From Software The Dark Souls II Megathread™

[meanwhileInPoland]

well From finally made gargoyles a good/challenging fight. my shitty mage could not kill them fast enough so at one point there was 5 or 6 of them intense as fuck

what level i should be in shaded woods? i killed that scorpions bitch but those lion faggots are raping my ass. with great soul arrow they take like 4 damage with their shields raised and around 40 with clean shot

also how do i open those doors in basilisks cave?

 

[DragoFireheart]

What Gargoyles? In Lost Balliste?

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

What Gargoyles? In Lost Balliste?

yes. IMO they are harder than gargoyles in DS1 and you cant cheese them like maneaters in Des.

 

[Kanedias]

For that door in the basilisk area you need a key that drops from the petrified beastman near the bonfire.

 

[praetor]

I dunno, I think I'm starting to like this game more than DK1 despite some pointed out flaws.

Bonfire warping is a really stupid thing to get butthurt about. I suppose if you hated DeS1 but Loved DK1 pre-Anor Londo it would make sense, but honestly it feels like the lead designer tried to combine DK1 and DeS1 together. The way poise is handled along with the difficulty of parries/backstabs is reminiscent of DeS1.

but that't the thing... he put shit from DeS in DaS without ever stopping to think if it would work, when it was obvious it wouldn't. level up at NPC was humongously retarded, and warping from beginning removes a lot of the tension, difficulty and atmosphere. f.e. status ailments, even nu-curse petrification, become barely more than a nuisance from the start because now you can simply warp to a safe location and continue (farming souls to buy a curative etc), and the enemies (and especially bosses) aren't that much better to make up for it

Oh, and despawning enemies makes the game easier. I can purposely farm out problematic enemies to make running back to the boss easier. I have yet to find myself short of souls either.

so i guess the talk of streamlining to make it easier was true... (but seriously, ever since the first stream it was obvious how stupid was the limited respawn)

still an excellent game, just shy of it's predecessors "complete package" (that could, but i doubt it will, surpass it with a few patches and maybe a DLC)

 

[DragoFireheart]

but that't the thing... he put shit from DeS in DaS without ever stopping to think if it would work, when it was obvious it wouldn't. level up at NPC was humongously retarded, and warping from beginning removes a lot of the tension, difficulty and atmosphere. f.e. status ailments, even nu-curse petrification, become barely more than a nuisance from the start because now you can simply warp to a safe location and continue (farming souls to buy a curative etc), and the enemies (and especially bosses) aren't that much better to make up for it

Poison is deadly: you die without a cure items on you. Same with Petrification with it being instant death is quite nasty. Not Dark Souls 1 nasty, but no more weak poison and more status effects helps make up for it.

Now, if you want situations were you are cursed and at 1/8 your life patch-free Dark Souls 1 with only New Londo as the only way to remove it then sure, I can understand your disappointment.

so i guess the talk of streamlining to make it easier was true... (but seriously, ever since the first stream it was obvious how stupid was the limited respawn)

still an excellent game, just shy of it's predecessors "complete package" (that could, but i doubt it will, surpass it with a few patches and maybe a DLC)

Here's the thing though: it's EASIER for good players but harder for bad players. Bad players will run out of souls and be fully hollow, while good players will clear areas and be drowning in souls. It's a very... interesting system. I suppose you could say that it rewards good play over bad play.

Contrast that with before where you had to be good for each respawn, but if you were bad you could endlessly farm souls you needed without regard for deaths.

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

but that't the thing... he put shit from DeS in DaS without ever stopping to think if it would work, when it was obvious it wouldn't. level up at NPC was humongously retarded, and warping from beginning removes a lot of the tension, difficulty and atmosphere. f.e. status ailments, even nu-curse petrification, become barely more than a nuisance from the start because now you can simply warp to a safe location and continue (farming souls to buy a curative etc), and the enemies (and especially bosses) aren't that much better to make up for it

the only two moments when i felt i fucked up and went to far and there is no way back in DS1 where at the bottom of blightown(before i knew about shortcut through valley of drakes) and in tomb of giants( went there after killing Penwheel at sls 20?). Glorious moments but lets not pretend that DS1 was like that all the time.


I never cared that much for lore in DS1 before all those lore videos on youtube but right now i fucking need to know more about Iron King/Mytha/Lost Sinner etc. Not even about drangleic but all those ruined kingdoms i visit

 

[Kanedias]

I don't think they streamlined this game to make it easier. I found this way harder than for example Demon's Souls, and while the despawning of enemies does help when you run to the bosses, in Dark Souls normal enemies never gave you trouble to begin with. Sure, they respawned infinitely, but you could easily run through areas once you knew the layout, ignoring every enemy. I still believe the limited respawn thing is retarded, but I don't think it makes the game easier.

And about the "complete package", I don't think DaS had the complete package either. People praise DaS bosses, for example, but more than half of them were shit, with massive blindspots where they can't hit you, or limited movesets. Sure, a couple of the bosses in DaS2 aren't too good (Old Iron King for example) but none of them is on the level of bullshit that was Bed of Chaos. All of them are legit fights, of varying difficulty (and this time around the difficulty of bosses has a lot to do with what kind of character you're using) and we even have some gimmick fights that are actually good (Rat Vanguard). Areas in general are more polished, too, I didn't see any part of DaS2 that looked unfinished.

Like i said in other posts, what I miss is the world design, I actually love a lot of the areas and even Earthen Peak/Harvest Valley weren't that bad when I played through them (they looked worse on stream) but I miss how everything was interconnected before. Areas still connect now, but it seems like less thought went into it: I still don't know how the hell Earthen Peak connects with the Iron Keep, for example. I don't know what fan theory people will come up with to explain how you take an elevator at the top of a fortress and somehow reach a keep half-sunk in lava.

As for the atmosphere, yes, it's uneven (though some areas like Castle Drangleic are on the level of Anor Londo), but I saw this coming since the DLC. Oolacile doesn't have good atmosphere, in my opinion. I hope that if they make another game they use the basic framework of Dark Souls 2, with the interconnected world of Dark Souls 1, with Demon's Souls atmosphere, that'd be the complete package in my opinion.

And for the PvP, the poise thing is annoying, but it's a bit better now that I understood how it works, and I believe it'll be better once we figure out the different breakpoints. DaS 1 PvP wasn't any better, what with the absolutely broken backstab mechanic. I've gone to a lot of fight clubs organized by Twitch streamers, and that PvP boils down to backstabbing all the time, and even when people use normal attacks they're just trying to set up backstabs.

 

[DragoFireheart]

In any case I've been happy with Dark Souls 2 and I think it's a worthy sequel.

EDIT: I'm going to just leave this here...

Spoiler

http://www.reddit.com/r/DarkSouls2/comments/20paj2/the_moonlight_butterfly_armor_is_hilariously_bad/

It replaces your rolls with tiny floaty jumps with no iframes.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

No Man's Wharf is probably one of the more DaS-like levels in the game, so I liked it a lot (except for the gimmicky zombie-varangian-pirate feeling). Lost Bastille/No Man's Wharf/Iron Keep are probably my faves out of the whole thing. The end-game has really left me disappointed.

 

[Kanedias]

Parrying in Dark Souls 2 PvP. A change I like is that now you can parry the full length of the weapon.

 

[DragoFireheart]

Kanedias have you had success with parrying? I still have not gotten the timing down. I've done it maybe 2-3 times successfully.

 

[Kanedias]

No, I'm bad at it, I was never too good at it to begin with (in the first game), and it's hard to get it now that you can't tank one hit and parry the second like you used to.

 

[DragoFireheart]

No, I'm bad at it, I was never too good at it to begin with (in the first game), and it's hard to get it now that you can't tank one hit and parry the second like you used to.

I was decent at parrying in the first one. Could usually parry knights and hollows with relative ease. Now I just die horribly when I attempt it.

Enemies really do not tolerate being circled for a backstab. There exist times when they do a slow attack and I can RUN behind them, but no more circle strafing for a backstab.

I find that two-handing a weapon and poking them for high damage and poise to work exceptionally well. It's easy to stunlock many enemy's this way. Longsword R2 is godly good.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

I was decent at parrying - now I can't really do it well. I sucked at backstabbing - now it seems to be much easier.

Shields - apparently my +10 greatshield can take 15+ drakekeeper overhead mace slams no problem, but any n00b can stagger me with a shield-breaking move.

 

[DragoFireheart]

Shields - apparently my +10 greatshield can take 15+ drakekeeper overhead mace slams no problem, but any n00b can stagger me with a shield-breaking move.

Can't parry/backstab as easily. Longsword R2 pokes anything to death.

Enemies have limited respawns. 3 archers next to bonfire.

We need more PvP! Rat Covenant where host has a whole area to give them a huge advantage.

Great shields can block giant dragon attacks. Stagged by human pushing you.

TROLL SOULS

 

[Invictus]

I think the only balance breaking items so far is having the drangelic armor so early on, it makes any melee build virtualy twice as powerfull. I have been doing co op since yesterday and I get summoned in less than 2 minutes for the skeleton lords fight, seems the servers are bursting with players which means the game must be selling really well.
So if any of you guys have finished it, does this game wrap up the Dark Souls storyline as in you think there could not be anything left for DLC or another sequel?

 

[Hobo Elf]

I think that

Spoiler

this game is a sequel to Dark Souls (obviously) but also a prequel to Demon's Souls what with the Land of Giants being wiped out and all. Also Vendrick is the main character from the first Dark Souls game.

In any case there is nothing stopping them from making a sequel since every single King's Field and Souls game follows the exact same storyline anyway. A Kingdom is in decline, monsters everywhere, find the king kill the king become the king, whatever. Or dragons, maybe.

 

[Invictus]

Yeah I know what you mean, but could they do another Souls game in this world? I hope they move on to Dragon Souls or Death Souls as to have a brand new setting for each game...Namco might not like that too much since they might perceive the franchise as Dark Souls not the Souls series but quite good just the same. As a side note it took them 3 years to develop the game with a brand new engine but now that that is done and they can move to next gen I wonder what cool new features we might get, at least we would get a new game much sooner

 

[Hobo Elf]

I don't see why they couldn't do it. The world always ends up dying and reincarnating. Who knows just how much time has gone by between DaS and DaS2. Maybe even thousands of years? I mean it seems like this is a world destined to always have mud huts and swords no matter how long time goes by. They can just pull another gap of thousands of years an have another Kingdom gone stale.

Also, some more lore / hidden stuff for people to think about that I thought was kinda cool

Spoiler

if you kill the Lost Sinner and Freja in NG+ they drop an Old Witch Soul and an Old Paledrake Soul. Just think about it for a second. And doesn't the spiders boss arena look similar as well? And what are they mining for? Crystals? Ok, it's getting a bit too obvious now. Vendrick seems to have injected the Lord Souls into some pretty crazy beings.

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

there is a nice theory on reddit(long read ) :

Spoiler

My personal opinion is that Drangleic is indeed the land of Dark Souls 1 thousands of years in the future, several kingdoms later. I do think that parts of it are Lordran specifically (Did we ever get confirmation that the entire continent was called Lordran? Or just the kingdom of Gwyn?), but not necessarily all of it. Dark Souls 2 is much larger in scope and its entirely likely that we venture out of what was once Lordran and into the other Kingdoms mentioned in Dark Souls 1 (Their future versions, anyway)

-Heide's architecture seems very close to Anor Londo (Minus the blue extras, but that could very well have been part of Anor Londo we've not seen, being a capital city it was likely very large)

-The Bastille is close to the Asylum, Brightstone like the Duke's Archives, and so on.

I actually think what happened was that with the death (essentially) of Gwyn, the humans of Lordran and other kingdoms eventually took over and kept rising and falling in cycles until Vendrick and his brother Aldia discovered the Kiln of the First Flame (The Throne of Want now).

Aldia discovered some way (Considering he was science man) to allow Vendrick to kindle the First Flame once again, starting another Age of Fire which is why Drangliec became the dominant kingdom for so long, Vendrick had access to the power of the First Flame which gave him a Great Soul of his own of some kind which is why he mutated into a Giant of sorts (The Old Iron King has Gwyn's Souls as seen in NG+).

However, Nashandra then showed up (reformed from Manus shards) and convinced Vendrick to wage war against the Giants across the sea (The ones who left with Guinevere) to steal an artifact of some kind. I'm willing to bet that it was an artifact that Guinevere's husband had (Who was Flann the God of Flame) that allowed the Giants to make use of the power of the First Flame to make Golems (Like the Royal Sentinels in Anor Londo and the Knights and such of Vendrick).

So he goes across the ocean and jacks the artifact from the Giants who have since devolved into mindlessness, likely due to their distance from the First Flame and the Lord Souls (Because remember, their souls are pure light souls, just like Artorias who had "nary a murmur of dark" and without being close to the flame they'd deteriorate).

She did this on purpose, hoping that utilizing the artifact and messing with the rekindled First Flame would ruin Drangleic as it had Lordran and corrupt Vendrick which would allow her to finally usher in an Age of Dark. He used it to create Golem armies just has she had hoped, and Aldia began to go insane, exposed to the possibility of such power, leading him to study dragons and Vendrick having to confine him to his manor for the safety of the Kingdom.

Slowly but surely using the artifact warped the First Flame and the kingdom itself accelerating its burn out, bringing about more and more dark, but in a subtler more insidious way than in Oolacile and New Londo. I'm betting that the reason Drangleic didn't go the demon direction is because the goal of Nashandra wasn't to recreate the First Flame, but to get rid of it all together.

At this point the Soul of Life (The Witch's Lord Soul) which seems to have a life of its own senses that the First Flame might be lost forever and possesses a human woman and attempts to use her to create a new First Flame once again.

However, the combination of Vendrick's Golem army and Nashandra shut her down before she can try again and thus cause demons, demons everywhere again and she's confined to Sinner's Rise. The Giants from across the sea then invade seeking the return of their artifact and Vendrick likely makes heavy use of the artifact once again, likely burning down the Flame to a few embers and warping himself further.

They win the war but Vendrick realizes what Nashandra was doing, she was hoping to twist and destroy the First Flame forever, and using an extremely powerful soul (Since hers isn't yet formed) ala Vendrick's new-ish 5th pseudo-Lord Soul create a new Dark Lord and envelop the world in the Abyss.

He flees into the crypt with Vestaldt, making use of Giant's Souls from the war to render him nigh impossible to be defeated by Nashandra and thus used for her plan, at the cost of mutating himself beyond recognition and losing what is left of his humanity. X amount of years after this, Dark Souls 2 starts.

Thoughts people?

a lot of speculation but still not bad for week one theory.

 

[Kanedias]

My preferred theory is the cycle one, which I made some time ago.

Spoiler

"Once the fire is linked, souls will flourish anew, and all of this will play out again" - Ending narration

Several NPCs have told us that Drangleic lies in a land where many kingdoms rose and fell. Straid, in particular, is very clear. At the beginning of the game, the cat tells us that this land will soon perish, "so that something new may be born".

The Flame (or the Dark) do not die forever. It's a cycle. After the end of an age, the Lordvessel eventually releases all the souls, and everything starts anew, another kingdom replacing Lordran, and eventually falling. Some patterns remain. however, and the old souls go to similar beings.

The description of all the Old Lord Souls is the same, and it talks about them being Souls from "eons ago", whose power has diminished.

The Witch of Izalith was reduced to a monstrous state after failing to recreate the First Flame, which was fading. Old Sinner, who like I said has the Old Witch's Soul, was reduced to her current state when she tried to link the First Flame. The gauntlets of her set increase pyromancy damage, and in NG+ she's aided by red phantom pyromancers. The links are obvious.

The deal with Freja is a bit different, because Freja is not exactly this world's version of Seath. Talking to the cat in Majula reveals that there was an "old traitor" that wanted what he did not have, and that this drove him mad. The cat then implies he became the "Writhing Ruin", and the description of the soul of Freja says she's the "keeper" of the Writhing Ruin. Also, she's different than other of the major bosses, because the "Great Soul Embraced" message only happens when you pick up the soul from the ground next to a crystal (with the other bosses, you get the Great Soul Embraced message as soon as you kill them). The entire place, the Writhing Ruin, is a reflection of Seath, not just Freja. It was a place where someone with an unhealthy obsession (Lord Tseldora) ended up going insane and creating abominations. Sounds familiar? Talking with Tark (the scorpion man) after killing Lord Tseldora gives us some interesting dialogue, where he says "our master cannot die, he simply takes a new form, so that he may seethe for all eternity".

Also, remember the devs talked about how there are two curses in the game, an obvious one, and a bigger one? Well, the curse most of the NPCs are talking about is NOT the Darksign. It's the cycle. That's the "curse" the Emerald Herald wants to break. That's why she goes on and on about deceiving fate. The fate she wants to deceive is the fact that in every age, history repeats itself to a certain extent.

Things I still need to do:

Spoiler

1)Talk with the Abyss covenant leader to hear what he has to say, if I remember correctly he talks about the Abyss fading, which can be interesting when linked to the theory as it's basically the same as the Fire fading (this game takes place in the Age of Dark).

2) Find out what is the "prize" Vendrick found in the land of the Giants

3) Find the link between Vendrick and the Ancient Dragon. At the start of the game, we are told Vendrick "peered at the essence of the soul", and the Ancient Dragon Soul says "Use the dragon soul, created by those who peered into the essence of the soul, to acquire numerous souls, or to create something of great worth."

 

[Invictus]

Coop day again, I have been helping out on the Sentinels in Lost Bastille and I really don't know how to handle those guys one of three. Guess I will have to wait to see ENBs take on that. How did you guys do them? I guess you can jump into the next plataform which is longer for manuvering but so far I always don't even bother and try to use the falling attack and get with my first running to the keep at least one sentinel out of it and dodge 2.
Maybe From decided to troll offline players with that encounter.
The liches err Undead Lords are definetly solable as long as you keep moving on the bone piles for spawns and you can whack a bonelord in 4 2 handed hits but the sentinels are damn tough.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

I was offline when I beat the undead lords on first try. Maybe it was just luck? I came close to beating the sentinels solo (upgraded greatshield/NPC) but never had the patience to keep going. I ended up summoning 2 players for help.

 

[Kanedias]

For the Sentinels, fight the first one on the platform you spawn from. They're not too hard to dodge or block when they're alone. Roll into the attacks, if you roll away you'll get hit, block with a good shield if you can't dodge them without wasting too many estus. If it falls down, don't jump after it, or the other two will spawn. Simply wait because it'll jump up again. After killing that one, you need to take two by yourself, and then it's a battle of patience and attrition, you need to wait until the time is right, then throw an attack, then play defensive again. Their attacks aren't too varied, but they have good teamwork. Each time they swing they are left open for retribution for quite a bit of time, so what you want to do is try to bait them both into attacking at the same time, this way it'll be easier to punish them.