chattius

Once upon a time there was a young elf who wished to be able to cast every spell in the world. But sadly she wasn't good in concentrating on her studies. So she learned every spell but then she coudn't concentrate enough to keep more than one buff up. When she spent time to work on two buffs, she was forgetting some spells. Her teachers were unhappy with her and wanted her to learn the same way as the other students. And a training lesson she accidently killed another student and had to leave the school..... Something like this but a longer story was the german sacred2 homework for my daughter when she asked for a faster graphic card. Play an elf with all 3 foci and lores, but without concentration, in hardcore LAN to Niob. As an outlaw she has no access to the common chest or our shoppers and smiths. I watched her playing at level 31: Skills: arcane lore, armour, arcane focus, constitution, storm focus, combat discipline, fire focus Attributes: All vitality Modfied Combat Arts, in this order: magic coup: 1 rune: change to hit, mana leech and stray damage teleport: 14 runes: less cooldown, invisibility and explosion raging nimbus: 1 rune: frequence, less enemy chance to hit, duration meteor: 1 rune: stun, more and faster Buff; unmodified regeneration buff with each extra rune in this. Sockets: half enemy can't evade and half evade, mainly cheap blue rings from shop, double run speed in boots from the griffon or the boar Her early surviving: Using a bow and each spells she found. Then around level 5 magic coup with a heavy polearm. To my surprise she modified teleport next. Collecting mobs and run in their mid, doing a combination of teleport and magic coup. She teleported to nearly the start point and damaged or killed all surrounding mobs with the explosion or the following magic coup. Then a combination with nimbus and magic coup was added for the time teleport had still its cooldown. With combat discipline all was put in one combination. I asked why she was choosing teleport first and she said because it has a cooldown so its no mistake to read runes into it to get a nice damage quickly, and the invisibility gives time for the following attacks. Next was meteor modified and doing a combination nimbus, meteor and magic coup when the teleport combination had to regenerate. Its amazing how few red potions she is quaffing after the first levels. Seems my kids can really be creative if they want something. But I wonder if mana steal will really replace GI later in game as she is hoping. Since I have no time playing currently I watch with interest her progress. How nice teleport for damage worked out early in game was a surprise for me.

Staff lore is even for staff using melee elves a waste. Since you probably fight ranged: constitution. If you wouldn't have combat discipline already I would change it to concentration if you want a finder/shopper utility character. But both buffs are to valuable to be ignored, so concentration is a must have. Luckily you need only 1 point in it. I would put each third attribute point in vitality

Interesting: If the coders prevented negative armour by capping it at 0 the 50% raise would be maximal. If NOT, and I would consider this a bug, then it becomes tricky, even division by zero may occur if the negative armour is double the FPA. (Reason for a crash?). If the negative armour is in the intervall (-2FPA,0) then the damage is boosted, for 2FPA it would be division by zero, and if in (-infinity,-2FPA) it would turn out as a positive armour damage reduction which reduces the damage, funny affect. I really hope they prevent negative armours. My 3rd daughter will be at hospital for 4 more weeks, so none of my family currently has time to do some testing. If you would like to do some tests, report your results. Edit: latest results: in the AddOn the (x-1)/(x+2) fits only in gold difficulty. In Niob having no armour does more than 3 times the damage on you. Edit2: the very latest results: In niob it is close to (x-1)/(x+0.43077), so having no armour adds 100/0.43077 percent damage. The guess is that the formula is (x-1)/(x+b) for all difficulties. The calculation of the FPA is still a riddle.

The calculation is for left and right click weapon attacks on armour. It started with standing still while easy mobs bashing on the characters who were trying out different values of armour. With this a formula was found which described the damage reduction of the armour. And for a character taking the hits, the character takes up to 50% more damage if close to 0 armour. Of cause you can't give different armours to the same monsters, and they may have mitigation which makes the testing difficult. So one prove that the same formula is applied at player damage versus NPC armour would be if armour piercing shows 50% more damage than it should do. Another possibility would be to take a high damage CA like BFG and use your niob BFG on weak beasts. The damage should outclass the armour by big numbers, so the damage should be close to 50 % higher than it is shown in your combat art screen, taking away criticals and bonus damage versus monster type. So the questions are if the same formula is valid for hits on monsters too, because we all noticed that combat arts showed sometimes way more damage than they showed in their combat art window. If you do mixed damage as with most weapons, the next calculations would be if each damage type uses the same formula. Currently I need people who do the tests, because I won't be able to play for weeks. All my spare time with 5 kids currently is needed to do hospital visits at our 3rd daughter. Nothing evil, but she has to stay there for 5 weeks and she is only 6. I can think and post while at work, but I can't play and test. And my two older daughters can't test too, because they have to sacrifice their autum breaks to care for our 20 month old twins and do more house work than usual.

Do you know if unarmed attacks have a fixed speed, or if you can boost them with leatherhat trophies and alchemy? I think unarmed is faster with trophies, but the different animations seems to have a different animation time, so I a mnot sure. I probably would have to do videos to be sure. Sadly my machine is outdated and whenever I try the framerate is down to below 10 because of the videosoftware. Single Core CPU, so it seems not much CPU time left for other stuff. And I think Kungfu Dryads can be done in this thread, because the main theme was armour piercing. And Ravaged Impact of the dryad can do this too. Edit: @Foosnark: seems you posted while I was typing. My first real character, a polearm-elf from mid decembre 2008, had magic coup at 2.4 seconds to do some left clicks while it regenerated. Beautiful animations and I did press both buttons all the time and was just moving from enemy to enemy with the mouse. Later I had to move to the next group because of chance to hit more enemies at polearm and stray damage of magic coup. At Niob I bought a nice dexterity based yellow lance with half natural fire damage and chance to hit more enemies. So my 2 fire buffs boosted the lance damage even for left clicks. Its always good if style and damage build a nice combination.

Seeing your kungfu dryad again, I wonder if armour piercing in this hard attack combat art modifier would add this 50% damage too. C(W)ould help an unarmed Dryad to do more damage if it would be this way. My unarmed test dryad did her last level at begin platin before I had the AddOn. Now with all the changes I would design her a bit different. I would give alchemy a try again and leave out bargaining because I have enough shoppers in my family.

To find some nice word for the neutral armour: If people agree I will name it fixed point armour. And since it is a function depending on damage: FPA(damage). FPA(71) = 52, if you would have 52 armour an enemy dealing 71 damage will do 71 damage. FPA(99)=72, if you would have 72 armour an enemy dealing 99 damage will do 99 damage. Armour\FPA(damage)=x So the ABDR (armour based damage reduction) would be: ABDR=(x-1)\(x+2) some numbers: x = 0 if you have no armour, so the formula will do -0.5 which means 50% more damage. x=1 then ABDR = 0 and you receive all the damage unmodified, because your armour is just the FPA x=4 then ABDR = 0.5. If you have 4 times the FPA you receive only half the damage. What is in my interest: I need more FPA values, not just the only 2 I have. So someone or myself is able to plot a graph of the function and may guess its formula. So if you stumble above some FPA numbers where the damage shown in last kill is the same that you got, please post it here. The enemy should do only physical damage for less confusion and you should add if you play bronce, silver, gold, .... in case the FBA numbers differ in the several diffuculty levels. Thanks in advance

Playing around with armour and damage tables in the 'How to become a Demi-God Thread', I stumpled above that having no armour against a damage type results in up to 50% more damage. These 50% are not like the x% damage from jewels or smith, they are a multiplier to your total damage! So the questions would be: If I have armour piercing weapons, do I get this 50% damage raise too? If I have dual wield, does the armour piercing of the 2 weapons add? So has anyone ever tried a dual-wield 2 dagger build which uses sword lore to unlock and boosts scalable armour piercing on daggers? If the praxis would prove the theory, such builds could be not only stylish, but very playable. SAdly I can't play for several weeks to test it myself.

I am at work so I can't test. But at least at one patch it was like: ..ER.. for 2 slots .WERT. for 4 slots QUERTZ for 6 slots -Z because I am german and use a qwertz-keyboard. So doing a Q for first slot was not doing anything at first levels. So I was clicking on the potions for several months. When starting alchemy characters I was using short-keys again, but I had already full 6 slots. So I am currently not sure if the above is still true. If you transform as a dragon mage, the potion slots vanish, but you can still use the keys. If you have alchemy the trophies remain unlocked even in shifted form and you can use them in dragon/berserk form with the keys. But you don't receive any boost from alchemy, since the dragon, berserker get a totally new body with their own skills, which are not the ones you have as a dragon mage.

Given that the formula (X-times_neutral_armour -1) / (X-times_neutral_armour+2) is correct, then having 0 resistance against a damage would result in (0-1)/(0+2) = -0.5. So all damage you get would be raised by (maximal) 50%. Or the other way around: combat arts with very high damage, like bosskiller with high regen, BFG, Acute Mind boosted staves ... would result in a low (close to 0) x_times_neutral_armour at the enemy. So they can get up to 50% higher damage if the enemy has no or low protection compared to your damage. Conclusions: Choosing an attack with a damage type your opponent has no resists can greatly boost your damage. If you have no armour against a damage type and get hit, you take up to 50% more damage. To be done by nice people: Still not confirmed if reduced damage from toughness adds directly to damage mitigation from equipment/buffs, so post your results. Still not confirmed if mitigation and damage reduction are done before armour is brought in. How are the maths for armour piercing, if it sets the enemy armour to zero, shouldn't have armour piercing a double effect then: damage not only not lowered by enemy armour, but also boosted by 50% because of the above formula. The armour piercing stuff probably needs an own topic. But I will wait till I get some results from others, because I can't test stuff for weeks.

Dragon mage is quite easy to start: Go elementalist and modify destroyers first, use gust of wind to keep enemies who come to close away. Gust of wind, even unmodified, is the best spell of a dragon mage in early levels. Mentalists and dragon tree is a lot tougher to play. The trick at dragon mages is to use activ spells for defense: Gust of wind to stop an attacking horde and keep it at distance, magic walls to slow down and split up mobs so destroyers can do their job easier, mahlstrom at your place and let destroyers and whirlwinds do the killing at range, away from you. Mentalism and dragon magic , without elementalism, is a bit tougher to play. I made a fun build and did a melee-dragon mage, it reached Niob, hardcore, without having a magical lore, only the foci. Learned to use the spells for defending this way. If you are used to fighters and want to play a caster: the shield maid from the high elf guide forum was custom made for my second daughter. It uses arcane and melee to start and around level 25 develops the magic part of the character. The dragon mage is the only character who lacks a weapon based combat art, and the dragon/berserk forms are not a real replacement for melee.

Because of an illness in my family I can't play for next weeks, so I can't test myself. Doing this question in lunch break at work: Is the damage reduction from toughness same as damage mitigation, sor do they have just similiar affects but don't stack, but multiply. Will 80% Mitigation +20% reduction from toughness be 100% or rather .8*.2= 16% damage equivalent to only 84% mitigation?

Regeneration per Hit was only for weapon hits, at least for the PC. And even for weapons it was not with every combat art. Trollteeth from alchemy give reg per hit from like 1.5s in silver to 4.5s in niob. They would be ultimate boss boosters if they would work with every combat art

There is some confusion because EP was changed in the AddOn to give direct magic find. It does no direct magic find before the AddOn, but it unlocks magic find on some items.

I knew that people wouldn't understand what I am trying to say: If an enemy does a fixed weapon damage of a single damage type -it doesn't matter if physical, fire , cold, ... - and you test out the damage you get with different armour numbers, then you will get an armour value at which the received damage is same as the damage shown in last kill statistics. I define this armour value as neutral armour. I could name it Banach-armour, because Banach did a nice fixed point theorem. I just needed a name for it. For mixed damage there can be up to 5 different neutral armours per enemy, for each damage type one. Neutral armour is a function of received damage, it changes with the damage you get.

Tell me if I am wrong, only Inquisitor can boost reflected damage? With the lowered reflection in the AddOn this tactic will be hard for other classes.

damage number from a thread in german forum armour-damage, monster shows 71 damage in last kill 446 - 20 430 - 21 400 - 22 356 - 24 351 - 24 326 - 26 305 - 27 - 36 (krit) 295 - 28 279 - 29 - 38 (krit) 261 - 30-------5times 240 - 32 211 - 35-------4times neutral 201 - 37 185 - 39 166 - 41 155 - 43----------------trible neutral armour 126 - 48 - 62 (krit) 110 - 52 105 - 53--------------double neutral armour 89 - 58 81 - 60 52 - 71-----------------------71 is damage shown in last kill 36 - 79 31 - 82 - 99 (krit) 15 - 92 armour-damage, monster is 99 damage 51 - 112 79 - 99------------------99 is damage shown in last kill 161 - 74-----double 243 - 60-----trible So if you look at the line where the received damage is same as the damage shown in last kill by the enemy and define the armour there is neutral-armour (it seems to have no effect on your received damage compared to original damage). Then having double the neutral armour is lowering your received damage by 25%, 3 times the neutral armour is reducing by 40%. So if mitigation is calculated first, before the armour kicks in, than mitigation lowers the damage and therefor the needed neutral armour. So your armour has way better effect too if you have mitigation. Calculating with fractions to find a formula, I am proud of this, because I found the laws using my ancient brain which was trained long ago to calculate without a claculator: 2 times the neutral armour: 75% damage, 1/4 lower 3 times the neutral armour: 60% damage, 2/5 lower 4 times the neutral armour: 50% damage, 3/6 lower 5 times the neutral armour: 43% damage, 4/7 would be 57% less, fits 6 times the neutral armour: 37% damage, 5/8 would be 62.5%, close to 37.5 7 times the neutral armour: 32% damage, 6/9 would be 66.6%, 33.3% would be it, rounding error probably 8 times the neutral armour: 30% damage, 7/10 lower, fits (X-times_neutral_armour -1) / (X-times_neutral_armour+2) would be the general formula then. So with a hell of time I probably have to re-do my calculation what is better: toughness or constitution, because toughness lowers the damage in two ways in the armour calculation too: giving more armour while reducung the neutral armour. Lower neutral armour is obviously good and not bad in the above calculations. I hope someone with better english knowledge translates that all in something people can understand. I couldn't find a good word for neutral armpour for example: neutral armour, base armour, just-even-armour, ....

I did something similiar with my full 3 aspect character. You can take concentration away and use only barkskin as buff, take away shield lore too. Take hunter focus and tactics lore and modify dustdevil in gold for damage. Its quite amazing to see how good dust devil does in damage doing if you have ancient magic to break physical immunities. The enemies in melee range to you are damage while you stand in the dust devil while it boosts your evasion. So you have attack spells out of 3 aspects. Without shield lore I prefer at higher levels the unique ice shield with multichannel damage mitigation.

Sadly we had to search for a person who got lost in the forest at most of the weekend, so I had only time to reach level 22. So the thread is still actual. So far I did: 02 concentration (5) to unlock the foci 03 armour lore (1), the second skill I was sure that I would need it 05 bargaining (22), started with an empty chest so no money on the first levels 08 Gods (1). did Testa, pushed it with orbs and general skills jewelry, collected a big horde, took a mentor, activated Testa, collecting the loot, selling it and buying better stuff while Testa was regenerating 12 arcane focus (22): magic coup (sure hit, mana steal and stray damage), then GI (storm and life) 18 ice focus (5): crystal skin (slow), raging nimbus (frequency) The numbers in () are the points I already put in the skill. If I am not fighting with the god powers I use a combination raging nimbus/magic coup and have a bow as a weapon. The Nimbus is slowing the enemies so that the chance that I hit the target with an arrow is bigger. And I need the hit to regenerate the combination with manasteal. The reason I use a bow is to kill from a distance if possible. Trying staff and shield for manasteal attacks the character often has to turn to hit. Ranged weapons have a chance to miss, but not this nasty and time eating orientation/turning to the enemy. Probably I will later use life leech shurikens even in normal combat, because it allows to recharge combination from the stand. On level 25 I plan Alchemy, at 35 perception. THis way I delay the decision for mky last 2 skills a bit. So the 2 last skills are open: Constitution and Fire focus, to have fire as second damage if target is ice immune, and fire skin for melee fighting Constuitution and Ancient Magic: To break immunities and better damage at only ice for damage Ancient Magic and Fire focus: All in Vitality and hope that faster killing and more variety in defense spells replaces constituition The animations are quite slow, because I am not allowed to take lores. I really have to get used to these slow casting and attacks.

We did some special rules for our 5th challenge, the first with the AddOn: hardcore 4 player lan 4 general skills only foci are allowed to modify combat arts, this includes even the first point if you choose a lore only 2 defensive skills are allowed you start with an empty chest your character class is from a lottery (obviously I got the elf and not the dryad I hoped for) All ideas and good wishes are welcome.

I know that around x-mas 2008 I finished niob with a polearm melee-elf at level 93. Build didn't survive my eye surgery and changing to a new computer with way bigger screen. arcane lore and focus, ice focus, fire focus, concentration, armour, constitution, tactics, polearms and speed lore All attributes dexterity, since dex-based polearms had less damage, but more than half fire damage if you found a nice yellow one in niob. And the 2 fire buffs really boosted that for left clicks, doing like 8000 damage left click while having magic coup at 1 second. Socketed a ice piece to have ice damage and slow from left clicks. Was not bad for a first real character. I was mainly running without fighting much except champions. Defense came from spells, expulse magic, cascading shroud, meteors, raging nimbus, all modified for stun, slowing, less for damage, 2 possible skins, ..... But that was single player, and I had 5 deaths, one at silver when our twins climbed on my knees and I wasn't looking at screen, and then the nasty turtle champions entering niob: Stray damage magic coup, chance to hit more enemies from polearms and I hit out of screen turtles, not knowing what killed me. 3 More deaths to reproduce what it was, since my survival bonus was down anyway. Where the last deaths before I lost the character at around level 140. My alchemy melee elf without weapon skill finished niob at level 110. mainly 4 people LAN. This character is hardcore.

The AddOn will bring the chest carrying-imp to everyone. You press X and the imp with your chest arrives. I really like it. I play the german AddOn already.

Thats why I left out DoT as I said in first line: The AddOn has some beasts which do strange DoT which seem to ignore mitigation (the new direct damage modifier?), then more hitpoints would be better. x% Life leech attacks do more damage if you have more hitpoints, but you die after same number of hits, because it are % of your maximum life. I did this calculation mainly for planing a long time character, not much time to play. So if mitigation gets dampened to never reach 100% in a possible patch, I wanted to know which values of mitigation would make it useful if I can only do constitution or toughness. Currently I think that only Serafim and TG should take toughness instead of constitution to be prepared for a possible fix of mitigation. Another factor in virtuality hitpoints are melee fighters: life leech works on real life, so 100 life leech would be 1000 virtual at 90% mitigation, 100hp regen per second would be 1000 virtual, but not in combat since no constitution. I was choosing constitution for my melee dragon mage now. I think that I can do 45% allchannel mitigation with armour. I would need every socket with mitigation jewels to beat constitution, greatly reducing my CTH and damage with staves because of niob-smith. But I wear every piece of mitigation which I can get without doing too much compromises. The AddOn has halved +allSkills jewels, but better orbs: Unique orbs can have a resistance and a skill like toughness, or double resistances, like 2 times fire, or fire and ice but no skill. All this makes the planing even more tricky. But since I had to start somewhere, and skills are chosen quite early in playing I calculated with this rough numbers do play already and do the fine tuning with equipment while winning experience with the character.

A socketed damage modifier changes the boosted damage, as does magic coup. Crystal skin boosts the ice damage of a weapon with natural ice damage, like ice flash. Then a damage type socket changes this already boosted ice damage. Magic coup works in a last step with the already boosted and transformed damage from all the steps before. The damage boosting is done in step one by crystal skin, not when magic finally transforms the damage. Doing a damage modifier in a socket at magic coup helps to transfor mmore damage into magical damage. Say that you have a lava piece which changes 50% physical to fire and magic coup changing one third of physical to magic. Step one will give you 50% physical and 50% fire, because of the lava piece. Now magic coup will transform one third of the 50% physical and all the fire damage into magical: result 33.3% physical, 66.7% magical compared to 66% physical and 33% magical without the lava piece. So a damage modifier helps you to do SAME total damage but more magical damage and less physical.

We upgraded to F-Secure 2010 at weekend and noticed that sacred2 was no longer starting up. I supposed that it would perhaps be some heuristic scans and unloaded f-secure from its unload button. Sacred2 was working again, so I stopped my daughter to do a new install on her machine. After a failed searched for Sacred2 yesterday at F-Secure today I searched for SecuRom in their knowledge base and found this: We play already the AddOn. If this affects activating or revoking too isn't written. So this post is mainly to prevent days of frustration when Sacred2 is no longer running. Heuristic virus scans have trouble with SecuRom. As have some tools from wininternals.