jimhsu

It's pausable in the middle of battles, like NWN. That should give an idea of the skill required. Unlike NWN though, most Area of Effect spells do friendly damage even on easy difficulty. Tactical positioning / threat (aka who gets the aggro) are very important concepts esp. in the later battles. Definitely not a "reflexes" game. As in most games like these, mages are late bloomers. The arcane warrior + blood mage combo is perhaps the most devastating in the game, but before level 8 or so you're worse than squishy.

The defense value changes even with no mods. You can test it.

Trade successful. Thanks. Somewhere in the middle of DA now. I highly suggest trying the first run through the game without any strategy guides -- the pain and frustration will be a learning experience. Some fights in the game can be truly freaking hard if you are not prepared. (Oh, it's only the PC version that provides such hard fights) (In that respect it's kind of like the first NWN. I found NWN2 comparatively easier.)

Runes of Protection for some reason bumps up your defense value. It's probably an undocumented boost.

At higher graphic settings DA implements some pretty decent effects like depth of field: http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/4452/scre...09111610070.jpg Definitely a more "serious" game than NWN or Sacred. Kind of like Baulder's Gate in that respect, though I never played that classic.

I'll prepare the gloves; heck I'll just send the whole set because I'm lazy. Out of your list, magisil and michels forging hammer look interesting. You wouldn't happen to have a high level (>120) glacial defender would you? Having fun with dragon age (the game has awesome cinematics I will admit) right now, so I might be slow to respond. I'm still here though.

Found a Methedrin's Sceptre, but I'm almost certain it's brown (unique)?

Yes, my point exactly. For a character with low attack, neither mod is useful without the other. But with both... And I did test "Opponent's chance to evade". Against bosses at least, this mod seems to work better.

I was surprised that there was no wiki entry for this mod: http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php5/Sacre...t_evade_attacks The synergy between this mod and Life leech % is insane, particularly with dealing with high level niob bosses with millions of hitpoints. Through my testing, it doesn't seem to matter how horrible your attack rating is; with high enough values for both mods, you can do 30000+ damage (on a non-critical) 1/3rd of the time. That's just with a weapon and shield slot, no socketing for damage or chance to hit on armor.

Belt - 76 (silver) helm - 140 (niob) gloves - 148 (niob)

I recall the Daemon forms are also castable on other characters. The penta-buff malarky? Ghost Meadow (BM) Reiki (BM) Flameskin/Stoneskin/Shield Wall (BM) Spiritual Healing (BM) Heroic Courage (Glad) Dagger Stare (Glad) Rotating Blades of Light (seraphim) Strength of Light (seraphim) Recuperation (WE) War Cry (kinda) I think. Though I think you could cast the DE's two Pak's on an ally as well (don't make me re-install S1 for this!)... What was the origin of the seraphim in S1?

Taking a look at your first post, I have complete Pyx's (120-135) and Mavv's (100 or so with level 30 gloves) if you are interested.

Yes definitely ... currently I'm packing -102% DoT mitigation which is somewhat excessive but makes it so that you can basically go AFK in that region. Lol.

I will see when I have time to do a full write-up. Hm...

Hm.. for Ice and Blood, anyone have nice damage mitigation armor for the dragon mage (level 120-140 or so)? Preferably stacked (I haven't ever seen one of those, ever). I have almost all of his sets complete, at various levels. And too many Officer's Sabers ... lol. welcome to the single player chest trades jimhsu,I'll have a look in my chest files for you,my dm is lvl145 at moment so should have some armors somewhere that would suit you,just a quick question though does stacked mean its got all damage mitigation types on it? "Stacked" means that there are basically two all channel (all types) mods on the armor. These are typically very rare (hence I posted here). E.g. a normal DM armor might have +12% to all damage mitigation types, a stacked armor would have 2 * 12% mods (but would still only "show" a single mod in the tooltip with twice the value). The reason it's stacked is that the Armor Lore DM mod and the Armor Lore Mastery DM mod are in fact separate and so both can spawn on a piece of armor. If you don't have such a thing, mitigation armor with sockets will also be useful. More info here: http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=12144 PS I managed to find one stacked DoT amulet after a few hours of shopping. -32% to all channel damage over time ... might be useful for some tough regions.

Hm.. for Ice and Blood, anyone have nice damage mitigation armor for the dragon mage (level 120-140 or so)? Preferably stacked (I haven't ever seen one of those, ever). I have almost all of his sets complete, at various levels. And too many Officer's Sabers ... lol.

Did some quick verification testing with an unmastered focus skill. I don't have any uber +All Skills gear (only up to +80 or so), so don't expect to see values like 200 or so. (And Ice & Blood nerfed that even more). Skill level Regen (calc) Actual (game) 77 63.89968412 63.9 84 64.96851239 65 90 65.77756765 65.8 So far the equation appears to be correct. What I want to see though are unmastered skill stats in the extreme high end (like several hundred or so). The regression equation might be off a bit at that high of a range, but not more than 0.1%.

I did a similar thing with lore and it shows the same pattern. The specific numbers may change however. I currently don't feel like going through all the skill data and regressing it with the same equation. I guess the real point is shown in 2nd figure. I.e. If you wanted to match the regen of a char with 110 focus mastery, you would need ~190 skill level without mastery. And so on - as the level with mastery becomes higher, the # of soft skill points needed to match becomes so high that it becomes basically impossible even if you manage to get +1K all skills. Thus, mastery becomes more and more essential at high skill levels -- but you already knew that didn't you? This is just an attempt to put some real numbers onto the observation. The 24 points (actually, 21) also makes sense. If you don't plan to take the skill to mastery, that is basically where you can expect to derive "half" the benefit from the skill. I think the formula and specific cutoffs will change from skill to skill, but I expect the general equation to look the same. PS For damage in skill lore: a = 394.04 b = 100 c = 5.895 These values intrinsically have standard error, so the real equation could just as likely be a = 394 b = 100 c = 6 The quality of fit is the same in both cases. It's the same equation. You can plot it yourself if you like.

As for verification: I will assume that the tooltip value is right. If not, thing may be more complicated. 1. Get a focus skill to 74 hard points and play around with +All Skills to get soft point skill levels. Record regen values. Something like a +1 All skills ring will help here (see step 2). 2. Get the focus skill to 75 hard points (mastery) and generate skill levels to (1). Record regen values. (a local save game might help here in case you screw something up). Values from (1) should fall onto the red line, while values from (2) should be on the blue line (and match the sacredwiki numbers). This is all assuming the displayed value is correct...

Your hypothesis is close. I'm almost absolutely sure that the equation is some sort of rational function. One hypothesis is the classic Michaelis-Menten equation (from enzyme kinetics): y = ax/(x+b), most commonly seen as rate = Vmax*/(+Km) This gives something that is close, but look at the residuals: Clearly there is a higher order term in there. So try the Michaelis-Menten equ with offset: y = ax / (b + x) + c That looks quite good, in my opinion. For the regression model: y = ax / (b + x) + c a = 74.364 b = 21.220 c = 5.6017 Since this IS the Michaelis-Menten equation basically, I'll try to use my knowledge of enzyme kinetics to try to interpret the parameters: a is equivalent to Vmax; basically the "maximum possible" regen rate benefit assuming skill level goes to infinity. In other words, you can't achieve >74.36% regen bonus without mastery, no matter how many soft points you have. b is equivalent to Km. This is the skill level at which you get "half" of the potential regen bonus (74.36/2, or 37.18%) c is basically the regen time at skill level "zero". Of course, such a thing doesn't actually exist. Results here. Hm.. results page seems to be dynamic. Try a PDF. All the top results have identical residuals and standard errors, suggesting that all those equations are basically equivalent. The second graph is IMO the most useful. It's basically a transformation of the 1st graph. Imagine on the 1st graph, drawing a horizontal line at a regen time - the 2nd graph is the (x,y) coordinates of the points at which each curve in the 1st graph touches that line.

Another interesting graph for people to ponder on: Shown are skill levels with Mastery (x axis) and without Mastery (y axis) that give the same regen according to my calculations. The further out you are, the worse it gets (a 200 skill level with mastery is equivalent to nearly 1700 without, according to the formula). Can that possibly be right?!

I see the edit was reverted - that's fine. This is probably a good place to discuss, and get hard values from the game for more evidence. As for the regression: I am working under the assumption that values generated for the tables are derived from some equation, with a unknown structure. (I.e. I don't know what parameters were used). So, we have an equation y = f(x) where x is the Skill Level, and y is the regeneration rate. By simply plotting regen rate with skill level, we see something like this (blue line). The blue line is actually under the red line, but you can't see it. The sharp break at 75 suggests that the function is not differentiable at that point, and thus f(x) is actually a piecewise function defined over the ranges [1,75) and [75,+infinity]; hence one function f1(x) gives regen rates from 1-74, and another f2(x) gives the rates from 75+. Taking the data and tweaking it a bit, I plugged it into a nonlinear regression tool (results here). I automatically excluded anything with three or more parameters, because of parsimony (the real equation isn't likely complicated), or anything with things like atan(x) or sin(x). As to why I settled on y = a / (b + x) + c : Plot Residuals 1. The curve "looks like" a square root curve (plot y = sqrt(x) and see what I mean) 2. High correlation (r > 0.9999). This cannot be perfect (r = 1) because the display value is rounded. Likewise, the values for a, b, and c cannot be exact because the input data is rounded. 3. Residual analysis shows low correlation of residuals. This is a good thing. Now is this right? I don't know. Unless a dev comes over, no one will know. But the equation does work with the data. If anyone has questions, I'll try to write simpler explanations later. I will also try to find a simpler expression with the tool. PS BTW this was nothing compared to what I had to go through for another game (Eve online) to analyze stacking penalties. If you're bored enough, you might find the relevant post via google.

I was bored, so I played around with a nice nonlinear regression tool trying to fit data for skill breakpoints. Aspect Focus. (trivia section) Can someone verify to see if these results are even close?

Also, was Toughness changed at all? Currently with level 131 toughness, I show damage reduction of -20.0%, while the table here claims that it is -15.0%.

Just put in the two other "important sets" in the wiki. Enjoy. What is notable is that all the "large sets" for DM have +All Skills as a first bonus. No other character has this. This probably has something to do with the giant +All Skills nerf. Now I'll have to see if I can get the other stuff to drop.