Pure Melee Seraphim Tutorial

[LeftNut 0]

GoGo asked if I could post this in these forums so here I am

 

Just want to start by saying there is no "best" build, this is just the version I've tried and tested up to plat. There has been one death on this build but it was completely avoidable and happened early due to a lost connection. So yea that being said these are my opinions and what I've learned. This build works as a dual wield or a 2 hand weapon build just as nicely allthough dps wise dual wield does do alot more.

 

SKILL CHOICES

 

-LEVEL 2 TACTICS LORE-

-This will be your first choice and if you're going to go the path of the Dual wielder it'll be the only skill you put points into until level 5 when you can select it.

 

-LEVEL 3 EXALTED WARRIOR FOCUS-

-This is the back bone of this build as will be explained in the combat art section.

 

-LEVEL 5 DUAL WIELD-

-Self explanatory, if you're going with a 2 hand discipline insert that skill here. If so I suggest pole arms due to their animation speed with pelting strikes compared to 2 hand swords.

 

-LEVEL 8 ARMOUR LORE-

-A very powerfull skill for lots of reasons. It lowers regen times of your Combat Arts by lowering the penalty on your armour, it also allows you to wear higher level armor sooner and the percentage increases are large.

 

-LEVEL 12 CONSTITUTION-

-To me it's a skill I wont go without on any build except a warding energy one which this is'nt a tutorial for:P The mastery bonus on this is fantastic to the point of almost being overpowered.

 

-LEVEL 18 COMBAT DISCIPLINE-

-An often overlooked skill it's extremely powerfull in this build as you'll be using pelting strikes a TON so the extra damage is nice not to mention the decrease in regen.

 

-LEVEL 25 CELESTIAL FOCUS-

-Once you choose this skill you'll put enough points into it to be able to modify radiant pillar and then leave it alone.

 

-LEVEL 35 COMBAT REFLEXES-

-A decent defensive skill more so for the ability to evade critical hits than the chance to evade attacks as you'll have alot of evasion from your armour allready.

 

-LEVEL 50 TOUGHNESS-

-Again a decent defensive skill. The resistance armour points added are then raised by armour lore making it not quite so bad and the damage reduction hits 10% at level 75.

 

-LEVEL 65 SPELL RESISTANCE-

-What makes this skill really nice is for fighting mobs like Spiders, Baby dragons and Dark Fairy Champions whose special attacks are unevadable by this build and are element based. Later level bosses also start hitting you with some attacks that you cannot evade aswell but this build will keep you alive through all of them.

 

-LAST NOTE-

-If you want to substitute another skill instead of any I suggested I suggest not choosing these three:

 

-Warding Energy-It's pointless to take this skill as the shield is useless without the other skills needed to make it not useless which we did'nt pick.

 

-Speed Lore-With the Combat Arts we'll be using your run speed will be maxed and the attack value raise is a drop of water in an ocean compared to what it'll be at with battle stance.

 

-Divine Devotion-The god skills are not worth a skill choice to make them even more not worth using imo.

 

SKILL POINT ALLOCATION

 

You'll want to keep Exalted Warrior at the highest level possible after unlocking dual wield until you reach level 75(character level). The reason for this is you want battle stance to be as high a level as possible and it's power trumps all.

 

The other skill you'll want to keep as high as possible is Constitution until you unlock the regen in battle mastery bonus.

 

For the rest I just put my extra skills in groups of 10 into the other skills until they were all at a soft 30 which means including item bonus. Once that is done take first Armour lore and then Spell resistance to 75. Then take Dual wield to 75 for the chance to double hit but dont bother putting any points into it after that as battle stance and dashing aliclarity make doing so pointless. Then finish it off by taking the rest of your skills to 75. For the ones to take beyond 75 I suggest tactics and armour lore as they are percentage based.

 

For attributes I put 2 points of strength for every point of Vitality for damage and increasing the power of constitutions mastery bonus until level 100 at which point I went all strength.

 

RUNE ALLOCATION

-Unlike SC1 the reading of runes does'nt reduce the chance to find more which makes things much easier.

 

-Pelting Strikes-

-You'll want to allways keep the regen of this under 3 seconds.

 

Succession-Increase your chance for a double hit. Honestly I hav'nt experimented with the raise damage vrs double hit but I do believe it's better as it seems to proc quite often.

 

Enfeeble-Chance to lower defense value. I'd rather make sure my attacks hit than have .3 seconds taken off of my regen time. In all honesty for this build anyhow it's just not worth taking the energy reduction other than for the first 30 or so levels at which point it becomes almost unnoticeable.

 

Precision-Chance to land crit hits, honestly you'll never be fighting anything long enough to make losing a crit hit worth a chance to reduce armour.

 

-Battle Stance-

-The core of this build. You'll switch between putting runs into this and Dashing Aliclarity when ever you can put any into Pelting or Pillar because of regen time which will be most of the time. I have over 130 runes into each one atm. you'll want to mode it this way:

 

Aggression- Raises attack damage by 5%. the reason I went this way is my attack value is allready overkilled without adding another 10% to it but damage is allways welcome. To put it into perspective I have a 87% hit rating against fen Fires without having to equip any -chance to evade items.

 

Flexibility-It's a scaling chance to evade vrs lowering the regen time of your other Combat Arts by a very small amount later game which we dont care about right?

 

Retaliation-This buff's true power and the main reason you want it's level as high as you possibly can is it's a chance to reflect damage and it scales with the buffs level.

 

-Dashing Aliclarity-

-A FANTASTIC CA whose timer is'nt effected by your buff and that you can eventually make chain castable. It'll max out your casting/running/attack speeds really very early game aswell as a chance to resist root. This is how I suggest modding it.

 

Sprint-Honestly this choice does'nt really matter as either choice will hit it's max very quickly but I chose run speed myself.

 

Delay-Now I know I said we allways love more damage which in a round about way choosing to increase the duration does do a better job of as it's our first step in making this a non stop CA and you a blur of attack speed.

 

Impatience-this is the 2nd step of making this CA pretty much your second buff as it'll be up all the time once you get the CA level high enough.

 

-Radiant Pillar-

-This skill will be one you only pull out for bosses as it's just not worth the cast time compared to your power house Pelting Strike and regular attacks. It's main purpose will be to help keep the bosses chance to hit below 10 percent. you'll keep it's regen time equal to pelting strikes and rotate between the 2 when fighting bosses. With that in mind mod it this way:

 

Delude-Reduces your targets attack value. Speaks for it's self.

 

Conserve-Increases the duration allowing you to have more up at once.

 

Ordeal-Double damage when the targets health falls below a certain value, since it really does'nt do much damage for us anyhow and will only use it on bosses where this skill actually means something it helps, a tiny little bit but it helps

 

ALLOCATING THE POINTS:

 

Completely mod battle stance, then dashing aliclarity and finally pelting strikes. Pillar you'll mod once you have chosen the skill for it.

 

Items:

+all skills Items are best with some slots changed over to damage mitigation and increased damage starting near the high end of plat.

 

ARMOUR::

 

The armour pieces you'll want are Set item wise, Holy protection, Helmut of Benevolence, Sash of Sacrifice, Wrist guards of dusk and Sofias protection. All of these are for their slots more so than their stats which on some are great and others only so so before forging. With this build the Exalted set actually hurts us by raising pelting too high and we'll mod these to make them well worth having. Lastly Wings of the serish. For the rest just use what ever your last best drop was be it a set items or not.

 

For smithing you'll want to have a chance to evade rune in each piece if armour you have and put it into the lowest level spot. The next item is your +all skills items(which you'll make sure you keep when you reforge right?or +offensive skills, which ever you have that is highest. The reason for this is simple math as far as how it makes these allright armour pieces VERY good. If I put a +7 all skills item in I've now added 70 total skill points to my build which is almost better than any set bonus. For the third slot when you have it I put armour/defence increase smith skill in as it does help when Stance gets debuffed and allthough it does'nt really do much early game it does make a large difference later game.

 

WEAPONS:

 

With this build you can grind Christmas island at which point you'll want one weapon with fire and one weapon with poison. If you dont enjoy grinding there then change poison to ice. I personally just put +attack damage/value smithing arts in for the rest, again does'nt do much early game but later game you'll see a large difference. For Maximum damage have a set of weapons for each elemental damage. I dont personally bother doing that with Dual Wield but I do on my single weapon chars.

 

COMBOS:

 

I dont use any but I do put each skill into a combo by its self to benefit from Combat Discipline.

 

LAST NOTE:

 

With this build I kill EXTREMELY fast and very rarely have to use a healing pot. If you wanted to though this build does allow for the use of Hallowed restoration which in it's self is a very powerfull skill. I just dont like having 2 skills I need to refresh periodically. One thing that is very important to know especially early game when you're still getting hit and are playing closed net is that your health bar lags BUT the damage above your head is real time so watch that and not your health bar when fighting bosses. Know your hp total and if you see anything that takes it down a third in one hit use a health pot and you'll never die. Boss battles are also where I use my concentration potions

 

I think that about covers anything but I guess the future comments/questions will correct me on that point Most importantly have fun and goodluck.

Edited March 15, 2009 by gogoblender

[gogoblender 3,070]

Welcome to Darkmatters!

 

Thanks for the build post, Leftnut

 

I haven't had a chance to really bear down on a seraphim yet, lol... five years of playing with them in old Sacred gave me sort of a hankering for a new girl ^^

 

After seeing your reference topic on the SIF I knew it would find a home here in the index of builds for Sacred 2. I'll be coming back to this when getting my new girl going.

 

Cheers!

 

gogo

[stubbie 21]

Thanks heaps for posting your seraphim build LeftNut.

My toons keep dying at around lvl40 so I have been reading heaps and heaps about builds over at the SIF.

But a lot of what sounds good just doesn't work in online HC because of the lag.

I noticed your build mentioned the health bar not being very responsive so at least I know you have used this build online.

 

Is this a viable HC toon to play? I ask as that's the only style I like.

(edit: doesn't matter answering this as I just reread your post and noticed what you said about the one death so this is certainly a viable HC build )

 

I have always liked the dual wield seraphim style of play so I'm very interested in giving your build a go.

The fact that you don't use combos (except for single Combat Arts) is very good for online play as I find that 50% of the time combos don't work.

I hadn't thought of using Combat Discipline purely for the extra damage and lowering of regen time, rather than using it for the extra Combat Arts in a combo.

I like that idea.

 

Definitely going to give this build a try.

Edited January 14, 2009 by stubbie

[LeftNut 0]

No worries I hope it works out for you. Been building up an Inquisitor lately as it seemed the best char to use as a trader but my seraphim atm is level 109 still with only that one dang death lol(haunts me). The mobs are +20 levels for her now and she still tears through everything even to the point that when I run the machines I leave the transporters active for the extra champion spawns as I tear through them all anyhow.

 

One thing I have noticed combo wise on my Inquisitor though and it sucks is you need to not be in auto attack to reliably have your combos go off.

[FLYFF 0]

I recently bought Sacred 2 since I loved Sacred and the Seraphim is by all means my favorite.

But! I realy want to play melee only. Meaning I dont even want to use that cursed Radiant Pillar all builds ive seen so far use!

Is it realy not possible/highly recomended to use it?

[Antitrust 32]

But! I realy want to play melee only. Meaning I dont even want to use that cursed Radiant Pillar all builds ive seen so far use!

Is it realy not possible/highly recomended to use it?

You can ignore the pillar, it's not mandatory

[Dobri 55]

Still, it's the best boss-killer weapon the Seraphim has, but if you follow LeftNut's guide to the letter, you don't need it. Pillar without Celestial Lore + Focus does slim damage to bosses - nothing a few swings can't compensate.

[LeftNut 0]

It's only used for the attack value reduction on bosses making it harder for them to hit you in this build, you can do just fine without it aswell:) Cant edit it anymore so I'll eventually just repost it but here's a few changes from things I've learned while playing. I have now played 1 seraphim through to plat in Sp (while I waited for steam to be able to play online) and just finished taking my 4th char into plat on closed net.

 

-Take Toughness before Spell resist and raise spell resist last(Not counting celestial ofcourse which you dont raise past the mod point) Also take toughness before Combat Disc.

 

-Priority of skills to 75:Exalted, armour lore, Const, Toughness, Tactics, DW, Combat reflexes, Combat Disc, Spell resist.

 

-Smithing- What I originally have works great until mob levels 130ish and have just finished testing swapping out the evasion build for my new build at level 90 and was very happy with the timing of it. You'll have evasion from reflexes and battle stance aswell as your greaves so for this char you wont socket any extra evasion into your gear past level 90. As you find better armour gradually do the change over which if you have average luck will be complete by level 110. the reason I tried a new strat is once I started fighting the higher level mobs and especially once I started hitting the 140's I started to get hit again and quite often for my stats.

 

My stats were at this point 78.6 true evade + 56.6% reflex evade (dont know how those numbers combine but they dont seem to do so in the tooltip.) 40.8 reflect (level 104 Stance) and the tooltip to hit was saying 1-2% which was'nt what I was getting hit at all hehe was more like 40%. After the changes my tooltip evade shows as 52.8%

 

So as we know +allskills will only be for Amu's which is fine, for any armour that has a gold spot(if you dont have a smith char) put in a +all skills max 1 per armour. For the rest use the smith art +armour/defense value. the only exception for this is if you're lucky enough to find the unique amulet Artmarks in which case you'll replace a smith arts slot with this instead and if need be due to a lack of smith a +all skills spot. It's a wonderfull amulet when coupled with the smith arts. I even have my level 100 pyro HE at 16k armour while using a 40 armour experience shield because of this treasure:) For seraphim when I was testing this out I hit 48k armour (at level 119)and hav'nt even done the full switch over yet.

 

What these changes will do is you'll get hit the same amount due to the raise in defense value regardless of what the tooltip to hits say(I get hit all the time on my Inquisitor when it says 0 to hit so yea hehe) but when you do get hit it will be for half to 1 third the damage that you were getting hit for in the evade build which was'nt all that much to begin with.

 

-Ring/Amu slots-Deathblow is what you want here, it's an amazing skill especially for a DW build.

 

-Weapons-I do bother using fire/ice/poison in sets as well it's pretty easy to have that many good weapons when you're taking all your chars up in stages together. Still use the smith arts for damage on them though.

 

-That's all I can think of atm.

Edited March 15, 2009 by LeftNut

[LeftNut 0]

Just to add to the math of my change in defensive strat. Evasion has a VERY large diminishing effect past 50%. With this build at level 119 with no evasion smithed into the suit I have 52.8% evade. If I socket in 300% worth of item evade it goes up to 78%. So for all those sockets I gain 26% evade which is'nt really all that much. Now ofcourse the important question is what do I gain if I put something else in there and the answer is 400% Armour and Defense value.

 

Put those 2 number side by side 26% evade or 400% armour/defense. The value of evade diminishes as you level but so does armour due to the same skills we have access to that the mobs do. But as you level and gain better evasion items the return value diminishes aswell while with armour and defense it actually increases as you gain better armour and stats + defense value also increase your chance to avoid an attack so you're not really losing 26% evade anymore.

 

Lastly look out for those Artmarks as they do rock:)

[Dobri 55]

Great work. I always thought close combat seraphim can't do without revered focus for divine protection and warding energy, but your build makes so much sense. It allows for great reflection, great death blow (this must be as high as possible for a close combat char, no question about it), great evasion, and so on, and so forth. You don't really need a set for it - just all of the set items that have 3 sockets and this character will rock. Wonderful. It's definitely worth trying it out.

 

I have 2 artamarks in SP (one level 65, one 70) and if you slap them both in the gold sockets on just 2 items, armor rating just skyrockets for all resistances. It's a great tactic indeed. Can't agree more.

[LeftNut 0]

Well to run a good test I like to try extremes because if it works as an extreme then it certainly works balanced or so I tell myself So I've been taking mp char number 5 through to plat with 0 evasion other than combat reflexes and using smith skills instead mixed with a little DB/allskills/experience items. He's now level 97 with 0 deaths and I hav'nt used a health potion since level 27.

 

At level 72 I put my build through the ultimate test though with a little help from a higher level char ofcourse. When I did this test I had level 64 combat reflexes, +37 in allskill items, only 30% Db at that point, +492.6% armour, +380.7% defense value. I also unfortunately and still dont have all the set items I need to have this build at it's best or any Artmarks yet for this char, but I do have the high armour chest which was enough. I also had 18% physical mitigation.

 

Now this test was unintentional but proved the worth of this build none the less. There I was in the SE marsh happily smashing spiders, Ohlms and werewolf's when I thought to myself boy these Olhms are taking alot longer to kill than normal. Turned out I had been fighting mobs 46 levels above mine and still did'nt have to use a single health pot or even notice anything largely out of the ordinary as the damage coming in was still less than I was getting back so my health bar stayed at or near full the whole time. I cant think of a better way to test a defensive build than facing mobs 46 levels over yours, well other than facing mobs 56 levels over yours hehe.

 

Ofcourse as with everything Sacred there is allways more to a build than what I just talked about and by changing to a smith art build instead of an evasion one(I do plan on running 50% evasion as that seems the point at which the return starts to tank) is'nt all of a sudden going to solve all your problems. The gear/skills/Combat Arts/Ca mods for each char also play an enormous part of it. But I thought I'd share a little more of what I've learned anyhow.

Edited March 22, 2009 by LeftNut

[Evasions 0]

Did this build on xbox and my level 49 does 2500 dmg and 5k once death blow kicks in. I have 14k health and tank like crazy