From Software The Dark Souls Discussion Thread

[praetor]

Shamed by the opinion of some posters here, I made a new character aiming at a Dex / Faith build, fighting by parrying. I see that you simply have to learn the proper moment to parry attacks by trial and error for each attack and each enemy. Sometimes you have to parry right before you'd be hit; sometimes, as with spears, you have to parry earlier. I'm not sure I like that, I thought it'd be a skill you could acquire on early enemies and use it later on but with each new enemy I have to learn it anew.

that way the game would be trivially easy. imagine a new player learning this "universal parry" early (tutorial, firelink and/or early burg) and encountering that black knight or havel early on? suddenly 2 difficult fights become trivial. suddenly the news spreads that parry is the easy-win button for almost every encounter and the game loses a lot of it's charm and difficulty.

and it's not that much trial and error, pretty much every attack can be parried if you time it so that you press parry when the animation starts "accelerating" (i hope i made myself at least somewhat clear). that only requires you to know the attacks of the enemies, no real trial and error. just my 0,02€

- in thief armour, you can simply sneak up on balder knights and backstab them if you move really slowly.

you can do that in any light armour

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Yea, always seemed like a pretty useless spell, same as the sneaky spells. Slots are just too precious for that kind of stuff.

The invisibility spell is basically a cheat.

Talking more about the silent step one. Never tried out invisibility due to my spells being largely geared for bossfights.

If your magic is just for bosses then you shouldn't need many spell slots. Plenty of room left for experimenting.

In my experience it seemed like you needed a plentiful bandolier for the harder bosses too. I generally ran Crystal Lance, twin regular Lance, twin Soul Mass, Crystal Soul Mass, Dark Beads, White Dragon Breath, and finally some extra picks that were usually something like Crystal Magic Weapon or Power Within. Never felt like I just had plain enough.

 

[Rolk's Drifter]

In my experience it seemed like you needed a plentiful bandolier for the harder bosses too. I generally ran Crystal Lance, twin regular Lance, twin Soul Mass, Crystal Soul Mass, Dark Beads, White Dragon Breath, and finally some extra picks that were usually something like Crystal Magic Weapon or Power Within. Never felt like I just had plain enough.

That's crazy amounts of firepower just for bosses. Did you not have any damage boosting items like Dusk's Crown and the Bellowing Dragoncrest ring?

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

In my experience it seemed like you needed a plentiful bandolier for the harder bosses too. I generally ran Crystal Lance, twin regular Lance, twin Soul Mass, Crystal Soul Mass, Dark Beads, White Dragon Breath, and finally some extra picks that were usually something like Crystal Magic Weapon or Power Within. Never felt like I just had plain enough.

That's crazy amounts of firepower just for bosses. Did you not have any damage boosting items like Dusk's Crown and the Bellowing Dragoncrest ring?

Bellowing Dragoncrest yes, my rings were that and Havel's. I also tended to use them to thin out the herd if fighting tougher enemies, since I wasn't very good at dealing with multiple opponents.

I guess another factor is just my preference of going in overwhelmingly prepared (I had grinded to Soul Level 47 before Taurus Demon).

 

[Rolk's Drifter]

Bloody hell there aren't even that many enemies before the Taurus! No wonder you were so down on farming in a previous post. How long did that take you? Also was this your first character? I imagine playing a sorceror for your first char must be pretty tough.

 

[Athelas]

I got incredibly lucky with the Taurus, I stumbled on it and beat it on my first try at around level10ish. My heart was pounding like crazy since I had completely run out of Pyromancy/Estus Flask and I had to get close to finish it with a shitty rapier.

 

[Darth Roxor]

sup guise

so why is this game so shit?

 

[Serious_Business]

sup guise

so why is this game so shit?

why are you so shit

Fuck you

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

sup guise

so why is this game so shit?

It was made in Japan, duh.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Bloody hell there aren't even that many enemies before the Taurus! No wonder you were so down on farming in a previous post. How long did that take you? Also was this your first character? I imagine playing a sorceror for your first char must be pretty tough.

Around 3 hours. It might have been after Taurus actually (been a while, and Taurus Demon wasn't a very memorable boss to me). I think it was indeed after Taurus Demon, since I used the Fire Drake's breath attack farm trick. But yea I farmed like a motherfucker while playing DSouls.

 

[Kanedias]

Shamed by the opinion of some posters here, I made a new character aiming at a Dex / Faith build, fighting by parrying. I see that you simply have to learn the proper moment to parry attacks by trial and error for each attack and each enemy. Sometimes you have to parry right before you'd be hit; sometimes, as with spears, you have to parry earlier. I'm not sure I like that, I thought it'd be a skill you could acquire on early enemies and use it later on but with each new enemy I have to learn it anew.

A tip that helped me learn when to actually hit the parry button against attacks I didn't know by heart was to first block those attacks, so I could check how much time passes between the attack animation starting and the moment it pings against the shield. I found this especially useful for those misleadingly delayed attacks that tend to get you to parry earlier than you should.

Also you can sneak up on dudes in any armour not just thief gear. Just FYI

There are different categories of armor that generate different amounts of sound, actually, though it only depends on the chestpiece. There are 3 categories, the more silent ones (cloth, leather, etc) chain (paladin set, chainmail set, cleric set, etc) and plate. This doesn't mean that walking slowly won't let you sneak up on an enemy if you're using, say, plate, but it will be more difficult.

Also was this your first character? I imagine playing a sorceror for your first char must be pretty tough.

Sorcerers are actually much easier than melee characters, especially from Logan onwards. Not only do they do a lot of damage but generally on bosses its much easier to find openings to attack with spells than openings to attack with melee, plus meleeing itself is more dangerous.

(I had grinded to Soul Level 47 before Taurus Demon).

I don't want to tell anyone how to play the game, but that seems like a lot of effort to make the game more tedious. Generally you don't ever have to grind or farm, at least not to that extent.

Most farming is done at the end of the game to upgrade more weapons to max for PvP, since you want a lot of titanite chunks and a couple of slabs. While playing through the game you shouldn't need to farm much unless you want to give the Blighttown leeches a go to get your weapon to +10 before Sen's or something. Soul levels are not worth grinding unless you really want to use a weapon that you don't meet the requirements of yet.

 

[Hellraiser]

sup guise

so why is this game the shit?

fixed,

also because it simply is damn good

 

[praetor]

lvl 47 after taurus?! holy fuck, talk about overcompensating... and holy fucking jesus at that amount of spells! you can kill O&S with half that in NG+ (recently used 3-4 casts of crystal soul mass, full casts of both lances and 2 casts of pursuers when i helped Multidirectional with the 4Kunts in NG+ and i even missed with a couple of spears and iirc one hcsm)! goddamn, were you really that bad at the game that you had to overlevel/overgear so much? did you have +15 weapons for the gaping dragon or something? jesus...

Sorcerers are actually much easier than melee characters, especially from Logan onwards. Not only do they do a lot of damage but generally on bosses its much easier to find openings to attack with spells than openings to attack with melee, plus meleeing itself is more dangerous.

and sorceries deal shittons of damage to something like 99% of the bosses

 

[Damned Registrations]

lvl 47 after taurus?! holy fuck, talk about overcompensating... and holy fucking jesus at that amount of spells! you can kill O&S with half that in NG+ (recently used 3-4 casts of crystal soul mass, full casts of both lances and 2 casts of pursuers when i helped Multidirectional with the 4Kunts in NG+ and i even missed with a couple of spears and iirc one hcsm)! goddamn, were you really that bad at the game that you had to overlevel/overgear so much? did you have +15 weapons for the gaping dragon or something? jesus...

Sorcerers are actually much easier than melee characters, especially from Logan onwards. Not only do they do a lot of damage but generally on bosses its much easier to find openings to attack with spells than openings to attack with melee, plus meleeing itself is more dangerous.

and sorceries deal shittons of damage to something like 99% of the bosses

Except, you know, gaping dragon, quelag, iron golem, seath, or basically any boss that has decent defense anyways. But yeah, it sure wrecks all the paper armour bosses.

 

[Kanedias]

lvl 47 after taurus?! holy fuck, talk about overcompensating... and holy fucking jesus at that amount of spells! you can kill O&S with half that in NG+ (recently used 3-4 casts of crystal soul mass, full casts of both lances and 2 casts of pursuers when i helped Multidirectional with the 4Kunts in NG+ and i even missed with a couple of spears and iirc one hcsm)! goddamn, were you really that bad at the game that you had to overlevel/overgear so much? did you have +15 weapons for the gaping dragon or something? jesus...

Sorcerers are actually much easier than melee characters, especially from Logan onwards. Not only do they do a lot of damage but generally on bosses its much easier to find openings to attack with spells than openings to attack with melee, plus meleeing itself is more dangerous.

and sorceries deal shittons of damage to something like 99% of the bosses

Except, you know, gaping dragon, quelag, iron golem, seath, or basically any boss that has decent defense anyways. But yeah, it sure wrecks all the paper armour bosses.

Gaping has low defenses, he just has high HP. Quelaag also doesn't have high defenses, the thing is that at this point you usually only have the low level spells, but even then ranged attacks often hit the human part of her body which does about 50% more damage than usual and staggers her. Iron Golem also doesn't have high magic defense, but I do admit that melee is easier because he goes into stagger really easily and he sucks at hitting beneath his feet. Iron Golem is an easy boss, anyways.

Also magic damage from spells doesn't get resisted as easily as other kinds of damage unless you're fighting something like a Crystal Golem because the way defense calculations work in this game means that defense wrecks low damage but is ineffective against immense damage (it isn't a % based reduction) and spells like Soul Spear and the ilk deal a silly amount.

 

[praetor]

Except, you know, gaping dragon, quelag, iron golem, seath, or basically any boss that has decent defense anyways. But yeah, it sure wrecks all the paper armour bosses.

as Kanedias pointed out, you'll have the crappy spells for fighting those bosses (except for seath, who really is somewhat magic resistant). for the others, NG+ with the same spells is fairer to asses who can and cannot be wrecked since you'll have the same spells for everybody. and then every single fucking boss gets obliterated by those high-level spells that make trivial even usually though (for most) bosses like O&S or the 4kings. so yeah, spells actually wreck pretty much everything

 

[Rolk's Drifter]

Also you can sneak up on dudes in any armour not just thief gear. Just FYI

There are different categories of armor that generate different amounts of sound, actually, though it only depends on the chestpiece. There are 3 categories, the more silent ones (cloth, leather, etc) chain (paladin set, chainmail set, cleric set, etc) and plate. This doesn't mean that walking slowly won't let you sneak up on an enemy if you're using, say, plate, but it will be more difficult.

Err... why are you telling me what I already said?

Also was this your first character? I imagine playing a sorceror for your first char must be pretty tough.

Sorcerers are actually much easier than melee characters, especially from Logan onwards. Not only do they do a lot of damage but generally on bosses its much easier to find openings to attack with spells than openings to attack with melee, plus meleeing itself is more dangerous.

I'm aware of the sorceror's strengths. What I'm not aware of however, is what it's like to play a sorceror on your first time through.

 

[Black_Willow]

sup guise

so why is this game so shit?

Because Dork Souls bro
Oh and look at all those "DARUKU SORU IS TEH BEST RPG EVAH" in the voting thread...

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

5 Points
Dāku Souru
Morrowind
Arcanum
Torment

 

[Kanedias]

Err... why are you telling me what I already said?

Ah, it wasn't directed to you in particular, I was just using the chance to give that bit of obscure info which many people ignore because it's not explained anywhere.

 

[dnf]

sup guise

so why is this game so shit?

Because Dork Souls bro
Oh and look at all those "DARUKU SORU IS TEH BEST RPG EVAH" in the voting thread...

Unlike the codex trinity, Dark Souls is actually a good game

 

[Bubbles]

In gameplay maybe. In terms of dialogue, I'd still give Arcanum a thin edge.

 

[Ninjerk]

-Hello, what is your name?
-SOD OFF YA PIKEY FUKKA

GOTY Dialogue all years

 

[praetor]

Because Dork Souls bro
Oh and look at all those "DARUKU SORU IS TEH BEST RPG EVAH" in the voting thread...

i don't think those people (me included) think it's "the best rpg ever, full stop", but it most certainly is "da bestest akshun rpg evar" (Dragon's Dogma being the only one that comes close [or even surpasses it, depending on your tastes], but it's not on master race certified hardware ... yet), completely obliterating in almost every way the usual codex favourite in the subgenre (i.e. the Gothic series, usually G2:NotR)

 

[felipepepe]

Gothic and Dark Souls have nothing in common. The great joy of Gothic series is the fucking BEST exploration ever made in a game, and tons of great options to solve quests and do stuff. Dark Souls highlights, on the other hand, is the wonderful combat, the atmosphere and the world & lore.