Bjorn

Co-oping later bosses can rack up a ton of souls very quickly. I wanted to hit Rank 3 in the SunBro covenant, which takes 30 Sunlight Medals, which takes co-oping bosses. So I did a bunch of co-op of my last 3 bosses, which ranged from 5K to 12K souls per kill (or more if I escorted them from a bonfire). If you decide to take people into a boss to help you, and you see golden summon signs, pick those (you won't start seeing them for a little while). You get a Sunlight Medal for taking a SunBro with you to fight a boss, and if you want to rank up in the covenant, that will make it a lot faster if you already have some. It sounds like you didn't get to the first boss of the Forest of the Giants. To get to that fire cave, you have to drop down some scaffolding. From where you dropped, there was also a building with a bonfire in it, which it sounds like you found since you bought the blacksmith key. Did you drop down the ladder in that room? The enemies in there are still much easier (mostly) than the big knights in the Tower of Flame. There are some other good items in there as well. That Heide Knight Sword you got is pretty good for awhile, though it gets outclassed pretty quickly by some other weapons. Oddly enough though, I'm using it for PvP right now against SL80+ people and doing well. For some reason, you can infuse it with poison much better than any other weapon. Poisoned weapons seem to be pretty popular in PvP right now. Agreed! There's plenty of stuff mechanically that is easy to misunderstand or just miss. My rule of thumb right now is that if I can get a lock-on on something, it dies. You can always lock-on to the white knights, so that's an enemy to me. I usually avoid using my bow until I've confirmed something is an enemy. I haven't got to the area you described yet, though it's probably next for me. I spent a ton of the last two evenings in PvP and Co-op, think I'll continue the single player stuff next time I play. I'll be headed through the room that the blue sworded knight was waiting to open. Oh, and about that room Oh, and really important NPCs (merchants and covenant leaders) leave a grave behind after you kill them. You can summon their ghost for a cost and still have access to their goods and services. So there's not more of that thing of accidently killing a merchant because it was dark and you were scared. Or you accidently hit the attack button as you walk up to them (which I did in one playthrough with the Dragon Greataxe).

D-D-D-D-Double Post! Patch 1.02 is out for the NA PS3 version today. Official notes only say that it fixes an issue with summon signs not working (which I have experienced a number of times). But...it's a 120MB patch Most people are assuming that there is other stuff in there that they didn't bother telling us about. Scanning some forums, some people are reporting that summoning is improved, and loads of people are reporting that summoning is completely broken. Soooooo...who knows.

Weirdly enough, I've gone from despising the man to appreciating his influence. I've lived with his church as a regular part of my life for almost 20 years. I've lived within an hour or less of them most of that time and tend to go to the types of events that they protest. Kansas is a weird place. It can be oddly progressive, but severely backwards at the same time. The presence of Phelps and his kin put a constant face on what homophobia and hate look like. People who otherwise might have been silent about homophobia would stand up to Phelps. He has been a great reference point to put other bigots in their place. When people around here say something shitty, you can just point out that their view isn't really that different than what Phelps says, just a degree or two removed. Even bigots don't want to be perceived as being someone like Phelps. That said, he could also be a distraction from the more casual (and harmful) homophobia and oppression that comes standard with parts of the Midwestern culture. Some people think you're only really a bigot if you're acting like the Phelps do. At any rate, it will be interesting to see what happens to Westboro now that the founder and figurehead is gone.

I just saw a trailer for Reaper of Souls, and all I could think is that I wanted someone to cut it with scenes from Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.

So far, yeah, except for hexes being both Int and Faith based. There were supposed to be some big changes involving both strong and weak attacks, maybe two handing, stuff like that. But as near as I can tell, all of that was abandoned. Maybe it just didn't end up working particularly well. I did find a groovy shield that doubles as a chime, and you cast with L2. But unfortunately the defensive stats on the shield just aren't good enough to justify using it, which is a shame. That would have been neat. And upgrading that shield doesn't appear to raise the defensive stats at all, just the spell power stats.

I've got a bunch of souls to spend, I may have to give adaptability a try, particularly as I'm back to having two Soul Vessels. Two primal fires have been lit. I also hit Rank 3 in the SunBros last night. Sunlight Spear has a 55 Faith to cast . For people interested in a long sword type weapon, the Sun Sword (covenant reward) may be an interesting option. It gets B scaling in Str/Dex, that caps out at A scaling at +10. It may become my PvP weapon for awhile, as it's just faster than my club, but my club is more damaging. I'm a bit disappointed in my selection of Miracles so far. I feel like I've seen a big variety of spells and hexes, but very little variety in miracles. All of the hexes I've seen have been dominated by big Intel requirements (and typically minor Faith requirements). I was hoping that Miracles would have received a bit more attention in this game, but it's not looking that way. Edited to add: Oh, and I don't know what to do about leveling up. I'm sitting on over 300K souls right now, from the amount of co-oping I did to rank up in the SunBros (plus it was a lot of fun). I'm level 76, and am pretty sure that I'm going to end up going back to some easier areas that I should have already done. I want to level up to try some new stuff, but would hate to level out of co-op range. I don't have any good idea on how many level 100+ people are running around right now.

?

Are there modern patches that fix the issue with one puzzle being hard linked to your CPU speed? The last time I played GF, I actually had to use a CPU throttler to get past one puzzle. That's the only puzzle I really remember infuriating me.

It says you can Play 3 Ways! I hope one of them is bizarrely complex and challenges a young child's faith that the world is a sane and rational place.

You might want to go back and look around. Actually, that's another reason I like Harvest and Earthen, I feel like there is a good story being told there. Some of it gets pretty explicitly told by an NPC, but plenty of the rest can be figured out from the environment.

It's not super common, but a 13 seed can upset a 4 seed. Have hope!

I felt super useful this evening! There are at least 3 bosses I've encountered where you can make a change to their environment prior to going in the fog door, always to your benefit. I was working on getting ranks in the SunBros this evening, and did a bunch of co-op on one boss, as it seemed the most active in my level range. This boss is nearly unbeatable without changing the environment. About a third of the players hadn't discovered what to do when I would be summoned, so there'd be a rather amusing scene of me pantomiming following me, and then trying to pantomime what they needed to do. Dark Souls Charades! Only one person managed to be completely dense about figuring what I was doing, and just quit following me halfway to run and challenge the boss by himself. That was a painful lesson. Overall I've felt that each area is okay, but hadn't been particularly blown away by any one area the way places in DS1 did. But the Harvest Valley and Earthen Something combo are real gems, and about as good as anything in DS1. The whole poison motif gets real tiresome, but the environment itself is really well designed. Oh, and discovered my first mimic. Thankfully I was not eaten.

Ah, that makes more sense if you're using an existing laptop.

Snake.

Doesn't really matter in my experience though. A couple of games off the top of my head (Mass Effect 3 co-op and Gears of War) you would see people doing annoying things (pursuing individual goals to the detriment of the team goal) or using annoying loadouts just in the pursuit of a badge or achievement. I don't think the idea is inherently terrible, I just think certain implementations of it are less beneficial than other ways of doing it.

Even Spelunky HD has pretty low specs, I can't think that the hardware cost to run it would be terrible different than hardware that wouldn't run it. Of course I haven't looked at building a cabinet in years. My problem in thinking about it was always hardware bloat. I would start with a simple plan, and then keep talking myself into upgrades that would ultimately result in me giving up. Plus I always figured on a 2 player cabinet at the minimum. I couldn't have something like that and not be able to play 2 person Joust.

Oh, also, apparently there is a glitch related to gender as well. Using a Soul Vessel can sometimes revert a female character to male as part of the character reset process.

I haven't seen these first hand, but the whole Generation thing being tied to increasingly difficult kill counts is the kind of thing that tends to drive me crazy in multiplayer games. It's great to encourage diversity of play, but I think it's terrible to saddle players with onerous tasks in order to level up.

I bought it on sale, but haven't actually fired it up yet. That's super disappointing if it's got problems across the board on different hardware. The console version is one of my fav games ever, and I was hoping the PC version would let me have it for years to come without having to keep a 360 around.

My brother was a grade-A shit in high school. Among his pranks was gathering a bunch of hog urine (don't ask) and then used an industrial sized syringe to hose down the entire contents of a guy's locker through the vents with it. Coat, books, backpack, everything, just drenched in hog piss.

You know that someday we're going to get into a political pissing match with China big enough that Fox News will declare that we need to start calling them Freedom Cookies. And they'll all come with inspiring quotes from the Founders with pictures of bald eagles on them.

I'll spoiler thoughts on that covenant, as it's a bit different: I'll have to pay attention, it's nothing I had noticed so far.

Thanks for the link to that FAQ. Mostly I had learned all that by now, but good to see it officially described by From. I hit the 30 kill mark in my current covenant. Think it's time to move on and try something new! My favorite kill of the night was nailing someone in the back with a lightning bolt as they tried to runaway and heal. Hopefully there are more sinners available now and I can start getting Blue Sent defense missions. I also found another PvP area that's pretty neat, might go with it. Has anyone else been down to the Grave of the Saints? Neat stuff, and fun boss fight. I'm really digging the integration of multiplayer more deeply across the board. I did a fair amount of PvP and co-op in DS1, but probably half my time so far in 2 has been spent in some form of multiplayer. I messed around with dual blunt weapons for a bit, which is neat and useful in PvE, but so far it doesn't feel viable for me in PvP, too easy to take too much damage. With the blunt weapons, it eats my stamina like a large weapon does as well. I may have to try some rapiers to see what it's like. The change to large weapons bums me out. My strength builds in both previous Souls games were my favorite builds. Not the most effective, but by far my favorite. But I just cannot get used to the manual targeting aspect of them now, and having to make sure that I completely stop before swinging feels like it slows down my reaction times too much.

I'm feeling like the dedicated server is a huge improvement for me over DS1. I am still having connections fail, but not as frequently. On my internet (which is crappy), I had 50 percent of my connections in DS1 fail, and I'm having maybe 1 in 7 fail in DS2.

I actually didn't know what caused it initially. I just knew that As for whether it's silly or not, I have some thoughts on what may be going on with some general lore: