Sacred Underworld - Combat Art Damage Cap

[Sethi22 373]

Gather, people of Ancaria, and pour all your wisdom into this thread here! New players should know, that there's a damage cap in this game! There's no Wiki page about this (at least I haven't found one) and I couldn't really find a thread here either. 

(I had no idea about it, and found it out the hard way, with my dwarf cannoner. I just kept reading runes into it, together with dwarven steel, until my damage on the tooltip was close to 300K. However, no matter how many I read, and no matter if I used dwarven steel or not, the damage would never go above 98K per single hit. And it sucked!!!)

So this cannot go on like this! Others shouldn’t fall into this trap because of the lack of information available. (What on Earth have you been doing for all these years, you lazy scoundrels!?!?!?!? ) Luckily, there’s a clever chap on this forum, called @SLD. All of the things mentioned here come from him, with his permission. I asked him to write this topic, but he’s a bit too shy, and says he doesn’t want to publish information he’s not 100% sure of. So I took this mammoth task upon my shoulders and collected all the things he told me about it in different threads and in private messages, after I kept pestering him for weeks. So here come his quotes:

„The dwarven "cannon" skills all run against the skill  damage cap that was introduced to prevent an overflow that could once occur. Some capped skills have tooltips that wrap around like bfg others like the dwarf ones claim to do higher damage but they don't. They're all capped at ~65535 per damage type and that is afterwards multiplied with the SB damage bonus so a possible total of around 98k per damage type, the dwarven mortar reaches cap with two and therefore gets to somewhere below 200k…

 I don't know if poison mist is capped as it usually doesn't reach that high a number on either of its damage types, but what I do know for sure is that the bonus from testosterone does not get capped and thereby poison mist can hit for far more damage in a single hit than basically every other non weapon damage based CA...”

 

This was the point, where I started to realize, that I really messed up my dwarf. So I tested and tested, kept shooting with him in all sorts of places at all sorts of enemies, with the same result. Damage never went above 98K. So I came back here, and started to poke the guy with my virtual wand to make him divulge some more information, and there came his next reply, saying:

 

„...You shouldn't be able to go past ~98K, and you could "prove" that there's a cap if you had a way to substantially lower or increase your damage. As long as the number on the Combat Art Symbol is above ~65535 (or ~98K in the inventory screen with close to 100% Survival Bonus) your damage dealt should not change at all. Should you go below that threshold however you should see the expected drop in damage...”

 

But I remembered, that with my soaring daemon, I could go way above this threshold, and even with my relatively new gladiator, in low levels, his fist of the gods already went well above 100K, not only on the tooltip, but really. So I decided it was time to clear things up, and asked him:  

„…So I guess this cap doesn't apply to weapon based combat arts then? Is this the case? Only spells? (Or spell like combat arts that don't include a weapon?) And if this is the case, why? Why put casters into such a disadvantage? How come weapon based combat arts can't "overflow"?

And then finally he told me all the rest:

„Yes, weapon based stuff is not capped.
Why the devs did what they did? I have no clue. But I'm sure the "dmg cap" was not originally intended. These combat arts could just reach beyond 65536 dmg on a single element and that's not some random number, its a 16bit integer value. The devs probably originally thought this "limit" would not be reached when they chose to only use a 16 bit integer.
So the problem arose that when you got like 70k dmg you actually started over, and had like 4.5k instead which sucks! The devs found out but the original alotted value could not be increased so they did the best thing they could at the time and built in a cap that prevents the overflow. This cap doesn't work equally on all skills meaning the bfg still "visibly" overflows on its tooltip while the dwarven arts just show huge numbers that don't take effect. In the end the numbers on the enemies hit, show the truth, that it's capped the same in both cases.
Survival bonus increases damage by half it's value so 10%SB gives 5% damage bonus and maximum 100%sb gives 50% damage bonus. That's how I get from ~65536 to ~98k. Numbers on the enemies match this so we know this multiplier happens after the cap. We also know that weapon lore and %dmg increase from gear, attribute bonuses etc happen before the cap.
The only exception I know of for certain, is testosterone on darkelf traps. That's why your poison mist ca can say like 300k poison damage and actually do that kind of damage.

These Combat arts I have been talking about all have one thing in common. On the Combat Art itself it states a flat value of damage. And that is the damage where each element is capped to ~65k. Should be capped on anything from fireball to bfg to mortar grenade... just everything that does damage on its own.

Weapon based Combat arts like hard hit or fist of the gods start with your weapon damage and bonus weapon damage from rings etc then multiply with all the factors fromn weapon lore to attributes and so on and then finally multiply that result with the % value on the combat art.
Wether the "basic attack" (left click) is capped at 65k per element I'd have no clue but it would be quite hard to get there right? So all we know that the combat art's +1000% or something seems to happen after any cap if there is a cap at all. We don't know if for weapon based combat anythig that could ever get too large is ever stored in a 16bit value, so we don't know wether an overflow could happen and therfore would make a cap necessary.

Also to keep in mind: crits should happen after the damage cap and "wounds increase damage dealt" is also a separate multiplier that happens after the damage cap. Very useful for cannon dwarves as dwarves have a temporary buff combat art (Berserk) that can give a huge amount of bonus to widd. Just in case you ever wanted to fire mortar grenades that deal more than a million damage... All you have to do is get to really low life

So again the reason why "spell" damage is capped is not a design decision it's the developers fix for a design flaw in the original code. To fix the far worse thing that was live for multiple patch versions. Not sure if fireball can reach the cap but it's one of the few mage spells that might, so imagine your Fireball does 65k+ damage and you put one point in magic lore, suddenly you do like 100 dmg. The cap is there to prevent this "bug".
Also interesting is that most spells don't ever reach that cap on a single element with a single hit. Look at all the woodelf spells or most of the battle mage spells, the seraphim spells... they all do low damage/multiple elements etc.
Would also be ridiculous if you reached the ~65k or ~100k with sb on ice shards or call of the ancestors, which is probably why the devs originally missed the few high damage single hit outliers when they chose 16bit value per element.

I couldn't find any information on when the cap was implemented. So like many other things, information about this might have disappeared with the official forums…”

 

So here we are then. The end. All you veterans out there, atone for your sins, and finally share your knowledge with us noobs! Which combat arts are affected, so which are the ones that can actually reach this cap? I can only confirm cannon blast so far, and according to @SLD, BFG is another for sure, maybe fireball and mortar grenade too. We’re waiting for confirmation about these, and also want to to hear about all the rest!!!

Edited January 25 by Sethi22

[SLD 524]

Thx Sethi22 for forcing me to do something good
 

4 hours ago, Sethi22 said:

I can only confirm cannon blast so far, and according to @SLD, BFG is another for sure, maybe fireball and mortar grenade too. We’re waiting for confirmation about these, and also want to to hear about all the rest!!!

The dwarves flamethrower can also reach cap, so all three cannon combat arts can hit high enough values and they are properly capped so no overflow. They show ever growing tooltip values on the CA but have no actual increase past the cap. The BFG hits the cap and overflows on the CA tooltip, yet the actual damage is also properly capped. That the fireball might reach the cap is purely a guess so far. We would need a high level mage to see if it does and wether it was properly capped or not.

I just loaded a darkelf and can confirm poison mist can on really high level reach the cap with its poison portion without testosterone. The CA tooltip is uncapped the inventory screen tooltip overflows and the actual damage does at least not overflow. I could not get the damage high enough to see if it's capped or somehow unlimited. Testosterone works properly and allows for sick damage  
With Bottomless pit I could also reach a high enough value to prove that its poison damage does not overflow(except for the inventory tooltip). Again, I couldn't find out wether it was capped or unlimited. Testosterone works the same as for poison mist. Bottomless pit would also reach high enough values on its fire portion if properly scaled/leveled. My darkelf was not equipped to do this. He also didn't have explosive charge to test. So again a pure guess would be that explosive blast would be able to hit high enough values, just like with fireball a character to test this is currently not available to me.

So those were all skills I ever encountered wher the cap was relevant, but I never had a high and mage or a seraphim using her lightning bolt. Never used the dwarven mines either. I guess they'd work like the cannon skills. No clue wether the woodelf's thorn bush does high enough damage. And the there are the demon's spells, not sure how far you can push those either.

Well I guess I did my part now. If anyone has a character that can give us some solid information on all my guesses, please share your experiences.


As far as I can tell, the fun in playing Sacred has not been capped in any way, yet I've noticed that there might be some weird diminishing returns formula at work like with the accumulation of survial bonus.

Edited August 1, 2024 by SLD

[Sethi22 373]

19 hours ago, SLD said:

some weird diminishing returns formula at work 

No way! It only gets better with time. Like wine.

Edited August 2, 2024 by Sethi22

[SLD 524]

3 hours ago, Sethi22 said:

No way! It only gets better with time. Like wine.

Believe me young one, when 900 builds you have played, look as good Sacred will not.

A severe lack of little green emojis I have just found.

[Sethi22 373]

Well I was hoping for some more masters to show up in this topic, but it seems we're alone, so we can talk about anything really.  Sadly I lost my Niobium daemoness who had blazing discs on her, because I accidentaly overwrote the exported character and now she's gone. Forever. So I can't check what was happening there, but as far as I remember, together with Infernal power it was really powerful even in Niobium. So it might be the same as with Testosterone and Poison mist, that it was above the cap, because it devastated everything. (But I'm not sure, don't count on it!!!)

(((((Apart from this, going completely offtopic, I would like to tell you, why exactly I think Sacred1 is getting better with age. Because it's an old man's game! I'm 44 now, and I played them all, @SLD, Path of exile, Last Epoch, Grim dawn, Titan, you name it... All the way back to Diablo 1. I was completely hooked on Path of Exile for years, spent days in Path of Building, I bought new character slots because every one of them was filled with level 90+ characters... But just like you, my eyes gave up. All those flashing lights that are present in every newschool arpg are completely unacceptable for me now. And Sacred 1 is the most beautiful, eye friendly arpg I have ever seen, even better than Diablo 1-2. It really stands out, and I don't think anything close to it will ever come out now. There are no annoying flashing lights in it! 0! (Only at the cutscenes maybe, but that's ok, you can skip it.) And I can play with it for hours without my eyes popping out of my head, or getting a headache. That's the main reason. Sacred 2 is second on my list, almost as eye-friendly! So this is why I love the Sacreds more and more with each passing day. (And all the rest of course, the great soundtrack, the funny gravestones and so on...) But most of all, the eye-friendly graphics! It's instant relaxation for my eyes, my soul, it's the (only) way to go if you want to continue hacking and slahing after a certain age, I think! (I don't have proof, maybe others are equipped with better eyes than me, I don't know. Only my feelings here. I definitely CAN'T play any new arpgs any more, that much I know. And to have any kind of fun with a game, first you have to be able to play it!)

In the end, I was spending far more time in Path of building than in the actual game, because my eyes said BOOM! after 10 minutes of Path of Exile (in the mines for example.) And then I realized, there's no point in this. Why care about a game, that I can't play any more? And the same applies to all the rest of the arpg games coming our way these days. They are all labeled "ugly, new school, flashy nonsense" in my book now. I hate them all with passion! Sacred 1-2, Diablo 1-2. That's it!)))))

 

Edited August 6, 2024 by Sethi22

[Lindor 574]

I can remember having some discussions across multiple threads about this, but it's mostly a single post. There's a lot of information out there that it just guess and hasn't properly been confirmed though.

I had e.g. some conversation with one of the creators of the ReBorn mod, the discussion was very toxic though and I don't recommend reading it.


Here's what I definitely know because I tested it ingame way back in the days:

• All Battle Mage spells are capped, but because some of his spells have a lot of hits and/or CC like stun, he's still playable in lvl 255, it's just not a pleasant experience but it is possible
• All Seraphim spells are capped and a spell dmg based Seraphim is absolutely unplayable in lvl 255, even with cheated gear
• Not a single Dark Elf Trap is capped, when they hit they can all reach values above the cap and this has nothing to do with testosterone

That's it for confirmed knowledge. If you want to test more, you can download the test characters I uploaded way back in the days. The characters themselves are cheated to get them unskilled, but the gear they have was honorfully farmed by killing Anducar a couple thousand times (he drops at least one safe set/unique on every death).

Now my personal opinion:
For me when I found this out this killed the fun of Sacred. The dream of putting enough hard work into your character until it's overpowered is dead for the characters I'd like to play. The only way around is mods, but there's very few mods and those touch things which I never wanted to be touched. I'd like to have smth like Flix's PFP for Sacred 1. Or an official remake of the game which removes the cap. That would be nice. But until then I'm rather focusing on Sacred 2.

[Sethi22 373]

(Look, we're not alone after all! ) Thanks for dropping in, and for clearing the mist a bit more! Well, I have no idea about what happens on level 255, but I was able to beat Nio Anducar with my capped dwarf in the end. Without ever dying. So being capped really sucks, but I wouldn't say it destroys the game. You won't be OP, that's for sure! You might be right about the Seraphim though, my only spell Sera never even reached Nio, she died in Platinum, or maybe even Gold Valley, I don't remember any more. It looked really bad, compared to other characters I tried. ((Luckily, BFG Sera in Sacred 2 is the most OP thing ever, so there's a bit of compensation for our pain!)) I don't do Sacred 1 mods either, so I'll stick with what we have.

You say Testosterone has nothing to do with the traps being capped or not. Then my theory of Infernal power pushing the daemoness spells above the limit is also in danger! I'm an idiot for deleting her, I forgot I had no saves, only the exported girl and overwrote it. I might just try your test characters for this! Thanks for pointing me to them! (I already knew they existed, but I was afraid of what I would find there. I remember how going into the cheater's room in Titan Quest with all the set items on the table completely ruined the game for me afterwards.) There are things an honest, hard working, well behaved  player like me should never see!

Edited August 5, 2024 by Sethi22

[Lindor 574]

From my experience, the most OP thing ever is the full Ettol'Rahc-Notwen's Breeze set.

I can see why after getting a feeling of what the end game looks like, there's not much reason left to play Sacred anymore. On other games like Age of Empires and Dungeon Siege, cheat codes are a fixed and important part of the game.

On Sacred it's different. The task to get to 255 is incredibly difficult, you dream of getting there and once it's done, you realize there's nothing there. That's why I think Sacred might not have been that good of a game after all. It makes the player hunt for an unreachable dream. Once you realize that, it feels kinda hollow. It's sad because the game has had so much potential. I wanted to feel what it feels like to play a character all the way up until its stats are perfect so that he would shred all Boss enemies in seconds. But it's not possible in general. There are very few playstyles that work like that because they're exploiting some not-so-well thought through game mechanic like the bow set I mentioned. And for those it's like an all-or-nothing situation: You either have the set and deal absurd amounts of damage, or you don't.

[Sethi22 373]

Well I never aimed so high, to be honest. My goal has always been beating Niobium Anducar without ever dying. And since that can be achieved even with a capped character, I'm content. (In Sacred 1, my most OP experience was the poison trapper so far. I wanted to try Ettol set with a wood elf (or a vamp), as I have dozens of it stored away, but other projects interfered with my plans, and I strayed from the path. But I'll definitely try it after your post, thanks for the tip!

And the BFG Sera in Sacred 2 I felt was OP on both sides. Both offense, AND defense. I had hundreds of thousands of energy shield with her, that combined with the damage she does... Now that was pure supremacy!)

I'll ask my next guest who comes to my home to have a look at your test characters, to see if the daemon spells can go over the cap! That's a good idea! I'll cover my eyes, so I won't see anything inappropriate, but still get the info!

Edited August 5, 2024 by Sethi22

[SLD 524]

15 hours ago, Sethi22 said:

o I can't check what was happening there, but as far as I remember, together with Infernal power it was really powerful even in Niobium. So it might be the same as with Testosterone and Poison mist, that it was above the cap, because it devastated everything.

I can say for sure that it's not "the same" as the infernal power fire% dmg stacks additively with some other stuff the spell casting demoness has. Not sure which ones but it's not as op because of it. Testosterone on Poison Mist is so OP because it doesn't get watered down by anything except dmg% on gear. Weapon Lore, Ballistics and the attribute etc all fall into "different"/at least "a different" category.
 

10 hours ago, Lindor said:

Here's what I definitely know because I tested it ingame way back in the days:

• All Battle Mage spells are capped, but because some of his spells have a lot of hits and/or CC like stun, he's still playable in lvl 255, it's just not a pleasant experience but it is possible
• All Seraphim spells are capped and a spell dmg based Seraphim is absolutely unplayable in lvl 255, even with cheated gear
• Not a single Dark Elf Trap is capped, when they hit they can all reach values above the cap and this has nothing to do with testosterone

How did you scale all the Battle Mage and Seraphim spells to that kind of damage? I somehow can't Imagine a way to both scale their level and damage that far.
Just as an example I loaded my Energy Bolts Seraphim. She's only lvl 130 or so but that shouldn't matter too much. Her LVL 415 Energy Bolts do around 11k magic damage at that point but only increase by around 800 magic damage by adding another "50% increased damage". Assuming you scale that to lvl 510 (~x1.25) we get 14k dmg +1k per 50% increase, so to hit cap you'll need around 50x50%=2500% bonus damage from gear. It gets a slight bit lower by increasing Magic Lore above the 168 I had and som from the attributes as well but still you're gonna needaround 2000% bonus which would be around 100% per socket for 20 sockets. But how do you get such a socketable and where do you get the 255 bonus to the combat art from when you didn't socket that? I see no way without cheated gear to reach cap on Energy bolts. Rotating Blades of LIght seems to even do slightly less damage. So that one is also quite unlikely. Her lightning bolt gets around 150 magic damage per level x510 that would be around the cap so I belive that one can be tested but the others are so far off. It could of course very well be that you cheated somehow for these testing purposes which would be totally fine my questions are just for making sure you know what you're talking about and your conclusions are correct. 
 

10 hours ago, Sethi22 said:

You say Testosterone has nothing to do with the traps being capped or not. Then my theory of Infernal power pushing the daemoness spells above the limit is also in danger!

Dude what would you need that for. If you can hit cap with the disks that would be somewhere between 100k and 200k damage per hit per disk. Compared to a poison mist trapper throwing like 700k per second traps, they both would just obliterate everything. My worry would rather be that the disk doesn't reach cap at all.
 

6 hours ago, Lindor said:

From my experience, the most OP thing ever is the full Ettol'Rahc-Notwen's Breeze set.

Under what circumstances does that do anything. If I understand it correctly it supposedly lowers enemy physical damage resistance. Restistance doesn't matter much when your hits are large enough. And removing all resistance should still only allow you to do the damage you do, never more. I admit I have far too little experience with that bow so I'd love to hear more about the use cases where it really shines and why.
 

6 hours ago, Lindor said:

On other games like Age of Empires and Dungeon Siege, cheat codes are a fixed and important part of the game.

What makes cheat codes in Dungeon Siege an "important part of the game"? I never felt the need to melee hit at 100 range and making myself invulnerable doesn't seem to make the game more interesting, rather less
Dungeon Siege is a great game but I don't understand what the cheat codes have to do with it.
 

6 hours ago, Lindor said:

On Sacred it's different. The task to get to 255 is incredibly difficult, you dream of getting there and once it's done, you realize there's nothing there.

Do the enemies reach 255 at the end? Otherwise I could understand that it's extremely difficult to reach levels that are past the level cap Otherwise I would consider reaching max level in Sacred rather tedious than difficult. There is nothing ever stopping you from progressing after all. I agree with you on the Idea that once you seen high enough Sacred gameply the motivation to push up there again is very low. The game just looks and feels exactly the same at lvl 50, 100 and 150. It just gets boring unless maybe if you love the campaign and quests as much as Sethi22 and therefore get to see some variety along the way.

 

6 hours ago, Lindor said:

There are very few playstyles that work like that because they're exploiting some not-so-well thought through game mechanic like the bow set I mentioned. And for those it's like an all-or-nothing situation: You either have the set and deal absurd amounts of damage, or you don't.

Hearing your balance complaints makes me look forward to your Sacred 2 mod. I'm curious to see what a game would feel like assuming you achieve the level of balance you seem to want in games. 

 

4 hours ago, Sethi22 said:

And the BFG Sera in Sacred 2 I felt was OP on both sides. Both offense, AND defense. I had hundreds of thousands of energy shield with her, that combined with the damage she does... Now that was pure supremacy!)

Why would you need "hundreds of thousands of energy shield" in a game where you can reach 100% mitigation? Of course having some energy shield is defensively OP in Sacred 2 as it is the only guaranteed protection against the sometimes double hitting 66%leech ligthning from those demon champs in the desolation. 2x66% kills every character that doesn't have energy shield
Offensively the BFG Sera wasn't that OP. When the game  came out there were other issues like disease dryads
Going CMPatch and beyond however the BFG Seraphim got buffed and buffed with more and more projectiles for the already most broken cannon in the game. No clue why they did that.

[Sethi22 373]

Oh this is great! I have two masterminds in my little topic now, this is getting exciting! I'll let you guys do the rest from here, I'll just sit back and enjoy...

Edited August 6, 2024 by Sethi22

[Lindor 574]

3 hours ago, SLD said:

It could of course very well be that you cheated somehow for these testing purposes which would be totally fine my questions are just for making sure you know what you're talking about and your conclusions are correct. 

That's exactly what I did.

3 hours ago, SLD said:

even with cheated gear

cheated gear can have up to 8 different boni and 8 different sockets, though you can only socket 4 of them. I gave her the most powerful gear imaginable and she was still completely unplayable.

3 hours ago, SLD said:

my questions are just for making sure you know what you're talking about and your conclusions are correct. 

Granted, I don't really care about ingame numbers or stats anymore because Sacred is deceiving. Remember the creator of the ReBorn mod I mentioned? Well, while he had a very toxic attitude, he still had a lot of inside into the game's code and he told me a lot about that, e.g. that the special damage sets wouldn't actually deal special damage but just give a hidden multiplier to your damage. Well, I don't know if what he told me is correct, and if you did the math, it might wark as if it was special damage, but from there I never trusted anything I saw ingame anymore. Only the way the gameplay feels.

3 hours ago, SLD said:

Do the enemies reach 255 at the end?

Can't remember anymore, sry

3 hours ago, SLD said:

Otherwise I would consider reaching max level in Sacred rather tedious than difficult.

Yeah agree, that's what I meant. It's exhausting. Even with the Sakkara pit.

3 hours ago, SLD said:

Under what circumstances does that do anything. If I understand it correctly it supposedly lowers enemy physical damage resistance. Restistance doesn't matter much when your hits are large enough. And removing all resistance should still only allow you to do the damage you do, never more. I admit I have far too little experience with that bow so I'd love to hear more about the use cases where it really shines and why.

Two use cases come in mind: Just standard ranged H11 and the Vampiress. For the latter it's a special kind of build, the only way I remember to use bows in meelee combat. She keeps the Boni when transforming to a Vampire, and using ripping claws with the bow set is strong. Very strong. One-hitting Anducar in demon form level strong. Maybe not at lvl 255, but still.

As I said, I don't trust ingame descriptions anymore. I don't know how exactly the bow is working. But I know it's strong.

3 hours ago, SLD said:

What makes cheat codes in Dungeon Siege an "important part of the game"? I never felt the need to melee hit at 100 range and making myself invulnerable doesn't seem to make the game more interesting, rather less
Dungeon Siege is a great game but I don't understand what the cheat codes have to do with it.

Agreed, Dngeon Siege is already great without cheat codes. But things like +sixdemonbag and then only using summoned creatures for the entire playthrough. Cheats allowed for unique playstyles that could not be experimented with normally. Like +drdeath'ing all your characters, but then only using Zap for the rest of the playthrough.

 

3 hours ago, SLD said:

Hearing your balance complaints makes me look forward to your Sacred 2 mod. I'm curious to see what a game would feel like assuming you achieve the level of balance you seem to want in games. 

I'm glad you're interested First I need to figure out why my mod breaks the special mount traders. I thought it's the blueprint.txt uniquename property, but apparently it's not.

Also it won't be the finished mod, just an alpha version. The spells and item boni will be completely rebalanced, but a lot of my higher goals won't be part of the release, e.g. removing almost all set items and items with fixed boni, but re-use their itemtypes for items with random boni, allowing for a more diverse playstyle and character build. There will be few items left with fixed boni, e.g. the legendary artefacts you get on killing the four elemental boss enemies. And I plan on keeping the Kaysers Luck set as a reward for the Epic Office Quest. And the XMAS sets as they're unimportant for gameplay anyways. And maybe I will keep the mutation sets but alter them to only contain max sockets on items.

[xeyp 53]

Okay, Hi all - maybe I'm a little late to the party

Truth be told I've mainly played CA based builds, the spell builds I've played I haven't taken much further than lvl 50-60. 
I just wasn't a fan of my main damage source being dependent on a flat damage value on a spell that can't change beyond eating more runes. 
I had read somewhere before about a spell cap as well so that doubled my cautiousness in playing spell builds. 
Thanks for the Spell Sera warning, was planning to test lightning strike in the future, now that dream's dead haha. 

Anyway, I did a little poking around in the game - this might or might not be relevant to this conversation but here it is. 
As you concluded spells that hit more times for a smaller amount can be scaled much further down the road, so I wanted to check what the hardest
hitting 'spells' or flat-damage abilities are. I tried to look for flat damage values at level one and damage increase per rune, but my googling skills turned out insufficient.
So I opened each character individually and picked a few Spells from almost every class that I felt hit the strongest for these classes. Then I (after a ton of 2 rune trades) got 
a rune for each dropped them in multiplayer and proceeded to make new character after new character (with Default Skill 0, so they don't influence on the damage of the Spells).
This is what I found, I'll color code the damage types for ease of reading - questions and conclusions will be after that:

____________________________________________________________________________

CLASS \ skill              | Level 1 Spell Damage & Damage Components | Level 2 Spell Damage and Damage Components | Percentage Increase (if my math is correct)

Seraphim:
   Lightning Strike:      55 = 10 0 45 0   |  90 = 18 0 72 0     | 63.6%

Demon:
   Blazing Disc:            33 = 16 17 0 0   |  54 = 26 28 0 0     | 63.6%

Wood Elf:
   Thorn Bush:             59 =   0 0 0 59 |  95 =  0 0 0 95        | 61%

Dwarf:
   Cannon Blast:           68 = 68 0 0 0   |  109 = 109 0 0 0    | 60%
   Mortar Granade:      68 = 34 34 0 0 |  108 = 54 54 0 0    | 58.8%

Dark Elf:
   Bottomless pit:         67 = 0 33 0 33 | 108 = 0 54 0 54     | 61% 

Battle Mage:
   Fireball:                    75 = 0 54 21 0 | 119 = 0 86 33 0    | 58.6%

____________________________________________________________________________

Now something that surprised me is the Wood Elf's Thorn bush, as it has the second highest damage component, only second to the Cannon Blast.
However, if I remember correctly - almost everything has physical resist of some sort. So it's the highest non-physical damage component. The size of the 
component matter because when you scale with X Spell Damage % (or even just X Damage %) it only scales one damage type per item and since weaker hitting attacks / dmg components 
are more severely punished by resistances we'd want to focus on one damage type as much as we can, so we take the largest component in any spell and focus on that.
That makes Thorn bush arguably better for scaling than the hardest hitting Spell ( at level 1 ) Fireball. 
Has anyone tried scaling Thorn Bush, does it have a cap, if no, I'd love to try and make a Wood Elf Spell Build (Druidess :P) and while we're on the Wood Elf - how did the Spider Arrow damage
scale, did it scale with anything from the character or just the level of the CA? 

Second of all about the percentage, I've never really tracked and tested damage increases per rune eaten, I just follow the golden rule if CA cooldown falls beyond X, eat rune until it's equal to X.
I assume it falls down some - do we have numbers on all CA/Spells that I've missed somehow - like we have the Skill return based on Points invested. 

7 hours ago, SLD said:

Her LVL 415 Energy Bolts do around 11k magic damage at that point but only increase by around 800 magic damage by adding another "50% increased damage". Assuming you scale that to lvl 510 (~x1.25) we get 14k dmg +1k per 50% increase, so to hit cap you'll need around 50x50%=2500% bonus damage from gear.

Is this really how badly Spells scale? The first thing that pops into my head is a wood elf I have at 82 w/ level 60 gear, that does between 250k - 800k (depending on crit) w/ explosive arrow(lvl64) and between 10-25k w/ very lightly invested into Penetrating Arrow and that's w/ the multi-hit applied I think. I can also think of a not so optimal lvl50 dual wield gladiator that hit for at least 30k w/ Hard Hit.
 
One last thing, it might be common knowledge but I hadn't considered it at least, spells that hit multiple times like Ice Shards on the BM can proc on-attack modifiers on every discrete hit of the 
attack. So 2% split, if you hit 10 times is closer to 20% than 2% on a per cast basis. I started an Ice Mage some time ago and remember having a 2% Split modifier from one item and splitting enemies every encounter I even had a fight with 2 orcs that turned into a fight against 6, w/o pulling any more orcs  Is this a META leveling strategy perhaps haha. 

[Sethi22 373]

Oh, welcome, welcome, you're not late at all! Please take a seat! You have done a great job and hats off for the beautiful colored letters too, even a half blind old drunkard like me can see them. I'll leave the math to you guys, I only want to tell you about two spells I've tried. Thorn bush I found really strong, although I only played it on lower levels. But I read it somewhere that it keeps its potential later too, and I believed it. I still think poison is the best damage type in this game, considering the low poison resist of the monsters in the Valley (and that's the place that matters really.) It's painfully slow though! It can be shot with a bow so it explodes, but taking out everything with that... Well, I'll leave that build for my really old days. I can see myself thornbushing everything 90 years old... But not any sooner! (Poison tendrils would be a nice addition, but I'm really not familiar with that spell...)

Ebolts Sera I played, and the damage was really low. It was ok in silver, maybe gold, but like SLD said, that 10K damage in later stages is nowhere near enough! I don't know about the rest of her spells, Ebolts was the only thing I really played (together with RBOL of course.)

Keep it going all of you, we'll get to the bottom of this!

Edited August 6, 2024 by Sethi22

[SLD 524]

6 hours ago, Lindor said:

Granted, I don't really care about ingame numbers or stats anymore because Sacred is deceiving. Remember the creator of the ReBorn mod I mentioned? Well, while he had a very toxic attitude, he still had a lot of inside into the game's code and he told me a lot about that, e.g. that the special damage sets wouldn't actually deal special damage but just give a hidden multiplier to your damage. Well, I don't know if what he told me is correct, and if you did the math, it might wark as if it was special damage, but from there I never trusted anything I saw ingame anymore. Only the way the gameplay feels.

What exactly would you have expected the "special damage" to be? I mean it says it does a bunch of % extra special damage and as far as I can tell that is exactly what it does.
 

6 hours ago, Lindor said:

Two use cases come in mind: Just standard ranged H11 and the Vampiress. For the latter it's a special kind of build, the only way I remember to use bows in meelee combat. She keeps the Boni when transforming to a Vampire, and using ripping claws with the bow set is strong. Very strong. One-hitting Anducar in demon form level strong. Maybe not at lvl 255, but still.

As I said, I don't trust ingame descriptions anymore. I don't know how exactly the bow is working. But I know it's strong.

I guess with H11:) you meant a bow woodelf with 2 seperate mistakes in the abbreviation. If not please enlighten me  
Theres supposedly a third use case on Call of the Ancestors.
For the general usefulness of that bow maybe Sethi22 will be able to tell me someday...
 

6 hours ago, Lindor said:

Agreed, Dngeon Siege is already great without cheat codes. But things like +sixdemonbag and then only using summoned creatures for the entire playthrough. Cheats allowed for unique playstyles that could not be experimented with normally. Like +drdeath'ing all your characters, but then only using Zap for the rest of the playthrough.

Ah, I understand. You just like playing weird stuff
 

6 hours ago, Lindor said:

I'm glad you're interested First I need to figure out why my mod breaks the special mount traders. I thought it's the blueprint.txt uniquename property, but apparently it's not.

Sadly I have no clue about the modding side of the game so I won't be of any help here.
 

6 hours ago, Lindor said:

Also it won't be the finished mod, just an alpha version. The spells and item boni will be completely rebalanced, but a lot of my higher goals won't be part of the release, e.g. removing almost all set items and items with fixed boni, but re-use their itemtypes for items with random boni, allowing for a more diverse playstyle and character build.

Oh boy, after seeing how dimitrius' attack on the item tiers went in his addendum beta I'm worried what ypu might do now
 

3 hours ago, xeyp said:

As you concluded spells that hit more times for a smaller amount can be scaled much further down the road, so I wanted to check what the hardest
hitting 'spells' or flat-damage abilities are. I tried to look for flat damage values at level one and damage increase per rune, but my googling skills turned out insufficient.
So I opened each character individually and picked a few Spells from almost every class that I felt hit the strongest for these classes.

First of all thank you for collecting the numbers. Also good job for detecting the odd connection, that all skills seem to increase in damage by ~60% from lvl 1 to 2.
I howeverdon't understand why you'd shoot for the hardest single hitting skills unless you want to run into the cap.
 

3 hours ago, xeyp said:

Now something that surprised me is the Wood Elf's Thorn bush, as it has the second highest damage component, only second to the Cannon Blast.
However, if I remember correctly - almost everything has physical resist of some sort. So it's the highest non-physical damage component. The size of the 
component matter because when you scale with X Spell Damage % (or even just X Damage %) it only scales one damage type per item and since weaker hitting attacks / dmg components 
are more severely punished by resistances we'd want to focus on one damage type as much as we can, so we take the largest component in any spell and focus on that.
That makes Thorn bush arguably better for scaling than the hardest hitting Spell ( at level 1 ) Fireball. 

I don't understand why you would scale damage solely with single elemental % rolls.
The resist idea is correct.
But we wouldn't "want to focus on one damage type as much as we can, so we take the largest component in any spell and focus on that". That is the whole point of this thread.  for example: Mortar Grenade beats Cannon Blast because both hit cap mortar just does it with two elements effectively dealing twice as much damage in endgame(Ignoring the "bug" of Cannon Blast hitting twice "sometimes").
That makes Thorn bush one of the worst spells on that list assuming you do hit the cap with it and if you don't it will be a really bad skill in the endgame doing less than 100k damage per hit. Unless of course thorn bush isn't capped at all and you can scale it beyond the cap value. Then it would still at best beat the skills on the list that are capped.

3 hours ago, xeyp said:

Has anyone tried scaling Thorn Bush, does it have a cap, if no, I'd love to try and make a Wood Elf Spell Build (Druidess :P) and while we're on the Wood Elf - how did the Spider Arrow damage
scale, did it scale with anything from the character or just the level of the CA? 

Haven't tested thorn bush. Expect it to have a cap.
If you want a "Wood Elf Spell Build" use Call of the Ancestors. If you manage to hit the cap with that you'd be dancing like a
Spider Arrow scales with nothing so you use it with multishot. The game is also really bad at dealing with it, so it's gonna be bad no matter how much damage it does.
 

3 hours ago, xeyp said:

Second of all about the percentage, I've never really tracked and tested damage increases per rune eaten, I just follow the golden rule if CA cooldown falls beyond X, eat rune until it's equal to X.
I assume it falls down some - do we have numbers on all CA/Spells that I've missed somehow - like we have the Skill return based on Points invested. 

I was first surprised, that you listed the % increase in your list. Reason for that is, that as far as I know the flat increase per CAlvl is a fixed amount. That should also explain why you now thnk that it "falls down some". Relatively it does, of course.
 

3 hours ago, xeyp said:

Is this really how badly Spells scale? The first thing that pops into my head is a wood elf I have at 82 w/ level 60 gear, that does between 250k - 800k (depending on crit) w/ explosive arrow(lvl64) and between 10-25k w/ very lightly invested into Penetrating Arrow and that's w/ the multi-hit applied I think. I can also think of a not so optimal lvl50 dual wield gladiator that hit for at least 30k w/ Hard Hit.

How often per second does your gladiator use hard hit:) The ~10k damage on Ebolts is "enough" for farming platinum sakkaras. It's certainly not the greatest build in raw damage but it's not necessarily unplayable either.
Spell damage does however scale really badly independent from that.
 

3 hours ago, xeyp said:

I started an Ice Mage some time ago and remember having a 2% Split modifier from one item and splitting enemies every encounter I even had a fight with 2 orcs that turned into a fight against 6, w/o pulling any more orcs  Is this a META leveling strategy perhaps haha. 

No, that is just a mistake on your part. Split cannot apply twice on the first target and can't happen at all to the split copy, so two orcs can at best turn into 4. How do I know for sure? Well, builds with 99% split chance(9x11% socketed) and the icon set would otherwise create hundreds of mobs out of one.
 

1 hour ago, Sethi22 said:

Ebolts Sera I played, and the damage was really low. It was ok in silver, maybe gold, but like SLD said, that 10K damage in later stages is nowhere near enough!

I never said that.

1 hour ago, Sethi22 said:

I'll leave that build until my really old days. I can see myself thornbushing everything 90 years old... But not any sooner!

Sad. It's the only build with its own emoji

[Lindor 574]

12 minutes ago, SLD said:

What exactly would you have expected the "special damage" to be? I mean it says it does a bunch of % extra special damage and as far as I can tell that is exactly what it does.

Converting it to a special damage type that the opponents have no resistances against. The guy said it wouldn't do that, it would just multiply whatever damage type you're dealing by a hidden, very high amount.

14 minutes ago, SLD said:

I guess with H11:) you meant a bow woodelf with 2 seperate mistakes in the abbreviation. If not please enlighten me  

Yes. Human error. I'm used as H11 as abbreviation for high elf in Sacred 2, but I meant W11 als abbreviation for Wood elf. I'm not even sure if the two abbreviations exist in english, in german it does because "eleven" is "elf" in german.

17 minutes ago, SLD said:

Ah, I understand. You just like playing weird stuff

That pretty much sums it up, ye

[Sethi22 373]

Good to know, I was wondering about this H11 also, but didn't dare to ask! I thought it was some kind of secret code people with brains use and all know, and if I ask about it, I will get booooed for being dumb again.

(And about the Ebolts Sera, you never said it wasn't enough SLD, that's true. You said it was like 11K at level 130 or something like that. I just checked my "corpse", she was only 118 when she died, with some 7K damage on the tooltip with some random gear. I don't remember how it happened, but she's dead now for sure. That kind of damage being "not enough" was my conclusion. A really good player might make her beat the game with it, but for me, that spell was disappointing and I don't think I'll ever make an ebolts Sera again, only If I want to punish myself for something...)

 

Edited August 6, 2024 by Sethi22

[xeyp 53]

18 hours ago, SLD said:

I howeverdon't understand why you'd shoot for the hardest single hitting skills unless you want to run into the cap.

Assuming not all skills are capped (e.g. Dark Elf ones) you'd always want to go for the largest base over which to apply X Spell Damage % or X Damage % modifiers.
For Battle Mage, which we know for a fact is capped on all Spells - you'd always want to scale a spell that isn't that high in damage to begin with, but I just hope, rather than assume 
that, say, WE's Thorns for example is one of the uncapped ones. 
 

18 hours ago, SLD said:

I don't understand why you would scale damage solely with single elemental % rolls.
The resist idea is correct.
But we wouldn't "want to focus on one damage type as much as we can, so we take the largest component in any spell and focus on that". That is the whole point of this thread.  for example: Mortar Grenade beats Cannon Blast because both hit cap mortar just does it with two elements effectively dealing twice as much damage in endgame(Ignoring the "bug" of Cannon Blast hitting twice "sometimes").
That makes Thorn bush one of the worst spells on that list assuming you do hit the cap with it and if you don't it will be a really bad skill in the endgame doing less than 100k damage per hit. Unless of course thorn bush isn't capped at all and you can scale it beyond the cap value. Then it would still at best beat the skills on the list that are capped.

 Again, agree - assuming there is a cap, which is why I asked if anyone's taken thorns to higher levels. Because if it isn't capped, it will be the hardest hitting, most scalable spell due its highest single-element damage.

18 hours ago, SLD said:

I was first surprised, that you listed the % increase in your list. Reason for that is, that as far as I know the flat increase per CAlvl is a fixed amount. That should also explain why you now thnk that it "falls down some". Relatively it does, of course.

I don't exactly think it falls down, but I assume it does an 'additive' 50% increase of damage level over level seems like a lot.
 

18 hours ago, SLD said:

How often per second does your gladiator use hard hit:) The ~10k damage on Ebolts is "enough" for farming platinum sakkaras. It's certainly not the greatest build in raw damage but it's not necessarily unplayable either.
Spell damage does however scale really badly independent from that.

I try keeping all CA's w/ the lowest possible cooldown relative to their animation as well, no point in having a CA be off cooldown while it's still being 'performed'. It's usually around the 1-1.5s mark.
So about a time per second, but it's a very low level Hard Hit, less than 1/40th the level of the Sera's Bolts, also your Sera's level is almost 3x his. I'm not saying your build isn't good or that you've not done a good job, I was just really wondering if spells scale so poorly that there's even comparison to be made between such a vast difference in both CA and character levels. I really haven't played w/ a focused spellcaster build past 50 so it's a genuine question, I'm trying to figure out which out of the many builds I want to try I should just cross off (like scaling Lightning Strike on Sera as her primary single target dmg dealer).
 

18 hours ago, SLD said:

No, that is just a mistake on your part. Split cannot apply twice on the first target and can't happen at all to the split copy, so two orcs can at best turn into 4. How do I know for sure? Well, builds with 99% split chance(9x11% socketed) and the icon set would otherwise create hundreds of mobs out of one.
 

 Well another orc might've snuck in why I wasn't looking (was quite zoomed in) but I can't be all wrong - I proc split on every engagement w/ ice shard @only 2%. Maybe I'm just witnessing statistical anomalies lol. I'm running PureHD, so it's not exactly vanilla Sacred, but as far as I know they've only fixed a few bugs other than the graphical side, so I doubt they've rebalanced / tinkered with how the game works. 
 

18 hours ago, SLD said:

Sad. It's the only build with its own emoji

 haha, that gave me a good chuckle

 

18 hours ago, Lindor said:

Converting it to a special damage type that the opponents have no resistances against. The guy said it wouldn't do that, it would just multiply whatever damage type you're dealing by a hidden, very high amount.

That sounds like a second critical strike only with 100% chance by default and using both I'd assume would result in crazy scaling. 
I've a question to those of you who have played enough spell characters and have run into the spell damage cap:
 - Does crit help scale it beyond the cap, assuming application of crit damage multiplication happens after the base damage is capped?
(and a bonus one) Have you tried it with one of those sets with the 'secret' damage - does the secret damage scaling help scale the damage, since we now know it's more of a multiplication rather than 
resistance avoidance?

 

20 hours ago, Sethi22 said:

Oh, welcome, welcome, you're not late at all! Please take a seat!

Thank you for having me, it's you who mentioned this thread in another thread me, you and SLD were writing very off-topic things into haha. Not going to mention it lest I anger the great GOGO.
But that's how I found this one, clicked on your profile and snooped around your activity haha. 

(Edit: Fixed and I.e. for an e.g.)

Edited August 7, 2024 by xeyp
SDL > SLD

[Sethi22 373]

On 8/1/2024 at 9:25 AM, Sethi22 said:

Also to keep in mind: crits should happen after the damage cap and "wounds increase damage dealt" is also a separate multiplier that happens after the damage cap. Very useful for cannon dwarves as dwarves have a temporary buff combat art (Berserk) that can give a huge amount of bonus to widd. Just in case you ever wanted to fire mortar grenades that deal more than a million damage... All you have to do is get to really low life

 

Here you go, quote from SLD himself! And I believe him now, because he really knows stuff.

[SLD 524]

12 hours ago, Lindor said:

Converting it to a special damage type that the opponents have no resistances against. The guy said it wouldn't do that, it would just multiply whatever damage type you're dealing by a hidden, very high amount.

Well the ingame impact has never "felt" like a "very high amount" and it "felt" more like the given number of up to 14% that may or may not ignore resistances would be accurate. Are you sure that what he told you is anywhere near correct?

12 hours ago, Lindor said:

Yes. Human error. I'm used as H11 as abbreviation for high elf in Sacred 2, but I meant W11 als abbreviation for Wood elf. I'm not even sure if the two abbreviations exist in english, in german it does because "eleven" is "elf" in german.

exactly what I meant with the two mistakes. H->W and 11 only working in german...
"Human error", be proud of it
 

6 hours ago, xeyp said:

but I just hope, rather than assume 
that, say, WE's Thorns for example is one of the uncapped ones. 

So far the Dark Elf traps are the only confirmed uncapped skills and they are not "spells". I don't share in your hope but you are right not to assume.

6 hours ago, xeyp said:

Again, agree - assuming there is a cap, which is why I asked if anyone's taken thorns to higher levels. Because if it isn't capped, it will be the hardest hitting, most scalable spell due its highest single-element damage.

"hardest hitting" "spell" yes, most scalable, not necessarily. You have the Hell Disk on your list, you can have multiple of those at once so overall damage can't be compared that easily. And you have 3 skills on that list that aren't "spells" at all. So the thornbush would only beat mortar grenade if you could scale it past 131k and the bottomless pit will always win no matter what.
 

6 hours ago, xeyp said:

I don't exactly think it falls down, but I assume it does an 'additive' 50% increase of damage level over level seems like a lot.

I'm confused what you're trying to say. My understanding of the Ca scaling is it gives a base dmg at lvl1 and a flat increase per level that makes for some standard linear scaling. The regen time works the same. Why would it be any different?

6 hours ago, xeyp said:

I try keeping all CA's w/ the lowest possible cooldown relative to their animation as well, no point in having a CA be off cooldown while it's still being 'performed'. It's usually around the 1-1.5s mark.

A hard hit with a full second animation? That sounds quite slow, but I don't have any experience here to contradict that.

6 hours ago, xeyp said:

I was just really wondering if spells scale so poorly that there's even comparison to be made between such a vast difference in both CA and character levels. I really haven't played w/ a focused spellcaster build past 50 so it's a genuine question, I'm trying to figure out which out of the many builds I want to try I should just cross off (like scaling Lightning Strike on Sera as her primary single target dmg dealer).

I haven't made any high lvl spell casters either. The Ebolts are a spell but it's just a super fast auto attack with range so I wouldn't count that.
I would never consider something like lightning strike even if it did infinite amounts of damage. Killing one enemy per CA doesn't seem too interesting to me. Maybe it's just my modern greed of aimlessly slaughtering with speed

6 hours ago, xeyp said:

 Well another orc might've snuck in why I wasn't looking (was quite zoomed in) but I can't be all wrong - I proc split on every engagement w/ ice shard @only 2%. Maybe I'm just witnessing statistical anomalies lol.

That every hit rolls the split chance is correct. My argument was just about the split more than once per enemy part.

6 hours ago, xeyp said:

 - Does crit help scale it beyond the cap, assuming application of crit damage multiplication happens after the base damage is capped?

Yes it does. It's just the value on your CA icon that is capped (the round thing you put in the bottom right slots). What ends up being applied and shown down there is capped everything that happens afterward should be fine. That's why %damage increase runs against the cap and Survival Bonus or widd don't.

6 hours ago, xeyp said:

(and a bonus one) Have you tried it with one of those sets with the 'secret' damage - does the secret damage scaling help scale the damage, since we now know it's more of a multiplication rather than 
resistance avoidance?

I would argue that we don't "now know" that.
Regardless, there's no reason to believe that the special damage would be affected by the cap. 
As far as I always understood the secret damage it is supposed to give 14%(or less if not Niobium) of your damage as extra resistance ignoring damage on top. Not sure if it does ignore resistances and wether it is "14% of damage dealt" or "14% of damage taken by the enemy" but I also never felt it was far off from this so I never did any investigating int that. If you do have one of those sets however, you could easily run some test equipping/unequipping a piece that is otherwise not damage affecting.
 

6 hours ago, xeyp said:

SDL

Not again!

[xeyp 53]

5 hours ago, SLD said:

"hardest hitting" "spell" yes, most scalable, not necessarily. You have the Hell Disk on your list, you can have multiple of those at once so overall damage can't be compared that easily. And you have 3 skills on that list that aren't "spells" at all. So the thornbush would only beat mortar grenade if you could scale it past 131k and the bottomless pit will always win no matter what.

Oh, yeah - hardest hitting is definitely the more accurate description, completely forgot about the Discs.

5 hours ago, SLD said:

I would argue that we don't "now know" that.

My bad, poorly expressed, I now know that, I was just aware of it before.  

5 hours ago, SLD said:

Not again!

Where, what I don't see what you mean LSD, I've spelled DSL correctly, LDS. 
(Sorry, I've fixed it now )

[Lindor 574]

7 hours ago, SLD said:

Well the ingame impact has never "felt" like a "very high amount" and it "felt" more like the given number of up to 14% that may or may not ignore resistances would be accurate. Are you sure that what he told you is anywhere near correct?

No. Not at all.

I can quote him, but I recommend not following the link to read through the entire discussion. He was an extremely toxic and elitist person. Communicating with him was extremely difficult because of the language barrier, he just interpreted everything I wrote in the worst possible way and it was impossible to clarify as he was believing that everything he says is correct and everything I say is incorrect.

E.g. he did not understand that calling someone a liar is disrespectful because it implies intention, I tried to explain it to him but he just said "I did not write that you are lying on purpose". Or when I told him that I used an editor to get the characters unskilled but farmed the items legit, he just wouldn't listen and say it's all cheated. And when I told him that it's impossible to legit get the characters unskilled in Vanilla, he said he would've done it with a mod. As if there was any difference between a mod and an editor, both requires tweaking the code. Or when I told him that there are single damage type builds which don't work, and a proper rebalance mod should make them work. He just said that there are no single damage type builds because they don't work. The list goes on and on. I'm still getting enraged today when I'm reading it.

Okay after the lengthy warning, here the quote:

On 11/28/2020 at 9:04 PM, MetaL said:

Especial damage types not exist, these final set bonuses just multiply all your damage (up to 2,34 times for niobium). And 10-12% of your total damage showed as separate number of "especial" damage type. So it's just a damage multiplier and other color for part of your damage. I even saw code of this, because in ReBorn we fixed this crazy damage multiplier to values that presented in description.

I think that he really believed it, but I'm neither sure that it's correct nor that it's incorrect. From what I saw ingame it wasn't really possible to draw a definite conclusion. Also I tried to tell him that multiplying the damage dependent on the enemies armor and resistances with converting the damage type can mathematically work out the same as dealing some fixed percentage of the damage as special damage. Again he didn't listen. And believed to know everything better because he saw the code.

It would be kinda nice to settle this once and for all. If somebody wants to make a test series and take screenshots of the enemy health bars to draw conclusions about the amount of damage he actually took, go for it. But for me, I had spent enough energy on this, it wasn't worth it. Because even if it turned out that the sets worked as it is implied ingame, he would've been too stubborn to listen and let himself be convinced.

Edited August 7, 2024 by Lindor

[alfchaval 196]

On 8/6/2024 at 9:10 AM, Lindor said:

cheated gear can have up to 8 different boni and 8 different sockets, though you can only socket 4 of them. I gave her the most powerful gear imaginable and she was still completely unplayable.

Using socketed weapons when cheating is overkill and unnecesary, one ring is more than enough.

If you want to one-shot anything using spells and don't mind cheating, a big amount of Wounds Increase Damage Dealt will do the work, you don't even need to lower your life too much, as soon as a mob hit you once you will be able to do insane damage.

 

[gogoblender 3,583]

19 minutes ago, alfchaval said:

Using socketed weapons when cheating is overkill and unnecesary, one ring is more than enough.

If you want to one-shot anything using spells and don't mind cheating, a big amount of Wounds Increase Damage Dealt will do the work, you don't even need to lower your life too much, as soon as a mob hit you once you will be able to do insane damage.

 

WIIDD… most favorite mod EVER ..very risky specially in HC … rip many in underworld
😳

gogo

[Lindor 574]

2 hours ago, alfchaval said:

If you want to one-shot anything using spells and don't mind cheating, a big amount of Wounds Increase Damage Dealt will do the work, you don't even need to lower your life too much, as soon as a mob hit you once you will be able to do insane damage.

 

2 hours ago, gogoblender said:

WIIDD… most favorite mod EVER ..very risky specially in HC … rip many in underworld
😳

gogo

Ye, someone in the forum, I believe it was schot, had a playstyle where he would use WIDD together with draw own life per hit to get to 1hp, oneshotting everything. He had a youtube video about it, but can't find it anymore.
WIDD is too risky and inconsistent for me, I never got into that sort of playstyle.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I found another topic where we were talking about this damage cap, nothing new, but maybe interestig.

On 2/1/2022 at 9:14 PM, SupremeJoker said:

@Lindor,tonight I've tested the build and I realise the reason why back in the day the Magician seraphim didint work,as you can see the spells,traps and everything beside combat arts have a limitation on Sacred Vanilla ,what I mean by this is that doest matter the level of the art ,the max dmg will be around 60k,after that the dmg will reset ,so you can have a celestial light at lv 200 with 60k and you think if you get it 255 will be higher ,but wrong ,maybe at 255 the dmg will be around 20k(this problem im talking about here for example have been solved in reborn mod).So I've tried anyway to see if it works ,everything works fine against (D,cay ,Anducar and forest god ,even if you dont one shot ,you can beat them pretty easy ,like 1 minute or so),but when I got to Valley of tears ,the problems start,because of the dmg limitation and green golems,cerebropod and others creature's from underworld ,having strong magic ressist,I couldn't do anything ,you see if the dmg didint have a limitation,that wouldn't be a problem ,with proper gear ,you will get the spell dmg so high their ressistence wouldn't matter,but having dmg limitation and monster's with high magic ressitence,result in a failure ,that's the reason most of the hardcore player's for Sacred Vanilla are playing with combat art's,the combat art's dont have dmg value ,it has multiplier's (I hope I said it right ) ,what I mean if you have 100k magic dmg with attack that dmg will be multiplied like 3000% ,no limit ,so from my point of view ,Caster\magician Seraphim is not good in Vanilla ,im sorry if you didnt know this ,but this is the sad true and the ressult from my search and test for the build.

On 2/2/2022 at 12:08 PM, RuDDicK said:

Almost all Abilities have a damage limit of 65535 (2 bytes) for each damage type. After this limit, damage is no longer taken into account!

Only the traps of the Dark Elf do not have this bug!

It is important to understand that 65535 is not the final damage, but the damage of the Ability, so it will still be increased by global damage multipliers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Today, because we were talking about this so much, I got some interest into playing the game again. Not for a longer period, just one or two days for fun. I used the test characters to scrambled together some builds and rate their fun. Here's what I found:
 

Quote

Very Fun
    - Battlemage - Fire
        Burning Bones are impressive VFX, it's fun as hell.
        Only drawback is the constant requirement to recast your buffs.

    - Battlemage - Water & Earth
        Watch ice shards disintegrating you enemies.
        Only drawback is the constant requirement to recast your buffs.

    - Dark Elf - Traps
        He probably deals the most amount of DPS

Medium Fun
    - Daemon - Hell Magic
        She deals okay damage, but the pentagram is a little bit slow to follow her.
        And the hell sphere has too much RegTime.

    - Wood Elf - Ranged
        She deald absurd amount of damage per hit, probably even more than the Trap Dark Elf.
        But she isn't very fast at killing because of RegTime.

No Fun at all
    - Daemon - Dralkcib:
        Unusable, medium to low damage, low hit chance, high RegTime, no survivability

I gotta say, moving items from one character to the other, duplicating them and clicking the mouse a couple thousand times for skilling is not fun. That's why I like the idea of finished builds, ready-to-go. Maybe I'll upload the builds I put together, they're not perfect, but they're good enough.

One more word: I can remember having played the Dralkcib build before, it was the same, nearly unplayable. I say nearly because I can remember that with more and more testing and careful character design, it was possible to get the RegTime and dmg to somewhat acceptable values. it was still frustrating to play, but it was possible. Of course I can't remember the exact setup anymore, it has been way too long.

I wish Battlemage had access to axe lore, then I could give him the auto fireball axe. I know it's possible to equip the axe to, let's say the Gladiator, and then change the character class in the editor. But then can't equip/unequip any item anymore afterwards or he will drop the axe.