OT: Sacred 2

Alright then, looks like I should move on to chapter 2.
(kinda weird that I could simply run to the desert, I think. It isn't even far to get there from Teardrop Hamlet.)
 
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I checked out the Epic Office quest spoiler. Thanks for the tip, although now I will never know if I would have being able to start it without spoilers. I am pretty sure I would have found the cave with the switch, and probably the dungeon close to the hydra (does it show up with a dungeon icon on the map?). After killing the hydra, I did not stick around and examine the area, so I would have done that the next time I got there.

I did notice several '!' characters (with blue ring on the map) that did not have anything to say to me before, and I kept wondering what that was about.
 
Lost sheep

I have trouble with the quest where you escort a seamstress to a pasture to hunt some rare sheep. I have 7 of the 8 skins I need, but I can't find the last one. I had a hectic battle with some wolves and human bandits in this place.

Usually, when you have quest items to pick up, there will be a 'bag' icon on the minimap, but I do not get one here. If I switch to another quest in the quests log, and then back, I see no big grey ring on the main map, and no grey arrow. If I pick another quest's grey ring on the main map (making it big/active), a grey ring for the sheep quest does show up on the pasture but I find nothing if I go there, and if I click the ring on the map, it disappears.

Can I do something to tie up this quest? Is it possible that the sheep somehow fell down into a dungeon below the pasture? I have seen a couple of dungeons in the nearby village but have not entered any of them yet.
 
Many quests of the "kill N monsters of type X" type are bugged in a way that the game sometimes doesn't spawn enough monsters of that type. This can only be resolved by saving and exiting ...
 
Alright then, looks like I should move on to chapter 2.
(kinda weird that I could simply run to the desert, I think. It isn't even far to get there from Teardrop Hamlet.)

You can get to most areas whenever you want IIRC, the map isn't too badly locked off by main quest progress.

Question: I have the option of sailing from Thylysium to some remote places (I presume they are from Ice & Blood and Community Patch), and I wonder at what stages in the game (chapter and/or character level) these areas will be appropriate to go to:
- Christmas Island - this was added as an Xmas bonus shortly after release & has no bearing on the rest of the game per se
- Seraphim hunting grounds (crystal) in the far NW - this one & the Bloodforest are the expansion
- Forest area in the far SE

The expansion is set (level-wise) after the main game IIRC. As Zaphod said, in the lower difficulties you may ruin into the level caps more easily, they'll be less of an issue later on though as you'll level up slower. You should notice that monsters have a coloured ring underneath them, this indicates the relative level difference, red/purple are progressively higher than you, yellow/orange should be around your level & grey/green should be lower than you. You'll be shown the coloured ring when you mouse over a monster, so you don't have to be surprised when it one-shots you...
 
I looked up a list on the wiki of all the little hints you get while loading an area.
(I usually do not have time to read them in-game because I have a reasonably fast computer and the game is installed on my SSD.)

Most hints weren't very useful but I learned two things about the world map that has helped me a great deal:
- you can scroll the map by dragging it with right mouse button (great when it's at maximum zoom!)
- clicking the middle mouse button (the scroll wheel) brings up the detailed map (the same as the one you enlarge with Tab while playing) for the position you click on and this view can also be dragged around long distances. Great for discovering places yet unmapped. I eventually found a dungeon I had missed in Tyr Lysia and some other unmapped spots because of this.

I do not seem to able to place more than one pin on the world map, and I can't attach any note to it. Annoying. I usually avoid dungeons until I know if there will be a quest related to going in there (otherwise it feels so anticlimactic if I have been there already) so I would like to have pins showing all my unexplored dungeons.

Since I am a completionist, I think I will get issues with the monster level cap here in Silver. Artamark seems to be just as huge as Tyr Lysia. Btw, the monster level cap for western Tyr Lysia in Silver is not 35, it's 37. I got there at level 46 and predictibly got hardly any XP for the monsters. They were also very reluctant to attack me. Understandably. :)

I have found two locked things that has me scratching my head:
- a small inner room in a small dungeon just E Sloeford
- a crate in a little camp in the southern mountains of Artamark (a bit E Dragonmaw Pass)
Are these maybe related to Shadow-campaign-only quests?
(btw, I managed to get into that inner room by looking in the right angle and Forest Flight in)

I get huge amounts of gold. Too bad I can't gamble. :(
About the only things I spend money on are relics (I buy one if it's better than my 3rd best of that element) and the occasional forging.

It's annoying that there are dense forest groves where I can't go. I'm a Dryad, I should be able to move through the vegetation!

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Oh, and I have noticed that most enemies in Artamark are now 6 levels higher than what I am (they still show yellow circle) and that a large portion of them (maybe 1/3, maybe even a bit more) are champions. Is this due to my pretty high survival bonus?
 
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Oh, and I have noticed that most enemies in Artamark are now 6 levels higher than what I am (they still show yellow circle) and that a large portion of them (maybe 1/3, maybe even a bit more) are champions. Is this due to my pretty high survival bonus?

Yup. Survival bonus will keep monster level ahead of you until they hit the area level cap.

Don't know about the two locked things! Maybe.

There are some really cool quests in East Artamark. Don't miss them.
 
Elyme the Dryad reporting from her new base, Ruka in the orc lands. I got there by using the map to find what I thought was the shortest path to the monolith that is on the map:

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I did not know if any of the more southern mountain passes would be possible to get through, but I was pretty sure I could pass north of the mountains as a whole. The reason I wanted to activate the monolith is that I thought it would be too far to go from Orcish Byway each time I had sold stuff (selling trips usually include vists to a hero chest and often blacksmithing as well). I did not even go all the way up the mountain, because I saw the portal on the map before that. And this city has everything I need. Very nice.

The orcs in Ruka seem to be pretty friendly, as far as orcs go (even though there was an idiot axe-ing me in the back a bunch of times while I was shopping! The nerve of these orcs...).


Some random ramblings:

- Excalibur?
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- Seems to me that the German-specific alphabet chars are sometimes used and sometimes not. For example, there was a guy I met (from the Epic Office quest) named something Müller (with german spelling), but another, Catharina Zeiss, was written like how I did it here and not with an eszett. Then again, a part of Artmark is named Grunwald, and not what you would expect, Grünwald ('green forest' in german).

- Question: The sigma sign on the inventory screen shows a long list of the total bonuses my character has, but they are now so many that they don't fit in one page. It says 1/2 at the top. I have not figured out how to view page 2. Do you know?

- Another question: if I were to socket a set ring or a set amulet into some other equpiment piece, does that count as being equipped for the purpose of (partial) set bonuses?

- I did not think I would like having a unique mount (actually I prefer the word 'steed' because 'mount' sounds a little...kinky) but I do. I picked the Nature Weaver variant of Battle Monitor. It gives a penalty to all combat arts of about 54% (it's currently 5 levels higher than me) so Ravaged Impact went from 0.4s to 0.6s, but I have a nice set piece of jewelry that negates all that if I hit anyway. But this is weird: my main boss-fighting combo, Tangled Vine + Goldenglade Touch, has a regeneration time of 10 seconds normally, but when I am riding, it's 9.9 seconds. Really weird, but I am not complaining!

- Gurf (that's what Elyme calls her pet - gender is unknown) racing a tiger that has somehow escaped its pit:
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(Gurf is slightly faster than the tiger, btw)

- The most exciting fight yet has been against Shelob the spider boss ('The Root of all Evil' quest). I have fought a boss underground before, Daloriel the Depraved, but there I at least had something like a 'loop track', 4 rooms connected, so I could back off and mostly stay ahead of him and his company. But Shelob and her posse were waiting right inside the entrance. It was scary seeing those red numbers going up, 380, 380, 380, 380...with me having less than 3000 max life! I had the green relics up, but I saw later in the wiki that magic would have been the better choice. Goldenglade Touch (plus a potion or two) saved the day once again.

- Shelob was just before I hit level 50, and that fight made me reverse my plans for the last two skill points. I now decided on Constitution first, then finally Nature Weaver Lore, instead of the other way around. Seeing how high I have levelled, I am now pretty sure I will reach well over level 65.

- This fight was also a cool one:
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The big guy is foreshadowed in the intro (and in the concert!) and the whole place is like an arena. What's not to like?
While Colossus was lumbering up some stairs, I Forest Flighted down to try to find (and deactivate) the glimmering stones my journal mentioned. Found none, so there was not much else to do but fight. Ah, the 'shield' was just some extra life to gnaw down. The small number is damage from Tangled Vine, the bigger ones are from Ravaged Impact double shots.

- I really like Forest Flight while exploring, and the Expert modification I've recently picked makes it all the more useful. Cooldown went from about 45 seconds to less than 10 seconds.

- While exploring SW Artmark I found a large locked entrance into the mountain, and then a weird symbol showed up on the map - looks like a red dragon:
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I later saw a similar symbol that I now understand was depicting GarColossus. Ah, this will probably reveal itself, eventually...
(and no spoilers please!)

- I really like how the game designers add stuff that shows they have a good portion of self-irony. Like how I got a lightsabre from that Yoda-esque kobold in the swamp (I just had to try it out in some fights - great sounds and animations!), that the 'Helmet of Unspeakable Evil' looks like Darth Vader's helmet, the fact that they actually use the word 'Boss' on the bosses' health bars, etc.

- Fighting monsters 3 levels my junior still gives OK experience. While doing the main quest parts in Artamark, I however ran onto some measly level 52 monsters outside Griffinborough. That's 5 levels my junior, and then the XP gain starts to get a bit lean...


Some stats:
Level 57 (a hair away from the next)
29.6% of the map revealed
Total time 108 hours
 
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The glimmering stones mentioned is one flight above the gar-colossus. It teleports you up or down the pit, that's all.

Unique mount raises CA regen time but decreases the regen time of that specific attribute ( thus cancelling out ). The practical effect is that riding a nature weaver mount increases regen time of capricious hunter and voodoo skills but keeps nature weaver skills at almost same regen time.

Don't know about the set item socketing. I would think not, though. Sigma sign can go to page 2 by clicking it again, iirc.

One of the southern mountain passes in Grunwald gets you into Nor Plat. You are right about excalibur! There are hundreds of easter eggs to be found in the game.
 
One of the southern mountain passes in Grunwald gets you into Nor Plat.

I wasn't talking about another entrance into Nor Plat (although that was interesting - must have missed that), I was thinking about when I had entered it, then left the road and turned north, and then tried to go W-NW up the mountain, between the peaks the map shows. That wasn't possible (but there was no way I could know that from just the world map) so I had to continue north and go around.

Unique mount raises CA regen time but decreases the regen time of that specific attribute ( thus cancelling out ).

I get that, but I can't see how +54% added to -33.3% can become something negative...
 
I don't think it adds that way, rather multiplicatively ( 1+ 0.54)*( 1 -0.33 ) = 1.02
( this calculation is not complete because you have skills like concentration and tactics lore which decrease regen time and buffs which increase regen time as well as various armor pieces and so on )
 
Leveled Seraphim to 75 today. With fast checking it would take ~30 mins to level up to 76, but I hope leveling would go noticeably faster on Platinum difficulty than it is now on Gold, and hopefully better drops too. So I've decided to drop leveling on Gold for now and proceed to Platinum to continue there. I did pump some levels into Constitution and I pump points to vitality every level, so her life is 6300 now. Definitely huge difference compared to 4000 I had before. Also decided to drop pumping offensive skills like maniac, and invested points to Armor Lore instead. Now she seems very powerful. It's amusing that opponents are level 86 now because of high survival bonus, they drop stuff I can't wear for few more levels.

Equipped her with gear to beat bosses, which includes close to 25% damage mitigation to all elements. That with high chance to evade is too strong for Gold difficulty (I'll see how she performs on other bosses, but my other Seraphim is farming final bosses on Gold difficulty, and she is weaker than this Sera I'm leveling now, so I have pretty good feeling how battles gonna go). And then, Platinum time! Can't wait to see do monters really do 3-4 times higher damage on Platinum than on Gold.
 
I can now verify the answer to that set items question I had, because I've socketed a couple of Jotun's Maw rings for the +12 integer damage (becomes +13 in a silver socket). No, it does indeed not count as if I'm wearing one.

+integer damage seems to be one of the more useful things to put in a socket for a weapon based build like this. Is that correct? Seems to do far more than what +% damage rings does, at least when it's socketed off-weapon.

I have found 5 of the 7 pieces of both Detheya's set and the seemingly very cool set The Wild Cat. Detheya's helm is still the only one of these I am actually wearing at the moment.

The orc lands were more beautiful and many of the orcs more friendly than I had imagined. Pretty satisfying fights here as well, with many large enemies that make a lot of noise.

Went back to that cave in Grunwald. Turns out it wasn't locked...I had just assumed it was locked because it looks like a force field blocks the entrance. Then there was a similar field by the back wall, but I could not make anything out of it.

Since much of the orc lands is made up of large plains with little forests on them (meaning: you can pretty much go anywhere on these plains with ease), I used Gurf and just lots of running (rarely bothered to stop to fight) to map out much of these plains when most else in the region was completed and my level was high. I imagined that this made Gurf quite hot, so I found a nice little pond (uh, more like an algal soup puddle) to chill out for a while in:
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Seraphim Island and the Dragon caves were just...weird. And so sterile - both me and my character longed for vegetation! I had moved on to chapter 5 without even noticing, and especially the main cave level confused me. It is indoors, but there are monoliths and even portals, and some of the main cave outlines can be seen on the world map, but it's obscured if there is an island above the spot in question. It took me a while to understand this, and I found it to be very confusing how all the parts were connected. The smaller islands were nice breaks.

I really like how my Tangled Vine looks like glowing iron in this fight:
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Ran into a bug in the Carnach fight - near total paralyzation of my character. At first, I thought I was simply boxed in by the summoned fire elementals and generally stunlocked, so I panicked a little. Potions were still working, and I took surprisingly little damage even after Goldenglade Touch had expired. I tried to shoot, tried to run, tried to Forest Flight away, tried to refresh GTouch, nothing worked. I eventually teleported back to the monolith and waited around for several minutes but I was still paralyzed. So I saved and exited, which helped. Then I beat him on the next try. I read later in the darkmatters forums that the paralyzation sometimes happens against enemies that have a knockback effect. Activating the God spell often breaks the bug. I'll try that if it happens again.

Hehe, I usually think of Gurf as being a pretty big creatue...
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I didn't trust him one bit - activated both Dust Devil and Goldenglade Touch both times before talking to him. That's generally a good idea for the suspicious dialogues, especially when surrounded by bandits and such.

The swamp was a welcome change from the sterile last two acts, even though the weather usually sucks and the lightning effects are annoying. HUGE area, bigger than Nor Plat, and it was much harder to do my quick roundup mapping in the areas with olms and spiders. Both of them have the ability to root me, and when something like 8 spiders are spitting at me, there are lots of 150 damage hits in a short time being shown. Constant Goldenglade Touch was a given here. The areas with rats, mud suckers and undead were much easier to map. Much less damage taken, and only the skeleton mages can root me, but they rarely do because they seem to have several spells to choose from.

I generally love the undead in this game! Gorgeous disgusting sounds from the zombies, glorious bony explosions when skeletal undead get destroyed. And those ridiculous animations when they are running. They're a riot.

I got an X (my first) for one of the quests in the swamp. :(
I blame confusing/bad wording, becuase my character did not act like how I wanted her to. The quest was about a lizardman father wanting to send a package to his son who had joined a cult. The rules of the cult was that members had to cut all contact with their family. A priest and gang intercepted me after I had received the package. He said something along the lines of "either you'll hand over that package or we'll have a fight!" I could now Accept or Decline. I thought to myself: does 'Accept' mean accepting to hand over the package or does it mean accepting a fight? Confusing. I wanted to deliver the package to the son because I thought the cult had too harsh rules, so if they were going to fight to stop me, then so be it. Apparently, Decline meant handing over the package (I could read this in the jourmal). Very annoying after 500+ succesful quests in a row.
(This was a chain quest that still could continue because the priest softened up and allowed me to deliver the gift anyway.)

I have now started the Epic Office quest. I already had the Khorum portal, so I sprinted from there to the portal by the archaeology site and then to the dungeon. If my notes are correct, all 70 Ascaron employees in the areas I have completed have been rounded up.

Next up: robbing Khorum blind and starting the six or so quests I can see there.
 
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Wow, nice progress!

Yes, integer damage are the best rings. You can shop them too.

Detheya set is not that good until you get all the parts ( although 5 pieces should still be good ). After you get the whole set though, nothing else compares! seriously.

Paralysis of that sort is annoying. I've seen it a few times.
The dragon caves are actually quite cool. The islands are all connected via boats as well as underground. There are about 5 quests each in act 4, act 5, so you might want to go back and check on that region.

Nor Plat and Swamp are very large areas. How were you able to do them so quickly?

There are again some very cool places in Nor Plat, such as Gronkor's outlook.

I don't think the epic office quest works that way! You have to go into the dungeon first, then ascaron office, then speak to employees who will then disappear.

Some quests are failed by their very nature. For example a 'Bring me herbs' quest in North Tyr Lysia. Others, such as 'Orpheus' force you to choose between outcomes, so one of them is going to be failed.
 
Nor Plat and Swamp are very large areas. How were you able to do them so quickly?

It wasn't that quick - I play a lot. :)
Yes, they may be big, but they are still smaller than Tyr Lysia and Artmark, and those are far more complicated to map, with all the dense forests.

The dragon caves are actually quite cool. The islands are all connected via boats as well as underground. There are about 5 quests each in act 4, act 5, so you might want to go back and check on that region.

I think I have completed everything, even though it was confusing to me at first.

I don't think the epic office quest works that way! You have to go into the dungeon first, then ascaron office, then speak to employees who will then disappear.

Yes, that's what I have done. They teleport away after I speak to them. I did not mention the office part, because I had already been close to that dungeon (met the hydra) so it was no big deal finding my way again (I ran from Teardrop Hamlet portal).
 
jiansonz,
Could you do the quest 'Desire for unity' ( swamp region ) ?
That one is almost literally impossible. You may have set a record.
 
Oh, maybe it was fixed in the community patch, I never checked.

Earlier it used to be practically impossible. Just google sacred 2 Desire for Unity to see what I mean.

Did you find the dragon in SE swamp region?
 
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