Just took a half dozen or so stabs at Gwyn. He moves so fast that I can't drink any estus without getting re-clobbered. Frustrating. The only way I can has some estus is to try and put a pillar between us to block him, and even then it fells 50/50 if I can get enough time. I ended up trying a few different shields and since he's all flaming sword and what not I decided to upgrade my Tower shield to +14. This gives me 90% fire block (seeing as how I take damage no matter what from Gwyn) and stability in the 80s. Tried different weapons, too. Default BKH +5 feels slow and too close. Fire Zweui+10 is too slow, though it did marginally more damage. Last time I tried the halberd +15 with charcoal resin. Longer reach and faster speed feels like a winner. Damage wasn't as good as the others, but I got more hits in so it's a winner. Funny enough I think it did more damage when the resin wore off. Got Gwyn down to about 25% when I got it during an estus drink. Football time, so I quit there. ETA, no idea why Solaire's summoning sign ins't showing up. I swear I did everything to save him.
Ok, so the green titanite/leech drops are definitely in full effect. 2 runs = 20 green and 6 large. I can definitely live with that.
What's the best way to deal with the poison rats in the Undead Burg, just after walking below the bridge with the dragon? I end up using most of my healing spells and items before even getting anywhere.
Try to get their attention one at a time and draw them out, then hit with something that will kill them in one blow, before they get a chance to attack. If I got poisoned by them, I usually ended up going back to the bonfire and trying again.
If you have a bow you can shoot two of them from underneath the bridge if you find the right angles. Then you can dispatch them one by one. If you don't have a bow, get one.
No, bows are the only weapon you can zoom in and aim with. There's supposedly a neat trick you can pull with crossbows and binoculars but I'm not sure that's feasible for that kind of shot.
Yes, it is preferable to get up to short bow for ease of use in terms of dex, but the light crossbow is a fantastic weapon and pairing it with binos works fine once you realize that reticles are misleading anyway relative to screen orientation. It just takes a bit of practice but the trajectory is flat and the range excellent, as is the damage for low dex builds. Much like the gargoyle halberd, the crossbow is not a weapon that you need good stats in order to get good damage out of, and it's just fast enough to be viable in most boss combats when push comes to shove. As for rats, they have an extraordinarily irregular attack pattern if you let them get going. I strongly recommend sprint attacking or using a big 2h or R2 attack to close the distance quickly and kill before retreating to deal with the next one. Once you get that armor upgraded and a higher stability shield, your margin of error will shoot up and you can figure out their patterns at your leisure.
Those rats can be really annoying. There were a few times that I lured them out and they just stupidly clambered off the cliff. You can also sometimes kick them off, but that can be hit or miss. I pretty consistently just get the first one out, kill it, lure the next one, kill it, then run back in to take out the third. I'm guessing you found the shortcut there. Pretty amusing to run up the stairs there onto the bridge, turn around and head back down, picking up 555 souls from dragon fire kills.
Skip them. Stand at the top of the stairs where you come up from the bonfire to the middle of the bridge with the dragon. Wait. The dragon will jump up to come land near you; as soon as he leaves his perch, sprint towards the open gate he was sitting on. Once there you can pull a lever (there's also a bonfire), and congratulations, you never have to see the rats.
You can actually still use a bow to pull things, even if you don't have the dexterity to use it effectively. You just won't do any appreciable damage with the arrow.
However, the knocking-on-ass effect of the Dragonslayer Bow on small to medium targets remains in effect, I believe, even if it does no significant damage. I'm not sure if that's true if you lack both dexterity and str or just the latter.
I actually find the thing about the reticle very neat and really well done. The various bows are not just the exact same weapon with a small variation in damage. A short bow needs to be aimed quite a bit to the left of a target, meaning that for firing shots at max range you're aiming at the targets ca 10 o'clock high. Get to the longbow and it's a bit more accurate, but you still need to aim a bit to the left. Then you get the Black Bow (and the dex to match) and you are all of a sudden hitting where you're aiming. I've one character with Black Bow +10, the bow ring (uh, Hornet?) and really high dex and man, I'm dropping targets that are but vague blurs in the distance with that. I also use the bow to aim my Lightning Spears, works great.
Having this thread outside of the Dark Souls forum is confusing. So I decided to do something about that demon behind blacksmith Andre, since I wanted to know what he was hiding. It only took two tries, and of I went to explore. At least a forest would make a nice change of scenery, right? First I got eaten by a plant. Fair enough, you die, you learn. Then I fell off a cliff. It's a bit dark there! I found a shiny door I couldn't open. I got eaten by 3 plants. No worries, back to the forest I went. Getting a bit further, I found a statue lying down. It got up and killed me. I should have seen that coming. Let's try a different way, a small path leading down. I found some pretty armor, a better bow. Defeated a Black Knight without dying (take that, Dark Souls!) Found a new camp fire, and a shortcut to Valley of the Drakes. Quickly returned to the Garden again, it looked dangerous there. A bit furher on I saw a light in the distance, a castle. On investigation I found a door with a warm, inviting light so I opened it. Some dude with a big club promptly killed me of course. But my souls and humanity were left behind, so back I went. I was able to retrieve my precious souls without getting the attention of the dude with the club. However, 3 steps later I got killed by a shiny golem type thing. Stubborn as I am, I went back, retrieved my souls (again) without aggroing any golems, went back to blacksmith Andre and called it a night. I got some nice loot out of it though, including a blue titanite and plenty of moss, so it's all good.
FYI Mirriam, just left of the shiny door is a wall. If you attack that wall, you will destroy it to reveal another bonfire.
So. Duke's Archives. I thought "my, that was a pretty short bit to get to the boss, wasn't it? I should probably try to get behind him ... what the" DARK SOULS. OTOH, I killed Stray Demon and am now the proud owner of a +15 Uchigatana. It killed Sif pretty easily. Possibly the first fight I didn't want to win, really. I'm such a softie.
My first time meeting Sif he owned me, a lot. Enough that I quit it and came back to him later so I wasn't really sad to see him go. Then yesterday in NG+ I was turtle-ing him with Havel's shield and got him down to a few ticks on the health bar and for the first time saw his limp, his feeble limp. Man.
When I fought Sif the first time, he was about to kill me with an overhead slash while i was doing a double drank, but then he stopped mid animation for no reason. Just because he diddn't want to kill an enemy who was healing. When he was limping later in the fight I was completely floored,and looked for a way to exit the arena for like 5 minutes. He should be a sunbro ;(
Yes, and the M fight was really fun to do in full artorias armor! He totally saved everyone.[whoops] Right now I have just gotten back into dark souls doing a high strength build and invading people in blighttown(until I run out of my 16 cracked eye orbs) with a +5 zwei. A lot of people try and kill me by making me run across the thin walkways, and then are frozen in terror when I do it with such ease that they let me kick them off :P EDIT: How is dark magic in pvp nowadays, I havent done a lot of high level pvp except for that bit with frank, and I assume level ~100 at the kiln and ~120 at NG+ are still valid pvp areas.
I ask because Dark magic is still a pain in the nuts. The crest shield, the silver locket, and running/rolling with creative use of stairs and obstacles remain the main way to deal with it. I try to make sure I can take one hit with it resist-wise, and then I bust out Avelyn because fuck you it's faster than your shitty casts and will punish you for standing still. As far as I'm concerned it's not an issue of fairness, but rest assured I will stop at nothing to completely humiliate the opponent's mangled corpse if I survive their filthy magic. Like, I wish there was a "Deez Nuts" carving. Not sure what you mean by NG+ since PvP goes across NG status and is only linked to level afaic think of. The best areas I've seen for PvP are the burg/parish for low level gear (ie nothing above +5, keep a pyro flame/elemental weapon on hand to torch the gankers) if you want honest melee through level 30ish or so, and then Oolacile township is usually rotten with level 90+/-30 opponents. I don't really like the tourney structure stuff so I don't do that. I haven't done PvP in the kiln since I moved off the xbox, really, and the few times I've made a run at Gwyn on PC have been either low level or hollow so not really useful data. Anor Londo is always a good place to invade, but frankly I don't really want to mess with people there because I've offed a few THANK GOD I JUST MADE IT PAST THOSE FUCKING ARCHERS OH NO YOU ASSHOLE WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYs and it's kind of an uncomfortable mid space in how to gear yourself appropriately.
Had some serious trouble getting Dark Souls to work with Windows 8 and didn't have time to read the entire thread but here is what I did to fix it: Installed Dark Souls on Steam and ran it and let it do all it's install stuff. Uninstalled GFWL and Marketplace. Installed the latest GFWL from Microsoft's website. Installed DSFix 2.0.1 (whatever the latest is) and set my parameters (just resolution to start). Verified the integrity of the Dark Souls cache (it replaced one file). Restarted Dark Souls from Steam and immediately canceled the extra install crap. Ran Dark Souls and it ran fine. Got invaded and killed by some guy with uber gear like 2 minutes into Undead Burg.
You're doing great, and thanks for the Win 8 info (I'm glad it's not a separate patch at least). It might be useful to know that after being killed in PvP you have ten minutes where you are incapable of being invaded. Quitting at that particular point is probably when you have your best shot at summoning someone to even the odds and maybe help you take out the black knight and Havel since they are somewhat daunting at low levels and the rewards are pretty great. Anyway, I'm glad you got it to run and I hope you get to give it another try. I got invaded five or six times last night in undead burg/parish when I was trying out a new character, and only one was a filthy ganker. The rest were exceptionally civilized combatants just looking for where the people were, and all but one even dropped gifts and allowed me to clear out AI enemies before engaging.I'm going to go ahead and say that swapping to the jagged ghost blade at the last minute caught almost all of them by surprise, and that's something that never would have occurred to me except someone here pointed it out as a great low level weapon.
I played a decent amount of this on Xbox back when it was out there but never finished, figured I would grab it on the cheap and see about getting it finished on my mostly new PC. Thanks for the tip on the jagged ghost blade I will have to find it.
Oh, there are more efficient tips than that, I just mention it because no one sees it coming in pvp and it has a great r2 for building up bleed effects. Point was just that just a little variety can rock faces in PvP since they are mostly expecting people with nothing up their sleeves. That won't help you against most bonafide gankers, but it's at least a start. Since it's really light you can keep it equipped and swap to it at the right moment. For straight PvE you are nearly at the main blacksmith of the game and that's going to open a lot of doors, and if you have the master key it might be a good time to use the undead parish shortcut to go to the firelink, then new londo briefly and up the elevator to the valley of the drakes. The dragon crest shield there is really handy in the early going.
Yeah, I had the drake sword and was already at the blacksmith at the time of that last post. Need to go grab that dragon crest shield though. I am going pretty tanky I think (half weight setup but running Havels ring and the ring you get from killing the guy down below the bonfire at firelink).
Lots of Demon's Souls in there: Flamelurker, Fool's Idol, Adjudicator, Penetrator, Maneater...it's a mix of both titles.
Really? Cause I'm pretty sure I can name every single one and I've never played Demon's Souls. So that's interesting.
Well, for one the Vanguard is there, along with that son of a bitch Flamelurker and the Adjudicator. From regular enemies you have the Mind Flayer and a couple of others. I'm curious who you see them as.
A few of them might be able to be misidentified at a glance (lance guy looks kind of like the Iron Golem) but who on Earth would you identify the guy with the enormous tongue as?
Enormous tongue was the one I couldn't place but I haven't finished the game or the DLC either, thought he might be in that. Yeah, I thought they gave Iron Golem the wrong weapon. Also, guy on fire behind Capra could maybe be Ceaseless. I thought. Alright, here we go: Blind Witch of Izalith, Moonlight Butterfly, Iron Golem, Ceaseless, The Crow, Priscilla, Beatrice, Stray Demon, Frampt, Chimera (Guardian DLC something), Exploding Skulls, Here's one I dunno. Alvina, Crystal Golem, Pinwheel, Snake Warrior, Giant Skeleton, Capra, Little Shroom and Big Shroom, Sif, Siegmund, Amazing Chest, Tongue dude, Quelaag, Law Firm.
Demon Souls= Maiden in Black, Flying Bearbug, Mind Flayer,Tower Knight,lizard, Flame Lurker, Vanguard,Storm Beast,Maneater, Abdjudicator,Fools Idol, the witch could be from Both games.
