a hidden powerhouse against heavily armored opponents, if it treats enemy armor as 0 every time it procs. But would probably require a modded item that gave 100% chance to bypass to test it. Imagine Carnach without his massive amounts of fire armor in late Niob :O But if I had to bet, I'd say it works only for player weapon attacks and weapon CAs, if that. Could be that the bonus is simply broken and does nothing. A custom monster with tens of thousands of armor would be perfect for this.

They are pretty tanky. I've only ever seen them get downed against bosses or if several enemies dump their hard hitting spells into a single one. And that is even without taking Spectral Shields (I went Sharp Blades - Commander - Elite Equipment). Either way, they just get revived after a short delay, so even if they get downed from time to time, it's worth it to not overlevel them to the "fear point". But I was playing a ranged Shadow Warrior, who was dealing the main chunk of damage, I ran the Nether Allegiance mostly for supplementary damage and mainly, to have some baits for enemy spells. Always makes me feel good when I see a Life Leech lightning, a homing fireball or a stun hit the soldiers instead of me. Could only make a build with 2 defensive skills thanks to that. But yeah, if you rely on them for damage, then yes, pumping the CA is still a good idea as it's the only way to increase it. But defensively, they are 100% going to be more efficient when they can draw aggro normally.