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Comments
On the other hand, it's supposedly more screwed over by its publisher than Demon's Souls was, leading to lots of glitches and slowdown and Hornet Ring DWGR Giants backstabs being the only tactic that works in PvP.
That said, it's still probably my favorite video game (or at least favorite non-music video game), so... yeah. (though I haven't actually played much of Demon's Souls due to lack of a PS3)
Also, regarding Dark Souls, I just beat it at soul level 1. Yay for me! Now, time to do that on NG+... (not that it's really any harder than the regular game, but enemies have more health so certain things I did won't work so well)
Clearly. Also, elemental weapons are lol. So it's not like it was really all that hard since I had strong weapons and spells. Still, SL1 means you only have 51 max equip burden and less than 600 HP, so you're going to be wearing shitty armor and getting oneshotted by most bosses. Plus, the strongest weapon you can equip is a battleaxe (which is definitely more than strong enough once you upgrade it to lightning or fire or chaos, but I'd still rather use a different weapon...). On NG+ I'll try to either not use pyromancy or not use a shield. Not sure which one. Or maybe it'll be both, though I have no clue how I'd beat Four Kings without pyromancy.
I was about to say that I'm not sure elemental weapons are as efficient as they're supposed to be, comparatively speaking, but when you're stuck using light, simple weapons, they probably are.
Elemental weapons are more than strong enough. If you have high strength or dex it's better to use a +15 normal weapon (or +5 crystal, but you can't repair those), but at SL1 it's pretty clear that I don't. So elemental weapons are stronger. Incidentally, and this seems to be a pretty big oversight on From Software's part, even if you have very high faith or intelligence, elemental weapons are pretty much always going to be better than a magic or enchanted or divine or occult weapon (unless your opponent was extremely weak to magic, or is a skeleton, but seriously it barely matters).
Yeah, the first time I played I went nuts with the lightning spear once I got it. Though I wasn't ever able to complete that file because my build was shit.
As far as I can tell, Man-Serpent Sword +15 is the best weapon in the game if you have the strength for it. That's what I wound up with the second time around.
Doing a SL1 run during the early stages of the game is probably a very efficient use of souls once you unlock weapon and armour upgrades. Even a weapon with an A scaling will only go up about 5-6 points in damage per a level of its related statistic, but a weapon upgrade could be anything from 8 points to dozens of points, if memory serves. And keeping your humanity going can give you up to 99 extra points of defense, which alone outstrips most light-medium armours unless they're a very high level.
^^ The issue is that elemental weapons top out; for NG+, faith/intelligence weapons are better since they continuously improve with your character's dominant stat, plus said stat empowers their support abilities. Even in the first playthrough, a weaker faith/intelligence weapon is probably more "efficient" because the same stat contributes to healing/support/ranged damage effectiveness. Of course, faith weapons were even stronger in Demon's Souls where they gave you consistent health regeneration. I wish that was in Dark Souls, because I felt it was a really characterful element of faith characters (and a nice little reference to Arthurian mythology).
That said, everything and their grandmother is weak to lightning in Dark Souls, so you can't really go wrong with your favourite weapon empowered by thunder. It even uses standard titanite.
While that is helpful in an SL1 run, in general the most important attribute of armor is its poise. An extra 99 points of defense will protect you from at most 99 points of damage, which maybe will mean you can take one extra hit before dying but probably won't mean anything. Poise, on the other hand, allows you to avoid getting stunlocked.
It's definitely a good weapon, but the game is actually fairly well-balanced in that regard, so there are lots of weapons that are equally viable. Unless you're going for backstabs in PVP, in which case you're probably just using a Zweihander or something.
How does poise work mathematically? Or, at least, what are the "cutoffs" for effective levels of poise? I could never really work out what amount of poise was strong or weak (beyond "higher is better than lower") because the game doesn't really tell you much about how hard enemy attacks hit -- for instance, some attacks that deal high damage might not disadvantage your character's stance, but some low damage attacks dealt with heavy weapons and/or two hands might send you reeling.
Well, it's more like, if you get all the scaling stats of a divine +10 weapon to 40/50, it will only do barely any more damage than a chaos weapon, and most likely you won't have every scaling stat up that high, since for many weapons that's three whole stats. In practice, they'll end up actually being weaker unless you are a stupidly high SL.
It works the same as status effects. When you get hit by an attack, it increases your poise damage by a certain amount based on the type of attack (but not by how strong it is). When your poise damage exceeds your poise value, you get staggered and your poise damage is reset. I don't know what values are needed for enemy attacks, but 20 should avoid getting stunned from arrows, mid 30s for katanas, rapiers, daggers, etc., 56ish for greatswords and such, 76 for ultragreat swords. Or something. Basically, 76/77 poise will prevent you from getting stunned by a single hit of pretty much any normal weapon attack. But yeah, it's based on the type of weapon and type of attack. How strong the attack is doesn't actually matter, nor does the weapon's upgrade path or buffs or anything like that.
Thank you for the explanation. Poise is reasonably important for me, given that I predictably favour heavily-armoured, knightly characters. Getting hit is part of it, so being able to reliably walk through a strike and deliver copious amounts of righteous, honourable fury is occasionally useful.
I tend to play a character who does a lot of ninja rolls for most damage avoidance, then give him Havel's armor anyway as backup.
Dark Wood Grain Ring + Ring of Favor and Protection + Mask of the Mother + Giant Armor/Gloves/Boots = lol.
I don't actually get the Dark Wood Grain Ring, because that would require me to not do the Chaos covenant every single time.
But t takes like... less than 30 minutes from starting a game to get the Dark Wood Grain Ring, then you can just go join the Chaos Servants afterward...
Though I do like the Chaos Servants too. The Daughters of Chaos are my favorite characters in the game, and I like having an egghead and doing the worm attack even though it doesn't really do much.
Yeah, but...I'm a covenant purist. One covenant per run.
Most of my defending's been from a shield and rolling. On that note, reached Blighttown, although I'm currently fiddling around with some side stuff like the Asylum revisit.
Oh God, Blighttown. It's easy enough to go through it now, but the first time I did it... it didn't help that I was almost exclusively using sorcery, and the enemies' walking animations are such that spells will almost never actually hit them.
On the other hand, "Amazing chest ahead" will never get old.
The Pyromancer's starting armour has stellar poison resistance, so I'm good there, at least.
I tend to just skip Blighttown. It's the one part of the game that I really think of as a pain to do.
There's this one platform where the camera always wants to clip behind the platform above it. Really annoying.
It's no fun to use the Master Key on your first playthrough. Though, I would agree that I'd rather skip it every time after that, and just go backwards through it to pick up Power Within if I plan on using it.
Yeah, I did it the first time. I just avoided it every other time.
I never actually use Power Within.
Power Within is hilariously awesome. 40% damage increase with everything, including weapons that aren't normally buffable and I think even magic. You take damage over time, but as long as you use an unupgraded pyro flame (the damage you take is scaled by your magic adjustment, but the buff isn't), it will only do slightly less than 100% of your max health over the 100 seconds it lasts, which isn't a big problem as long as you remember to heal yourself.
I know, but I need my attunement slots for making stuff blow up.
Reminds me that I need a couple more spells. Only got Fireball and Combustion ATM.
Join the chaos covenant as soon as you finish blighttown.
Or don't, because it's not worth spending two attunement slots on one spell that only has four uses. Upgrade your pyro flame to +10 or higher, and then you can talk to Quelana at the bottom of Blighttown somewhere. She'll sell you pyromancy, including Great Combustion and Great Fireball, which will basically be able to get you through the whole game.
But does more damage than other pyromancies, can hit like five enemies at once (if they're normally sized; when grinding for humanity in the Tomb of Giants, I could generally hit nine or ten), and can hit twice per use.
Congratulations, From. I don't know how you did it, but you managed to lag a PS3.