For some people the important things are the serious similarities. Don't be those people. Those people can turn Dark Souls into just another sugar pellet/time delivery system, and you don't want that.
What, you guys don't snipe them from the stairs with the fog ring on, ensuring the AI fails to take any action at all? Pharis + Fog Ring makes some stuff a joke.
The crossbow does enough damage usually that you don't need the fog ring to be effective, if you take out the archer first. I just haven't played enough dexterity characters lately as a result of peculiar turn of masochism.
OK I definitely didn't mean it was like WoW in the Pavlovian sense. More in the sense that what I enjoyed about raiding was the need for a level of environmental awareness, familiarity with the enemy, the need to deploy my tactical resources in response to the enemy's abilities, and the element of resource management. That's the stuff I really enjoyed about WoW, and it's what I enjoy about Dark Souls. Encounters are designed to be puzzles, and I enjoy solving them.
Easy there. I don't think pointing out the similarity between modern MMORPG raids and Dark Souls bosses (ie, it's all about choreographing) is going to break anything.
Tried to beat Sif for two hours with utterly no progress. I upgraded my Claymore to +8, my Pyromancy Glove to +10 and myself a level of Dex for more damage. Nope. I simply don't have the skill to dodge his stupid double swing, no matter how many times I try. Time to move on to another area. Fuck that wolf.
Have you tried using your highest magic resist shield to block the stupid double swing? Then run underneath him and slash/blast until he jumps away?
The only thing that matters in that fight is the choice of shield. High stability trumps all other things, and then you can (as with any boss other than Queelag) just use the basic Great Combustion/Combustion combo to take him down, regardless of build. IIRC an Eagle Shield at +8 is ample to simply endure the double slash as needed; as I noted earlier, I almost never dodge in this fight and use medium stability setups like the Dragon Crest +3 with 20+ endurance and it's usually fine. Green grass you can farm near the moonlight butterfly is the shortcut to fast stamina, but obviously other endurance items are fine. I find <50% easier than <25%, and usually fill out my space with stone armor because it's right there.
I was trying, but the first hit would deplete my stamina too much, and the second hit would nail me. Is it magical damage? I thought it was physical. Thanks, I'll try the Eagle Shield, which I guess means grinding for Large Titanite. I think this is just the first point in the game where I've had to spend a few hours grinding to get up to the right level to beat a boss, and it's thrown me for a loop. You guys who say you always have enough souls for whatever you want to do are confusing me because I never have enough souls to do anything unless I want to face the prospect of just grinding on dudes I know how to kill. Those forest covenant guys are a pretty good source of souls luckily.
Immediate success! Eagle Shield at +5 allowed me to survive his blows, the Claymore did the rest. I was really not understanding Stability. For whatever reason I thought it made it harder for you to get staggered, separately from decreasing the stamina you exert from taking a hit. I think I was confusing/conflating it with Poise. I did try the Eagle Shield earlier, but didn't have success with it so I didn't go back to it and I should have. Thanks LK.
I have discovered a foolproof strategy for Blighttown: before you ever enter it, read about how terrible and difficult and loathsome it is for the better part of a year. Turns out it's not all that bad. I died only a couple of times on my way down, all from falling. I grabbed a lot of sweet loot. I found some bonfires. And then, for the first time yet (despite always playing online), I was invaded. It was actually pretty great! My invader was very polite; he first dropped a bunch of blooming purple moss for me. Suspicious as I was, he had to gesture to me a few times before I picked it up, and even though I was poisoned, I declined to use it for fear that he would sneak attack me. He then bowed and came at me (bro). Was using some kind of punching attack that did some damage even through my shield (combustion I'm guessing?) but I was generally able to get a hit in with my axe every time I took a hit and ultimately prevailed. Unexpected, to say the least. Moving right along, I went after Quelaag. First time up I got toasted, so I decided the best plan was to get stoned--in addition to my Stone Helm, I donned stone armor all around and swapped out Spider Shield for Dragon's Crest. Thus armed against the flame, Mildred and I dropped Quelaag in short order. Bell rung, retreat to Undead Parish effected, and now I'm about ready to move on to Sen's Fortress. Might farm a bit first and see about upgrading some other weapons, such as the Uchigatana, what with its enticing dex scaling.
I always thought anything that glows did magical, and it seemed like it did a little damage through a 100% physical resist shield, but I could be wrong.
This is what great combust looks like on a high level high dex (faster casting) character. Could have also been a fist weapon with magic or elemental upgrades. You have a number of choices right there in Btown. I recommend the Great Hollow for an easy 20 twinkling titanite, diverse chunks, and potentially some slabs; make sure you have at least 3 up to 10 soft humanity to boost your item drop and get better quality stuff, although frankly at this point even large shards will be handy. There's also Ceaseless Discharge, who has a trick to beating him that makes any class at any level capable of doing it, and we can talk more about that; immediately, it would give you access to decent fixed stat light armor, to the large fire ember and the chaos ember which is less important to your build but still there just in case. Finally, you might be doing enough damage to methodically clear your way through New Londo with transient curses, which would give you access to the Very Large Ember and let you get from +10 to +15 in your weapon. You would have to kill the vendor along the way, which can be done safely with arrows or fairly easily up in his face if you clear the ghosts on the way. We can talk ghost strategy if that's interesting to you. Long term, it gets you to the Darkwraith area and means you get as many titanite chunks as you are willing to work for.
Yeah. Only very slightly, but if you compare 10 dex to 45 dex (the maximum for this bonus, IIRC), there's a difference. It's more of a bonus for using dex and pyro together than something to target in a build specifically, though. I've heard that it also increases casting speed for sorcery but I'm not sure about that.
Relatively difficult for Jamie on his PS3. Sub-optimal for me (and maybe others) on my PC due to laggy steam sych, GFWL login pause, and splash screens that DSFix doesn't skip for whatever reason. I did this last week in NG++ and didn't have a problem running past the sentinals. They come up the stairs, sure, but at that point your issues is the knight, and when you go to stab his face the Sentinels don't go all the way up off the stairs. Yup, this describes my first attempt for the wolf. I came back much later and it wasn't a problem. Of course I'm wondering why you're bothering to grind for titanite and hit your head against this wall for so long. You didn't need* to fight Sif until after you had access to the smith that sells large titanite and probably would have had a much better shield. This is really why I, and most others, rate shields as secondary in the equipment hierarchy, after weapons. * for new players doing their first run. They pretty much won't need that abyss ring till then.
The important thing is that now he has room to make judgments about stability in the future and can adjust his priorities accordingly. I think, for many of us that started with earlier versions, the eagle shield was such an obvious piece of equipment that we all got an in-depth tutorial on what a huge difference going up the scale of stability can make. I blame the over-weighting of the nerf and the pathology of upper Blight Town trauma for making it less central for newer players. I think killing Sif early is a great idea, because getting in the Darkwraith covenant early is the surest way to enjoy PvP in a more organic manner as you go through the game. It takes on a much different appearance when you've been calling the shots in a few invasions, and combined with some quality time at the very start in the Forest Covenant gets you leaps and bounds ahead of straight PvAI players in terms of getting the most out of the game.
Yeah, at least for this thread, which is frequented by newbies and those on their first playthrough. Eh, I could reach the power button on the PS3 pretty easily. It'd be a pain to reboot and relaunch the game, but might be worth it if I were on a mission to do a summon and take on a boss. What happens if you just cut the power like that? Just lose progress since last autosave? If so, that's probably not much. The game saves constantly.
Virtually nothing. Typically you lose about ten-twenty seconds or so. With Demons' Souls the preferred method was just holding down the PS button and quitting the program that way (or shutting down, I forget). There is a risk, according to the game's warnings, that you will corrupt your save file, but I can't speak to that as I have ragequit with a power off/force quit literally hundreds of times in both games across three platforms and never had a problem. On the PC, however, Alt f4 works really well as the saves are near instantaneous (at least with my SSD) and skipping the logos and what have you means I really only have to wait for Steam to get its shit together and let me relaunch the game. Again, I don't advocate doing it as opposed to just playing offline or hollow if your goal overall is to avoid invasions; otherwise, you are clogging up the game for people who are trying to invade and go through the whole cycle of invasion only to get booted. But sometimes you have to do what you think is necessary in order to stay sane. Because the game takes so long to populate P2P groups, you should have a bit of time before the next invasion when you come in.
I did some quit to dashboards on the Xbox because I really wasn't in the the mood for an invasion right then and there. I only got one nastygram because of it.
Does it? I've tried to alt+f4 out of poisoned situations (alright alright, it was ragequits in Blighttown) and logged back in just to find myself dying from it. I thought an alt+F4 during invasion would just leave my body standing there for a free backstab. Ugh, no. WoW's game mechanics were a very gamey way of calculating swing attacks as aoe. Dark Souls is much more accurate with its hit detection on swings, which is why rolling works so well. I imagine the fact that so many enemy attacks lock-on is an indication that the developers thought the hit detection was too accurate. I haven't been in the fight you're describing, but it sounds like a very unique situation in the game compared to anything else. I suppose Maneater "tanked" Quelaag for me, but I don't see that as taking after WoW so much as the developers not really spending too much time thinking about how the AI decides who to attack.
You guys are taking the comparison a bit more literally than I'd intended. Obviously from a mechanical standpoint Dark Souls and WoW share very little in common.
Well now you've given me a new task on character #3. That sounds intriguing. What exactly does "calling the shots" mean as a Darkwraith? Also, the Eagle Shield was a huge boost to my first (light armor) character. Not sure what made stability click exactly, but that shield definitely played a huge part.
At any given point, I have no pre-existing knowledge about which area is harder than any other, so I basically just have to explore, venture into an area and see how hard it is. How am I supposed to know that Large Titanite becomes easy to obtain later on? In fact, I just learned from reading this thread that having soft humanity makes grinding for drops better. It doesn't tell you that anywhere in the game that I've found. I generally find the idea of grinding unappealing, but maybe with a bunch of soft humanity loaded I wouldn't. After beating Capra Demon, which was a milestone for me because of all the scary talk I've heard about him, the order in which I did things was basically this: 1) Depths + Gaping Dragon 2) Too scared of Blighttown! Backtrack and do first part of Darkroot Garden + Butterfly 3) Darkroot Basin + Hydra 4) Ventured up the ladder and into the hard part of the Garden, but the run back from the bonfire became too annoying, so I decided to get the souls to open the door. So, this led me to... 4) Blight Town + Quelaag --> gave me the souls for the Crest of Artorias 5) Opened the door and did the second part of Darkroot Garden In Darkroot Garden, I faced the forest covenant humans who are described on Wikis as being pretty tough ... I was able to defeat them all pretty easily. This is almost always Game Language for telling you that, while it will of course be a challenge, you should be able to face the boss of the zone as well. Why did I bang my head against Sif for so long? I had a few attempts where I really did get Sif down to 25% or so by dodging his attacks. There was just enough progress to make me feel like it was possible. That, combined with my own stubborn determination and my OCD for completing a certain task before moving on kept me going. This may seem like a tangent, but you know old school adventure games like Monkey Island? I have a bad tendency in games like that to try something, have it not work, and then discard it in my mind as "wrong". Even if I should have been using it differently, it will be in my blind spot now, and I won't go back to it ... that is until I read a guide and realize "Ohhhhh! That's how you use that? Stupid game". I think that's what happened to me with the Eagle Shield in the Sif fight. I used it, but I guess I just didn't keep it up properly or I tried to roll with it or something, and it wasn't working, so I discarded it and went back to my "lower stability, but higher damage reduction" shield. Really, I should have been more observant, but shit like that happens to me sometimes.
Yes, of course, but once you start beating your head against the wall the answer is never 'more, better.' In this case it was 'use something different', but equally valid is 'come back later.' Well, you don't know, but I think it's fair to infer it. You've met one smith and he sells the beginning upgrade and that later on another smith may sell others. I believe the scarcity of upgrade materials was discussed here and assumed that you've read those. Agree, and it sounds like it worked out once the shield confusion was cleared up. I have the same tendency, but it's certainly a detriment in this game. I got one boss down to a sliver of heath only to die, and ended up spending far too long to not get that far again. It was totally optional so I went back later.
Forgot to mention a few things about a play session a while back. My wife was watching me play for a bit, and I was working my way through the Great Hollow. She felt the game was pretty dumb when I started fighting mushrooms. I feel like she's right on that, especially when one of them kills me. I moved on to the next area (can't remember, the one with the beach and the hydra) and she was treated to those ridiculous looking walking clams. This did not improve her opinion. The Hydra down there was pretty intimidating (especially when it reveals its mobility), so I ran past it and headed into the nearby tree. After I'd cleared that out, I went back out and realized I could just camp out in the space between the tree and the sand dune and take my time on knocking heads off. If things got iffy, I could just run back into the tree to safety. Beat him on the first try. Then I limped my way to the end of the level, where OH GOD PLEASE JUST BE oh good just an NPC. Is the Dragon Head Stone a single-use item, or can you just do that whenever? I didn't want to use it up if it's a consumable thing.
Whenever, you can even upgrade it by increasing your covenant level and will eventually get the Dragon Torso Stone and you can get a sword by cutting off that dragon's tail, this doesn't aggro the dragon at all.
Huh, I am unfamiliar with this item as I have not actually joined he covenant. And I'm not sure I ever saw one of their summon signs. I saw a gravelord sign once, but fear of gravelording kept me from it. Yes, NG+.
USE IT No, you have not. Not a lot of people join that covenant and between that and the netcode and the fact that you have to be carrying a dragon scale means it's unlikely that you've seen one. Also you'd remember if you had because it looks awesome. Such a cool idea, such a lot to be desired in the implementation. :/
I'm going to USE IT as soon as possible. The description alone excited my giddy-five-year-old cortex. But 30 dragon scales to upgrade? I don't know about that. Depends on how much I like it.
I saw their summon (I assume it was) for the first time 2 days ago, after ~180hrs in the game. :/ Really not that common at all. I didn't realize it was tied to you carrying dragon scales, but I don't use dragon weapons much so typically do have them on me ... Of course I summoned but ... SUMMONING FAILED. :|
The intent is to PvP. You also got the Dragon Eye from that dragon which lets you lay down a PvP sign and the winner of the battle gets a dragon scale. Check out the Path of the Dragon covenant for more info.
