From Software The Dark Souls II Megathread™

Lucky you: you have a good reason to start another DS 2 playthrough.

 

Kill the dragon. It's the stupidest boss in the entire series, you can't say you truly experienced DS 2 if you haven't cursed your god at least once thanks to the Ancient motherfucking Dragon.

 

I think you're confusing it with he Ancient Wyvern in DS3. Because that one is some high quality stupid.

 

The Ancient Wyvern is stupid, but it's harmless compared to the Ancient Dragon.

The Ancient Dragon is the lowest point of the series. That puny gimmicky wyvern can't even hope to compete with it.

 

I never even tried killing Ancient Dragon, he seemed like a good bro.

 

He lies and he is full of shit. He needs to die.

 

Lyric Suite if you were going to play demon's souls anyway, why play it after dark souls? It's much easier than the games that came after.

 

I'm planning to play it because i got wind of the fact it's in a playable state in the emulator. So what about the difficulty it's not like that's the only thing that matters here.

 

He's a fake. You get Soul of a Giant from killing him.

 

I killed the ancient dragon, even though it was tedious. Hugging always wins

 

I left the Ancient Dragon alone. Fighting a dude with a billion hp in the game with the fastest weapon degradation never appealed.

 

The first time I fought him I had an inconceivably shitty build and I broke two swords to take down that fucker.

 

I vaguely remembered farming Raime/Fume Knight to powerstance his ultra greatswords in both hands to buttrape the Ancient Dragon.

 

Killing ancient dragon is pointless
winning the fight doesn't reward you with a cool ass boss weapon or fashion soul drop
he's not mechanically fun to engage
and he isn't even hostile to you in the first place. You are the one poking it with sticks.

Fighting something like this is very sisyphean.

 

It drops an important item lore-wise (if you care about that stuff), but the only real reason to waste your time trying to kill that bastard is to be able to boast about having killed all DS2 bosses (again, if you care about that stuff).

 

Lots of souls for farming

 

If you want to use the Ruler's Sword, King's Ultra Greatsword, and/or King's Shield, you'll need Soul of the King. To get the Soul of the King, you need to defeat the hollowed Vendrick in the Undead Crypt. If you want to defeat the hollowed Vendrick here, you'll need Soul of a Giant to make it actually possible to damage Vendrick, five of which needed to deal full damage and can only be gained, aside from the giant encounters and memories, also from the Ancient Dragon. Defeating Vendrick also make it possible to access the King's Set. While you can respawn the giants down in the Black Gulch with the ascetic, it seems they only drop their loot upon their first encounter, so it's not possible to farm the soul there. Not sure if you can use the ascetic to get the soul from the memories, though.

 

Fighting the Ancient Dragon to make Vendrick slightly easier is like fighting the entire USA army and steal their weapons to kill your paralytic neighbor.

 

I've never needed a better reason to kill something in a Souls game than "because it's there".

 

I killed Vendrick without the extra soul, it's really not worth going that extra smile.

 

Dark Souls 2 has the best fashion souls, best weapon variety, power stance, hexes, more creature variety and better NG+.

 

Fashion souls. Also, even with just 4 souls, Zwei+Greatsword powerstance burned down Vendrick pretty fast.