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skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?
^^^Did you talk to everyone in Majula? There's a guy there who will point you the "right" way.

Ice Fist posted:

So here are my total newbie questions. First, all I have is this garbage starting equipment and my sword is broken or something. What do I do about that?

Get a blacksmith to repair it, and pay more attention to your weapon durability next time.

Ice Fist posted:

Do you typically find new equipment in this game or is it more common to buy poo poo?

Both are good.

Ice Fist posted:

I assume I need to help this blacksmith dude find his key right?

Well, he did tell you to. Chop chop!

Ice Fist posted:

Next, I reached the 50% health loss in no time at all. What do I do to fix that?

Use a Human Effigy to restore your maximum health.

Ice Fist posted:

Lastly, what do you do at bonfires? Right now it looks like nothing.

Warp, stash items, attune spells.

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skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Internet Kraken posted:

Well the sword guys weren't hard once I figured out how to fight them, they just take FOREVER to kill with my dagger. Also they kept kicking me off ledges to instant death.

The boss just destroyed me though. I didn't even get a chance to see how he worked since he took off all my stamina with one hit, then killed me with the next.

EDIT: HOLY gently caress HOW DID I MISS THIS PATH :suicide:

I guess what they intended players to do on entering Majula was go to the monument and talk to Saulden, since he points you directly to Forest (and you can see the path really nicely from his position). This game is not great about unambiguous direction-giving! No surprise there.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Guest posted:

Well I picked a Cleric because that's what I'd played in Demon's and Dark Souls. Turns out you don't start with enough stats to use your starting weapon :thumbsup:. I finally get the point of strength I needed to use the only effective weapon I have and the fucker breaks before I have time to read the message telling me my weapon is about to break. So at this point do I have any options beyond restarting and picking a class that isn't gimped, or fighting my way through the forest with a broken thief's sword/my fists?

Insufficient stats in DaS2 isn't as crippling as it was in DaS, your weapon will do reduced damage but it's not going to turn into a nerfbat like it used to. Especially if you two-hand the mace it will do fine.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Kimmalah posted:

There's a priest's chime you can find in Majula that will let you cast miracles (and hexes). I'm not sure if you can cast any offensive ones yet, but they will eventually wreck enemies at later levels so it would be worth sticking with the class I think. Maces are also great.

Cleric starts with the same chime anyway, you don't need to get the Majula one unless you had a different starting class.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Guest posted:

Nah, even two-handed the broken mace is hitting for about 20 damage on hollows. The one-handed broken thief sword is hitting for about 40.

Broken weapons are no good, get that mace repaired.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?
^^^It lets you join a covenant later on and having them in your inventory makes you slightly more likely to get invaded.


Buy the blacksmith's key from the merchant in Forest and unlock the smithy in Majula. If the 1000 souls for the key sounds like too much then you can always restart.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Cowcaster posted:

Honestly, I've been finding it easier than Dark Souls 1, but I've only gotten up to just past the first boss.

A huge help is the massive summon attachment rates: Going through an area as a phantom/shade once to learn where the gently caress everything is before assaulting it on your own really helps. Going through it 5 more times just to get the hang of it helps even more!

I mean, I don't know how getting mobbed by 3-4 guys while something else chucks fire bombs on your head is even that much different than undead burg? You could make the argument that there's more enemies and they're more aggressive, but even so they're still just bargain-basement hollow trash that can't take more than a few hits and have huge windups to their attacks.

DaS2 doesn't start out much harder than DaS and doesn't ever really get much harder than DaS' hardest areas, but it ramps up the difficulty much less smoothly - there's about three early game areas, not all of them connected, and then you get dumped into the midgame without so much as a "well, ya done good". It's pretty jarring to get to Bastille as your second area, which may account for some of the salt in this thread.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Gortarius posted:

I wish they wouldn't have used an easily traversable pile of rubble, or some variation of, as the way to cut off paths. It feels incredibly lazy and there is so many spots like that.

The path just before shrine of winter is a perfect example of this. A couple of rocks lie on the road and that is all it takes to stop our brave hero. The villains should've just imported some of those exploding barrels from Bastille and collapsed a couple of doorways or corridors and they would have had the hero beat.

Or the ladder/bonfire pit before Belfry Sol. That spot feels like its lifted straight out of some early playstation 1 3D platformer, and not the good kind.

You can fall down 20 meters or more and be fine, rocket up ladders and swing weapons which weigh as much as you do but an inconveniently petrified person somehow stops you dead in your tracks, and any knee high wall or stone or even some curbs shorter than that are impossible to get by.

Warp points everywhere means points of no return everywhere, no surprises there. It's lazy but was foreseeable consequence of the design decision. Kind of wish the "press X to climb over a really short thing" prompts from Demon's Souls would make a return though.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Elysiume posted:

How effective is the Delicate String (ring that increases your chance of being invaded)? I want to get my brawl on.

If you conduct an NPC massacre before going on to NG+, you will never want for invaders.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Jose posted:

Is the fact my gate near McDuff, and pretty much everyone's whose world I got summoned to closed mean they went to Lost Bastille from beating the Pursuer?

Uh, not really. McDuff's door is opened by the Bastille Key, which is available no matter which route to Bastille you take.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

pmchem posted:

Vendrick is a real PITA. I'm a 30 STR / 50 FTH build and lightning is pretty weak on him. 4 Giant Souls. Is he vuln to anything special? I could enchant a weapon to like, fire or poison or whatever. Tried some pyromancy but the cast time sucks. I feel like I need to tank up my main armor more so 2 hits don't kill me when I screw up my first roll (is that even possible...).

4m SM still in NG. Thanks, hackers giving me 500k SP at a time when I kill you.

Try beating to a pulp. Honestly Vendrick is just kind of rear end as a boss fight. You can go get another Giant Soul by asceticing the first Black Gulch bonfire, but he's very doable with just 4. No casting is needed, though Great Combustion or GRS can help it won't be enough to kill him and you risk getting hosed over by weird hitboxes or mistiming poo poo so that he smashes you. Don't bother stacking armor, you might give yourself enough resistance to eat two swings but really it's better to just avoid being hit entirely. Stick behind him, hit once or twice between each of his attacks, never be on his right side.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Tallgeese posted:

There is some bad level design here.

If an invadee rides up the elevator to the Embedded room, how do I chase him?

Basically don't, it's sort of bugged with phantoms. This afternoon I invaded a dude whose elevator was up, King's Passage door closed. I considered climbing the ladder, but as I stood there the elevator began to descend. All well and good, I figured, and waited for him to arrive. Only he wasn't on the elevator. Okay, I figured, I'll fight him up top. So I ride the elevator up and find nobody there. The door to the Embedded's room is closed and I can't open it. Better yet, the elevator won't go back down so I am stuck up there. I assume he jumped off the elevator halfway down, but I'm not really sure why I couldn't make the elevator descend.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Internet Kraken posted:

Doesn't mean they couldn't try harder. I mean, magic was horribly broken in Demon's Souls. It was still horribly broken in Dark Souls but there some signs of improvement, as you could no longer easily have infinite spell casts. Then they added items in Dark Souls 2 to replenish spell casts and its back to being completely broken again.

IMO pyromancy is the closest magic has come to being balanced in these games. Most pyromancy spells have rather limited range so you are still exposed to enemy attacks, but are strong enough to make them worth using. I can't see powerful, long range projectile spells ever being balanced. The game is designed with a melee focus in mind, and being able to negate the attacks of almost every enemy by killing them from across the room throws balance out the window. As long as you can do that, magic would never be balanced. They could give bosses a bunch of long range attacks to punish spell casters but then sorcery would still trivialize everything else.

If you ask me, they should just scrap magic entirely if they aren't going to redesign it. Long range spells just don't work with the Souls gameplay.

VVV These games are supposed to be hard. Having an entire magic system that turns it into easy mode kind of defeats the point of that.

Who says Souls games are supposed to be hard? As you yourself point out, there's an almost effortlessly accessible mechanic which is basically unchanged through all three games in its ability to gently caress up almost every single enemy without exposing yourself to threat. Seems to me like these games are supposed to be breakable to whatever extent the player is willing to break them.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Internet Kraken posted:

In Dark Souls, this applies to every boss that isn't from the DLC or Pikachu and Snorlax. I believe its intentional in some cases, as every boss being completely relentless would be incredibly harsh on new players and also get rather tiresome. Some bosses definitely need some more punishing follow ups though. In Dark Souls, Seathe is a complete joke that is only going to kill you if you go after his tail. Otherwise he's slow, big, and his attacks are easy as hell to avoid. Demon of Song is a late game boss that is only going to kill you if he oneshots you. Getting away from him and healing is trivial. It almost feels like he should of had some adds but they removed them.

Dragonrider is just beyond pathetic though. Even for an early game boss he's ridiculously sluggish and doesn't even hit that hard.

Estus as a very quick and powerful heal that can be used even in a free moment during a fight is not a bad idea, and I didn't like its being slowed down for DaS2 on top of being less reinforceable and less plentiful (both of which were good, needed nerfs). Seath has the same problems as OIK, he looks nice and hits pretty hard but all his attacks are so slow and telegraphed and he can't avoid your attacks in any way. Demon of Song didn't need adds, they tried that enough in various configurations in this game and the one before it and it works sometimes but not always. What he needed was to be more mobile and less obviously "here is my weak point, please beat the poo poo out of it while I do nothing". I don't want to say his hood/death's head thing is a bad idea because it's one of the best/weirdest designs in the game, but it's implemented in a pretty unsatisfying way. If that frog was jumping about from wall to wall or some poo poo while intermittently making himself invincible, he would be more interesting and much more difficult than he currently is. That said, his boss room is still full of stains every time I go through there.

Dragonrider feels like that boss you kill that will be a regular enemy by midgame, only they forgot to put the regular enemy version in the game.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?
^^Last Giant is not optional, you cannot get to Place Unbeknownst without his key.

Bobnumerotres posted:

There's a good chance players will fight him or Ornstein as their first boss. I feel like they're easy because they didn't wanna smack players down for exploring alternate areas, or joining the blue sentinels to defend other new players from those big internet bullies.

But lost sinner has no business being a really slow Gwyn. Opening cutscene is supposed to creep you the gently caress out and she ends up fighting like a basic hollow with a leap attack that makes the Gargoyles look like greased lightning.

Yeah, it's Pinwheel syndrome basically (and to a lesser extent Moon Butterfly). If it can be your first boss, it's probably not going to be hard, and so if it wasn't your first boss, you'll probably breeze past it. Dragonrider and Last Giant (and to a lesser extent Pursuer) are designed to be beatable by somebody who has a pretty imperfect grasp on when to block, when to dodge, when to attack.

I liked Lost Sinner pre-nerf honestly, she wasn't much harder than she is now but it made her last longer. I like the fight as a concept but I feel that she definitely suffers from lack of follow-up on her attacks. She hits hard enough to guard-break, but there's enough downtime between her attacks that the player can easily escape before she swings again.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

BobTheJanitor posted:

A few pages back, but I really like this theory. It actually has some vague evidence in the form of the little stone circle things to back it up. Unlike most lore explanations which are completely unsupported rear end-pulls.

If the dark chasms were supposed to be old Lordran, I wish they would have put a tiny bit of effort into making them look like it, though. Just steal some assets from the original map, guys. It worked great in the DLC! Instead we just got bland grey caves.

They do look vaguely like Chasm of the Abyss which is, after all, what they're apparently supposed to be according to Grandahl.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Manatee Cannon posted:

The Herald and the two hex people are pretty weak but the rest of the NPC dialog is usually fine. Benhart could stand to gently caress off about his sword though.

I actually think Felkin's dialogue is pretty good, he is basically a nerd who dropped out of college to pursue his true life goal of SHOWING THEM, SHOWING THEM ALL. And then instead of doing that he goes and spends his days staring blankly at a wall cause, y'know, it's dark.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

So about pyromancy... in DS1, pyromancy only scaled with the upgrade level of your Flame and nothing else, right? But in DS2, there's a Fire BNS stat which scales off of INT/FTH. So, does that affect the power of pyromancies? If so, it's not accurate anymore to say that pyromancers don't benefit from high stats. Requirements are still nonexistent though, apparently.

It does add some damage, but scaling is mostly not good in DaS2 and pyromancy is no exception. Pre-patch you could do something like 1300 damage with a Flame Swathe from a +10 pyro hand even at single-digit INT/FTH. It's since been nerfed of course but you can still do excellent pyro damage without any scaling to speak of.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Space Hamlet posted:

Then why does the Emerald Herald literally describe the cycle and then say "It's your choice to embrace or renounce this?" I guess it could just be bad English, but that seems like a wider leap than assuming that what she's saying is true.

I think the game has a theme of an unbroken cycle, sure - because of the succession of leaders like Vendrick and Gwyn who do everything they can to hold onto their respective ages. But I don't see any real evidence that the flame could never be extinguished ever, but I do see some evidence that there are characters who want that to happen, and are trying to make it happen.

She's talking about NG+ basically. She's not saying "you can choose to link the fire, or you can choose not to". You can make such a choice in the game, but only by going to the Throne in the first place. In the ending cutscene she's describing the linking of the fire as a fait accompli - which it obviously is, since you have just brought fire (in the form of your four Great Souls) to the kiln (Throne). If you don't do that the fire will persist in its unlinked state. But since you've done this, the world will be repopulated with bosses and you can play the game again (embrace) or not (renounce).

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Whix posted:

Fashion souls i need a helm



Drakekeeper? Royal Swordsman? Ironclad?

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Genocyber posted:

Don't see the point of Homeward when the game throws Homeward Bones at you (you can get eight just in Majula).

This isn't so much why Homeward is useless, it's more the level design. In DaS it was easily possible to get to places in the map where it was just a pain in the rear end to walk back from. Great Hollow or early Catacombs are probably the most dramatic examples, but in general if you were not playing optimally it was totally possible and not really difficult to get yourself into a place you wouldn't want to go back through on foot - not that it was impossible, it was just nice to have the option not to do it. In DaS2 I can't think of a single such place where the best solution isn't just to keep progressing, because in almost every area in the game there's going to be a bonfire pretty soon. I used like two Homeward Bones in the whole game, it's simply not necessary in the vast majority of situations. I wish the Aged Feather let you level yourself up instead of being an infinite boner, it's kind of a poo poo reward considering how late you get it.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

burntpork posted:

Soul Bolt is trash, but White Dragon Breath was good in dks1. It was good for taking out multiple trash mobs, had a lot of casts, and was good in pvp if you free-aimed it.

I mean it sure killed poo poo in PvE, but I can't believe that any human would be dumb enough to get hit by it no matter where it was aimed. It takes about a million years to cast and travels slowly in a straight loving line. It's actually pretty impressive that they managed to make it worse.

Vanderdeath posted:

Wow, I want the Skeptic's Spice I used infusing Blinding Bolt back. That spell is hot garbage.

Blinding Bolt is super finicky and for every time you manage to nail someone for 2500 damage there will be two times where you get nothing. I've had some luck using it in the vein of Lingering Flame, i.e. as an attack from ambush/area denial delaying tactic.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

neetengie posted:

Do you mean the dog things in the Gutter?

The Bastille dogs are also pretty jank, though not nearly so jank as the Gutter dogs.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Internet Kraken posted:

I figured it out on my own because I ran through the area once and noticed that none of the spiders went after me until I opened the chest. I have no clue why they set something like that up for exactly one room.

You have to figure they planned to do more with traps at some point, before trap disarming got removed.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

CJacobs posted:

Trap disarming didn't get removed afaik, I thought I remembered reading that it's tied to agility now. Granted this is the internet and people lie and speculate about anything Dark Souls related at a moment's notice, but it sounded likely to me.

I was pretty sure that right when the game came out, I opened a chest in Forest without a trap and later came back on a different character and found the chest to be trapped. That said when the game came out, I was also pretty sure that chest traps were randomized - that is to say that trapped chests might be poison in one game or arrow in another. But I can't really provide any evidence for that and since that time have accumulated a lot of evidence against it.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Polo-Rican posted:

I think one single factor makes it significantly worse: the adaptability stat. Without consulting a wiki you'd NEVER have a clue that raising adaptability makes your rolling better, and that's actually a huge deal because without it your entire playstyle changes dramatically.

Adaptability is just mechanically pretty poor idea overall, even ignoring information clarity (which I mean yeah, it's not exactly gotten across to the player well what ADP does, but I don't play Souls games because they have such great transparency about their mechanics!). If there were ever a compelling reason to stop leveling, it would be at least kind of interesting because some builds might have to gouge it and deal with a weaker roll in exchange for higher damage stats or whatever. As it is, though, there's just no reason why everyone shouldn't bump ADP to 20 as soon as possible (and this is really soon too, since 8-17 levels in ADP at the start of the game cost almost nothing and don't leave you significantly disadvantaged on any other stat while greatly improving your survivability). If it affected Poise to a meaningful extent as well it might feel a little less vestigial, but even then it would still need to be rebalanced pretty heavily to avoid being what it is now, which is trivial to max out the useful effects of and basically useful for everyone. Why even give the player the choice of doing without it?

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Good Citizen posted:

Yeah but I hear other dudes were still invading her every 10 minutes

Actively, serially invading.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Cowcaster posted:

I heard dark hail is a far cry from its predecessor, dark bead, with which I slaughtered dozens of dragon butts in Lost Izalith and an oolacile ivory catalyst on my meathead warrior. Is that true?

Dark Hail is okay as a situational thing, but Dark Bead was a magical version of [insert favorite ridiculously short-ranged FPS shotgun here]. At range it mostly sucked, but the individual orbs took a while to spread out and if you hit someone at point blank it could easily do four-digit damage.

e: just realized that i read your question backwards. Dark Hail is as I said okay but it spreads out way more quickly, so the shotgun effect isn't noticeable. It's good for really big bosses.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?
Skeletons in DaS seem more like guys who died normally pre-undead curse and then were animated by the necromancy of Nito/the Pinwheel/his cult. They're not really alive in even the sense that the undead are, they're just soul-powered golems made up of dead people's skeletons (which is why it's possible for there to be enemies that are just big moving towers of haphazardly arranged bones). DaS2 kind of keeps this theme going with the necromancers and Lords in the Copse but its (tragically scarce) skeletons clearly postdate the undead curse, so it's anyone's guess as to how they got dead people to begin with. Maybe they just completely debone hollows or something.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Yeah that is absolutely Shaded Woods/Drangleic architecture. Mostly I'm just jazzed about the chance to actually fight Golems, the backstory builds them up as this super cool ~soul arts~ achievement that was the secret of Vendrick's power or someshit but in the game they are basically just fancy locks you need to kill dudes near to open. Hope they are fun to fight.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

SHISHKABOB posted:

Aw man but Last Giant is so much fun to fight.

Die motherfucker, you huge motherfuckin locked up lazy lonely son of a bitch.

I mean hes fuckin huge, the Giant Lord (Giant King?) was fuckin huge, so this Last Giant must have been pretty important right.

Seems to me like he is the same guy without the crown and fancy pants.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Harrow posted:

Dark Souls II has the "Final Fantasy problem": when you have a shitload of bosses, many of them end up uninteresting and the entire concept of a boss loses its meaning. I was struck by this the last time I played Final Fantasy VII. Boss fights become really routine after a while because they're everywhere and most of them are pretty uninteresting.

This is kind of DaS2's problem in general, it tries to add more poo poo than DeS or DaS in pretty much every aspect and a lot of parts of the game just wind up cluttered with a bunch of poo poo. The majority of spells are garbage that there is never a good reason to use. Huge numbers of consumables are dubiously useful filler that are probably just going to rot in your inventory forever (does anyone use the balms, for example?) Most weapons in a class are functionally identical reskins with slightly varied numbers. And of course there are assloads of areas, some of which are rather oddly placed and many of which are pretty mediocre. I'm loth to call this out as being terribly bad thing because frankly it's unlikely that you're going to get straight-up better than DeS or DaS while trying not to piss off your fans, so you might as well go bigger. I think the DLCs really save the game because of this. They extend the really boring and short Pit branch and the generally pretty uninspiring Iron King branch, and also give you another branch to go off on right at the point where the game as it shipped begins to funnel you into endgame, and they also add a bunch more content which is almost all good.

Also there's no way Giant Lord is more aggressive than Last Giant, I've never even seen him leave his spot. He is a terrible boss, all he does is spin around and whiff while you kick his ankles/fruitlessly smash the ground you were standing on five seconds ago while you pelt him with hexes. He makes a good soul farm at least.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?
^I agree, it is cool. I wish its area were bigger, I'm a sucker for "run scared through labyrinth while big boss guy chases you" type levels. I guess from promotional material that that was the original concept for the Chariot but they couldn't pull it off, which was a pity.

Mighty Dicktron posted:

They added new magic that could or might not have been useful because if you might remember pretty much half the spells in Dark Souls 1 were ascending levels of soul arrow.

There's four of them, actually (out of like 20). I'm not saying the majority of sorceries were terribly useful in Dark Souls either but my point is that rather than rebuild sorceries from the ground up and risk pissing everyone off, they essentially put all the sorceries from DaS back in the game except the absolute shittiest ones (Resist Curse lol) and then added like ten more on top of them, and of the new sorceries there's like one and a half that I would ever use (Soul Greatsword is good and actually much more satisfying to use than any DaS sorcery, and Soul Geyser is kind of decent in a few situations). Which is why I think the "all the old stuff, but with more everything" approach, while not necessarily a bad idea, winds up being a problem for the game as often as not, because it doesn't solve any problems with the content that you've already got and pretty much the best case scenario is that it doesn't add any new ones.

skasion fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Nov 10, 2014

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Gologle posted:

Is Blinding Bolt good from a PvE stand point? The spell you can get from Gwyn's Soul. I've actually never used it on a faith character because I was leery about the random factor, but apparently even with that it's alright. I just need an actual witness to back that dubious claim up though.

It's okay but Heavenly Thunder does more or less the same thing, isn't significantly weaker, is way easier to get, and requires like 40 less faith.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Vengarr posted:

I can't believe they never patched in a reliable source of red orbs. It seems kind of important to the PVP experience for there to be some PVP.

Like so many other things in the game, it is basically balanced around the notion that you will just keep playing through NG+ cycles with one character of SL150+. Currently I have like 60 orbs on my NG+ SL240 dude and I haven't gone out of my way to get them or traded with the crows or done the arenas or anything. If you want unlimited PvP you can always put down a sign (in like...the one location where people do that) but to get invasions, you basically have to keep moving through to NG+ at which point you can buy orbs infinitely for chump change. I liked DaS orbs too, they were convenient and if the blue orb mechanics weren't so broken/inane I would have considered it pretty well perfect, but it's not as if it's impossible to just invade everyone forever in DaS2.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Jade Mage posted:

How do you fight Lud and whatserface? I can't block nor dodge some of their attacks.

Dodge into everything except the soul mass attack (sprint perpendicular to it) and the aoe (sprint away), don't block anything. Kill the first cat very very fast, you want something with huge DPS. If both cats are attacking you for more than like ten seconds you probably hosed up and will die. Red Iron Twinblade works well but only hit once for every attack the cat makes. The best time to get in a hit is right after dodging through the leaping attack. The NPC phantoms aren't a whole lot of help so dismiss them once you reach the fog gate. Each individual cat is basically no harder than Aava, what makes the fight hard is the pressure you feel after plodding through Frigid Outskirts and the possibility of getting double-teamed.

e: also it helps to go full demons souls and strip naked, armor won't save you and the faster you can roll the better.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Ralepozozaxe posted:

I want to make a character that is a "Bellbarian". I would have the chime shield, the chime hammer, and that bell helmet, but am wondering what armor I should use, any ideas?

bellkeeper diaper, and nothing else.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Neo_Crimson posted:

1. What stats should I be focusing on (I'm a knight) early on? I've looked up builds but they seem don't make much sense to me.

STR/DEX (pick one, depending on whether you want to focus on heavy or fast weapons early on) and END, maybe a bit more ADP if you feel like your roll speed isn't very good.

Neo_Crimson posted:

2. When do you start getting new equipment outside of that one shop in Majula? I've been running around in my starter gear for a while now. Any early game sets I should be looking for?

There's a blacksmith in Majula as well who has some good weapons, and the Majula armorer gets more armors as you progress. Most armors you just have to go out and find though. There is a decent heavy set past the second boss in the Forest.

Neo_Crimson posted:

3. Are two-handed weapons any good? I've seen some player ghosts run around with one and a shield. Can you actually do that, and is it a good idea?

You can two-hand any weapon, and probably should unless the one-handed moveset is way better. You usually need high STR to use a big weapon and a shield, and shields aren't really necessary in most situations.

Neo_Crimson posted:

4. If I had to choose one or the other, should I spend souls to level up or buy better equipment?

Upgrading weapons you like > upgrading stats > buying equipment

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

gtrmp posted:

It'd be even better if it wasn't basically a straight corridor leading directly to the boss and the next area.

Aldia's Keep was a cool idea but they didn't really take it far enough, it's built up to be like this big haunted manor where an ancient wizard lived and did hosed up experiments but it's pretty much a big, weirdly lit hallway with some side rooms containing recycled monsters. The traps are cool but the map could have been more ambitious in design.

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skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

Wiseblood posted:

Yeah, they showed off the area leading to Soldier's Rest a lot in prerelease footage. It was pitch black except for the area around your torch. It would have sucked it most of the indoor areas of the game was like that.

This is because the tunnel to Soldier's Rest is, you know, a pitch black underground tunnel with no windows. I don't think anything like "most of the indoor areas" were intended to be like that. Honestly we never saw enough of the fancy lighting to make any claims about what its actual effects on gameplay would have been, probably because they didn't do much of it before they realized it would make everyone's console melt and scrapped it. Demo footage is anything but a representative sample of some superior finished version they are secreting away to make you pay sixty bucks for again; in fact I bet the new version will be pretty ugly too.

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