It takes ~thirty minutes to clear Dragon Aerie to the extent needed to upgrade three different weapons to maximum and an assload of souls, at SL7+ ascetic tier. It takes up to hours to achieve the same in DaS1. Boring it may be like all farming, but Aerie is REALLY efficient.
(Drakes' hitboxes nothin', the worst part about them is their goddamn wings obscuring the camera whenever they walk, and the way they push you around when they walk seemingly forever; at least they can be killed pretty quickly with a proper weapon tho provided it doesn't feel like taking a stroll)
absolute, 100% horseshit.
a) to upgrade 3 twinklie or boner weapons you need 45!! upgrade materials, aerie gives 6-8 per run (depending on the RNG on the shitty dragons), and after a couple of ascetics the dragons have well over 10k HP, meaning unless you have the highest tier sorceries (pre-nerf geyser, maybe CSS?) or hexes (or miracles? how does sunlight spear work), it takes forever to kill them and they constantly slide around, and the hitbox on their foot stomp is absolute bullshit (once it will kill you straight away, another it won't even scratch, a third time it will take 75% of your health even when standing 5m away. and btw, with 40 dex and a manslayer, poisoning them ~4 times and hitting them all the time, it goes through the durability at least), plus you'll surely run through all the way at the very least twice, if you're very lucky, to get all the 11 crystal lizards 'cause after a while they can't be one shot even by forbidden sun (maybe GRS?), and some of them will randomly run in random directions, plus they have some semi-random i-frames on their wake-up. so, all things considered, you're looking at something like 10-30mins per run, depending on build and luck! so you're looking for at least 20min if you're lucky to upgrade 1 twinklie/boner weapon. the only thing "superior" to DaS1 here is that you get both twinklies and boners in a single run (and slabs), but then again it takes more materials to upgrade, there's way more useful boss-weapons in DaS2, boss-shields now are a must to upgrade (since now it increases stability), and the majority of good armours are also twinklie-upgraded. so yeah... there's of course also the giant lord farming for infinite twinklies, and you'll need quite a few ascetics so you'll also have to farm those
b) in DaS1, you can buy twinklies for 8k a piece, it takes only 10 for a full weapon upgrade, farming the phalanx yields 8-12k in less than a minute regardless of build. you do the math. chunks? also an average of 1/min if you farm at the Kiln, maybe more if you're lucky with the RNG at new londo (plus the chance of slabs). demon titties? there's very few weapons worth upgrading, so you'll be farming maybe once or twice max. dragon scales? only if you use MLGS, and then you'll find enough just playing. really, only slabs are shit to farm, and there's only 3 guaranteed per playthrough
