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Comments
So, I just learned that a Bastard Sword +5 can in fact stunlock a Gargoyle for half its health bar.
I think Havel's AI is rewritten to be even more defense-oriented. Took me forever to get him to attack so I could backstab.
This run is going really well. Just beat the Capra Demon and got the Large Ember and Laurentius. I've died twice so far, once from Hellkite, once from somehow aggroing the three enemies in the bottom floor of the church while upstairs while thinking I was safe.
Edit because I'm already posting too much: Went straight to Quelaag, died twice. Her AOE attack is doing more damage than I'm used to and she's taking less. I think I was lower level than I usually am for her, so I headed back to the depths for a bit and then to the forest and killed the Moonlight Butterfly.
Also I rolled off a cliff at one point, so I'm at three deaths.
In that case, allow it to break, but remove the +20% equip load anyway.
And I disagree with the notion that the Dark Wood Grain Ring should provide a fast roll at 50% equip burden. If it continues to do that, then it'll still be overused and therefore damaging to the metagame. Especially since it allows people to use both heavy armour and fast roll at minimal build cost, which isn't cricket. If someone wants to use fast roll with plate armours, they should have to pay for it in endurance and therefore make it a factor of their build.
I mean, the basic gist of most builds (hell, including mine) is:
Which provides ninja flip, 1800 HP, 192 stamina, up to about 400 standard defense, at least 72 stability in a shield, 350-700 damage (depending on how heavy the weapon is) and often good casting. It's very much "have your cake and eat it", which I'm pretty sure is not how Dark Souls is supposed to work.
In addition, I'd probably change it so spells can't be doubled up on. If you need to double up on a spell for PvE, you probably aren't good enough to finish the game anyway, and if you're doubling up on a spell for PvP, you likely intend to spam. So there goes your Wrath of the Gods spam, since people will only ever have three (or perhaps four) castings, and only dedicated Faith builds are likely to deal enough damage with it to kill with three uses.
Hmm. I didn't even know the thing about 25% equip load. Combined with all the other stuff I didn't know going in, I might just start a new file.
That's what I did. Twice. Beat the game on my third.
That would make it utterly useless. Maybe if everything but the 20% equip load were removed.
20% health and 20% equip load, what else did it have?
20% stamina, I think.
Except that it's the only ring that increases your maximum stamina, and the only one that increases your maximum health by a non-trivial amount (which is very important when so much of the metagame is based around backstabs for ridiculous damage). If it were just +20% equip burden, it'd be completely unused since there's already Havel's Ring.
Even for single-player, Havel's Ring would render a +20% equip burden ring almost totally useless, while extra stamina actually is very useful for single-player (extra health less so because of how much healing you get).
Do you like... raise your Endurance all the way to 99? >.>
Because even with Havel's Ring and the Ring of Favor and Protection, you still need 72 Endurance just to wear the full set of armor at 25% equip burden, even with no weapons equipped...
In any case, Havel's Armor isn't all that great. It has worse defense than Giant's and weighs more. Its poise is a lot better but not so much that it actually matters most of the time. Notably, Giant body+arms+legs gives you enough poise to take a hit from pretty much any normal weapon and still leaves your head free to wear a mask.
Aw hell no.
The +20% stamina is a huge deal -- perhaps the hugest. In fact, I think it's the only item in the game that raises your stamina bar. It's the difference between four two-handed greatsword swings and five -- and when your strategy revolves around finding an opening and stunlock abuse, that's a massive difference. The +20% health is nice, but you can already get heaps of it and high vitality is mostly good as error control. But the +20% stamina boost is the unique factor that gives it its application, but that means you can dodge, block and attack more.
Or, in a more cerebral sense, it means you can extend your strategies beyond their previous limits. The Ring of Favour and Protection would have a place even if it were only the +20% stamina boost, just for that.
Havel's Armour is notable for its capacity to give you 160+ poise is combined with the Wolf's Ring, effectively rendering you stun immune to everything but the most stupidly godly attacks in the game. My favourite set is the Elite Knight or Paladin set, though. The second for being the best medium armour set in the game (possibly barring Cleric armour?) and the first for being so stupidly good for its equip burden, how easy it is to find, how cool it looks and its 46 poise (unless you live in particular regions, in which case you get the nerfed poise value).
Wait, the nerf was not global?
Yeah, I definitely failed to take that into account. I think I just assumed there was otherstuff that did.
^^ Nope, I still get 46 poise.
There are a few things that raise your stamina regeneration speed (Grass Crest Shield, Cloranthy Ring, Mask of the Child), which is nice but not quite the same thing.
I hate you. With all of my hate.
I appreci-hate the sentiment, but there's not a whole lot of difference. 34 poise protects you from all basic attacks from standard-sized weapons, but 46 isn't enough to stack and protect from additional attacks. Essentially, it protects you from a higher range of standard attacks and prevents particularly small weapons from stunlock abuse, but it doesn't protect you from the really heavy stuff like 50+ poise sets do.
The rationale, I think, was to differentiate the starting Knight armour from the Elite Knight set, so it's not a no-brainer in terms of which one to choose. Although now I think it's swung the other way, since the 12 poise advantage of the standard Knight armour is so much better than the 13 additional defense of the Elite Knight set, even taking into consideration that it's not as useful as it looks on the stat screen.
What about the wolf ring? 74 vs 86?
74, I think, is still enough to prevent really, really large weapons from getting the stun. 86 is much safer, of course, but I think the biggest advantage (again) is the higher value's higher capacity to resist chained attacks. Although, in this case, both sets can only take two straight sword attacks until being staggered on the third. So basically the original value is stronger against lighter weapons like curved and thrusting swords, but the difference is pretty immaterial when it comes to straight swords, greatswords, hammers, axes and other weapons that can base their strategy on stunlocking.
Oh wow they actually did nerf the DWGR in the PC version, apparently (you need 25% equip burden to get its effect), as well as fixing the dragon head glitch.
Did they patch the console versions yet, or will we have to wait until the DLC comes out?
I think we'll have to wait until the DLC. And yeah, I heard of that. Thank goodness.
Anyone have the formula by which damage is calculated? I noticed that my samurai character was dealing over 400 damage to the Undead Parish Black Knight, despite hitting heavy armour with an uchigatana +13. So my damage was exceeding the attack rating of the weapon (plus scaling) by a significant amount. I do know that damage works on the basis of improving returns (so the difference between 300-350 is much smaller than the difference between 500-550), but not much beyond that.
Nobody knows the damage formula yet, last I checked. And because of various factors it's pretty difficult (or even impossible) to accurately determine what it is.
I did some research on the matter, and apparently this is a proposed formula:
(1-Resist*0.001)*Damage-Resist/2
So, we'll say an attack has 400 damage against 300 defense, making the formula:
(1-0.3)*400-150
or
0.7*250
which leaves us with
175
This is based on the rationale that half your defense counts for a flat reduction while your whole defense divided by one thousand counts towards calculating the modifier.
Using the Mugen Monkey character creator, the most heavily defended, practical character I can come up with has 50 resistance at SL125, with 50 vit, 40 end, 27 str and 14 dex. Wearing the Giant's Armour, this character has 490 basic defense, which I'll count as 500 for simplicity.
Against the same 400 damage attack from above:
0.5*(400-250)
for a whopping 75 damage.
Without the buffed resistance stat, the formula goes:
0.65*(400-225)
for 114 (rounded) damage.
But while I'm doing this, let's check that against a more powerful 600 damage.
So the higher an attack's damage is, the more damage your defenses seem to mitigate. The initial difference was of 39 points; the second is 69. Does this make a resistance build worth it? Probably not, as things stand. But if resistance was buffed by a point in each defense stat per a level, then it might be worth the investment in order to empower vitality characters. If there were a way to push up to 600 defense in SL120ish PvP? Christ.
Huh. That's a pretty interesting damage formula, I have to say.
Yay, I'm back home, I can play more.
So. I'm in the catacombs and just realized that when I stand perfectly still, I can hear my character breathing. Has that always been the case? Either way, very nice touch.