Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
You uhh...you can't kill the other players with that ballista in the battle with the forest of the giants boss, can you?
I ask because I'm pretty sure I just did trying to hit the boss and I need someone to assuage my guilt for accidentally murdering the poor bastard that summoned me for help.
You uhh...you can't kill the other players with that ballista in the battle with the forest of the giants boss, can you?
I ask because I'm pretty sure I just did trying to hit the boss and I need someone to assuage my guilt for accidentally murdering the poor bastard that summoned me for help.
You absolutely can in fact kill people with that ballista. Sorry.
You uhh...you can't kill the other players with that ballista in the battle with the forest of the giants boss, can you?
I ask because I'm pretty sure I just did trying to hit the boss and I need someone to assuage my guilt for accidentally murdering the poor bastard that summoned me for help.
good work
+9
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
You uhh...you can't kill the other players with that ballista in the battle with the forest of the giants boss, can you?
I ask because I'm pretty sure I just did trying to hit the boss and I need someone to assuage my guilt for accidentally murdering the poor bastard that summoned me for help.
fine work but hole
...
Ivory King down. Gauntlet of knights before the boss fight is one of the few things I will characterize as "cheap" in a Souls game, because I swear those bastards read controller inputs so they can hit you just as your roll iframes run out, but the boss himself only took a few tries to figure out. I did have to use a Soul Vessel at one point because the amount of stamina I had, which had gotten me through everything before that fight, just was not doing the trick.
I think I would have had a much less frustrating time with the third game if I'd played through these bosses first; they really feel like the turning point where From decided that using a shield was something they were going to highly discourage.
Anyway, that leaves the DS1 DLC as the only stuff I haven't done. Maybe wait on that a bit, I'm already getting a fair bit of "didn't you PLAY that already?" from the better half .
The game mechanics aren't poorly explained. There are messages in the starting area that tell you what each button does, then you experiment with them to see how they work. More esoteric things like poise and invulnerability frames aren't required to know about explicitly in order to play well, since you'll just get a feel for how they work as you get better at an enemy type as you play them. "Oh, if I dodge at this point of the attack I don't take any damage, even if the sword goes through my player, neat." "Aha if I hit the enemy's shield with my greatsword twice they go into a kind of stagger animation then I can do a counter attack." "Hmm I used to get interrupted when I was hit while casting fireballs but now that i've put on this heavier armor it happens less often."
It's just a series that asks a lot of the player.
Text on the ground that just says press this button to do this thing is a terrible tutorial.
Understanding poise and i-frames are absolutely required to play well. If you don't know to roll through a boss's attacks you're gonna have a lot of trouble getting close with enough stamina left to do decent damage. If you're having trouble with enemies that are staggering you to death, knowing that you can wear heavier armor to get staggered less is really important information. And I question the ease of figuring them out that you claim. I-frames? You're talking about getting the precise dodge timing right accidentally, and doing so repeatedly such that you can notice what's going on. As for poise, how'd you be able to tell it was the armor? It could be the armor, it could be the enemy, maybe leveling up makes you stagger less, ect. This one is at least sorta intuitive so one might be able to figure that one out.
The messages are only part of the tutorial. The entire opening area is the tutorial. You see a message that says how to attack and you see an enemy that is entirely motionless and passive. You press the button and attack them and kill them. You see another message that says how to backstab, see an enemy ahead of you facing away from you, walk up to them and attack and you do a backstab. You see a message that says how to roll and an enemy ahead that will attack you (but with a weak weapon and slow combos) you press the button and roll away from the attacks. They don't just have a picture of a controller on a loading screen with all the labels, it's an entire interconnected section.
You don't need to know how invulnerability frames and poise works to play well. Someone wears heavy armor to take less damage, maybe they'll notice the interruption reduction maybe they won't. If you're playing such a way so that you frequently get hit in the middle of casting a spell you're going to have issues more pressing than getting/not getting interrupted. If you're dodging attacks all you have to do is dodge attacks. Using dodging to get out of the way works just as well as invulnerability frames do. Through the process of doing that the player will naturally figure out what timing works to dodge attacks.
You can absolutely get through the games doing nothing but blocking attacks with a shield, rolling backwards out of the way, and occasionally getting interrupted when you try to do an attack. Will knowing these concepts give you an advantage? Sure, but they aren't necessary to succeed just like Ash Lake isn't necessary.
Play however you want. If you're having fun who cares how you're playing. If you're not having fun go ahead and complain online to get tips and/or look up stuff. But saying having a wiki open in the other window is mandatory if someone wants to finish the game is ridiculous.
Aistan on
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KlatuAussie Aussie AussieOi Oi OiRegistered Userregular
Putting aside the malicious design elements, the camera clearly can't cope with the area. I've had my camera completely freak out and jump all around, had lock-on grab someone further away, 90 degrees from me, and on the other side of a pit instead of the guy directly in front of me, had it hang up on stuff, etc., etc.
Honestly, with 4-1 and 5-1 both sucking, I'm nearing 'nah, I'll replay DS2 instead'.
edit: Which is quite a goofy sentiment, since DeS seems to resemble DS2 more than any of the others. Including the incredibly frustrating first playthrough.
I cannot disagree with the mantas of world 4, I dislike them, but the thief ring really does help a lot. It gets worse in 4-2 as you progress down the cliffside. Avoid world 5 until you're much stronger. Seriously. It's just not worth the trouble.
My recommended path, fwiw:
1-1
4-1 - falchion, uchi, regen shield (wear on your back while you two hand everything), compound long bow, do the skip, get regen ring, kill boss. But Klatu you say, do the skip? Yes, fuck this zone. Do the skip. If you got those items you've got all the good stuff already.
1-2 - kill dragon, kill boss (get purple flame shield from 1-1)
3-1 - get rapier or estoc and black leather armor, kill boss.
2-1 - at this point I just crush all of world 2, use the rapier/estoc from 3-1 in one hand, falchion in other. The "grunts" that are mining etc take bonus damage from the piercing weaps, bosses all take bonus damage from falchion.
2-2 - Before or after clearing it all, make sure to run down and get the dragon longsword, it's hidden in tunnels, it helps for world 5.
2-3 - dragon boss is easy.
3-2 - clearing 3-2, the world itself is really easy, but the boss is maneater and either you blitz it and wonder what all the complaining was about, or you find out what all the complaining was about and want to put the game down. If you killed maneater, then go kill old monk, he's not hard.
4-2-3 - at this point you can probably just blitz through the remainder of world 4. To make it even easier, upgrade your purple flame shield with the anti magic stone to give yourself 90% mag resist on your shield, you may need it for the fucking laser idiots.
3-3 - kill maneater and old monk if you didn't already.
5-1 - learn the falls, do the falls down to bottom section, unless you want to explore the zone. Use fire sword and kill leachmonger.
5-2 - you're going to get poisoned. Don't even fight it. Regen ring, adjuncters shield, black leather armor help. It's more intimidating than it looks honestly. I'd take 5-2 over 5-1 any day of the week. Hug the walls on your first exploration. Lots to be had just from wall humping. Watch out for the black phantom on the left side of the zone, she's not hard, but you won't be able to move well in the water and she is using the cleaver, so you can't interrupt her swings. Find the first fog gate and walk through, now the real 5-2 begins. You have 2 options here. a) thief ring, stay off the main path stick to the water, keep an eye out for where mobs are and avoid them. If you keep the main path on your left side, eventually you'll spot the next fog gate. Guarding the fog gate is a poison caster, and 3 giant bastards. If you have the thief ring on you can just make a run for the fog gate and only the poison guy "might" notice you. Go through fog, kill the immediate 2-3 guys that present themselves and wait 30 secs for the poison guy to see if he spotted you. If not, you're golden. Now fight your way to the end of the area - open the shortcut if you want, i always do but have never died to this boss ever - fight boss with fire sword.
5-3 - all the little idiots won't bother you, just ignore them, run down right hand side of the zone to force the knight to move down to guard the boss. Once he has moved, run back around to near where he was standing, pull out your bow and kill the boss from range, if you find you're not able to out dps her healing, then you will need to do the fight the hard way, if you can out dps the heals, enjoy the easy win.
1-3-4 - at this point enjoy the best zones in the game imo.
Thats my "you've never finished the game and aren't really familiar with it" path.
Fume knight down, and I think he may be my absolute favorite Guy In Armor Souls boss. Of which DS2 has many. He killed me more times than I could count, mind you, so this may be some sort of weird masochism thing. It really was just a matter of learning his, like, six different moves, how to dodge each, which I could punish with one hit, which I could punish with two, and which I could safely drink estus in. Problem is, I don't learn fast.
Also I beat him wearing only a hat, four rings, and a morning star. Armor didn't seem to be making a dang bit of difference other than hurting stamina regen.
Now I'm on the Burnt Ivory King and I don't like the fight one bit. Thematically I get it, but wow if I wouldn't prefer a version that let me skip the intro bit and just do one on one with the boss.
How many Loyce knights do you have with you man? I found if you have found all the knights in the zone and you summon the 2 npcs, it's a really enjoyable fight.
Once I felt familiar with the game, I decided it was time to do my favorite Souls character, the UGS user.
Which meant rolling a Knight and beelining for the DBS after grabbing the Crescent Falchion from 4-1. Firelurker wasn't as bad as I had been led to expect, but wasn't easy with minimal healing items and cruddy stats.
Then I got the DBS and started steamrolling things. Doesn't feel quite like a UGS, but it works!
Putting aside the malicious design elements, the camera clearly can't cope with the area. I've had my camera completely freak out and jump all around, had lock-on grab someone further away, 90 degrees from me, and on the other side of a pit instead of the guy directly in front of me, had it hang up on stuff, etc., etc.
Honestly, with 4-1 and 5-1 both sucking, I'm nearing 'nah, I'll replay DS2 instead'.
edit: Which is quite a goofy sentiment, since DeS seems to resemble DS2 more than any of the others. Including the incredibly frustrating first playthrough.
I cannot disagree with the mantas of world 4, I dislike them, but the thief ring really does help a lot. It gets worse in 4-2 as you progress down the cliffside. Avoid world 5 until you're much stronger. Seriously. It's just not worth the trouble.
My recommended path, fwiw:
1-1
4-1 - falchion, uchi, regen shield (wear on your back while you two hand everything), compound long bow, do the skip, get regen ring, kill boss. But Klatu you say, do the skip? Yes, fuck this zone. Do the skip. If you got those items you've got all the good stuff already.
1-2 - kill dragon, kill boss (get purple flame shield from 1-1)
3-1 - get rapier or estoc and black leather armor, kill boss.
2-1 - at this point I just crush all of world 2, use the rapier/estoc from 3-1 in one hand, falchion in other. The "grunts" that are mining etc take bonus damage from the piercing weaps, bosses all take bonus damage from falchion.
2-2 - Before or after clearing it all, make sure to run down and get the dragon longsword, it's hidden in tunnels, it helps for world 5.
2-3 - dragon boss is easy.
3-2 - clearing 3-2, the world itself is really easy, but the boss is maneater and either you blitz it and wonder what all the complaining was about, or you find out what all the complaining was about and want to put the game down. If you killed maneater, then go kill old monk, he's not hard.
4-2-3 - at this point you can probably just blitz through the remainder of world 4. To make it even easier, upgrade your purple flame shield with the anti magic stone to give yourself 90% mag resist on your shield, you may need it for the fucking laser idiots.
3-3 - kill maneater and old monk if you didn't already.
5-1 - learn the falls, do the falls down to bottom section, unless you want to explore the zone. Use fire sword and kill leachmonger.
5-2 - you're going to get poisoned. Don't even fight it. Regen ring, adjuncters shield, black leather armor help. It's more intimidating than it looks honestly. I'd take 5-2 over 5-1 any day of the week. Hug the walls on your first exploration. Lots to be had just from wall humping. Watch out for the black phantom on the left side of the zone, she's not hard, but you won't be able to move well in the water and she is using the cleaver, so you can't interrupt her swings. Find the first fog gate and walk through, now the real 5-2 begins. You have 2 options here. a) thief ring, stay off the main path stick to the water, keep an eye out for where mobs are and avoid them. If you keep the main path on your left side, eventually you'll spot the next fog gate. Guarding the fog gate is a poison caster, and 3 giant bastards. If you have the thief ring on you can just make a run for the fog gate and only the poison guy "might" notice you. Go through fog, kill the immediate 2-3 guys that present themselves and wait 30 secs for the poison guy to see if he spotted you. If not, you're golden. Now fight your way to the end of the area - open the shortcut if you want, i always do but have never died to this boss ever - fight boss with fire sword.
5-3 - all the little idiots won't bother you, just ignore them, run down right hand side of the zone to force the knight to move down to guard the boss. Once he has moved, run back around to near where he was standing, pull out your bow and kill the boss from range, if you find you're not able to out dps her healing, then you will need to do the fight the hard way, if you can out dps the heals, enjoy the easy win.
1-3-4 - at this point enjoy the best zones in the game imo.
Thats my "you've never finished the game and aren't really familiar with it" path.
Fume knight down, and I think he may be my absolute favorite Guy In Armor Souls boss. Of which DS2 has many. He killed me more times than I could count, mind you, so this may be some sort of weird masochism thing. It really was just a matter of learning his, like, six different moves, how to dodge each, which I could punish with one hit, which I could punish with two, and which I could safely drink estus in. Problem is, I don't learn fast.
Also I beat him wearing only a hat, four rings, and a morning star. Armor didn't seem to be making a dang bit of difference other than hurting stamina regen.
Now I'm on the Burnt Ivory King and I don't like the fight one bit. Thematically I get it, but wow if I wouldn't prefer a version that let me skip the intro bit and just do one on one with the boss.
How many Loyce knights do you have with you man? I found if you have found all the knights in the zone and you summon the 2 npcs, it's a really enjoyable fight.
Bounced off the fight several times with one Loyce Knight, finally figured out that I MUST be doing something wrong, looked at several "how to kill the Burnt Ivory King" guides before I found one that mentioned that I was intended to have four dudes with me, looked up guides on finding said dudes, most of which had hilarious mistakes or started with "go to the Lower Garrison bonfire" which I hadn't unlocked, got my four dudes, noticed I had more summon signs, tried it several times with four dudes + two phantoms, couldn't keep Lucatiel alive... finally found that the sweet spot for me was four knights and no phantoms, after that the actual boss was pretty easy. But god DAMN those charred knights do not follow the rules.
An example: I am cycling targets through the mob of knights and I find a sword & shield knight at fairly low health, fighting one of my Loyce knights and separated from the mob. I roll twice towards it, come out of the second roll, get hit with the pyromancy from another knight who had apparently anticipated my rolls and cast the nuke AT HIS OWN BUDDY so it would hit me, and said buddy gets eyes in the back of his head, does a 180 away from the Loyce knight he was fighting, and skewers me. I'm not sure if the pyromancy staggered me or the knight sword did, but the result was a dead bearer of the curse in very short order.
Also the boss spear attack has one of those animations where you can see that it has missed you, and then your character gets dragged several feet to the side so you wind up on the spear. But that's a small quibble since he doesn't do it that often.
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KlatuAussie Aussie AussieOi Oi OiRegistered Userregular
edited May 2017
Oh yeah, the pyromancy guy cheats like hell.
I died the first time getting greedy, but Lucatiel died early that fight. The second attempt when I got him down the loyce knights all died, but Luca and bow/arrow guy lived. I'm going back in a few times if I can get summoned, want more loyce knight souls, and may as well try to get my sunbro medals while I'm at it.
edit: also, you could have just continued watching BlueLizzardJello, he'd have shown you that area eventually :P
I'll be honest, I always have a wiki open anyway when I play Souls games. Hell, I research the fuck out of them to find what gear I'd like to aim for before I ever start playing one . . .
Yeah, the way the game is designed it's practically mandatory. The way the death system fucks you over for winging it, the poorly designed UI, the poorly explained game mechanics, the stuff you can easily miss. It all encourages you to look up first, do later.
"Mandatory" is a bit of a stretch, I think. I mean yeah if you want to get every item and do every npc quest line and max all the covenants, sure.
But you can absolutely beat the game without looking things up. I've done it three times.
The death system doesn't fuck you over for winging it, all it does is make you lose whatever souls you had on you at the time. If you have no souls you can just run out past enemies grabbing all the items you see then dying, with zero penalty whatsoever. Hardly a punishment.
Yeah, it doesn't fuck you over so long as you dismiss the ways it fucks you over. The death system is designed such that one death, probably in an area you were having difficulty with because, you know, you died, means you are now in danger of losing all your souls, which is actually a punishment and hilariously leaves you less able to level up or upgrade to better deal with why you died. Hence the best strategy in any situation is to always know what you are getting in to in the first place. Like watching boss videos before you meet the boss because just winging it puts you at too much risk of getting fucked.
The UI isn't poorly designed, it works fine. Top left is health and stamina, pretty standard. Bottom left is equipped weapons, spells, and items, positioned to match up with the d-pad direction you press to switch that particular slot. Bottom right is soul counter. Inventory is a bit of a mess if you just leave it higgledy piggledy sure, but it's not much work to dump stuff into the storage box that you don't need to keep your personal inventory streamlined. You can even press select on any equipment information screen to get a description of what each stat does.
The game mechanics aren't poorly explained. There are messages in the starting area that tell you what each button does, then you experiment with them to see how they work. More esoteric things like poise and invulnerability frames aren't required to know about explicitly in order to play well, since you'll just get a feel for how they work as you get better at an enemy type as you play them. "Oh, if I dodge at this point of the attack I don't take any damage, even if the sword goes through my player, neat." "Aha if I hit the enemy's shield with my greatsword twice they go into a kind of stagger animation then I can do a counter attack." "Hmm I used to get interrupted when I was hit while casting fireballs but now that i've put on this heavier armor it happens less often."
It's just a series that asks a lot of the player.
Dude, you can't even compare shop equipment to what you have. This is one of the worst designed UIs I've seen in a game. Almost every screen is a mess of meaningless numbers that requires a guide of some sort to figure out.
And yes, the mechanics are poorly explained. The messages on the ground in the tutorial area are barebones. They basically teach you how to run around and swing shit at people. They don't explain to you wtf poise means or what it does, how to riposte or what that even means and all sorts of stuff. Trying to figure out the upgrade/imbue system, especially in DS1, was just not happening without some outside guides.
The game asks plenty of it's players but it's also got bad design decisions and especially opaque and poorly explained and unclear mechanics and behavior filtered through a UI that is frequently a confusing mess.
It reminds me a lot of old school MMOs where you aren't really gonna get much of anywhere without looking some shit up on some community site where people have spent a lot of time figuring out wtf is going on with the game.
So I just sacrificed myself to give the crummy status quo more time on the clock. Did the Chosen Undead know he was going to die by doing all this?
Damn, if I had known about that, the deception (apparently there is no Gwynivere and Anor Londo is actually dark) and the other stuff you can do with the lordvessel, I would have probably sided with the wraiths (never found/came across them though).
The wraiths are worse. You remember New Londo?
Well, I was thinking of it more from a purely selfish point of view and the idea of feelings of betrayal superceding my view of a bigger picture (which tends to happen a lot in video games, it seems).
Both options are terribly depressing and fucked up but that one in particular seems like it could end with me sitting atop a throne made out of skulls and drinking humanity out of a chalice which could be fairly entertaining.
There's really no good ending in DS1.
Or DS2.
I'll refraining from talking about DS3, but the endings are INTERESTING if nothing else.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
My understanding was that the designers actually wanted players to talk about their strategies and information between each other, and what is a wiki but a collection of information and strategy at one centralized location? I consider the opaqueness a feature, not a bug.
I don't think the game is meant to be friendly, and I'm fine with that, but I do think it's a bit misguided to claim the game is friendly where it isn't.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
My understanding was that the designers actually wanted players to talk about their strategies and information between each other, and what is a wiki but a collection of information and strategy at one centralized location? I consider the opaqueness a feature, not a bug.
I don't think the game is meant to be friendly, and I'm fine with that, but I do think it's a bit misguided to claim the game is friendly where it isn't.
That's correct. They wanted people to look for help in the game.
That being said on all my initial runs with DS games I never look at wikis or guides. I just let the game come to me as it does. The wall of numbers are intimidating but you can get through by feel alone without having an exact understanding of the underlying mechanics.
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KlatuAussie Aussie AussieOi Oi OiRegistered Userregular
The first time I played DeS I went in blind and in the end never finished it. Went back to DeS recently and finished it blind. Then did what I did with DS1, read up what i missed, and started grinding out my plat trophy.
DS1, played blind, finished it. Then went to wiki and was amazed at the amount of stuff I'd missed. Made me love the game so much more.
DS2, played mostly blind the first time, went in WAY over my head to one of the DLC but kept trying and trying and burned out. This time around I did a little bit of research, watched some stuff and am playing with wikis and stuff, absolutely loving it! Grinding out plat trophy now.
DS3, will attempt blind ... see how it goes in the end.
My problem with Demon's Souls right now is that the Tower of Latria scares me to death and I can't play it at night. The first time I did when the game was brand new, and the singing started up, I probably had nightmares for days.
So I'm going to wind up clearing the entire rest of the game then doing that in one go at like Noon when I'm super overpowered and can breeze through it.
The DLC ending in DS2 is Hopeful? Or at least Spiteful Fuck You Fate? Which is as happy as a DS ending gets, really.
And yeah, I'm kind of on board for the whole "NPC storyline handling is shit". DS3 is the absolute fucking pits for it, I looked at some of it, went "I don't care enough" and didn't even bother.
Yeah, if you don't want everyone to die to flags you kind of really have to play with a wiki open. Greirat dies if you happen to touch Irythill Dungeon at all before taking out Sulyvahn, which is easier to find than the actual way to reach Sulyvahn, because then you make Siegward leave and he gets murderized. Anri can just disappear and you never know what happened or even that he died. If you get the tower key early you can straight up miss Patches existing completely. And so on.
I purchased the game and strategy guide at the same time for all 3 dark souls and bloodborne, I feel no shame over this. I just don't have the free time to blindly stumble around. Still really enjoyed the games and did not really feel like I missed out on much by looking ahead.
Also despite the fact that I place it behind dark souls 1 and bloodborne, 2 is the game I have spent the most money on outside of WoW. Collector's edition plus strategy guide, all 3 dlc at full price, and then I bought Sotfs edition for my PS4 although not at full price. So I guess even a third place souls game is still worth well north of $200 in my book.
I'm not sure what their point was, to be honest. They decry that difficulty sliders offer 1 good choice and X bad choices, but follow that up with complaints that Kirby is too easy? Guess what, a difficulty slider could have fixed that.
"I wish all games' difficulty was perfectly balanced to everyone" is not a solution, it's asking the impossible.
Glal on
+3
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
Online seems to still be kicking ass in DS2. A lot easier and quicker to summon people or get summoned.
Tried not to get my hopes since I had imagined most people moved on to DS3 but its nice to see all the activity in these early areas still.
Maybe I'll pull out a wiki and scrouge up the Titanite Slabs I missed some time and give it a shot.
But the flip side of that is in NG+ you have the equipment and options for about 3/4ths of the game to just blow through it. It's only the last 1/4 where enemy health and damage really hurts.
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Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
edited May 2017
Its raining souls.
I laid down a summon sign close by to where a pursuer spawns and just raking it in. Still early on and already at lv 53.
KlatuAussie Aussie AussieOi Oi OiRegistered Userregular
Fume Knight down. God I was tilting super hard. Took a couple hrs break, got it on 2nd attempt back. 19 or so attempts.
Sir Alonne down. 13 or so attempts.
Darklurker down in 7.
Ready for NG+. Only master of sorcery, pyromancy, miracles left. Need 29 more sunbro medals to get miracles. Pyromancy and Sorcery will be mine in NG++.
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
Think I finally found a way to turn the tables on those damn ruin sentinels.
While dicking around in the lost bastille while waiting to be summoned, found the blacksmith and he sells large titanite. Abit of soul grinding and my axes should be taking off enough damage quickly that I can finish off two of them quickly enough before things get out of hand.
The most OP weapon in the game is already available to you.
Buy a couple of maces from the blacksmith in Majula and powerstance them.
They are pretty fast and do tons of damage, since so many enemies are weak to strike damage.
broken image link
+4
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
They're dead. Thank Gwyn that shit is over with, managed to overpower it with two NPCs and a player phantom.
On a sidenote, only just now realizing that illusory walls are opened like doors in this one. Saw all these signs pointing them out and when hitting it didn't work, I just assumed they were screwing with me like ledge jumper messages.
ShimshaiFlush with Success!Isle of EmeraldRegistered Userregular
edited May 2017
Havel disappeared.
He killed me, I went back and he was gone. No idea why, didn't even know that was a possibility. I closed Dark Souls, maybe hopefully when I reload he'll be back.
I had him down to about 5% and got complacent, as is usually how this happens.
So I've fought the Executioner's Chariot in DS2 many many times over several playthroughs, always doing the normal, intended method of killing the boss.
(spoilers since we have people going through for the first time, I think?)
This time I had such a fuckabout with the run to the boss that I decided to try that arrow cheese people talk about doing when they can't beat the boss normally. You know, sit in an alcove, pop the chariot as it passes, repeat. If your bow is upgraded, you actually do the boss fairly quickly if you're good at timing your shots.
Anyway, I did that for a giggle, when all of the sudden the boss stopped coming around at something like 40% health. Very confused and thinking I'd bugged out the boss, I went around the arena, killing the skeletons, when I got to the other side of the pit jump, where I saw it.
The horses hanging on to the edge, desperately flailing to scramble back up from the edge, with the cart itself hanging off into the pit. One hit and the horses fell off, boss dead.
I have two hundred hours in this game, and I had no idea you could do that.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
+9
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
Also best strategy I found for Ruin Sentinels was to kill the first one quick while on the ledge, smack the second one around when he jumps up to the ledge and then bail as the third one comes up. Don't stand near the edge where they jump up.
After that it's the old Dark Souls 1v2 dance. Get some distance, get them both on your screen and play safe. When you get an opening, fuck the one at half health up till there's only 1 left, then you should be good.
Posts
I ask because I'm pretty sure I just did trying to hit the boss and I need someone to assuage my guilt for accidentally murdering the poor bastard that summoned me for help.
You absolutely can in fact kill people with that ballista. Sorry.
get out those cracked red eye orbs
fine work but hole
...
Ivory King down. Gauntlet of knights before the boss fight is one of the few things I will characterize as "cheap" in a Souls game, because I swear those bastards read controller inputs so they can hit you just as your roll iframes run out, but the boss himself only took a few tries to figure out. I did have to use a Soul Vessel at one point because the amount of stamina I had, which had gotten me through everything before that fight, just was not doing the trick.
I think I would have had a much less frustrating time with the third game if I'd played through these bosses first; they really feel like the turning point where From decided that using a shield was something they were going to highly discourage.
Anyway, that leaves the DS1 DLC as the only stuff I haven't done. Maybe wait on that a bit, I'm already getting a fair bit of "didn't you PLAY that already?" from the better half .
The messages are only part of the tutorial. The entire opening area is the tutorial. You see a message that says how to attack and you see an enemy that is entirely motionless and passive. You press the button and attack them and kill them. You see another message that says how to backstab, see an enemy ahead of you facing away from you, walk up to them and attack and you do a backstab. You see a message that says how to roll and an enemy ahead that will attack you (but with a weak weapon and slow combos) you press the button and roll away from the attacks. They don't just have a picture of a controller on a loading screen with all the labels, it's an entire interconnected section.
You don't need to know how invulnerability frames and poise works to play well. Someone wears heavy armor to take less damage, maybe they'll notice the interruption reduction maybe they won't. If you're playing such a way so that you frequently get hit in the middle of casting a spell you're going to have issues more pressing than getting/not getting interrupted. If you're dodging attacks all you have to do is dodge attacks. Using dodging to get out of the way works just as well as invulnerability frames do. Through the process of doing that the player will naturally figure out what timing works to dodge attacks.
You can absolutely get through the games doing nothing but blocking attacks with a shield, rolling backwards out of the way, and occasionally getting interrupted when you try to do an attack. Will knowing these concepts give you an advantage? Sure, but they aren't necessary to succeed just like Ash Lake isn't necessary.
Play however you want. If you're having fun who cares how you're playing. If you're not having fun go ahead and complain online to get tips and/or look up stuff. But saying having a wiki open in the other window is mandatory if someone wants to finish the game is ridiculous.
I cannot disagree with the mantas of world 4, I dislike them, but the thief ring really does help a lot. It gets worse in 4-2 as you progress down the cliffside. Avoid world 5 until you're much stronger. Seriously. It's just not worth the trouble.
My recommended path, fwiw:
4-1 - falchion, uchi, regen shield (wear on your back while you two hand everything), compound long bow, do the skip, get regen ring, kill boss. But Klatu you say, do the skip? Yes, fuck this zone. Do the skip. If you got those items you've got all the good stuff already.
1-2 - kill dragon, kill boss (get purple flame shield from 1-1)
3-1 - get rapier or estoc and black leather armor, kill boss.
2-1 - at this point I just crush all of world 2, use the rapier/estoc from 3-1 in one hand, falchion in other. The "grunts" that are mining etc take bonus damage from the piercing weaps, bosses all take bonus damage from falchion.
2-2 - Before or after clearing it all, make sure to run down and get the dragon longsword, it's hidden in tunnels, it helps for world 5.
2-3 - dragon boss is easy.
3-2 - clearing 3-2, the world itself is really easy, but the boss is maneater and either you blitz it and wonder what all the complaining was about, or you find out what all the complaining was about and want to put the game down. If you killed maneater, then go kill old monk, he's not hard.
4-2-3 - at this point you can probably just blitz through the remainder of world 4. To make it even easier, upgrade your purple flame shield with the anti magic stone to give yourself 90% mag resist on your shield, you may need it for the fucking laser idiots.
3-3 - kill maneater and old monk if you didn't already.
5-1 - learn the falls, do the falls down to bottom section, unless you want to explore the zone. Use fire sword and kill leachmonger.
5-2 - you're going to get poisoned. Don't even fight it. Regen ring, adjuncters shield, black leather armor help. It's more intimidating than it looks honestly. I'd take 5-2 over 5-1 any day of the week. Hug the walls on your first exploration. Lots to be had just from wall humping. Watch out for the black phantom on the left side of the zone, she's not hard, but you won't be able to move well in the water and she is using the cleaver, so you can't interrupt her swings. Find the first fog gate and walk through, now the real 5-2 begins. You have 2 options here. a) thief ring, stay off the main path stick to the water, keep an eye out for where mobs are and avoid them. If you keep the main path on your left side, eventually you'll spot the next fog gate. Guarding the fog gate is a poison caster, and 3 giant bastards. If you have the thief ring on you can just make a run for the fog gate and only the poison guy "might" notice you. Go through fog, kill the immediate 2-3 guys that present themselves and wait 30 secs for the poison guy to see if he spotted you. If not, you're golden. Now fight your way to the end of the area - open the shortcut if you want, i always do but have never died to this boss ever - fight boss with fire sword.
5-3 - all the little idiots won't bother you, just ignore them, run down right hand side of the zone to force the knight to move down to guard the boss. Once he has moved, run back around to near where he was standing, pull out your bow and kill the boss from range, if you find you're not able to out dps her healing, then you will need to do the fight the hard way, if you can out dps the heals, enjoy the easy win.
1-3-4 - at this point enjoy the best zones in the game imo.
Thats my "you've never finished the game and aren't really familiar with it" path.
How many Loyce knights do you have with you man? I found if you have found all the knights in the zone and you summon the 2 npcs, it's a really enjoyable fight.
Which meant rolling a Knight and beelining for the DBS after grabbing the Crescent Falchion from 4-1. Firelurker wasn't as bad as I had been led to expect, but wasn't easy with minimal healing items and cruddy stats.
Then I got the DBS and started steamrolling things. Doesn't feel quite like a UGS, but it works!
Bounced off the fight several times with one Loyce Knight, finally figured out that I MUST be doing something wrong, looked at several "how to kill the Burnt Ivory King" guides before I found one that mentioned that I was intended to have four dudes with me, looked up guides on finding said dudes, most of which had hilarious mistakes or started with "go to the Lower Garrison bonfire" which I hadn't unlocked, got my four dudes, noticed I had more summon signs, tried it several times with four dudes + two phantoms, couldn't keep Lucatiel alive... finally found that the sweet spot for me was four knights and no phantoms, after that the actual boss was pretty easy. But god DAMN those charred knights do not follow the rules.
An example: I am cycling targets through the mob of knights and I find a sword & shield knight at fairly low health, fighting one of my Loyce knights and separated from the mob. I roll twice towards it, come out of the second roll, get hit with the pyromancy from another knight who had apparently anticipated my rolls and cast the nuke AT HIS OWN BUDDY so it would hit me, and said buddy gets eyes in the back of his head, does a 180 away from the Loyce knight he was fighting, and skewers me. I'm not sure if the pyromancy staggered me or the knight sword did, but the result was a dead bearer of the curse in very short order.
Also the boss spear attack has one of those animations where you can see that it has missed you, and then your character gets dragged several feet to the side so you wind up on the spear. But that's a small quibble since he doesn't do it that often.
I died the first time getting greedy, but Lucatiel died early that fight. The second attempt when I got him down the loyce knights all died, but Luca and bow/arrow guy lived. I'm going back in a few times if I can get summoned, want more loyce knight souls, and may as well try to get my sunbro medals while I'm at it.
edit: also, you could have just continued watching BlueLizzardJello, he'd have shown you that area eventually :P
Yeah, it doesn't fuck you over so long as you dismiss the ways it fucks you over. The death system is designed such that one death, probably in an area you were having difficulty with because, you know, you died, means you are now in danger of losing all your souls, which is actually a punishment and hilariously leaves you less able to level up or upgrade to better deal with why you died. Hence the best strategy in any situation is to always know what you are getting in to in the first place. Like watching boss videos before you meet the boss because just winging it puts you at too much risk of getting fucked.
Dude, you can't even compare shop equipment to what you have. This is one of the worst designed UIs I've seen in a game. Almost every screen is a mess of meaningless numbers that requires a guide of some sort to figure out.
And yes, the mechanics are poorly explained. The messages on the ground in the tutorial area are barebones. They basically teach you how to run around and swing shit at people. They don't explain to you wtf poise means or what it does, how to riposte or what that even means and all sorts of stuff. Trying to figure out the upgrade/imbue system, especially in DS1, was just not happening without some outside guides.
The game asks plenty of it's players but it's also got bad design decisions and especially opaque and poorly explained and unclear mechanics and behavior filtered through a UI that is frequently a confusing mess.
It reminds me a lot of old school MMOs where you aren't really gonna get much of anywhere without looking some shit up on some community site where people have spent a lot of time figuring out wtf is going on with the game.
There's really no good ending in DS1.
Or DS2.
I'll refraining from talking about DS3, but the endings are INTERESTING if nothing else.
I don't think the game is meant to be friendly, and I'm fine with that, but I do think it's a bit misguided to claim the game is friendly where it isn't.
That's correct. They wanted people to look for help in the game.
That being said on all my initial runs with DS games I never look at wikis or guides. I just let the game come to me as it does. The wall of numbers are intimidating but you can get through by feel alone without having an exact understanding of the underlying mechanics.
DS1, played blind, finished it. Then went to wiki and was amazed at the amount of stuff I'd missed. Made me love the game so much more.
DS2, played mostly blind the first time, went in WAY over my head to one of the DLC but kept trying and trying and burned out. This time around I did a little bit of research, watched some stuff and am playing with wikis and stuff, absolutely loving it! Grinding out plat trophy now.
DS3, will attempt blind ... see how it goes in the end.
I used a guide to try it one time and I still fucked it up.
I only looked up how to upgrade weapons, since that stuff is DIRE in Dark Souls 1.
Other than that, blind playthroughs of the trilogy. I lived, I died, I got gud.
So I'm going to wind up clearing the entire rest of the game then doing that in one go at like Noon when I'm super overpowered and can breeze through it.
And yeah, I'm kind of on board for the whole "NPC storyline handling is shit". DS3 is the absolute fucking pits for it, I looked at some of it, went "I don't care enough" and didn't even bother.
Also despite the fact that I place it behind dark souls 1 and bloodborne, 2 is the game I have spent the most money on outside of WoW. Collector's edition plus strategy guide, all 3 dlc at full price, and then I bought Sotfs edition for my PS4 although not at full price. So I guess even a third place souls game is still worth well north of $200 in my book.
PSN:Furlion
Maybe I'll pull out a wiki and scrouge up the Titanite Slabs I missed some time and give it a shot.
"I wish all games' difficulty was perfectly balanced to everyone" is not a solution, it's asking the impossible.
Tried not to get my hopes since I had imagined most people moved on to DS3 but its nice to see all the activity in these early areas still.
But the flip side of that is in NG+ you have the equipment and options for about 3/4ths of the game to just blow through it. It's only the last 1/4 where enemy health and damage really hurts.
I laid down a summon sign close by to where a pursuer spawns and just raking it in. Still early on and already at lv 53.
Still can't dodge for shit though.
Sir Alonne down. 13 or so attempts.
Darklurker down in 7.
Ready for NG+. Only master of sorcery, pyromancy, miracles left. Need 29 more sunbro medals to get miracles. Pyromancy and Sorcery will be mine in NG++.
While dicking around in the lost bastille while waiting to be summoned, found the blacksmith and he sells large titanite. Abit of soul grinding and my axes should be taking off enough damage quickly that I can finish off two of them quickly enough before things get out of hand.
They are pretty fast and do tons of damage, since so many enemies are weak to strike damage.
On a sidenote, only just now realizing that illusory walls are opened like doors in this one. Saw all these signs pointing them out and when hitting it didn't work, I just assumed they were screwing with me like ledge jumper messages.
He killed me, I went back and he was gone. No idea why, didn't even know that was a possibility. I closed Dark Souls, maybe hopefully when I reload he'll be back.
I had him down to about 5% and got complacent, as is usually how this happens.
(spoilers since we have people going through for the first time, I think?)
Anyway, I did that for a giggle, when all of the sudden the boss stopped coming around at something like 40% health. Very confused and thinking I'd bugged out the boss, I went around the arena, killing the skeletons, when I got to the other side of the pit jump, where I saw it.
The horses hanging on to the edge, desperately flailing to scramble back up from the edge, with the cart itself hanging off into the pit. One hit and the horses fell off, boss dead.
I have two hundred hours in this game, and I had no idea you could do that.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Like a traumatic war flashback.
Had way more issues with other bosses. Like that Capra Demon cuntsicle.
After that it's the old Dark Souls 1v2 dance. Get some distance, get them both on your screen and play safe. When you get an opening, fuck the one at half health up till there's only 1 left, then you should be good.
If it helps, as long as you're playing the Scholar edition, those guys are completely optional. Vanilla and you have to kill them.
Just be glad PvP is probably dead, so many ganks in that tower.