SL128

Nick Plays FROM; Currently - Bloodborne

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I absolutely refuse.

 

SL1 runs sound really tiresome, not sure why anyone puts themselves through that unless they've become so good at a game that they need to do something completely crazy for it to become challenging. It's like where people who become super fit have to worry about their heart not working well enough while they're asleep.

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I just saw they nerfed Ring of Life Protection in SotFS, that's good.

 

I kinda want to play DS2 now even though it's my least favourite. Help!

It's weird, I almost felt a bit of the hate leaving my body. I think I suddenly like that game way more.

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52 minutes ago, eot said:

I'll briefly mention Bloodborne too. It's different from the other games in that you can't really do a tanky build, you're forced into an active play style. The mechanics are tuned to accommodate that however. The first area can be very challenging, even if you've played all the other games, but a bit like Dark Souls I find that it's kinda easy to out level the game without meaning to. If you dig into the optional stuff there are some very challenging bosses though.

 

My prediction is that you'll like Bloodborne the most, because it kind of is the best game even if it's not my favourite, and find DS2 the hardest. Welcome to the dumpy.zone.

 

 

I'll second Bloodborne as a game I think Nick would get along with better. There's only one really viable build for Bloodborne (strength and HP all the way, with some points in skill depending on your weapon), but it is a super fun way to play the game. With the exception of frenzy, I didn't find the game really had any bullshit mechanics, and all the boss fights felt fair to me (although I think I was probably over-leveled by the time I fought Ebrietas to be fair). The DLC for Bloodborne is incredible too, although it means you'll get access to weapons that make certain parts of the game trivially easy.

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32 minutes ago, eot said:

I just saw they nerfed Ring of Life Protection in SotFS, that's good.

 

I kinda want to play DS2 now even though it's my least favourite. Help!

It's weird, I almost felt a bit of the hate leaving my body. I think I suddenly like that game way more.

 

I'm having that experience with DS3 right now. When I put the game down last I thought I was done with the Souls series, and I thought DS3 was the worst one yet. I dipped my toe back in recently though because Bloodborne revived my love for the series, and while I don't like DS3 as much as Bloodborne, I'm having a much better time with DS3 than in my first run. I'm also discovering the routes I took in my first run probably made things way harder than they needed to be, go figure.

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35 minutes ago, eot said:

I just saw they nerfed Ring of Life Protection in SotFS, that's good.

 

I kinda want to play DS2 now even though it's my least favourite. Help!

It's weird, I almost felt a bit of the hate leaving my body. I think I suddenly like that game way more.

Gooble gabble gooble gabble, one of us, one of us

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5 hours ago, Nick Breckon said:

 

In my defense, I did not think I'd beat the boss -- that everyone was constantly pumping up as a big deal -- on the second try. 

 

Which actually begs the question: what's the difficulty level of DS2 in comparison to DS1/DS3? So far, at least in my playthroughs, I'd say DS3's bosses were trickier on average than DS1's. But then again, I was new to playing the game, so maybe I'm just better at combat now and DS3 will seem like a cakewalk when I replay it? 

 

I just finished my first run of DS2 this week, and finished DS1 earlier this year (haven't made it to DS3 yet). I think DS2 was harder on the whole, but it also felt smoother. The couple of times I got tripped up in Dark Souls (Taurus Demon, Ornstein and Smough, Tomb of the Giants), it meant several multi-hour sessions to figure out what I was doing wrong and how to correct. For Dark Souls 2, I only had to walk away and come back later for one boss, but it also had more bosses that took more than one hour. So from my experience, you'll probably find the early parts of Dark Souls 2 fairly easy, but it'll ramp up to a comfortable challenge. 

 

I'll also add that Dark Souls 2 has a couple areas in the DLC that I think are worth skipping for being too hard in ways that aren't really fun (specifically

the Iron Passage and the Frigid Outskirts

), but the DLC in general has had some of my favorite fights of the series so far.

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56 minutes ago, Upthrust said:

I'll also add that Dark Souls 2 has a couple areas in the DLC that I think are worth skipping for being too hard in ways that aren't really fun (specifically

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the Iron Passage and the Frigid Outskirts

), but the DLC in general has had some of my favorite fights of the series so far.

 

Only Souls boss I've never beaten, not even solo, is the latter of those two. Over the course of eight hours spent trying, I got one hit away once and went for it. Unsuccessfully, of course. Else, I never even got close. In general, all the bosses in the DS2 DLC that were supposed to be "multiplayer" bosses are actually filled with the rank bullshit that many people think characterizes every Souls boss.

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17 minutes ago, Gormongous said:

 

Only Souls boss I've never beaten, not even solo, is the latter of those two. Over the course of eight hours spent trying, I got one hit away once and went for it. Unsuccessfully, of course. Else, I never even got close. In general, all the bosses in the DS2 DLC that were supposed to be "multiplayer" bosses are actually filled with the rank bullshit that many people think characterizes every Souls boss.

Yeah, the only reason I managed to get through both of those areas was by deliberately killing the mobs until they de-spawned, and even then the run to the latter boss fight took about 3 mintues. After I got close enough to winning solo that I felt like I "solved" it, I just summoned an NPC and beat it so I could get on with my life. Felt especially disjointed after I went on to beat the main boss for that segment in one go.

 

I did make pretty decent progress through the audiobook I was listening to, though.

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For the frigid outskirts you really just have to look up a map. IMO they should have put a bonfire by the tigers -- that area's really cool to go through ONCE, but putting it before one of the hardest bosses in the game is absurd.

It's a hilarious place to get invaded though, because good fucking luck with that. You could probably farm awestones just by getting a lot of sin, activating a seed of the tree of giants, and just go AFK with the red string equipped and let the blue phantoms kill themselves.

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7 hours ago, SL128 said:

Feeona (of being in Twitch chat fame) started streaming DS1 today, and encountered an event worthy of Nick Breckon: https://clips.twitch.tv/feeona/GleamingHeronShadyLulu

That's kinda crazy. I've seen it fall off the hole in the bridge, but even though it was hard to tell from that video it almost looked like it jumped over the 'railing'.

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This might just be an issue of it being my second souls game, but DS2 seemed pretty easy to me. There's so many ways to go, that if a boss is any trouble you can swap to a different path and return later. The start seemed harder when I was getting to grips with a new system, and low on estus (also accidentally joined the covenant of champions).


But quite quickly it became as natural as my second run through DS1.

 

Though I've also never used poise in DS1, so maybe I benefited from the balance changes being purely beneficial.

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I think a lot of the relative difficulty of the game has to do with the build you're using, and how fast of an action game you like to play. As has been mentioned in earlier posts, poise took a nerf in DS2 and again in DS3, so if you have a play style that you expect to get hit sometimes, the games get harder as you go along. On top of that, DS3 enemies especially are a lot more fast paced and simply swing more often, compounding those issues even more. Personally, I've always specifically avoided using a shield or heavy armor, even in DS1, but also have a hard time keeping up with the speed of enemies in DS3, so I found DS2 (excepting the DLC) to be the easiest. Going back and playing it again with the DLC, I might say DS2 has become my favorite as well. It feels flexible in a way that neither DS1 or DS3 feel, has the polished mechanics and controls, but combat is still slower and more strategic than DS3.

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DS2 might have the most variance in player experience. At launch faith builds were extremely strong, to the point where a few casts of a single spell would kill most bosses, while people going for Dex builds hardly did any damage at all. It's also seen the most radical balance changes of all the games, especially when you take SotFS into account. So depending on when you played it, and how you played it your experience could have been very different from someone else's. Coming from DS1 I expected it to be easier, so I did try to make it harder for myself, did every playthrough in CoC etc. but there certainly are cookie cutter builds in all the games.

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2 minutes ago, Nick Breckon said:

Alright, I think tonight's the night. Will start streaming around 4pm Pacific. Though I have to leave by 7pm, so we'll see. 

I'm sure ProblemMachine or someone else will point it out, but aside from the mainline progression you have left there is one (two) optional area(s) you could visit. There are no bosses there and people might say it's only for the lore. While there is a lore connection you won't give a rat's ass about, I'd say it's worth going there for the ambiance of the place, it's quite striking.

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39 minutes ago, Feeona said:

 

Although it was hilarious I feel a little cheated out of my kill. Roll on the next boss, eh?

Hey, watching through the vod now and seeing a lot of dropped frames. You might want to drop your bitrate if you haven't already, assuming that there weren't like background downloads or something going that you put a stop to later.

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Nick putting on the Calamity Ring is amazing. I can't wait to hear about it on the podcast after a stream full of frustration.

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Nick, in-between beating Dark Souls 1 and starting Dark Souls 2, can we please have a social eating stream?

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