chattius

Link to the picture in my german post: Sohei with Mind Strike showing a 100% blockchance for spells at a hit

Magic coup has no guaranteed stray damage unlike shadow step. That was the reason that my daughter is now doing shadow step modifications before magic coup. In the AddOn you have regeneration per hit, so you can go for higher level in magic coup which will result in more damage, better chance of stray damage, more life leech, and better hit chance (even if you didn't modify for sure hits)

Do you mean a picture what is displayed when I move my mouse on the combat art part of the menu which appears when I press 'F' ? Or do you mean a picture of an enemy after I hit it with a spell ehich has this shown effect? (I saw no visible effect other that somehow I wasn't debuffed in 40+ griffons in niob). I try to do picture if something is shown if it is the this what you want. If you have a mage with expulse magic modified to block Combat Art, do some expulse, stand inside the circles, press F, move your mouse pointer on the combat art and you should see block chance spells/Combat Art below the shown damage. Swap combat arts while the expulse are active. The Block chance should be displayed on all spells.

I was firing cobalt strikes from inside some stacked expulse magic circles and pressing F and then moving mouse on combat art: showed 200 something % to block spells as an extra to cobalt strike. Expulse magic was modified to block spells. So now I wonder if it is same for dryads with a dust devil modified to block spells. Do their spells do this too while casting from inside? Are totems spells? Do totems hits have block spell effect if you stand inside a dust devil ?

If you mod runes for combat art block and press F and then move mouse on combat art: extra stuff on hit (sorry I play german vesion, not sur what you read in english) : Blockchance combat arts x% where x% is nearl double the value from runes.

I think I wasn't there for ages because of these traps. But enemies you know..... The picture looks as if when you trigger a trap Abishai is doing the corresponding combat art? If it is this way, might block chance combat arts actually work? About debuffs: I currently try to understand why my sohei (dragon mage: polearm mentalist) isn't debuffed. combat art block as extra effect at a spell hit

I wondered why our Sohei build was never debuffed by the white griffon in platinum and niob. The debuffing from the griffon is a combat art, so I thought that runes of protection modified for combat art block would be the reason. The chance is shown as 48.5% for it. We have a bit more than 10% on the sohei's equipment, but never seeing any debuff at below 60% chance was a bit strange. I was already thinking that runes of protection would have another effect which is not shown in the tooltipp, like the 220% it adds to defense value at my 68.3 runes. But this effect is at least shown under the sigma sign, but a higher blockchance than the 48.5 isn't. Then I thought it might be my mindstrike which has a chance to reduce combat art regeneration of an enemy, so I asked my daughter to use another spell: still no debuffs. She turned off runes and used just mindstrike and got debuffed. I pressed F, moved on the combat art, and saw something ( I have german version) combat art extra effects: chance to block combat arts 8.8%. I turned runes on and this effect jumped to 99.8%. !?! This is more than runes and equipment added. Now I wonder how this extra effect works: Is it the way that every time a spell hits its target the target's attempt to finish a combat is interrupted with a 99.8% chance? Or is each spell hit having a 99.8% block chance for a little while? How will spells with DoT do this extra effect thing? Which spells will do it? It seems all, not only mentalist ones for the dragon mage, even the maelstream lists it. Are there other classes with it: Elf : checked so far only the elf: it has blockchance spells. But crystal skin has Combat Art reflect, so no synergy. I have to admit that I forgot to try expulse magic in my 15 minutes playing yesterday. I was already at work when I thought about it. Dryad: no tests yet, but it is possible to modify dust devil for Combat Art-Block ..... Could the reason that our beloved Sohei plays so save is a feature? It is an RpT-Build which fires a mindstrike from a distance, approaches, recharges with a left click weapon hit and does the next mind strike. Mind strike is modified for area effect and better slowing of regeneration of the targets. Obviously I was able to approach in the time they were combat art blocked/slowed, then a quick left click and another mindstrike to block/slow them again. Debuffers were the most feared enemies for me playing hardcore. But seeing how the sohei, probably every dragon mage, seems to be able to avoid this is nearly a bit too easy.

I don't get it: If an item has x% fire damage and you socket the blacksmith power , the y% damage of the power is splitted up into the different damage types and the original x% fire from the item will be shown as a sum with the y% from the power. If you have gold sockets it is like 15% more? Too close to end of work to look in wiki. So a 48% ring would be like 55%. You have 2 rings this makes 110% from the 2 fire rings, add a blacksmith power with like 60% to all 5 damage types and you are at: 110+60 = 170 for fire, and 60 for the other FOUR (not 5) types.

The dragon mage has not a single combat art which works with a weapon. So the regeneration per hit is done with left clicks which have no regeneration time. What was my concern: The main attack may reach regeneration times close to its animation speed with this rune cap. But maelstream (which has a longer regen in 265) and others still win from RpH. I think I will add variants of the sohei for people who don't like alchemy. But they will be untested and would be more a skeleton to build your own characters. The idea of these characters is to use RpH on normal attacks to recharge the combat arts. The main damage will come from spells so the weapon is mainly to recharge spells and less for damage. Of cause we will use x% lifeleech damage if a weapon has it. We would be fools if not. But Lifeleech gets nothing from tactic lore and like the elf it doesn't give any modification points for us. We really don't need it. Several people don't like alchemy, some don't like melee combat, some prefer bows, some want to use staves, some want a shield, .... Lot of different stuff, so I will only do 3 variants, all without alchemy: Variants of the Sohei 02 concentration (1 point- 2 buffs early on) 03 armour (unlock modifiers on equipment before we get sets, later unlock shield) 05 mentalism lore 08 dragon magic focus 12 mentalis focus 18 polearms (Variant A), Staves (Variant B), Tactics (Variant C) 25 speed lore (x% life leech shuriken and no ranged lore) 35 dragon magic lore (Variant A), constitution (Variant B) 50 shields (1 point for a long time to unlock block chance on yellows) 65 ancient magic (late, but we will master it as 3rd or 4th skill) Fighting Bosses, all variants: use an x% life leech shuriken with a proper shield. Leftclicks to recharge fitting combat arts. For normal enemies: Variant A: This is a melee character. RpH is done at close range but without a shield. But the polearm has life leech. This allows to choose dragon magic lore instead of constitution so the hitpoints from the dragon buff can be like the one you would get from constitution. So we get an additional damaging attack: the dragon strike which also lowers attack value of enemies. Choosing some dexterity as attribute gives damage to the weapons and better defense value and we don't have a shield. Doing kills close to you means less time needed to collect the loot. Variant B: This is a mixed character. RpH can be done at close range and with staff shots. But staff shots may miss moving targets. Staves have no life leech so constitution would be my choose for its combat regeneration. Staves win from intelligence so they can do decent damage for this character even without tactic lore. Staves may have modifiers which help your spells. Variant C: You like ranged weapons more than any other weapon. In this case a weapon lore would be a waste and tactic lore would unlock speed lore. If you do only shuriken with life leech you could do dragon magic lore. If you don't use life leech weapons all the time, like bows, then do constitution. You can do more damage with your weapon and you dexterity instead intelligence could be an option. Edit: was tired when posting this, so I changed all ranged lore to speed lore which is the only offensive skill to raise ranged chance to hit.

You play console, hmmm. On PC my shoppers are normally fun characters. They have the purpose to reach a certain level like 80 and then stay at this level supporting other characters with equipment for this level area. Because they are sooner or later stationary I do fun builds, trying out some ideas, so idon't ruin a good character if they fail. Then there are shoppers who level together with the character of a friend or your main character. A funny stationary shopper for up to level 90 is a kungfu dryad, a character you probably won't play to level 200, but which is fun to play for a while. A friend at firefighters plays such a character (PC-build, because of alchemy): 2 alchemy, 3 concentration, 5 bargaining, 8 tactics, 12 reflexes, 18 armour, 25 nature magic lore, 35 hunter focus, 50 nature magic focus, 65 constitution We had the idea when discussing a kungfu build: it need rings like (x-x damage/+y all Skills) to get a decent base damage value. Also jewelry for attack speed, enemy can't evade, ... because there is no unarmed weapon skill. We decided for alchemy to unlock bargaining: trophies can boost attack speed, hit chance, reg per hit for a boss fight. Also the x% life leech of the detheya set is a big amount of damage versus bosses. So at Bosses we use a dethaya set socketed with defensive jewelry and get the offense from trophies for a saver playstyle. At normal mobs the sockets of custommade (rather custom bought) rare gear are filled with more offensive stuff like attack speed, enemy can't evade, damage x-x, .... So the Kungu dryad needs a shopper and it was nice that she was the shopper for her own. I don't know how high you want to play your shopper, but if its just up to platin I would go for a fun character. You learn a lot of play tactics with fun characters. On the console alchemy is ugly, sadly. But there are more fun characters to be discovered, a boss hunter with divine devotion ?

My daughter played a bit with the character at weekend, 13th Combat Art modification was mind strike to bleeding damage. After ancient magic as fourth mastery mentalism focus was brought to mastery at 5th and currently she is working on dragon magic focus as 6th mastery. She made a discovery that runes of protection seem to affect the enemy's chance to hit you, which is not shown in the combat art tooltipp. Further tests have to be done. Sadly our oldest dog died at saturday, a 14+ year old mix of a saint bernhard and a traditional german shepherd (the long hair variant). So we all were not really in the mood to play. We really miss the babysitter of our kids, the 130 pound beast with the long fur our kids were grapping when they learned walking. And when we searched them when they were in kindergarten age we found them sleeping at the dog who curled around them. We will remember our Tarzan. He got the name as a pup when he bite into a rope hanging in the barn and not letting it loose even he was swinging wild through the air.

My daughter told me that she noticed that turning of runes of protection buff changed the hitchance of the enemy in the last kill tooltipp. She was playing my sohei character which had runes of protection modified to stun, arrow and combat art block. I read nothing in the combat art description which could lower the enemy chance to hit?

If you play the AddOn: A combination with Raging Nimbus and Magic Coup is very very powerful combined with a high regeneration per hit. Probably the coders had that in mind when they added regeneration per hit into the gloves of the storm magic set. Regeneration per Hit builds needs a high hit chance. But the hit chance of magic coup climbs with more runes so it is worth to put some thought to play this build as a hybrid in the AddOn. For example: Have Nimbus and Magic coup at 3 seconds, RpH at 3 seconds and if you hit with magic coup your combination is recharged the same moment.

I think OO-Defrag can do MFT and other elsewhere blocked files. There are free defrag for single files and write protected files at sysinternals: PageDefrag But they are 32bit. Don't know if they plan to update their programs.

I normally do Knoppix Linux with Knoppicillin. Its a live linux with virus scanners by german CT magazin. But I think there are international and free variants of it with ClamAV. I normally prefer to have a bootable life linux or usb-stick with a mini-windows for the scanning. Kids bring a lot of virus stuff home from school. A big problem was when the AddOn (more the SecuROM) was false positive tested by several heuristic virus scanners. So I installed a script that at each start of sacred2 all internet access and external media access was denied and the virus scanners disabled. F-Secure's deep scan for example prevented Sacred2 AddOn totally from starting up. Since we live at country side we play LAN only anyway because 4800 baud is not really quick internet access., so disabling external stuff works for us. The sysinternal site has some nice stuff too, if I think that the system behaves strange.

I did a graph showing how your received damage depends on your armour. It is for a 150 level niob wolf doing 224 damage. You need 1750 armour at least to take a neutral 224 damage hit. Below 1750 armour the received damage is boosted by the formula up to 744 damage if you have no armour. You need more than 1750 armour to lower the damage of a 224 damage hit. This 1750 depend on the received damage, difficulty level, enemy level and probably your level too. So don't wonder if you take massive damage because you forgot to swap your relics when changing an area. No Armour can boost the received damage in niob by a factor 3 or more. Rüstung = armour , Schaden = damage German Posting with the damage/armour graph

So an arcane build without magic coup? Or an arcane build with magic coup only as one but not the main damaging Combat Art? If you play the AddOn or console regeneration per hit to recharge your combat arts might be an idea. Shadow step with invisibility and explosion is very nice to start with. My daughter used it as first modified damage doing combat art. Pure arcane and no magic coup for the ones who like challenges on the PC (alchemy is clumsy to use on consoles): bargaining (we need excellent regeneration per hit jewelry) arcane lore staves (without magic coup we need something to give us hit chance, and ranged is easier to regenerate with hits, more options) arcane focus armour shield lore (as a pure arcane no melee reflect, so shield lore is the best melee defense) constitution combat discipline (cobalt strike, teleportation are low on damage, so we need combat discipline and ancient magic) alchemy (in niob a trollteeth gives +1000% attack value for more than 50 seconds at 300 alchemy, we will need this) ancient magic Take speed lore on consoles. We need good jewelry with regeneration per hit, so bargaining is kinda a must have. Also to have regeneration per hit working nicely we need a high attack value. Without magic coup alchemy trophies are the best way to hit bosses for normal left click attacks. I would modify teleportation first: less cooldown, invisibility and explosion. Since its cooldown gets lower with more runes its no mistake to have it at malus. Gather some mobs, teleport on place to have explosion affecting the surrounding mob and recharge your spells with left click staff shooting. I see no room for tactic lore and staff shooting is single target anyway, so perhaps choose a staff which has chance to freeze and socket it with ice to slow the enemies you use to recharge your spells. But I don't think that this playstyle will be for beginners. Its a lot easier to include magic coup with sure hit. If you don't want it as a group killer modify it for criticals, or do just the first 2 modifications. Hope I understood you right that you asked for a pure arcane caster build?

After my daughter did the quest for her new graphic card (An elf with all spells but no concentration), she said she will not ask for more RAM if I can play a character without a skill which gives regeneration time (concentration, combat disciplin or aspect foci), with 4 red offensive skills and 2 general skills. Since I wanted to play a Double-Dagger-Girl for quite a while now to test if armour piercing builds would be playable I decided to give a dryad a try. Since we have no dryad shopper yet I decided to go for bargaining too in this build, so it wouldn't be a total waste of time if it failed. I plan to base my character on regeneration per hit and the detheya set (x% life leech) for boss fights. Attributes: All in dexterity The Skills: 02 alchemy - unlock bargaining 03 tactics - unlock dual wield 05 bargaining 08 dual wield - 2 armour piercing weapon and I hope it stacks 12 nature magic lore - barkskin 18 sword lore - unlock armour piercing on daggers 25 combat reflexes - unlock armour 35 armour 50 speed lore - I want more defensive, and dexterity wins two times from speed lore 65 constitution - somehow I really think I will need this I hope I can win the challenge, test armour piercing for Gogo and have a dryad with bargaining with this character. Do you think another class could be easier for this challenge?

A similiar question can be done for alchemy. What will Alchemy mastery give in trophy effects or potion duration. The full table in the wiki was done by a test characters and then slowly putting one point after the other in alchemy? So all values above 75 are mastery ones? I am quite sure currently that my armour formel is correct. I fight same beast with two different (not too close) armour values and I can predict the damage I will take for other armour values quite exactly. So (x-1)/(x-b) seems to work for that. We tried to easy our formula by inventing a fix point armour (FPA), which depends on difficulty, level and damage of enemy. If you have FPA fitting for the received damage then the damage you received equals the damage shown in last kill. So no damage reduction from armour will be done. So x = your armour divided by FPA. For x = 1 the formula should be zero, which it is. For no armour we could easily test how much bigger our received damage was compared to the shown damage, and we could calculate the b. If you get hit in niob without any armour to the received damage type the damage can easily more than tripled. So knowing this I know always socket at least one artamark to prevent one hits. Damn I am talking about damage formula again. Well I will do the maths for alchemy if noone else will do

Yes. If there are no Sets with mitigation you can get multichannel mitigation on torso and shoulder on yellow stuff. Then the unique ice shield has it and a mini-set shield in the Addon. But the Serafim has all of the above and can have it on wings.

And just when I finished typing my sohei article the new 2.65 patch came out. Protecting Runes have less stun now. Maelstrom has more regeneration time. The rune cap fix just meant that they are now capped at 200 but won't reset to 0 if you read one too much. Windows 7 support is said working but I don't know, I am still at XP. But my daughters say that the chat window now prevents using potions in multiplayer and that really sounds evil. I hadn't time to play in the patch myself yet. I just downloaded it before I left work because our telefon cable is nailed to trees from our house mid in a forest to the next village. Luckily only 28MB size, but at 4800 baud it would have taken ages. What I hoped for, that runes would have no limit except the malus again, proved wrong. So I wonder if regeneration per hit will be really needed late in game when you are at the limit and more levels won't add to the rune number but will lower regeneration times. I will add more experience with this character when I have time to play again (mainly at volunteer firefighters in lan 2 evenings a week, if no emergency call gets it). Our third daughter is out of hospital now, but she still is weak from borelliosis and helping her to catch up the lost time at school is more important than playing for me at the moment.

In the The how to become a demigod thread I did some tries to find the formula which is used to calculate the damage reduction done by armour. It seems it is something like (x-1)/(x-b). So I suspect similiar easy formulas in your case too. If you have time you can perhaps translate my calculations in this thread into nice english maths and test first if they are right. (x-1)/(x-b) gets close to 1 for x-> infinity but never reaches it. X would be the factor of how much higher your armour is than needed to have no seen effect against a hit. Doing tries with different armour numbers at always the same enemies. If last kill shows 100 damage done and you see 100 damage when you have 250 armour then what I call fixpoint-armour is 250. If You have 1000 armour, the enemy does 100 damage, then x = 4. The (x-1) gets zero for the fix point armour, so no damage reduction done. If you are hit naked then x = 0 and you get the b in the formula.

The Sohei The Sohei was an oriental battle-monk, equipped mainly with a naginata. His enemies were often paralyzed in fear because of his close standing to the gods. The birth of the character So why would someone want to play the dragon mage in a sohei-style? The dragon mage is the only class without any combat art based on a weapon. There are several reasons: Elementalism with destroyers is way too easy Several eye surgeries made my playstyle close and personal and halfway zoomed in I did bo-jitsu for 20 years now and I like to see it on my characters too. Regeneration per Hit finally working in the AddOn made me considering to restart my melee-elf based on this modifier. But lack of time forced me to make a dragon mage as close in playstyle as my polearm melee-elf instead. I wanted to try out the mentalism aspect. Testing alchemy on dragon mages for my german alchemy guide. Getting experience with speed lore and dexterity as main attribute for defense .... The Attributes Dexterity, every single points till level 91 yet. Edit(26.2.2010): Added the reason from an answer in the running thread. Dexterity does 3 things in this build: It adds to weapon damage: Some polearms are dexterity based, some are strength based. I think it are the polearms with a 'ball' at their tip which are dexterity based. It adds to attack value. It adds to defense value. The last was the most important reason for me. I was not using a shield, noone seemed to have a close melee dragon mage played. So I had no experience with it. But since dexterity builds up a nice defense value I wanted to boost this base defense by x% raises from speed lore and RUNES OF PROTECTION. Even Runes of Protection doesn't show it in the tooltipp: it gives a '+x% defense value'. So the defense from dexterity is pushed by RoP even more. Another consideration was going all in vitality, but at the time the thread (it wasn't planed as a guide) was written, the most feared enemies in the then new AddOn were enemies with x% life leech. Since x% life leech is calculated from maximum hitpoints adding viatlity would mean taking higher damage from these life leech enemies. I found out that RoP modified for high combat art blocking can defend them so that you take only few hits at once. If you are not used to alchemy, you can replace it by dragon magic lore to add even more hitpoints to the companian buff. The Skills: The points I had at level 81 are added. Ancient magic I brought to mastery at level 81, the others at 75. 02 concentration -5 03 armour -1 05 polearms -75 08 mentalism focus -9 12 dragon magic focus -9 18 mentalism lore -75 25 alchemy -1 35 speed lore -75 50 ancient magic -75 65 constitution -1 Discussion of the skills: Why no tactic lore? I decided against tactic lore. The main weapon damage against bosses is x% life leech which is not affected by tactic lore at all. Why polearm and no staves? I went polearms because I have no experience how good I will hit at high levels with my life leech weapons. Staves would allow to shoot and use regeneration per hit from a distance, but they have no life leech. So I would need shurikens at bosses. But the idea to use regeneration per hit demands a 100% hit chance. I decided to go fully polearm. Constitution or toughness? In the following thread: How to become a demigod (post23) I calculated at which values of mitigation toughness could replace constitution. Without a shield the dragon mage would have to take too much compromises to reach thesevalues. I decided for constitution. Why Alchemy? I was using alchemy for nearly a year now and wrote a german guide about it. To give one number, the main important for me: In niob at 300 alchemy a trollteeth trophy does +1000% attack value for more than 50 seconds. I have to hit bosses to recharge my spells, and 1000% attack value is a very big number. Add mentors lasting 4 minutes at these alchemy values and all the other nice stuff. Edit(26.2.2010): If you dislike alchemy, I would replace it by dragon magic lore. It adds another Area of Effect attack and more important HITPOINTS from the companion. The modification of my combat arts: 1. mind strike - weakness 2. mind strike - expansion -fast Area of Effect Damage 3. runes of protection - awe - stun works even if the enemy does non physical damage 4. familiar - firebug - I have my polearm socketed with lava, so increased chance to burn. experience-modifier is currently bugged 5. familiar - quick mind - I want a fast dragon strike to weaken enemies 6. familiar - life force - more hitpoints 7. runes of protection - stone skin - missile block. We play melee. 8. runes of protection - runes - Combat Art block 9. maelstrom - burden - less armour would mean less mindstrike damage, so slowing 10. maelstrom - extension - lasts longer, I I know I will forget to redo it at bosses 11. maelstrom - demoralize - lower attributes of enemies 12. energy blaze - confusion - target attacks slower The Playstyle I try to keep the buffs at their malus. Mindstrike, energy blaze and maelstrom I keep at 3 seconds regeneration time. I try to have 2.5 regeneration per hit. So after each melee hit the combat art can be done again. But more than 3 seconds reg per hit means that you may kill the whole group with a strike and can't recharge anything till you reach the next enemy. 3 seconds are a good compromise. I use to press both mouse buttoms all the time, on the right button is mind strike because it's fast. You have to hit to recharge your spells, so I have trollteeth on a hotkey in case I run in trouble hitting. Equipment There is one amulet I wouldn't want to miss: The Artamark's Star. Can it be played multiplayer closed net? The character is mainly an experiment, so get insprirations, but don't exspect that this character is even close to optimal. I live in countryside with very slow internet so my tests were on 4 player LAN. I play softcore with this character but I never died yet. I pushed through the campagnes to reach niob at level 91. I was not using our smith character but I used equipment from my former dragon mage and melee elves. So if you play closed with friends the character should be comparable.

Thanks for doing the work. At the first glance I see no mistakes. Stuff which I would add but need to be confirmed first: Mitigation comes befor armour? The way the armour reduction works means that too low armour for a fixed damage value could result in receiving more damage than is seen in damage from enemy in last kill. In niob being hit with nearly no armour could result that the received damage is tripled. So Damage mitigation can have a double effect: It reduces the damage and then this reduced damage is put into the armour formula. So a 50% mitigation could theoretically reduce your damage by 80% at optimal armour/damage values. My daughter found a set shield in the AddON yesterday: at level 90 10% multichannel mitigation and 2 times blockchance in red, affected by shield lore. The shield was named Kira something. Sadly our current characters are all polearm ones. When we find some time I will look at the stats with a shield lore character. Could perhaps be a good alternative for the unique ice shield.

Nah, I don't want credits. I just wanted to say that I did some maths for the case if you have to decide between toughness and constitution, at which numbers of mitigation toughness would be the better choose. I named the calculation virtual hitpoints in lack of better words. A full channel mitigation of 50% would result in that you can receive double the damage. 100% more Hitpoints would have the same effect. So mitigation can be considered virtual hitpoints. In the same thread I did some maths how armour is reducing the damage. I need someone who will do it into some understandable english;) The how to become a Demigod Thread