I Have Some Questions - My Return to Underworld

[LEXX 2]

Hello there! So I got back into Sacred Underworld, something I thought I'll never do, but it happened, and I'm happy to say, this is my best time I ever had with the game, after previously failing to progress much in the regular campaign. I still have some problems with it though... for example, the intense backtracking still drives me nuts from time to time. On the plus side, progressing further in the game got me to the parts I was missing out on in my previous attempts, stuff like the more interesting monsters, boss encounters, and loot. I got hooked and finished the original campaign on bronze (because I'm a noob), and got pretty strong by the end, one shotting most monsters with my melee vampiress. Here's the problem now... I decided to continue in the upper difficulties, but first I wanted to complete the Underworld campaign on silver difficulty. I've switched to it, and all of a sudden I'm doing miserable damage. On my character stat screen it says my normal attack should be doing an average of 1500 damage and my Ripping Claws attack is supposed to be doing an average of 6000 damage... and that's exactly how much damage they did by the end of bronze, but at the start of Underworld in silver, my regular attack damage is 400-500 and my Ripping Claws around 2000, even though it says they should be 3x times stronger. I'm talking about the damages during daytime, of course. 

What is the cause of this? Are the enemies tougher? I'm sure they are, but what exactly makes them neglecting 2/3rds of my damage? Do they have more armor and defenses, but similar health according to their class? I hope the reason for the bad damage is not some game breaking bug, that's my worst fear. Seeing the damage numbers plummeting like that, and all of a sudden going from having an OP character to struggling to kill regular enemies, is really discouraging.

Anyway, I'm still looking forward to continuing the original campaign on the higher difficulties.

I'll use this thread for further questions and help, if that's okay.

[RuDDicK 133]

monsters on silver have more resistances, and enemies you are currently fighting may have more resistances of the type you are attacking

monsters resistance on bronze x1
monsters resistance on silver x2.5

there is also a bug with the vampire

in vampire form, weapon bonuses are no longer counted when switching weapon slots! This is easily fixed by switching the Skill being used - changing a Skill slot or changing a Skill in a slot with a hotkey. You just switch to another Skill and back again immediately.

[LEXX 2]

@RuDDicK thank you! I've noticed the weapon switching bug, and figured out how to deal with it. It's not a big deal at the moment, since I only use one weapon (a rare 2h sword) and don't have viable alternatives. I also just realized that I've screwed myself big time, and have to replay the entire campaign on silver, because I couldn't finish the Underworld campaign... I'm not even sure if beating it on silver would grant me access to gold. But the end of Underworld is brutal, I got to the part with these annoying squid/slime-like creatures that freeze the cooldown of my combat arts and I couldn't pass through the area to reach the final dungeon. It was day time and fighting them was impossible, so I decided to try and run pass by them, but they were so many! I ran out of potions (I had around 30, and it still wasn't enough) and I had to reload the save and export the hero, since I didn't want to lose my survival bonus, which is at 70% at the moment. I'm not dealing with these guys again, this has to be of the most frustrating enemy type I've ever seen in an isometric ARPG.  

[Dax 481]

You should fight fire with even more fire.

Solution one would be to complete the Faldamar-Set (Min Axe Lore: 10) first and rush with ease through the rest of the game. The set is prettymuch overpowered. Just fire up the campaing and smash some dragons, until you got everything together. Axe plus three rings. If the set is now from gold, bronze, or silver difficulty, does not matter.

Solution two would be to use various compagnions you can summon, or reanimate. Crabs are nice to have, also the living trees from the DryadForest. Make sure you got many friends on your side, before visiting the more dangerous regions of the game. Speaking of bugs, simply quicksave/quickload after reanimating monsters and they will stay with you nearly forever.
While mounted, you can "send" your monsters to attack a certain foe by hitting "Shift" and klicking the target.

Also, make better use of your spells. "Claw Jump" has a huge stun radius on higher levels, "Blood Bite" stuns every monster for a short time. I´d say, go back to the main campaign and smash the desert dragon (weakness: fire damage) until you got some neat stuff together.

[LEXX 2]

@Dax thank you for the recommendations. Unfortunately, I've already focused on swords, so I can't train Axe Lore, I have no available slots. I might take a few screenshots to show my build. I feel like right now my gear is underleveled, since it is all set or rare (yellow) items from bronze, and a few items from silver Underworld. I jumped in Arcania on silver, and I'm very happy to see that I can use my portal waypoints, and don't have to discover them again. I killed the desert dragon once, didn't get anything good. I assume that, if I want to farm him, I need to make multiplayer games? I will give it a try. I also need to mention that up to this point I played the game 100% vanilla, but yesterday I've installed the latest Sacred ReBorn patch, and I'm loving the quality of life features it provides, but I also have a feeling that it makes the game even harder. I've already noticed that my Ripping Claws are damage nerfed by 25-30%... wasn't very happy about that. On the plus side, it looks like the attack hit chances are improved, not only for combat arts, but also for the regular attack. I hope I'm right about that. 

By the way, the Dryad Forest is one of the few places I'm not looking forward to going back to. It's a frustrating place for a melee character with all the enemies with entrapment spells. But you got me curious what these "living trees" are. And speaking of summons, at the moment I have focused on training only the spells I use - Turn Into Vampire level 22, Ripping Claws lvl25, Whirling Claws level 27, and Claw Jump lvl15. The question is, is it late to start developing the bats and the wolf summons? Do I need to bring them to around the same level of the enemies I'm facing in order for them to be effective? I'm level 63 at the moment and I'm in Act 2 Silver, fighting enemies that are 2-3 levels above me.

I will farm the desert dragon and share some screenshot with the build and gear I have, so you can tell me how bad I've screwed up.  I'm not going to lie, I've read a few vampire builds here on the forum, just to get a better idea how build the class for melee in permanent vampire form, but these builds are from before 2010, so I'm not sure how viable they are.

[Dax 481]

Ah, Reborn mod, I see.

Yes, it looks for the first moment, that it is harder, but the truth is that the makers made it incredibly player friendly.
The leveling in Reborn has been warped, so it is far easier to get many, many levels together. Hanging around and smashing gobs is rather useless.
I´d recommend:

- New start. Reborn is active so far, I assume.

- Wolf Call: 1
...and it stays 1 since your wolf will get re-animated and has to smash some ultra-monsters for you. Keeping it a level 1 means quick cooldown.

- Reanimation:
See how your Undead Wolf performs versus Dragons, then level up and step by step to 18-19 points max. If you go over 20 runes in Reanimation,
the XP-output will be reduced to 1 single XP, since the creature level is to high for the current difficulty bronze/silver, which means you just
shot yourself in the foot. So save now and then to avoid a complete, frustrating restart.

- Blood Bite: 1
Leave it alone for quite a while. The only thing you want is the stun-effect in the hero-caves. Let your undead wolfes attack first, then use
Blood Bite to stun the Dragon. Take them one by one. The undead wolfes wont last forever, so make sure you can dust off to a save place.

- Vampire Form
Boost it to 20-40 for the beginning. As soon as the money starts rolling in, stay on it.

- Combos
There is, for me, only one useful combo for the Vampire:
Summon Wolf: 1
Summon Wolf: 1
Vampire Form (as high as possible, to avoid unwanted shapeshift back to human form in battle)
Summon Wolf: 1
It has following effect:
In Knight Form, two Wolfes are getting summoned, one dies immediately. Then, we shapeshift into Vampire Form and summon a Vampire Wolf. The body
of the deceased Wolf should still lie on the ground, let´s reanimate him on the spot! We have now physical and magical damage covered in a badass
way. Now, lets summon a second Vampire Wolf, which immediately kills the first one. Lets reanimate it as well. Result: fire and poison damage is
covered.
Combined with "Blood Bite" and some patience, the hero cave, described below, is not that hard anymore.

Starting it:
You can level a bit around the starting area and around Silver Creek, then jump from Bellevue Teleporter north. (Strg+Click) Be carefully, the
monsters around Hedgenton are quite dangerous. After you have arrived in Hedgenton, activate the Teleporter and buy yourself a nice load of potions.
Save.
In Hedgenton you can also buy a quite speedy horse, with movement rate of 200, which gets you quickly to the hero cave. Save, lauch the combo to
have some protection from the dangerous monsters around you, mount and lets go.
Stay direct south of the river, which divides the village into two, head east until you run into the cave entry. Save again. Trouble lies ahead.
You will make it quickly to level 100 in Silver, which means the most foes will not attack you anymore, since your level is simply too high. I have
then started exploring the game world without getting bothered by monsters.

As for a new build, I recommend to go for Axe Lore and Pole Arms simultaneously (10 points each, not more), so that you can use both set mega-weapons to
your advantage. After you got your own gear together after a while, you might discard the set weapons entirely, or put them aside and equip them only
now and then, when you want to dish out some nasty extra damage.

[LEXX 2]

Oh, I see, I should've installed Reborn from the get go, to take full advantage of the rebalancing. Your post made me consider starting over from scratch, but if I do that I'll probably try a different class this time, as I don't want to go through the process of building another vampire, I'm afraid I'll get bored if I do that, after spend a lot of hours on that class already. It will have to be something different from the melee play style. I want to make a build that is both powerful and lazy/less effort, that focuses on using just a few skills and having good survivability at the same time, because I'm a bad player and I like it simple. I've read somewhere that the Dwarf has an overpowered skill, "Mortar Grenade". Maybe I should make a build that focuses on that ability, while still keeping the vampire in mind for future continuation. The question is, how viable is the skill in Reborn? I guess I'll start the character, once I get the Mortar Grenade I can test its power, since I can easily switch between vanilla and Reborn. 

[Dax 481]

Vanilla is incredibly misbalanced imo, you will turn into a rampaging death machine with every class. However, the laziest and most devastating, but also
coolest hero is the Demon I´d say. Since monsters do not have spell resistance (yet), you can easily eliminate anything moving using your spells and
the dive-bomb attack.
Speaking of invested time, I understand you. It took me years to get my stuff together and having a maxed out character makes the game incredibly boring.
I do not have the time however to start it all over again. So the remaining heros get a smaller run now and then, usually up to level 50. Sorry guys.

[idbeholdME 394]

As for the enemy resistances in vanilla Sacred 1, they are applied to your base damage before any damage modifiers, which is massive. My late-game Niob Gladiator had 783 248-973 603 listed damage on his Hard Hit, yet dealt only about 100 000-123 000 damage to the Hell Golem Warriors on Niobium. About 14% of the listed damage. Reason?

Because the HGWs resistances get applied to your base damage. My Gladiator did 27775-34525 damage against the HGWs 22237 resistance. I also had pretty split samage types, same as the HGW has resistances, so the damage was drastically reduced. And only after that does it get multiplied by any damage bonuses. Which resulted in me doing about 14% of the listed damage, because the base damage was reduced to that amount.

In Sacred 2, the damage gets applied against enemy resistance after all your damage bonuses, so it's not that big of a deal. But enemy resistances are extremely powerful in Sacred 1 and it's pretty important to focus on one damage type to punch through enemy resistance. My last post here goes into detail:

https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/71919-enemy-resistances-impact/&do=findComment&comment=7135732

I hear people constantly say that it's primitive to become an overpowered god in Sacred 1, but I found that to not be the case, especially when it's your first character. It is somewhat easy in Sacred 2, but Sacred 1, especially Underworld, can be quite tough. And enemies chunk you for like 1/3rd of your health constantly in Niob. Maybe spellcasters have an easier time, but weapon characters require strict gearing to deal effective damage and good piloting to live. I pretty much have to resort to perma-stunning everything in the penultimate Underworld area with Stomping Jump to kill/live efficiently, especially the Cerebropods.

Edited July 1, 2023 by idbeholdME

[Dax 481]

Well yeah, S1 Vanilla is not so well balanced, set weapons (plus the icon set) easily knock the whole balance out. Set weapons are easy to come by, hammer-smashing
everything in your path. So becoming a damage-god in S1 is not that difficult. If you also choose the right class, things are becoming that easy that it is
rather rediculous. There are several videos of Underworld white-gear-only-runs on youtube. The extreme misbalance in Vanilla might be an aspect of Sacreds popularity.

Yes, melee only characters have to consider more aspects than ranged heros, spellcasters, or summoners. In my wildest dreams monsters can block attacks,
have spell resistance, regenerate hit points, are immune vs life leech, summon help, have an increased attack rate, use curses, deseases, drain life, infest
our hero, slow him down, set him afire, turn him into an ice block, backstab him, steal his rings/necklace, render his potions useless and many other things...

[gogoblender 3,070]

1 hour ago, Dax said:The extreme misbalance in Vanilla might be an aspect of Sacreds popularity.

 

😮

astute .. never thought of it like that way before ..  had always thought that the short lengths of the buffs made it more difficult to manage than sacred 2

It’s still a very cool insight

😀😀😀

gogo

[Lindor 438]

On 6/29/2023 at 6:53 PM, Dax said:

Since monsters do not have spell resistance (yet), you can easily eliminate anything moving using your spells and
the dive-bomb attack.

15 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

Maybe spellcasters have an easier time,

 

It definitely should be noted, that like in Sacred 2, there is a fundamenta difference between spell damage based combat arts and weapon damage based combat arts. Let's not refer to "Combat Arts" as "spells". Combat arts are combat arts and spells are a subclass of combat arts.

The only character which is a viable spellcaster is the Dark Elf with his traps. Because of a bug, in Vanilla the spell damage will reset after reaching a limit (I think it was 65535 or so), completely breaking any late-game spellcaster builds. Dark Elf Traps are the exception, they don't suffer from this bug.

The demon's dive-bomb attack is not a spell. It's a weapon-damage based combat art. These are extraordinarily powerful and the reason why everybody of the so called 2hard-core-gamers" says "Sacred 1 is so eay blah blah blah". No, it's only easy if you have the right build.

Sacred 1's difficulty curve is it first is pretty easy, then after a few leves suddenly it becomes super hard making it a real challenge for new players, and then it becomes easier and easier over time until you oneshot everything with your combat arts.

 

 

Don't let this information cloud your mind. It's still entiirely possible to beat the Sacred 1 campaign with a spellcaster like a battlemage e.g., and it's a lot of fun. It's just not possible to build a level 216 spellcaster mage beating the Underworld campaign in Niob. But up to around level 100, like Gold or Platinum, he's viable and that's enough for most people.

[idbeholdME 394]

17 hours ago, Lindor said:

The demon's dive-bomb attack is not a spell. It's a weapon-damage based combat art. These are extraordinarily powerful and the reason why everybody of the so called 2hard-core-gamers" says "Sacred 1 is so eay blah blah blah". No, it's only easy if you have the right build.

I know the difference between spell CAs and weapon CAs.

I brought a Gladiator to late game Niob Underworld, Valley of Tears (a level 169 character vs level 186 or so enemies) and I have had a pretty hard time dealing damage efficiently with weapon based attacks due to the problem I described, that the damage vs enemy resistance is first done on the non Combat Art damage and only then multiplied by the % bonus from the weapon CA. My level 132 Hard Hit tooltip says 783K - 973K damage, but I am only doing ~9% of that to Cerebropods because my base damage is so low and split over multiple types so the enemy resistances are mostly negating it. And that is after I spent a dozen or so hours by hardcore shopping for gear to increase my base damage (% of attribute dealt as damage), it was more like 7% before that. But I did reach a stage where I can 2 shot Hell Golem Warriors (who take about 14% of the listed damage compared to 9%) with regular Hard Hits and being able to one shot them sometimes with a crit. But one shotting stuff like Crerebropods? That is pure dream territory for me and I don't see that changing even if I pump Hard Hit all the way to 255 (which would render it pretty much unusable due to regen time anyway).

I have pretty much no idea about other characters (only played a caster Seraphim through Silver). Maybe they have some broken weapon CAs that allow you to one shot the game effortlessly, but I played the Gladiator pretty extensively, and am very, very far from that stage. So unless by "right build" you mean that there is some extremely overpowered CA the other characters have, then that might be it.

But here is an example from my Gladiator:

Stats of my Hard Hit and normal weapon hit:

 

 

A higher damage roll of a non-critical hit with Hard Hit on a Cerebropod with its stats:

 

If I doubled my current damage and scored a lucky crit (x2) damage, then I might get close to actually being able to 1-shot it. Maybe.

Edited July 3, 2023 by idbeholdME

[Dax 481]

Check MetaLs mini boost:

 

[idbeholdME 394]

17 hours ago, Dax said:

Check MetaLs mini boost:

Pretty much all the videos of Sacred 1 out there show insane numbers with builds by power gamers who have the best possible gear and probably thousands of hours on their characters. I've seen some where they show inventories and they are fully decked in 20 copies of the best jewelry piece and BiS armor and weapons at the highest levels. That is basically unachievable for 99% of the players, who are going to be struggling in late game Niob a lot, maybe even sooner. I did too when I arrived in Valley of Tears at about level 150. It got slightly better since then, but I am probably like 1000 hours of grinding away, minimum, from the state in the video, if not more.

I can clear entire Niob with the character, but carefully and methodically. I can't even one shot regular enemies in Valley of Tears without a crit, let alone elites and bosses. And that is after updating several pieces of my gear.

Edited July 3, 2023 by idbeholdME

[Dax 481]

I understand you. I did some extensive farming as well, do not know anymore how many hours I have put into the game until I had what I wanted. Also I can say that
the game gets incredibly boring, after you got your elite gear together. You are bored to death. Believe me.
Back in the day when I played vanilla I was in the same situation like you. The game puts you under constant pressure to find new gear, or to level up your combat
arts/spells, which is a nasty trick since, as you mentioned it already, combat arts/spells become nearly unuseable, as soon as you cant control their cooldown anymore.
I am not saying  it is trash, it is, imo, clever customer binding to the product. Since you have to start it all over again, after you m!ssed up your build.
It helped me to regard it in a different way.
Level to the max as fast as possible, then start the game again, look relaxed for better gear, see the game world with other eyes, read the books. (Ok. They are
not so great right now.) Make the quests, let you time. Put your top gear into the hero chest, buy some white items, give it a run...
But to get there as fast as possible, you have to circumvent the game mechanics. Get yourself the set weapons, smash everything and break out of this frustrating
circle. The icon set has been uploaded on Darkmatters several times already, grab it and lets go!
Vanilla is abandoned, the makers are scattered across the world and never looked back. Otherwise they would have patch-fixed the whole shebang long ago. But they
did not and instead moved on quickly to Sacred 2, which was, if I get it right, in the same desolate condition on release. Only a bit more complex with better sound
and improved world building. So, with the makers gone, there is no need anymore to play after the rules. Instead, work yourself in front of them and lead the circus.

[idbeholdME 394]

On 7/4/2023 at 12:27 PM, Dax said:

The icon set has been uploaded on Darkmatters several times already, grab it and lets go!

Funnily enough, I actually gathered the set on my own. I got 3 pieces by regular play and the other 3 by save/loading early game quests (before normal sets can drop) until I got the missing pieces as rewards. But it also was exactly the point where I burnt out on the game a couple years ago.

I might come back and do some power-splitting in the Valley with it and grind to level 200. I consider characters that complete Niobium as finished, but I want at least one level 200 character in vanilla just to say that I did it. That is why I power-farmed the Icon set to grind experience, but never actually got around to doing it  The Gladiator was my first Sacred 1 character ever so bringing him all the way to the end of Niob was already a big achievement for me. My goal isn't to really reach the state that is in the video, I'd rather roll a different character than grind a thousand hours on the same one.

Edited July 5, 2023 by idbeholdME

[Dax 481]

You play the game the way you like it. Period.
As for myself, starting it all over with new hero is not an option. Not enough time. I give it a run up to level 50 max, but thats it. So it is still enjoyable but I am not forced into farming and grinding to keep up with the game at all costs, since the hero gets dropped at level 50 anyway.
Right now, I just roam the game world in search of an incredibly specialized item, nearly impossible to come by. If it does not work out (as always) I boost my survival bonus (97% yay!), do all quests, or visit the region bosses to discuss their future.
I do not want to lure you away from vanilla, but all the problems you have mentioned, are getting removed by the Reborn mod. One day, you might take a look into it if you want and got some time left.

Edited July 6, 2023 by Dax

[LEXX 2]

On 7/6/2023 at 1:46 PM, Dax said:

You play the game the way you like it. Period.
As for myself, starting it all over with new hero is not an option. Not enough time. I give it a run up to level 50 max, but thats it. So it is still enjoyable but I am not forced into farming and grinding to keep up with the game at all costs, since the hero gets dropped at level 50 anyway.

 

I have to say, I came to a similar conclusion, after my Vampire run. I like maxing out characters and reaching endgame content in ARPGs, but in Sacred that seems like a much lengthier process, and I've lost motivation to do it. Going further after lvl50 doesn't seem rewarding enough, because all I'll be grinding for is numbers, but the character itself and the gameplay style won't change between level 50 to max. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, a lot of hanck'n'slash ARPG are like that, including their daddy, Diablo 2. In D2 you can reach a point where your build takes shape around level 50, and then you keep playing the rest of nightmare and hell difficulty for fun and higher tier loot. The only difference, in D2 it doesn't take long to get there... unless you have to grind for gear, then it's pain.  Diablo 2 also increases champion and unique spawns in higher difficulties to make it more interesting, I'm not sure if Sacred does a similar thing, or the whole world has fixed spawns that never change and only get a level boost in higher difficulty.

I'm happy I could finally play a full campaign of Sacred, and will be looking forward to doing it again with another character in the future. 

[Dax 481]

No, there is nothing new on higher levels. You repeat the same thing over and over again. There are no new areas, no new enemies and no new quests. In theory, there is not even a difference between Silver and Niobium difficulty. The only thing you do, after maxing your hero out, is to look for highly specific gear, to make him even more deadly. Or, as soon as you have farmed enough stuff together, you can try an entirely new build with seperate gear and switch from axes to ranged/pole arms and so on. But after all, it remains the same.
I suggest to check out Reborn Mod and Sacred NL.