Dark Souls SL1 / Starting Build Discussion

Not quite, actually. The Claymore takes a looooooong time to surpass the Drake sword if you go for the normal upgrades. And getting fire upgrades can be kind of a pain in the butt.. definitely doable, but it's kinda nice to be able to not bother with it for awhile.

And even after you do get the fire upgrades, that gives you a weapon with dual damage types, whereas the Drake Sword is all physical... which is super handy a lot of the time.

Besides... don't underestimate the value of the 2-handed R2.

Yes, upgrading the drake sword is a *very* niche thing to do, but hey... if you're playing a SL1 character, you can use all the niche benefits you can find.

With base hunter stats, Claymore surpasses the unupgraded Drake Sword at... +2. Yes, it takes a lot longer to beat the Drake Sword +5 with normal damage, but that's irrelevant because a non-leveled up character is going to use elemental weapons anyway.

It's not really any easier to upgrade the Drake Sword beyond +1 or +2 than it is to make fire weapons.

Not when you're doing so little of it.

Works just as well at +0.

Yeah well despite all of the above bulletproof points you still might as well go for it I guess. It's not like you're saving those scales for the other dragon weapons that you can't even use.

+2? Really? The upgrade chart at http://darksouls.wikidot.com/claymore says that a +2 claymore will do 123 damage, plus scaling. Scaling at a hunter's base stats wouldn't add 77 damage, would it?

Huh. If so, then my clever upgrading plan is even less clever than I thought.

You couldn't be more wrong about this.

Not even taking into account the stagger of the Claymore's second swing or the upgrade cost of dragon scales.

I believe so. Hunter's starting strength and dex are 12 and 14, and the Claymore scales C/C. (12+14) * 3 = 78.

Worth noting that there's a subreddit for SL1 help. The DLC content is murder. I

Just finished the Four Kings, and not without difficulty. I broke off the RoFaP because doing them with essentially no very useful rings was too much. Not sure if I'll put it back on or not. I did like the extra endurance and I found that the extra health was just enough to let me survive a dark orb, but the extra attack stopped being as useful once the flame started supplying twice or thrice the damage of the club. Then again, I don't even know what rings to equip at this point because I'm so used to only having one changeable ring slot. The only really compelling reason to not use RoFaP that appeals to me is that the Red Tearstone Ring doesn't really make sense if you don't also have the Bellowing Dragoncrest Ring equipped, because if you're willing to accept that everything in the game can one shot you you better get all the advantage you can out of it. I might try that out but I'm not sure I'm a bad enough dude. I don't know, we'll see.

Anyway, only Kalameet remains before Gwyn. Ready to co-op any time, just need to talk to Gough about it first.

Oh I remember: Lingering Dragoncrest Ring for better Power Withins is the other dual-ring configuration that I wanted to try out (alongside Bellowing, naturally). That's basically a safer, almost as powerful version of the Red Tearstone Ring.

On whether or not to RoFaP at SL1: I say yes. It's a good general purpose ring, and getting two of them per playthrough means you still have the flexibility for the few times you really need it.

Just invaded a level 1 via CRE, dropped a Gargoyle's Halberd for him and watched as he very slowly crept towards it, terrified to pick it up. So fun!

It took a bunch of tries, but the Sanctuary Guardian Mk 1 is defeated. I tried going for a 50% approach at first, with a bit of stone armor to ease up the pain along with the lightning and steel rings, but he was having none of it, and the one shots were still one shots. The other problem I was having was that without an eagle shield or silver shield, I really had nothing with decent lightning resistance and stability; the blood shield would have been the go to back in the day but that's been nerfed down to 50%, and making other shields lightning shields kills their stability.

So I went with the gargoyle shield at +12 for 68 stability (I'd spent a bunch of chunks recently), the child's mask, and my tattered leg/torso +9 that keep me under 25%. And I equipped my trusty light crossbow +15 and some sniper bolts/heavy bolts. I still had to learn the pattern, but I could soak a lightning blast if needed on the shield, and after memorizing the dodge cues I got through mostly unscathed (I'd say it was about 10-15 tries, hard to say once the failure fugue sets in). The last run was almost perfect apart from one AoE side hit from the overhead blast, and the bastard was down. Now to restock on crossbow bolts, because I'm starting feel like this whole "closing the distance to hit" thing is a sucker's game when the going gets tough, and it feels more natural even with the OH SHIT reload animation than pyro.

Did an invasion in the parish as a victory lap, switched to my raw +5 club and my balder soldier outfit but stayed at <25%. Dropped him a balder side sword +5 and allowed him to clear out the rest before engaging, at which point we had a great brawl. He was in knight's gear, and took full advantage of his ability to beat me in R1 speed, so I had to resort to luring and R2 pounces, which of course runs the separate risk of getting backstabbed. It was a great scrap, took about 4 minutes or so, and he sent me a message afterwards commenting on how much fun it had been. He only had 230 achievement points, so I figure it was relatively early in his career and the whole thing felt pretty good.

Sweet. If you want to try some jolly cooperation on the rest of the DLC bosses let me know, I should be available most of tonight.

I didn't see that until today, unfortunately, I kept looking for people to be online with xbl or steam. Ended up being an invasion heavy time after that, with the parish invasions uniformly excellent and the DLC invasions much more 2 vs 1 and the like. I actually had two clowns form a phalanx of sorts on the bridge into the Royal Forest.

I only typed it today! I mean I'll be available most of tonight. I only have Kalameet left to do along with some endgame errands.

SO I JUST NOTICED ... that the Black Bow of Pharis has "S" scaling for Faith if you turn it Divine. Anyone done that and how did you like it? This question, I suppose, is only relevant for Dex/Faith builds as I imagine you still need 18 Dex just to use it. I'm mainly interested in mid-game viability.

That's a pretty interesting idea. FWIW, the Long Bow also has it.

Great catch! It's a mite easier to get to as well.

How did you upgrade your glove if you're still in the burg?

Stray Demon? I did him this morning on my main character, and his attack pattern is really easy to avoid once you figure it out. Circle strafe behind him, wait for him to blast the area in front of and immediately behind him with one of his two blasts, attack, and get out before he can fly up and butt smash you (or ideally blast again). Rinse and repeat.

Taunting him (by practically pressing your lips against his butt) into doing the butt smashing technique repeatedly is also a good tactic as its a lot easier to avoid than the other attacks and gives you plenty of time to get in some retribution when he's done. I think I got him or the firesage (with the same AI) to do butt slams about four times in a row.

Your main character is SL1?

No, but I just tried him on my SL1 character, and he was about the same. His attacks seem to scale and don't do any more relative damage. My +5 club and +5 pyro glove don't do nearly enough damage (33 damage from the club), but with a bit more damage or patience he'd be easy enough.

Well, my comment was from someone who was playing a SL1 character to someone playing a SL1 character. In that context, it is not directly comparable to my main character or anything normally leveled. In any case, my point was exactly that an enemy with whom I'd had no trouble in virtually any other playthrough became a much tighter margin situation when I had to successfully endure/avoid a lot more of his pattern.

Given what we've talked about with bleed and him since then, I would speculate broadly that a jagged ghost blade is a shortcut to quickly killing him with a low level character, but even then it really depends on how well my experiences soundly thrashing him with upper level dex weapons translate to the bottom end of the tier; the risk profile just changes when your damage output is a lot lower and your hp/armor can't take the basic hits. The fact that you died to him rather than simply steamrolling him suggests he's not "easy enough", to me.

It didn't seem like the number of hits you can take changes at all for that fight. Maybe I have a different definition of "easy enough", especially since you respawn adjacent to the boss. He took me 9 tries on my main with a greataxe +7, and I'd consider that easy enough. A few tries to figure him out, and then a few tries to successfully execute without getting stuck on a wall or something on the floor and dying. I'm not going to try to kill him with my +5 club to prove a point, but I'm confident that if and when I come back with an upgraded pyro glove and/or lightning/fire club, that he'll go down without what I consider to be great difficulty. I'm less confident about, say, Quelaag, but I guess if I bring Maneater Mildred that one won't be so bad either.

Easy enough to me is "I beat him the first or second time with this build, solo", and that would still be constrained relative to significantly different situations. It means that you don't have to go off and get better/different gear in order to bypass them with a specifically optimized strategy. So I think we are talking across a number of misunderstandings.

All of that is different relative to "how long it took me to beat the first time and how much help I needed/advice", which is a different process from the sort of troubleshooting/tactical design that a SL1 run usually implies for an already experienced player.

Well, that's my main point. In that fight specifically, nothing really changes between SL1 and SL40, at least the way that I approach it. His blast damage appears to scale off your max life, so you can take two hits regardless. I pop in and out and gradually poke him to death and/or pyromancy him, so endurance isn't a constraining factor either. By the time I got my greataxe +7 in my normal run, you should be able to get your pyromancy up to a level of almost as much damage (maybe not quite as much, so it might take a little longer). But I'm not going to say anything else on the topic until I actually come back and beat him. Extarbags didn't seem to have any trouble with him, though.

I don't think that's what he's saying, it's more that he has a different threshold for what he considers easy, one that weights number of attempts/margin of error less than...well, I'm not absolute sure since we haven't talked about what he thinks are "hard" bosses but probably technique or something. Which I don't think is an accurate weighting of the game as to how I perceive it, but it's not the same as "lol noob". I mean, I'm pretty much done with explaining it because it doesn't make sense to press the point when the underlying fundamentals are so far apart, but that's a separate thing.

I had to go back in the thread to refresh my memory. He was a real turd when I first fought him at SL1, but like always I availed myself of the option to just leave and come back later. He was quite easy in the end, because I had very strong pyromancy (I want to say maybe +12 or +13 along with the CoD and BDCR), just like he's easy with very strong pyromancy or sorcery on any character, so in that sense he's very similar at whatever level. However, he's very possible to beat relatively early on on a normal character but very, very difficult early on for an SL1 character, because even though I think you're right about his magic blasts dealing a percentage of your max health, the rest of his attacks sure don't, and just not getting hit by them at all is far easier said than done.

I do, but against Stray Demon they don't seem any more punitive at SL1, at least the way I fight him.

The flying butt smash seemed to be doing about the same amount of damage with either character - maybe a quarter to a third of my life if it landed nearby, and instant death if it landed directly on my head. I never got hit with a conventional attack, iirc. How do you beat him early on with a normal character? Or does "early on" mean shortly after getting a large ember and upgrading a weapon to +7 or more?

I just mentioned it. One way is to take advantage of scaled attacks on your end through a fast bleed weapon, most likely the bandit's knife; others prefer pyro but I find the speed of fast bleed to be a lot more appealing although I don't have firm memories of the degree to which bleed staggers the demon so you can get away (I know with two bleed attackers the firesage explodes into a confetti of flesh in short order, but that's not the same thing). Either way, your first issue is addressing your shield deficiency, for which a +3 crest shield is adequate and doable.

I don't remember bleeds staggering the Stray Demon at all. I could be misremembering, though: it's been a loooooong time since I last got lucky & picked up a Bandit's Knife as a drop.

Usually I use magic of some sort on that bad boy.

It can mean that, or it can mean beating him with a weak magic/divine/elemental weapon, or the Bandit's Knife or whatever. Really I just mean fighting him before you're far enough along to be getting those windfalls of souls that let you acquire powerful magic and equipment almost at will.

SL1 Law Firms suuuucks, but those assholes are dead. Phase one was easy enough, but Slough kept killing me in phase two, so I finally just decided to play it extremely conservatively, and got one lucky dodge in that allowed me to land the killing blow.

Another SL1 fun fact: Iron Golem killed me five times, and I've literally never died on that fight before. He kept pushing me off the edge, the bastard.

The darkwraith guys on the lower level of New Anor Londo have a pretty high drop rate. Plus they're pretty easy to kill.

Probably none that will change what you would have done anyway, but for some reason I was in the habit of farming Royal Guards for those, which really sucks at SL1, until LK tipped me off to doing the darkwraiths in NLR instead like everyone else does.

Red chunks are a bigger pain than normal, actually. Fortunately you don't need very many of them since you get two from the BKs in the Asylum and find a couple more in LI, and you only really have the one thing to upgrade with them. I'd probably actually suggest that if you don't have an elemental club yet just dash to the Giant Blacksmith real quick and make the lightning one, since you're very close to that already and can max it out right now if you've already beaten the Stray Demon.

As for large titanite, allow me to quote myself from the previous page:

That's Oolacile Township for you. It's so lucrative that I've started planning the order of my upgrades around it, because why farm it anywhere else when they just hand you fistfuls of the stuff there?

Yeah, they're pretty easy to backstab, and don't have a lot of health. With 410 item find you can get 2 - 6 chunks per run, which is like 6 minutes, plus the odd titanite slab.