Kyir

I'm a bit bummed I missed the stream this time around, but I'm glad progress was made despite that! I wonder how many hours Nick has put in at this point.

All twitch VODs now have logged chat, so if you remember which stream it is, you can go find it.

We already know what Nick thinks about them. It's something along the lines of "what? what is this? why is my life going down? what?" followed by a dip on the internalization meter. I think either way we cut it, Nick is probably only going to get past one major boss in the next stream though. It might make more sense for him to do dungeon/capital first since that's longer, and then do Anor Londo + whatever part of the castle he can make it through on the next stream? I'm already haunted by the idea of him getting deep into the dungeon, stopping, and then having no idea what was going on the next week.

So which direction do we think Nick will go from here? I have a feeling the Silver Knights might be a bit of a high stepping stone once the drinking starts, which I assume will be right away.

I have now gotten 100% of achievements in this game, which are surprisingly comprehensive in their scope. Doing so requires beating the game on NG, NG+, and NG++, doing PvE, co-op, and both kinds of PvP. It took me about 110 hours to do so, though some portion of that was just me messing around. This is the first From Software game (and any game of the Souls genre I suppose) that inspired me to come back and beat it more than once. Usually they just leave me feeling sort of exhausted about everything, but Dark Souls 3 left me feeling energized enough to press on. The visuals and music felt might higher on the "haunting" scale compared to how plainly horrific the stuff in Bloodborne was or the sheer sense of decay in Dark Souls 2, and several of the bosses stand above all the others in these games I would say. I don't feel conflicted at all in saying that this is my favorite of the series in pretty much every aspect. I'm sort of wary saying it, but I really hope we get a Dark Souls 4. If anyone wants help beating anything I would be more than happy to jump in at this point, but I imagine it would feel a bit trivial doing so. P.S. The summoned PvP in this game is actually really good since most people abide by the no-healing 1v1 rules. It's tense but not overly so, and I generally had some really good fights. https://www.twitch.tv/kyir/v/67284097 was probably my favorite.

That's what I mentioned to him too. The solution didn't seem to work when he tried it, but then it didn't happen again afterwards? I really have no idea on this one. Actually, I now realize that we were both looking at a Dark Souls 2 page. Whoops!

He was suffering a bug where shield auto-locked on. If anyone knows the solution to it, that might be helpful in future streams.

Using embers to heal is less effective when you have a huge amount of them, but when there's a limited number in a situation where farming isn't really desired, I think waiting to use them further into a fight is perfectly reasonable. Nick did beat Pontiff without using one at all in the end, though I suppose it could also be argued that means he shouldn't worry about running out of them. Though, to be fair, you're not wasting estus unless you overheal with it, which you shouldn't be doing either way. It's a bit more dangerous to have a lower HP cap still, but I wouldn't be recommending doing it unless there was the risk of running out of them soon.

I thought you made a lot of progress honestly! I'm looking forward to the next stream.

We do have to consider that Nick will be somewhat less drunk this time though, and he did get the Abyss Watchers pretty quick.

You might also want to try rolling less when you're just backing up. He can close the space fast no matter what, and there were a few times in there where he did and you were out of stamina because of the rolling you did when it wasn't necessary. He's hard, but I'm sure you can do it!

I'm excited to see how true the "completely internalizing the game" claim turns out to be. I'm hoping for not true at all.

You can do a lot of damage to the clone as it's coming out. You might be able to pop it just during that span of time?

Either way, killing Patches saved the soul-farming time to buy the armor, so I still call it a win.

I spent a lot of time trying to lead Nick through the Cathedral leg of Siegward's quest. I can only call it an experience comparable to playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, except with hundreds of other people talking at the same time and precision controls. I felt the ups and the downs, the pain of defeat and the euphoria of success. Also I got to see Patches get murdered. What a stream! Slight spoilers ahead:

I didn't think it was super hard or anything. DS2's DLC was much more difficult to beat I think, except for maybe the Nameless King (builds and difficulty vary somewhat of course). The difficulty curve felt kind of wobbly for some of the bosses though, like Deacons of the Deep were even easier than Iudex Gundyr in both NG and NG+.