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The shivan is very good, but it has a weird failing in its lack of airlocks, so no venting to clear out boarders or fires. Also, build that door system and then upgrade it, do so with much haste. If you end up with a breach in an empty room, consider leaving it alone and using it as an impromptu airlock. As of AE, i guess the oxygen draining racial trait of the Lanius would also be very valuable on that ship, since their oxygen drain can affect multiple rooms if doors are opened.

I'm pretty much in the same spot as you, but now preparing to go kill the last few optional bosses, trying to open up a few locked doors and find a few illusory walls, and... Also, couple things about the memories:

If you find a "peculiar doll" in the undead asylum on the return visit, you can use it to interact with the large painting in the temple to the left of the main path through Anor Londo. What about the ash lake, or the valley of the drakes? Ash lake is pretty cool and well worth seeing, it's hidden in the tree at the far end of the swamp beneath blighttown. Valley of the Drakes is mostly just connective tissue between several other areas, but at no point is it actually required for you to traverse it, so it's easily missed by most players. Also, yes, you can parry Gwyn. Quite easily, as it so happens. It kind of breaks an otherwise very difficult fight.

Are you playing offline? The general problem with invasions is that, even when the game is hitting you with them semi-frequently, they happen just infrequently enough that you can never quite become comfortable with the ways a pvp fight is different from the pve combat. Spending some time with one of the pvp covenants, or conducting some invasions yourself, is the surest way to get a handle on it, if you don't want to just perpetually be stomped by invaders whenever invasions happen. Anyways, if you haven't done the return trip to the undead asylum, you haven't done the painted world either, so don't forget that. It's actually one of the more entertaining areas of the game. Have you done everything else?

There have also been several other attempts out of nintendo to sequelize Yoshi's Island, and they've always been somehow off the mark.

From has been on the record multiple times about how they were not at all happy with the version of Bed of Chaos that ended up in the game, it just ended up that way because of time restrictions. (If i'm recalling this correctly, the original plans called for a kind of mobile vine monster slithering around a large and open arena.) Persisting latency woes aside, the PVP combat generally works much better in DS2. Backstabs are much, much harder to initiate and rolls are generally much less abusable. Still, somebody coming in with a PVP-centric build to mess with you and your likely PVE-centric build still puts you at a significant disadvantage. Estus is disabled for phantoms though, and the adaptability stat lets you chug estus like crazy. There's also a covenant that automatically summons a protector for you from another related covenant. (There's even an item that lets you turn monsters in your world hostile towards invaders.) Invasions being an always present threat also kind of makes them less predictable, you don't really run into "I've just restored to human aaaaand i'm being invaded." (Though you definitely get shades of that when going into the Bell Towers or the Rat King areas.) However, as you allude to, invasion items in Dark Souls 2 are very limited and going through with it doesn't really have much of a pay-off anymore, so people just kind of aren't doing it in DS2.

Shared experience seems like something that might have the opposite effect of what they intend. I mean, in Dota 2, if you're not amazing, you can kind of hang back and play support, just try to keep your carry happy. If everybody is sharing experience though, everybody needs to be on top of shit. I'm not sure where this race to the bottom with accessibility is going to get anybody. Learning to play Dota 2 was one of the harshest learning curves i've ever been through, and it reminds of trying to learn to play fighting games. The emphasis on broad rosters of characters, the way fights are all about positioning and searching for that opening and nailing those ability combos, and even the completely non-evident game systems that you basically need to just have somebody explain to you. The way other LORDS MANAGEMENT games are chasing Dota even feels to me like how so many fighters, even today, follow the footsteps of Street Fighter. (Much has been made of how all these LORDS MANAGEMENT games are emulating eachother's characters, but it's not much different from how so many fighting games spent years emulating the SF roster.) So, and here's the point i want to make, maybe it's worth pointing out that the broad majority of fighting games with any enduring legacy are ones that cater almost exclusively to the hardcore set. High skill ceilings and competitive balance are what keep people coming back to games for long periods of time, and HOTS sounds like it's trying to curtail at least one of those. Perhaps the more salient point though, is that nobody's going to jump in and become the magical, inexplicable "Smash Bros" - something that seems able to appeal to everybody equally - by imitating something with such hardcore roots as Dota, they're only going to do it by coming from a wildly different place. (Perhaps though, perhaps Blizzard thinks this is the game they're making... Is it?)

Are the Lost Vikings in this game? If not, they fucked up.

Every time i've seen the game, it's looked super evocative of the old Konami arcade game "Time Pilot", just with wacky physics. I got that 40% off coupon too and was seriously considering buying it, but a glance at the steam forum seemed to suggest a lot of technical problems with the game. Have any of you had troubles with it?

Also, did you guys know that Bonfire Ascetics are apparently completely permanent? Every time you use one, you bump that bonfire's area up to the next playthrough's difficulty, resetting spawns and such in the process, that's the obvious effect. However, the bump allegedly persists into all subsequent playthroughs, and so the area you pushed into NG+ in NG will be NG++ in your NG+ playthrough.

Yes, it's almost definitely another Souls-style game running on their DaS2 engine. (An engine that From specifically said was built to shepherd them into next-gen development.) That said, i'm certainly not in the camp that feels the Souls games are the only worthwhile thing From has done. They're a developer that has kind of just trucked along doing their own sometimes flawed, but always ambitious thing, and so they've ended up with a ton of really fascinating games in their history. (I will argue vehemently for their mech games.) As for annualizing souls-style games, i'd like to believe they wouldn't bleed it out like that, but based on From's history... I would get the impression the only thing holding them back from trying is an issue of the manpower required for such large games. The thing is, as of Dark Souls 2, it looks like they now have two separate teams working on RPG's side-by-side, so I wouldn't put it past them.

Given that a lot of chests will give you five at a time, i suspect there's probably a lot more than fifty. (Not counting random drops.) Also, Dark Souls 2 is really long. Also, successfully defending either of the bell towers earns you titanite chunks? I was wondering why titanite chunks seemed so rare, you're obviously supposed to get them through the bell keepers. No wonder nobody does proper invasion pvp in this game, the rewards with the rat king covenant and the bell keeper covenant are so much better. I finally saw a real invasion though, he caught me in a small cavern and i misjudged the height of the ceiling. My overhead halbred swing clanged, and he ohk'd me with a hex. Really wish i had that dispelling ring.

That might be the case, that seems to be the theory going around regarding halbreds. A lot of the halbreds/pikes/spears are really terrific, but it'd be hard to main them with how quickly they degrade. My mastadon halbred is just preposterously damaging though.

I've been kicked offline a few times by steam outages, definitely kind of annoying. Also, i've started using the Mastadon Halbred, that thing is awesome. It seems to take extra durability damage though, it degrades very quick, so i've been using it as a secondary equip.

I've been using human effigies when i lose about a quarter of my health bar, and i've basically been having no trouble maintaining a supply of them. I pretty much always have about seven on hand. If you do actually completely feed through your supply, there aren't any places you can buy more early on in the game, but if you keep forward momentum through the game, you'll keep finding lots more. (Also, no shop keeper ever has an unlimited supply, i believe. Does conducting invasions still restore humanity? That might be the last option.) Don't feel bad about forest of the fallen giants though, i had it a bit rough there too. I think you start out considerably weaker in DS2 than you do in DS1. Lifegems will help out a lot early on to compensate for your gimped estus flask, and some early points into adaptibility might help a lot with getting your mobility up. (By most accounts though, the gains from adaptibility fall off quickly and sharply. It soft caps pretty hard around the 20's, so probably don't focus on it.) Also keep in mind that the revised encumbrance system gives more importance to the entire sliding scale and not just the hard breaks. (My understanding is that the hard breaks are now at 70%, 100%, and 120%, but a 50% roll will also now feel significantly different than a 69% roll.) In general though, the roll has been hugely nerfed in DS2, and if that's how you played DS1, you'll have a harder time starting out. There's also just a lot of narrow paths and narrow corridors to contend with in the later parts of that area, it's not optimal for rolling. There's some shields available in the Majula shops that are pretty good for the early game, if you're not doing a two-handed or dual-wielding style.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. That is the first time i feel like the game has screwed me over in a fashion similar to what the first game would have happily done. I'm kind of glad From still had it in them, but god dammit i'm frustrated.

You should definitely not be as far into the game as Nito with non-upgraded armor, and as already noted by others, you definitely need to think about damage types other than physical. Sorcery and miracles both have good options for mitigating non-physical damage.

That's kind of the point though, isn't it? The twinkling titanite items are supposed to be some of the best items in the game, and therefore require a little more work to upgrade. The drangleic sword, in particular, has pretty wild potential for balanced builds.

That was the case in Dark Souls too, really. It looks like some of the best shields are boss soul items, and there's some amazing spells to be had, but most of the weapons are pretty so so.

If Sony's involved, it's going to be platform exclusive, so that bums me out. I think i'm getting kind of a colonial, early-industrial vibe from some of the screenshots, which might be kind of neat.

It's a curious thing, right? I don't think anything's broken, the multiplayer definitely works, the PVP areas definitely work with no problems, i don't really ever see failed connections or anything like that. (Summon signs don't work sometimes, but i'm pretty it's just the players on the other end cancelling the sign or being summoned by somebody else. If i hit one as soon as it appears, it pretty much always goes through.) So why don't invasions happen? Did pulling out the humanities system affect balance in such a way that people don't feel like they need to conduct invasions anymore? What do you even get for invading people in DS2? I've literally not been invaded a single time outside of the PVP areas, and i have probably a good fifty hours in the game. Opening up region restrictions in the options might help out, i guess.

Having spent some time with the Rat King covenant now, i get the impression that if people understood they could win those events by completing the gauntlet, those invasions wouldn't always be such a stomp. Nobody does though, so it's always a stomp. It's very difficult to chase down a player that is intent on keeping his distance, and there's definitely been more than a few situations where players would get considerably ahead of me down the path of the gauntlet just through the natural progression of the fight, but instead of just taking that advantage and bolting, they heal up and return to fight me and my monster posse and invariably get wasted. I've also read that arena fights and invasions are counted separately, two different tallies building towards the possibility of covenant progression. That is absolutely ridiculous, i'll never get that great chaos fireball.

I don't know, it sounds like Funimation's business model involves translating and dubbing anime as cheap as possible. They operate in a cheap city, and they hire non-union voice actors and there's only a few who'll put up with their shit.