Dark Souls

Just spend them, you can't really go too wrong in how you spend souls unless you spend them on something you're never going to use. Upgrade a few weapons, shields and armour or maybe your Pyro flame if you don't want to level up. Carrying them around will mean you'll eventually lose them.

Level up Resistance to 40 and finish the rest of the game with nothing but club, plank shield, and sack +10!

(I've always wanted to try that one.)

peacedog, your dude from Demons is buried in the graveyard next to that first bonfire you come to after the tutorial level. They were nice enough to leave your winged spear right next to his gravestone! It's waiting for you.

You level up your sack? Jesus... talk about doing it on easy mode.

Man up & try doing it without leveling your headgear.

The Zwei is pretty much the only very large/heavy weapon available early in the game, unless one of the black knights drop their weapons for you. But I wouldn't recommend the black knight weapons; they all require 18 dex in addition to their strength requirements, and their movesets kinda suck. They do put out massive damage, though.

One step down from the Zwei & BK weapons, you have the claymore and the gargoyle halberd. (if it drops) They both have stunningly low stat requirements, but they both put out rather massive damage. The claymore, by the way, is widely considered one of the very best swords in the game due to its combination of very high damage output, low stat requirements, and a moveset that gives you pretty much everything you might want from a weapon: a thrust attack, and overhead chop, and a widc swing for multiple enemies. It has it all. The only downside to the claymore is that because it's so good, so easy to find, (it's right on the wyvern bridge) and so easy to meet the stat requirements for it, I'm thoroughly sick of it. I think practically every one of my characters has used the claymore in one capacity or another. Maybe not as their main weapon, but as their divine backup, or maybe my lightning weapon... something.

BTW... keep in mind that using big weapons makes it harder to remain at <25% encumbrance. If you use the zwei, for example, that's 10 pounds out of your alloted 12.5 pounds (at beginning encumbrance) right there. Contrast that to, say, a scimitar, which only weighs you down 1.5 pounds.

Nothing's available as early as the Zweihander. I'm guessing Claymore-sized things don't meet your threshold for largeness, right? Apart from the Zwei, then, the Great Club and the Large Club are both in Blighttown which makes them pretty quick to get, although the Large Club does need to be farmed. If curved greatswords are big enough for you, the Server is also in Blighttown and the Gravelord Sword is (effectively) in The Catacombs.

I think you should go all in and go for the Asylum Demon's tail. NOTHING BUT STRENGTH.

I bought the xbox version of this game today. The clerk at the game store asked me "what have you heard about this game?" I answered "I heard it's really difficult." He looked at me warily and then advised me to start with a pyromancer and to be prepared for perpetual frustration. Installing now. Padding my controller so it won't shatter when I throw it on the ground in rage.

Any tips for cutting the black dragon's tail? Not having much luck.

Summon someone that knows you are after it. Trade off always making the dragon choose one of you to attack rather than standing next to each other. Watch for the attack where he gets up on his hindquarters and blasts fire, as that's your window to run to his back and 2h r1 his tail, ideally with a downward or diagonal slashing weapon. The sequence is not triggered by any particular behavior, so you just have to keep doing stuff to whittle at his health without burning all of your estus until he gives you enough opportunities that it comes off.

You should probably list your platform and SL when these things come up so that anyone who can help can do so.

You'll be fine. The OP has a bunch of tutorials and the like as you decide to puzzle out the deeper mechanics, but in general feel free to ask specific questions about what's confusing to you before it prompts a controller toss, and even before that try doing something completely different from what you just did (be aware that your character, for instance, moves very differently at <25% and <50% max carry weight, and shifting to either more gear to protect you better or less gear to move faster is an easy variable to tweak). The answer to almost every problem in the game is not "just keep doing what you did but better", and that's what drives most people to madness. The pyromancer is fine from an optimization standpoint although other builds like the knight and fighter have their own strengths in terms of what they acquaint you with early and the advantages they give you. Strongly recommend that you start with the Master Key as your gift in case you decide to take advantage of any of the areas it allows you early access to.

A few pages back extrabags and me had quite some tips.

http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/dark-souls.294/page-100#post-299941

thx to lizard king

The number at the bottom right of the post, next to the "like" button, gives you the permalink to that individual post so you can right click it and copy the link location.

It's not actually the tail. You get it for beating him on the first try instead of using the door to the side and dropping down on him later--i.e. before you have a weapon that isn't the Broken Straight Sword. It's doable but it's super tedious. Also 46 strength required :/.

SL90, PS3. Think I'm done for the day but I'll happily coordinate with someone tomorrow if anyone is willing.

Well, good luck. Hopefully someone will chime in.

The easy way to do it is to choose the black bombs as your gift, apparently.

If you want the weapon I believe you can trade Rubbish The Sack for it with Snuggly the Crow.

Edited so I don't leave incorrect info in the thread. No, don't thank me, thank extarbags

Oh yeah, I forgot about that option. That's probably even worse, though... would you rather spend an hour killing that thing or several hours screwing around later because you don't have the master key? Spoiler alert: the best answer is neither. :-[

Rubbish gets you a titanite chunk, Sack gets you the hammer. I neglected to take Snuggly into account in my earlier roundup of big weapons that are available early, and maybe that qualifies since you only have to make it to The Depths. That's the only weapon Snuggly has to offer.

Choose the thief and have both!

If you're including the depths when looking for large, damaging weapons, you can find the Greataxe down there. When fully upgraded, it's one of the highest damage weapons in the game. I'm pretty sure it's quite a bit better than the zwei, in terms of damage per hit. It has a pretty hefty strength requirement, though, (36, if I remember correctly) and its range isn't all that hot. (the zwei has a much better range) Also, I find the zwei's moveset to be much more useful than the Greataxe.

I picked this up on PC, and I'm going to give it another go. I played a lot of it on PS3, and really enjoyed it. Nearly finished it before burning it on the four kings. That time my character was a pyro, using eagle shield, havels set, and fire zweihander and some kind of halberd (maybe lightning). I want to play a different kind of character this time, but I don't want it to be a whole lot harder. Any thoughts? Maybe sorcery?

Yeah!! Sorcery will make it a whole lot less hard.

This is the only thread I have been reading while I am away on vacation. THIS GAME.

In that case, I'm looking forward to tackling the Four Kings on my sorcerer. 44 Int, Logan's Catalyst and more crystal spells than you can shake a... um, catalyst at.

When I fought the 4 kings with my NG sorcerer I only had to kill 3 of them.

I found that slow, powerful weapons are precisely the kind of weapon that *begs* for heavy, high-poise armor. With small, light weapons your attacks are so quick that you don't really need poise; enemies are unlikely to be interrupting you unless your timing is really off. But with weapons like the zwei, your swings take so long that it's pretty common for an enemy to hit me and thus interrupt the attack unless I have the poise to swing right through it.

I'm betting that really good players don't run into this problem. But then again, really good players never get hit in the first place, so they hardly need armor at all. I am not that "good player".

Damn that fight for making you sacrifice a ring slot, though. I'd love to see just how fast they die with crystal sorceries, the Crown of Dusk and the Bellowing Dragoncrest Ring. Sadly, my sorcerer uses the Ring of Favour and Protection, and I'm not too keen on taking it off and breaking it.

You can get a replacement in the same playthrough, if you want.

By the way, I'd like to add that the agony of "Is now a good time to break my Ring of Favor? Now? How about now? No.... now?" is precisely why I don't wear that thing anymore. It's a *fabulous* ring, but it stresses me out. As sad as that is.

Just take it off. You can get a second one easily enough.

FUCK THE CRYSTAL CAVE, ITS DESIGNER, HIS MOM, AND EVERYTHING HE STANDS FOR!














/breathe

I do not understand what could possibly be disappointing about it.

It'll be ok. It's intimidating but it's not actually that hard once you get the hang of it. Once you go through it once or twice you'll be running to the boss without even slowing down.

Mastery of the crystal cave relies on two things: learning the 2 long distance reference points for the main long transparent paths ( the first is easy, the second needs both the butterfly to your left and the outcropping you land on) that get you to the boss, and completely ignoring the blue slab and the golden golem/chunk underneath. This last part is very important.

I believe wise men everywhere widely acknowledge that a man who wears a boar's head by choice should not throw stones because it might remind people that they need to use a black separation crystal as soon as possible.

What's disappointing about Catarina specifically? Once upgraded, it seems perfectly competent as far as these things go. Is it the bullshit about parrying and deflection?

Oh, I see what you mean. Curious, I don't recall having that problem on the xbox. I'll have to check that out again.