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I've really enjoyed my NG+ playthrough, there's some fun surprises in there. New events, remixed enemy layouts, tons of new drops. I think it ends up feeling like a pretty fresh playthrough. (It kind of tapers off towards the end though, the later areas are largely unchanged from NG, perhaps because they were already pretty brutal to begin with.) As a general rule, Boss Soul weapons are incredibly situational and often require very specific builds to get much out of. There's a few standouts though, such as the pursuer's ultra greatsword, which is a phenomenal ultra greatsword for just about any strength build. It's worth looking at a wiki to see what weapons/spells/gear your collected boss souls can be used to construct. (As another general rule, souls that can be used to create spells are pretty much always worth it if you're a spell caster. They're often among the very best spells in the game.) That said, if a soul doesn't offer anything that looks applicable to your build, go ahead and consume it. (Save them up and do them all at once when you feel like you need a good buff.) I'm not too worried about soul memory impeding matching, at least not at this point in the game's life. Deep into NG+ with nearly 10 million soul memory, i'm seeing more invasions than i ever did in NG and just loads of pvp and co-op summon signs. There are a lot of people playing. Also: Just in case this is actually what you did, you can resurrect a few of the critical NPC's in DS2. A grave should appear somewhere in Majula where you can summon them as a phantom to carry out their usual tasks. (Or so i'm told.)

In Dark Souls, if you quit to the menu, it saves your position and world state exactly as it is.

You know, even if the game ends up not being so great, these trailers have been super fun. I do think the game looks really great though.

In general, i would say it depends on the game. Speaking more personally though, I think i probably come down on the side of preferring real-time designs that don't require that kind of gameplay pausing. When i'm playing FTL and i'm tapping the pause key to frame-by-frame through a battle so i can carefully micromanage my crew and combo my weapons, i can't help but feel like something with the design has gone a bit wrong. (Make no mistake, you do not play that game without abusing the pause. It makes me wonder why it isn't just turn-based, or step-based, or something.) I've also always been a big fan of games with inventories that don't pause the action, games like Dead Space/System Shock/Dark Souls. It always seems especially goofy to me when i just can just tell the game "HANG ON A SEC" at the brink of death and then go swap out all of my gear and down twenty potions and just be right back in the fight. A game that doesn't pause for inventory makes you feel like you're scrabbling around in a sack looking for that important item while imminent death surrounds you, i enjoy that tension.

I joined the Dragon Remnant to do some straight up duelling and found that there's a completely different tone among the players of that covenant relative to the other covenants. People kind of generally hang back and give eachother time to prepare for the fight and do the little bow and then even show eachother enough respect to not constantly be running off trying to heal. It's a nice escape from the opportunistic ganking of mostly everything else. Pretty sure i ran into my first cheater though, which... Hey, if it took this long, that's not that bad. I also abandoned my mace for an estoc mainly because the mace just wasn't cutting it in PVP, even though it's certainly a better PVE weapon. The estoc is superb for duelling though, nobody ever gets out of that R1-R1-R2 combo cleanly. It's an incredibly dull moveset otherwise, though.

When fighting well-armored enemies, splitting your damage with an elemental infusion can just cripple your damage output. (Instead of one strong attack rating being calculated against one defensive value, you're calculating two smaller values against two separate defense values.) Even with augmentation spells having bonuses for stacking with elemental infusions in DS2, it simply doesn't seem like it's worth it in most cases. Or at least isn't worth it in the case of weapons that get a large portion of their damage from scaling bonuses, since you then also have the compounding problem of the infusion degrading scaling. (I went and infused my weapons to test it out and tried killing a few larger enemies in different areas and my damage output was nearly halved despite the attack rating ostensibly being higher.) And yeah, the derived elemental bonus stats are what actually govern both spell scaling and elemental damage scaling. (Though in the case of elemental damage on weapons, the scaling isn't nearly as strong as str or dex scaling is.) The fire stat scales off of both intelligence and faith, the magic stat scales off of intelligence, lightning scales off of faith, and dark scales off of whichever stat is lower between faith and intelligence.

I'm thinking about fire infusing my weapons since i have the flame weapon pyromancy now, but i'm not sure about it. The way game calculates defense values, splitting damage usually isn't worth it.

Weapons with good base damage and low scaling are usually the prime candidates for infusion, because they simply won't compete with high-scaling weapons in the normal upgrade path.

Scaling is one of the most critical, core systems in Dark Souls 2. Virtually every piece of gear in the game scales for an additional amount of defense/damage off of your stats. Weapons scale off of either dexterity or strength, armor scales off of your physical defense stat, and spell catalysts all scale from your elemental bonus stats, which are in turn derived from faith/intelligence. (You can see the derived elemental stats on your player status screen. The magic bonus scales off of intelligence, Miracle bonus scales off of faith, Fire bonus scales off of both, and Dark bonus scales off of whichever stat is lower.) Look at the weapons you're using, the weapons you like most. Meet their base stat requirements for you to equip them, and then focus on either strength or dexterity, whichever those weapons scale more highly with. (The same is true of spell-casting: If you want to use miracles, you want to focus almost entirely on faith. Points in intelligence are more or less wasted on you.) Another quirk of this scaling system is that since it's scaling off of an item's base values, B dex scaling on one weapon can end up offering less than C dex scaling on another stronger weapon. There's also a bit of variance in comparison of equal values, two equivalent weapons can have B scaling of different strength, but that's... That's getting into invisible percentages and that's not worth thinking about too much. And yes, it's absolutely viable to be a melee heavy hitter with a side of magic. (I'm playing a strength-focused pyromancer.) What gets you into trouble is not knowing what you want to be, and trying to spread stats around evenly. Infusion makes things way more complicated, probably don't worry about it right away. A normal +10 weapon with decent scaling will get you a long, long way and will often outperform infused weapons except for special circumstances. (Again, upgrade your gear if you haven't. You get more out of gear than you do out of stats.)

I expect to see lots of trailers for games we won't be able to play for several years.

In much the same way that carrying a few weapons gives you a lot of options in pve, it does the same in pvp. My character has a pretty heavy pyromancer slant, but i don't actually use those spells much in pvp. (Except for when i'm adjusting my build to specifically take advantage of some pvp pyromancer spells like acid surge.) I generally use my mace against dex builds, my halbred against strength builds, and if i can't chase down a wizard with my halbred's two-handed running R1, i break out my crossbow. (Also useful for catching people who flee from a fight to chug estus.) Being able to throw spells around isn't a requirement for doing pvp. However, if you have low faith/int on your character, be mindful of your elemental resistances. You will definitely want a shield that can block a lot of that damage. This is interesting, i might respec in light of this. I hit the soft cap for agility with relative ease since i have 32 attunement on top of a sizable adaptability investment. You're done with the lost bastille path, pretty much. Lost Sinner was the endpoint. (Have you found belfry luna and fought the bell keepers and the gargoyles?) Regarding the petrification cure, you should find a few more. I know there's one in Harvest Valley beyond Huntsman's Copse. (Not behind the Chariot boss, don't worry. It is a tricky fight, but it's optional.) About your investment of points, it looks like you might need to focus your build a little more. If you're doing a quality build or just trying to hit equip limits, the 30/20 on str/dex is probably fine, but consider if you're investing points there that you don't need to. (If your weapon has like b scaling for strength and e scaling for dex, you should not be investing in dex.) What kind of magic are you using though? If it's either sorcery or miracles, you only need to invest in one of those, the other is a complete waste. (Pyromancy scales with both, but can go a long time with any stat investment as long as you keep upgrading the flame. Hexs do need an even investment though, since they only scale with the lower stat.) Don't ignore attunement and adaptability. Attunement gives you more spell slots, faster casting, and eventually more spell charges. Adaptability increases your agility and your status effect resistances. I'd also put more into health, 11 vgr is pretty flimsy. If you have a Soul Vessel, you can respec by talking to the firekeepers in Things Betwixt. They're pretty rare items though, so think hard about it. You know, and when you find gear you're pretty sure you're going to stick with, upgrade it quickly. You get way more out of gear than you do out of stats. I'd say a general understanding of the systems is valuable at all levels of the game, but yeah, you certainly don't need to sweat the details in NG.

I've seen video of some hitbox oddities crop up in DS2, but in my own two playthroughs with the game, i've not really experienced anything like that first hand. (I suspect it's an artifact of extremely low agility, perhaps? What's your agility like?) Hitboxes are generally a lot less forgiving than DS1 though, a lot of enemies have very broad attacks that are harder to cleanly maneuver around. Which brings things to adaptability, which has the derived stat of agility, which in turn governs how many invincibility frames are in your roll and the speed of the animations for consumables. (Including estsus.) Managing your encumbrance to steer clear of the fat roll will still help you a ton, but adaptability is arguably even more important in DS2. (Agility is also raised a small amount by attunement and softcaps at 110.) All that said, i do think the game is actually much easier than DS1, overall. It's also worth pointing out that Dark Souls 2 isn't really a "b-team" game, because while the director of the first two games is indeed working on a different project, a large majority of the teams from the first two had still remained intact for DS2. THREE. They released three games. Anarchy Reigns was really freakin` cool and nobody played it.

First thing: I recommend leaving them for much later. They're a huge roadblock, but if you just follow the Forest/Heide paths, you run into them really early on. Don't beat your head against it, because at that point in the Lost Bastille, you should be able to open up other paths out of Majula. The Ruin Sentinels are one of the toughest boss fights in the game and you shouldn't feel bad about leaving it alone and coming back later. Anyways, I've done them melee in two playthroughs, it's definitely not impossible. There's no real trick to it though, i think the fight is kind of the O&S of DS2, though the size of the arena and their slow speed obviously makes ranged options easy to abuse. If you want to do them melee, you just have to figure out their attack patterns, there's no slow recovery attack you can bait them into and no obvious gaps in their hitboxes to exploit. The overhead slams are easily dodged and punished, but one particular version will probably frequently surprise you because it follows up with a horizontal swing that will catch you when you're trying to punish. (If you haven't upgraded adaptability at all, this would probably be a good fight to do it for.) On the upper platform you fall to when you start the fight, stay up there until you can kill that sentinel. You do not want to fight all three at the same time, and staying up there gives you a bit of leeway if the other two show up since they're not likely to all leap up there right away, though they eventually will. You need to kill that one before the other two start giving you trouble. If you can't do that much, you should probably just come back later. (Again, Ruin Sentinels are the penultimate boss for the Lost Bastille path, they are meant to be difficult.) Once it's down to two, it's actually a lot like the O&S fight, but with a much more generous amount of room to maneuver in and no fast dashing tacks to avoid. (So way easier, actually.) Strafe around the room in a backwards circle, take care not to be surrounded as the AI will continually try to circle around you, and just attack whenever you have an opening. Don't get greedy, the fight doesn't put as much pressure on you as O&S did. Perhaps try to bait them into both attacking at the same time, so you can have the second locked down in a recovery animation while trying to dodge and punish the first. If you're not used to target switching with the right stick, get used to it with this fight, you need to stay oriented to whichever sentinel is the nearer threat. I think the Ruin Sentinels might be one of my favorite fights in the game, actually. Also, failing all of that: If you have a lockstone, you can skip them. You have to be on the side of the Bastille reached from the Heide path though. Aside from squishy wizards, the other majority of what i see in PVP are dex builds. It may be true that dex doesn't scale as strong as it did in DS1, but those builds still cause a hell of a lot of damage. A pure physical build is completely doable, but forgoing magic will basically be imposing on yourself an extra level of difficulty. It will also become doubly important to carry weapons that can deal with a variety of situations. In general: A fast one with either thrusts or vertical swings for speedy enemies and narrow spaces, something else with broad and powerful swings for crowds and bosses, and then a crossbow/bow to round it out. Weapons tend to be much more situational in DS2.

There's definitely no medium shields that are as good as the silver knight shield was though.

The same thing is happening to me in DS2, PVP reached its height towards the end of NG, but i think i'm back to mostly fighting scrubs in NG+. I think a lot of it is that the more experienced pvp community for the souls games sort of implicitly agrees to congregate around certain points in NG playthroughs. The deeper into NG+ playthroughs you go, the harder it is to be matchmade.

The OKS seems to be really bad for parrying, that's one other thing going against it. That might just be me though, i was never great at parrying, but it seemed like i was having more parrying success with other shields. I guess its scaling is really bad too, but even with my NG+ character, scaling doesn't have enough of an affect on most other shields to challenge the base stats of the OKS. Do chaos pyromanices ignore the normal fire resistances or something? I've been able to land kills with chaos storm even against drenched opponents, where my other pyromancies would be worthless. Perhaps it's just the sheer amount of damage output the spell has, i don't know. The way water plays into the resistances is generally a really frustrating counterpoint to pyromancy though, but i guess it's a good way for the game to hold pyromancy in check, with it still not really obeying the normal rules of the game.

RE4 would probably be a pretty informative game to play through, given that its influence can be felt in virtually every third person shooter of the last decade. I'm not 100% certain, but i believe it was the first time anybody had done that kind of over-the-shoulder camera perspective, or at least the first time somebody did it and it caught on. I mean, RE4's been cited as a direct influence for games like Dead Space and Gears of War. The latter, especially, went on to influence a whole host of other games itself. (Including, arguably, the somewhat misguided RE5 and RE6.) RE4 is amazing though, it never settles on doing one thing for too long, the game spans a huge breadth of content. It's constantly throwing you into new situations, but they always feel so finely tuned and purposeful. It's a game that could have collapsed under its ambitions, but it never does. The boss fights in particular are all totally distinct, but all really great. It's easy to understand why RE5 and RE6 don't work as well, they're still chasing RE4, which is a game that probably shouldn't have worked with how many distinct things it was trying to do. I'm very curious to see how Evil Within turns out, it's Shinji Mikami's return to survival horror after having left Capcom post-RE4. He's been involved with a lot of great games over the years though. Vanquish, one of his other post-Capcom games, is particularly worth checking out. . ... What's this thread about?

I thought the changes to Onslaught in UT3 completely ruined it, and i didn't like the maps or the feel of the game as much as UT2k4. (Which is my personal favorite in the series, but i'd also take the original UT over UT3.)

I'm generally in the "adaptability is boss" camp too. When people break it down like it's only adding a small number of invincibility frames to your roll, it sounds like it might not be that useful, but the practical effect its had on gameplay is massive. I've been coasting through boss fights without even getting hit, it's definitely not the resistance stat of Dark Souls 2. (I'm not sure i can say a whole ton about how it's affecting pvp, because all i've been matched against in NG+ is frickin` wizards.) You know, and it's nice being able to dodge a hit and then safely down an estus charge before said boss can finish their attack recovery. That Avelyn though, a +10 raw avelyn with ring of blades +2 and lightning-element bolts is just ridiculous. Squishy pvp wizards just melt. They hang back like they think they're just going to safely spam spells, but then i hit for 90% damage and they just go and hide and make me chase them down. Also, that dark infusion on my old knight's shield worked out splendidly, because it basically now has a flat 70% elemental resistance across the board. I don't know why more people don't use that shield, it's just so good, and shields never degrade quickly enough for its durability to be an issue. (I have repair powder slotted anyways, but it ends up being more for my halbred.) One more random comment: If you pay attention to how being doused in water affects your adjusted resistances, it doesn't actually just give you a fire resistance buff, it debuffs lightning resistance. (Usually by enough to bring it down to 0 resistance, at least for me.) I don't know if that's widely known or not, i haven't seen anybody mention it anywhere. That would seem to make lightning absolutely cruel in any of the water-logged areas of the game, of which there are certainly quite a few. Advice for the pursuer: Strafe to your right around him, that generally gives you a hitbox advantage as his right-handed attacks will struggle to track you. (Most notably with the curse attack, which will straight up miss without you even dodging.) Also, generally try to keep your distance, because he'll try to do his ranged dash attack which is very slow, easy to dodge, and has huge recovery for you to punish.

I'm in NG+ with around 5-6 million soul memory and i'm kind of shocked at some of clumsy, ill-equipped builds people are playing with that deep into the game. There was kind of this difficulty curve where i started being matched against people who were super on the ball at the end of NG, but now into the separate matchmaking pool for NG+ and beyond, it seems like it has fallen off pretty steeply.

RE5 is dreadful as a solo game, you're just constantly fighting with the crappy partner AI.

Well, I understand the updated version of Rev for PC and home consoles is pretty alright. I'd recommend RE4 ahead of Rev though.

Okay Dark Souls 2, you got me good. In NG+,

I love RE4 so much, probably one of my favorite games, though I ended up having a weird relationship with Resident Evil because of it. I didn't really like the series before RE4, but it convinced me to try out a few other RE games. I ultimately sort of ended up back where i started though, thinking that most of the RE games are kind of terrible and realizing that RE4 is just a really amazing, singular standout. (Though i did think the 3DS's RE:Revelations was actually pretty great.) Unless you just find the control scheme completely revulsive, it's absolutely worth sticking with that game. Don't forget that you have a quick turn, use it constantly so you can abuse the sprint when putting distance between yourself and an enemy. Also don't forget that you have access to hilarious context-sensitive instant-kills when near a stunned opponent. (Either a headshot or a legshot will do it.)