Barsby

That's $129.95 Australian, not US. Still got ripped off though. Check gamehead.com.au, that's where I got mine, for about $80. I don't play online because of the lag. I'd absolutely love to play HC characters online with the folks on these forums, but death by lag frustrates me waaayyy too much.

Hrm. The displayed static damage of f.emblazer changes when you change weapon. I'll have to have a play and see if the damage done changes or if it is just a display thing. If elemental sockets in the battery don't affect left arm CAs or normal shots... why on earth did they put an elemental socket in the set battery? I can understand it appearing on random batteries you find, just like finding +capricious hunter aspect on seraphim only gear etc, but the set items? They need a text log option for combat, so you can try a few things then go see what actually happened

Well, soldats, maybe you can help me with my LF TG conundrum! Got any idea why my Furious Emblazer is displaying as pure magic damage, and not fire? Does your battery have any impact on Combat Arts, or just the left arm shots? I stuck a lava rock in my battery - I assumed the conversion would apply to any attack from the left arm as it would, logically, be powered by the battery - but Furious Emblazer is still showing as 100% magic damage. I have a magic pearl in my weapon but couldn't see how that would affect left arm CAs and in any case, it's only 34% conversion. edit: Hmm, grabbed a weapon with fire conversion in it... furious emblazer switches to 100% fire. Damage changes according to equipped weapon also. Fiddling with the battery does... nothing I could spot Gah, stupid TGs.

Hmm, never played Sacred1, but did spend obscene amounts of time playing all the others you listed there, so I'll just comment in relation to them: The camera. You might be ok with it, but the default settings are horrendous. Use the camera fix - you can find it somewhere on Darkmatters - to escape the hell that is the default camera. The controls - are terribly limited. I have to assume it was designed with just 4 skill hotkeys (5 with the expansion, assuming it will ever be available in Australia ) to allow easy conversion to console controls. If you were a big diablo fan like me, you'll no doubt spend a long time praying for a mod that allows D2 LMB/RMB hotkeying. It's pretty similar to TQ in that respect, both of them need a UI overhaul in a big big way. Other bugs - have been pretty minor, I have to say. I do find the occasional quest where I need to collect 5 thingos, and only 4 are spawned, forcing me to exit and restart. Every time it has happened though, lucky number 5 has been waiting on the ground when I run back to that spot. Frustration - the AI of followers in escort quests. Dear freakin' lord. All they do is run around building the biggest train possible, willfully trying to get themselves killed. Fortunately, there aren't too many and any that are vital to advancing the main story or the class specific story have god mode so you can just ignore them. The world - it's completely static, like TQ. The map and all dungeons never change, which is a bit of a dagger in the back for replayability. On the flip side! The world - is huge! It's also not utterly linear like TQ. There are so many quests you can pick and choose. If you like the look and feel of an area, explore it more fully and do all the quests. If you think an area smells a bit, zip through it - explore it to reveal the map (and thus improve drops from what I've read) but give the quests the flick. Or not, whatever you want. The points is you don't have to follow the same exact footsteps with each character, on each difficulty. Kind of a pseudo-randomness. It's pretty! Eye-candy is never a bad thing. Characters, animation, mobs and world, they are all very, very nice to look at. Assuming your PC is up to it, of course Loot! There's lots, it's very Diablo-esque, prefixes, suffixes, sets, uniques, legendaries, etc. Sadly, from what I have seen, sets seem to be hard to beat for armour. Uniques seem to be winners for weapons/shields. Because of the way the items work - where there is an upgraded version of each set every certain number of levels, it does mean your characters tend to get a certain look reasonably fast and it is unlikely to change. I did see the screenie gogo posted recently, of a rare with rare mods, socketed with rare jewelery that seemed to kick the behind of any set item, so there are those elusive special items out there, wanting to be found... Skills - the character building options are pretty detailed. There are a lot of choices to be made in how you build your characters. You will want to do your homework on your planned build, down to the smallest detail in how you customise the main combat arts you intend to use. There's no re-speccing options like TQ. It's Diablo - once the click is made, it's made. So, both good and bad, for me. I'm not trying to sell, or not sell, here. Just pointing out my observations.

Ok then, I finally get it. It's just displaying the damage of the first hit (pelting strikes being the skill I was looking at while gear fiddling). I mean, I knew it wasn't showing the total damage of the attack sequence but for some reason it never occurred to me that the first hit would only be using 1 weapon. And from that, I've just now understood why normal attacks on my characters often look so powerful compared to CAs - being the combined damage from both weapons, and requiring both weapons to hit to produce that sort of damage. My own fault for building dual wield characters. The Dryad doesn't have better CAs, she just only uses 1 weapon Yes, some days, I am a retard. Thanks again.

Well, I'll be buggered. Thanks Dobri. That's going to make it more annoying for a build that spams a CA and pretty much never uses normal attacks. I'll have to actually pay attention to mods/sockets on the low damage weapons that I currently don't look twice at. Kinda makes me wish I'd opted for a 2h build on my shadow warrior

So, I was just fiddling with gear as a way of avoiding the decision of quest vs pushing ahead on the main story and I noticed something odd... I'm on a dual wield character, one weapon with a lava rock in it, one with a magic pearl. My normal attacks show physical/fire/magic portions, but my combat art is only displaying physical+fire. I stripped off the fire weapon and the display updated to be physical+magic and the damage figure increased (the magic pearl weapon is a higher damage weapon). I re-equipped the second weapon - the damage type breakdown did not change, it stayed physical+magic and the listed figure stayed at the higher value. I take off the magic weapon and it all goes back to the original fire enhanced figures. Is it a display bug, or is the combat art really only using 1 weapon, making the second weapon redundant except for normal left button attacks? The animation certainly makes it appear as though pelting strikes is using both weapons.

An auto-run option With the camera unlocked (reading that thread sealed the deal for me buying the game, I borrowed an install from a mate and the camera and I fought so much I didn't buy it back then) I play it more like an over-the-shoulder dungeon crawler a-la Heretic 2, WoW etc, rather than a clicker like Diablo et al. So, I hardly ever move with the mouse, I run about using keyboard movement and man, I can't tell you how many times I've gone to hit Num Lock to get auto-run going. Yes, yes I did play far too much WoW.

Thanks Zinsho. I'll have to seriously re-think. From those numbers, at 75 base warding energy lore I'm looking at about 100 absorb, without revered tech lore. Blah. I kinda think I made her all wrong now. I already put the point in concentration and that's pure waste if I'm not going to bother with warding energy. Knew I shoulda grabbed constitution first. I can't even switch her over to a shopper now. WTB respec! Or character editor

For those of us who do not have blank level 200 characters to play with... do you have the numbers for how that 500 blocked came to be? As in, what the 75 warding grants and how much was from Revered Lore? From the wiki site, it says level 75 warding energy lore grants 27 damage absorb. It doesn't list how much revered tech lore will boost by, but does say level 75 boosts damage by 180%. Does the revered lore damage boost just get multiplied by the warding energy absorb - ie: 27*180=48ish, so new absorb value is 75 or so? No idea how much a full high level Endijian's set will affect that, and then the gold mod adds more block. Does the revered lore improvement apply to the gold mod as well? What I'm chasing is how effective the warding energy buff will be without revered lore. My seraphim is a dual wield, exalted warrior type. I was intending taking concentration and warding energy as my last 2 skill picks as my way of compensating for not wearing a shield. I took Revered Focus to unlock the CA mods for divine protection and warding energy, I wasn't concerned with damage from that tree. If that means my warding energy is going to be severely gimped by not taking revered lore to buff it, I will be a sad panda. If it's going to be less, but only a bit less, then I should be fine.

I'd kinda been wondering the same thing, about how a character would go through the top difficulty without support from a shopping character. I've been playing a bunch of characters up to 40ish, just to see which ones are most enjoyable once you get the unique mount and have good regen times. It turns out the pyromancer elf and the temple guardian that I chose as potential shoppers are well down the list, so I've been looking at my more enjoyable characters, trying to see which of them I can add perception and bargaining to. Maybe I shoulda posted this in a dryad thread but it was about fitting in a shopper, so meh. The most likely is my dryad (high speed shooter type dryad). I have 2 skill slots left and I had penciled in combat discipline/spell resist/constitution as my 3 most wanted. Or I can toss them out the window and pick up EP/Bargaining. Do any wiser minds have advice on how she'll go skipping the survival skills and checking for pretty shoes instead?

The quest begins with the ghost in the cemetery in town (can't for the life of me recall the name of it, but it's the big town East from the tunnel through dragonmaw pass). Spirit of Atherton or some such is his name. First step leads you to the chest option. /edit - Griffinborough is the name of the town

It's all relative, isn't it? I'm playing devil's advocate here, not just arguing because it's an online forum and that's how people generally behave. Now, I'm new to the game and haven't a character over level 40, but I have haunted the forums for a bit, so keep in mind that I'm working on forum knowledge here I recently saw a post from someone saying they have 88k health @ level 160ish and believe they'll crack 100khp and 4k/sec regen at level 200. Based on that, is there any point putting point in vit? 4% more hp and 5% more regen? But if say your character was a low hp type and was only pushing (picking random numbers here for easy math!) 40k max health, then pushing vit is a 10% boost and a lot more worthwhile. With 20k health, it's a 20% boost and sounds fantastic. Now, using your numbers, if a level 200 character has 900% avg combat art regen and can pick up an additional 200% with max stam, doesn't that seem a reasonable gain in comparison? The logical extension of this argument is exactly the one you disagreed with - if you are likely to have good regen, stam isn't all that hot. The worse your ACART is, the more impact stam will have.

I've always killed them, never gotten a key for that chest.

Outstanding response, thank-you for that. I had no idea Armor Lore worked that way, nor did I ever try using both mouse buttons together. Should be more than enough for me to work with