From Software The Dark Souls Discussion Thread

How many things does it even work on though? The only things of note I recall are the fatties in blight town, the blue drakes, and the asylum demon type bosses. Silver/black knights? Nope. Ornstein? Nope. Havel? Nope. Quelaag? Nope. Seath? Nope. And so on. The enemies that can bleed and are worth bleeding to death (i.e. don't die in one backstab anyways) are few and far between. Admittedly I haven't dicked around with the bandit knife in a long time though, maybe I'm wrong about this. But I'm pretty sure I've tried bleeding almost every boss and very very few of them are susceptible.

 

Of course bleed isn't going to work against every boss, but a lot of weapons don't work against all bosses anyway. As always it is expected of you to carry a back up weapon or two for the various different situations. But the bosses it does work against, it is potent as fuck.
As for Havel.. I cut up a negroid in full Havel's with my bandits knife like he was covered in warm butter. Thanks to bleed I chomped through his health like a hungry pacman. And whenever he tried to heal I interrupted him with a backstab.

Fake edit: Also something else to consider about daggers is that when you use the enchant spells they give you a flat damage bonus. Say, 35 damage. That means you get a flat 35 more damage into each swing, and daggers are really good at swinging fast. One can argue that daggers stand to gain more from the enchantment spells than the other weapons do.

 

It's a Dex weapon if the stat scaling is Dex. Black Knight Sword is not. Scythes are.

What does one-handed have to do with dexing? That's a playstyle thing, completely unrelated to Dex. And if as you say parry or blocking is impossible 90% of the time then why even bother one handing in the first place? Not going two-handed is just gimping yourself.

Great scythes are pretty damn fast weapons you know. Not as fast as daggers or anything, but not needing to run right up to enemies makes up for that. Certainly faster than the majority of Str weapons, especially long-ranged Str weapons. If you are using a Rapier when it isn't the right weapon for the job then you are, again, gimping yourself.

Absolutely, thats one of the reasons Dex is so much more deadly damage-wise than Str. +150 adds up really fast when you can swing twice a second. Magic users are even more insane, +200-400 damage per hit midgame.

 

I have a dex build

And I'm using the upgraded Longsword, because it has both Regular/Thrust attacks and I can back-stab shit with it. Also the longbow is doing some serious damage. In fact in some places, is the main weapon.

Also I'm using the upgraded black leather armor, therefore my avatar is a combination of warrior-ranger-thief On the other hand, my vitality is low and this is making the game quite challenging.

I did not play pvp at all, but my impression is that a good dex character is deadly ... in pvp.

 

Where do you use the longbow in fights? I wanted to experiment with a long range build too, but it does only sub par damage most of the time to me :/

 

Where? In Demon Ruins, it takes me 10 arrows to the head to kill a big guy or a worm. Is not impressive damage, around 80.
But on other mobs like the fatties from Blightown, a headshot can give 150+ damage. It depends on the mob and if I manage to hit the head.
For example: The harpies from Anor Londo are taking 2-3 arrows.

But like I've said, my character is fucked up: 30+ dex and 30 strength. Usually I start a fight with an arrow to the head and I end it with a back-stab.

Edit: Yes, the mobs are not too bright. Most of them simply sit and wait to get arrows in the head.

 

1 in 5 bosses is a bit worse than 'not every boss'.

Like seriously, go down the list. (Spoilery boss list incoming)

Asylum Demon O
Taurus Demon O
Gargoyles X
Moonlight Butterfly X
Capra Demon X?
Gaping Dragon X
Quelaag X
Ceaseless Discharge X
Stray Demon O
Hydras O?
Iron Golem X
Ornstein/Smough X
Priscilla X?
Seath X
Nito X
Sif X
Four Kings X
Firesage O
Fire Centipede X
Bed of Chaos X
Gwynn X

Feel free to correct me on any of those, but it doesn't look very favourable to me. An enemy list wouldn't look much better. (I was referring to Havel the NPC btw, obviously bleed works on pvp, that's like, the only point of it though.)

Swinging twice per second isn't impressive when you're swinging for 1/4 the damage, which is usually the case due to how armour works. Going from a 200 damage weapon to a 100 damage weapon that hits twice as often is NOT an upgrade. It's a massive, massive fucking downgrade. You'll go from hitting for 80 to hitting for 20, shit won't get staggered anymore, and your attacks will bounce off shields. I'm sure it evens out again at level 80 or whatever the fuck you are to have 96 equip weight and 1500 hp AND 600 damage on a mediocre weapon. But for the other 90% of the game before you get there, you're just gimping yourself so you can have stat B instead of stat A on the exact same playstyle.

Difference between weapons speeds on the same type of weapon are pretty small. Maybe around 10-15% https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTe89nVm3wg

 

By the way, the Dragon over the bridge took around 40 arrows. And I'm using only standard arrows, cause they are cheaper

 

One word (or two): back-stab.

 

That doesn't really work for the bosses though.

 

Well I have 55 dex and am using a +15 Iaito and the Silver Tracer + 5. I can one shot quite a few mobs with the thrust attack of the Iaito, and if it's not a one shot kill I can do a 4 hit combo quickly enough that they have no time to react (useful for farming the Man Eater Shells). For humanoid enemies, such as the the spirits in Darkroot Basin, and every type of knight, I just equip the Hornet Ring and Parry Dagger and backstab or riposte with the Silver Tracer, it is a one hit kill every time and is a hell of a lot more fun that just smashing a great sword down on their head.

As for the bosses, the quickness of your strikes gives you far more time to react to the bosses attacks. Every time I've summoned a phantom to help me in a boss fight (and they've literally allhad great swords or axes) I've seen them constantly getting slammed due to the animation time of swinging the sword, and the subsequent drain on stamina; whereas I can lay in 2 to 3 double-handed hits with my Iaito, then re-equip my shield and do a quick series of rolls to safety. As long as you're not a fucking retard with ADHD, then most boss fights may take longer but you are in the end safer.

That said, no of course it's not completely better. But then neither is using a great sword completely better. That's exactly what I like about Dark Souls.

At high level pvp however you will be laughed into the ground for using a great sword or axe.

On the topic of the Longbow, I also use it, and at +15 with a high amount of Dex the thing is a complete beast. Especially with large arrows and the Hawk Ring equipped. You can use it to farm the shit out of the blue dragons in front of New Londo, since if you stand far enough back and shoot them they don't react at all, and they are vulnerable to headshots.

 

True. Sif was a nightmare for me. But is good in pvp.

 

It does work on Havel though. I find it funny when people bring up what a hard time they had with Havel, since the fight was so trivial if you just got him into a back-stab loop.

 

What weapon are you using that is so much better? Don't say Black Knight because you can't get those reliably until the last area and they barely outclass a great scythe anyway (while also being NOT ENCHANTABLE, I might add, so far weaker vs enchanted weapons). Scythe is very nearly the top of the power curve in total damage while still being fast.

Weaker weapons are worse at first, true. But if you haven't taken a fast dagger or rapier, applied Sunlight/Darkmoon blade and Power Within, then demolished a boss in a few seconds, you haven't been using them right. You're looking at a cool +400ish damage, which is then augmented by +40% from power within for over 550ish elemental damage. This is in addition to the base damage *1.4 from power within. Crystal Magic Weapon can do almost as well with +350ish base damage, with the additional bonus that you get 3 uses of it and it can last 50% longer.

What are you trying to say here? That one scythe isn't faster than another? The point is that all of them are much faster than strength weapons, which is why you use Dex weapons in the first place.

 

The scythe and black knight halberd are both halberds as far as the game is concerned. And I don't think I've played a patched game where I didn't get a weapon off of one of the first 3 black knights. The drop rate is stupidly high. They have pretty much the same speed. You're not comparing a katana to a greatsword here. You're not getting extra swings in. Power within makes anything cheesily powerful, it works just as well on a str weapon. Never mind capped magic enchants. You're trying to compare the damage a level 80 character can do to the damage a level 20-30 character can do. Str weapons take far less investment to do more damage and stun harder. Scimitars, daggers, painting guardian swords, rapiers, they all do fuck all by themselves and if you enchant them they're still weaker than an enchanted two hander. Upgrading your dagger damage from 16 to 80 with lightning resin helps a lot, but you could have just pumped strength 2 points and fucked the thing with a two handed claymore for 120 without the resin.

You don't NEED power within with strength weapons. Using it turns bosses into jokes that die in 5 hits, before you even run out of stamina.

And how the fuck do you argue that the black knight weapons barely outclass a great scythe? For pretty much the entire game, your scythe is going to be between +5 and +10. The black knight weapon is going to be at effectively +6 the moment you get a crystal lizard (since very upgrade is about 3 times as valuable), and can easily be capped before you even get to anor londo. The damage isn't even remotely comparable.

 

I can see arguments on both sides. Strength weapons are powerful from the beginning, but slow and suffer from whiff-stun on a complete miss. Katanas get nasty with higher level stat scaling, but they are lame and prevent you from equipping self-respect in the off-hand.

However, the crucial point no one seems to be addressing is that the the Balder Sword is the shit. R2 motherfuckers!

 

So if you get the rare drop you need (out of several potential drops you don't want) off a handful of limited-spawn foes, Black Knight weapons outclass normal weapons if you don't bother to buff them? That's a lot of conditionals to say that normal weapons aren't good.

You should have a +10 weapon sometime around blighttown (swamp leeches have like a 75% drop rate), and you can easily pick up the ember for +15 weapons from the beginning of the game if you want. +15 is in theory possible before anor londo, though +12-13 is more likely.

Power Within is just cheese for the sake of cheese really. Any weapon buff along with a good weapon will cut bosses to shreds, and fast weapons use buffs the best.

 

I'm the one with too many conditions? "Gee, if you two hand and use power within and have 30 faith to use sunlight blade and have 40 dex and sequence break for early upgrades then a scythe does slightly more than any random black knight weapon with minimum equip stats."

vs,

"lol one of the 4 black knights you are likely to run into before you even go to lower undead burg dropped a weapon, guess I 1 or 2 shot everything in the game except bosses till I get the lordvessel."



A scimitar with black pine resin isn't going to do fuck all to the iron golem btw. Or Quelaag. You need lightning for pretty much every boss past the taurus demon. But hey, there's like, 4. That's totally enough. Never mind that you'll use 2 just on the gaping dragon, IF you don't try to cut his tail. And you can always cast magic sword for like, 30 extra damage. Wooo.

 

I don't know what you people are talking about; I didn't use any magic in either game. In Demon's Souls I managed to handily kill everything with a +9 or so Claymore and in Dark Souls there was nothing my Demon's Great Hammer / Great Club +10 couldn't handle. You certainly don't "need" lightning for anything.

I couldn't have used any other weapons anyway because I didn't know fuck all about the games and just increased STR to 40 or so, then boosted END, then VIT, never qualifying for anything but heavy bashing and smashing tools.

Edit: That said if I had known that investing in Dex to wield one of those Black Knight weapons would have yielded such a tremendously powerful weapon I'd have used that. Why make it harder on yourself on your first time through? The game was hard enough as is for me.

 

I think you are selling buffing a bit short. At Int 15, Greater magic weapon with the Ivory catalyst should add around 200 raw magic to each hit. Buffing adds the same flat damage amount no matter what the weapon's base damage. So tripling the attack speed means 600 magic damage vs 200 magic damage in addition to physical damage. Magic weapon will do ~430 vs ~ 144 raw magic. So if you are doing an extra 30 a hit with Magic weapon, greater magic weapon will up that to an extra 80-90, for ~250 damage for 3 hits plus whatever physical damage you do.

Also gold pine resin can be farmed from the mushroom parents, so its viable to use throughout the game once you get past the crest of artorias.

 

The Iron Golem is an utter joke with an upgraded Long Bow and a good amount of Dex. I beat him without taking a single hit: by just shooting at him until he got close, then running through his legs, rinse and repeat. Quelaag is nothing if you can summon Maneater Mildred, just have her tank and slash away at Quelaag with the Iaito; even without Mildred all of Quelaag's attacks are so slow and pattern heavy that you can predict them and roll away with ample time.

 

No, the scythe is more than powerful enough to do that without any buffs. It's only barely weaker than your beloved black knight weapons, and that is with high stats on each. The buffs are specifically required for weaker, faster weapons. It sounds like you compared an unenchanted rapier with a fully built up black knight weapon and drew your conclusions from that. Have you even tried Ricard's Rapier (moar like Raper am I right guys?)

Just so we are clear, from your little calculator: Black Knight Halberd @ 32 str/18 dex (min requirements): 477 damage. Scythe @ 14 str/36 dex (same number of stat points): 464 damage, and further buffable (+150-+300 elemental damage depending on how you roll).

Sequence break? What the fuck is that? It's an open world game. You'll have +10 for sure as soon as you hit the upgrade bench after killing a few slugs in blight town. +15 is totally optional and easy to get.

As far as I'm concerned a build planned around a luck-based drop isn't a build, it's a a lottery. What are you going to do if they don't drop any? It can happen. What if they drop a weapon that is far out of your stat range? You claim I ask for high stats when I say you CAN use sunlight or darkmoon weapon (spending a pitiful amount of souls for consumables or finding some for a decently big buff works as well), yet many of the black knight weapons REQUIRE high stats.

If you are talking about gold pine resin when you say only 4, maybe you should find out where you can buy them.

 

Yes, I have tried Ricard's. It sucked balls. It was the hardest fucking game I've ever played. Completely not worth it.

Btw.
Since my last post, started new character.


Finally, after farming an agonizing 2 black knights 5 minutes apart.

Damage with the twinkling I already had before getting the weapon.

One more upgrade from the lizard in the basin.

So, pray tell, what does the best dex weapon do at this point? I think I could upgrade my katana to +5 and get it to about 160.

That uchigatana really did kick ass for about 2 minutes before I put it away and used a spear instead though.

 

Ok I upgraded my dex weapon so both are +3 now.





I think they're pretty close guys, katanas are like 10 times faster.

Update: I've had an epic battle with the area boss. It almost killed me but then I remembered I could attack by swinging my sword so I swung my sword 4 times and it died. I think enemies get hard later in the game though cause I heard theres this lava guy and you have to hit him 5 times that sounds pretty tough.

 

Spider shield = you were in the depths = your normal weapons should be +10. Try again. Nevermind that you are comparing a Str build vs. a Dex build while having Str stats for both, which is idiotic.

Also OMG SEQUENCE BREAKING WTF? I though we all knew this was such a horrible thing to go off the rails?

BTW killed all 5 of the early game accessible black knights w/ 10 humanity and got zero of their weapons. Apparently luck or savescumming is now a viable build?