There are two ways to play Sacred, these are Server-based and Offline. Depending on what you consider more fun or less of a hassle, both are gated in some way. Offline Single Player is gated by the fact that you have to finish the main quest before you’re allowed to start a new difficulty. Servers are level gated and your characters need a specific level to unlock a difficulty. If speed is a concern Servers ARE faster.

These are the only quests in the game that matter as far as the power progression of your character is concerned. Completing these quests will award you Skill Points and/or Attribute Points and other good rewards. (Thank you to the good people at Wolfe’s Lair)[pctalk.info]

• Bounty Hunt [pctalk.info]
  
• Farmer's First Prank [pctalk.info]
  
• Freedom for the Haduks [pctalk.info]
  
• Free the Slaves [pctalk.info]
  
• Intrigues Series [pctalk.info]
  
• Missing Brother Series [pctalk.info]
  
• Missing Child [pctalk.info]
  
• Path to Becoming a True Fighter Series [pctalk.info]
  
• Remembrance [pctalk.info]

Note: All of these quests start in Underworld areas, except Bounty Hunt which is completable in the base game areas. Freedom for the Haduks is obtainable only by Battle-Mage, Dwarf, Gladiator, Seraphim & Wood Elf and is the counterpart to the Intrigues Series obtainable only by Daemon Dark Elf & Vampiress. Min-maxers should definitely start in Bronze difficulty.

The Max level in Sacred is 216, however, due to diminishing returns, points past 170-180 in a Skill award little additional benefit, it oftentimes taking multiple points to unlock the next tier of benefits. So for simplicity's sake we’ll be thinking in multiples of 50 when talking about skills. This means our breakpoints are generally 100 for 1⁄2 of max level investment, 150 for 3⁄4 of max level investment and 200 for max level investment. Other breakpoints will be mentioned however they are there either due to mathematical convention as is the case for AS or to enable the usage of a unique item or due to special rules governing the skill. It’s notable that unless needed to be able to equip an item, all breakpoints are soft.

1. Damage Scaling (max i.e. a point every level)
   
   Weapon Lore - Melee Damage
   Magic Lore - Spell Damage
   
   
2. ATK/ATK-SPD Scaling (10 unless another value is needed for a Unique)
   
   Unarmed Combat - Unarmed and Gauntlets
   Ranged Combat - Arrows
   Blade Combat - Du'Blades (Dark Elf Long Swords)
   Dual Wielding - Two Weapons
   Sword Lore - Swords
   Axe Lore - Axes / Maces / Hammers (20 for Thain’s, 28 for Tree Rage)
   Long-handled Weapons - Polearms (28 for Tree Rage Polearm variant)
   
   
3. CDR / DMG (balance, though you usually end up at 1⁄2 of character level)
   
   Concentration - General Melee CDR
   Meditation - General Spell CDR
   Trap Lore - Trap CDR
   Dwarven Lore - CDR for Dwarven Technology
   Heavenly Magic - CDR & casting IAS for Heavenly Magic
   Weapon Technology - CDR & IAS for Dwarven Technology
   Hell Power - CDR & IAS for Hell Magic
   Fire/Earth/Water/Air Magic - CDR & IAS for BM Magic
   Moon Magic - CDR & IAS for Moon Magic
   Bloodlust - CDR & IAS for Vampire Powers
   Vampirism - CDR for Vampire Powers & Less Sun Damage (max)
   Ballistics - DMG and Trap IAS
   
   
4. DEF (1⁄2 of character level)
   
   Agility - ATK/DEF (less DEF overall than Parrying) (sometimes 3⁄4 of character level)
   Parrying - DEF
   Armour - RES/SPD
   Constitution - HP/Regeneration (HP regen acts as if the Physical Regeneration Attribute had the added % bonus stated in the tooltip)
   
   
5. Special (variable)
   
   Trading - Improves price and stock of merchants (max)
   Riding - 25 for Heavy Warhorses, 32 for ATK value parity with unmounted combat.
   Disarming - Improves Chance to Disarm. Bosses wield unique weapons (AND VARIANTS) specific only to them (Hrunga'zz the Forest God drops Tree Rage for example, which can ONLY be acquired through Disarming) (up to personal preference)
   Forge Lore - Allows the use of Dwarf Blacksmith Arts (which are superior), more points increase the ilvl of the items that can benefit from these. (keep at highest ilvl, i.e. max)

A simple rule to balance Combat Art levels with their Cooldowns is:
For spammable Combat Arts like Attack: ≤ 3.0s CD - GOOD ; > 3.0s CD - BAD

Buffs have different governing rules where:
1 Buff: if CD = 3⁄4 of buff duration = GOOD
Or where concurrently running them is synergistic:
2 Buffs: if CD = 1⁄2 of buff duration = GOOD else if CD < 3⁄4 of buff duration = also GOOD
This, however, can be negated entirely by using buffs in a Combo and chugging yellow potions or running them as part of a rotation.

*Minimum level a skill may be selected - I use (*) as a signifier

---

IAS = Increased Action / Attack / Animation Speed.
CDR = Cooldown Reduction.
DMG = Damage.
RES = Elemental Resistances.
DoT = Damage over Time.

On level up Attributes automatically increase by 10% of their base starting value, which then becomes the new base value used for calculations. I won’t mention what all of them do exhaustively because to be honest they’re not all that relevant. But if you want to read up on it, the excellent people at Wolfe’s Lair[pctalk.info] have a full list on everything they do.

STR is really important for melee / martial builds that focus on left-clicking for the simple reason that it grants Increased Weapon Bonus by X%. This means that weapons become better with STR investment and since what we’re focusing on usually in left-click builds is the damage coming from left-click hits, that’s a good synergy.

DEX is one of those Attributes that lives in limbo. On one hand it will increase your ranged left-click damage but few ranged builds even focus on left-clicking through the game preferring to do damage via Combat Arts instead. On the other hand, it's one of the few ways to directly increase your ATK rating value besides STR.

PR is one of the really important attributes because it directly lowers the cooldown of your Combat arts. Not only that, it also increases your Maximum Health and its regeneration. We lose left-click damage because we’re no longer investing in STR but it’s not a significant loss, since PR is mainly used in builds that want to spam CAs.

MR is PR’s magical counterpart. It’s STR/PR fused into one because it lowers Spell Regeneration Time and increases CA damage. It’s head and shoulders above anything else for Caster builds.

CHA is again one of those limbo attributes. It lowers trading prices, so it’s an interesting consideration for your trading mule character or any other that focus heavily on trading. It also increases poison damage and weapon poison mods use this to scale their damage off of, so it leads you to an interesting choice of whether you want to increase your left-click DoT damage or focus on PR to increase your CA effectiveness. Poison will still do damage over time regardless, albeit lower.

Before you do anything, all characters start off with two default skills preset. This is less than optimal for some, and the freedom to choose is generally a better, more satisfying experience so you want to set DEFAULT_SKILLS : 0 in the Settings.cfg and STEAM_Settings.cfg files inside the installdir to be able to build your characters the way you want to.

Skill-centric Melee Builds: I am well aware itemization in this game exists, Sacred is a deep game and items come with many associated bonuses that work off of % values of your attributes. There are plenty of class-specific sets that work this way and I’ll use Lorgar’s Healer as an example to make my point. Every piece of the Lorgar’s set has the Weapon Damage Poison: +X% Charisma mod on it. In fact the weapon associated with it splits its damage between Physical and Poison. This means Gladiators should invest in Charisma since it scales their poison damage? Well, yes, but no. This fails to take into account the classes kit and design philosophy which is far more of a determining factor of overall damage than Attribute effects.

Gladiators like to bash things a lot and the fact is that the increased Weapon Bonus %X from STR is far more of a significant damage boost than Weapon Poison Damage by 0.001545 coefficient of the "weapon's base damage" we get from CHA. Sure, you increase the poison part of your damage directly and all calculations based on it but all weapon bonuses remain as described on the weapon. Or you increase the poison DMG bonus by something like 200% and it blows that coefficient increase out of the water and that’s at a low STR investment of ~50 points. If you really want to left-click poison 1:1 STR and CHA is the way to go.

There’s another consideration: rare armorus and uniques are oftentimes better for the builds or are better itemised and/at taking advantage of a build’s strengths. In fact you won’t even see me recommend armour simply because my intent is to preserve player choice while giving them the tools to succeed. Whether you invest in Charisma to scale your Lorgar’s Gladiator’s damage or you achieve your cooldown balancing by itemising for regenerate special move % or you invest fully into Physical Regeneration or socket amulets and rings with STR% scaling weapon damage mods then becomes of little consequence since your build and itemization is already doing 90% of the heavy lifting. The point is you don’t have to reroll, just use other items and socket differently. And if you did invest fully into Charisma, it’s only 200 points, 216 maximum. You also get TONS of + to Attribute gear, especially in higher difficulties.The only point where they matter is early levelling where you eke out a little more cooldown reduction or damage when it matters and feels good, but whether you’d enjoy a little less cooldown early or a little more damage later is not a decision for me to make.

Trading and Disarming: You can reduce the role of these skills to one thing, Magic Find. It all depends on how you want your Magic Find to function for you. Naturally, Disarming will only apply to whatever weapons or shields your enemy is holding, the restricted scope of items found is a tradeoff for them being free to acquire and acquired through combat, which there is a lot of in Sacred. Trading costs gold which isn’t used for very much else unless running a “Damage received reduces gold” mod on your armour in which case that becomes your primary gold sink and whatever else you acquire from merchants, however it isn’t restricted to just weapons. So the discussion boils down to primarily wanting more Defence and a little more Magic Find with it OR wanting more Magic Find and a lot more of everything else. In my opinion Trading is the meta choice simply because it uses a rarely utilised resource to grant bonuses to everything feasible, though there is a build that utilises Disarming to great effect. But the truth is you only need one character with Trading to mule for all others, the payoffs are huge in terms of power growth over time on the character using it but require patience and maxing the skill. Make a mule and build better, more specialised characters.

Item Muling: Is accomplished easily. You click Multiplayer where you create a cooperative game with a character you've exported that has the items you want to mule. You drop the items on the ground and save the game. Then, you load in with an exported character you want to access whatever you dropped, pick them up and export and overwrite that character to save your inventory.

Attack Speed: Attack Speed (AS) is capped at 220. Any further increases affect nothing and are wasted stats. Since the cap is relatively easy to attain past level 100 in Gold / Platinum Difficulty just with item bonuses, the investment we make to our ATK/ATK-SPD Scaling Skills in martial builds is capped to 10 and whatever deficit we have to reach the 220 cap is made up from armour mods. 10 is the minimum requirement to equip most class-specific weapon types and Ettol'Rahc-Notwen's Breeze (Reduced Enemy Physical Resistance) or Egil's Vehemence (Projectiles Pierce) since both are the best in slot of their respective item classes.

AS DOES affect Combat Arts. However the point when faster execution time of a CA benefits you more than more raw damage is when a hit from a CA (in most cases) would already kill an enemy, so the only way to scale that damage further is with more / faster hits per unit of time. Which is why 10 is a nice breakpoint for most ATK/ATK-SPD Scaling Skills. At 10 we not only satisfy any item usage gating we also get 52% ATK and 34% Increased Attack Speed. 34% IAS means whatever point of AS we get it’s now valued 34% more since multipliers work off of base values in Sacred, and since AS starts at a base of 0, a value of 100 AS would be worth 134. Which reduces our AS hard cap to 164 which is trivial to obtain. All specific weapon related ATK-SPD information is sourced from Belix.[nightwolfe.proboards.com]

Meditation vs CD+IAS: In some builds you see me recommending Meditation instead of the class-specific skill that governs cooldowns and casting speed for their spell school. This is because generally more CDR = Better. But in reality this is a playstyle choice you must make for yourself. Whether your buff casts are 2 seconds long or 0.5 seconds long should not affect the outcome of a fight. Since most players have the ingrained reflex to buff before a boss fight starts, buffs running out before the fight is over shouldn’t be a problem for one, and for another, if you can’t afford to cast a buff in the middle of a fight due to how much damage you're taking you have far greater problems with your build that remain unaddressed before needing to worry about casting IAS.

Riding: “When you get on a horse, your attack rating drops significantly to ~2/3 of its unmounted value. Riding improves this. At level 25 Riding (enough to use the Heavy Warhorse) the mounted Attack Rating is only ~98% of the unmounted value. (thanks to Llama8) You'll be equally good on horseback as on foot at level 32 riding, and above that you'll actually have more benefits to attack.” (Sourced from Pevil[darkmatters.org]) Also, the player's riding level is only checked when you get on a horse, so as long as it's sufficient before getting on then you don't need to actually put many points into Riding, which means carrying +Riding gear sets to conserve points is a playstyle choice you can make. (Thanks to Llama8[darkmatters.org])

Riding past 32 points invested becomes a way to scale our ATK value and horses contribute a lot to our HP and RES, with some caveats: It shifts your ATK-SPD values around so it disables some melee builds from functioning optimally but enables others instead. However there is a drawback, you can’t ride a horse everywhere, specifically dungeons/caves, which are very good XP due to having dense concentrations of Boss NPCs. However this can be mitigated by playing something like a 2h Multi Hit build since you’re relying more on spamming the CA rather than left-clicking the enemy while on foot and while riding you get faster AS to left-click.

Survival Bonus: SB boils down to two things, the more time you spend in combat (i.e. the circle under your character is Orange) the higher the value grows giving you a % increase to your Weapon Damage and Magic Find. This obviously impacts and punishes Melee builds more since they rely on Weapon Damage and are most exposed to danger at all times, especially dragon melee attacks. It resets to 0% on death.

Combat Arts: The logic behind character Combat Arts is the following. If there are any buffs in the kit, we are compelled to use them, buffs in Sacred can negate the need for an entire Skill or triple its effectiveness. Mobility skills don’t just save time, they save your character from dying, conserving your Survival Bonus, as such we are compelled to use them, especially on Melee builds. Regarding Melee builds, if there are Combat Arts present that make use of AS scaling to increase the speed of their animations we should use those as well. Regarding AS if there are skills that increase it for casters or melee we use those as well. I’ll always bold mandatory Combat Arts the rest should be personal preference however there are a few stand-out CAs that I will mention when relevant.

Hybridization: Sacred loves its buffs and cooldown management. Personally I can’t help but feel that a lot of the class design went the way of mixing left-clicking with CAs. This is particularly easy to see in classes that have both types of skills from the fact that spells and CAs are on different global cooldowns, incentivizing their mixed use. It’s a design choice I’ll make note of and consider building around throughout the guide.

Constitution -> Agility -> Armour: Why? The biggest hurdles you face early on are in the order of survivability, hit chance and resistances, this skill progression is purely personal considering skills tend to end up at the same investment of 100/150 points but it takes care of each of your problems as you run into them linearly. I don’t like spending too much time thinking about swapping this piece of gear for another and this just streamlines my decision making process. By all means if you want to focus on a different skill distribution it’s not wrong at all.

Gladiator lends itself well to melee builds. Having only Combat Arts whose cooldowns are reduced by Concentration enables him to use every defensive skill and still have space in his template for a flexible skill slot. Naturally we want to be as defensive as possible since we will be in the middle of enemy NPC groups and meleeing bosses, so high resistances and defence are necessary in later difficulties. He’s quite simple to use since his basic build template can left-click for a very long time before needing to spam CAs to keep up with damage and his buff Heroic Courage is literally the CA version of the Agility skill.

As far as weapon AS is concerned, the Gladiator is fastest while Unarmed or Dual Wielding. Fast with all 1h weapons and 2h Swords, Normal with Bows and Crossbows and Slow with the rest.

On Horseback things change. 2h Swords become very fast and Axes and Polearms become Fast but Ranged attacks become Slow, disincentivizing their use on horseback.

General Build: (Attack, Hard Hit, SJ, HC) STR
A standard Melee setup making use of every skill needed to increase our DMG, AS and DEF/RES. Trading or Disarming is up to your personal preference. You could use this build for left-clicking, spamming CAs or as a hybrid.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Dual Wielding / Unarmed Combat / Axe Lore / Sword Lore* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility (ATK/DEF)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Parrying* (DEF)
50 Trading* (MF) / Disarming (DEF/MF)

Polearm Build: (Attack, Multi-Hit, SJ, HC) PR
A Polearm setup that takes Long-Handled Weapons as soon as it becomes available shifting our DEF skills earlier. Your reliance on Combat Arts for damage will increase however the payoff would be getting something like Orla-Aisling's Jolt and using the increased Pole range to Multi-Hit swipe large groups.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
6 Agility (ATK/DEF)
12 Armour (RES/SPD)
20 Long-Handled Weapons* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
30 Parrying (DEF)
50 Trading* (MF) / Disarming (DEF/MF)

Ranged Build: (Multi-Hit, SJ, HC) PR
Gladiator has Normal AS with Bows and Crossbows, it is the only character that can use
Crossbows that fast on foot which means a Crossbow Gladiator build is especially viable.
Reliance on CAs is increased, however Multi-Hitting with a completed Egill's Vehemence is too
good (and fun).

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Ranged Combat* (ATK/ATK-SPD Scaling)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility (ATK/DEF)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Parrying* (DEF)
50 Trading* (MF) / Disarming (DEF/MF)

Riding Build: (FLEX, HC) STR
Horse Charge gets better the higher level your horse is and this also enables you to efficiently melee with Polearms and Axes where normally you’d be confined to spamming Multi-Hit on Foot due to the low IAS frames of the weapons. The question here is what are you willing to sacrifice for Riding? Normally I wouldn’t recommend sacrificing DEF though it remains a possibility but since we have a FLEX slot we might as well use it and take Riding as soon as it’s available to enable the playstyle.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Dual Wielding / Unarmed Combat / Axe Lore / Sword Lore* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Riding*
12 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
20 Agility (ATK/DEF)
30 Armour (RES/SPD)
50 Parrying (DEF) / Trading* (MF)

Riding+Polearm Build: (FLEX, HC) STR
This combines the logic behind the Polearm and Riding Builds to take the relevant skills as soon as they’re available and giving up the FLEX slot in favour of Riding.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
6 Riding*
12 Agility (ATK/DEF)
20 Long-Handled Weapons* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
30 Armour (RES/SPD)
50 Parrying (DEF)

Attribute: Strength or PR
There are some DEX scaling Gladiator-specific Uniques and there is an argument for high level Combat Arts overriding boosts in Strength, however, the weapons and jewelry you will be finding and using will use STR% scaling to DMG types and later on will exceed having an extra level in the Attack CA by far. There is also an ulterior motive behind investing purely into Strength, it increases your ATK, Melee DMG, HP, increases Weapon Physical & Fire Damage by a coefficient AND on top of that it offers an Increased Weapon Bonus by X%, meaning Elemental Properties, Blue Modifiers and Unique Modifiers on weapons are increased by that percent PER point.

Combat Arts:
The CA's that benefit from AS are Attack, Hard Hit and Multi-Hit. Taking one or all is up to personal preference. Multi-Hit should be prioritised in the Ranged Build since it’s a very good density clearing tool that does the aiming for you.

Attack if DMG is good is generally a group clearing CA though has a hard cap of hits that vary in animation speed depending on the weapon/s being used & class using it. DW caps out on 8 on Gladiator. Though being locked in an Attack animation isn’t necessarily always a good thing, killing 8 weaker enemies in the span of 2 seconds usually contributes to your safety.
Hard Hit will rattle the HP on Bosses.
Multi-Hit infinitely scales with the number of enemies hit, its usage is dependent on clever kite and setup strategies however any on-hit effects your weapons have have a chance to apply to each enemy hit individually. This means Multi-hit whirlwinding large groups with a completed Orla’s set is a terrible power to behold. It’s also a far superior skill to use on Ranged builds having different effects when used against groups or single enemies.

Heroic Courage is our Buff for ATK/DEF.
Stomping Jump is our Mobility CA.

Notable Mentions:

• Dagger Stare is a Thorns Aura that damages enemies by a set amount when they are in radius. This skill is scalable only through reading runes and item bonuses for a maximum theoretical level of 510, which would be hilarious.
  
• Fist of the Gods. Winds up a punch that pulverises one enemy hit by it. Honestly this can One Punch Man the entire game if you balance DAM and CDR correctly to make its usage possible. It may even replace Hard Hit at that point
  
• Awe. Another Aura skill that repels enemies in a radius around you, though its duration is relatively short in comparison to its cooldown. Since the effect is anti synergistic with melee it’s a decent OH SHI- button to press when surrounded so you can jump to safety.

Seraphim is a very flexible class that can be played either as a Melee, Caster or Hybrid character. It can use both DMG Scaling Skills Weapon Lore and Magic Lore, and Heavenly Magic which is the caster counterpart to Concentration. And alongside that, it has a special school-specific Skill to increase the AS and reduce their cooldowns, so it has all the tools it needs to be successful at one or both playstyles. Due to it possessing a specific Magic School the class is invariably played hybrid to some degree if one doesn’t wish to ignore CDR for her Buff Skills or her AoE skills.

As far as AS frames are concerned, the Seraphim is fastest while Unarmed, Fast with 1h weapons, Dual Wielding and Polearms. Normal with Bows but Very Slow with 2h Swords and Crossbows.

Things change on horseback, every weapon becomes Fast including Bows, however Crossbows are worse dropping down to Slow. And then there’s spellcasting. While there isn’t a complete list, in general Click, Cast, Click while moving in a direction will yield very fast spell casts on horseback, so in a sense Riding can only ADD to a caster build, regardless of class.

Melee CA Build: (Attack, Hard Hit, CJ, SoF) or (BFG, CJ, SoF) PR or 1:1 STR:PR
Sera can be played purely Melee using the same build logic as Gladiator but the skill availability differs and we require a way to improve the cooldown on our Buff which is tied to Heavenly Magic since it’s a Magic skill. This build is a good example of why Buffs are strong, Heavenly Magic reduces the cooldown of SoF enough so that Agility is no longer mandatory. Running one Skill or both is purely up to playstyle.

Riding follows the logic of previous Melee builds, heavy investment in it will rival Agility in terms of DEF acquired from it (+RES&HP) however you might not want to give up the ATK in which case I recommend waiting till level 50 and making the tradeoff there.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Sword Lore / Long-handled Weapons* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Armour* (RES/SPD)
20 Parrying (DEF)
30 Agility* (ATK/DEF) / Heavenly Magic (CDR) / Riding
50 Trading* (MF) / Heavenly Magic (CDR) / Riding

Dual Wielding CA Build: (Attack, Hard Hit, CJ, SoF) PR or 1:1 STR:PR
This is the same logic as the Melee variant except skill availability forces us to shuffle around their order. I personally like to prioritise Constitution early but Parrying can certainly be assigned in its place as long as we eventually assign it at level 20.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution (HP/REGEN) / Parrying (DEF)
6 Dual Wielding*
12 Armour* (RES/SPD)
20 Parrying (DEF) / Constitution (HP/REGEN)
30 Agility* (ATK/DEF) / Heavenly Magic (CDR)
50 Trading (MF) / Heavenly Magic (CDR)

Ranged CA Build: (Multi-Hit, CJ, SoF) PR or 1:1 DEX:PR
Same logic as before, the skill order gets a reshuffle. Heavenly Magic still remains a playstyle choice but somewhat diminished since Ranged Combat benefits greatly from the increased total ATK from Agility and SoF both, so I advise using both at the same time, but it isn’t a hard requirement.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
6 Parrying (DEF)
12 Armour* (RES/SPD)
20 Ranged Combat* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
30 Agility* (ATK/DEF) / Heavenly Magic (CDR)
50 Heavenly Magic (CDR) / Trading* (MF)

Riding Melee Build: (FLEX, SoF) STR or 1:1 STR:PR
Riding purists might want to take Riding at the earliest thus enabling their preferred playstyle in which case the skill order reshuffles to reflect that. HOWEVER, a tradeoff will have to be made between your source of ATK from either Agility or the SoF buff. I’d take Parrying/Heavenly Magic for Swords or Agility/Heavenly Magic for Polearms. Or just don’t use Heavenly Magic.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Riding*
6 Sword Lore / Long-handled Weapons (ATK/ATK-SPD Scaling)
12 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Agility* (ATK/DEF) / Parrying (DEF)
50 Parrying (DEF) / Agility (ATK/DEF) / Heavenly Magic (CDR) / Trading* (MF)

Riding Ranged Build: (FLEX, SoF) DEX or 1:1 DEX:PR
Same idea as Riding Melee Sera, we take Riding and Ranged Combat at the earliest available levels and reshuffle our build to fill in DEF and ATK. You may be able to use Trading instead of Parrying at 50 depending on how hard you’ve invested into Riding. Or Heavenly Magic.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Riding*
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Armour (RES/SPD)
20 Ranged Combat* (ATK/ATK-SPD Scaling)
30 Agility* (ATK/DEF)
50 Parrying (DEF) / Heavenly Magic / Trading* (MF)

Seraphim is particularly quick to jump into a Caster playstyle since you have all DMG Scaling, CDR & IAS skills upfront followed by just the DEF portion of her build. Her kit has all the necessary tools to succeed such as a point-based AoE with Celestial Light and Lightning Bolt as something akin to Hard Hit for single targets. Her Buffs fare a lot better and cast faster since we use Magic Lore scaling and Heavenly Magic but kiting becomes somewhat of a necessity offset by how fun it is to blow up groups with Celestial Light after balling them up.

Heavenly Magic Caster Build: (EB/CL, LB, CJ) MR
Sera caster is comfy, you smite your enemies and burn the Undead to a crisp. The real turning point comes at level 30 where you have to decide on your playstyle. The extra DEF of Agility and the extra MF of Trading are very good. You don’t sacrifice any notable skills running these two together. The weapon specific skills are ONLY there because you might find some godly weapons with Spell CDR and Magic DMG% increases that may be gated behind a certain skill level. That being said Solwemyr's Trial is not bad and neither is The Finished Prototype Sword you obtain from The Unknown Warrior quest chain which require no points in Weapon Skills. Riding can realistically replace Agility if you want to go that route since we don’t use its ATK component. We however DO use its ATK component if you want to run Energy Bolts.

1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
1 Meditation (CDR)
3 Heavenly Magic (CDR & IAS)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN) / Parrying (DEF)
12 Armour* (RES/SPD)
20 Parrying (DEF) / Constitution (HP/REGEN)
30 Agility* (ATK/DEF) / Long-handled Weapons / Sword Lore / Riding
50 Trading* (MF) / Long-handled Weapons / Sword Lore

Riding Caster Build: (CL, LB) MR
Same logic as Riding Ranged Sera, we take Riding the earliest it’s available and use the same caster oriented skills. Agility once again has an ATK component we don’t make use of so it’s the prime candidate for replacement. Weapon skills again, just in case you find something.

1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
1 Meditation (CDR)
3 Riding*
6 Heavenly Magic (CDR & IAS)
12 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Parrying (DEF)
50 Trading (MF) / Long-handled Weapons / Sword Lore

General Hybrid Build: (Attack/EB, RBoL, CJ, SoF) 1:1 PR:MR
Sera feels great as a hybrid. You get both DMG scaling stats so your weapons scale in every regard not just physical, both CDR skills because we will be mixing Combat Arts with Heavenly Magic often and we ensure a good DEF value with Parrying or Agility in the case of using Polearms and Bows. The caveat is that there are some specific point allocations in order to level up with a linear increase in power but the payoff is that she can use any weapon and her kit eats enemies for breakfast, especially undead. There is no space for Riding without some significant part of your combat effectiveness or defence being gimped in favour of taking Riding. The easiest to replace would be Armour since horses give largely the same kind of bonuses (i.e. RES, SPD & HP) but your Armour skill is tied to actually being able to equip some high level chest pieces, Parrying comes to mind next since RES and HP translate into effective HP somewhat well and Melee is less of an issue due to how easily you can kite enemies but dungeons will be that much harder in the latter difficulties.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling) (odd levels till 100)
1 Magic Lore (Scaling) (even levels till 100)
3 Heavenly Magic (CDR & IAS) (odd levels till 40)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN) (odd levels after 40 in HM)
12 Concentration (CDR) (1 point every level till Attack CD < 3.0)
20 Parrying (DEF) (1 point when not adding in Concentration) for Sword Lore / Agility for rest
30 Armour (RES/SPD) (dump stat till 1⁄2 your character level)
50 Sword Lore (ATK/ATK-SPD) / Long-handled Weapons / Ranged Combat (10 or whatever
value needed for equipment)

Attributes:
Physical Regeneration or 1:1 STR:PR / 1:1 DEX:PR for Martial builds.
Going by the logic of the previous Martial builds, STR% scaling weapons add a LOT of damage since we’ll be mostly left-clicking enemies and using CA’s when the need arises. However there’s one CA where STR% scaling is not good enough, that’s in the case of BeeEffGee where you NEED to keep your cooldown close to the duration of the skill, in which case I advise investing fully into Physical Regeneration or 1:1 between STR and PR depending on how much you want to melee outside of BFG (which regardless of effort will have ~ 4-5 seconds of downtime between casts).
Mental Regeneration for Caster builds.
Self evident really, MR is the only Attribute that increases spell damage and lowers spell cooldowns.
Physical Regeneration : Mental Regeneration 1:1 for Hybrid builds.
Hybrid builds need both attributes since their playstyle revolves around using Combat Arts and Heavenly Magic off cooldown, for the caster side the only real choice is MR and for the Melee side there’s an argument to be made in favour of STR since both meleeing and CA’s play a role however high level CA’s need that PR investment to manage their cooldowns in order to remain hybrids as per their playstyle lest they fall into favouring casting and becoming very martial mages.

The CAs that benefit from Attack Speed are Attack, Hard Hit, Multi-Hit and BeeEffGee.
They work in exactly the same way they do for Gladiator with one exception. BFG turns your weapon into a celestial polearm that fires ranged piercing orbs of light that do Physical damage, so Sera has two unique ways of playing ranged beside just using bows. While there is little point in levelling other CA’s if you want to play with BFG nothing is stopping you from doing so. You may freely pick from these CA’s as long as the next two are being used.
Strength of Faith is our Buff for ATK.
Combat Jump is our Mobility CA.

For Casters:
Celestial Light is our AoE clearing Magic. It’s notable that some enemy types will run out of its effect, but considering how often you get to cast it the AI will quickly become overwhelmed.
Lightning Bolt or Energy Bolts is our Single Target Magic. They both have a little physical damage present in their damage formula but for casters I feel Lightning Bolt is better due to a larger portion being Magic and scaling better with Magic Lore.

For Hybrids:
Energy Bolts and Rotating Blades of Light have hybrid physical and magic damage formulas and as such fit very well into the hybrid playstyle. They are however scaled by Magic Lore so they work great with the caster build as well. RBoL will take care of melees in an AoE around you and EB will give you an alternative ranged single target playstyle. Hybrid is conceived as making use of the Attack CA alongside RBoL but nothing is stopping you from using EB.

• Light makes you squint less in indoor areas and damages undead stopping them from resurrecting. It’s in fact so good it trivialises Undead areas. BUT there are potions for that. Your choice.
  
• Irritation is interesting, it doesn’t do any damage but when you realise it acts as an ATK debuff the implications for group play are rather considerable. However, since the multiplayer scene is rather limited and ATK debuffs really only being useful against melee opponents coupled with the fact that it only affects one target on cast, its limitations make it useful only on bosses, which isn’t a problem since that’s where debuffs are usually the most useful.
  
• Light Shield is a ranged protection buff. There’s few cases where I’d personally find this useful enough to regularly use outside of speedrunning in areas with lots of ranged enemies.

Daemoness is one of the classes added in the Underworld expansion and consequently has a bit of power creep or possibly oversight in design philosophy. It’s another class that’s designed in the same way as Seraphim was and as such is very flexible in terms of her approach to building. There was a more quality-of-life, AoE approach to her design and generally there are a lot of feel-good abilities in the Daemons kit. There’s also more playing around with the damage formula for her abilities and shifting the focus from Magic typing to Fire typing.

Daemones’ kit really screams hybrid, since it doesn’t contain the usual CAs and has to rely on Transformations to access them. Moreover Descent which is her equivalent of Heavy hit HAS TO go through the Soaring Daemon transformation first, which however fast isn’t something spammable. She has no CAs that benefit from AS AND the other skills that would fill the AoE gap in her melee builds are only worth taking if we’re also scaling their damage with Magic Lore. This makes Meditation by itself lacklustre since it’s there to reduce the CD of skills we don’t spam, only being useful for Buffs. However, this logic only stands if we think of Sacred as a single player game, in a two player+ environment or for the person that enjoys being slow and methodical, things are very different. Her debuffs are very strong, Transformations increase their associated RES and Dread decreases both ATK and DEF for the enemy. The dev team invented the tank.

As far as combat animations are concerned, the Daemon is Very Fast while Unarmed, 1handed and Dual Wielding, while 2h Swords and Polearms are Fast and Crossbows are Slow, disincentivizing its usage. She can’t use a Bow or 2h Axe at all.

Horseback makes it so all your animations are Fast. However her Crossbow speed becomes even worse at Very Slow.

Daemon has an entirely unique animation set while in flight (yes). All of her animations are Normal speed yet Dual Wielding and surprisingly Crossbows are Very Fast.

Physical Daemon Build: (BD, SD, CoD, Dread) PR or STR or 1:1 STR:PR
Melee Physical Daemon is a hodgepodge of best practices from other builds: Dual Wielding, ATK buff and the Attack CA. I recommend Battle Daemon to even be able to competently play melee physical Daemon because you NEED the Assail (Attack) CA in ths case. Call of Death largely does the same thing Strength does, allowing you to fully invest in Physical Regeneration since the weapon DMG bonus is already covered by the buff. Infernal Power if you want to use it increases our ATK and adds a Fire bonus damage component to all our damage and Dread weakens the ATK and DEF of enemies in a large area around us.

We’re going off Gladiator logic where we want to be effective with our chosen weapons early on and take defensive skills since we’ll be sitting in the middle of crowds. Daemon can’t actually use Trading so for level 30 you have a choice between more DEF from Disarming and Riding for the same reason OR Meditation to lean further into that tank playstyle by using Dread for every group of enemies.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Dual Wielding / Axe Lore / Sword Lore / Long-handled Weapons* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility (ATK/DEF)
20 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Disarming* (DEF/MF) / Riding / Meditation (CDR)
50 Parrying* (DEF)

Poison Farts Build: (PD, SD, CoD, Tentacles) PR or 1:1 STR:PR
Poison Daemon is a more refined and specialised variant of melee. For starters it has a great attached CA that can be spammed and does huge AoE DoT damage. You can use something like the Fadalmar’s Counsel set Axe and Tree Rage disarmed from the Forest God, however Fadalmar has a requirement of 28 in Axes which will eat a skill, this is up to personal preference. Alternatively you can ignore Fadalmar’s completely and run double 1h Tree Rage freeing up a skill for Meditation. Call of Death is a great melee buff and lastly if you want you can use Tentacles for more AoE Magic/Poison damage, it’s not necessary but very fun (and gory).

Note: this is one of the few builds where I’ll straight up tell you to use a weapon skill over the others. Dual Wielding here has a huge benefit.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
6 Agility* (ATK/DEF)
12 Dual Wielding (ATK/ATK-SPD)
20 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Axe Lore (28 For Fadalmar’s Counsel + Tree Rage) / Meditation (CDR)
50 Parrying* (DEF)

Energy Daemon Build: (ED, SD, CoD, Tentacles) PR or 1:1 STR:PR
Charged Bolts are largely the same idea as Poison Ring but with a different flavour, the Charged bolts spread in a frontal cone and pierce enemies. While our CoD is active we do massive damage and you can use Tentacles to eke out more AoE damage but it isn’t strictly necessary. Meditation helps with the CoD regen at high levels and we aren’t constrained by something like Fadalmar to eat a skill slot for Axes if the temptation arises to use it. However, there is a stand-out. You’re free to do as you like of course but Orla’s Jolt makes a perfect thematic addition with her charged bolts on proc which requires Long-handled Weapons.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling, includes CB DMG)
1 Concentration (CDR for CB)
3 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
6 Agility (ATK/DEF)
12 Dual Wielding / Axe Lore / Sword Lore / Long-handled Weapons (ATK/ATK-SPD)
20 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Meditation (CDR)
50 Parrying* (DEF)

Fire Daemon Build: (FD, SD, IP, CoD, Tentacles) PR or 1:1 STR:PR
Fire Daemon works a little differently depending on which component we’re focusing on. For melee we obviously only care about left-click being really good. Fadalmar’s Counsel and Aarnum's Regalia especially (since it boosts Fire DMG by a %) are great weapons for Fire DMG but both need 10 points in their respective governing Skills barring Dual Wielding however that still remains a possibility. Infernal Power converts even more of your physical damage into Fire and is a great synergy for Fire Daemon. Tentacles are a great added splash DMG.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling, includes CB DMG)
1 Concentration (CDR for CB)
3 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
6 Agility (ATK/DEF)
12 Sword Lore / Axe Lore / Dual Wielding (ATK/ATK-SPD)
20 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Disarming* (DEF/MF) / Riding / Meditation (CDR)
50 Parrying*

Flying Crackpot Build: (SD, CoD, IP) DEX or 1:1 DEX:PR
Alright so this is admittedly a crackpot build but hear me out, Daemoness has Very Fast AS while flying with Crossbows. The idea is you buff the everloving heck out of yourself and fire away. Meditation or Hellpower is largely your choice based on the flavour of spell CDR you enjoy, you don’t NEED much of it since all you’re using it for is to buff your left-click damage. Disarming is nice simply because we don’t have Ranged Combat to slot. Alternatively you could slot Magic Lore and since you have one of the CDR skills you could fling some Blazing Disks around or lock down an area with a Hell Sphere and pelt enemies with arrows like some flying Hell Fury. But I personally think this shifts the focus from flying crossbows too much. Or makes for a great Hell Fury RP build, sky’s the limit (literally) (heh).

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
6 Agility (ATK/DEF)
12 Hell Power (CDR & IAS) / Meditation (CDR) / Magic Lore (Scaling)
20 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Disarming* (DEF/MF) / Magic Lore (Scaling)
50 Parrying* (DEF)

Hell Mage Build: (BD, HS, SD, IP/Tentacles) MR
Daemon Caster has a nice feel to it, on one hand you become a mobile turret with Hell Sphere and on the other you can throw around Blazing Disk which will follow enemies around.

Infernal Power is cast and forget if you want more Fire DAM but it shouldn't be necessary. Alternatively Tentacles will free you up even more since it makes a mess wherever something dies that proceeds to do the killing for you since its DAM scales with Magic Lore. At 30 you make a choice based on playstyle between Disarming and Riding or any of the weapon skills if you found something godly that has a requirement.

1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
1 Meditation (CDR)
3 Hell Power (CDR & IAS)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility (ATK/DEF)
20 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Disarming* (DEF/MF) / Riding
50 Parrying* (DEF)

Magic Tank Build: (BD/MD/PD/FD, SD, Dread, AC, Tentacles) MR
Alright lets free the Assail build from its constraints. Concentration is only needed if we want to spam the associated Transformation CA. In this case, since we’re not relying on Assail for our DMG we just need the duration of Transformations to be equal or longer than their cooldown which we can comfortably get by itemising with Regeneration Special Move % on our Armour pieces. We lean further into the tank playstyle by going sword and board. Alternatively Hell Power remains an option, albeit a distant one, since shields play into the spirit of the build and AC spam is already very fast regardless.

Constitution / Agility is a matter of preference, as stated I like CON earlier in my builds but it’s largely irrelevant since we’ll take both. Hell Power can be used or ignored.
We’re free to use any Transformations we like since the components that actually interest us are their passive benefits and NOT the associated CAs (they have their own builds).
Again we want to play as defensive as possible so at 30 there’s a choice between Disarming and Riding, it all depends on how you want that to be accomplished. We’re spamming Abysmal Choir for an AoE AS debuff that does Damage over Time AND CAN STACK the damage portion. Dread enables us to Tank comfortably while Tentacles will do AoE magic and poison damage around everything we kill.

Note: this is the other build where I’ll straight up tell you to use a weapon skill over the others. 1h Melee + Shield has DEF benefits that we use to great effect. So it’s your choice between Swords and Axes.

1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
1 Meditation (CDR)
3 Axe Lore / Sword Lore* (ATK/ATK-SPD) / Hell Power (CDR & IAS)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility (ATK/DEF)
20 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Disarming* (DEF/MF) / Riding / Hell Power (CDR & IAS)
50 Parrying* (DEF)

General Hybrid (BD/MD/PD/FD, SD, CD) 1:1 PR:MR
Hybrid Daemoness is extremely flexible. This build pretty much frees you up to play however you’d like and mix and match the skills you like to use. I still recommend Call of Death if you want to melee in a large capacity but that’s about the only thing I’ll mention. Do anything you like. Unfortunately, Riding doesn’t have a place here since it would eat skill slots we can’t give up.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
3 Hell Power (CDR & IAS)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Concentration (CDR)
20 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Dual Wielding / Axe Lore / Sword Lore / Long-handled Weapons (ATK/ATK-SPD)
50 Parrying* (DEF) for 1h / Agility (ATK/DEF) for the rest

Fire Daemon Build (FD, SD, IP, BD, Tentacles) PR
For spamming Wall of Flames we’re better served running a hybrid build. Magic Lore scales our DMG and Weapons remain a big component when we’re not throwing firewalls. Infernal Power is very good once again since it buffs our ATK and %Fire DMG and Blazing Disc can be used as a ranged alternative though not necessary. Tentacles again have huge AoE pressure but aren’t strictly required.

Everything around us is always on fire so we constantly Leech 9% DMG as HP from 5+ sources, consequently this means we can sacrifice a portion of our defences if our offence is good enough to keep us alive. Wall of Fire is also a ranged skill that is thrown and bounces to its target which makes it a pretty safe playstyle.

Sword Lore has a huge benefit here since we get to use Aarnum’s Regalia (and it feels great to bind every ranged and caster enemy) however Fadalmar remains perfectly viable and Dual Wielding remains possible if desired.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
3 Concentration (CDR)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Meditation (CDR)
20 Agility (ATK/DEF)
30 Sword Lore / Axe Lore / Dual Wielding (ATK/ATK-SPD)
50 Hell Power (CDR & IAS)

Attributes:
Physical Regeneration or 1:1 STR:PR for Martial builds.
While STR does add a bunch of %Weapon Bonus we’re already getting that from CoD and even if CoD weren’t a thing it’s still better to spam her associated CA’s whenever possible due to how strong damage conversion or the %bonus is. Most enemies don’t have 100% RES to a single element, enabling you to do some crazily boosted left-click damage on some types.
Mental Regeneration for Caster builds.

Self evident again, MR is the only Attribute that increases spell damage and lowers spell cooldowns. The Tank build runs on its own ruleset and needs the MR to scale its DMG even further.
Physical Regeneration : Mental Regeneration 1:1 for Hybrid builds.
Hybrid builds need both attributes since their playstyle revolves around using Combat Arts and Hell Power skills off cooldown, for the caster side the only real choice is MR and for the Melee side PR simply because of how much freedom it gives us and how well it synergizes with the overall build philosophy.

Daemon has NO CAs that benefit from Attack Speed. This may be due to possible oversight on the part of the developers BUT I have a theory that Transformations, specifically Battle Daemon, incorporate AS into Assail (Attack) as a baseline.

Transformations and CAs:
Battle Daemon ATK / %Physical DAM / %Physical RES
Energy Daemon %conversion of Physical to Magic DAM / %Magic RES
Fire Daemon %conversion of Physical to Fire DAM / %Fire RES
Poison Daemon %conversion of Physical to Poison DAM / %Poison RES

Soaring Daemon is our Mobility CA (DEF/SPD)
Infernal Power is our Buff for ATK and %Fire DAM
Call of Death is our Buff for % WEAPON DAM bonus

Notable Mentions:

• Dread significant ATK/DEF debuff
  
• Abysmal Choir AS Slow debuff and PHY + MAG DoT DMG that scales with Magic Lore
  
• Hell Sphere will guard an area with a stream of Fire + Magic that scales off Magic Lore
  
• Blazing Disc will hunt down targets and deal Physical + Fire DMG that scales off Magic
  Lore
  
• Tentacles Magic and Poison AoE damage on kill

Dwarf is the other class added in the Underworld expansion and consequently has a bit of power creep into his kit taking what would be a VERY good melee class on its own and giving it some great AoE clearing options. On the other hand, it has a lot more buffs to cycle through which is great if what you like is a diverse approach to combat, or bad if you dislike a spinning plates playstyle.

Dwarves suffer a little from their success. On one hand, the addition of Weapon Technologies no longer limits the player to a purely CA based rehash of the same playstyle. On the other hand, that's also the problem. Concentration governs CA cooldowns and WT is a separate school of skills whose cooldowns are governed by its specific Skill. Worse still, you could ignore every buff the dwarf has in favour of using only Dwarven Steel however it’s in the WT group. So we end up needing Dwarven Lore alongside Concentration. However, I think this was an intentional design choice meant to push the player deeper into the WT group of skills since Cannon based skills are suspiciously and invitingly spammable.

The addition of Weapon Technologies opens up the kit to Fire DMG typing so we’re no longer limited to just Physical DMG, but, as we’re about to find out it would be irrelevant if it did since Dwarf has the single most insane buff in the game through Dwarven Steel which reduces enemy physical resistance by 86% ON LEVEL 1. Not only that they get Greed that boosts their MF, granted it costs 90% of your DEF at level 1 but it only ever improves, capping out at 3% reduced DEF eventually with investment. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, Wounds Increase Damage Dealt is an armour mod that exists which is especially good for melee coupled with 9% Leech and this would be a great way of taking advantage of it since we actually want to get hit often to be on low HP for more damage and Greed offers you control over your DEF that way.

As far as combat animations are concerned, the Dwarf is Very Fast with 1h Melee, 2h Swords and Polearms AND their unique weapon type Pistols and Rifles (pistols are faster than rifles). They’re Fast with 2h Axes as well. I feel like the lack of AS benefit for their CAs got rolled into the baseline weapon animations somewhat, but is also supplemented by Battle Rage.

Dwarves have short stumpy legs which means horseback riding is not possible, but their class-specific gear has quite a bit of Speed mods show up attached to them to offset this and it’s pretty easy to cap 220 Speed with them.

Dwarven Berserker Build: (Assault/Vehemence/HB/Wrath, DS, BR, WC) PR or STR
Martial Dwarf has a very fun gameplay loop since left-clicking has visual feedback tied to it because of Battle Rage. Dwarven Steel boosts your damage to such extents that worrying about enemy physical resistance is pointless. I’m not warmed up to War Cry, on one hand it’s amazing and you could theoretically skip Agility entirely for it, on the other balancing three buffs with different durations to me sounds more like an enchanter playstyle rather than the fire-and-forget no-worries martial Dwarf.

You COULD also take Ranged Combat over Axes if you’re more fond of Pistols and Rifles than Bonking, don’t let me tell you how to have fun with your left-click. Dwarven Lore is there to make sure you remain on top of your Dwarven Steel Cooldowns.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Axe Lore / Ranged Combat* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Dwarven Lore (CDR)
12 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Parrying (DEF)
50 Agility* (ATK/DEF)

Unarmed CA Build: (Assault, Heavy Blow/Wrath, DS, BR, WC) PR or STR
Unarmed is the same build as Berserker except we shuffle our skills around a little to make room for Unarmed Combat at level 6. I may not understand why you’d want to, but don’t let me stop you.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Dwarven Lore (CDR)
6 Unarmed Combat* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
12 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Parrying (DEF)
50 Agility* (ATK/DEF)

Sword CA Build: (Assault, Heavy Blow/Wrath, DS, BR, WC) PR or STR
Swords actually have a great reason to play them since Aarnum’s Regalia exists, not only that but they’re one of the most abundant types of weapons you will find and you’re able to mule good ones from your other characters.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Dwarven Lore (CDR)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Sword Lore* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
20 Armour (SPD/RES)
30 Parrying (DEF)
50 Agility* (ATK/DEF)

Artillery Build: (Cannon Blast, Flamethrower, DS, WC) PR
I mentioned WT skills being suspiciously spammable, as it turns out WT is governed by the same logic used behind magic schools and as such comes bundled with its own CDR & IAS Skill. Uh Dwarven “Mage” anybody? Cannon Blast slaps anything it touches and Dwarven Steel makes sure that even their descendants will feel it. We can use Flamethrower to add an extra DMG layer to everything however DS + CB is more than enough to eat every enemy in the game. We’re also free for the first time to take Trading or Forge Lore without feeling like we’re giving up an integral skill to our build logic. Hell, this is an excellent occasion to remind you that with sufficient levels in War Cry even Agility becomes a flex skill that can be replaced for Disarming, we’re not using the ATK component, but that again, is a value judgement you should make for yourself.

Forge Lore is better than the standard Blacksmith Arts, at least when it comes to Dwarves, however the ilvl of armour it can affect is based on the points invested into it so the higher your character level the more points FL needs to be able to socket its own blacksmith arts into your armour. They’re great however, ATK/DAM%, %DEF and RES/MF, it’s in fact the only surefire way to even have access to low-effort allRES/MF.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Dwarven Lore (CDR)
3 Weapon Technology (CDR & IAS)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Armour (RES/SPD)
20 Trading / Forge Lore
30 Parrying (DEF)
50 Agility* (ATK/DEF) / Disarming (DEF/MF)

General Hybrid: (DS, WC) 1:1 STR:PR
This will pretty much allow you to use whatever you want in terms of CAs and WTs with the mention that DS is indispensable to give up. If you don’t feel like investing in a melee skill Agility is there as always at level 50 you won’t miss anything in particular. If you DO decide to invest in a weapon skill we always give up Agility for it and make War Cry a mandatory CA since we want the ATK/DEF it provides to replace what we lose.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Dwarven Lore (CDR)
6 Weapon Technology (CDR & IAS)
12 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Parrying (DEF)
50 Agility* (ATK/ATK-SPD)

Melee/Ranged Hybrid (DS, WC) 1:1 STR/DEX:PR
1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Axe Lore / Ranged Combat* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Dwarven Lore (CDR)
12 Weapon Technology (CDR & IAS)
20 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
30 Armour (RES/SPD)
50 Parrying (DEF)

Unarmed Hybrid (DS, WC) 1:1 STR:PR
1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Dwarven Lore (CDR)
6 Unarmed Combat (ATK/ATK-SPD)
12 Weapon Technology (CDR & IAS)
20 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
30 Armour (RES/SPD)
50 Parrying (DEF)

Sword Hybrid (DS, WC) 1:1 STR:PR
1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Dwarven Lore (CDR)
6 Weapon Technology (CDR & IAS)
12 Sword Lore (ATK/ATK-SPD)
20 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
30 Armour (RES/SPD)
50 Parrying (DEF)

Dwarf also has NO CAs that benefit from Attack Speed. This may be due to possible oversight on the part of the developers BUT more likely due to the existence of Battle Rage.

Wrath is essentially our Multi-Hit
Heavy Blow is the equivalent to Hard Hit
Assault is Attack with a different name
Vehemence is a Hard Hit that does splash damage exclusively usable by 2h weapons

Cannon Blast deals purely Physical DMG in an AoE radius around its target
Flamethrower purely Fire DMG in a frontal cone with a short DoT after the initial hit

Battle Rage is our Buff CA. As long as we’re in combat it’s fire and forget. It increases our AS till it caps out at 220 and slows down when not fighting, eventually expiring. ALSO it incorporates the WIDD effect meaning we can either choose to ignore WIDD on Armour or double down and get more of it.
War Cry is our other Buff CA. It increases our ATK and DEF values and half that for our Allies.
Dwarven Steel is our buff that reduces enemy physical resistance by a huge chunk and then
slowly fades away till the values become normal again.

Notable Mentions:

• Mortar Grenade is a long range shot that splits its damage between physical and fire. This does however have a minimum range meaning you MUST use it for long range shots.
  
• Landmine drops a number of mines behind the Dwarf that deal physical and fire damage.
  
• Greed is our MF buff that decreases our DEF while active.
  
• Dwarven Armour is our buff that increases our Fire and Poison RES and then slowly decreases their value back to normal.
  
• Entrench is our buff that increases %DEF and increases allRES but makes us immobile.

Wood Elf focuses on ranged combat more than any other class, having unique CAs that fire special types of arrows but also retaining the melee CAs as well. Not only that, she can also use potent spells to enable her to be played as a caster. Neat! Her flexibility doesn’t necessarily come at a cost, however I feel like Call of the Ancestors could have worked a little differently mechanically speaking and it would have been massively more satisfying to use. But it’s by no means a bad skill. Some modders got it right when it comes to balancing this skill. There’s an inherent advantage to playing ranged since most enemies can be dealt with before they even get to you and you get to skip Dragon melee attacks which can be quite devastating.

Concerning IAS frames, the Wood Elf is Very Fast while Unarmed, with 1h weapons, Polearms and Bows. Fast with Dark Elf Blades and Very Slow with 2h Swords and Crossbows.

On horseback, she’s Very Fast with everything, her Bows slow down to Fast and Crossbows speed up to Normal.

Sword CA Build (Eye for an Eye, Hard Hit, QaaF) PR or STR
Melee Wood Elf is a simple thing, Quick as a Flash caps out at 60s duration at level 41 BUT gives us 95 AS and Speed. There’s an argument to be made here about replacing your Sword Lore / Long-handled Weapons or Ranged Combat entirely and taking Meditation instead, and just get the AS from QaaF however the cooldowns are enormous so I wouldn’t attempt this without a lot of Regeneration to special move % on your armour. You’d get little benefit out of it too since all it does is allow you to pick between Trading and Disarming at level 30 for your flex Skill. You’re always welcome to use Companion of the Woods if you enjoy having a meat shield with you but with melee it’s less needed.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution* (HP/REGEN)
6 Agility (ATK/DEF)
12 Sword Lore* (ATK/ATK-SPD) / Meditation (CDR)
20 Amour* (RES/SPD)
30 Meditation (CDR) / Trading (MF) / Disarming* (DEF/MF)
50 Parrying* (DEF)

Polearm CA Build (Eye for an Eye, Hard Hit, QaaF) PR or STR
This is the same thing except we’re taking Polearms instead of Swords. I’ve excluded Ranged Combat as a choice at level 3 since Ranged has its own build which is VASTLY superior to left clicking and would just be redundant.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Long-handled Weapons* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility (ATK/DEF)
30 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Meditation (CDR) / Trading (MF) / Disarming* (DEF/MF)
50 Parrying* (DEF)

Ranged Build (PA, MS, CotW, x4 PA Combo) PR or DEX or 1:1 DEX:PR
Multiple Shot is just brilliant. It tanks your damage per arrow significantly but you regain that pretty soon since you’re firing WAY more arrows than you ever would such that if you hit a single target it’s as if you’re hitting 2-3 times per arrow at least. Multiple-Hit is always a great grab especially against single, BIG targets like dragons but Penetrating Arrow is the star of the show, lasting long after its initial target was killed it’ll circle and damage whatever else is possible in its AoE. Firing PA with Multiple Shot is super satisfying. Companion of the Woods can be used as an on demand summon that will stay until killed, and it takes quite a bit of punishment after a bit of investment in it, not only that, it does a decent amount of damage too! I took Moon Magic over Meditation this time for the sole reason of speeding up the cast time of CotW since you don’t need that much CDR to make it usable because the pet doesn’t die a lot and when you do need it, you need it right now, not later. IMO you shouldn’t need more than 50 points but this is largely a feelgood point for me personally.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Ranged Combat* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility (ATK/DEF)
20 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Moon Magic (CDR & IAS)
50 Parrying* (DEF)

Riding Martial Build (Eye for an Eye, Hard Hit, Multiple-Hit, QaaF) PR or STR
This is the same idea as the Martial build except we’ve substituted Parrying for Riding early on to enable the playstyle.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Riding*
6 Long-handled Weapons / Ranged Combat(ATK/ATK-SPD)
12 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
20 Agility (ATK/DEF)
30 Armour (RES/SPD)
50 Meditation (CDR) / Trading (MF) / Disarming (DEF/MF)

Riding Swords Build: (Eye for an Eye, Hard Hit, Multiple-Hit, QaaF) PR or STR
Once again we’re enabling the playstyle by taking Riding as early as possible and shifting Skills around to take Sword Lore at level 12.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Riding*
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Sword Lore* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
20 Agility (ATK/DEF)
30 Armour (RES/SPD)
50 Meditation (CDR) / Trading (MF) / Disarming (DEF/MF)

Thorny Druid (CotA, PT, TB, CotW) MR
Wood Elf Casters are an interesting bunch, they feel a lot more stationary than they are and it’s mostly because of Call of the Ancients. It’s a great skill that works the same way Penetrating Arrow does however it’s not that spammable and even if it were you don’t summon more spirits you just refresh the ones you already have and assign them a new area to prowl. They hit like a truck though and pass through everything. Poisoned Tendrils or Thorny Bush to me feel like the spammable abilities this Build lacks, it’s essentially your choice but TB is a skillshot that pierces and leaves a huge DoT on the target. I’m pretty sure PT was the basis for the Daemons tentacles and works in the same way being able to hit BIG enemies multiple times. Ultimately you can use all of them if you feel like it.

You end up with a flexible slot which you can use for the general Trading / Disarming playstyle choice or if you want, Ettol’s set pierces physical resistance, CotA has a physical damage component, it doesn’t hurt or you can take Polearms if you’ve found some godly staff.

1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
1 Meditation (CDR)
3 Moon Magic (CDR & IAS)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility (ATK/DEF)
20 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Trading / Disarming* / Ranged Combat / Long-handled Weapons
50 Parrying* (DEF)

Thorny Druid on Horseback (CotA, PT, TB, CotW) MR
We’re sacrificing Parrying and shuffling some skills around to be able to take Riding the earliest we possibly can. Otherwise it’s exactly the same build.

1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
1 Meditation (CDR)
3 Riding*
6 Moon Magic (CDR & IAS)
12 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
20 Agility (ATK/DEF)
30 Armour (RES/SPD)
50 Trading / Disarming* / Ranged Combat / Long-handled Weapons

General Hybrid Build (CotA, TB, PT, CotW, MS, PA, SA) 1:1 MR:PR
This pretty much lets you excel in any combination of CAs and Moon Magic you wish to use. Parrying isn’t a huge sacrifice since Agility tends to work out better for 2h builds. It also lets you remain flexible in terms of your weapon choices. If you want to bump up the hilarity I recommend using Spider Arrow as your main attack instead of PA, it’ll summon a horde of hangry spiders that jump on everything. Interestingly, your spiders have a set damage so the bow you’re using literally doesn’t matter. Spider DMG seems to only scale with CA levels but Magic Lore might also have a small effect over it since Weapon Lore does nothing, but in case I’m right this makes SA THE hybrid skill for Wood Elves. Unfortunately I can’t justify a Riding Hybrid build, pretty much the entire skillset is locked in to enable the playstyle. It’s not that it’s not possible but it wouldn’t be particularly great and worth the mention.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
3 Meditation (CDR)
6 Moon Magic (CDR & IAS)
12 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
20 Armour* (RES/SPD)
30 Agility (ATK/DEF)
50 Ranged Combat / Long-handled Weapons / Sword Lore

ALL Wood Elf Combat Arts including Arrows and Multiple Shot benefit from Attack Speed.

Eye for an Eye(Attack), Hard Hit and Multi-Hit are all present and accounted for in the Wood Elf kit.
Multiple Shot eats your damage per individual arrow. I assume by as much as 66% but you get to fire WAY more arrows as compensation which works out to a damage boost past 3 arrows. I do have to mention the short duration though, it’s 20 seconds, you will be using this thing A LOT and it only works with left-click and special arrow CAs.
Penetrating Arrow fires an arrow that will encircle an enemy and pierce through them doing damage.

Quick as a Flash is our buff AND mobility skill, it increases SPD and AS.

Call of the Ancestors summons wisps from the earth that pierce through enemies in a large AoE, screen size usually, around the point they were summoned from, for a large wallop of Physical + Magic DMG.
Poisoned Tendrils summons little tendrils in a small area, about cursor size that deal AoE death-by-a-thousand-cuts Magic + Poison DMG.
Thorn Bush throws a bush that deals Poison DMG and leaves a DoT on the target proportional to the Poison damage dealt.
Companion of the Woods summons a Unicorn to act as our meat shield. This is why they’re extinct. (you monster)

Notable Mentions:

• Explosive Arrow is the ranged equivalent of Hard Hit, if you like gore it’s a brilliant skill.
  
• Spider Arrow is a shot that will summon spiders next to the enemy they hit. It’s (sort of) a summoner playstyle but very hilarious the way they will jump and chomp at everything they see.

If Gladiator is a class revolving around wearing out your left-click button then Battle Mage loves wearing out your right-click. He’s a fun mix of spamming skills so much so the devs gave you Ghost Meadow so you can reduce a huge chunk of your cooldowns even at level 1 and spam even more often. It presents an interesting design conundrum since by and large the theme of the class does away with the martial focus and moves into spellcasting which would be tragic since melee does constant DMG through their weapon swings. So I think Ghost Meadow was the solution to alleviate that. And boy did it ever.

His kit is split between the 4 elemental magic types and every element has a skill that can be used to clear and do heavy single target damage. And the best part is these are all governed by Meditation in general and have their own IAS spell school so you can expect to run around with at least two elements specialised in at any time.
Not only that, he’s also competent in melee and has some spells that take advantage of relative enemy position and increase your DEF at the same time for a melee enchanter playstyle.

When it comes to AS frames Unarmed and Dark Elf Blades are Very Fast. 1h melee and Polearms are fast, Swords and Bows are Normal and Crossbows are Very Slow.

Horseback keeps Dark Elf Blades Very Fast but bumps up everything else to Fast AND Crossbows up to Normal. So we have another Gladiator situation with the caveat that you need to take Riding.

Enchanter (FB/Spiral/MS/Purgatory, FS, SS, CoA, GM) MR
The idea here is to be a Martial Mage Tank. We take our melee skills as soon as they’re available to enable the playstyle. We want to take advantage of the benefits of Flame Skin and Stone Skin for both our DEF and our DMG. These two are the stars of the show since FS is great DMG and range protection and SS is a huge boost in our defences so now you can melee and chip away at HP at the same time. It really depends on your playstyle what you want to do to supplement that damage. Fireball is your only single target option and the rest are all AoE split between Flame Spiral, Meteor Shower and Purgatory. You’ll be next to your targets anyway so all of these work great. Ghost Meadow is there because we always want to use it. Cataract of Agility is great and is greatly synergistic here since it increases both AS and Casting Speed and it’s just really fun to bonk something on the head very quickly. It’s up to you if you like swords or polearms / staves better.

You can use Shield Wall if you want to lean even harder into the buff upkeep thing but Flame Skin is already doing half its job and you’d be trading a DMG skill for it.
Theoretically you could replace Parrying for Riding but it’s a big DEF loss. I don’t really see any other slot you could put it in.|

1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
3 Sword Lore / Long-handled Weapons* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Meditation (CDR) / Agility* (ATK/DEF)
12 Fire Magic / Earth Magic (CD & IAS)
20 Constitution* (HP/REGEN)
30 Earth Magic / Fire Magic (CD & IAS)
50 Agility (ATK/DEF) / Parrying* (DEF)

Bow Enchanter (FB/Spiral/MS/Purgatory/CoF, FS, SS, CoA, GM) MR
Now the thing with bows and crossbows is we don’t have a skill for it. So it frees us up to take our elemental skills earlier. We have the choice of either staying on foot or riding in which case the skill order changes. Keep in mind Bows and Crossbows are way better in terms of their AS while on horseback. Also Circle of Fear is a great crowd control and defensive tool for range.

Horseback variant:
1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
3 Meditation* (CDR)
6 Riding
12 Fire Magic / Earth Magic (CD & IAS)
20 Constitution* (HP/REGEN)
30 Earth Magic / Fire Magic (CD & IAS)
50 Agility (ATK/DEF)

Foot archer variant:
1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
3 Meditation (CDR)
6 Agility* (ATK/DEF)
12 Fire Magic / Earth Magic (CD & IAS)
20 Constitution* (HP/REGEN)
30 Earth Magic / Fire Magic (CD & IAS)
50 Parrying (DEF)

The Flexible Caster Build (your choice, GM, CoA, PS) MR
The beauty of Battle Mage comes in the form of Armour. He doesn’t have the Skill, which makes sense really, Mages wear robes. But this gives us a lot of options to play with. This means RES will be a little issue and maybe SPD early on. You’re free to take any TWO spell schools, maybe three if you’re willing to give up Disarming/Trading/Riding, however Riding does synergize pretty well with casting since you can always kite-cast-kite-cast to animation cancel AND it’ll give you that missing RES/SPD you don’t get since Armour is not available. I HAVE to mention Whirlwind has HUGE synergy with the Disarming Skill. You’ll be littering the entire game and disarming bosses left and right.

1 Magic Lore (Scaling)
1 Meditation (CDR)
3 Fire Magic / Earth Magic / Water Magic / Air Magic (CDR & IAS)
6 Agility* (ATK/DEF)
12 Trading / Riding or Elemental Magic
20 Constitution* (HP/REGEN)
30 Fire Magic / Earth Magic / Water Magic / Air Magic (CDR & IAS)
50 Parrying* (DEF)

There’s an entire discussion to be had about Battle Mage spell schools. Do we invest 1⁄2 of character level and end up at 100 points? OR do we just cap it at 50? ~48-50 seems to be the point at which you no longer get faster cast speeds for your invested points.

Since there are entirely too many permutations I’ll try to list some variant builds, obviously these pair up with their respective elemental Skill but really you’re flexible to do as you like.

Air/Water Magic Variant: Chain Lightning. Your CAs will be Lightning Strike, Ice Shards,
Ghost Meadow, Cataract of Agility and Phase Shift / Water Form (1).
Air Magic Variant: Gust of Wind. Your CAs will be Gust of Wind, Whirlwind, Ghost Meadow,
Cataract of Agility and Phase Shift / Water Form (1).
Water/Flex Variant: Your CAs will be Ring of Ice, Ice Shards, Ghost Meadow, Cataract of Agility
and Phase Shift / Water Form (1).
Fire/Flex Variant: Your CAs will be Fireball for single target, Ice Shards/Gust/Lightning for AoE
OR Meteor Shower for what amounts to AoE Fireball, Ghost Meadow, Cataract of Agility and
Phase Shift / Water Form (1).

The sky's the limit if you take 3 elemental skills. You could slot another one at level 12 if you dislike the choices but to me more than 2 elements are too much of a good thing and will leave you starved for points and scattered in focus early on.

The effectiveness of all of these variants changes depending on what you want to get out of them. Gust of Wind is a superbly defensive variant since it pushes back any enemies coming toward you and Whirlwind will disarm melees rendering them ineffective, doubly so if paired with Disarming. Chain Lightning while less defensive will eat entire screens of enemies in one cast. I do want to make a point about Ice Shards, piercing skills/spells/effects are very good since they apply damage in several frames, which makes Ice Shards the equivalent of several Hard Hits on a boss, especially large ones and you cast them super fast. There’s nothing stopping you from taking Stone/Flame Skin or Circle of Fear and the rest if you enjoy those, defence has its purpose but I feel in this particular build we’re not taking advantage of the strong suits of those particular Spells.

Ghost Meadow is our Buff. It works in the same way Concentration does by giving us a HUGE % boost to the value of Mental Regeneration
Cataract of Agility is our other Buff that increases Speed and Attack / Casting Speed. It works pretty much the same way as QaaF
Phase Shift / Water Form are basically two separate spells doing the work of other Combat Jump type skills. PS will move you to inaccessible terrain while Water Form will disengage you from combat. Now the choice between these is really up to you, if it were up to me I’d say Water Form will get you out of a lot more trouble (and has some stealth mage playstyle implications) than PS since PS casts too slowly to be of any use for escaping combat but then some people start missing being able to hop over rivers and hills.

Fireball is the thinking man’s Hard Hit. Good, reliable, spammable, what’s not to love?
Meteor Storm will conjure some meteors to fall in a small area around your cursor, their number and area increases with investment but so does the damage, it does SO much damage especially on large Bosses.
Ice Shards throw a growing number of shards in an increasingly wider Arc in front of you, each of which pierce. I like to think of it as a Caster version of Penetrating Arrow.
Gust of Wind will throw enemies everywhere in a MASSIVE frontal arc. Not only do the tornadoes pierce, they can each pierce individually. Which makes it the Ice Shards of Air builds and is supremely good on Bosses.
Lightning Strike is basically chain lightning. Number of chains grows with invested points and it hits decently hard for how spammable it becomes.

Notable Mentions:

• Shield Wall is a buff that really only sees use if you’re concerned about Magic / Ranged damage which most of the time shouldn’t be a huge issue. I could see someone use this if they’re interested in speedrunning any %.
  
• Fire Spiral will create a spiraling vortex with you at its centre however it only does damage once the flames actually contact an enemy. Some people really love this spell, I think I’m sleeping a bit on this one, it could be the animation/graphics.
  
• Purgatory is interesting, for one it follows your opponents around albeit slowly but it becomes very spammable after a while and the DMG tick rate is also pretty fast, 3-4 of these under a target will kill something very fast.
  
• Stone Skin is why we lost armour, it’s very good at what it does if you enjoy spinning plates to keep separate buffs up. Most of the time killing something before it kills you is more effective but that doesn’t mean defensive players don’t have something to play around with.
  
• Whirlwind will turn the screen into an eyesore squint-fest with how many weapons you disarm just from it alone, couple this with the Disarm skill and you can easily farm boss uniques.
  
• Ring of Ice will create a circle around you that damages enemies passing through it. Some people really love this skill though it can be a bit buggy on horseback if you get bound by some enemies that cast the root skill.

There’s a common theme with Sacred classes, they’re good at hybridising. The Dark Elf plays much like an assassin, great in melee, involves Poison DMG and has an assortment of traps to help out with AoE damage.

His kit contains two Buffs that enable him to scale his ATK, Poison DMG and DEF with Trap Lore/CA levels, this is great since you can rely on these exclusively or double down and use them together with a Skill. Classes like Battle Mage have access to skills that stun but only conditionally, Cobra works REALLY well and has a goldilocks zone of level 8 where it can even stun Dragons and other Bosses. His defensive options are very good as well, not only do you get the DEF buff but you get the only buffs in the game that reflect DMG back to the attacker, so you scale with enemy power as well.

He gets to use a special weapon type called a Du’Blade, now on first glance you’d assume those to be the edgy and sharp looking swords with long handles that look like they’re very Dark Elf fantasyesque, those are called Thal Baldes. Du’ Blades are long blades. Now SOME of them can be equipped by just about anyone, especially the bladestaves, they even have some unique animations on the other classes that make them hit faster because they sometimes like to use them as maces, SOME OTHER ONES require a minimum of points invested into Blade Combat. So it’s a little bit wonky, always check the fine print on the items you’re using.

His Attack Speed is Very fast while Unarmed, using 1h Dark Elf Blades, Dual Wielding and Polearms, Fast with normal 1h weapons and Bows, Normal with 2h Swords and Slow with Crossbows.

While Riding he’s Very Fast with everything, stays fast with Bows and speeds up to Normal with Crossbows.

Martial CA Build: (Rage, Revenge ,Testosterone, Adrenaline, Mongoose) PR or CHA or STR
To me this build plays sort of like Enchanter where the entire point is running the buffs concurrently to beef up your left-clicks. However it fails to utilise the other portion of the DE’s kit since yeah, you could run any of the trap skills with just trap lore but you’d have no way to scale their damage outside of levels. It’s here only for completion’s sake. Also at level 50 you get to choose whatever you’d like. I put Traps first since I think that’s the most beneficial skill in this build philosophy but feel free to make the changes you want.

I’ll mention you can sacrifice Parrying for Riding here since you get so much DEF out of Adrenaline that Riding might actually be a buff when not in dungeons.
Charisma vs PR here is purely because the DE has a TON of weapons with Weapon Poison Damage %Charisma mods, whether you want to have left-clicks with more potent DoTs or spam CAs remains your choice.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Dual Wielding* / Blade Combat (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility (ATK/DEF)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Parrying* (DEF) / Riding
50 Trap Lore (CDR) / Ballistics / Riding / Disarming / Trading

Unarmed Martial CA Build: (Rage, Revenge, Test, Adre, Mongoose) PR or CHA or STR
For completion’s sake, the same build with skills shifted around for Unarmed. I don’t know why you would but you definitely could.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution* (HP/REGEN)
6 Unarmed Combat (ATK/ATK-SPD)
12 Agility (ATK/DEF)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Parrying* (DEF) / Riding
50 Trap Lore (CDR) / Ballistics / Trading / Disarming

Swords Martial CA Build: (Rage, Revenge,Test, Addy, Mongoose) PR or CHA or STR
Sword Variant. For the Sword and Shield aficionado. Stick’em with the pointy end.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution* (HP/REGEN)
6 Agility (ATK/DEF)
12 Armour* (RES/SPD)
20 Sword Lore* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
30 Parrying* (DEF) / Riding
50 Trap Lore (CDR) / Ballistics / Trading / Disarming

Ranged Martial CA Build: (SF, Revenge, Test, Addy, Mongoose) PR or CHA or DEX
Ranged is actually not a bad way to play this build. Sure you don’t have a weapon skill to specialise in but your AS is almost on par with Wood Elf and that’s not nothing. Remember we’re still spamming CAs for these builds and Sudden Fury (Multi-Hit) with Range is not bad at all. So because we don’t have a weapon skill we can invest into Riding with impunity or into one of the other skills, prominently ballistics so you become a sort of Martial Trapper without the DMG scaling. It’s an interesting way to play.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution* (HP/REGEN)
6 Agility (ATK/DEF)
12 Armour* (RES/SPD)
20 Riding / Trap Lore / Ballistics / Trading / Disarming
30 Parrying* (DEF) / Riding
50 Trap Lore (CDR) / Ballistics / Trading / Disarming

Reflect Tank Build: (Pak-Dain, Pak-Nakor, Addy, Test) PR or STR
Martial Builds so far have been so and so. Not this one. There might not be much difference compared to the other ones in terms of Skill template but now we want to use the Pak CAs. They both have pretty good durations and will reflect range and magic skills IN FULL to their attacker. Now I don’t need to tell you how strong this can get in Niobium. Melee enemies can be taken care of relatively easily with any of the combat CAs though I recommend Rage due to how good of an AoE clearing tool it becomes. But if you want some dumb fun, you can use Soul-Catcher, it’ll give you HP for every enemy that dies so all you have to do to stay alive is to keep killing. Want even more dumb fun? You could use Confusion. It’s an AoE stun that sometimes charms an opponent, I’d probably use this as a fully thematic, crowd control, meme build.
The reason I break my own convention here is because of how important the ATK/DEF is from Agility early on, we want it early because the higher our DEF the higher the chance we reflect damage and this enables our playstyle.

This plays akin to the Battle Mage Enchanter build. Why Dual Wielding? Simply because the way Pak-Nakor and Dain work, they give you a weapon based chance to block an attack, two weapons, higher chance! And because it has the highest number of hits when using Rage, capping out at 7. Why still Dual Wielding if not using Rage? DW is still one more attack made per swing than regular 1h melee, but I guess at that point you could take Blade Combat or shift your build around a little for Swords or Axes.

Note: This is the last build where I’ll tell you to outright favour a melee weapon over the others.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Dual Wielding (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Agility (ATK/DEF)
12 Armour* (RES/SPD)
20 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
30 Parrying* (DEF)
50 Trap Lore (CDR)

"Caster" Build:
Trapper Build (PM/BP/EC, Addy, Test, Mongoose) PR
Ok what’s happening here? Well if we’re going to build a “full caster” it would look like something chucking traps all over the place so we’ve taken all the skills needed to scale their damage and reduce their cooldown and the respective defensive skills. Why not Agility? Well unless you plan on melee fighting anything there is no point is there? Except for the DEF which I assure you is covered by Adrenaline. I admit this is more of a speculative build but hear me out, Riding is a hefty chunk of effective HP + RES and helps out with DEF. Concentration is there if you want to use something like Soul Catcher to recover the HP from defeated enemies otherwise I’d just get Disarming to be even more defensive and finish off the skill list with something like Trading since it’s nothing but pure benefit.

1 Trap Lore (CDR)
1 Ballistics (Scaling & IAS)
3 Constitution* (HP/REGEN)
6 Riding
12 Armour* (RES/SPD)
20 Concentration (CDR) / Disarming (DEF/MF)
30 Parrying* (DEF)
50 Trading* (MF)

Hybrid Trapper Build: (PM/BP/EC, Addy, Test, Cobra, Mongoose) PR
To me Dark Elf is a natural Hybrid. None of his builds really make the most of his kit unless you build him as a hybrid, he’s supposed to be good in melee and support that with traps. However there are a lot of difficult choices to be made based on how skewed you want to be towards traps and how effective your melee should be. This is made with the idea that we’re still not relying on buffs at this point and are making skill choice concessions to decrease that reliance.

This leaves us with not a lot of room for flexibility though you could always take Riding if you feel you don’t need Parrying or just want to ride around instead though at that point you might as well use the “caster build” since it’s the same playstyle but more optimised around that.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Trap Lore (CDR)
3 Ballistics (Scaling & IAS)
6 Dual Wielding / Blade Combat (ATK/ATK-SPD)
12 Armour* (RES/SPD)
20 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
30 Agility (ATK/DEF)
50 Parrying (DEF) / Riding

Unarmed Hybrid Trapper Build: (PM/BP/EC, Addy, Test, Cobra, Mongoose) PR
This one’s the Unarmed version of the previous build. Bladed gauntlets and have some cool uniques but that’s about it.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Trap Lore (CDR)
3 Ballistics (Scaling & IAS)
6 Unarmed Combat* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
12 Armour* (RES/SPD)
20 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
30 Agility (ATK/DEF)
50 Parrying (DEF) / Riding

Sword Hybrid Trapper Build: (PM/BP/EC, Addy, Test, Cobra, Mongoose) PR
The Sword variant of the previous builds. Sword and board is a bit more defensive since you’re using shields but otherwise no significant change.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Trap Lore (CDR)
3 Ballistics (Scaling & IAS)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Armour* (RES/SPD)
20 Sword Lore* (ATK/ATK-SPD)
30 Agility (ATK/DEF)
50 Parrying (DEF) / Riding

Mist Trapper Build (PM, Addy, Test, Cobra, Mongoose) PR or CHA
What’s a Dark Elf without a Du’Blade? A dirty Elendiar!
To me this build has everything. It’s a bit melee skewed early on since you won’t have a lot of trap levels to devour enemies so you resort to bonking their heads but once we acquire Ballistics it’s only upwards from that point on. If you’d like you can swap Blade Combat and Dual Wielding depending on your preferences.

Why no Agility and Parrying? Simply put you don’t need it. For one Adrenaline covers for your DEF and you should have it up all the time when fighting something dangerous. Same thing to be said about Testosterone and ATK. For another Cobra will stop groups of enemies in their tracks including Dragons, Bosses you name it, for the low price of 8 levels. And if you’re playing this the way I’m playing it they’re stunned in about 2-3 instances of PM fuming away under them.
Why PM specifically? Testosterone gives you a ton of %PSN DMG BUT nothing’s stopping you from using Bottomless Pit or Explosive Charge. And if something does make it to you, you’re dual wielding class-specific weapons that generate pretty often with the poison DMG % Charisma on them. There’s an even safer skill to use, Sudden Fury (Multi-Hit). This will push back anything that makes it close to you and disperse AND STUN entire groups.

Why no Riding? You could absolutely slot riding but then you’d be missing out on Blade Combat weapon Uniques like Deathbringer that gives you a big bonus to All Skills and into Adrenaline and Testosterone.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Dual Wielding (ATK/ATK-SPD) / Blade Combat
6 Trap Lore (CDR)
12 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Ballistics (Scaling & IAS)
50 Blade Combat / Dual Wielding OR Riding

I have an internal debate whether more CDR is better or more Charisma to scale poison damage off of. Generally PR feels better but it’s a matter of playstyle.

CAs that benefit from Attack Speed are: Rage (Attack), Revenge (Hard Hit) and Sudden Fury (Multi-hit).

Testosterone is our offensive buff that increases %ATK and %PSN DMG.
Adrenaline is our defensive buff that increases %DEF and %PR.
Mongoose is our mobility skill.

Pak-Dain is a buff that will block and reflect ranged attacks back to the source.
Pak-Nakor is a buff that will block and reflect magic attacks back to the source.
Soul-Catcher is a buff that will regenerate a value of HP when we kill an enemy.

Poison Mist is a trap that deals Poison damage continuously for a good duration at the point of impact.
Bottomless Pit is a trap that deals Fire and Poison damage with one caveat: it lasts way shorter than Poison Mist and it takes a little time to arm itself.
Explosive Charge is a trap that acts more like a grenade for PHY + Fire damage in a decent AoE at the point of impact.

Notable Mentions:

• Confusion is a trap that always AoE stuns and sometimes charms enemies at the point of impact.
  
• Battle Fog is a trap that acts exactly like water form, disengaging any enemies caught in it from combat with you.

Vampiress had the OG transformation skill in Sacred. While not a visual spectacle it’s a pretty huge buff. Her whole kit is built around it i.e. you need to transform to even be able to access the other half of your Vampire Powers which add some themed abilities.

Vampire Form has NO cooldown if you make a level one combo with it, the skill gets stronger the more raw stats your character has, it gets EVEN STRONGER if it's night, you can prolong nighttime in the game by socketing class specific runes, it's class specific runes (i.e. the easiest to get type of runes because drop chance is higher for class-specific runes) are the ONLY runes that have leech life on them AND you can artificially scale the level of your skillsby socketing TiV or Attack runes into your armour. This works because combos snapshot whatever bonus levels your armour grants and it being a level 1 skill baseline inside the combo it uses the level 1 cooldown because cooldowns are combo/ level specific, which at level 1 is nothing (and can be nullified with yellow potions). It's the best rune farmer in the game because rune drop chance decreases the more runes your character has read and it only needs ONE RUNE read IN TOTAL to function you just need to find Ripping Claws (Attack).

Her AS while Unarmed or with Dark Elf Blades and 1h Melee is Very Fast, it’s Fast with Polearms, Normal with Bows and 2h Swords and Slow with Crossbows.

Riding slows down everything to Fast with the exception of Bows which become Slow.

Martial CA Knight Build (RC (Attack), CoD (Hard Hit)) STR or PR
I’m just going to be up front, you’re missing the best parts of Vampiress if you want to play a Melee CA build. It exists, it’s ok, it might even be great RP but its other counterparts are FAR superior. The problem with Vamp is that her Transformation IS her buff and without it she’s not bad but she’s a wet noodle compared to what she could be. This one uses either Axes or Swords at level 3 and you get to make your own choice at level 50 between Magic Find and Defence or Riding.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Axe Lore / Sword Lore (ATK/ATK-SPD)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility* (ATK/DEF)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Parrying (DEF)
50 Disarming (DEF/MF) / Trading (MF) / Riding

Martial Polearm CA Knight Build (WC (Multi-hit), CoD (Hard Hit)) STR or PR
This is the same build with a few skills moved around to make room for Polearms at level 20. If you’re partial to Orlas.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
6 Armour (RES/SPD)
12 Agility* (ATK/DEF)
20 Long-handled Weapons (ATK/ATK-SPD)
30 Parrying (DEF)
50 Disarming (DEF/MF) / Trading (MF) / Riding

Martial Ranged CA Knight Build (WC (Multi-hit), CoD (Hard Hit)) STR or PR
Just like before, we swap some skills around to make room for Ranged Combat at 50, which is the earliest you can use it. I wouldn’t recommend Riding here since it makes your Bow AS terrible.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Concentration (CDR)
3 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
6 Armour (RES/SPD)
12 Agility* (ATK/DEF)
20 Parrying (DEF)
30 Disarming (DEF/MF) / Trading (MF)
50 Ranged Combat* (ATK/ATK-SPD)

"Caster" Builds:

“Caster” Vampiress (Bats, Blood Kiss, TiV) No attribute
Unfortunately this playstyle isn’t really possible. I had something like this in mind thinking it might enable you to spam your Vampire Powers, however you don’t have a lot of candidates for damage if you ignore your claws. Bats while they do decent damage, cap out at 3 in total per skill and any new casts will just replace your old ones, it is nice however that they remain after you leave vampire form, however: the small cap, the fact that they only seem to scale off runes read in the skill and their tendency to wander off into the ether rather than stay anchored to you makes for a pretty poor substitute. So onward to our other candidate. Blood Kiss I’m SURE becomes a serviceable skill in the late levels when you can spam the heck out of it and cast it quickly. However it suffers from the same issues, it doesn’t scale off of anything but rune levels, the dot is nice, the debuff is nice, but it doesn’t seem to stack the damage and just can’t enable you to play a caster type build. So the only thing left is to try playing as a necromancer/summoner, but you don’t need an entire build to play like that, one Vampire Power will suffice, more about that later.

1 Vampirism (CDR & DMG)
1 Bloodlust (CDR & IAS)
3 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
6 Armour (RES/SPD)
12 Agility* (ATK/DEF)
20 Parrying (DEF)
30 Flex
50 Flex

Hybrid Builds:

The Nosferatu Build: (Ripping Claws(Attack), 1x level 1 TiV Combo) STR
We’re finally using the Vampiress to her full capacity. Vampire form is a tremendous buff and power multiplier, not only do her claws do more damage and attack faster, they integrate whatever you’re equipping in the weapon slot + their bonuses (skills included) AND they get a scaling damage buff at night in the form of glow. So the more you attack the harder you hit. Vampirism also reduces the damage you take from the Sun so you can easily use it during the day because if you keep it maxed the most you’ll take is 1 DMG per tick. I heavily advise levelling your Turn into Vampire skill by socketing rings/amulets/ with bonus levels to TiV into your armour, or runes. Yeah, maxing vampirism will keep the cooldown under control and it isn’t as much of a problem but the only thing you get from levelling TiV is total duration which you can get by socketing appropriately and using the level 1 Combo thereby not increasing its cooldown. Concentration is here simply because the idea is to spam Ripping Claws.

I will not make a riding variant since you have so much offence it becomes redundant once coupled with 9% leech. And speed increases as well, especially at night.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Vampirism (CDR & -DMG)
3 Concentration* (CDR)
6 Axe Lore / Sword Lore (ATK/ATK-SPD)
12 Agility* (ATK/DEF)
20 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
30 Armour (RES/SPD)
50 Parrying (DEF)

The Nosferatu Build Orla’s Edition: (Ripping Claws(Attack), 1x level 1 Tiv Combo) STR
While Axes/Swords have interesting reasons to play them, especially Fadalmar and Aarnum’s, I can’t help but feel that Orla’s is even more of an interesting reason. Polearms being two handed have higher DMG ranges than 1h melee and since you flood your enemies with attacks because hand to hand (which claws are) attacks have extra swings during Ripping Claws that’s an extra chance to proc Orla’s. Great zappy-clunk bonk sounds.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Vampirism (CDR & -DMG)
3 Concentration (CDR)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility* (ATK/DEF)
20 Long-handled Weapons (ATK/ATK-SPD)
30 Armour (RES/SPD)
50 Parrying (DEF)

The Vampire Form Tech Build: (Ripping Claws(Attack), 1x level 1 Tiv Combo) STR
Why Ranged? We’re not really interested in ranged as much as using the bow as a stat stick for our claws. Remember how claws inherit weapon slot bonuses upon transformation? Yeah, Ettol'Rahc-Notwen's Breeze exists, we’re a melee class doing physical damage, X% Reduced Enemy Physical Resistance is nothing to scoff at. Vamp uniquely permits you to get to level 50 easily without specialising in a weapon since all Vampire form needs to scale DMG is better gear and better stats both of which are sourced from character levels.

1 Weapon Lore (Scaling)
1 Vampirism (CDR & -DMG)
3 Concentration (CDR) / Bloodlust* (CD & IAS)
6 Constitution (HP/REGEN)
12 Agility* (ATK/DEF)
20 Armour (RES/SPD)
30 Parrying (DEF)
50 Ranged Combat (ATK/ATK-SPD)

There’s one unmentioned skill. Awaken Dead. Here's how it works: You can only cast this in Vampire form, it raises a corpse, whatever corpse, including Dragons / Bosses if you’re high enough level, as your minion with whatever stats it used to have while alive ~halved and there’s about a 50% chance that anything killed by it will be resurrected instantly and added as another minion to your undead horde. And this has NO CAP. It just grows into an increasingly more insane horde of undeath.

How did the developers decide to balance this? Reasonably. Your minions die permanently upon their second death OR they turn to dust immediately upon Vampire Form ending. Now you can prolong the night by socketing runes which is obviously the design intent OR if you cast awaken dead JUST before you enter the animation of Vampire Form ending you turn into a human and the minions are permanent, till they die. You help them kill a few enemies to get the ball rolling and you're an unstoppable necromancer lord.

So in general a level 1 Tiv lasts about 25 mississipis. And this is not at all a difficult thing to pull off with regularity. If you absolutely feel like you have to, to make this even easier for you, you COULD take Bloodlust* at level 3, in lieu of Concentration without it being some great DPS loss. But it’s a convenience loss since Concentration allows you to scale your Ripping Claws through reading runes as well. If you want to fully tech out your Vampiress by all means forgo Concentration, become a rune farmer and scale your TiV and Ripping Claws levels via armour socket bonuses. The sky’s the limit.

CAs that benefit from Attack Speed: Ripping Claws (Attack), Claws of Death (Hard Hit) and Whirling Claws (Multi-hit).

Turn into Vampire is our Transformation. It turns our weapon swings to Unarmed left-click swings which are even faster than regular Unarmed swings at night. Also at night these start glowing, adding damage up to a cap of ~10 hits and remain for as long as you’re attacking. Even without the glow your claws receive bonus damage since TiV will boost your attributes by about 10%.

Awaken Dead will resurrect a dead enemy to fight for you until Vampire Form ends. There’s about a 50% chance that anything killed by it will be resurrected instantly and added to your undead horde.

Notable Mentions:

• Blood Kiss works much in the same way as CotA, it does Physical Damage and applies a decent DoT and is also an ATK debuff for the duration of the DoT. It seems though that it doesn’t scale off of anything except levels.
  
• Bats: Blood Swarm summons Bats that will work similarly to CotA with the added benefit that they will disrupt the enemies they hit by knocking them back. Same as Blood Kiss, it doesn’t scale off anything except for levels.
  
• Wolf Call will summon a wolf minion that will do damage to enemies. It’s nothing spectacular. And minions are different from pets since you can’t use the B key to heal them with potions, only with targeted healing skills which isn’t ideal since we don’t have any.
  
• Bats: Guard summons Bats that will occasionally catch an arrow or a spell projectile, the same same limitations apply as with Bats: Blood Swarm.
  
• Claw Jump is our mobility skill, given that you can only use it while in Vampire Form and that Vampire Form is an existential threat to pretty much every enemy this is anti-synergistic to say the least.

The fact that I obtained such build diversity applying just my own logic and mechanical knowledge of the game (and who knows what else is possible) is proof of how unnecessary it is.
Yes this is a mechanical exploration of the character build possibilities in an 18 year old game (as of writing) made by a now defunct company that was on the verge of bankruptcy before the game even made it to market. Which wasn’t planned to be an ARPG in the first place. It just goes to show how much you can accomplish with a good foundation.

The fact remains the developers cared more about a FUN experience. And an exploration of their world in order for their assets and ideas to remain preserved, even if the preservation is sort of like a Baudrillardian Simulacrum at this point.

The project didn’t have time to implement any gameplay biases or mechanical content gating and this is very evident from the fact that it has Adventure Game DNA. There are some 300 side quests in Sacred, plenty of art assets to enjoy and funny dialogue. Sure there are difficulty levels but difficulty is an artifice designed to gate progression in an interesting way, it isn’t the game itself. The game here is the freedom to have an adventure and that there’s adventure to be had.

So more than anything, play the way you enjoy. Some ways are a bit better to subvert the game’s mechanical challenges in later difficulties, but Sacred is more about the journey and the exploration. If you don’t care about rune/unique farming in Niobium or vanquishing Ancaria of every last enemy on the highest difficulty possible or other forms of masochistic completionism, all this is unnecessary for a fun experience. Please, above all, have fun. Pick a class that looks cool, a skill that you enjoy using and savour the experience.