Sno

CoC does actually increase your odds of being invaded, i believe. There are actually a lot of ways to increase invasion odds in DS2, i wonder if some players are just vacuuming up all the invasions and preventing others from seeing any. As for adaptibility, i've had mine sitting at 20 for most of my time with the game and that's felt like a substantial enough buff by itself to overcome the slow item activation and weak dodge. I might push it up to 25 or 30, but i definitely wouldn't go as far as the soft cap.

I think the Flexile Sentry is the easiest boss in the game. And yes, the theme for the Skeleton Lords fight is awesome. Velstadt might have my favorite boss theme in the game though. The also has a great piece of music that i think most players would be likely to miss with how quickly that fight can be over, and nothing else on the soundtrack beats the theme for pure bombast. There's a few other pieces i really like as well, i don't think the soundtrack is bad by any stretch.

Given that an SL1 playthrough just on its own would probably be so much more difficult because of adaptibility, doing that on the CoC difficulty doesn't sound fun at all. (Have you spent any time with the pvp convenants, or just all CoC?) Anyways, I don't think anything with the rat king covenant areas should be taken too seriously, they seem to be more about From's wry sense of humor than anything else. (Also, I liked that boss fight. ) Speaking of story details, some relatively important pieces only show up in NG+, though I will agree that Dark Souls 2 struggles a bit with tone. In Dark Souls, even when you had no idea what was going on, i think it was pretty successful in implying through its tone what was going on. It's evocative of a game like Shadow of the Colossus, i'd say.

There's a few things that have me souring on Luftrausers. I think the spawns are way too inconsistent for it to be a good score attack game. The normal fighters are essential for keeping a combo going, and if you can't keep that combo going, you may as well not play. The thing is, sometimes they just sort of vanish from the play area and the game decides to give you three battleships on the same spot, with the overlapping fire that entails, and surrounded on each side by two more battleships. What? What? I mean, and evidenced by the regenerating health, it's not really a game where you're expected to reliably weave through fire, so your actions kind of have to be a little more broad and strategic, but the game isn't really allowing you to have enough information for that. I think the camera is zoomed in too close, you're constantly trying to shoot at and respond to things beyond the edge of your screen. All this has done is made me want to play Geometry Wars.

I think the optional bosses right at the end are pretty weak, but the fights immediately preceding those were my favorite in the game. (I loved the looking glass knight fight.) If you're specifically just talking about the hitboxes when mentioning fairness, i'll give you that, DS2 has some weird hitboxes in places. (I do think the dodge and estus recovery needed to be nerfed a bit though. Being able to easily tank hits by chugging estus in DS1 is lame, and with the dodge tied into a stat now, it can actually end up better than the first game's, can't it? Just at the cost of needing to make it a focus of your build.) Related to wanting the game to highlight new items in inventory, there's also the thing about the status screen not showing adjusted elemental resistances. You to have to flip through the stats on the equipment screen to find those. There's lots of weird little UI things like that, though i'm sure i'd find lots of similar things in the previous games if i went back and looked. I'm also still not sure how i'm supposed to read stats for the spell catalysts/charms/flames. Maybe the pyromancy flame is just a weird exception that confuses everything else, but that stuff is way less clear that the magic adjust stat in DS1. Regarding the absence of Miyazaki, i'd have a hard time making any judgements about how his absence affected the game without having played Demon's Souls and even just knowing how things changed between the two games he was hands on with. If nothing else, i get the impression that Dark Souls 2 is a little less bleak and hopeless than his games were. It's definitely important to point out, though, that a large majority of the teams from the first two games remained intact for Dark Souls 2. Still, taken purely on its own merits, Dark Souls 2 does feel a little at odds with itself, i think. It clearly wants to establish its own identity, but maybe ends up feeling a little constrained by being beholden to what was probably among From's most financially successful games ever. (Some of the callbacks to the first Dark Souls feel pretty forced.) As for the OST, i've kind of gone through the same arc with both soundtracks. I didn't like them at first, but they slowly grew on me. There are more songs in DS2's soundtrack though, and perhaps relatively fewer stand out.

It absolutely seems like they're just trying to get a bunch of indies and modders using UE again, yeah. It's super, super unexpected and weird. Honestly, and i think i might actually trust the Unreal community more than Epic to make a good UT sequel. I have no faith in Epic without Cliff Bleszinski. (UT3 was baaad.)

It's interesting how much of a difference the scaling bonuses on the armor pieces makes. On peripheral pieces like the gauntlets, i get nearly as much protection out of the scaling bonus as i do from the base damage resistances. (I use the Alva set, which i've been thinking about replacing with something a little heavier, but i'm not sure what i should go for.) Seems that there's never any scaling for the elemental resistances though, which would make it even more important to pick armor with higher elemental resistances.

It's bad enough if you want a weapon, it gets ridiculous if you want an armor set. There's a set i'd like to try out with my character, but having to farm a non-respawning NPC phantom by pushing an area deep into NG+ difficulties while at the mercy of low percentage drop chances on each individual piece is just nuts.

I've learned not to trust the positioning that much, i back way the hell up when i need to recover stamina. I really wish the netcode was better. The fighting engine is so much improved, and there aren't any of the connectivity issues that Dark Souls had, but it can still turn into a total mess because of latency. From's been pushing hard for these big online-centric experiences in their games, but their netcode has always been just short of terrible.

The big slow weapons are pretty harmless in pvp, guys running around with those ultra greatswords thinking they only need to land one hit are damn near worthless as opponents. Also: Those findings about the matching ranges are pretty valuable. For the hell of it, here's another useful reddit thread. (I'm sure at least some of you are already familiar with this, but i don't think i've seen it linked in here before.)

My best fighter seems to be the "holy diver", which is the bomb body, the laser, and the propeller engine. (Love that there are names for every possible combo.) Current high score of 25,000 thousand, consistently hitting 15,000. I wish the camera was pulled out a little more, there's a lot happening beyond the edge of your screen. You often have to just kind of intuit what's going on, making blind shots at way too distant enemies, and i'm not sure i dig that.

I fought the flexile sentry on NG+ and was.. To elaborate on my earlier comments about degradation, i will mirror some of what has already been said in that i especially like the durability system in DS2 because it both cuts back on the busy work of item maintenance while simultaneously making it more of a factor that you have to pay attention to. I hope this bug with weapon degradation gets fixed though, i guess that's why my weapons are mysteriously losing half of their durability under certain conditions? After all the issues it caused Dark Souls, i'm surprised From made another mistake about tying things into updating at every frame tick. It shows their console-focused history though, where they could rely on the framerate being predictable. (There actually is an option in DS2 to lock the framerate, isn't there? For now, that might actually fix the issue, though obviously that's not ideal.) In a sense, there already kind of is. When fighting normal pve enemies, physical damage types actually matter. Using strike damage against big heavy armored enemies will get you a kill in fewer strikes than anything else will, and therefore cause less durability damage to your weapon. Also, it was discussed much earlier in the thread, so a couple more notes about mace versus club: I have both to +10 with 50 in str and the mace still does more damage for me. I presume the 15 dex i have for the mastadon halbred is enough on the mace's e scaling for dex to put it over the top, but even without that, it must be pretty close. Combined with the greater poise damage, my impression is that the mace is the superior weapon, despite the wonky hitbox on its light attack. That mastadon halbred, however, has an attack rating of over 600. That thing is wacky.

I've always been a proponent of degradation systems, it's one of those asshole mechanics that forces you to be a little more mindful and feel a little more frail, and it seems to me like it's perfectly in line with the kind of experience Souls is about.

DARK SOULS 2! Enemies don't permanently despawn, you can burn an item called a bonfire ascetic at a bonfire to reset an area completely, but it has the side affect of permanently increasing that area's difficulty to a level equivalent to whatever the next playthrough for that area would be, and the effect persists in subsequent playthroughs. So on NG, an area would become equivalent to NG+ and would remain elevated by that amount, relative to the rest of the game, on further playthroughs. Additionally, with this method, you could actually gain early access to NG+ exclusive items. That probably sounds confusing, and it is. It's a super weird system. Regarding difficulty: Personally, i've been finding the game easier than the first, but i know others have been finding it dramatically more difficulty. It seems to vary from person to person based on what playstyle they're trying to bring over from the first game. DS2 does force you to fight mobs far more frequently than DS1 would have, but the game gives you the tools you need to deal with it. It's a lot of things that would have often been ignored in the first game, weapons with wide sweeping attacks that clang in narrow corridors, or spells with huge aoe's and slow casting. In DS2, these things become very important for crowd control, and you also have more slots for active equipment in DS2, so it's easy to carry multiple weapons to deal with different situations. The flick targeting with the lock-on system is also more important in DS2 than it was in DS1, it's valuable to get a handle on switching targets in the middle of a fight. (DS2 also presents multiple lock-on points for many of the bosses, which is a big improvement over the last game's lock-on system.) About the ugly main characters, you actually become progressively more gross and decrepit with your increasing levels of hollowedness in DS2. Your character's features become progressively more sunken and rotten, your hair starts falling out, etc. Some of the other cool covenants: There's one that summons a protector for you when you're invaded, and one that lets you be the summoned protector. There's one that lets you set up a bunch of traps in a specific area and forcibly pull another player exploring that area in their own world into your world state to run the gauntlet you've prepared, while there's another covenant that simply summons multiple players to go try and gank people exploring another set of locations.

Additionally, you shouldn't have had to make any jumps to get to the bottom of the great hollow, there should be a clean path through there.

Also, the illusory wall thing never bugged me that much because of the hint system in the game, people pretty reliably mark the location of all the secrets in the game, and there's something actually kind of fun about that. (Though it's taken a turn for the worse in DS2, jerks are seeding in so many false leads.)

Nintendo's done stuff like this before, you know. Unique hardware targeted at emerging markets.

Maybe? There are parts of Anor Londo that definitely feel like you are breaking the game, like you are creatively moving beyond the designed and intended playable space, but are in fact doing exactly what you are meant to be doing.

So if you use the red sign soapstone in the candle-filled room near the arena for the looking glass knight boss fight, there's a chance the looking glass knight in another world will summon you to assist it against whoever is fighting it. I will totally have to try that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0pLAjafkV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI2shCFrq5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_i7YWFo-B4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLkbLyFdrjA I don't think i like the sequel's soundtrack as much as the first game's, but there's still a fair number of pieces i quite like.

I just always really enjoyed how monolithic and surreal some of the locations in the first game are. The Izalith stretch of the game, despite being probably the weakest part of the game, has some very strange and imposing visuals that always stood out to me. Or just even the incredibly towering concentric walls protecting Lordran, with Anor Londo at their center, that you spend most of the game fighting in and around.

Earlier in the thread i had mentioned hearing stories about that form of cheating, yeah. Just have to hope that the VAC implementation can catch it, i guess. It doesn't sound like it's extremely wide spread, at the least. Also, Heide's Tower seems to be meant as a pretty early game area, so you'll probably stomp through it. I think i did the same thing, got to Lost Bastille early on and beat my head against it until i got through, and then started exploring the other paths out of Majula, only to find that i probably should have looked into them earlier on.

The ruin sentinels were the first boss in DS2 that gave me real, real trouble, it was a very difficult fight. (Though I might have actually had more trouble with the swarm of hollowed soldiers that can aggro on you before that fight, at least until i figured out the back door that lets you skip all of that.) At that point though, you should be able to start heading down some of the other spokes coming out of Majula though, it might be worth tackling some other stuff before coming back. I definitely got the impression that the ruin sentinels might have been meant as an intentional road block. Also, i just started NG+. I am enjoying the remixed layouts that seem kind of purposefully engineered to prey on my newfound complacency.

There's definitely some really fantastic areas in DS2, absolutely. The area design might actually be a little bit better on average. What you lose is the sense that they all cohere, you don't really have things like looking out across all the areas you've previously been from atop Sen's Fortress, or looking out into the Izalith caverns to see the journey ahead of you. The spaces generally feel a little more confined and separate. The most you really ever get in Dark Souls 2 is some things like... At Majula, you if you look out to the ocean and peer to the left, you can see Heide's Tower of Flame off in the distance, but it's presented as far further away than you could possibly have traveled underground to reach there. Stand in the same spot and look right, you can see the massive statues in the cliff side that belong to the fortress you explore in the forest of fallen giants, but again the geography doesn't quite match up. That's the stuff that bums me out most about Dark Souls 2, after Dark Souls presented such a consistent and intricately constructed world.