Sacred 2 - Game Mechanics And Gameplay-Related Technical Questions

[Hooyaah 3,111]

There are often some simple questions related to the way Sacred 2 works insofar as how damage is calculated, what modifiers are and how they work, and what skills are best for a particular character and so forth.

So, ask a question here unless it pertains to technical support or bugs that keep the game from working properly and such. If you believe that you know an answer respond to a query with what you know. If something here is properly clarified it may be updated on the Sacred Wiki in order to clear up potential future confusion.

To get this thread started I will pose the first question: Does the item modifier, Chance To Disregard Armor apply only to Weapons and Weapon-Based Combat Arts or does it apply also to Spell-Based Combat Arts?

[Androdion 900]

That's a damned good question for our in-house master modder to answer, since I for one have no idea how the code works in that respect.

[Flix 5,216]

On 3/29/2019 at 6:37 PM, Hooyaah said:

Does the item modifier, Chance To Disregard Armor apply only to Weapons and Weapon-Based Combat Arts or does it apply also to Spell-Based Combat Arts?

Weapons and weapon-based combat arts only.

I believe Dmitriy changed it in his mod to work on all damage sources.  At least I remember it being up for discussion during CM 1.60 development.

[Hooyaah 3,111]

46 minutes ago, Flix said:

Weapons and weapon-based combat arts only.

I believe Dmitriy changed it in his mod to work on all damage sources.  At least I remember it being up for discussion during CM 1.60 development.

I'm making a note in that it's only for weapons and weapons-based combat arts in the Sacred Wiki. On another note, one thing that seems unusual about "Critical Hit"s is that Glacial Thorns and Incendiary Shower may be modified to increase the chance for Critical Hits, yet the modifier itself has no effect. I feel that this could be misleading, so I made a note in that regard as well.

[Flix 5,216]

1 hour ago, Hooyaah said:

On another note, one thing that seems unusual about "Critical Hit"s is that Glacial Thorns and Incendiary Shower may be modified to increase the chance for Critical Hits, yet the modifier itself has no effect. I feel that this could be misleading, so I made a note in that regard as well.

It has an effect, just not when it's on gear.  Spells can still critical hit, and the chance boosted by Spell Intensity/Intelligence.

[gogoblender 3,420]

Brilliant thread.  Technical paraphrasing with good documentation skills/will is nigh miraculous.  I've made this thread a featured thread, perhaps even more folks can help out with the energy and mechanical feeds.  Getting this to the Wiki is a blessing, thanks guys and Hooyaah for starting this 

 

gogo 

[Hooyaah 3,111]

11 hours ago, Flix said:

It has an effect, just not when it's on gear.  Spells can still critical hit, and the chance boosted by Spell Intensity/Intelligence.

So then, the modifier Chance For Critical Hits is not effective for Spells when it is found on gear of any sort including armor, weapons, and jewelry? Is that correct?

[Androdion 900]

Yes, in the case of the modifier being present in gear it won't affect spell-based CAs. But if you have it as an enhancement on the CA itself it does work.

Otherwise you'd have a dedicated blacksmith and splash lv.200 Enhance arts on lv.2 gear for an up and running caster and you'd be a demigod! It's a matter of balance, like RPH not working with spell-based CAs.

[vagnerhammer 39]

I can not find ... What is the real effect of value "defense"?
What differentiates value "defense" from value of "armor"?

[Androdion 900]

That's pretty basic stuff. Defence value and attack value are values that get checked against a mob's to calculate your chance to hit and your chance to be hit with melee and ranged attacks. The higher the better since you hit more often and get hit less often.

The same is valid for spell resistance (defence) and spell intensity (attack) when the hit is a spell-based CA.

[Hooyaah 3,111]

Exactly, which means that Spell-Based Combat Arts are not affected by the Defense statistics or by Chance To Evade. The terminology and the manner in which a player protects their character is different.

[Dragon Brother 620]

3 hours ago, vagnerhammer said:

I can not find ... What is the real effect of value "defense"?
What differentiates value "defense" from value of "armor"?

To add to the other responses, armor reduces the amount of damage you will take from a source.

More simply; increase defense to reduce your chance to be hit and increase armor to reduce the damage you take when hit.

More complicated; you also need to consider the effects of damage mitigation, chance to evade, etc. on your gear.

[Androdion 900]

To simplify it; modifiers like block chance, chance to evade, chance to reflect all deal with averting being hit, so in simple terms they "deviate" part of the incoming damage. The remainder of it will take into account the amount of armour you have, and only then is the calculated damage dealt to your hit points.

Damage mitigation works before everything else and essentially reduces the amount of incoming damage by the percentage you have on your sigma value. That is before all other calculations take place, so it's a very powerful modifier. There are also energy shields which are an added barrier before the damage finally getting to your HP.

This topic is recent and talks about it: 

 

[vagnerhammer 39]

1 hour ago, Dragon Brother said:

More simply; increase defense to reduce your chance to be hit and increase armor to reduce the damage you take when hit.

Perfect!!!!

[Durmir 7]

Brilliant, a dedicated thread for my future questions

 

Let's get cracking: if I select the Divert silver mod for Ancient Bark, and I pump the CAlvl to 40, I am basically immune to melee damage, is that correct?

Then, Shield Lore would only provide additional defense value (only from the shield or overall bonus?), still useful for ranged attacks (and magic?). If I understand properly, defense is used to determine the evasion chance? Then wouldn't Combat Reflexes be better at it even if I use shields? Although it would not do anything anymore in terms of melee defense.

But then... Wouldn't Spell Resistance become a better skill overall? Especially since higher melee evasion means less damage reflected? Except... Goldenglade Touch's silver mod persevere would provide me with enough Willpower to dwarf Spell Resistance?

The question behind is that I would like to pick Armor Lore (secondary defensive skill), but if the 3 primary defensive skills are more or less useless for a caster dryad, then is Armor Lore still worth picking (2 skill slots for it)?

 

Another stupid question: if I select both Magic Staff and Dual Wield as skills, can I fire with ranged attacks from both hands?

Cheers

 

Edited April 2, 2019 by Durmir

[Androdion 900]

4 hours ago, Durmir said:

Let's get cracking: if I select the Divert silver mod for Ancient Bark, and I pump the CAlvl to 40, I am basically immune to melee damage, is that correct?

It's not, that info on the Wiki is dead wrong. I've just tested it out of curiosity and these are the values I get for CA level/reflect chance. This is valid with CM 1.60, no idea about vanilla.

• 1 - 25,2%
• 40 - 39,4%
• 132,6 - 58%
• 142,6 - 59,5%

So don't ask me what's the correct formula but no, you can't get immune to melee damage at lv.40 CA. Not even at level 140, and I assume that due to diminishing returns even at CA level 200 you shouldn't get much more than 60/70%, but that's an estimate on my end.
 

4 hours ago, Durmir said:

 If I understand properly, defense is used to determine the evasion chance? Then wouldn't Combat Reflexes be better at it even if I use shields?

Defense value determines the chance an enemy has to hit you in melee/ranged. Evasion is another thing. Combat Reflexes ups your evasion chance, plus your chance to avert critical hits.

Don't count on GT to overcome SR (the skill, not the stat), it just won't. And always use AL, and I mean always in every possible build you use.

 

5 hours ago, Durmir said:

Another stupid question: if I select both Magic Staff and Dual Wield as skills, can I fire with ranged attacks from both hands?

You could do something like that, there was an exploit in the game where in that situation you'd kill everything on and off-screen with invisible projectiles. But that was fixed with CM 1.60 and now only the right hand staff fires them, and at the correct distances.

[Durmir 7]

Ah ok thanks. I thought it was too good to be true (about Ancient Bark).

 

Regarding evasion and defense, do we know in what order the calculations are made? Here is an example with what I now understand to be correct (but feel free to correct anything):

If a monster attacks me (weapon basic attack) for 100 damage:

- there is a first roll to compare his attack value with my defense value and determine if his attack goes through

- if it goes through, then there is a roll with my %evasion to know whether or not I dodge it

- if it goes through, there is a roll on my %chance to reflect it

- if it goes through, then I take damage. The damage is mitigated by armor and %damage mitigation of the corresponding type, sequentially

 

So, if with attack and defense values the monster has 50% chance to hit me, and if I have 10% chance to evade and 20% chance to reflect. With 10% mitigation through armor and 10% mitigation through item modifiers, I would take on average:

100 x 0.5 / (1+0.1) x 0.8 x 0.9 x 0.9 = 29,45 damage per hit?

 

The question is particularly interesting to know whether I should raise my defense value, my evasion chance or my damage mitigation if I use reflect damage.

 

Also, I could not find on the wiki, what is the formula that relates attack value and defense value? The question behind is: as a general rule, is it better to increase %defense+ or %evasion? %evasion should work the same regardless of level, but the defense value will depend on the ennemy type and level. However, defense may have an overall greater impact, especially with %defense.

 

 

 

PS: so if I use 2 staves, only the one in the right hand would fire a projectile? Well that is disappointing...

Edited April 2, 2019 by Durmir

[Androdion 900]

Quick answer as I'm on the run.

Priorities, see my post from Sunday around 11 PM. Formulas, can't help you with that but there are others here who can. It's always a good idea to have high values of all that's good for your HP, but if your idea is to use chance to reflect as an offensive measure then evasion won't do you any good. You'll want to "get hit" for the damage to be reflected. It's trickier than that I know, but that's the short answer.

Notice that weapon-based CAs are also regulated by your primary weapon, you can easily see that from their tooltip and the types of damage they display (which are the same as on the primary weapon). Like I said you could kind of use both, but the exploit was quite nasty so...

[vagnerhammer 39]

Another basic question ...
Does the mechanics of the game react based on logic?

Example: If I leave the unprotected character   of poison, the AI the game's can respond to this by generating attacks just from what I have no protection?

Edited April 2, 2019 by vagnerhammer

[Androdion 900]

Nope, there's no "adaptive learning" from the mobs' AI. A spider will always cause poison damage regardless of the armour you carry.

[Dragon Brother 620]

9 hours ago, Durmir said:

Regarding evasion and defense, do we know in what order the calculations are made? Here is an example with what I now understand to be correct (but feel free to correct anything):

If a monster attacks me (weapon basic attack) for 100 damage:

- there is a first roll to compare his attack value with my defense value and determine if his attack goes through

- if it goes through, then there is a roll with my %evasion to know whether or not I dodge it

- if it goes through, there is a roll on my %chance to reflect it

- if it goes through, then I take damage. The damage is mitigated by armor and %damage mitigation of the corresponding type, sequentially

 

So, if with attack and defense values the monster has 50% chance to hit me, and if I have 10% chance to evade and 20% chance to reflect. With 10% mitigation through armor and 10% mitigation through item modifiers, I would take on average:

100 x 0.5 / (1+0.1) x 0.8 x 0.9 x 0.9 = 29,45 damage per hit?

 

The question is particularly interesting to know whether I should raise my defense value, my evasion chance or my damage mitigation if I use reflect damage.

 

Also, I could not find on the wiki, what is the formula that relates attack value and defense value? The question behind is: as a general rule, is it better to increase %defense+ or %evasion? %evasion should work the same regardless of level, but the defense value will depend on the ennemy type and level. However, defense may have an overall greater impact, especially with %defense.

 

There may be some formulas floating around on the boards somewhere that have been posted, but you'd have to go looking for them as I don't recall any specific threads off the top of my head.

However, the easiest way (or at least what I always found was the easiest way) to satisfy yourself that your chance to hit / chance to be hit are high enough was to use the last opponent window. From memory it would show the last 10 monsters you killed so if you had a champion (or even a boss) in there it would show your chance to hit them and their chance to hit you and this would update based on whatever gear you were wearing at the time. This would allow you to play around with items to see which modifier at the time had the greatest affect and help you decide what to equip.

[Durmir 7]

Thanks guys!

 

Another question, absolutely not related:

It is obvious there is some kind of "smart drop" system in the sense that drops correspond to the class in 90% of cases.

Do we know what are the other components of the smart drop system? For instance, if I take "Ranged Weapons" as a skill, would it drop more ranged weapons? If I kill mobs using certain skills, would I get more items with bonuses related to that skill (similar to headhunting CAs for the dryad)? Etc.

[Androdion 900]

It's more like 70%?! There are a couple of lines in either options.txt or balance.txt (can't remember right now) that regulate the drop ratio. One is for runes and the other for gear. The lines are something like "isusablebyhero" and "runeisforhero", and forgive me for my bad memory but I'm on my cell and I can't properly confirm the locations and specific names/values.

 

So in short, nope, only the Dryad has such a mechanic with shrunken heads.

[Veracious 267]

I think I can confirm androdion's claim. Its in balance.txt. If you read the lines you'll easily be able to pick out the corresponding value you're looking for. I changed these in the past as well. Its been years so I can't remember if it's in the first section of code or the second. But its in balance. 

[Androdion 900]

I think the chance is 70% for gear and 40% for runes to be of your own class.