From Software The Dark Souls II Megathread™

[Silverfish]

Here's very simple fix to adaptability:

Level vitality and strength instead and equip heavy armor and a greatshield. Be the man Havel wants you to be.

 

[Max Damage]

You only need anything light with elemental armor + greatshield if you want to block a lot, heavy armor in DS2 doesn't do shit besides hindering your roll and stamina recovery (making you worse at blocking, funny enough).

 

[Silverfish]

heavy armor in DS2 doesn't do shit besides hindering your roll and stamina recovery

It also makes you look cool, which is the most important thing of all.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Despite what ignorant Dunning-Krugers may think, it is not ideal for a hitbox to be the exact size and shape of the weapon model you see in game.

That's like, your opinion, man. I certainly think it's very cool when you character has performed an attack that hunches him down which causes the enemy attack to pass over his head. I would love to see a whole combat system of that stuff.

It's obvious when you think about an enemy like the Ruin Sentinels that they should be able to hit you with more than just the tip of their hammers, lest they be made completely trivial by circlestrafing.

Funnily enough it was DS2 (IIRC) that introduced variable damage from player-wielded halberds depending on if you hit enemies with the shaft or the blade, which was awesome.

I agree about glancing blows, in my opinion a stab should only lead to a grab if it properly hits center of mass. Not even Elden Ring does this, though, so I don't know why DS2 gets singled out.

It's because DS2 has fewer i-frames at base agility, so the inaccurate hitboxes get exposed for what they are. When a grab attack connects with the very edge of the player model in any of the other games, there are usually i-frames in effect, from the player having just rolled away from the attack, that smooth out the situation. And so it should be, because not only does the grab attack connecting with the foot teleporting the player into a torso grab look silly, it also visually indicates that that is where the attack connected. The player will then naturally suppose that what he has to do to avoid the grab is to get his character's center mass out of the way of the grab attack, despite that not being how it works at all. There's a disconnect between what's shown on the screen and how the game actually works, and that's bad.

> DS2 hitreg is garbage
> Actually, aside from a few admittedly unfair cases, DS2 hitreg is fine
> REEEEEEE!!!! You're high on copium! DS2 is shit

nice argument, however I have already depicted myself as the gigachad so you lose

 

[RoSoDude]

Despite what ignorant Dunning-Krugers may think, it is not ideal for a hitbox to be the exact size and shape of the weapon model you see in game.

That's like, your opinion, man. I certainly think it's very cool when you character has performed an attack that hunches him down which causes the enemy attack to pass over his head. I would love to see a whole combat system of that stuff.

This stuff works in Dark Souls 2 just as well as the other games, because the hitboxes work on the same principles. In practice it requires a ton of knowledge about boss movements and weapon timings, but it's very doable. Here's a montage of it in action in DS2:

I agree about glancing blows, in my opinion a stab should only lead to a grab if it properly hits center of mass. Not even Elden Ring does this, though, so I don't know why DS2 gets singled out.

It's because DS2 has fewer i-frames at base agility, so the inaccurate hitboxes get exposed for what they are. When a grab attack connects with the very edge of the player model in any of the other games, there are usually i-frames in effect, from the player having just rolled away from the attack, that smooth out the situation. And so it should be, because not only does the grab attack connecting with the foot teleporting the player into a torso grab look silly, it also visually indicates that that is where the attack connected. The player will then naturally suppose that what he has to do to avoid the grab is to get his character's center mass out of the way of the grab attack, despite that not being how it works at all. There's a disconnect between what's shown on the screen and how the game actually works, and that's bad.

I agree that the visual communication matters. The roll-into-grab teleporting and staggering after a roll from a hit half a second ago are really bad for giving an intuitive understanding of the action on screen. The hitbox just isn't the problem though, it's that grabs in every FromSoft game activate when the hitbox intersects any player hurtbox, when they should use a special rule that requires hitting the torso. Even with the same hitboxes, this would make for much less punishing grabs. The DS2 Mimic wake-up and DS3 Curse-Rotted Greatwood would still be bullshit with their giant spherical hitboxes, but the grab stabs people complain about would be perfectly fine.