Dark Souls

There are also two easy crystal lizards in the catacombs along with some other nice items, and for my money it's worth it to do them properly with a real divine weapon in order to make sure you get that extra lantern for the ring of fog.

I find that most of the gear I want to use fits well within the 25%-50% range so far (through Firesage today), and generally Havel's ring is what I need for a significant upgrade in capacity (half of 76.5 vs 51). For 25% I'm generally at dusk crown, pyro clothing with no gloves, using balder shield and a club. With Havel's I can add gloves and the crossbow. With 50% I can swap in stone or havel's gauntlets, and with havel's I can wear both legs and arms of one of those sets +/- crossbow.
I don't think for most situations a helm other than the dusk crown makes sense, as with 2 slots of pyro that's your primary damage output and it needs to count. Centipede is about to be an exception, of course, as pyro is not too useful there, although I may try power within for shits and giggles.
I don't like locking down my options with the RoFap outside of dedicated PvP, and I haven't really needed the dedicated stamina now that I have a balder shield at +15. But it was touch and go until I got to sen's because I couldn't get one of those damned things to drop. Immediately afterwards I have, of course, gotten like 5 on top of my pile of balder side swords I can't use and other great drops. I would like to invade people and just drop them, but I need to get my invasion orb because the cracked red is annoying as hell.

I did some theme invasions this morning as a balder knight with a +5 regular club (unfortunately, none of the appropriate balder weapons are in my reach with dex 9). I kept pyro on hand for summons, and then had some pretty scrappy fights with others. Some really good fights, I thought, and I would like to imagine people appreciated a constrained invasion, by and large. At least they were bowing, apart from the NG+ guy who seemed really taken aback by the whole thing. Probably like me he's gotten used to not being invaded at all in SL1.

Every lantern is an extra lantern.

FWIW, I hardly ever use the Mask of the Mother on my SL1 run, but then again I'm playing a pyromancer, so the Dusk Crown (or whatever it's called) is pretty much permanently attached to my head.

But even if I were playing another class, I think Mask of the Child would be more helpful than the Mother. Stamina is the biggest limiting factor for me. And besides, Mask of the Mother doesn't give you as much health as it would in a normal run, since the base number which is being multiplied is smaller. Not only that, but my habit of focusing on "interesting stats" even in normal runs means I'm pretty used to not having any health. So I would rather ameliorate some other weakness than increase my health. Hell... I'd probably the Gargoyle Helm over the Mask of the Mother with other classes; physical defense & resistances are nothing to be scoffed at.

As for RoFaP, I'm not quite sold on it, even though I'm currently wearing it. It suffers from the same problem as the Mask of the Mother (i.e. smaller base numbers) and on top of that it's *super* important to be flexible in an SL1 run; I'm not thrilled having a ring slot permanently occupied.

You can only play a pyromancer in SL1, and yeah that makes sense. Don't know how I forgot about it since I wear that thing on every character now.

Today I saved Solaire without the chaos covenant, for the first time. As the internet had said, the solution was to toxic cloud through the door before beating the centipede demon. You won't get the maggot until you go around to the other side, but it's definitely a cool twist and it sure beats 30 humanity to a covenant with no other abilities.

Wait, explain this? How does it work?

That's it. That's the whole trick. You go to the lost Izalith shortcut door while it's still locked (from the firesage side), then blast toxic cloud (from Eingyi in the Lady of Chaos bonfire) through the door. You'll see a health bar go up and drop quickly, and it will die. Then after you beat the centipede and circle back around, emo Solaire will be sitting there as ordered next to your gross & incandescent hat.

I fucking love Dark Souls.

That fucking rules.

So my SSD, my main system drive, crashed. I went to install Dark Souls on my backup drive while OCZ sends me an RMA, but it just crashes on startup. Oh well, I guess that just reinforces my Souls break for a while longer and forces me to get some distance from my rapidly growing menagerie of builds.

Wrapped up Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith today. Time to head to the Archives (tried sequence breaking, couldn't catch the elevator on the way down, died from fall damage, I'm not that curious to keep trying :P) and then hope for ease of summons on 4K. Then the DLC - very curious what that'll be like with this slow/big weapons build.

I'll also be trying that low SL Catacombs run again, now that I know I can't take out that first necro by just running through. I'll try getting to him methodically, *then* see if I can get to Vamos easily, because I'm still curious about that question. :P

So. Walking up to bad guys that have their back turned? In light armor? Yeah. You learn something new every day. And you can take your SL1 playthroughs and stuff 'em. I'M going to play all the way through without using ANY magic. With a Dex "build". AND I also suck. So there.

Also. If a weapon has STR req of 32, I need 24 STR to wield it in two hands, or 16?

22. The way it works is that when you two-hand a weapon you get a 50% bonus to strength for the purposes of determining what weapons you can wield, so 22 + 11 = 33.

Perfect! Thanks.

- Decided to take another crack at an SL1 run.
- Got the BKH during my new character item runs.
- Definitely saving this guy for the next time I want to play a strength build and re-rolling a new SL1 character.

Also, news from my sorcerer: Manus is such a shithead. I just need to come back with more vitality I think. I usually get pretty close but he has like four or five different attacks that can one-shot me from full health, and my execution just isn't perfect enough to handle that.

So where do I upgrade the pyromancy flame anyway? Decided I would get some spells and upgrade a hand some for the priest to use in certain situations (having awful time with sanctuary guardian, though maybe it could help there e.g.).

Any of the guys that sell pyromancies can also upgrade your flame, although only Quelaana can ascend it to access the highest five levels.

I'm enjoying SL1 a lot more this time around. I think what I missed last time is that you have to pick the world clean of every possible advantage before progressing, which is why I'm three and a half hours in and just now getting ready for my first post-Asylum Demon boss fight (Capra Demon).

Question: what's the best way(s) to upgrade the Light Crossbows?

So it turns out that despite all the rage:



Seath can't really hit you very well in that room.



I finally got bored of posing and walked into the spikes to get it over with. Hee.

The faith character is up to SL 73 (37 end, 30 faith, 20 vit, 16/12 str/dex). Having lots of trouble with Artorias, bot the silver covetous ring, coaxed Solarie through Izalth. Basically ready to do Bed of chaos, Seath, and Artorias again. Oh, and Nito.

The toxic cloud thing worked really well.

You know... I *still* haven't killed Manus the honest way. I've used the "shoot him with a bow before the fight starts" trick every time. When my SL1 pyromancer gets to him, I'm going to try my damndest to see if I can get that trick to work with my pyromancer's crossbow.

What do you mean? There's pretty much only two ways you *can* upgrade it: normal & lightning. Lightning will put out more damage, but you'll bleed money from all those lightning bolts. Since I have better use for souls than that, I upgraded mine to +15. When I get ahold of a second light crossbow, I'll prolly upgrade that one to lightning.

For the sanctuary garden, I've found the that the key element is your shield, not your offensive tool. So far I've beaten him with pure pyromancy, a super slow strength weapon, and a quick high damage dex weapon, and in every case it was my shield that was the important element.

Basically, you want an upgraded Eagle shield +15. It has super high stability, and it blocks most of his lightning. So you just hide behind the shield, and he can't do jack to you. You don't even have to dodge his lightning breath attacks; the shield will handle those too. Just make sure that you put down the shield right before he does that weird wind blowing attack that drains all your stamina if you're using a shield. (It does zero damage if you don't block it with a shield, so there's no penalty for putting down your shield. You don't even have to dodge it.)

But yeah... as long as you have an upgraded Eagle shield, you can just watch him do his thing, and occasionally peek out to hit him with your weapon of choice.

If you mistime it & get whacked, don't panic. Just hide behind the shield even more until he charges/flies away. Then drink real quick.

There's one exception to this: if you want to use either Greatbow, you need to have the actual required strength, even though you 2-hand those weapons. So the Dragonbow requires you to have a 20 strength, and Gough's requires... ummm.. 27, I think.

(I'm aware that you prolly already know this, extar. I'm just letting Hammett know.)

Manus is a boss where a summon that isn't shit can do great things for you just by taking some heat off you periodically (even the NPC summon, who kind of sucks but at least you don't have the responsibility to heal). Learning to tell the difference between his big freak out attack, his pounce (both of which you need to move away from, ideally diagonal to his facing and with <25% rolls) and his other attacks that can be easily sidestepped from up close is key. Both of his magic attacks can be avoided by being next to him. I still recommend the crest shield for characters going light because it's your main chance of surviving if you do get caught by a magic burst, and it has just enough stability to cope; alternately, you can stack heavier gear and go with the eagle shield and stamina items to keep it up, which works pretty well especially if you are using pyro or magic to keep your stamina out of the picture.

I think at this point I've killed Manus with summons, by myself, and (mostly) as a summon dozens upon dozens of times. He's a tough one to narrow down the timing for magic, and I would really consider going with a fire or moonlight weapon because unlike pyro you don't have the relative safety of proximity. Medium range is where he is deadliest.

It is remarkably effective at normal +15. I obliterated the dino bottoms in Lost Izalith just because it was so easy to do so with the hawk ring and the binos. Also, used it as my only damage source for the Centipede demon while it flailed away at Solaire, and at the time I went to Queelag it was doing more damage per hit than a comparable normally upgraded club.
Lightning bolts work great on it as is. I'm doing a lightning version just to see, but I don't expect it to be all that different.

Two brave adventurers set off to find out how long Gwyndolin's hallway in the boss fight really is. And then they beat him to death with their fists, because that's what you do.



Other things that I'd thought might be possible but never pulled off


Time to reevaluate whips

Woah. That's really cool. What's more, the stat requirements put it within reach of 3 SL1 characters.

Man... now I'm seriously tempted to try a SL1 run with a whip wielding wanderer. It would mean I would have to finally *find* the whip, though. It's in the part of Blightown I'm not familiar with: the front entrance part.

Why not fire?

Also, another gear question: could the Tower/Caduceus Kite Shields be a good alternative to the Balder Shield? Only three less stability at +15, better defenses, and it weighs a pound less. Also you can get it to only one less stability if you take it to Crystal +3, which should actually not be so bad since you can just buy them and keep replacements handy. I have no idea how often you'd have to replace a crystal shield though.

Also also, would an SL1 thread be too much? We have at least four people doing it concurrently and it is definitely fodder for its own conversation.

I've done this (after a lot of tries, it is not too easy), but unfortunately you can't shoot and kill him before jumping down. Or at least not with whatever spells I tried, not sure about a bow.

Grrr, fucking stray demon! Of all pictures to post today (or at least for me to read today). I was doing Blighttown form the Depths on down for the first time since my first character. Get to the bonfire at the bottom and remember that that rusty ring is good to have. Hike up and over to the asylum and get it. Take the time to kill the black knights, too. The one by the peculiar doll drops me a sword (this is my STR character). I was only one DEX away from using it, so I popped a nameless soul, upgraded, then found I had two twinkling titaninte to upgraded that, so I popped more souls and figured to take a stab at good old stray. Got him down to two ticks on his health bar, two ticks! One more stab and he would have been dead, but I totally screwed it up (full, health for me, too non the less). Suffice to say when I went to bed he was still alive. DARK SOULS.

Yes, please. It wouldn't be as active as some others obviously but there are probably ten or twelve ongoing threads to be had.

I'm making a SL1/starting builds thread right meow.

I'm not going to say I don't like this, but I'm curious as to the why.

So I've done a little farming on the faith character to build up a lightning bow and also upgrade the antiquated dress to +5 (I'll do the whole set for Seath of course; realzied I lacked the cursebite and hadn't actually done 4k so they'll be next). Across my 3 characters, I find that lacking good ranged oompf is occasionally problematic on the fighter, especially with some bosses (whom I am used to blasting to death); his Lightning bow is +5 actually in part to help compensate. Still not sure what I'll do with him long term; probably build towards BK weapons as I'll get them eventually.

But he's the character the has the least problem "advancing" through areas, owing to his much higher end at earlier parts of the game and also to his much higher vit at earlier parts of the game. And the fact that the Zwei owns. If the sorceress is not holding back she engages in all sorts of name taking, but sometimes you need to save spells for a boss at which point she's not as effective (she's pretty good mind; Moonlight GS up to +4). I definitely miss the Zwei's wompiness, which I've gotten a lot more accustomed too. But I'll have a harder time against artorias and maybe the Sanctuary Guardian with the Fighter, I suspect. And I guess he'll have to use a bow on the centapede?

Actually had something odd happen versus him with the Faith character. I apprently lopped off an appendage and got the ring early. I then learned that, yes, if you stand in front of him when he closes to melee bad things can happen. But I used the ring to run to that area over to the right. I see it's not too hard to get there without the ring so I guess I'll do that next. I find it hard to tell if I'm in "front" of him, though, so I'm a bit nervous for the fighter's prospects.

You can't upgrade arrows AFAIK; bows upgrade just like anything else. Though thinking about it I've never noticed whether or not you can move over to the ammo tab on the reinforce screen.

There are no lightning arrows, although fire arrows are a thing and they are fantastic if you have spare souls. Likewise, lightning bolts (but not fire) are available for crossbows, and they will do considerable elemental damage depending on your target. People like synchronizing weapon to ammo in order reduce the amount that you are spreading out damage across resistance types. For SL1, it seems to me that +15 is always a good basic answer and you can swap ammo to taste.

I think in general the best cost-benefit for daily stuff is with the regular arrows and bolts on a good bow, but lightning and fire can beespecially handy in NG+ and in PvP where speed counts for a lot and souls don't. Ammo cannot be upgraded.

Your answer lies within.

Ah, that makes sense. I actually already did upgrade one of them to Fire +5 but I guess I just won't go any higher than that. I have more Light Crossbows than there are viable upgrade paths anyway, so no great loss.