chattius

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

If you are doing it, you could bring my clumsy tries about damage mitigation=virtual hitpoints and how armour values reduces damages into readable english too. It's in the demigod thread in the genertal guide section who deals with mitigation not only at serafim. Currently I have to do homeworks, my older daugthers have the homework to ask their parent how they remember the opening of the german german wall 20 years ago.

As I wrote before: To my knowledge reg per hit behaves in the consoles as in the AddOn, even the patch level of the consoles is something pre 2.43. So I guess not working reg per hit was a bug which never affected the comsole versions, because of different autotargeting whatever. So I say again, if you write ideas, tips, guides, mention your platform and patch level. It help to prevent a lot of misunderstandings.

There was a short lived thread about a character with 5 general skills a while ago. I wonder if I would take concentration instead of a weapon skill. My latest melee elves could be played without sure hit modifier and a weapon skill. Most combat arts have a hidden buildin chance to hit, which gets better the higher level your melee attack is. But you play without AddOn and I don't know if regeneration per hit was working already for the shadow warrior in 2.43. But this would probably be more for a shadow hand build, because melee attacks need the weapon speed, or eat up way too much trophies or perhaps modify rousing command for attack speed. I did some maths about constitution or toughness in Dobri's demigod thread and it seemed if you can't get to 70% damage mitigation then constitution would win. For alchemy: Trolltreeth trophies: +1000% attack value for 50+ seconds in niob/300 alchemy Beginning with gold difficulty the drop rate of trollteeth at the re-spawning orc cave was enough to do constant kill runs there and have enough left for other regions. I liked the orc cave, good drops and known enemies so I could optimize my equipment for these runs. iron ore trophies: 3000 physical armour for 50+ seconds in niob/300 alchemy these throphy would be nice for the orc cave, the 3000 physical armour is the naked armour value, before any +x% armour stuff is calculated in. I don't know at the moment if the summoned elementals from orc shamans (?) from schot's trick drop this kind of trophies. would be nice to know a nice place to get a supply on iron ores. skull from undeads for critical, leather hat for attack speed from goblins, talisman for evasion from humans are not used that much

You can use left click attacks for recharging spells with regeneration per hit in the AddOn. Don't know if it works for all or only if you use masterhand regeneration system.

I thought of this aspect too, but I know that my nephew plays a necro-style netherworld-inqui in the AddOn. Inexorable subjugation is at really high levels and get recharged with regeneration per hit. It is targeted at already damaged enemies (from your horde). Paralyzing dread used to be bugged but it seems fixed in the AddOn. Inexorable subjugation however can't be used in combinations anymore in the AddOn. No longer possible to put it first in a combination and let the other combat arts do their job to finish the mob while it is active. So now you seem to need ancient magic and probably high levels in it. He has more than 10 ghost beasts active at a time in platinum.

I use to do challenges when my kids ask for a new graphic card, sounds card, laser mouse, ... My latest challenge was that my oldest had to play an elf without concentration and all 15 spells fully modified to niob to get a new graphic card. She did it and now I have to find a bit harder challenges. So I started a similiar topic already in the german forum: If only one aspect of a class is allowed to get modification points, which class and aspect would you choose for your worsest enemy to play it? Its kinda the opposite of what class is best, but I noticed that doing the question as a character for your worst enemy people think of more ways why an aspect can be played and therefore it is not the worst aspect.

I think spectra hand behaves a bit like magic coup from the elf. So its attack speed is from the magical lore, its damage is from magical lore, your weapon and the attribute fitting to your weapon. Its hit chance is from a weapon hit, so jewelry with enemy can't evade helps a lot. Also in the AddOn, not sure for consoles, Regeneration per Hit is working on it. So if you have a regeneration per hit of 2 seconds, your spectral hand regenerates in 3 seconds, a successful hit will speed up your regeneration per 2 seconds.

Regeneration was changed in the Addon to bring in the new masterhand regeneration system as an option. Perhaps they overworked reg per hit and mana steal because of this. When I asked for an idea for a mind flayer = mana steal Inquisitor I got following picture in the german forum: Inquistor with life leech and reg per hit in action Red is life leech, white reg per hit. Reg per Hit is quite useful for magic coup too, stray damage takes usage of it. Now I can't wait (sadly I have to) to test a horse-Combat Art using character with reg per hit. I hope that I can charge charge-Combat Art which has no cooldown with weapon hits.

Even if late: Congratulations Hope you have less paper fighting than we had with our 21 month old mixed twins: born 23:51 and 00:17. My wife was too exhausted to do decisions because she didn't want a caesarian and narcotics and the second twin had to be turned. I was asked if the twins should have same official date of birth or not and I didn't want to decide alone. What I didn't know was what a trouble it is to change it after it is registered once. Then double nationality since my wife is from a country not in european community which has blood right and we will probably move there in some years. BurauCRAZY and even more if you live in germany I think. At our second daughter they wrote the second name the wrong way: Katja instead of Chattia (latin for female wild cat, and the state we live in was called chattii by the romans for wildcats, which was word transformed to Hessen in nowadays germany). So now we have daughters 14years, 12years, 7years and 21 month and a boy(older of the twins). When our 7 year old returns from hospital I will work on my babysitting build again: playable character with twins doing climbing exercises on my knees. Perhaps we should collect lazy character builds which can be played while babysitting

Okay since my only shadow warrior was in decembre 2008 just to know how it plays I have not much experience with shadow warriors. But some stuff is true for all characters: Toughness or Constitution Damage mitigation (toughness) can be considered as virtual life points. In the demigod thread How to become a demigod in Sacred2 I did some calculations and it is like: if you have to choose between toughness and constitution take constitution if you won't get at least 70% mitigation. If you think that you need a focus for your melee combat arts, stand back, think twice and calculate if perhaps regeneration per hit can be enough. Regeneration per Hit is said to work on consoles (I have none to test it) and on PC with the AddOn. Read about it there: Designing a Chracter based on regeneration per hit Regeneration per Hit is like: You have a regeneration time of 3 seconds and you have items with 2 seconds regeneration per hit, then a successful hit will only have 1 seconds regeneration time on its Combat Art. But if you miss you have to regenerate the full 3 seconds. So building up with regeneration per hit makes sense if you are sure that you will have a good hit chance.

@Dragon Brother: Since I don't play online from home (mid in forest in country side and telefon is a wire nailed on trees all the way to the next village: results in 4800 baud at good weather) I have to believe your online experience. But it works like a charm in 4 player LAN. My approach was to modify magic coup for x% combat regeneration mana leech so it can at high level have 100% combat regeneration on hit. But you run into a rune window when x% mana leech is not fully regenerating magic coup and the 30% not regenerated are some 6-7 seconds regeneration time:) I can close this gap with regeneration per hit and hunting demons in blood forest for demon tooth trophies. So my tries were to push the level of magic coup as high as possible and use it to recharge combinations with spells which are really high too. Like a maximums runes raging nimbus, followed by a maximum runes magic coup and repeating this combination like every 1.4 seconds. So up to 6 nimbus can be up, adding their powers.... I saw the Astral Lord of my daughter who stayed invisble and spammed out spectral hands who had re per hit to boost their level. For online it is probably best to have one attack at lower levels for lag times and one high for no lag. Another thing to be tested are the 2 different regeneration systems and if they have differrent effect on reg per hit or x% mana leech.

Sorry not seen on cooldowns or god powers. Horse Combat Art still need to be tested. I seem first the regeneration time is done and then the coold down. So even with reg per hit it is not possible to go below the cooldown. But some Combat Art's get lower cooldown if modified so at the price of higher regeneration times - but what if these price is cheap because of reg per hit? But this thread is to collect information. I did my tests with magic coup. Manasteal is a x% regeneration at hit and it seems to work nicely, even in combination with reg per hit. So test all stuff carefully before ruining a character. In 2.34 reg per hit was strange, not working on every Combat Art, some suspected it was working on unaffected base regeneration time, so it would get less useful with more runes, lot of rumours in old times. All I can say: my elves work like a charm now and when asking for Combat Art's at which Combat Art would have no efect noone told me one in 3 weeks in the german forum. So I ask now here again for feedback, because if it is really working it would change a lot. Reg per hit are these lines like life leech but with a different colour.

The idea is simple: In the AddOn regeneration per hit is working correctly, as is mana steal from the elves magic coup and probably this hard hit of the inquisitor.. By having a 100% hit chance and adding either x% manasteal from combat art modifying or regeneration per hit by x-seconds from equipment or alchemy you can recharge your combat art/combination with a successful hit. I play mainly melee elves and I read 199 runes in magic coup and can use a coup again as soon I have hit and recharged it with mana steal (modifier) and/or regeneration per hit. Interestingly magic coup has a buildin Chance to Hit modifier which is not shown ( I don't speak of the sure hit modifier in magic coup). So even a unmodified magic coup has a higher hit chance than a left click. So even the hit chance is shown at only 80% in last kill, magic coup hits way better. The 80% are only for left clicks. So by eating more runes I boost my hit chance and damage at no regeneration costs------ as long as I hit and my regeneration per hit is high enough. Dev-Team confirmed in the german forum that many combat arts have such a buildin hit chance. So I am playing my magic coup elves for some time now without a weapon skill, since double hits are not working for magic coup, attack speed is from arcane lore and most unique weapon don't have modifiers which have to be unlocked by a weapon skill. So I was thinking which other classes would gain from this idea: Best of cause would be combat arts which do a weapon attack but are a spell: spectral hand of the shadow warrior, sword fire( is it the english name, too lazy to look up) of the serafim. These could perhaps get better hit chance with higher levels too and could recharge themself with regeneration per hit. No need for tactic lore for these and perhaps you could even take away a weapon skill as I do with my melee elves. So gaining a free skill by not taking a weapon skill. Of cause all weapon based Combat Art's are candidates too....... Currently noone told me of a weapon based combat art in the AddOn for which Reg per Hit is not working. Even the dragon form combat arts seem to recharge with reg per hit-with trophies from alchemy skill. So please give some feedback if this idea is working for other classes than elves too, I lack the time to play them all. It can change a lot: Higher buffs, more buffs, hybrids with a weapon Combat Art to recharge a spell combination, using only tactic lore to modify weapon Combat Art's, since regeneration is not really needed, ..... A lot of funny and strange ideas and perhaps some of them may even work. Think out of the box, throw away pre 2.64 behaviour: this is the AddOn and reg per hit is working on the PC now, and it was working for consoles all the time already I heard.

Well you use ranged weapons and build your damage mainly on shadow step. So you share a lot with magic coup builds already. But they do their main damage with the weapon and are designed for nearly pure weapon damage. What I would change however is spell resistance. The explosoin works best while you are inside a group, so you are in melee range. Using a bow takes away shield lore and with this one of the elves best melee defenses. Crystal skin is of cause a nice protection, but only as long as the enemies are doing physical damage. Doing a crystal skin at casters with spell reflect on it and a fire skin at melee enemies with non physical damage and melee reflect on it would be best. I would change spell resistance for Pyromancer focus. I know this double skin theory is from the shield maiden, but I think it is a useful approach for your ghost elf too.