Sacred:Combat and Game Basics

Combat Basics

Injury to both you and your enemies is calculated in "hit points". Once your hit points (or your enemy's) are depleted, your (his) life is ended. Your current life reservoir is reflected in the red oval around your portrait in the upper right corner of the screen. Your enemies' are reflected in a horizontal bar that appears when you target them by placing the mouse cursor over their image.

Injury/Damage comes in four types: Physical, Fire, Magic and Poison. Each weapon or spell that inflicts injury delivers some combination of these four damage types; perhaps all physical, perhaps half fire and half magic. In the discussion below, any reference to damage applies to any or all of the types separately. For example, physical damage and poison damage are each calculated using their respective damage and resistance values, then once computed, the four types are added to arrive at the final figure.

Your effectiveness when fighting is determined by several factors. In particular, the damage you inflict upon your enemies depends upon three main factors:

• Your Attack Speed – How quickly do you strike your opponent?
• Your "To Hit" – How likely is it your blows will land?
• The damage dealt per hit – How hard do you hit?

Similarly, the injury they do to you depends upon the same factors, but in mirror image.

Attack Speed

The rate of attack for any character is affected by her Attack Speed rating ("AS"), and also by the type of weapon in use. Some weapons, such as daggers, are intrinsically faster, while others, such as crossbows, are innately slower. Additionally, certain characters have a natural ability to use some weapons faster than other characters. You should be aware of this synergy. Selecting an appropriate lore (e.g. Hafted Weapons for use with Thaine's Axe) can increase attack speed. Your attack speed is not affected in any way by the enemy you are fighting.

To Hit

The chance you have to effectively land a blow depends upon both your character and your opponent. You have an Attack Rating ("AR"); your opponent has a Defense Rating ("Def"). Both of these contribute to the likelihood of landing a blow. The higher your AR, the better your chances. The higher your opponent's Def, the lower your chances. The Chance To Hit formula explains in more detail. At the same time, your enemy is striking you as well, causing you damage. That calculation is exactly the same, replacing your AR with your enemy's, and his Def with yours.

Armor

Increased levels of Armor provide greater Resistance by enabling more effective use of equipment, and also permit increased movement speed by reducing the encumbrances imposed.

Damage Dealt

The actual damage inflicted upon your opponent again depends upon both your character and your opponent. The higher your damage value, the greater the injury; while the higher their resistance, the lesser the injury. The Damage Inflicted calculator describes the mathematics of this. Again, substitute your enemies damage for yours and your resistance for your opponent's to perform your injury calculation.

Experience

Each character gains experience for every kill made and when the character has gathered sufficient experience it will advance to a new level, allowing it to improve it's skills and attributes. The experience required to reach the next level increases with each level obtained, making each successive level more difficult to achieve.

Experience needed per level

Timers

Much in Sacred is based on Timers, the ability to be able to regenerate a Combat Art quickly enough to be able to use it again without taking too many blows from monsters while waiting for the regeneration to finish before they kill you. Simple enough to define, but difficult to manage when playing some class builds.

Sacred uses three distinct timers, one per aspect, any of which can be used to release Combat Arts which can inflict damage, create a shielding buff, and/or a wide manner of other in game effects.

A badly managed timer or group of timers can cripple your build and breaking balance with timers is, unfortunately, very easy.

Auto Leveling

Comparisons have been made between Sacred 2's method of balancing player to monster difficulty via leveling to that of Oblivion's. Sacred 2's auto-leveling of enemies is a wholly different method than Oblivion's and is, in fact, needed for Sacred 2 to function properly.

Oblivion v.s. Sacred 2 Leveling

Many players interchangeably use the term auto-leveling with the understanding that leveling is handled the same way in both Oblivion and Sacred 2, while both in fact are different. An important consideration which distinguishes the two as being different, is that Oblivion would introduce a completely new monster type to offer a player challenge as his levels increased, while Sacred 2 would simply offer the same type of monster but at a different level.

In Oblivion, it would be difficult for a player to do what a majority of gamers have done in the past, which is getting ahead of the power curve while remaining there indefinitely and receiving good experience regarding the same chosen monster. It is impossible to go and craft a perfect weapon, with the hope in returning to destroy the previous enemy with ease especially if it was guarding a treasure chest that the player was curious about. This would have been impossible to do because the monster that was previously guarding the treasure chest, as in Oblivion would have now changed into a more powerful monster to match the character's new level.

This is a significant different from simply having an upwards adjustment to an enemy's level based upon a player's new level as in Sacred 2.

Sacred 2 auto-leveling of enemies will have a rat (enemy) leveling from 1 to 40, which is different from Oblivion's method of increasing player to monster difficulty, which would have introduced a completely different and new monster type, a Minotaur for example, to match the player's level at 40.

The two types of leveling found within Sacred 2 and Oblivion are distinct and markedly different from each other.

Challenge and Difficulty

A reason why players may not understand the auto-leveling feature in Sacred 2 is due to the perception that monsters are not challenging enough, hence the blame on the auto-leveling feature. Auto-leveling in Sacred 2 actually forces the player to change areas or levels until he finds the same type of monster at a higher level or a different monster entirely that offers challenge and through that, more experience. A look at another popular hack 'n slash RPG, Diablo 2, demonstrates that a player could find a great weapon, and they would suddenly be at the upper end of the power curve. The power curve is the balancing mechanism that provides challenge. It ensures that a player is not too strong, and also that an enemy is beatable. The power curve mechanism in Diablo 2 would fluctuate, so that if a player found an enemy that was unbeatable at a certain level, the player could just gain levels, perhaps gain a new skill and then return to the previous monster which could then be beaten. While using that particular method of leveling, Diablo 2 offered a player satisfaction from killing an earlier enemy, while Sacred 2, as contrast, will have a player looking for another possibly same type of monster but at a higher level.

Why are there differences in balancing player v.s. monsters between the two games?

• At least twice the number of different and distinct monsters currently offered would have been needed to emulate Diablo 2's method. The level range in Sacred 2 is huge, 1-200, whereas Titan Quest's was 1-75 and Diablo 2 was 1-99.

• The world in Sacred 2 is much larger, free-roaming and therefore needs more content to emulate the same sort of satisfaction via killing static and unique enemies that never leveled up as in Diablo 2.

One of Sacred 2's largest differences to Diablo 2 is it's fully open world. Each area has level caps for the enemies. Rats, for example, in the first area around Sloeford possess a level cap of 37. The reason for this, is that as per the manual, players receive experience based upon the level of the creature defeated. A player would have no reason to kill thousands of creatures that are level 1, who provide no challenge for a level 80 Seraphim, because they would give the player 0 XP. The closer an enemy's level approaches a player's level, the better, the higher compared to your character level the better too as then the highlight for the enemy creature is red which yields maximum experience. The reason enemies increase in level and power as a player does and, as well, the reason that enemies are capped in areas, is to allow a player time to explore a chosen massive area while continuing to level up, without exhausting the supply of enemies close to the player's level, which gives the player enough experience to level up with.

Diablo 2 did the same thing, except they capped the max too.

In Diablo 2 the world is linear (randomized, but closed),very much like a complex maze. The enemies are staggered in their level. Enemy levels as organized here, offer a good range, but are still around the same average level.

Players would constantly fight monsters around their level, by nature of the way the game was controlled. It was a closed system, and players were known to be of a certain level by the time they reached a selected, chosen area. And if not,a player would receive depreciating returns in experience, and thus would found the game difficult to play, as in the jump from normal to nightmare and nightmare to hell, as there were usually a few levels disparity between the two, due to the levels not matching up precisely.

It is useful for a player to consider the auto-leveling in initial areas as a large tutorial section. The levels of challenge offered purposely so as to instruct the player via quests, while familiarizing himself with his character.