Bloodeyes
Going from 30 to 40 vigor is a
50% increasee in your total HP while a corresponding ten points in you weapons stats might give you a 10% damage increase at early weapon upgrade levels.
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And 10% is optimistic because most unupgraded weapons don't have that great of a stat scaling (the letter shown is a vague indicator, just because something has a B doesn't mean it's fantastic), you get the most benefit from added offensive stats when you're deep in your weapon upgrade level.
An example from my STR run :
Grafted colossal C in STR, +187 in stat scaling, Greatsword at B, +177 in stat scaling. Grafted at C scales better, it's because I have it upgraded at a higher level than the GS ( somber stones are so much more usable ).
Btw for regular weapons, at low levels I highly recommend you make a run to redmane as early as you feel you can handle to grab the fire whetblade. As long as you're not fighting something like a wyrm which has high fire resistance, it is better damage than standard, heavy, quality or keen attunements. Those are only good at high offensive stats and weapon upgrade level.
Also, it's really cool to see the hand spiders throw tantrums when they're getting lit, caria manor is less intimidating when you see them whimpering on their back every time you hit them.
Buying a game to train me to play a game I suck at. This feels like the sunk costs fallacy. But I've grabbed Dark Souls remastered from the playstation store. I'll see how it goes.
Thing is, DS1 is a very easy game in comparison, people overstated the challenge of early souls games when they started getting popular and confuse "challenge" for "punishing". Punishing is the right word I would use to describe DeS and DS1, DeS more so. DeS has a hefty health penalty for losing your human form, less so with the cling ring but then you lose a slot. DS1 halves your HP if you get hit by curse status. They're games that easily kill you when you don't pay attention to the environment or spam attacks. Dying means your progress in an area is reset unless you feel confident enough to skip things and memorize layouts. Kill an npc you shouldn't kill and live by the consequence. All of this is summed by : punishing. Make mistakes, get punished. Mechanically, those games don't present a major challenge. Enemies have very predictable, fixed patterns of attack, with very slow telegraphs compared to what is done in DS3 and Elden Ring.
Playing those will teach you the foundation of souls games, which the modern games still have, but with much more leniency when it comes to the need to press dodge at the exact right time. Medium shields are more effective, so any build can play turtle behind a shield and not just STR builds. In DS3 and ER any random mook can break your guard easily if you're not on a greatshield.
As you ease up to the play style of commited attacks and learn the patterns of enemies, you'll feel more confident in dropping shields and defenses and just go all out on the offensive. Then you'll be more ready to suffer through the current era of attacks with feints/varied delays with the same original telegraph, relentless combos, attack tracking.. the early souls games have so little attack tracking, you can even avoid most attacks just by running back and forth and circling around enemies without dodging or blocking, just keep the camera unlocked and run around. Oh sure, this is still technically possible in modern souls games, but where it was a viable strategy in the early games, only a few attacks are worth sprinting away over dodging these days because of the massive tracking.
Overall, I feel that as From went deeper into the mechanical challenge aspect, they also lost the punishing aspects of their games. DeS made you farm if you used too many healing items, had world tendency, HP reduction on losing human form and even a boss that could delevel you, DS1 had things like curse status, enemies you couldn't hit if you didn't have the right consumable (ghosts) or weapon, could make you deeply regret overextending in an area you shouldn't be in because of the inability to teleport before you get the lordvessel, while in a game like ER, you can just bash your head over 3000 times on something if you want to, there's never anything to regret, checkpoints are always 2 seconds away from where you were, teleport whenver you want and they even invented areas in which you can't attack NPCs which is mind numbing and a Todd Howard move IMHO.
Something was lost in the soul of souls games. The pursuit of MLG 360 roll'd'it was done at the cost of losing the core philosophy of souls games and what made the adventure of exploring levels feel tense, slow and methodic.
By the haligtree, I was grabbing sites of graces by running blind to be done quicker. Would I dare do this in a modern equivalent of The Depth in a game in which I can't just go somewhere else when I want? no. I still remember the feels when I got cursed there. Ouchy.
