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.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Has anyone seen this? Has this been posted here before? 20 videos, ~5 minutes each, give or take, from 9 years ago.

This is incredible. I mean, we all knew that Best Souls 2 is, well, the best souls game, but these videos show a whole other level of care, passion, creativity, love and most of all, SOVL put into this game.

 

[Odoryuk]

Has anyone seen this? Has this been posted here before? 20 videos, ~5 minutes each, give or take, from 9 years ago.

This is incredible. I mean, we all knew that Best Souls 2 is, well, the best souls game, but these videos show a whole other level of care, passion, creativity, love and most of all, SOVL put into this game.

Don't want to burst your bubble but such videos exist for all of their games. I reject watching such videos on ER because I still find new stuff in that game organically, and watching someone pointing to it on youtube will ruin these small magical moments

 

[Dark Souls II]

Has anyone seen this? Has this been posted here before? 20 videos, ~5 minutes each, give or take, from 9 years ago.

This is incredible. I mean, we all knew that Best Souls 2 is, well, the best souls game, but these videos show a whole other level of care, passion, creativity, love and most of all, SOVL put into this game.

Most of these are well known I think.

But speaking of old DS2 content, many years ago there was a Twitter thread by a Russian autist that was the most in-depth exploration of Dark Souls II lore. It was 100+ tweets long. The same guy also made threads for Dark Souls 1 and (I think) Demon's Souls. Does anyone maybe have these archived, or even knows what I'm talking about?

 

[Child of Malkav]

Don't want to burst your bubble but such videos exist for all of their games. I reject watching such videos on ER because I still find new stuff in that game organically, and watching someone pointing to it on youtube will ruin these small magical moments

None of them are as experimental and unique as DkS2. Reject all you want, the truth can be too much for some to handle.

 

[cvv]

Don't want to burst your bubble but such videos exist for all of their games. I reject watching such videos on ER because I still find new stuff in that game organically, and watching someone pointing to it on youtube will ruin these small magical moments

None of them are as experimental and unique as DkS2.

This. My favourite shit from DS2 is using the shittiest weapon in the game for a long-ish time (raw Santier's) until the bulb smashes and you get one of the best weps. So fucking brilliant and they've never done anything like that ever again.

In comparison DS3 secrets look like Watson's retarded meathead cousin next to Sherlock.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Don't want to burst your bubble but such videos exist for all of their games. I reject watching such videos on ER because I still find new stuff in that game organically, and watching someone pointing to it on youtube will ruin these small magical moments

None of them are as experimental and unique as DkS2.

This. My favourite shit from DS2 is using the shittiest weapon in the game for a long-ish time (raw Santier's) until the bulb smashes and you get one of the best weps. So fucking brilliant and they've never done anything like that ever again.

In comparison DS3 secrets look like Watson's retarded meathead cousin next to Sherlock.

And it was designed to help you do a no bonfires run since you couldn't repair your stuff the usual way then.

There's depth to the design.

 

[Vincente]

"bonfire ahead, jumping required" message with 1100 approvals and 10 bloodstains around it.

 

[Tehdagah]

"bonfire ahead, jumping required" message with 1100 approvals and 10 bloodstains around it.

I need to replay this game.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

"bonfire ahead, jumping required" message with 1100 approvals and 10 bloodstains around it.

Dark Souls please never change!