From Software The Dark Souls Discussion Thread

Really have an axe to grind with the backstab mechanic, huh? I'll give you the leeches on account of them being pretty much the exact same thing as the statues. Actually, no -- the leeches have two different attacks, making them better. Talk about all fighting the same way. At least humanoid enemies can kill you when you don't yet know the game inside out.

 

Whats your beef with them exactly? Not enough budget used on them? Are your graphics whore feelings hurt?

They're a type of enemy unique to that area that don't behavel ike anything else in the game. They're not amazing but saying they're the worst is ridiculous.

 

What? They look fine.
My beef is that their incredibly slow movement, and their fire breath which has about a full second of wind-up and goes on for ages, and... that's it. They are supremely boring enemies.

 

Funny because

these are essentially the same. Except they don't occupy an end game area so their lack of any real threat is a lot less offensive.

 

I love fighting humanoids, because you can parry them, which feels incredibly cool. Backstab is boring by comparison. When you parry a Black/Silver Knight, that feels cool. I was going through Anor Londo, taking out Silver Knights by the 10s, feeling like Chuck Norris. Although, the ones with Spears/Halberds gave me some problems. They have 2 types of attacks, a super quick thrust, and an incredibly slow unwinding twirl, so I would often guess wrong (twitch on the twirl or watch them on the thrust). But there are ways to deal with it. If their thrust gets through, they will follow with 2 thrusts, 2nd of which will be on a delay, so you can catch them then. If their twirl gets through, you can just reset and try again.

The fire-breathing statues in Demon Ruins ARE bad because there is too many of them, and no skill fighting them. Sidestep slow fire attack, poke to death. Over and over. Fortunately Ricard's Rapier quick-attacks super fast, so 4 fast attacks at +10, and bye bye statue.

 

Like 3/4ths of the enemies in the game pose no real threat. What makes these the worst out of all of them? Who cares if it's an end game area. They're like the goofy bone pillars in the tomb or the tiny baby hollow corpse tings or the big goofy toilet monsters or the spooky free loot dragon zombies. Not everything has to be a bonewheel skeleton in your dick.

 

Dunno if I'd call them the worst, but certainly one of the worst. At least stuff like slimes are set up to ambush you and mosquitos work to trick you into falling off something in blight town. The fire statues are just sort of there, in an underdeveloped area.

 

They aren't. They're just boring regular old statues, and there's five of them every two steps, in an area with nothing else (apart from a few toilet monsters and an NPC). Those other enemies you mention are A) more unique and cooler-looking, and B) a supplement to the actual dangers of the areas they're in.

 

At least they don't float up through the ground or spawn infinitely and serve to do nothing but prevent you from taking a piss. Seriously, fuck those mosquitos. They can't even poison you when you're in the lower area. Sen's has like 30 fucking serpent warriors and they're boring as fuck. Archives has 30 skeletons, they're boring as fuck (the squid monsters are awesome though, pity they're only in a single room.) The frogs I'm convinced have never killed anyone except people who either wanted to be cursed or dropped their controller for some reason, and they're the only enemy in an area that probably takes longer to go through than Izalith does. Don't even get me started on the egg monsters.

Anyways, they're just one fucking enemy. There's also the wall monsters, the toilet things, the demons, the dragon butts, and 2 of the most unique bosses in the game. I'm not going to shit all over the area because it has wimpy little statue dudes instead of wimpy little skeletons.

You know what's a shitty, uninspired monster? The torch hollows in the depths. They're identical to all the other fucking hollows, they just stagger forward and do a bullshit frenzy. By this point you've seen 50 of them, and they offer nothing interesting at all. They don't even look mildly interesting like the shitty crystal skeletons. Try replacing all the statues with generic torch hollows and tell me thats somehow an improvement.

 

Sounds like you were a lot better at this game than me, going through it for the first time. I'm glad I had a lot of trouble with all those things you mention, I doubt I'd have had as much fun if three fourths of the enemies posed no real threat.

 

That's not a boss, it's some sort of unreleased content that accidentally made it's way into the game instead of an awesome fight with Shiva.

I was referring to Ceaseless and Centipede.

 

Those shitty turd demons (I'm sounding like sullynathan ) are a syntom of one of the problems with the DS1 later half and Izalith/Demon Ruins more obviously. It's mindless spam of mobs trying to fill in for a mostly empty level design. You can see it with the hordes of infested dudes, you can see it with the gangs of Capras/Taurus spread around in the middle of nowhere, and most notably, the fucking Dragon Butt lakes.

Torch hollows at least are a unique enemy that is actually incredibly dangerous if it catches you off guard, and there are like... Three total? If not, three encounters.

Mosquitos, in their eternal bullshit, are also rare, limited to their area, and still have something unique going for them as they are the only mob that can apparently ignore geometry? Is that a good thing, I don't know.

And lastly, slimes are rather an environmental trap.

The turd demon statues spew fire in a very small come doing very little fire damage in an area were everything deals fire damage so you should use some fire defense to mitigate it even further. They're incredibly slow, easy to stu lock, little health, and generally are less menacing than an angry roomba despite their numbers. They aren't EVEN coupled with actual enemies to spice up other encounters where they could add some area denial, you never have to take them in simultaneously to something else. But please, tell me more about how amazing they are.

It's not like the problem with backstabbing is fault of a rather ultimately flawed combat system, no, it must be the enemies' fault.

There's a fair lot of fall in praising this area's bosses to diss pretty much the whole of 2's, considering they are essentially a slow time event (tank the hits and DPS the cheeto or do the instakill that I still don't know how to do), "Mr. Small platform bullshit" and last but not least "hit the glowies then a jump".

 

Excactly.

 

Torch hollows are unique and interesting enemies. Top kek.

 

The core problem is that the area itself is shit, uninteresting, non-dangerous. Literally every enemy in the Souls series is awful if you just put them alone in a wide open area to be fought 50 times over. The Izilith fire-spewers just happen to be one of the simplest enemies in one of the worst areas that clearly was rushed and underdeveloped.

 

They don't spawn indefinitely. And soul arrow works at them.

 

Ok, there's only like 50 of them that aggro from across the entire cavern so it'll ONLY take about half an hour to finish them all off. Unless you move away from any of them. Much better I'm sure they're very exciting enemies for you guys who farm leeches to upgrade your weapons.

 

who farms leeches if you can buy green shards at sen fortress?

 

Isn't it easier to farm them? Then again I've never had to.

Still pretty loler how they're terrible when using the same metric. Not backstab-able!

I didn't say they were interesting, but they actually have a solid chance to kill you. That's already a lot better than the hovering rocks.

 

I used to farm leeches closer to the OG launch. You can kill like, Moonlight Butterfly alone, and then have access to Divine/Fire/Magic before you touch any other boss or level your character. I liked to have a collection of elemental weapons set up for any occasion before I started a playthrough in earnest.

That said, if you *do* farm leeches, you're out of aggro range for the mosquitos anyhow (run from the bonfire at the top of the great hollow, loop around the back of the tree and back to the bonfire - rinse and repeat, no mosquitos involved).

Aside from that, Ring of Fog makes them ignore you mostly.

 

Well, Demon Ruins is a gift that keeps on giving... Yeah...

Was stuck on Centipede Demon for a while. That %#*$)#$&***#)&@##$#er is a real piece of work. The lava and his body structure make it next to impossible to melee him, so I started off with my bow, but then of course he closes in at some point. So I started ruinning around the little slivers of land, trying to kite him, when lo and behold, once he hits half health or so, he turns into a fireworks display, lobbing 20 exploding fireballs up your ass.

Tried a lot of different things, none of them worked. Even summoned Solaire once, to tank him, but he killed both of us. Which is good, cause summoning Solaire felt a little like cheating.

Anyways, after countless attempts, finally got him. Using Occam's Razor, I figured if I can't battle him at range with my bow, AND i can't melee him up close with my melee weapons, I will melee the 30 headed skunk with my bow. Softened him up at range, moved over to the area on the right, and once he closed in, I just rolled under him, and started loosing arrows up his belly. Got lucky maybe, as he didn't do any major leg stomping, just jumped up a lot. Sometimes he would get me coming down, sometimes I rolled out of the way, either way, potion, shoot more arrows, rinse, repeat. I was pretty shocked when it finally died. Then PTSD kicked in.

Made my way further into Izalith then, and encountered the next fun boss, everyone's favorite Bed of Chaos. At first I thought what is everyone smoking, this thing swings like a 90 year old woman. Then I realized it's invulnerable. Then the floor started falling off in random places. Yeahhhh....

I need to go back to Anor Londo, to the peace and tranquility of herds of Silver Knights.

 

PorkyThePaladin try horse but hole

 

Not sure what that means. Are you talking about the Centipede Demon? I tried hitting it in the ass, but he has those annoying leg stomps/jumps/tail swipes or whatever, did not work well at all.

Anyways, you may all bow down now, for Porky has slain the one and only Bed of Chaos. Not gonna lie, took a while, about 2-3 hours of dedication. The worst part was the freaking running from the nearest bonfire to the damn fight room. About 4-5 minutes of lava running, even if you avoid all the monsters. Just to get rimmed or sideswiped into the pit by its freaking paws.

I kinda figured you gotta dodge the sun-claws, then dodge the two paws, and jump down into the pit staircase early on, but to actually do it was rough. Dodging the sun claw was pretty easy, but dodging the two paws one right after the other and then jumping in the correct place before they reset, that was painful. After I messed it up a few times, and being really angry about all the running, I finally put some good music on, and that helped in 2 major ways.

One, it made the running to the room much easier, and two, with the music relaxing you, the dodging got easier too. Not shitting you, but after I started the music, I instantly made it to the staircase twice in a row. The first time, I didn't dodge successfully, kind of half-dodge, and the hand swiped me into the staircase. Then, since I wasn't sure what to do, stood there and got blown up. Next time, full dodge, landed on staircase, skewered its heart, and got the Lordsoul.

Hhhm, who should i go after now... There's Seath above Anor Londo, Nito way below, and the 4 kings. Decisions, decisions.

 

Well...

 

You did Lost Izalith before the other Lords? That explains some of your trouble. Most players save it for last since it's universally considered the worst part of the game. By the time they enter it they are fully decked out in +15 equipment, max estus, soft-capped on at least health and stamina. At that point you just sort of mow Centipede and the rest over.