Fighting in the intro segment was ok, although the chimera seemed to take forever to die. Maybe there's a trick to it besides climbing onto its back and mashing heavy attack.
Sort of. Climbing on chimera's is part of the best strategy for them, but the other part is taking off each head in the right order. You want to cut the snake tail off, cause it to go into stun (which gives close to double damage while it rolls around in pain), then do the same for the goat head (now that the snake can't pluck you off), use your biggest damaging attacks while it again rolls around, and then mop up the crippled monster however you want. And I'm not sure if the intro character has it slotted, but there is a sword skill called Gouge that is designed for stabbing things effectively while climbing; much better than generic heavy attack.
I picked strider since bows, fuck yeah. Aiming was a bit of a bitch though, the thumb stick apparently has no middle ground between static and move cursor at full speed, making precision adjustments against moving targets quite tricky. Enemies take ~20-30 arrows to kill with regular attacks but can kill you in 1-2 solid hits. Oh yay, HP bloat.
Oddly enough, bows can only be a good primary source of damage for two classes: Assassins and Magic Archers. Assassins can do it through all sorts of damage augments and a zoom shot skill to kill far away enemies in one (maybe two) blow(s) and Magic Archers are just plain awesome. For everyone else, the bow mostly serves as support, to knock out aerial enemies, disrupt mages with knockdown shots, deal elemental damage when enchanted, and take advantage of nifty specialty arrows.
Also the non-magic bows have a lot of "trap skills"; skills that are just plain bad. Any of the multi-shots are pretty terrible, the only things worth bothering with are power/knockdown shots or disabling ones. I'd say of any weapon, bows have the most. Fortunately, bow classes have daggers, which are excellent weapons with tons of great skills.
I literally sent a bandit flying 20 metres backwards with an arrow. Immersion: Shattered. But you have to use dire arrow. Because the 7-arrow shot does no damage.
Yeah. This is no game for anyone with a simulationist bent. Double jumping, air-juggling, rolling making you invincible, launching slashes, and POWAH ARROHS will drive them batty.
I tried firing 20 regular shots into the torso of another highway bandit from the same group and knocked less than 25% of his hp away.
The bandits on the way to the woods, right? Poor placement by the devs, sticking a high level bandits so close to a low level quest. Blast Arrows did a good job messing them up, as did a quick throw off the cliff.
I'm level 15 and there's a quest in the starting village to go down a well. There's some crocodile men down there. After my pawns all bumrushed them and died I spent 15 minutes standing on a ledge shooting arrows into them. I managed to kill one, but the hit point pools on the others were just too damn bloated.
Lucky. I tried that my first time down the well after a frontal attack turned bad, but the bastards just followed me back up. Eventually I killed them with the use of a few combos (Oil arrows plus fire attack) and accidentally learning the secret to beating them is to cut off their tails, which takes out their ludicrous damage resistance, and makes them flop around dead. Lighting them on fire was more fun though.
World is servicable but bland.
Pretty much. There's not very much in the way of cool stuff to find that isn't quest-related. And the fact that the exact same enemy spawns are constantly present in the world (barring some changes after a certain event) gets a little boring; I started traveling at night to change things up, or going it alone to just avoid some encounters altogether (mostly wolves/dire wolves). It's also retarded how some of the coolest monsters are sandbagged until the "post-game", and the fast travel system can't be (effectively) used until New Game+.
Combat is not paticularily difficult but working your way through a bajillion hitpoints is tedious as fuck.
I agree combat isn't very hard for the most part, but I don't see the HP bloat complaint as valid. That's only if you play it like a typical RPG and just do what your build is "supposed to do". The game rewards experimentation and clever thinking. I don't know if you got to the Everfall quest in Gran Soren, but as a part of that quest there is an ogre wandering around a part of the dungeon. This monster is clearly meant to be avoided by use of side tunnels, but I had to kill that mofo. Weapons weren't powerful enough to deal with its damage resistance at the time, so I got creative, luring it to a spot of the edge of a long drop, in which I had a powder keg lying in wait. Set it off with a blast arrow and knocked the sucker down to his death, gaining a level or two in the process.
The save system is utterly retarded.
It's annoying as all hell, for sure. My guess is that they didn't want people farming the shit out of rune crystals by gearing up low level pawns with end game gear and essentially "cornering the market", making every other player's pawns not worth hiring. Being restricted to one character at a time solves this, I suppose, but I don't think it was worth it. Then again, I found Dark Soul's online features completely superfluous and resented not being able to pause in hostile areas if something came up, so maybe I'm just not down with this new generation of online integration.
Overall, while the game was not without some glaring flaws, it has a lot of upsides and a sequel could make for something really great if developed well. I would recommend giving it another go, except for the fact that single save slot plus modded FAGBOX tendency to corrupt data sounds like a recipe for HULKRAGE. Maybe they will say "Fuck it!", to the (IMO, worthless) online component and make a better save system next time?
