It's kinda funny, but as I've gotten better at the game I've stopped seeing certain weapons as sub-optimal and instead see them as just playing the game on a higher difficulty level. Same with my SL1 runs. (i.e. playthroughs where you never level up) For obvious reasons, they're *incredibly* sub-optimal, but it's a way to ratchet up the difficulty in an interesting way. What's truly amazing about this game is that it's deep enough where these artificial obstacles spur you to figure out creative ways to tackle problems. On my SL1 run as a pyromancer, I didn't have the dexterity to use a bow, and I never would. How in the hell do you get past the archers in Anor Londo without poison arrows, Hidden Body, or the Fog Ring? Turns out: you can. It just involves running very fast along a catwalk, timing it just right, and lots of swearing and cussing at the TV as you fail over & over & over.
And so it begins. I died like 15 times so far, but figuring out how to do a leap attack, and then trying it on that big fucking demon from above and having it work, was supremely fucking awesome.
So... the Back button to get a description of stats is just uhhhh... giving me a description of my name. Did anyone fucking beta test this game?
You hit back to go into "help" mode, and then move that little bright window around. It starts on your name, but you can use it to view other stats too. Beta test lol.
jeffd has his Gargoyle halberd, I have my zweihander (+10 now!) and am loving life with that thing! Daily journal? Finished off the gaping dragon today on my second go. First one I got careless, and took my first steps down towards Blightown. I'm now seeing where all the hate for this place comes from. After getting toxic a few times and running out of my meager supply of the blossoming purple(red?) moss, I decided to make a detour for a while and farm up a few souls to buy a supply of them from the female merchant to help ease this unholy trek down to Blightown. Have I mentioned how much I love the R2 attack of the zweihander? I've started to become much more confident with this thing and it's allowing me to take on monsters I'd avoided until that point because I just couldn't damage them fast enough. Those stone giant things in Darkroot garden? Cake. A Black Knight I'd been avoiding in the Undead Parish? Two wacks and he was out cold. Found the butterfly boss, and a few tosses of some pyromancer skill I'd bought for fun, coupled with a couple wacks and I'm in possession of my first boss soul. Dark Souls.
The zweihander overhead smash never gets old. "BOW DOWN BEFORE ME!" I'm thinking I should start a compilation of things that a +15 large club one-shots at 50 str. It's a crude weapon for a less civilized age, but damn does it get the job done.
It might be more efficient to farm the purple mosses in Darkroot Garden. The tree dudes almost always drop one of the mosses, and both the white & purple mosses are helpful in blighttown. (I've never found the red mosses useful, but you can sell them to frampt for 50 souls each, so even they're kinda nice to find.)
I'm going to have to take a break from Dark Souls it seems. The lag in Blight Town keeps killing me. It's impossible to navigate those swaying bridges because I fall off when the frame rate stutters, and position my character doesn't work either. I also ran into a few bugs with the bonfires (the one in Blight Town didn't save despite me tagging it, and the one in Firelink shrine has gone out without me meeting the conditions for that to happen. I'll come back to it once we upgrade my PC, but that could still be a while. At least now I'll get a chance to look at the other games I bought during the Steam sale :D
Armor: higher poise is good, right? Got the set from Darkroot Garden and have a couple of bits on me. Able to kill those stone knights now. Wait for them to cast, get in behind, stabby stabby! But in an enclosed space the black knights are awful. I end up dazed and dead after their jabby jabs and avoiding them can be hard. The Gargoyle halberd. I can wield it but wave about after a big swing, like I can't wield it - is that just how it goes? Not quite sure where to go now. I doubt I can take both gargoyles on the parish roof. I don't have any humanity... Hmmm.
Yes, and that set is awesome. Only if you miss. A lot of larger/heavier weapons are like that. Get in the habit of testing weapons out on actual enemies.
In my experience there are two consistent ways to handle the swaying bridges: run like hell after making sure you've removed autolocking camera in the options (thanks for this tip, everyone, I tested it and it works a lot better for that and other places), or treat them as signs that you shouldn't go that way. I have only completed them on rare occasion, and you are far better off going back and around as the sprint option is as nerve-wracking as it is for the log crossing near the crimson clothing, except even less fair. Just do yourself a favor and treat them as traps. I certainly do. The one at the top has solid bridge just to the left of it, and is obviously a trap. The other one seems like a shortcut if you've cleared in one direction or another, but I would say you are again better off going around. The area underneath the iaito is treacherous as there are two of those angry fellows waiting at the bottom of a ladder; I've found that creative luring (going down ladder and back up) lets me pull them up the ladder, and then I can kill them as they come up with ranged weapons or just beat them to death as they get off the ladder. But don't go across, as the other side of that is just as accessible from its own top area. It is possible to light a bonfire a without using it (that's what you do the first time you touch it). In fact, you must sit at the bonfire for it to take as a save point, renewing your estus and respawning monsters. Unfortunately, it's the other way around. For the Firelink to remain lit, you must meet the special condition of killing Lautrec either in the gargoyle church when you first meet him or at the Firelink. If you ignore him, he will still go about his business. OTOH, the firelink is only a moderate inconvenience, as the Parish bonfire is a minute or two away by elevator, and long term you get one excellent armor (the dingy robes) and one average but interesting armor (Lautrec's) for seeing through his story. Just don't "use" the firekeeper soul you get from Lautrec, make a beeline back to Firelink and relight it if you want that bonfire lit.
The easiest way to fix that would be to get summoned into other people's games, for which you need no humanity and are rewarded with soft humanity for a victory over a boss. Put down your white sign by the area between the church and blacksmith tunnel, and work on your technique with the various hollow soldiers and balder knights (try seeing who you can backstab). It can be quite lucrative early on if you get some rare drops, and once you get summoned a couple of times you'll be right as rain. Beating the Gargoyles is much, much easier with either a human or Solaire or both.
Thanks, I'll know that for when we upgrade my PC! those bridges are evil and if I can avoid them, I will! I did rest at the bonfire (even swapped some equipment from my box) but the special effect with the glow that appears when you use a bonfire quite often causes the game too slow incredibly, or kick me out if I'm not in offline mode, so perhaps something went wrong and it didn't stick. I certainly haven't had that happening before. I must have misread about the Firelink bonfire then, I thought he'd wait with It was just a minor mishap in an evening of battling bad frame rates and my fear of heights I suppose, on it's own it wouldn't have mattered. As you said, the Parish bonfire is only a few kills away.
Ah, that's curious. I don't know as I don't have frame drops for some reason in Blight town (never really noticed them to be a problem on the xbox either), but it's certainly possible if you're noticing a broader visual glitch that there's something going on. You might consider turning on the save backups in DSfix and cutting the time intervals to 600 secs if the problem persists, as if the game doesn't do its part and save your state properly you do what you can to avoid going bananas. I believe it's not the number of firekeeper souls but rather whether you've picked up the one in Blighttown at all and/or rung the second bell. For most people, that's the second estus upgrade. I'm sorry that it came as a nasty surprise, though, as losing firelink is disconcerting even if it doesn't "matter".
I've collected the one in Blighttown, not rung the bell, and went back to reinforce only to be disappointed.
Get the camera angle right and you can make that run without taking a hit, first try. Just be careful how you line it up before you start your charge.
I believe that's exactly the KEH HEH HEH moment the designers were going for. But at least they throw you a bone with the daughter of chaos being nearby.
I did pick up the one in blight Town behind the bars, so that must indeed be the trigger for that quest.
Any way I can easily configure a gamepad for this game? I think LT for parry and LB for block is kinda retarded, I tend to parry when I want to block because it's so much easier holding LT than it is to hold LB on this controller (which is smaller than a typical 360 controller)
I think we're referring to two different things. In my post I was talking about getting past the two archers perched on the ledge just outside the cathedral. Camera angles don't come into play there; it's all about killing the archers (or at least the one on the right) without getting knocked off.
Mirriam re: Blighttown Bridges: move slowly across them, as soon as they start to sway, stop. They'll stop swaying after a moment or two, and you can continue creeping forward. I don't have framerate issues and they're still a pain to cross otherwise.
Oh, and add PogoTribal for GFWL friends, I don't know if this game has any preferences for showing messages from friends or whatnot. Also, beat this big bitch on my first try: Although using like 4 Black Firebombs certainly helped, even if 2 of them missed completely.
Killed Gwyn this morning, and I may post a more extensive post-mortem if I have some time. Went ahead and started a new character, with the goal of focusing on light, dexterity-based weapons and <25% armor, and I'm forcing myself to parry/riposte as much as possible (I'm half-decent at it right now, but have a lot of room for improvement). I excepted Havel from this, because a missed parry against him is instant death at low level of course, but whittling him down with 34 damage backstabs was fairly satisfying nonetheless, even if it took forever.
Mostly no, but with some minor exceptions. Proper bosses - the ones with health bars that appear along the bottom of the screen - and most mini-bosses never respawn. However, as you progress through the game, you will re-encounter certain creatures that you previously fought as bosses or mini-bosses, often in a weakened form, and some of these will respawn.
They don't work the same. While they're filling up they both represent buildup and don't cause any ill effects, and once they fill up you actually get inflicted with the thing, which is where they diverge. Poison causes you to lose life over time, as expected, whereas bleed deals you a lot of damage all at once.
Gargoyles down. Actually seemed pretty simple on the whole; heater shield kept me from taking much damage, and Drake Sword brought the pain in a big way. Now the happy owner of a gargoyle tail axe and starting to think about weapon upgrades, having gotten my hands on a few titanite shards. And thus I find myself in need of assistance: can somebody explain weapon stat bonuses? I see letters in "ParamBonus" but would like to know what that translates into in mathematical terms, so I have an idea of which weapon I'd like to upgrade. I will go running around trying out move sets with my various weapons for now, but I REQUIRE ANSWERS POST-HASTE.
The formula for the stat bonuses is (x * y) where x is the level of the stat and y is the modifier the weapon gets from that stat. The letters translate like this: S=6, A=5... E=1. That holds for melee weapons for stats up to 40, at which point there's a serious dropoff. Spell tools are weird in a way I don't fully understand (I just use a calculator for those since the lack of any meaningful moveset makes it a lot simpler--there's always a "best" one for whatever level of int/faith you have), and I can't vouch for how ranged weapons work though if I had to guess I'd say probably the same as melee. Edit: here's an example: Your unupgraded Gargoyle Tail Axe requires 14 strength and 14 dex, so let's say that those are exactly the stats you have. It deals 93 base damage and scales D/C, so the total AR (attack rating) will be 93 + (14 * 2) + (14 * 3) = 163.
And is that (i.e. the total attack rating) displayed anywhere? What is indicated in the "+" column next to base damage in the "ATK" table?
The + part is the total being added in that category by your stats, so in the above example it would sho up as "93 + 70." The overall total is not displayed anywhere.
Closed out of the game but IIRC it was displaying only around +20, and my strength/dex are above minimum for the weapon. Could I have something equipped that is lowering it?
No. Check again when you have a chance. It might be you're just misremembering, or it might be that the wiki has it written up incorrectly or something, but that's how it works.
And one last dumb question--I bought the thing that lets me upgrade weapons at bonfires; any advantage to doing it at a blacksmith versus just doing it myself?
Blacksmiths are the only ones that can ascend weapons (from normal to say fire, or magic, or whatever, also go from +5 to +6 and +10 to +11) so doing it yourself is fine, you just can't do all of it yourself.
