Dark Souls Confessions (Spoilers Naturally)

Actually, rage quitting is my considered choice after a period of mastering the patterns to the point where I could competently escort a summoner through it 9/10 times. I just don't care anymore. I'm at the point where I blow up a side (and the left side I do with arrows or bolts, just to be extra sure), and once I've accomplished the destruction of one side I quit the game. That way it spawns me right before the fog wall when I reload and ready to go to the next phase. Then it's time to play center area roulette, where I alt F4 if killed to get my blood stain back to the entrance. Because fuck you, Bed of Chaos; I came in with x humanity and y souls and I'm walking out just the same. .

I just died from the first Seath encounter. Twice. "Oh, this time it'll be different. He'll probably won't even be in here anymore."

I'm also of the opinion that in order to really enjoy Dark Souls fully you need to embrace your inner ragequitter. My knuckles just about healed from a ragequit of epic proportions. Thick concrete walls can be both a blessing and a curse, y'know?

I confess that stunlocking Quelaag to death feels So. Damn. Good.

Wait, what? How is that even possible?

You can get back to where you came in, get the lift down, go up and enter the fog door. But you have to really work at it!

Oh neat, so he's still there? I knew you could get back there because of <later event that you may not know about yet>, but I always assumed it would be empty.

Hot diggity damn this game is better than any other in making me just give the fuck up. Crystal Caves. First it took me two hours or so to figure out how to get across reliably (Orange Soapstone ftw). Then I spent another hour realizing I needed to cheese the sonsabitches in the Blue Oyster Bar with a bow since any one of them could get me knocked down and if I got knocked down I died. Every single time. But at least I got some Twinkling Titanite for my troubles. Then it's the boss fight where I'm pretty soon losing any situational awareness and just keep hacking away until I scroll past my Estus and I die from something with him down to less than an inch of health. So now I'm going to find out if I can just run through the Blue Oyster Bar without getting killed I guess.

(And can I get a big goddamn cheer for coming up with the name Blue Oyster Bar?)

Sorry you had such a tough time in the crystal caves. It's really not that much of a fuck you. If anything it's a lesson in paying attention to the environment. You might have noticed the falling 'snow' and that in some spots it hits empty space and stops, and in others it doesn't. In addition the pathways run dead straight (except for the blue slab) and are fairly wide. The game gives you a bunch of tools even if you miss the snow. Soapstones, but usually other players leave them, prism stones (you wondered what those were for, right?), and arrows work well, too. Arrows are my preferred method for finding my way to the blue slab.

Every enemy you come across from the Duke's bonfire to Seath you can run by (at < 50%, too). The oysters are fairly tough and time consuming, so I skip them.

Oh Crystal Caves are fine. Just not optimal for discovering for the first time at three in the morning. I realized what made Seath such a weird experience - game slowed down to a crawl. It's probably the graphics card trying to keep up with rendering the millions of crystals he spews forth. Anyway, killed him, but it was a close call. And yes, sprinting and doge-rolling through the Blue Oyster Bar (soon you will ALL use it and I'll be swimming in royalties!!!!) worked fine.

This is also how you can farm the gargoyles at the church for the halberd , kill one quit and repeat until you got it.

Four Kings. First try. Solo. Pleased.

Full Havel's and a +15 large club aren't the perfect tools for every situation. They are for the Four Kings, though. Absolutely night and day from my sorceror in light armor.

Mine was cloth armor actually. But with Dex at 39, uchigatana at +15 and Grass Crest Shield - just get in very, very close and start swiping. Needed to Estus between them spawning, other than that it was a piece of cake. Hrm.

I'm surprised you had trouble with them on your sorcerer. Homing Crystal Soulmass always made 4k as easy as they've ever been for me.

"Crystal Palace"?

(Thanks, SwiftKey!)

You can unbotch it by running back to where you pick up the robes, and waiting for him to come all the way back, and and then proceeding as normal.

Hmm... try the side passage? Usually works as long as you're under 25 percent.

If you must fight him straight up, the main thing that's going to work for you is heavy armor with fire resist (I just use stone for everything pretty much) and the dragon crest shield at +5 (hopefully). Then you're going to want to wait at the entrance, take your licks, and just get in the hits as it goes. All of his deadliest attacks are scaled to your HP iirc, so it's really just the small hits that will get you or not having 20 estus flasks.
But yeah, unbotching would be optimal.

Try just running through and not healing until you get there. You usually have a lot of time before he catches up.

His breath clips through the side passage anyway. Gonna be tough.

Yeah, just think of the cutscene when you arrive at the other place (which is empty). He arrives to defend the you-know-what with much ado, presumably swooping in from that upstairs lair. He has no reason to leave if you go straight back.

However, I wonder if he'd still be there if you went to the cave, triggered the scene, died, and went back to the top lair? ... not that interesting really, but I kinda wonder if it'd be consistent.

Now look here, dear DS developers. Crystal Caves wasn't a very fun gaming experience. I did think, however, that the concept and implementation was so fucking cool that it didn't matter, much. One of the better aha! moments I've had in gaming, along with all the other good to great aha! moments in your game. However. Bed of Chaos. I'm fairly certain that if I had an interest in playing a Super Mario Bros game, I'd play one of those with Super Mario Bros in the title. I'm all for challenging. I'm all for death that comes out of almost nowhere. I am NOT into running, jumping and climbing over instantly opening collapsing ground. The only redeeming quality of this is that it is indeed trivial to get back to the fog gate. I'm now going to spend some time watching youtube videos so I can memorize a path to the second hand. This is not good game design and I sincerely hope you never put in any more levels like this in any Souls game ever. Thank you.

I have 160 hours in the game.

I found out today that alluring skulls trivialize the first armored boar and .... that you can reorder items in your inventory. /facepalm so much scrolling ...

It kind of cracks me up that this game does some very Zelda like things (well, minus the iconic music) with some of it's consumables (Transient Curse, Prism Stones, Dung Pies, Alluring Skull, even the Resins to an extent) where they are immediately meant to solve a problem and they still get overlooked as the game is subtle enough and good enough at misdirection that no one tries it at first.

How anyone figured out the secondary effect of Lloyd's talisman is beyond me though.

Huh. It's been ages since my previous playthrough, so I don't remember what spells I was using.

This time I just hit them a lot with my club. Each one died long before the next one showed up. The only dicy bit was that I entirely forgot about their grab attack and got nailed by it a couple times. Fortunately I had enough health to survive it. That might have been the difference, come to think of it--better armor, slightly more vit, and this time I'm wearing the RoF&P.

Nah, I got him with light armor <25% and a long range weapon like the Gargoyle's Halberd, 2 handed. If you stick in close, he'll just rear up and try to smash you with one of his tentacles. Dodge out of the way and punish him on the return. It did help that I had flash sweat and the fire def ring on, but I can't remember which shield I had on my back at the time. You can also run right into his melee range if you managed to botch the cheese attempt, which is how I found out this method works.

You only need to make it to one hand, ideally the right one. The left one can be released through archery relatively easily, from the last protruding corner. Then it's a straight run up the center and you hope that he does something stupid. Much like Ceaseless, it's a lot better if you go all in on the very first attempt at the middle rather than trying to play it safe, in my experience.

Oh damn. Didn't think of archery. Which is pretty silly considering I am an archer. Made the damn jump, got smushed on my way to the middle afterwards, came back, waited forever for him to smash the centre, charged, jumped back as he did finally smash the centre, made that jump as well and Bob's his uncle. Realized I should have found Solaire around there somewhere so will journey back for that helmet. Since I traded my Skull Lantern for a Fog Ring. Tomb of the Giants is pretty goddamn dark without a light source.

I'll also check whether Riposte with the Hawk Ring has a bonus attached to it. Or is Riposte supposed to do lots more damage than a Backstab?

It does do more than backstabs. Hawk Ring doesn’t affect either afaik.

The hornet ring boosts critical damage from both Ripostes and Backstabs. Ripostes have higher crit bonuses than backstabs. Combining the 160 crit of the silver tracer with 40 dex and a hornet riposte is sublime.

Alrighty then. I just did 1000 points of damage with my uchigatana on a riposte and I've never even come close to those numbers before. In other news, I've got Nito and Gwyn left, should I do the DLC before Gwyn? Probably doesn't matter.

Well you won't be able to do it after Gwyn.

Yeah after Gwyn it's over, your only option to continue playing is NG+. You'll have to get the Lordvessel again, kill the golem in the Archives to get the pendant and then do the DLC.

Thanks guys! Now Nito is kicking my ass. Well, in order to be precise - the gorram skeletons he employs lets Nito kick my ass. And I don't have a Divine weapon lying around either, the one I used to clear the Catacombs with back in the day I made a Fire weapon of. Oh well, a few more tries and if I don't make it I'll just warp off and make a divine weapon.

Don't bother, well, assuming you have a fog ring or can cast hidden body. Use either one and flank Nito on the right and you shouldn't aggro the skeletons. Try to pull with ranged spells/weapons (I think there are some skeletons near that side, but you should be able to lock on to Nito and not pull them) and fight him.