Let’s start first with the gameplay options. In this picture you can see my personal preferences.

1 - Here you can see the different camera options. I personally like to have the “Follow Camera” option off, so the camera is not fixed to the back of your character and does not spin around whenever you turn to the left or right.

2 - The Advanced Settings. With the first two, “Collect” and “Collect Misc. Items” you can set which item value the auto-loot function should collect. The auto-loot function is normally set to the Q-key and creates a white circle around your character. Every item which belongs to you, that lies on the ground and inside this circle, and is of the value level you have selected here, will be collected instantly. With the last option in advanced settings you can set in which order potions are automatically consumed by pressing the space key if you have healing potions on you with different strengths.

3 - Some additional options. “Circles” displays the colored circles around enemies that indicate how high a particular enemy’s level is in comparison to your own. “Damage Details” shows damage numbers and experience points gained. “Auto Equip” equips items you pick up if the slot it can be equipped to is empty. It does not auto equip better items. The “Gore” setting displays blood and guts when activated. “Buff Display” shows the visual buff effects. Some enemies in Sacred 2 have abilities to deactivate buffs, and you might not notice this if you don’t have these effects. “Quick cast” changes the way combat arts are used. Normally you would switch to a slot with a combat art or combo slotted into it with the number keys 1-5 and then press the right mouse button to use it. If quick cast is active, pressing a number key will instantly use the move in the corresponding slot into the direction the mouse pointer is pointing at the time.

1 - When creating a new character you first choose a character class. The character classes available in Sacred 2 Gold are Seraphim, High Elf, Temple Guardian, Shadow Warrior, Dryad, Inquisitor and the Dragon Mage who was introduced in the Ice & Blood expansion.

2 - you choose between the shadow and light campaign, which is really just your characters alignment. The campaign is pretty much the same with some minor changes and different side quests. However, if you plan to play LAN mode, only characters with the same alignment can play together. Also, the Seraphim and the Inquisitor cannot choose an alignment. The Seraphim is always a light side character and the Inquisitor is always a dark side character.

3 - you then have to choose a deity. This will determine which god spell you get. A god spell is somewhat of an ultimate with very long cooldown. This sounds more exciting than it actually is. Due to the way Sacred 2 scales combat arts or in this case the god spells, they will be rendered pretty much useless in higher levels although they can be helpful at the very start of the game.

4 - you can choose your initial difficulty level. The game offers 5 difficulty levels (bronze, silver, gold, platinum and niobium), but on a new character only the first 2 are initially available. To unlock the next difficulty level you have to beat the campaign of the previous one. Bronze difficulty is fairly easy so you might want to start right away on silver.

5 - you can set hardcore mode. One death and it’s game over. Only characters with the same setting here can play together.

6 - you can set the expert touch mode. This was also added with the I&B expansion. Every character has 3 different combat art aspects. Each combat art has its own cooldown. When expert touch mode is activated, the use of a combat art will reset the cooldown timer on every other combat art that is part of a different combat art aspect, and in turn speed up the cooldown of the combat art that was originally used. This mode was designed with the idea in mind to focus on a single combat art aspect. If you want to use combat arts from more than one combat art aspect, I would suggest setting this to off.

7 - you can click on the character class name and type in a name of your choice, which will be displayed in the game. Below that is a list of the settings you have made and below that you can customize your character and the color of your Carrier Imp. You can call the Carrier imp in the game by pressing the X key. This is rebindable from the options menu.

This is a short introduction to the character classes. For more detailed information about character classes, please go to the Sacred 2 Wiki[www.sacredwiki.org].


The Seraphim is described as a “battle angel”. Her combat art aspects are Exalted Warrior, which focuses primarily on close combat, Celestial Magic, which contains magic based combat arts to damage, blind and turn enemies, as well as a healing art and the Revered Technology aspect, which contains two magic based combat arts, two energy shield combat arts and a buff that lets the Seraphim summon a two-handed laser gun, dubbed the BeeEffGee. The Seraphim is a good starting character for beginners due to her high HP and higher than average damage output. Most of her combat arts from different aspects also work well together, so it is possible to create a warrior type of character that uses her magic based combat arts to weaken and disorientate a mob before killing it off in close combat.


The High Elf is a sorceress capable of using deadly fire and ice spells. Her combat art aspects are Arrant Pyromancer that features fire based combat arts, Mystic Stormite for ice based combat arts and Delphic Arcania, which features magic based attack combat arts as well as a teleport combat art and a buff called Grand Invigoration that reduces cooldowns across all aspects and has no downside. The High Elf is a classic “glass cannon” character class with low HP and very high damage. With a good build, the damage output of this class can be so insanely high that he game has problems keeping up with it and starts to stutter when, for example, a mob is hit by fifty or so critical hits from her glacial thorns combat art. She is even being able to one shot bosses with this. Still, I would not recommend this class to beginners because she starts out as a weak character and it does take a while of leveling up to make her that powerful.


The Temple Guardian is a combination of magic and machine. His aspects are Devout Guardian which focuses on close combat, Lost Fusion which utilizes different elemental attacks through his arm cannon and Source Warden which contains some AoE combat arts that have special buffs and debuffs on them. The Temple Guardian is a very unusual character and has a quite different handling than the other characters. First of all, instead of a left hand he has an arm cannon that can shot lasers, but prevents him from using two handed weapons or shields. Second, the look and function of his arm cannon changes with the currently selected combat art. So if he has for example the Battle Extension combat art selected, his arm cannon is replaced by a claw hand and another claw is added on his back. This is not only visual difference, but also adds the chance that all attacks become double hits for the time the Battle extension combat art is selected. The Temple Guardian has good HP and his gear has overall a higher defense value than other classes to compensate for him not being able to use shields. Still I think that the Temple Guardian is too complex for a beginner.


The Shadow Warrior is an undead barbarian type class. While his first two aspects Death Warrior and Malevolent Champion focus on close combat and buffing himself and other players, his third aspect Astral Lord gives him the abilities to raise the dead, summon a turret or even becoming invisible. Interesting things to note about this class is, that both Death Warrior and Malevolent Champion gain modding points from the skill Tactics Lore, which means he can use both of those aspects to their respective full potential and it also means at the same time he needs one less skill slot to do so. On the other hand, the invisibility combat art from Astral Lord can be modded to be a buff. Since buffs have no cooldown and are always active, this means he can be permanent invisible. The Shadow Warrior is an easy, straight forward class with the only weakness is that he is being considered an undead in the game so he would take extra damage from combat arts that do extra damage to undead in PVP situations (chances are slim this will ever be relevant to you as the PVP servers are dead), but he has a lot of HP and damage and is therefore an excellent choice for beginners.

The Dryad is a class that focuses primarily on ranged combat, debuffs and poison. Her aspects are the Capricious Hunter featuring ranged combat arts, Cabalistic Voodoo for poison and debuffs and Nature Weaver for binding an enemy in one place healing and buffing. The class has good damage, low HP and with the blowpipe access to a special ranged weapons type that only this class can use. Despite the fact that this class is primarily designed as a ranged class, all of the combat arts in Capricious Hunter can be used with close combat weapons like swords for example. So it is possible to play this class like an assassin. I personally have not played enough of this class to wholeheartedly recommend this class to beginners, but from my limited experience, I think this class is a viable choice for beginners.


The Inquisitor combines close combat with dark and twisted magic. His aspects are Gruesome Inquisition, mostly for close combat, Astute Supremacy for powerful AoE spells and creating a clone of himself and Nefarious Netherworld for buffing, debuffing and corpse explosions. The Inquisitor is a bit difficult to handle. First of all, he has low HP, but a high dexterity and dexterity growth which results in natural high defense value, and also a buff from the nefarious Netherworld aspect that collects the souls of fallen enemies and even further buffs his defense vale by a percentage for a certain time after the soul was collected. This means if he feeds enough souls he can have a ridiculously high defense value. The defense value is this game protects you from being hit in close combat (not spells). And this means he can avoid most of the attacks. However, as said before his HP is low and his gear is not that protective and he cannot wear a shield. AoE combat arts from Astute Supremacy are quite powerful, but the way they work means that he needs mobs with lots of enemies in them. He has a problem with most bosses due to not having strong single target combat arts and if there are no other enemies around the boss his soul collecting buff is pretty much useless. This makes him a very risk & reward type of class who can take on masses of weaker mobs but has real problems against bosses. Definitely not a class I would suggest to a beginner.


The Dragon Mage is like the High Elf a pure spell focused class. His aspects are Dragon Magic which contains combat arts to transform into different dragon forms or to call in a dragon attack, his Elemental Magic aspect contains physical based spells and his Mentalism aspect focuses mostly on buffs and debuffs. The Dragon Mage was added with the Ice & Blood expansion and some of his combats arts were unfortunately not that well implemented. The buggiest combat arts are featured in the Dragon Magic aspect. His dragon transformations deactivate the armor and defense values from your gear which results in the Dragon Mage taking way too much damage when transformed. Also, his Dragon Strike combat art, which calls in a dragon that sets the ground on fire, might fire his attack in the surrounding trees or buildings and not in the space you would like to set aflame. On the other hand, the combat arts in his other two aspects work well. The interesting thing about the combat arts from Elemental Magic is that they are classified as spells, but do physical damage. Spells ignore defense values and always hit their target, which means they cannot be blocked or evaded, however they are affected by spell resistance through the willpower attribute. Mentalism has an AoE debuff named Maelstrom that reduces Enemy Speed and attributes within it. This actually stacks with itself. Decrease in attributes is dangerous, because it does not only reduce defenses, but also HP and raises the chance to hit. Combining both aspects can be quite a powerful combination. Like the High Elf, I do not recommend this class to beginners, especially since one aspect is useless in its current unpatched state.

In the upper part of this window you can see the character name, class name, level and information about the current attack damage, attack value and defense value of the currently equipped weapon and the combat art as well as the armor value. Note the bars that represent the damage type the weapon or combat art attack with and the armor protects against between the text and the numbers. In this case the equipped weapon and the combat art do only physical damage and have no other damage type modifier that could change the damage type. The equipped armor in the picture does also only protect against physical damage.

If you hover the mouse pointer over the character level the game will display a pop up that looks like this. Here you can see some basic information about the character, how long the character was played, how many deaths and so on. But the most interesting part is the survival bonus. The survival bonus is how Sacred 2 scales the difficulty to the player’s abilities. In Sacred 2, the enemies level scales with the player’s level. But the longer a character survives without dying the survival bonus increases. And with it, the enemy’s level increases above the player’s base level and at the same time the player’s attributes and the chance to find valuable loot also increases. This means that a player that hasn’t died after hours of playing may face enemies that are more than 10 levels above his or her own. As the levels increase, naturally also the damage increases and this can be quite challenging especially if you have to deal with bosses that could one or two shot you. Every time a character dies the survival bonus resets and all bonuses as well as the enemy above player level increase is removed.


Here you can see the currently equipped items. Note that with the exception of rings and necklaces all body armor items are class specific. For example a Shadow Warrior helm can only be worn by a Shadow Warrior class character.


The bar that reads 100% in the picture represents how much the currently equipped armor increases to the cooldown of combat arts. Heavier armor increases the combat art cooldown stronger than weaker armor. You can reduce the cooldown increase through armor by putting skill points into the armor skill. On the right side of the bar you can see four symbols. The first one is for blacksmithing; it is grayed out and can be activated by putting skill points into the blacksmithing skill. The second one is a sell option to sell items in your inventory without the need of a merchant. You do not get as much gold for your items when sold with this option. The third symbol displays all the bonuses from equipment when hovering with the mouse pointer over it. The last symbol displays the names of set items if you are wearing set items as well as the bonuses that the set gives.


The inventory shows how much gold you got and the items you have collected so far. In the upper right corner is a sorting button that sorts the inventory in one of two ways: from top to bottom or from left to right.


This shows the six different attributes. Strength, dexterity and intelligence determine the damage and the attack value (chance to hit) you do with a certain type of weapon. Axes, hammers and swords are strength based, ranged weapons like bows, blowpipes, and laser guns but also pole arms and smaller swords are dexterity based and staffs are intelligence based. So if you put all your attribute points into strength and you wonder why you don’t hit anything with your new pole arm, you now know why. Intelligence raises also the damage of spells. Stamina reduces the cooldown of your combat arts. Vitality raises your HP and HP regeneration out of combat. Willpower increases spell resistance.


This is the list of the skills you have activated. You have 10 skill slots. You unlock a new slot at level 2, 3, 5, 8, 12, 18, 25, 35, 50 and 65. All skill choices are permanent; there is no respec option in Sacred 2. For a description of the available skill types please see 13-16.


This displays some information on the last enemy you have killed. Note that your chance to hit is determined by how high your attack value is in relation to the enemy’s defense value and this also applies vice versa.


Here you can see the three different aspects. All aspects have four active combat arts and a buff, if no combat art was modified to be a buff, which can be done to a selected few. To unlock and level up a combat art you have to read runes of your corresponding character class. You can see two such runes in the inventory screen on this picture, in the top left corner of the inventory is a Temple guardian rune and in the middle right is a Shadow Warrior rune. Do not read in all runes you find for your character. Every time you read in a rune you not only make the combat art stronger but it also increases the cooldown significantly. The challenge in building a good character is increasing the damage of the combat arts while at the same time trying to keep the cooldown under one second.

On the right side of the aspect windows you might have noticed the empty quarter-circle bars. These display how many skill points you have to put in the skills that are directly affecting the damage and cooldown of the combat arts in the aspects. Every time a bar fills up, you get a modifier point for that aspect. You can spend these modifier points by clicking on the arrow button the right of the aspect windows. For every combat art you can choose up to three modifiers from a selection of two on each level. These modifiers are quite vital because they can change the way a combat art works. Certain builds rely on the choice of a very specific set of modifiers on combat arts.


It’s possible to create combos from active combat arts (no buffs). You can set up to four different combos. At the very start combos are limited to two moves per combo, but this can be increased to four with the choice of a certain skill.

The “Orb” is located on the bottom left. In its center is the god spell button and it is surrounded by four relic sets with three slots in each of them. Artifacts are gem shaped and element colored objects that can be placed in the slots. Their purpose is to increase your elemental resistance to their respective element when equipped. Relics come in four different kinds: fire (red), poison (green), ice (light blue) and magic (blue). Some rare relics also come with multiple elemental resistances and bonuses to certain skills. You can put relics in all relic sets, but only one of the artifact sets can be active at all times.


The compass can display arrows to the target of multiple active quests. The main quest arrow is gold colored, regular side quests are grey and special character quests are displayed in blue. To the left of the compass you can see weapon slots. You can put different weapon sets into the slots and cycle thought them with the F1-F5 keys. On the right side you can see combat art slots you can put combat arts into them or combos and cycle through them with the 1-5 keys unless you activated quick cast in the options. By reaching certain levels new weapon and combat art slots open up. By level 20 you have access to 5 slots each. Above the combat arts and weapon slots you see additional slots for potions. There are 5 different types of potions available. Health potions (red), mentor potions (blue; increases experience gained in combat), concentration potions (yellow; decreases the cooldown of combat arts), recovery elixirs (green; reduces poison DoT) and potions of undead dead (violet; decreases the chance that undead will rise after they were killed). Additionally there are a menu button (Esc) and an auto-loot button (Q).


Here you can see a circle that consists of five buttons with four smaller circles on top. The five buttons open the character and inventory window (E), the attribute and skill window (F), the aspect and combo window (C), the map (M) and the quest log (L). The first three circles are slots for buffs. At the start of the game you can only have one buff, to unlock more slots you need to put skill points into the concentration skill. You can drag and drop a buff from your aspects window into a buff slot and then click on the slot to activate the buff. The slot edge will be green and you get a distinctive visual effect on your character if the buff was activated. The last slot is the call mount slot. If you have a mount you can press this button to call it.


Skills listed on the left-hand side can be chosen whenever a level up (2, 3, 5, 8, 12, 18, 25, 35, 50 and 65) permits it. To unlock the skills on the right-hand side there must first be put at least five skill points into a skill from the left-hand side of the same skill group. Notable is also that when put 75 skill points into a skill, the mastery of that skill unlocks, which is usually an additional bonus. The maximum number of skill points that can be put into a skill are 200. It is possible to raise the skill level over the maximum by equipping items with "+ all Skills" or "+ defensive/offensive/general Skills" bonuses. However, the maximum number of skill points any character can receive via leveling up is 921, so you can't max out all 10 skills you have choosen.

As the name implies, these passive skills directly affect the combat arts (see User Interface Part 1, 8a-8c) of the class. Every class has its own set of combat arts skills. They usually have in common that for every aspect there is a corresponding lore skill and focus skill. The lore skill raises the damage of all combat arts in the aspect and the focus skill reduces the cooldown of all combat arts in the aspect and also raises the level a combat art can have.

With most combat arts, you shouldn't put all that many runes into them, because it raises the cooldown. But for those combat arts you are not plan to spam in combat, like the ones with fixed cooldowns or buffs, you can put some runes into them, and will eventually hit a level where the combat art level doesn't go up a full level per read rune. For example, lets say a character is on level 4 and read 5 runes to a buff, without the focus skill of the aspect the buff is in, the combat art level of the buff is displayed as 4.6. This means that the increase the combat art received via the combat art level is also only 4.6 and not the full bonus it would get from combat art level 5.

Lore and focus skills also add modifier points to the aspect. You might have noticed that there are no lore skills for the Shadow Warrior’s Death Warrior and Malevolent Champion aspects in this skill group. This is because the damage of physical based aspects are affected by Tactics Lore from the Offensive Skills, which also adds modifier points, in the case of the Shadow Warrior even to both aspects. As you can see there are also the skills Combat Discipline, which adds more combo slots to the combos and also raises the damage of combos, Ancient Magic, which raises the damage of spells and can reduce spell resistance at mastery, and Concentration, which reduces the cooldown of all combat arts in all aspects and unlocks new buff slots, but its cooldown reduction is weaker than the aspect specific focus.


Offensive skills increase the damage and offensive capabilities of a character. Skills like Sword Weapons or Hafted Weapons will increase the attack value and attack speed when a weapon of this type is equipped. They also unlock different bonuses on certain weapons that are unique to that weapon type. Certain pole arms for example have a chance to hit additional opponents that can be unlocked and increased by the Pole Arms skill. Tactics Lore increases damage of normal attacks and combat arts from physical aspects. Dual Wield lets a character dual wield two one-handed weapons, and also increases attack value and attack speed, but does not give any bonuses beyond that. Speed Lore increases attack value, defense value and run speed. Damage Lore increases the chance to trigger a secondary effect from an elemental attack like burn from fire damage, freeze from ice damage, poison from poison damage or weaken from magic damage.


Defensive skills increase a characters ability to absorb, avoid or reduce the damage received. Most of these are self-explanatory so I will focus on the more interesting ones that have secondary bonuses. Armor Lore is an essential skill, because it improves resistances and reduces combat arts cooldown penalty for wearing heavy armor. Constitution is also very essential, as it does not only increase a characters HP, but also the health regeneration out of combat. And on level 75 it replaces the out of combat health regeneration with an in combat health regeneration. Warding Energy Lore is only available to the Seraphim and the Temple Guardian as these classes are the only ones having combat arts that create energy shields. It works similar to Constitution for energy shields.


These skills do not affect the combat capabilities of a character, but instead things like drop quality (Enhanced Perception), raising the rarity of merchants offer (bargaining) or giving the ability to use trophies (Alchemy). Trophies are consumable items that can give a temporal stat increase.


This is how the combo window looks when a combo slot was dragged and dropped on the combo creation slot. As you can see I slotted two combat arts into the combo and could now drag and drop the newly created combo into a combat arts slot located to the right of the compass in 11.

I hope this guide was helpfull to some people.

If you have any questions related to the user interface, the gameplay or this guide in general, please feel free to write them down in the comment section. I will add a FAQ section to the guide and answer them to my best knowledge.

Until then, have fun with Sacred 2!