Dark Souls

I steamrollered through him the first time I encountered him but for some reason on NG+ he was a different kettle of fish; blasting through about half my health bar - despite loading up on fire defence and blocking with my sturdiest shield, and I was having no luck rolling clear of those tentacles either. Luckily he is also susceptible to patient arrowing from range, which is one reason I always make sure to keep a large, 300+ stock, of whatever is my current arrow of choice.

I've got as far as the Law firm on NG+ but have been hanging back from engaging while I enjoy the easy soul pickings from the nearby sentinels and silver knights and exchange aforementioned pickings for upgrades.

It's an exciting time in the life of someone who wants them souls. Do you hang out and kill the enemies for 5k apiece, or do you take on the boss for 190k all at once?

Did you guys know that the royal sentinels can stab you through the fog door? I got murdered by them during one of my solo attempts in NG++.

I think this happened to me once. I very rarely start the fight without killing them first but I've gotten into the habit of moving forward and to the left, away from the fog door, as soon as the fight starts.

Abbott & Costello.

I AM FAMILIAR WITH THIS.

Also, clams at Seath's gate.

Also, Bert & Ernie.

I got back into playing after taking a couple months off of being stuck at S&O. I wasn't really having any more luck defeating them so I decided to hop into the Painted World, which was a nice distraction. Since I had a bunch of souls saved up from that I started upgrading my equipment then spent a little while grinding more souls to do a bit more upgrading. What really helped was finally finding the bonfire underneath the hall with the Painted World entrance (DARK SOULS!), so that I could just run back to S&O without having to kill anything. I also decided not to rely on summoning Solaire to make running back to them faster. Getting back to them faster turned out to not be a big deal, since after upgrading my gear I only died two more times before beating Super Fatty. Multiple fist pumps were performed.

"Ornstein".

FWIW, I believe the faster way to the Law Firm is from the obvious bonfire near them, jumping over the railing on the spiral staircase to shortcut most of the run. It takes a little bit of practice to pull off the jump consistently, but once you get it you can quickly and safely make it to them while only fighting the one silver knight at the bottom of the spiral stairs. (You can probably skip him, but that leads to having a bad time if you flub the railing jump so I found it easier to quickly backstab him and move on.) It helps if you drop a message to yourself on the stairs indicating where to jump once you figure it out.

Yeah, it felt to me like the central Anor Londo was the obvious way to go as well, but then someone mentioned the one where Solaire hangs out off to the side (that I didn't even consider at first) and it turns out they're right. Manipulating the staircase to get aligned saps most of any time gained by going in a straight line. In addition, the run is long, the stairs are long, and you're running the entire length of the cathedral - it adds up.

I've always figured that the one with Solaire is the one to use, and that's the one that seems to have all the summon signs anyway. I only used a different one once, on my SL1 run, and then I used the one with the firekeeper. It never occurred to me to use Gwyndolin's.

Using Gwyndolin's was one of those bad habits that I got into. My very first time through Anor Londo was a giant suckfest with the Silver Knights such that Sentinels, royal or otherwise, was preferably to the Knights. Of course now I can stab those stupid knights in the face till dawn but I didn't change that dirty habit till co-op with Charles and he was all, 'LOLWTF RU DOING THERE?!?'

Yea, I was pretty disappointed that Charles talked like that, too.

Cool, I didn't know about the shortcut with the spiral staircase. I mainly stopped using the bonfire with Solaire because I got bored of going the same way and I was able to do the run without stopping. With a +10 Zweihander the Silver Knights were not a problem, since two overhead chops took them down (please ignore all the times I did something dumb and got killed by one of them). I might have gone back to Solaire's bonfire if I had taken more tries to finish off S&O, since the spinny stair-evator did take a while.

This is what I did last time. In fact, both me and my summon did, so I wager it's not so uncommon.

Playing this on the PS3, and it's just not the same with the PSN outage. I really miss the tension of knowing I might be invaded at any time.

Funny how that works out; I'm in Anor Londo now on my main and the Silver Knights are - from my perspective - cake. They're like Black Knights--, which means a couple of backstabs takes care of them. Seriously I'm like a Terminator when it comes to dealing with them. On the other hand, while I can deal with Sentinels solo with no problem, as soon as I'm dealing with two of them I'm in trouble. They hit hard enough to where I can't rely on my shield if two of them are smacking me, and I find their attacks have enough range to make separating them somewhat problematic.

Finally my tale of Gwyn from last Thursday now that I am back at a computer proper (I'll keep it short).

50 INT, Crown of Dusk, Bellowing ring, red tearstone ring (along with < 20% health), Logan's catalyst and flash sweat active (a damn near practicality to withstand some blows and not die), silver knight shield along with fire resist gear. The tough thing for me with Gwyn is getting time to cast stuff. In the initial standoff there is enough time to cast a HCSM which did 45% damage (!). I was able to maneuver around to get another HCSM casted, which landed, then all it took was a single solitary poke from my enchanted +5 halberd to finish him off. Yikes! I am now a fan of this red tearstone ring.

I am curious, though, as to what could be accomplished with the TCC and power within casting crystal soul spear with the above setup. Possible to literally one shot Gwyn? Of course the red tearstone ring and power within will be in opposition and my VIT isn't nearly high enough to sustain it for more than one cast (and without flash sweat wouldn't be able to take one shot anyway), but I feel like I want to try. Hopefully DSFix has a save backed up so I can try this.

Oh, funny enough my original plan to get <20% health was to use the eagle shield against the knights, but I found that too slow, so I took a blow and it was good. But I forgot to swap the shield and on the next knight I died. Dark Souls.

I kind of doubt it. NG Gwyn has 4250 hit points, and with those buffs you're looking at +110% damage (I believe that's how they stack*), so your natural CSS would have to push around 2k damage at him. That seems really high. I do wonder though if this would be doable with Pursuers, Manus Catalyst, and high-ish strength? It should definitely be possible with Dark Bead but it's probably pretty hard to land max damage on him with that.

*If I'm wrong about this part, the odds of this working go up significantly.

What really surprised me was how much damage the HCSM did. My experience has been they do less than CSS, so to see them do ~45% was astonishing. Throw power within onto that equation and I feel it'll come really close to doing the job. I don't think I have the VIT to wait to cast dark bead. If I have that save handy I'll try it though, for science!

Also, I can't find confirmation either way about how those percentage-of-damage buffs stack. This might need testing.

Lizard_King can you explain this backup stuff? How do you decipher which is which and where do you restore it to?

I think I figured out the mystery of the DS save backup. Unfortunately I was playing an alt and overwrote anything pre-Gwyn with my sorcerer. Science will have to wait.

Who is the guy who appears on the stairs and attacks you in New Londo just before the first bridge into ghost town? I feel like I should be able to figure that one out, but I'm blanking.

Also, I spent what felt like an hour (but was actually maybe half) trying to figure out how to open the contraption in The Painted World. I eventually had to check a guide to see that there was a wheel in the basement that I'd apparently missed. That was a big waste of time, but I did go up a few levels from it.

That would be the Crestfallen Knight, aka the guy you first meet in Firelink. He gets ticked off by Frampt's snoring (and smell) and goes off, disgusted. Unfortunately it doesn't work out very well for him.

Most things don't, because DARK SOULS.

I think I missed that in the Painted World too. There was one turn that I never took in the very first building, naturally.

There is only one save file that includes all of your characters in their last played state.All of the .bak files underneath that latest save file are just time interval (which you can set down to a certain minimum in the dsfix ini) copy pastes of that same file.

The way you sort them is by using the last time altered/created in details view, which tells you the last moment they were saved. Because DS saves frequently, you can (in windowed mode) simply see if the time matches your time and ctrl c the current file (ie the one without the .bak suffix and the numbers) before ctrl v'ing it in a separate folder and doing a Bubba Watch This kind of thing. I find that faster than using the save backup if it's something that I know I'm going to die a bunch of times.

My next build is going to go with elemental weapons. I'm thinking lightning large club and fire flamberge. Something different as I've not used either, and I figure the lower output of the flamberge can be offset with some bleed. I don't want to pump STR too much as I want to avoid using STR scaling weapons. I figure I'd load up on END (poise) and VIT and try to eat some hits as it's not a play style I've done before. Maybe even 2H the weapons and not turtle with shields so much (and lower my STR reqs). Thoughts?

End/vit + elemental weapons and pyro glove used to make the game ridiculously easy. I think they've been nerfed a bit since back in the good old days, but it should still be totally viable.

End/Vit + elemental is still very effective in PvP, but noticeably less so in PvE than it used to be. If you haven't done it lately, it's quite different especially in the DLC areas where scaled damage is king. So expect to supplement it with pyro a lot more than you would have had to before. I would be surprised if access to shields didn't have you getting more points in strength and access to bows in dex than you might otherwise be anticipating, but that's just because I tend to want a lot of options in such a build.
I find bleed on slow weapons/high stamina weapons like the flamberge to be a laughable proposition, but that's just me. 2h is not all that efficient on account of most of the damage boost from 2h coming from the scaled damage addition, iirc, and it's mainly if you like the moveset.
That said, given that SL1 builds are like yours without any of the advantages, the pyro/elemental path is still plenty effective, especially if you really get to know the advantages of a weapon class (like the poise damage of clubs in 2h).

If you're going to be 2-handing things (i.e. foregoing shield), I would recommend faster rather than heavier weapons. You want to stay manueverable, and the commit-time of larger weapons means a large reduction in that.

If you're doing elemental you won't be doing much of either STR or DEX. Have you considered going a Faith route for some magical support?

VIT's pretty great for me. It took me from frustration on Seath and 4K to ... well, not frustration and victory, and that was just going from 14 to 22.

I've already played a full on faith character. Elemental VIT/END isn't something that I've play before and am looking to mix it up. My other option is a full on DEX build, but this alt is past that a little bit already.

about the one hit kill thing. A guy on youtube, by the name of "vageta311" (yeah, I know. Hey, you listen to "EpicNameBro" so don't complain) put up a series of videos of him one-shotting (yes, one attack only) all the bosses and minibosses in the game. not only that, he devised a (WAAAY overcomplicated) challenge system so that he ended up doing at reeeeeally low level. First video is below. BEar in mind that almost the whole first video is him setting up his character while overexplaining the challenge system, but it does pick up.

Vageta is an excellent source of information, and I've posted his videos in the past because he does great stuff.

His parrying guide taught me to parry. +1 Do like.

This is some food for thought. Maybe go smaller/faster with relatively low STR/DEX requirements which would make me try new and interesting (to me) weapons.

Since green shards are so easily available you can make anything into basic fire quickly and then test them out side by side. The key is to break out of the traditional "conservative" fighting stances and really take advantage of your stamina for combos and rolling and R2 attacks, and see what sticks.

Wow, meeting up with the second serpent fills in a lot of the story.

Fought Capra Demon to get to the depths for the large ember. I walked in there only with an un-upgraded dragon crest shield. Stood at the door withstood the attack, but lost 1/2 health, staggered, camera went to shit and died. Second time ran around Capra's initial double over heard, up the stairs, killed a dog. The other dog ended up getting hung up on the columns somewhere. From there it wasn't bad. Double chops did some damage, but being cool and collected was worth as much as a high stability shield.

I probably over did some STR (19) prior to making the decision above to go small. As it was I picked up the reinforced club and Uchigatana. Dunno if I'm a fan of the Uchigatana, but that 'humble' reinforced club sure is something. Got it to +3 (maybe +4) and was 2HR2 one shotting the stone giants in Darkroot. Used a green herb and dragon crest shield to 2HR1 (mostly) stunlock the non-respawning bastard in there. I mostly needed the green herb to successfully stunlock them with my relatively small END so far. So, I didn't do well clearing it out/farming it. I don't know if I'm going to make that club into a fire or lightning weapon. Maybe make two!'

Figured I'll make the gargoyle halberd into a divine weapon for the Catacombs and go down there post Quelaag (once I get a few green shards for both).