chattius

Even more robust if taking alchemy for enhanced perception. EP unlocks better experience chance and magic find on item. Alchemy does longer laster mentor potions, heal potions really heal full in niob and nice trophies. Allows even to use one hand staff with acute mind or life leech shurikens in your build without any changes. Disadvantage: no magic find and experience items can add more experience than mentor potions. Everyone should decide on his own taste.

Personally I dislike to aim at each monster individual. With magic coups stray damage you aim at the champion in a group, and the moment it dies its group normally had died already because of stray damage My old melee elf had tactics lore to unlock polearms. She was a tri-focus elf: tactics, speed lore, polearms arcane-, storm- and fire-focus, concentration and arcane lore armour and constitution Dexterity polearms can have a high amount on natural fire damage which can be boosted from fire buffs. I had magic coup way above malus at a regeneration time of 2 seconds, so I did like 2 normal hits on one magic coup. The magic coup stray damage was able to kill a whole group except champions. Following 2 normals hits killed the champ. The chance of stray damage climbs with level in magic coup. The life leech is like +x life leech per magic coup level which is then multiplied by arcane lore bonus. I think the ratio of normal hit to magic coup was 12000 normal to 38000 magic coup damage at niob.

You want to play with left click attacks and not with magic coup? Because sooner or later Magic Coup will be usable as a standard attack when its regeneration is shorter than its animation.

This is the most important line in my eyes. Sacred2 saves item properties not with a certain bit set or unset for a certain property. It is using lists. The Addon will bring a new class which needs new properties. So the lists had to be sorted new, because old lists had not enough room for new stuff. Like simple example: List1 (all skill, reg per hit, experience rate, toss from horse) List2 ( x% damage, blocking, evasion, toss from horse) So if the random numbers are 1,3 it will be all skills together with evasion. And 3,1 would be experience rate and damage. Only these numbers and the number of the lists are saved. If the AddOn needs properties like dragonaspectA and dragonaspectB they had to be put in existing lists: List1 (all skill ,reg per hit, DragonA, DragonB) List2(x% damage, blocking, evasion,reflection) The allSkill/Evasion would stay, but the expRate/damage would turn into a DragonA/damage. Thats is a quite simple explanation. So some combinations have changed with 2.43. Some because of new sorted lists and some because developers thought that stuff like expRate/x%damage was too powerful. The good thing however is that patch 2.43 brought the new save-file format already. So the AddOn shouldn't change items again. Hopefully they reworked the lists so that changing randomized items at a patch will not occur in future patches again.

I use to press expulse magic whenever I enter a cave. If I can't stay away from monsters, then the monsters should stay away from me. When the monsters run away they can't hurt me. When I am in my expulse magic circle I am quite immune to combat arts. It is working for me. Well I have expulse modded for power and the savety, not the damage, mods. Also arcane lore may have some effect too.

You can move to avoid damage. (run speed, teleport) You can scare monsters away. (expulse magic) You can be invisible. (cascading shroud, teleport) You can reflect damage. (fire skin for melee) You can block damage. (shield lore in combination wit ha scaling shield, fire skin for ranged) You can evade damage. (cascading shroud) You can defend versus damage. (shield lore, speed lore, dexterity) If all that failed: Your armour can absorb some damage. Damage mitigation can lower the damage. (fireskin for fire damage, cascading shroud for physical) If all the above failed: You hopefully have enough hitpoints left. I don't use combinations with my melee elf and her 4 hot keys are: magic coup, expulse magic, cascading shroud and shadow step. Expulse magic is one of the best protection spells in the game if it is modded for defense. A caster-elf should be way easier to play than my melee-elves and my melee-elves can survive in hard core niob. You have to find a nice and working combination of active and passive protection spells and equipment which fits to your playstyle.

Fire focus, shield lore and ancient magic would be a possibility if the first 7 skills are already fixed. You want fire focus and not lore, because the level of fire skin gives it reflect chance and more fire damage in gold mod. The level of fire demon gives more fire damage. I would modify fireskin first before level 50, then meteor for its stun at around level 80( without lore there won't be much damage but it stills stuns long enough for a magic coup) and last fire demon at level 120-130. With 75 points for fire mastery you can get 3 full modified spells. You can use cobalt strike as a ranged attack. Because you will be a bit hybrid, I would modify magic coup to sure hit and not damage as first modifier. Also sure hit helps to get some hit chance since you won't have alchemy at tough opponents. Modify GI to silver first: fire and life regeneration. Magic coup next: hit, life leech and stray damage. cobalt strike: in your case as an arcane mage: chain, chain/weaken-both are okay, explosion teleport : faster regen expulse magic : power and the other defensive stuff I would go all vitality at least till level 75. Life leech and life regeneration need a base life pool to work with. All what is changed in skills is alchemy for ancient magic, so the defense should be okay. Also console has more hotkeys so you can have a ranged cobalt strike and a meteor for stun (and a bit damage). Try to damage the opponents from a distance and if they are close use your weapon to have some extra heal with life leech. You probably have to find your own balance with hit and damage jewelry. If you play this way please give some note if it is working or not, and if not where the problems are, so we can help others players to avoiid same mistakes.

High-elf, I have most fun with my Melee-elf which has no weapon lore. The 8 month I played, 7 were different melee elves. My new character is a dryad and I 'hammered' as much builds into a single dryad as I could to try out different builds in a single character. Again no weapon lore but alchemy to allow ranged and int boosted staff combat. She play very variable and nice too. But overall I like the melee elf more. My new dryad: voodoo lore, tactics, voodoo focus, concentration, shield, armour, alchemy, nature focus, nature lore and ancient magic My alchemy-melee-elf is in the guide section.

If you were not playing on console.... I never really played an inquisitor. My oldest daughter started one, based on the experience I did with my alchemy builds for dryads and melee elves. She used bargaining to unlock alchemy. She was not using double-wielding because she likes two-hand polearms. Also the doppleganger was not as a buff. But concentration was at mastery at 75 for the 3 'normal' buffs. So if she has no souls to boost her hit chance, she uses a trollteeth to get it. The orc cave is nice for that, because it is kinda self supplying with trollteeth. Since she has no weapon skill she doesn't make any doublehits, nor can she use modifiers on weapons which need a lore. On the other side: The hit chance is get via jewels to hit champions at 100%. For bosses and hard to hit champions you use trollteeth. So the hit-chance is the same if you use energy-staves, two-handed swords, polearms.... At non reflecting bosses a polearm with x% life-leech is a fantastic weapon, at melee but not ranged reflectors you can use energy-lances,.... She gave up some damage for more flexability in PvP-duels with classmates, trophies to block root effects, giving big amount of physical armour, boost attack speed, better healing potions, mentors lasting for minutes, concentration potions reducing 60% even in niob, anti-undead potion last long enough to cross the swamp, .... But I heared that trophies are hard to use on consoles. On PC I hotkeyed trollteeth with t ( as Treffen, german for to hit), and other easy to remember keys. (Melee)-Inquisitors had always the bad rumour that they would be real bad versus single enemies. But Alchemy had a rumour of being useless too. And I really like it, mainly in PvP.

Animus: I think there is nothing for the damage but number of runes and type of head (monstertype and colour), but vodoo lore seems to give better armour. As all my characters my dryad is a weird build: vodoo lore, tactics, vodoo focus, concentration, shield, armour, alchemy, nature focus, nature lore and ancient magic I can play nature caster, totem, summoner, ranged (shuriken), int boosted staff and shield, kungfu and some more with it. I sadly have not that much time to play anymore, so this jack (Joanne) of all trades allows me to test different dryad builds in a single character and follow the discussions in the forum. Its not the best in any of the disciplines, but very close to. I put all in vitality because I had to sacrifice constitution for more versatility. But by doing shield and not reflexes and sticking to one weapon I got a better defense than the normal reflexes and double wielding builds. For each of the different playstyles I have another combination of items. The start of the character was with socketing vodoo runes for life leech, using shurikens and a shield, while totem and animus did the damage. I never took anything from the common chest ( means no use of my bargainers and smith). It is fun to play. I don't like unskilled characters, I prefer such universal builds to test stuff and then when I know how to start the character and how to play it I do a specialized ones- if I have the time

Melee-elves are very easy to play too: You only need a yellow shield with block chance scaling with shield lore. GI modified to life regeneration. Magic coup modified for sure hit ,life leech and stray damage. One of the buff skins. Put all attributes in vitality. The only item you have to find or bargain is the yellow shield and perhaps 3-4 rings with -enemy chance to evade.

I don't see sword lore in your list of skills.

I had similiar problems when deciding how I should modify my magic coup in bronze: Sure hit or hard damage. I solved it by comparing rings on level 5,35,65,95,125 ( thats the levels our shoppers are placed). Sure hit is like 30% +.2% per level , while damage is 20% +2% per level. And you can find both on rings. I found out that around level 95 when my magic coup is around level 50 the turning point was arrived. If magic coup is below level 50 then you need less sockets for damage than for sure hit. At level 50 the number is equal and above level 50 choosing hard damage would be better because you would need more sockets to get the damage than the sure hit. If it is not pure melee sure hit is better, because damage rings would work on both: spells and magic coup. On Topic: So the best way to solve the discussion would be: compare rings with fire damage and rings with -regeneration time. And look how much sockets you will need. But you will have the problem that fire focus will affect regeneration malus from the buff. So not as 'easy' to do the maths than for the magic coup modifier. I do all my calculations in sockets: Level 150 shield lore: 7 sockets with block gear, Level 150 fire skin: 5 sockets with reflect, so playing a lancer elf with crystal skin would need 12 sockets to get the defense my shield/sword elf with fire skin has. Than polearms do more damage, so I can substract damage sockets from the calculation, but since swords are overkill already.... I value skills and modifiers with a virtual socket currency. So I sell defense for offense, starting from a build which I know that it works.

I am playing a magic-coup-elf without a weapon skill but with alchemy at level 134 in niob. Since I have no weaponskill I use alchemy to give some extra hit chance versus bosses while I do the hit chance versus champions with jewels: enemy can't evade. My experiences with ranged builds: Stray damage is working and Life leech is working at magic coup. But the damage you do with ranged magic coup is way lower than if you do melee, given same weapon class and both weapons affected by dexterity. I use ranged mainly in combination with shurikens with x% life leech. So a boss with 500000 hitpoints and a weapon with 2% life leech are 10000 un-resisted extra damage each hit. My opinion: going for the ranged skill is probably a waste, because of the lower damage in ranged magic coup. If you play PC and want to test ranged magic coup builds, I would do a build which unlocks alchemy with bargaining, because you will need really good equipment.

Just to avoid some confusion: There are: A) real immunity, which means 100% damage mitigation b) ultra high armour Disregard armour is not working in case A, while life leech is. The comparision with the maths from my last post were for case B obviously.

Weapon, fitting attribute for your weapon, level of MC, arcane lore, mods: (damage, life leech, criticall/stray damage), damage +xx, +x% damage , +x% yyyy-damage ( if yyyy is a damagetype natural to your weapon), buffs which add +x% yyyy-damage (fireskin, fire monkey for weapons with natural fire damage. crystal skin for ice), combat discipline, ...... In difference to most other builds: melee elves spend not much time optimizing their damage, but optimizing their defense, mainly : you do as in soldats post: 40000 damage at 36000 hitpoints. now add doublehits, criticals and +x% monstertype damage which are not shown in the 40000 damage. You have to know which monsters can reflect your damage and how to remove reflecting auras. If you play hardcore I would really do a softcore melee elf first to know which areas are dangerous because of reflectors. I play without weaponskill-mastery because I don't want doublehit and criticals which make it hard to control reflected damage. (well I had an eye surgery so I tend to overlook some reflectors). But not enough damage is really not a problem for a melee elf.

Just found this thread. That is more or less what I was doing when I decided against a weapon lore for my magic coup hardcore elf. Balancing the hit chance against champs to around 100% and using troll tooth with alchemy on bosses for the extra hit chance. Calculations were showing that a weapon skill gave just the difference in hit chance between a champion and a boss, sometimes even less. This may be different for other classes, but it was so for a melee elf with no buff/CA affecting attack value. So melee elf with thain's axe on mobs , shurikens with x% life leech at bosses, and bows versus goblins for fun. Playing hardcore doublehits from a weapon mastery are a risc if they get reflected together with criticals. I think my alchemy elf is best for my play style: better save than sorry in hard core. And bargaining and senses toi equip my other characters.

Did Schot post his experience with regen per hit somewhere? Because this modifier drives me insane. I see an effect on first levels , but later on I see nothing. If someone found out a way to reproduce when regen per hit is working and when it is not I would be really happy. Given that my alchemy builds have 3.4seconds regen per hit for 50 seconds at 300 alchemy with a demon tooth trophy I would have a lot of ideas once I know how to make regen per hit working in a reproducable way. It is not working on cooldowns and not on god powers. With 1.8s regen per hit in early game I could spam my magic coup with a reg time of 3 seconds every 2.5 seconds (patch 2.31 was my last testing). So it seems to work but not with the shown numbers.

Which skill you use to unlock bargaining on your dryads? Alchemy? x% life leech shurikens trollteeth to boost attack value leatherhat for attack speed wonder how much damage you will be able to do with left clicks and if it would be enough for bosses

I am quite sure that it worked, but that was at my old melee elves. In new builds I am more on life leech. I will check again when I find the time- more a free game computer as long as my kids are not in bed. The arcane set has ignore armour and I am quite sure that the developers had a magic coup build in mind when giving disregard armour as a set bonus.

I would choose speed lore. Main reason for it would be its defense value which is multiplied with the shield lore per cents. Run speed is experience rate: you are quicker at the mobs. Run speed is defense: you can dictate where you want to fight and can avoid to get circled. The extra hit chance from speed lore frees up a socket or 2. Ancient magic: For resistances there is life leech, which can't be resisted or with sword lore: choose a dagger with ignore armour. Combat discipline: I can one hit normal mobs in niob without double-hit from a weapon mastery or having combat discipline. The problem of a melee elf is not to do enough damage, but to do enough damage to kill while still being able to survive a reflection. And at higher levels I had to reduce the damage of my magic coup more and more. Often I found myself throwing knives on the turtle island when I planed to visit the poison lord. Reflections are hard for a melee elf. You can debuff an reflecting aura with expulse magic, but you have to know that there is a reflector. You have just magic coup, so one of the few ways to fight reflectors is having a weapon in your slots which does a lot less damage whenever you fear that you can hit a reflector.

You got an eye surgery and the doc said that training eye-coordination with computer games would be a good idea. And now you wonder if you can claim extra costs for health regeneration at your tax sheet because you bought a new graphic card and monitor only to train your eye-coordination At least you are back to work earlier cause of the good eye training and so you can work more hours this year to pay more taxes to the state than the computer costed.

Tactic lore: Magic coup can kill normal mobs even with its stray damage in niob. That makes reflected magic coups this dangerous in hard core. As long you are not planing to do left click attacks tactics is not needed in a magic coup build. Spell resistance: I use trophies when I run through areas which I know to hold enemies with rooting attacks. Without alchemy spell resistance to keep your mobility may be not the worst idea. Also I have a weapon slot filled with a shuriken, so at casters I can stay in my expulse circle and throw at the casters outside. Since I am not using a weapon lore my chance to hit is balanced with equipment to hit champions with every weapon at 90% and for the tougher fights I add trophies. I notice that most melee elves calculate their hit chance for their main weapon. So changing to a ranged significantly reduce their chance to hit. You can 'buy' most skills with jewels in sockets. You can buy hit chance, evade, block, and so on. But you have only a limited number of sockets. The overall balance of a build has to fit. If you don't go shield lore because you want to play a lancer then you need something other defensiv: storm focus with cascading shroud and ice storms for slowing, or speed lore for more defense..... You have to balance a character. I played a lancer-elf with hit and run tactics and she was a lot of fun. I did her in 2008 when there was a lot of confusion about melee-elves. But I was without build related deaths with her. Our twins climbing on my knees and disturbing and stuff like this is not build related. 2 tactic lore 3 armour 5 concentration 8 polearms 12 arcane lore 18 storm focus 25 arcane focus 35 speed lore 50 constitution 65 inferno focus I used magic coup as a group killer with high regeneration times and my normal left clicks could do group damage too because the polearm had a chance to hit more enemies. At bosses most of the damage came from x% life leech of a special polearm so even the left clicks did a hell of damage on bosses. I used crystal skin and cascading shroud till begin of platin, then I noticed that physical resistence became less important and that inferno focus with a reflecting fire skin may have been better. So I decided to do it instead of spell resistance which I had planed. The elf made a lot of fun as long I could play her. Of cause with my nowadays experience I would do the skills in another order, but the set of skills I did in 2008 are not unplayable even in 2.40. A melee elf forgives a lot, as long you have life leech from magic coup and GI to life regeneration. And do vitalíty the first levels as a buffer. Feel free to experiment...

I wrote it down to test it when I have time to play at weekend. Think I will try the arcane set on my melee elf which has disregard armour as a set bonus. For doing more damage than shown: the monster specific damage bonus like +60% damage versus animals is not shown in the combat art window. For me as a hardcore player which tries to keep his hitpoints above 2 times my maximal reflected melee damage these monster bonus is a big factor which caused 2 deaths because I hadn't it in my calculations. x% lifeleech numbers In the post above I did a test about weakening effect of cobalt strike. I was using x% life leech to test its effect on maximal hitpoints of an enemy. Numbers: No equipment with fix life leech. Magic Coup not modified for life leech. Using alchemy to hit the white griffon when debuffed. Weapon used: Shuriken with 2.2% Life Leech Hitpoints of Griffon: 562698 2.2% of 562698 : 12379 Shown extra damage at 20 hits: 12379 All life leech hits the target unresisted and its always from the maximal hitpoints. Wounds effects, weakening and so on reduce max Hitpoints for a while and therefore x% life leech does less damage. CAUTION MATHS Let's say 3 different monsters: 10000 hitpoints, 50000 hitpoints and 500000 hitpoints all totally immune to your normal weapon damage. 20% disregard versus 2% life leech, and normal hit doing 5 hits doing 5000/20000 damage 10000 hitpoints and 5000 damage: 1 hit in average with 5000 vs 5 hits with 200 leech = 5000 vs 1000 10000 hitpoints and 20000 damage: 1 hit with 20000 vs 5 hits with 200 leech = death vs 1000 50000 hitpoints and 5000 damage: 1 hit with 5000 vs 5 hits with 1000 leech = 5000 vs 5000 50000 hitpoints and 20000 damage: 1 hit with 20000 vs 5 hits with 1000 leech= 20000 vs 5000 500000 hitpoints and 5000 damage: 1 hit with 5000 vs 5 hits with 10000 leech = 5000 vs 50000 500000 hitpoints and 20000 damage: 1 hit with 20000 vs 5 hits with 10000 leech = 20000 vs 50000 I think my current solution with disregard armour from set and socketed disregard armour into my weapon/shield combination which I use at magic immunes, the weapon a shuriken with x% life leech, is close to optimum. X% life leech starts to shine at bosses (at least as long you are able to stop them reflecting the damage). In my melee elf build I said that shurikens with life leech are perfect boss killers and I think even the maths show it now. I used them intuitiv before.

As I listed in the variants section, alchemy is not a must have. For me it added a lot of fun to experiment with trophies and different weapons. For a melee elf my main problem playing hardcore was, that I did too much damage ! I suffered from an eye surgery so I often overlooked enemies with reflection in the stray damage distance of magic coup. A weapon lore with double-hits made it hard to adjust my damage output in a way to survive 2 hits on reflectors with one coup. With a weapon lore and mastery I would want to survive 2 hits which can be doublkehits. So I would have to survive 4 times the damage of my magic coup. So the decision was to get my hit chance with alchemy for every weapon type and stay away from doublehits. Luckily not everyone has these bad eyes. So if you are sure to see all reflectors and are able to avoid hitting them to quickly or always debuff them you can go a full damage build even in hardcore. Just use a low damage weapon set whenever you walk in areas with reflectors. Since you do enough damage you can sacrifice some of your damage sockets to socket stuff to increase you hit chance. If you add ancient magic you could even use cobalt strike on melee reflectors. Its all up to you. Do whatever gives the most fun for you. I like to experiment and I want a lot of possibilities in a build because I lack the time to play much.