Hello, guys!
First of all - congratulations and thank you for the great guide, Dobri. I've read other posts by you (on the Sacred off. forum too) and found them very helpful. It's rather funny to address my questions to you in English (since we're both Bulgarians), but I think that your reply may be of good use for other players too. So let's go on topic.
I'm pretty new to the game - started playing about a week ago. I'm also big fan of hack'n'slash rpg-s. My favourite characters are pure casters, so no surprise I picked the HE and the pyro build. Right now I'm level 56 at the very end of Gold difficulty. A lot of +to all items - sockets, etc - just like it should be. I spoiled some of the stat points (put around 15 in stamina, because I started this char before I found your guide and didn't know that later on I wouldn't need those points at all). I doubt that's the source of my problem. Since level 50 I'm on a crossroad - I haven't invested any of the extra points (by extra I mean 3 per level - the rest I put in lore/focus). I'm playing lan (in fact hamachi, whatever) with a friend of mine whose char pick is Dryad. We're actually a killing machine - especailly the bosses die very quickly being entangled and showered. The problem is that I'm having a really hard time surviving. I'm around 4.5k of hp, my armor is probably pretty low, the defense rating too, so I get hit frequently and suffer heavy damage. The little scorpions in the desert, for instance, do ridiculous amount of damage to me. And it's not just them - the panthers too, and so on. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it. My question is: should I master armor lore or constitution first and which of them increases survivability later on? Another thing I was wondering is around which level do the damage mitigation items appear, since I think that's the key to success (based on one of your posts in the off. forum too). The high risk of death spoils my whole gameplay strategy since I can't gather big groups of monsters and BT them, fearing I would die in couple of hits. My last question is not related to my defensive problems, but to one game mechanic aspect I couldn't find info of. What the hell does the +%damage mod. really do? How and which kind of damage does it affect?
That's all for now. I'm looking forward to reading your advices!