What to know coming in from Demon's Souls?

Played Demon's Souls, but never got around to picking this up; cash was tight around release. Probably should do that, though!

Can someone give me a spoiler-free overview of important mechanical changes? Outside of the obvious world structure, etc.

My endgame/NG+ for Demon's Souls was pretty much dual-handed MEATCLEAVERMEATCLEAVERMEATCLEAVER in melee and SOULRAYSOULRAYFIRESTORMSOULRAY by way of magic. Obviously, I'm not going to be able to do that exactly, since this isn't Demon's Souls. But does the general idea (ie: keep enemies at arm's length with Soul Ray if they're dangerous up close, demolish hordes of guys with Firestorm, and maul anything I choose to melee with my Meat Cleaver until it's a fine red mist) hold up? Or have the extra-large weapons been nerfed?

While we're at it - are unique weapons like the aforementioned Meat Cleaver still generally good choices for PvE?

Dunno about Demon's Souls but that lovable ol Meatcleaver still ... cleaves meat like there's no tomorrow. So to speak.

The Meat Cleaver in Dark Souls isn't anywhere near as good as in Demon's Souls but generally speaking great swords and ultra great swords are very strong indeed. A shift from Demon's Souls on weapons is that the unique ones generally aren't as good as the regular ones. Some things have been streamlined in Dark Souls, there's no more tendency stuff (which I think is fantastic) and the weapon upgrade paths are normalized (ascension happens at +5/+10 for everything). If you're familiar with Demon's Souls you'll easily find yourself at home in Dark Souls.

You won't need to memorize wacky stat glyphs.

Being dead/hollow won't halve your health. The benefit to being dead is you won't get invaded by PVP, but you won't be able to summon help either.

I really forget my Demon's Souls, but I think there's more specialization in Dark Souls. For example, you won't be able to max and use all sorceries and be able able to comfortably swing a great sword (or wear heavy armor).

The tell me how to get started thread has some good discussions of poise and stability and how they work in this game. The former is new and makes armor a much more interesting part of the game, and the latter has been tweaked significantly in terms of how degrees of it work on shields.

Magic and faith both work on limited numbers of casts per spell slot. Pyromancy separates out the fire spells and creates a stat-detached form of spell that anyone can use if they just invest souls into the item directly. Magic and Pyro remain extremely powerful offensively, faith is more of a selectively applied tool you supplement the big picture of your build with. Because there is no longer a multipurpose beast talisman, you will rarely see people trying to do all three or even two of them at once.

Multiplayer is oriented around covenants you make with NPCs and monsters. You can still participate in friendly summons with an item you get relatively quickly and in hostile invasions with a cracked red orb you can find or buy. But it's worth considering the different covenants depending on what kind of multiplayer behavior interests you, as there's something for everybody and some work better than others. Popular ones include the Darkwraiths (the traditional invasion oriented thing, the host will always be at or higher level than you), the forest covenant (free for all multi-invader combat against generally more powerful hosts), and the brotherhood (coop oriented summon covenant).

The general idea you have of DS1 combat is accurate, but the pacing of combat in DS2 is much more measured and open to tactical choices. I encourage you to experiment with different weapon speeds and damage outputs and movesets, because I think you'll find that the somewhat paranoid/overwhelming force approach you needed for much of DS1 to be consistently safe is not really the case here. You can give yourself margins of error here while you learn enemies, and you can adjust your choice of attacks and decisions on the fly without having crazy reflexes (for one thing, the wind up on most attacks is much more overt, and the ones that don't have such big tells usually have answers you can learn to pull out instinctively).

Thanks, everyone.

One more question - can the AI actually handle large weapons now? Or is it still possible to get an enemy in a corner and start spamming your strong attack whenever they're actually about to get up?

Although, apparently there's no longer really any reason to cheese the enemies like that?

Spamming still works situationally, but a lot of that has been ironed out, especially in PvP terms, at the point you are entering the game. Mostly, the way poise works means that the AI has a much bigger margin of error (and, again, you won't necessarily gravitate to strength weapons although they remain a great way to progress, but mostly because of their one-shot/backstab/parry potential).