chattius

The beginning - first thoughts about a horse rider In sacred1 our oldest daughter liked to play characters riding a horse. Now she and our second daughter hoped to play horse characters in sacred2 too. But sadly: You can't use combat arts or buffs on a horse. So nearly everyone who tried a horse-character had the same thoughts: melee combat with the only weapon which allows some area damage: polearms. I had a little challenge with friends to do a horse-soldier lan party half a year ago, because we didn't want overpowered solo-characters when we planed party-play. So I was running some tests with characters I had already to see what would affect horse combat arts: Ancient Magic, Intelligence, Combat Discipline, Concentration and most important Riding. I said okay, horse combat arts are spells, if I want the most out of them I should add riding to a character which is designed as a caster, my choose was the dryad. There are only 3 classes with ancient magic and the dryad was the best compromise between defense and good intelligence. She played nice, but I noticed the way too long regeneration times horse-Combat Arts have. They are about 4-6 times longer than listed. So I left the character on the harddisc, mainly as a testbed if I would get some new ideas. While playing around with my mainly alchemy builds I designed an all aspect dryad which I planed for testing all possible dryad guides, or at least most of them. So for example I boosted the attack value and attack speed of a single staff with alchemy and used acute mind to boost its damage. Just like the dualwield-int-staff-build from viper, but only one staff, but with a shield. I had to sacrifice some defensive stuff for multi-aspect, so I wanted at least a shield. And sure as hell, I tried a horse with this build too, no riding skill, but I was able to kill a whole group with a single charge in gold: Unmount, turn on Acute Mind, mount and charge into the group. While Acute Mind still up, I used my still int-boosted staff to kill some stranglers. I showed it to my daughter, and she started a Pferdeflüsterin (german for female horse whisperer). The character got the name because unmount, acute mind, mount looked like speaking with the horse. But because of the extreme long regeneration times none of our family liked to play the character more than an hour. It was just not enough fun. It was okay for 15-20 minutes, but the idea had the weakness that you had 30 seconds of nothing everytime you killed a group, while waiting for the horse-ca to regenerate. So today, while posting in a thread about my all aspect dryad in the german forum I got an idea: Why not use long lasting combat arts in the time the horse-Combat Arts regenerate. Designing the character Skills We start with the skills a horse-ca using dryad should have: Riding, Ancient Magic Since we have traders and a smith in our family character pool, we will use alchemy to unlock riding. From my melee-elf I know that I can kill a boss with alchemy and a life leech shuriken alone. So we are at 3 skills now. Now add some defense. The character will have no buffs while on the horse and she has to unmount to turn on acute mind. So she will be fragile as soon as she unmounts for a while. So first after unmounting will be creating a dust devil. We will modify if for shorter cooldown, lasting longer and doing damage. To modify it and to more damage with it while shortening its regeneration time we need tactic lore and hunter focus. Both skills are also needed to do weapon damage. So we are at 5 skills now. We want acute mind to boost our damage for horse-ca, dust devil and the staff. Also we have to use barkskin if fighting indoors. So nature focus will be our 6th skill and nature lore our 7th because it helps boosting our intelligence. We need some defense, with dust evil already doing evasion and considering shield lore to be better than reflexes anyway:shield lore will be our 8th and armour lore our 9th skill. That leaves 1 skill: concentration, constitution, reflexes, ... I will take none of them. I will do voodoo focus. So this results in 2 tactics, 3 alchemy, 5 hunter, 8 shield, 12 riding, 18 armour, 25 nature focus, 35 ancient magic, 50 voodoo focus and 65 nature lore. Attributes Every point will be put into vitality, till I know that the character is robust. There is no need for an attribute to boost weapon damage, since we use an int-based staff. Acute mind will give enough intelligence for all our needs. Stamina would be an option, but devil has a cool down and horse-Combat Arts regeneration times are bugged anyway. What is not covered? Enemies doing magic attacks. I hope that horses with block combat arts scaling with riding will solve this. The playstyle we unmount while our horse-ca regenerates we build a fortified camp: dust-devil and 2-3 totems we turn on acute mind we mount we charge the closest group while acute mind is up we do a half-circle gathering some enemies and lead them into our fort we unmount we do acute mind to kill them with our now again boosted stationary weapons we mount we search a place for our next fort ... repeat So far the idea. We use the regeneration time of the horse-Combat Arts to kill with long lasting Combat Arts. May even try to spread disease quicker when riding. The combat arts: We will have enough points to modify all nature and hunter combat arts. Voodoo focus will be brought to 75 for its mastery. This allows us to modify 3 voodoo arts. My choose would be Totem, Black Curse and Viperish Disease. How to charge: Charge builds a small aura in front of the horse. While charge is active (my record is 14 seconds) it will damage and stun an opponent. The aura vanishes if you fail to find free terrain to continue charging. So the trick is to use the keys and not the mouse. With the 'W' for forward and 'S' for backwards keys it is way easier to keep on charging. Hard to describe, you have to try it out. At fixed camera: Bring the enemies on north-position of the screen. Aim for a point above them. Short before reaching the point press the backwards key, if you are south of the group, press forwards again. You can do 4-5 runs through a big group this way. Somehow each target can only be hit once while charge is active. But with acute mind on most are one-hits anyway. At turning camera: Pressing backwards will make you charging in a circle, because the camera tried to follow the backwards movement. My daughter managed to use this, but with my bad eye I prefer the fixed camera. Final Words The character will be played by my daughters. The purpose of this build is: To make horses useful, but not frustrating. It should be able to kill with different combat arts. For example doing nature indoors while hunting/voodoo/riding outside. So they can discuss with their friends/classmates about dryads but won't have to try out each build for dryads on their own. So if you exspected a thread about a powerful uber-character: sorry, this character is mainly for fun. At least I think so. But my just for fun melee-elf without a weapon skill is hardcore 162 now and my just for fun all-aspect hardcore dryad us 141. And their playtime:experience ratio is not much away from special designed characters from friends.

It looks like a monkey, it annoys opponents with its throwing fire fruits(balls) and makes them angry, but it rarely kills them. All this is more monkey than demon Aus dem Bauch heraus (Whats that in english? On a gut level, acting on instinct?): Combat discipline and ancient magic and trying to get the attack speed from jewelry. You have bargaining. Probably you need 5 jewels early and later 2-3 jewels for full attack speed. Cutting this away from this build discussion and starting a topic in console section about combat disciplin/attack speed and experiences to replace it with jewels might be a good idea. Because I don't want to give any bad advice and I have no experience with console playing. And the answer of this question affects other classes too. Sorry that I am not of more help.

You can't use magic coup again before magic coup animation has shot the arrow and the arrow reached the target place. So yes, shooting at a high distance may result in something like 1 second or more. I prefer shurikens for several reasons: quick, still have a shield and you find x% life leech on them. Speaking of the PC-version: The statistics for last kill show the hit chance for normal left clicks, which is very close to the ones of magic coup for low levels. BUT: even unmodified magic coup has a build in hit chance too. (Confirmed by a developer in german sacred forum). So if you get better in magic coup(50+ combat art level) you get a way better hitchance than left clicks. For a hybrid build which uses spells and weapons I would modify magic coup bronze for sure hits. Damage rings will work on melee and spells, but rings for better hit chance are a waste for the spell component. So if you plan combinations, I read this as spells and melee, don't do a weapon lore at all. Magic coup will hit better and better in late game, even if you don't have a weapon lore. My Alchemy elf is currently at 40% left click hit chance and I don't see her miss normal mobs with magic coup. For a few hard to hit champions and bosses I have to use trophies. On a console I would do 2 weapon sets: Shuriken/throwing knife/sword/shield which give just enough hit chance with jewels in its sockets for the normal mobs. Do a special boss killer weapon slot: x% life leech shuriken/shield with every socket in this slot adding to your hit chance: sure hit, enemy can't evade and such. But I wonder which spells you want to use? Cobalt strile, teleport with explosion, expulse magic modified for undead hunt? All these spells do magical damage, magic coup does too. So doing ancient magic into a hybrid build is kinda a must have to break magic immunities later in game. With 75 points put in the aspect your skin is from, fire or crystal, you can modify 3 combat arts. If fire, I would vote for fire skin, fire monkey and meteor (for its defense, stun, more and longer lasting meteors). You can modify fire skin for more fire damage and the fire monkey will later five more fire damage too, so together with ancient magic you will get some nice damage which is not arcane, If crystal: crystalskin, cascading shroud and raging nimbus ? Again, ancient magic will help a bit with the damage. But getting ranged lore would eat 2 skills. Too much in my opinion if you plan a hybrid.

Well for people who like to know before buying I thought my answer more for guessing why the developers made some with strength and some with dexterity.

hah, you will have 500% SB in notime then. Does this mean that Gogo eats all the time? For myself I do hard with the french language and I can never decide if I am a gourmet or a gourmand or both. 12:00, time for lunch at work. Something tasty like 'Handkäs mit Musik' today because its hot and close to a thunder storm - and a glass of apple wine. I like to live in a barbaric nation and then in the most barbaric state of it, fear our cuisine.

On the PC ranged is a right skill, you would need a left skill to unlock it. Its not the speed, but the lower damage with magic coup which is to be considered when using ranged weapons. weapon lore gives: attack value double hits at mastery - not for magic coup attack speed - not for magic coup weapon level - = attack speed ,see above unlock weapon modifiers - most one hand uniques have none to be unlocked I wrote a guide about a melee hardcore elf here in this section. This elf is using alchemy and not a weapon lore. I noticed that I needed a really high hit chance only against bosses. For these few fights I could use alchemy trophies, optimizing my hit chance to hit all normal mobs. But on the console: I heard that alchemy is a bit complex to use there. It is not possible to replace a potion slot with a trophy for more frequent use? Like putting trollteeth at the place green potions normally are. ? If you think that you will be able to use trophies without too much finger acrobatic and if you really want to play ranged: You have already bargaining, so adding alchemy would not mean an extra skill to unlock it. Just a thought. I like my melee elf which has alchemy but no weapon skill a lot: total freedom in which weapon I use for fighting, be it ranged, staves, swords, ... But since I have no console I don't really know how alchemy is be used on them.

I played my first polearm character -a lancer elf- in sacred2 as soon as I had some time and bought the game in decembre 2008. I played hunter seeker spear serafim in sacred1 and a Jabazon in diablo2 when everybody sayed that lancer-amazons are too weak to be played. In Sacred2 the big advantages of a polearm were there biggest disadvantages in pre-2.43 too. You never knew which targets would be hit by magic coup in combination with a polearm chance to hit more enemies. So I gave up on polearms when I had to undergo an eye surgery. I wasn't able and willing to check surroundings in a wide radius for reflectors first before doing a magic coup. 2.43 lowered reflection damage by a big amount, so a polearm-elf could now be playable. Not having a shield makes characters without toughness a bit tricky defense-wise. An elf can't even have reflexes. So my approach was a lancer-elf which used fireskin for its reflect and cascading shroud for its evasion. The fire vulnerability of cascading shroud is a bit weakened by fire mitigation from the skin. I suffered 5 deaths with the lancer, 1 in early gold when our 1 year old twins tried to climb on my knees and 4 in niob when first facing out of screen reflectors. Last 3 of them to find out what the hell happened. One of the advantages of some polearms is their x% life leech. X% life leech is depending on the maximal hitpoints of your enemy. So a 2% leech is 200 extra damage at a 10.000hp mob, but 20000 at a 1.000.000hp boss. This extra damage can't be resisted and is healing you. So a polearm character is not really needing a combat art optimized for boss killing. And the last reason to play polearm-elf: no shield hiding the beauty. And no she is not wearing these negligee-like set armours, but yellow stuff, so she looks a bit more than a warrioress. Strength or Dexterity for polearms I think the polearm is using strength if used active: spears for thrusting, beard-axes thrust and swing. While anti cavalry weapons are more dexterity. You press the end in the ground and you have only to aim with the tip against a rider. So beard-axe and spear = strength, and lance and gleve = dexterity. But since polearms were made in millions of different styles there will be people saying that long beard-axes and spears could be used to stop horses too, and that some gleves had edges and were swung, ..... Some languages copied weapon names from other languages but not in the same meaning. In germany there is Kuse and Glefe. The tips look same but the length is up to 5 feet for the Kuse and 10 feet for the Glefe. So here the Glefe is way closer to lances than in french or english usage.

I think afk means away from keyboard. So he/she/it can do experience while preparing the lunch, being at work, ....

Just out of interest, what would be the best/easiest hardcore single player niob shopper? The theory of such a character would be a bit different to normal ones. Designed for around level 50. So scaling reflect, blocks and evades haven't reached most of their power yet. It should be able to kill boss and survive. Is a life leech thrower best because you can trim it for better defense?

Spell resistance is a waste on elves. Replace it by arcane focus and you get expulse magic to block spells, you get regeneration buff and a teleport. Fire and arcane of ice and arcane are very easy dual aspect builds. Fire and ice is a bit more complex. Most people who tried it, found that after ancient magic mastery there is no need for a second aspect.

For my melee high elves I prefer the fire skin and not the crystal one: Reflect melee, arrow block. Then add shield block and a yellow shield scaling with it and some evasion in equipment or from cascading shrouds or trophies. if I would aim for something close to invulnerable I would change perception in my alchemy using elf from the guide section here into storm focus. Sounds weird, but a melee elf needs no weapon skill. For the physical armour crystal skin may bring, if I really need high physical, I use alchemy and the iron ore trophy. In niob at 300 alchemy such a trophy gives 3000 physical armour more than 50 seconds. Now this 3000 doesn't sound much, but this 3000 count as an armour piece. So armour lore, smith arts and all boost this 3000 even more. And remember there is no mitigation for life leech., for the people who play PvP.

None of both if you are highelf. Can't do toughness anyway and you have expulse magic, crystal skin mirror and other options to fight enemy Combat Arts. None of my characters have toughness or spell-resistance. But that is just normal, giving that the 9 month I play sacred2 I spend 8 with melee elves and 1 with a dryads. The 5 other classes I will play till sacred3 is hopefully out in 3 years

So the highelf is the only character which can't reach 100% all damage mitigation? So my melee elf can call all other characters tricksters I was close to this idea, but just against fire damage. Avoiding getting outnumbered for my HC-melee-elf, so I fought mainly in hallways: seraphim island, temple-guardians. So I optimized my fire protection and came close to 78% fire mitigation. In germany we have a saying: 'Nicht kleckern, Klotzen!' = Don't spread, focus. Made famous by a panzer/tank general against the french, which had more and better tanks but put 2 in each infantary platoon instead having a full tank division. Mitigation is same, you have to bring it really high, you can't stop half way. This is especially valid for high elves and dryads. You don't want to socket 10 amulets with 2.5% mitigation just to reach 25%. But if you are already at 70% and have a working offense you may spend the 10 jewels, if you have them. So to have a bit of challenge back to my horse-whisperer dryad. She only did 231000 damage with her horse combat art and I want to reach the million.

Most of the crashes friends in our playgroup suffered from were related to overclocking and too much details, driving the temperature of the graphic card way too high. I suffered no crash yet on my nearly 3 year old machine. Well I have an extra partition with only vista, service packs and sacred2 and all background services cut away if not needed for playing. So some of the reported crashes might be conflicts with other software. I played a hunterseeker polearm-seraphim in sacred1 so my first character in sacred2 was a polearm melee elf. No damn shield blocking the look of my beautiful elf. From 9 month sacred 2 I played 8 melee elves. Now with sacred2 I don't miss sacred1. Wonder what the AddOn will bring end of this month. Too bad these troubles at ascaron, I always wished for a new patrizier like game. I still play patrizier after all these years.

I think I add the question here: any numbers for the effect of accumulator or mechanical part trophies? How good are they in regenerating shields .Will they work even in combat? I feel ashamed ,but I never played a seraphim or a TG in sacred 2 yet, they looked too futuristic for my taste.

I have a self-sufficient melee elf with perception and bargaining, but without a weapon skill. Nice to play ,and who ever said that elves are fragile in close combat should look at her in the guide section. My dryad has only bargaining, I used alchemy to unlock it. Alchemy added weapon combat power to my totem dryad. But the discussion was if a character can be played starting with an empty chest and not using bargaining. My family has a shadow warrior smith who was played first by whole family to have a smith for all following characters. It was quite robust and was never getting allSkills stuff from the common chest before it reached niob. Then a smith equipment was made with a hell of allSkills to reduce chance that jewels are destroyed at unsocketing. In my opinion bargaining (or another shopper character) helps to play extreme characters: weapon less dryads, horse soldiers and such who need an optimal equipment to be playable.

I tried to use regeneration per hit around xmas 2008. But it seemed it is a cool down and not a regeneration time? So I wasn't seeing any results for half regeneration effects too. Don't know if stuff changed meanwhile, but I doubt it. So the only idea left was to bring it to mastery and use as many +all skill stuff as possible. But I gave up on priest characters when I had my eye surgery.

My melee elf did all vitality because she was started pre 2.43. 2.43 reduced reflection damage by a big amount, and reflections were the only thing I really feared in hardcore. So obviously priorities change with time, patches, play experience or even optimizing equipment. The addon will bring a new(optional) regeneration system and it is very close. So I limit my thoughts on recent builds I play and which don't need stamina: All ready mentioned: pure left clicks, 3 high-buff inquisitors and such. Horse-Builds which use horse-Combat Arts are another. You get your horse-ca level by your level/riding-skill ratio. No chance to eat more runes. Regeneration per hit builds are obvious not needing (more) stamina. My daughters melee elf with mana leech mod has magic coup at its malus and only .4 seconds regeneration time-all goes vitality, because hardcore. But I am crazy and even play alchemy builds. Most Combat Arts are overkill on normal mobs already. So I use a weapon/shield combination which boosts CA-level when I fight a boss and quaff a alchemy boosted concentration potion. For nomal mobs I use a weapon/shield without boosts, the rest of equipment balanced to kill normal mobs without too much overkill and therefore lower reg-times. I wonder how the regeneration times will be affected by the addon. My current character project is to do multiaspect guides for some classes. They are planed for people who just started and want to test out a class before deciding to play a highly specialized fast leveler. Or for people like me with 5 kids, who can't play all, but want to be able to discuss when work allows some forum reading. So my dryad is able to use ranged, int staves, nature and vodoo magic and for fun can kill weapon less with nice animations. She had to sacrifice some damage and defense, but somehow she is level 141 hardcore now. So I plan to collect some of these jack of all trades for several classes so people like me with not much time can test a lot of stuff in a single build. Somehow most guides are for fast leveling power characters. And not for the one character per class you play for a year and which still offers fun, because there is always still a playstyle variant in it you haven't discovered yet. I bet everyone without much time to play stumpled in something like: You read a guide of a fast leveling character. You think, fantastic, thats what I need when I want to reach level 150 in 6 month. But then a patch balanced all (like disease for dryads) and you have a highly specialised character you spend half of your playtime in and which can't be worked out to something else. So I will do/collect guides for people who are old and in their twenties like me, hexadecimal numbers of cause, older than 32 in decimal. These builds should be very flexible in their possibilities to do damage and reasonable defensive to avoid dying. Also I like these characters to be played by my kids. Not boring ladder storming, but rather find solutions to master a situation.

I played a weapon-skill-less melee-elf and my daughter did sword lore instead perception. She now reached sword mastery this weekend and so I asked her if she was seeing any doublehits, the result: Doublehits from Mastery are not triggered by Magic Coup I noted this in the variant section of my guide, since the original guide has no weapon skill at all. So a short write up what a weapon skill does for magic coup: I gives some hit chance and it unlocks some modifiers. Nothing else because attack speed for magic coup comes from arcane lore, and thats why a too high weapon level has no effect on magic coup. Magic lore has a hidden attack chance in addition to its first modifier. So even last kill shows only 50%, these 50% are only for the left click. Magic coup may hit to 90%, but it is not shown. A developer confirmed the hidden chance in german forum. So even without a weapon skill but high magic coup levels you will be able to hit normal= non-bosses beasts with a high enough hitchance. I was kinda puzzled that my level 90 magic coup seemed to hit 100% except a few bosses, without moifying it for sure hit, without using alchemy trophies and without a weapon skill or speed lore and without putting points in strength or dexterity. So now I know that magic coup and some more weapon combat arts have a hidden hit chance. Weapon mastery may be needed in high levels to unlock weapon modifiers, but there is no need to reach mastery before these weapons occure. So doing inferno mastery before weapon mastery may be wise.

I feel so guilty. In january most people said that alchemy would be a total senseless skill. Then our play group (all adult volunteer firefighters and sitting around at fire watch building at weekends) decided to do characters with at least 3 green/general skills. We wanted to limit our damage output so that party playing would be needed. So I started a melee elf with no weapon skill but having alchemy. Magic Coup was doing more than enough damage and my only fear to die in hardcore wit ha melee elf before niob were reflections. So I said no to double-hits from a weapon skill to have a better chance to survive reflections. Attack speed of magic coup is not affected by weapon skill, again no weapon skill needed. Higher level weapons just reduce attack speed, which I don't need. Weapon skill would unlock weapon modifiers, but most uniques don't have modifiers which have to be unlocked. Link to this elf: Self sufficient alchemy based weapon-skill-less HC melee elf A shadow warrior my daughter is playing: Shadow Warrior with alchemy Our family dryad to test out nearly all dryad ideas in a single build: Dryad build to test a hell of possible dryad guides The PvP Melee elf my daughter uses to slaughter her classmates, sadly noone answered to this post, guess lacj of alchemy knowledge: PvP Melee-Elf with alchemy I did a guide about alchemy into the german forum, when I noticed that most people never considered alchemy and called my idea not playable (Its 161 in HC niob now). In this alchemy guide I mentioned some ideas, which characters could use alchemy: Melee inquisitor: At bosses without souls he may have a problems to hit. But low hit chance against bosses is something where alchemy shines. Boosting attack value by 1000% at 300 alchemy in niob. Dryads with bargaining: They need bargaining unlocked, why not alchemy. If it is a caster dryad, she will get left click life leech shurikens at 150% attack speed against bosses for free. And no need for tactic lore or a weapon skill. Or take these double staff dryads. Double-wielding for more damage and hit chance with staves. Alchemy would be one staff, but you have a shield. Kungfu Dryads: The animations for fist attacks are there, just no weapon skill. Alchemy can be used for criticals, hit chance and attack speed. While rings with damage x-x do the base damage. Modify hunter Combat Arts so that a combinations poisons your fists and then knockback the enemies for better crowd control and let damage lore do poison DoT. Funny build, nice animations. Horse-Builds: No Combat Arts or Buffs on a horse. Alchemy helps a bit. PvP: Trophies to block root effect and arrows or give physical armour..... seraphim's: None of my family played a seraphim's higher than gold yet, so no experience. But archangel's wrath is close to magic coup so that may work too All my new builds have alchemy. Once you get used to it you use the trophies without thinking. Too bad that alchemy is kinda clumsy to use on consoles. Dobri: Your guide to the respawning orc cave was very useful. An alchemy build which needs troll trophies can get them there in greater numbers than are needed to empty the cave. My melee elf does 3 runs while 1 trollteeth trophy and finds 2-3 trophies in these runs. Also more than enough mentor potions to have them up all the time during the runs and have some saved for other areas.

Are you using horse-Combat Arts at all. Do you have any experience with them? My oldest daughter is playing a horse-build which uses the horse-Combat Arts. It is terrible to play for a longer time, because it needs a high real life concentration. The problems seem to be that horse-Combat Arts are spells, so their damage comes from intelligence ,ancient magic, combat discipline and riding skill. Horse_CA's regeneration timeare no where near the time which is shown in their window. She is playing a dryad with acute mind. She has to unmount, start AM, mount do a charge or 2 while it is up, ride a distance, unmount, AM, mount, ....... Charge with AM is able to kill a whole group. The possible remaining champion she kills with AM boosted staff. She used alchemy to unlock riding, so hitchance trophies from trolls are always needed. It seems that charge attacks are best done with the forward and backwards keys. If you use horse-Combat Arts, what is your preferred tactic? TIA chattius

Riding and Combat Discipline: Damage Yes, Regeneration-Time No. Riding CA can't be put in combinations( 2.40). Horse Combat Arts are Spells, so ancient magic, intelligence, ... boost their damage. The regeneration time on horse Combat Arts are bugged still in 2.43. Alchemy: I know I am crazy, but since I am sure that I am not a zombie and therefore living: At least one person played a build into hardcore niob (Lvl161) which is heavily using alchemy. Weaponless magic coup elf, using alchemy to get the hit chance versus bosses. This character has no combat discipline because I play her pure melee, without nimbus or meteors as close combat control spells. As a melee elf she can't use toughness. My Dryad staff/shield-horse rider used alchemy to unlock riding. Acute Mind used to boost horse Combat Arts and staff damage. Alchemy used to unlock riding. Having Alchemy I didn't take concentration, just as Gogo. Rider builds are something different. My daughters call this build the Pferdeflüsterin (female horse-whisperer) because the dryad has to unmount , start Acute Mind, mount and then can kill whole group with a charge. This unmount/mount looks as if she is whispering to her horse. Some surviving stranglers can be killed with the staff before AM is down again. I don't play the build for more than an hour because it needs concentration, but it is a funny build. Dryad has no staff skills, so I used alchemy for hit chance, attack speed and criticals on staff attacks. The character is kinda a shared character, played by everyone of our family. Classmates of my daughters are most often stunned how powerful horse Combat Arts can be. I don't think that some skills are totally useless. Some just need certain other skills/ideas to work. For example you want a dryad bargainer. One of Divine Protection, Alchemy or Enhanced Perception will be needed to unlock bargaining. If I choose alchemy, then I have access to better heal-, mentor- concentration-potions and the trophies. As a caster dryad I would only need one Buff really: barkskin. We all know that most of our spells are overkills in 90% of the fights. So why not use concentration-potions in these 10% and don't take concentration at all. In the 10% tough fights we use a weapon/shield combination with a lot of +CA for our main attack and reduce the higher Reg-time with potions. (My oldest daughter plays such a dryad at the moment, to buy equipment for my kungfu-style dryad).

Weaken doesn't seem to stack. Have to test it again when I am back at my play machine at weekend. A way to test this is: use x% life leech shurikens against Bosses. x% life leech is calculated from the maximal hitpoints of the target. So with 2% life leech and the target having 1000000 hitpoints you will see 20000 extra damage each time you hit. After hitting the boss with a cobalt strike modified to weaken , this extra damage will go down to like 19000 damage. The first hit after the cobalt strike will still show 20000 damage. It seems you have to wait one burn effect (well burn if it would be fire DoT, I lack the english word for magic damage) before weakening is in effect. Following 7-8 hits will all show the lower extra damage, then it jumps back to normal extra damage. If magic coup would trigger weakening effect and damage lore boost its effect and it would stack, that would be a hell of a magic coup elf, because not only the hitpoints would go down, the strength and dexterity and other stats would too. Wonder how I can test it without damage lore in my melee elf. Thain's axe in one slot, and swapping to shuriken after a hit? Have bosses at same level always the same hitpoints or is there some random?

You didn't want to know what I thought what a cookie cutter build was. As someone who avoided english at school, I thought a cookie cutter would be something like a daisy-cutter I know from my army time. A big bomb with a pole on its top so it explodes a metre above ground and mewing all down like daisies. So I thought cookie cutters would be mass Area of Effect builds too. Daisy-Cutter at wikipedia But when reading about cookie-cutters in wikipedia I saw the difference. Characters who are 100% clones of characters who proved to be good. Like Henry Ford's T-Model, you can have every colour, as long it is black.

Added some stuff to make the guide fit for 2.43.