Here are some of the interesting concepts in the new game coming out 'Sacred':

- There are 6 characters to choose from: Barbarian, Seraphim, Wood Elf, Dark Elf, Battlemage, Vampiress
- You can utilize horses for getting places quicker and mounted combat is different from normal combat, different abilities can be used
- There are 2 types of Skills:
* One set very much like D&D skills where the more points, the better you are at it (Unarmed combat, Swords)
* One called Combat Arts, which could be mostly attributed to spells / special abilities (Fireball, Hard Hit)
- You can create combo attacks out of the Combat Arts (Leap Attack -> Stun Kick -> Hard Hit -> Fist of the Gods) and this combo attack will just string out the above listed abilities
- Combat Arts don't have 'Mana' that you have to wait for them to recharge rather each skill has it's own regeneration time. More later.
- Combat is very Diablo-esque, you click a lot of times on the enemy to kill it
- Combat Arts are received not through points like the skills but rather you get them through monster kills / quests. They are randomly dropped so you don't always get what you want, but this also works to your advantage at times...

COMBAT ARTS:
- Combat Arts are dropped randomly from monsters, they appear as runes (scrolls) and you right click on them to learn them or upgrade your current level in the combat art.
- The higher level in a combat art your skill is, the longer the regeneration time is.
- You can offset regeneration time by a skill called 'concentration' the more points you put into it the less regeneration time your combat arts have. (I have heard something like 5% less per concentration point put into it, but will reserve my judgement on that)

There are some pretty cool Combat Arts out there, but having played the demo (which limited us to Seraphim and Barbarian) I only have experienced a few.. here are some examples:
- Fist of the Gods (You hit an opponent for like 4x damage, normal hits were in the 40's or 50's this hit for 250!)
- Irritation (Target is stunned for x seconds)
- Attack (Seraphim goes into a special attack art form which makes her hit multiple times [further note: you generally swing 5 times and hit 2 times, with the attack skill I was swinging 7 times in the same time frame and hitting 7 times])
- Look of Daggers[not sure if that is the name] (Basically any creature in the range of your aura takes damage every second, it was pretty good although at higher level it would probably be awesome)

So it really is a give and a take:
If you increase your Combat Arts, you increase your damage, but they take longer to regen
If you increase your concentration, you can use your combat arts more often
This also means that you get more of a benefit from concentration the higher your combat arts level is...

Once I get home today I'll copy this into it's own webpage...