Bummer. Maybe you moved on without seeing it and it disappeared when you died? Looks like someone's bound for the Magic Warrior Round Shield.
Oh since someone asked: here are my stats Vit: 11 (I just raised it!) Attunement: 12 Endurance: 26 Str: 16 Dex 15 (I originally raised these two to use, uhh, I think it was the winged spear and drake sword) Resistance 12 Intelligence 10 Faith 8 I guess at this point since I am in love with my gargoyle halberd, I should turn it into a lightning weapon while cranking END/Vit?
Sounds like a plan, although I would probably advise fire over lightning at this point. Although you can (and probably should) make that one one and another one the other.
And regarding the Crest shield: does it disappear if you die or anything? I just went back there, and it's definitely not lying around. The nearby Black Knight dropped me fairly soon after I killed that dude; maybe that's why I can't find it? edit: NM, I found it! It's hidden nearby!
See, players always blaming the game. I know, I've done it. That said if you do die dropped items will disappear. I've lost two notable items that way.
What happened was I fought him out in the hallway, didn't notice that hole in the wall where I came out from at the beginning of the game... For whatever reason, the shield was in there.
If you can get ahold of a bandit knife, the Stray Demon fight becomes trivial. There are two ways to get it: 1) Start the game as a thief 2) Kill the thieves in lower undead burg until one of them drops it. It has a fairly low drop rate. With the bandit knife, every 3 swipes applies the bleed effect to the Stray Demon. Because it swings so fast, it's really easy to get all 3 swipes in after a butt slam. Actually, there are lots of openings where it's easy to get in 3 swipes. But the butt slam is the most clearly telegraphed one. Anyways, do that 8 or 9 times and he dies.
When you kill him, the shield drops wherever you killed him. However, if you die or reload "perma" drops like this one (or, for instance, the Pharis gear) will reset to the starting position of the npc in question.
More of the hard stuff is weak to fire than lightning. It isn't really that big a difference in the original content but the new content is pretty heavily stacked against lightning. Also lightning uses up the same materials as normal which sucks, but that may not matter to you. If you aren't doing scaling you should probably just make one of both, but of the two I think fire is preferable. And oh yeah, you can go do it right now if you want to.
Yeah he's in The Catacombs. If it's too tough for you in there though, don't worry, it's ok to do it later on.
Not too tough! Took several deaths, but that was mostly while I hunted down the necromancers. I've replaced my +10 Gargoyle's Halberd with a +5 Fire Gargoyle's Halberd. Mostly it seems the same; I assume I'll notice the difference when I run into stuff that's either resistant to physical damage and/or vulnerable to fire?
It should just be dealing more damage. Edit: specifically you had 292 AR before and the wiki says you should have 430 now, although I don't know if that is taking the patch into account or not.
That's kind of why I say the gargoyle halberd is best left as a normal or divine weapon; its base damage is good enough that unless you have a full set of them you're better off using a weapon you would normally never have the stats to get the most of. Sure, before the game was patched both lightning and fire were just plain better, but now that's no longer the case it's more of a mixed bag.
I don't understand... high base damage usually makes a weapon a good candidate for elementalizing. Can you elaborate? Also, I really wish somebody would update the wikis. It’s really frustrating not knowing how much damage things are supposed to do.
Let me try again. On low-level characters, assuming one gargoyle halberd, I use that halberd for a divine weapon, since I'll need it to clear the catacombs and Nito painlessly and it holds up well in NG+ regardless of your stats. If I have an additional one, I would keep it normal for enemies that benefit greatly from straight physical damage or are lightning vulnerable but I lack a lightning weapon. I prefer to use fire or lightning for weapons that either do max tier damage (and I won't have the stats to operate fully as a normal weapon) like the zwei, or for weapons where I again won't have the stats to get the most out of them as normal upgrades but I'll really appreciate the moveset and maybe trigger bleed with them or something like the aforementioned bandit's knife or the painting guardian sword. As an aside, thanks to my sl1 playthrough, I am never going without a reinforced club again (although +5 or 10 normal suffices if it's not your main damage dealer) because four pounds of weight to get max or near max level stagger with the 2h r1 is money in the bank, so that's probably going to turn into an "I don't know what to do" side item for elemental upgrades. And (I know you're going to love this) I have yet to experiment much with fire/lightning bows and crossbows, but I've heard good things even beyond the Avelyn.
Ah, I think I see what you're saying. Not so much that normal is better than elemental for the GH as that the GH is better at being normal than other things with lowish stat requirements, right? In that case it does make sense, though I wouldn't say that either thing is right or wrong (not that you did). Yeah, one of the really cool things about SL1 is how much good equipment it exposes. Both the Reinforced Club and the kite shields are options I'll be considering for almost every character I make from now on, and I only found out how good they are from "having" to use them. What I found out in SL1 is that both fire and lightning crossbows are worthwhile, because lightning bolts add surprisingly little damage to what you can get out of heavy and sniper bolts. Normal is actually the one I never got to a high level, but at equivalent medium levels both elemental kinds did out damage normal. Presumably normal would beat either one on enemies resistant to that element, but in theory carrying both elements should ensure that you always or almost always can do better than normal.
I actually had the opportunity to get a +15 light crossbow and it served me pretty well throughout (and indeed was my first fully upgraded weapon since it's much easier to get early for my patterns). It proved pivotal (at +10 and then at +15) in Queelag and the Centipede Demon, and again with the Sanctuary Guardian. So I guess I got a lot of bang for the buck, although in a theoretical sense I'm sure lightning/lightning/fire would have been optimal. I did max Fire and Lightning on the clubs, eventually, and a hand axe at +9 is my backup choice for when I need/can get away with a quicker weapon or a lighter partner for the light crossbow. And, of course, I mentioned before how much I was enjoying the jagged ghost blade as a bleed weapon and the raw club ( in lower level areas) as an invasion weapon that is neither OP nor handing the other guy a victory.
Well like I said; I've got it at +5 and in terms of killing stuff; it's about the same as a +10 normal Gargoyle. The damage numbers seem a bit higher. Is there an explanation on how damage actually works in this game? Like e.g., the +10 normal Gargoyle Halberd was rated at 230 physical damage. The +5 Fire is 218 physical, 218 fire. That seems like its should be much more, nearly double, but uhh it's not. At least not against the skeletons on the way out of the Catacombs it wasn't.
Each damage type is affected by its respective type of resistance, so where a phys weapon has phys resistance cutting it, a fire weapon has its damage split across two resistance types. So typically fire and lightning are only good bets by my reckoning for a character where the phys damage rating of the elemental is higher than you would get with the straight physical, or for particularly vulnerable enemies, which does happen with the two categories I described above. Even then, I tend to opt for pyro where timing makes it possible on fire-vulnerable boss fights because I like cutting down the number of hits and I like not using stamina. There are exceptions, of course, as I find the moveset and range on something like a washing pole to be fantastic with a min stat build that makes it maxed fire or lightning, and uchigatanas are always versatile for neither quite dex or str or high base damage weapons. The skeletons are a case in point for how it's not always a smooth curve with resistances, as the difference between how +6 treats them and +5 is pretty substantial iirc.
Gotcha. So bottom line: when a weapon's statline says, e.g., 218 physical, 218 fire, what it really means is 218 total split between physical and fire?
To be clear, I think it's two separate amounts of damage, but both are affected by their own resistance categories; yours could be an accurate description of the average impression made by the weapon across all enemies. And perhaps you can carve up a model that accurately places what the numbers in the resistance columns mean relative to what is actually done in specific terms, as I'm pretty sure there's a Nobel Prize in it somewhere.
Well, to be fair, I just swung it at skeletons and nothing but, and my impression was I'm doing about the same damage. Maybe they're all very fire resistant! edit: testing it on some of the starter enemies up the stairs toward the Undead Burg... It's definitely doing more damage, and what's more the damage seems rather highly variable. E.g., whereas I used to hit from about 180-220, now I'm seeing hits anywhere from 180-400+, averaging around 340. Interesting! I wonder if there's not some weird probability model incorporated into resistance; it's pretty clearly not a linear thing.
Not a weird probability model in the sense you are thinking. It's just that there's a sub category of critical hit (think of it as the interrupt or stagger hit), modeled most cleanly in the Leo Ring's function that ENB describes in detail in the third video on that page, that give you a slight boost to damage. That's where elementals get interesting: for critical hits, especially in parries and backstabs, the straight damage boost (usually +100%) can sometimes put both damage types into pretty high levels. Since backstabbing and parries make you safer thanks to invulnerability frames and give you a slight bonus to souls, there's no reason not to go to town.
Well, all of this was on normal hits. I'm definitely hitting harder, but there's also definitely a lot more variance in my damage numbers. I guess "special" hits like staggers and whatnot might account for that.
No it's 218 of each, but they both get reduced by defenses. In general a weapon that deals two types of damage will hit about as hard as one that deals 3/4 that amount in a single type. Also you didn't take scaling into account from your normal one, and so it's closer than that. It was 292 before. You should still be doing more damage in general but not the ton more you thought. Also, the reason for the variance is that non-physical defense will vary a lot. On an enemy with no fire defense at all you'll deal a ton of damage, on one with higher fire defense you'll do less.
The variance was against the same enemies (or at least I assume they're the same, maybe they do have different resists). Either way, we'll see how going back into Blighttown feels! Speaking of: I was thinking last night about how much things have changed for me over 20 hours of Dark Souls. Those early hours where I was barely able to move through the Burg because I was chugging Estus flasks like candy are way behind me; even in Blighttown I'm generally not taking much damage (though fuck those dart throwing poison guys!) The game has a great sense of progression built into it.
Enemies will take more or less damage depending on when you hit them. For example during my 4k run in NG+ I was doing ~330 damage to an enemy in a 'normal' hit. If I got them right after their attack or if they hit my shield and staggered I could do >400. This was 1H with the BKH.
Did my first white soapstone, be summoned to someone else's game last night. That was fun. I hadn't tried it until now, but helped some guy take down the Gargoyles, which went quickly and was a ton of fun. I'm going to have to buy more of those things and help others out. It's a rewarding break from avoiding having to fight the Capra Demon (which I spent 2 hours last night doing), but now that will most likely be my next step. I also managed to take out another two black knights which was frustrating but fun as well.
I've found the most reliable way to take down Black Knights is backstabs. That's often easier said than done; the game likes to stick them in narrow corridors. They'll follow you a pretty long way though, so you can lure them out into an open arena and do your work. You can also try parry-riposte if you're feeling saucy, but uhh it's risky!
I ended up doing the parry-riposte with the first one in the Undead Asylum that was close to the bonfire. Made it easy to fail and get right back up and try again. The second one I took out was the one on the cliffs of Darkroot Basin. He fell a bit down by the ring and I was able to get below him on the slope, so most of his swings went over my head and made just slicing away at him much easier. So I've been getting much more used to the move set of the Zweihander (+5 now, and needing to find the larger titanite shards or whatever to continue it's progress) and it packs a punch! I love wacking down guys before they can even get a swing at me, but I'm still not comfortable with it in taking on a more challenging enemy yet. Also, good to know on the white stone! I think I'll provide my service yet again, since I keep losing any humanity I gain through silly deaths, and then doing something stupid on the way back to recover it!
Q: is there any limit to what bosses I can volunteer to help on? e.g., even though I'm way past them, can I go back and help people w/ Twin Gargoyles? nixon66: when you get to the Depths, there's an area just outside a bonfire with six slimes. They're the only thing that reliably drops Large Titanite Chunks (as far as I can tell). I farmed them for a while to upgrade stuff. NOTE: they're very physical resistant, if you don't have pyromancy don't bother.
In theory, yes, you can. Since the boss is dead you can't summon but you can throw yours down. That said there is a level range +/- [10+10% of the summonee's level] that the summoner can see. So, if you're SL 35 and most people there are SL15, or whatever, they won't see your sign and you probably won't get summoned.
One of the links in the OP to the main thread is to the wiki page that has the average levels for each area. You'll have some areas like Anor Londo and the Royal Wood where you get a much broader range from that midpoint. I generally do it in locations where I want to farm anyway (like slugs or leeches), so I have something to do while I'm at it. The leeches in Blight Town are a better bet in my experience, but both are viable if you have at least 2-3 soft humanity to boost your drop rate to something reasonable.
This evening was successful: I got the Iron Ring and I killed the Gaping Dragon. Now I can either get the Crest from Andrei and see what's behind the door with the shining lock, or spend my souls on some extra intelligence points and go onto Blight Town.
Bleh, just lost 80k souls to jumping down the pit to fight Four Kings and hitting one of the ledges on the way down.
