osmosisch

There's an elevator up to the daughter of chaos bonfire from just behind the demon firesage if memory serves. e: and there should be a bonfire just before the centipede gate as well actually.

The story basically becomes high comedy in the last two acts, with the most incompetent villains this side of Snidely Whiplash. Good grief. I played through as a Witch Doctor which was absolutely goddamn hilarious just because of the class/skill flavours. Doing things like transforming into a chicken, charging a group of enemies, exploding, throwing a jar of spiders at them and then making a circus troupe of zombies make a 'human' pyramid and fall over and explode... well, I just can't get enough of that. There's a butt-ton of skill/rune combos that I found interesting to experiment with but this only really came into its own in act 3-ish, maybe midway through 2. Level 25 I think.

Not anymore! They used to spawn infinitely and give no souls. Now they stop spawning after 7 or so kills and give actual souls.

That does look awesome. I'll keep my eye on it in case they do a TPB, I hate loose comics.

The letter ranking tells you how strongly a weapon scales, ie. the percentage by which its base damage will be increased by increasing that particular stat. This makes, for example, the Bandit knife a lot better in the lategame than it looks at first glance because its dex scaling goes up to A at +14. That's all one truly needs to know, the rest comes naturally with experimentation. Above all else I'd advise you to relax about this whole thing and just try every weapon out for a bit to see whether you like the moveset. It's almost impossible to screw up a character in Dark Souls as long as you don't put points in resistance. As far as I can tell, the reasons Dark Souls' system is rather arcane (with the diminishing returns etc) are firstly to encourage the type of dialogue that's going on in this thread (helpfulness among comparative strangers - a sense of mystery) and secondly to prevent total investment in a particular stat to be completely overpowered (they arguably failed in this respect with Int).

Sorry you caught me before my edit. That post does apply, just not to the drake sword, which does pure pysical but just flat out does not scale. And yeah, you've got the gist of it, though it's not actually flat reduction. I'm not certain of the numbers, but basically resistances have nonlinear scaling, where the first couple of points take off a lot more damage than further increases. So, let's say you've got 200 damage incoming. Your resists are 100 physical 20 fire. If the incoming damage is 100% physical you would take (wild guess) 120 damage. Adding 20 points of physical resist would reduce the damage you take to (again wild guess) 110. Now, if the damage is 50/50 physical/fire you would probably take more to the order of 90 damage, because those first 20 points of fire resist reduce more damage than the 20 extra points of physical in the 100% physical damage example.

I just read this book, which I found fascinating. One of the things mentioned near the end is that in the US there's now the idea that everything hinges no teacher 'effectiveness' and teacher have to be assessed and monitored all the time. Is this an outflow of this policy? It sounds super-shitty. I wish you much strength.

Yeah, the scaling is coming into effect there. The claymore scales with both Str and Dex at C (this type of split scaling is comonly called 'quality'). You don't get to see the result of this scaling until you try to equip the weapon. There's several views you can switch to when switching equipment that will show you the effects on your stats.

My favourite currently-running webcomics are: Gunnerkrigg Court - children go to a school that is also a technomagical institute in the middle of a magical forest. Gorgeous art. Nimona - An evil genius and his shapeshifting sidekick. nicely subversive. Paranatural - Boy moves to town, finds out town is full of ghosts, joins paranatural activity club. Hilarious and so anime.

I found Smarter than you Think by Clive Thompson to be the exact antithesis of that description. Highly recommended.

I'm pretty happy with my current collection, got something for most of my moods. The Maker's Mark was a gift, I don't care for bourbon at all. e: damn, that's blurry. From left to right: Monkey Shoulder, Jura, Cardhu, Laphroaig quarter cask, Highland Park, Glenmoray Lagavulin 16, MM, Laphroaig 10y, Connemara, GlenMoray, Balvenie doublewood, BenRiadh, MacNamara. Not all excellent quality but sometimes one doesn't care.

Yeah, came in here to post that the section on the importance of being allowed to fail is amazing. Especially as a parent that's such a tough, important lesson.

Er, derp, yes, sorry. It's the armour worn by the stone giants which is where my wires got crossed.

For high poise the Giant's armour set is also pretty amazing (under the bridge with Alvina in Darkroot).

Maximum poise (fatroll is fine for them, they do little damage when you're next to them anyway except the grab), a max-upgraded weapon and/or pyro flame with great/regular combustion. A helpful trick is also to keep swinging once one dies, the healthbar still takes damage while they're doing the disappearing animation.

Good lord Patrick that picture is disturbing.

My overall favourite whisky is probably Lagavulin. I love Laphroaig too but I have to be in the mood for it. At the sweeter end of the spectrum I've greatly enjoyed Highland Park and the Balvenie. Of the Irish I've tried Connemara and Bushmills were probably my favourite.

Good job. I hope it works out, but either way I think it'll be an overall beneficial experience. It's strange how hard it can be to ask for help, considering how easy and pleasant it is to be the one giving the help. Ego I guess.

The gargoyle halberd has probably my favourite moveset in the whole game. The light one-handed attack is so fast and has amazing range. Besides the boss souls spears the most interesting spear is probably the one that the gargoyles in Anor Londo use. it's got built-in lightning and looks creepy. Oh, and the channeler's trident of course. Oh, and the silver knights can drop their spear, that one's pretty schmexy also.

No, I got my facts completely mixed up, sorry. Actiblizz actually split from Vivendi last year, but Tencent's still in. Not too hopeful in other words.

If you don't like the duke's archives, it's a fine moment to go and explore some other areas. You can head down the graveyard from firelink, you can check out the spooky ghost party in firelink's other basement, or you can keep going past where Quelaag was. Oh, and there's still the crow flight path from firelink as well. Many people are of the opinion that the best boss fights are in the DLC. It also adds some fascinating lore, especially regarding Artorias and the furtive pygmy. I'd recommend holding off on it for a bit though if the archives are giving you trouble. There's several unique spears. One is made from the soul of the Moonlight Butterfly and is mainly intended for int builds. One builds from Ornstein's soul and looks boss as hell. It needs a lot of both dex and str thought. As far as getting weapons past +10, you need the ember for that, which is found in the aforementioned place fulla ghosts.

Given that muscle is heavier than fat, odds are you've at least improved your body. Nice work!

Haha, that's amazing.

Damn, that sucks. Sorry to hear it!

Why injections? That seems weird. http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/02/fetish-vitamin-b12-shots.html