Dark Souls 2 (Dark Souls successor (Demon's Souls successor))

[dartmonkey]

And then I strut to the exit, feeling as badass as I've ever felt in a Souls game. 

As a reader, this story could only be improved if you turned and fell into the lava Or walked into it, slowly sinking as your hand clenches to a thumbs-up.

 

 

Why the fuck does it cost a human effigy to fight Darklurker

Cost me about 30 by the end.

 

I've just started a NG+. Not sure how far I'll go with it as I've kinda had my fill.

[eot]

Why the fuck does it cost a human effigy to fight Darklurker

Probably to stress you out. Personally I don't like that choice either. The enemies in there drop ascetics though, and for every ascetic you can get 5x effigies and the dude also sells 10 of them. If you're worried about running out I say back up your save.

[N1njaSquirrel]

That was an insane story Bjorn.

 

My recent bell bro stories are less interesting, just that I killed Chuck Norris, but Thundercunt killed me shortly afterwards. 

 

I also invaded a fella, only for mace windu to join me too. He had a hood on and a katana which had some hex magic on it, to make it look like a lightsaber. Custom names are the best thing on the PC version.

 

Quick question about company of champions - I devoted about 6 awestones that i've collected last night. I looked at my tablet and there was a 0 next to my name. Is the number my devotion level or number of Awestones?

[Bjorn]

I joined the Dragon Remnant to do some straight up duelling and found that there's a completely different tone among the players of that covenant relative to the other covenants. People kind of generally hang back and give eachother time to prepare for the fight and do the little bow and then even show eachother enough respect to not constantly be running off trying to heal. It's a nice escape from the opportunistic ganking of mostly everything else.

 

The Dragons are my favorite covenant.  Once I'm high enough SM to see their signs, or reach the covenant myself, that's pretty much the only PvP I do.  You will get gankers occasionally, I've been attacked while bowing and even had someone unleash hexes on me as soon as I spawned.  But its rare.  You can roll out of bow animations, so just always  be ready to do that.

 

 

Probably to stress you out. Personally I don't like that choice either. The enemies in there drop ascetics though, and for every ascetic you can get 5x effigies and the dude also sells 10 of them. If you're worried about running out I say back up your save.

 

Once you beat Darklurker, you can freely enter the portals without an Effigy anymore, giving infinite access to Bonfire Ascetics through farming. 

 

That was an insane story Bjorn.

 

My recent bell bro stories are less interesting, just that I killed Chuck Norris, but Thundercunt killed me shortly afterwards. 

 

I also invaded a fella, only for mace windu to join me too. He had a hood on and a katana which had some hex magic on it, to make it look like a lightsaber. Custom names are the best thing on the PC version.

 

Quick question about company of champions - I devoted about 6 awestones that i've collected last night. I looked at my tablet and there was a 0 next to my name. Is the number my devotion level or number of Awestones?

 

I haven't experienced anything like that in the towers before.  Usually if there are two defenders, I melt like butter.  The name of my whip/spear character is Devo.  When I murder people with whips, I switch over to the Channeler's Trident and dance on their dead body.  The tablet shows total number of Awestones given.  It takes some time to sync up to the server to show your current number, just check the next time you play and it should show up.

 

 

I've been learning a ton about spears the last few sessions.  I always looked at their damage numbers and felt they were average to bad.  You really can't judge a spear on paper though.  The Dragonslayer Spear in particular looks terrible, particularly for a boss weapon.  But they have high counter damage (hitting someone during an attack or animation), and some of them seem to have a larger counter window to hit in.  Throw on the Old Leo Ring, and counter damage is boosted even more.  The result is that a lot of your hits end up doing damage that's 50 percent higher or more than you expect.  They are very hard to dodge if someone wants to hit you.  They can roll around, stay back, whatever.  But if they want to do damage to you, they are going to have to go through the spear to do it.  The strong attack of the Dragonslayer Spear is brutal up close.  Both the spear and the lightning strike will hit an enemy.  On PvE enemies, I saw it hit for 800+ a couple of times when I 2-handed it, and it's not fully upgraded yet.  You can also use the binoculars to manually aim the lightning, just like a spell. 

[Dosed]

Ok, so I've started again. Don't ask me why. Just don't alright. I was wondering about Boss Souls.. is it generally worth consuming them for souls or do they offer access to the best weapons in the game? I mean not all of them can do that so what souls are worth holding on to? In NG+ (if I make it that far) is it just like starting a new game but it's harder? As in are the bosses all still there and you can get their souls again? 

 

Interrogation over.

 

I restarted because I killed the Emerald Herald by accident. 

 

I didn't really, but you thought I was an idiot for a second, right? 

[Bjorn]

All that really depends.  I don't consume souls as a general principal now.  I want to keep my Soul Memory as low as possible to stay in certain PvP tiers for as long as possible (all matching is based on total Soul Memory, not your Level).  However, if you aren't doing a lot of PvP or don't care, then munch away.  You can get all the boss souls again in NG+, or you can respawn ANY boss with a Bonfire Ascetic to fight them again and get the soul again. 

 

Boss weapons are all over the board in terms of whether they are useful or not.  Some seem like trash, others are top tier weapons.  Many of them require specific builds to use, because they may have an ultra high stat requirement, or requirements in 4 different stats.  It's hard to know if you'll like one or not until you've bought and used it.  On my first playthrough I bought every single one just to try out once.  One thing to know when looking at them is that they almost universally have trash stats at base level.  But they level up significantly more than regular weapons weapons, so they do become a lot more powerful. 

 

I really can't suggest which souls to keep, it depends so much on what you want to play.  The only one I think is useful for most builds is the Dragonrider Bow.  You can get it crazy early, and it packs a bigger punch than any bow that you are going to see for a long time, even if you never upgrade it.  It hits like a truck with the right stats and upgraded, though it requires a Str/Int build to pull that off. 

 

NG+ is mostly just harder, enemies have more health and do more damage.  But there are other changes!  Some treasure is different, many bosses drop new items and there are new enemies, sometimes in very surprising locations.  The new enemies are the thing most likely to get you killed.  I've Bonfire Asceticed a couple of bonfires and got killed right around the first corner because I wasn't expecting anything to be there.  Good rule of thumb, if you are in an area and there are a lot of bloodstains but no enemies, then one of two things is happening.  Either it is a high level fight club area, or it's an area where new enemies spawn on NG+. 

[Sno]

I've really enjoyed my NG+ playthrough, there's some fun surprises in there. New events, remixed enemy layouts, tons of new drops. I think it ends up feeling like a pretty fresh playthrough. (It kind of tapers off towards the end though, the later areas are largely unchanged from NG, perhaps because they were already pretty brutal to begin with.)

As a general rule, Boss Soul weapons are incredibly situational and often require very specific builds to get much out of. There's a few standouts though, such as the pursuer's ultra greatsword, which is a phenomenal ultra greatsword for just about any strength build.

It's worth looking at a wiki to see what weapons/spells/gear your collected boss souls can be used to construct. (As another general rule, souls that can be used to create spells are pretty much always worth it if you're a spell caster. They're often among the very best spells in the game.)

That said, if a soul doesn't offer anything that looks applicable to your build, go ahead and consume it. (Save them up and do them all at once when you feel like you need a good buff.)

I'm not too worried about soul memory impeding matching, at least not at this point in the game's life. Deep into NG+ with nearly 10 million soul memory, i'm seeing more invasions than i ever did in NG and just loads of pvp and co-op summon signs. There are a lot of people playing.

Also:

 

I restarted because I killed the Emerald Herald by accident. 

 

I didn't really, but you thought I was an idiot for a second, right? 

Just in case this is actually what you did, you can resurrect a few of the critical NPC's in DS2. A grave should appear somewhere in Majula where you can summon them as a phantom to carry out their usual tasks. (Or so i'm told.)

[Gormongous]

Good rule of thumb, if you are in an area and there are a lot of bloodstains but no enemies, then one of two things is happening.  Either it is a high level fight club area, or it's an area where new enemies spawn on NG+. 

 

Unless it's the tower in Majula. I haven't played the game for long, but I love that it's literally covered with bloodstains from people convinced they can drop down to one of the ledges below.

[eot]

I killed a few more bosses.

The Gargoyles took me a while. It's not that hard to avoid their attacks, it's just so hard to find safe attack opportunities, especially when you're focusing on a specific one. For me the key was to kill the damaged gargoyle before the third one had time to spawn, so I could keep it as a 1vs2 most of the time. Also, turns out it's pretty annoying having to 2-hand your weapon every time you want to attack. I imagine you could make this fight quite easy just by using throwing knives or something similar.

 

After I got the Bastille Key I did Lost Sinner as well. Much harder than I expected! With low ADP it's difficult to get a heal in, so you basically have to not get hit and blocking doesn't really work either. The tricky part is that damn thrust attack of hers, I can only dodge that consistently if I'm very close to her. I find thrust attacks hard to dodge in general in this game, maybe because of the tracking. Now I just have The Rotten and Freja left before it's time for Drangleic Castle!

[Sno]

About that Lost Sinner fight: In NG+...

She summons two pyromancer phantoms to help her out, and the AI for the phantoms is really quite evil. They sprint to keep their distance from you and try to position themselves behind the Lost Sinner while they sling fireballs at you. Lucky for me, i found Lost Sinner one of the easiest fights on NG and only marginally more difficult on NG+. The game obviously wants her to be the Artorias of Dark Souls 2, but it didn't really pan out. In addition to a lot of pokes that are easily dodged, if you can get a clear sense of her attack range, it's easy to bait her into attacks that will whiff, giving you plenty of time to estus up. She hits crazy hard if anything actually connects though, especially in NG+.

HEY, HOW ABOUT SOME LORE? Anybody care about that stuff? Isn't lore fun?

 

It's pretty strongly implied that the Lost Sinner is one of the surviving witches of Izalith, she even drops an "old witch soul" in NG+, and never even mind how the bug that crawls into her eye during the fight intro looks an awful lot like the Bed of Chaos' core. Various item descriptions in the game also explain that she was imprisoned for "trying to relight the first flame", a probable reference to the act that destroyed Izalith and gave birth to demons in the world of Dark Souls.

Edit: I'm just going to throw an extra, unrelated comment in here, which is that i think the ring of soul protection is too good. Instead of breaking and disappearing permanently as its DS1 equivalent did, this one in DS2 only costs 3000 souls to fix and can be fixed as many times as you want. That sounds probably like a big cost, but it only is for about the first third of NG, then it quickly becomes a trivial amount of souls when the alternative is losing seventy thousand.

The only real downside is that it's eating up a ring slot you could use for something else, but even there it's... Okay, you can go do your min-maxed build and be all awesome for a while, but you'll eventually die and leave your bloodstain out there with all those souls in it. Then you throw the ring on, because if you die during your corpse run, the ring prevents you from leaving a new bloodstain and allows the original one to persist. This way, it only detracts from your build when you're specifically trying to corpse run.

It could really trivialize the punishing nature of the game, it would even be an essential thing to keep in mind for pvp characters, making it easier to get the most out of your soul memory because you've been losing fewer souls.

If i had been abusing it on my character, my build would be probably hundreds of thousands of souls more developed than it is now, relative to my soul memory. (I guess it's also worth pointing out that consumables are kind of a sunk cost, i cringe thinking of how many souls i've spent on bolts for my crossbow.)

(I guess the compounding issue here is that soul memory is a really shitty system. I mean, it seems to work in a general sense, but that it allows for these edge cases really irks me, perhaps more than it should?)

A much later edit: Huh, apparently Blue Sentinels can be summoned into Bell Keeper fights. Somebody probably tried to invade into the arena and the world host was probably with Way of the Blue. If there was an invader though, he was dead by the time i got summoned to defend the belfry.

[Bjorn]

I found a nuclear combination of melee weapons tonight.  Like when I started with them, most fights ended in less than 10 seconds, and usually 2 hits, maybe 3.  On one hand, it's really neat to come with a combination of weapons that I've never seen anyone else run before, and have them do so well.  I ought to be excited about it, but it's also kind of gross to know that I might have found the next Santier's Spear uber-weapon.  Actually, I destroyed two Spear wielders with it, not even a competition.  The only weakness I can think of is that you can be parried.  I won 17 of 18 matches, and then just started using my whips, but kept my nukes in my back pocket.  If anyone else pulled out a nuke (Avelyn, high power hexes, Santier's, Dark Fog, etc), then I'd switch to my nuke, and usually still win. 

[osmosisch]

Well go on then, out with it man!

I've got the dragonslayer spear at +5, faith and dex at 50 each and it's hitting for a piddly 200 dmg, maybe 300 on counters. This is on the dogs next to McDuff. The strong attack does hit for a bunch more if you manage to shotgun someone in the face with it but overall it's a gigantic disappointment to me. So many dragonbones

Also at SM 10M I'm getting a human phantom from the mirror knight every single time. It was annoying at first but now I'm just trolling them by switching to pyro with toxic mist and acid cloud. Let's see how long they find this fun.

[Bjorn]

Well go on then, out with it man!

 

 

Sorry, was super tired and paranoid about giving away my secret weapon, which is silly.  The combination is the Helix Halberd and any other Halberd you want to use.  Mastodon is obvious candidate, with Black Knight next.  The Helix Halberd is a unique weapon, it has moves in the halberd and spear sets, plus a couple of unique moves.  But power stanced with the Helix in your right hand and the other in your left, you get the fucking Spear moveset.  Which is nuts.  Vice versa (helix left, halberd right), you get the regular halberd moveset.

 

There are several problems with the spear movest and halberds.  One is that the Helix gets a unique attack where the head splits open and a spike shoots out.  If you hit at just the right range, this does ridiculous damage, like easily double damage.  But it only happens with the R2 normally.  It's got a slow wind up animation and can be dodged. Power stanced, the special attack goes off with L1, so there's not windup.  You get the Helix's uber attack with no penalty.  Halberds big downside are that you need to hit with the blade, if you're too close, you hit with the halt and do half damage.  Not if you're using it as a spear.  The blade always hits first. 

 

Halberds also get much higher poise damage, the Helix has 35 and the Mastodon has 40, compared to the 20 of spears.  So you're going to stagger a lot more enemies out of their attacks than with spears.  And the other combinations that can do major damage (double Ultra weapons) aren't as fast as the spear moveset.  So you'll both take a hit, both stagger, but the spears will get the next attack in before the Ultras will. 

 

Dodging power stanced spears is hard.  It takes only the tiniest mistake and you've been jabbed.  Spears depend on counter damage to get great damage, but halberds just dish out a ton of damage no matter what.

 

So the problem is that you get the raw power of halberds with the speed and hard to dodge moveset of spears. This is the same problem as Santier's Spear.  It's a halberd that is better than every single Twinblade in the game, rendering an entire weapon class worthless other than personal preference.   The Helix halberd does the same thing to spears.  If you're interested in power stancing the most powerful spears, your choice is clearly a pair of halberds.  Which is fucked. 

 

Then with this combo you also get access to 3 movesets.  You've got the regular halberd, Helix halberd and spear.  So you can switch between the three to keep your opponent on their toes.  Throw on a whip or two for people who are fishing for parries and you've got a killer combination. 

 

Edit: I'm just going to throw an extra, unrelated comment in here, which is that i think the ring of soul protection is too good. Instead of breaking and disappearing permanently as its DS1 equivalent did, this one in DS2 only costs 3000 souls to fix and can be fixed as many times as you want. That sounds probably like a big cost, but it only is for about the first third of NG, then it quickly becomes a trivial amount of souls when the alternative is losing seventy thousand.

A much later edit: Huh, apparently Blue Sentinels can be summoned into Bell Keeper fights. Somebody probably tried to invade into the arena and the world host was probably with Way of the Blue. If there was an invader though, he was dead by the time i got summoned to defend the belfry.

 

I used the Soul Protection ring during my first playthrough some, and have by and large avoided it ever since, although I do where it once in awhile while dueling when I'm practicing with new weapons so I can save my effigies at the cost of souls.  It is balanced in a way.  3K per break can add up to a lot of you're dying a fair amount.  And that fourth ring slot can be a necessity for some builds.  But I've mostly come around to your way of thinking, that it breaks one of the core elements of a Souls game without having a high enough cost or tradeoff on it. 

 

Was it a summoned Blue, or was it an avenging blue spirit come to invade the world of the guilty (the host)?

[osmosisch]

OK, I gave up on LGK and summoned a helper. That fight is not doable for me solo if there's a dude specced for PvP being summoned in at about 90% of the boss HP left. I did manage to poison and annoy a bunch of the spirits but the LFK would finish me off while I was distracted. Or vice versa. Ugh.

[BadHat]

But they have high counter damage (hitting someone during an attack or animation)

 

Whoa, I had no idea this is what counter damage did. I always assumed it was the damage modifier for attacking someone after a parry. This changes everything.

 

Halfway through my NG+ and enjoying it a lot. The game is just familiar enough now that I can make a plan of action to take on each zone/boss, but with just enough twists thrown in that I have to stay on guard. Something I'm not sure on: do the bosses gain any new attacks in NG+? I nearly had the Pursuer dead in the first encounter where the eagle drops him on the roof, then he busted out an attack I'd never seen before in all 20+ times I'd fought him in NG. He fired off a barrage of hex-looking spells that I wasn't quite able to roll through. Maybe it's just something he does in that encounter and not in his actual fight?

[Bjorn]

Whoa, I had no idea this is what counter damage did. I always assumed it was the damage modifier for attacking someone after a parry. This changes everything.

 

Yep, critical damage (shield break, riposte, backstab) seems to be a seperate hidden modifier.  Something like a dagger will kill you or cripple you on a backstab.  Counter damage is most important for Spears, Lances and Daggers.  Though don't discount the value of the Old Leo Ring if you're using a thrusting damage weapon.  It only applies to counter hits, so you want to focus on catching enemies in an animation.  The high level Lances with the 160 counter rating are deliciously powerful if you catch an enemy with it. 

 

 

 

Whoa, I had no idea this is what counter damage did. I always assumed it was the damage modifier for attacking someone after a parry. This changes everything.

 

Halfway through my NG+ and enjoying it a lot. The game is just familiar enough now that I can make a plan of action to take on each zone/boss, but with just enough twists thrown in that I have to stay on guard. Something I'm not sure on: do the bosses gain any new attacks in NG+? I nearly had the Pursuer dead in the first encounter where the eagle drops him on the roof, then he busted out an attack I'd never seen before in all 20+ times I'd fought him in NG. He fired off a barrage of hex-looking spells that I wasn't quite able to roll through. Maybe it's just something he does in that encounter and not in his actual fight?

 

Did you, or a phantom if you summoned one, get cursed?

Lots of enemies have very rare combos or attacks that seem to be more likely to occur on NG+, in the Company of Champions or if the right condition is met otherwise.

[RubixsQube]

This has been kicked around online, but someone deciphered the Dark Souls II list of banned words. It's real glorious.

 

i like ass
i love ass
i love tit
i love tits

[Sno]

Was it a summoned Blue, or was it an avenging blue spirit come to invade the world of the guilty (the host)?

I initially thought that too, i was confused and ended up dying during that fight, i wasn't sure if this guy was hostile or friendly. Invaders in the bell keeper arenas can be hostile to both sides, but they only get something if the world host dies, right? They usually want to avoid a fight with the bell keepers, but this blue phantom was actively defending the world host. I guess he might have just been screwing around and capitalizing on the confusion.

 

 

And that fourth ring slot can be a necessity for some builds.

 

Like i said though, you don't even need to equip it unless you're specifically corpse running.

 

I'm also going to say that i think dual-stanced avelyn builds are hilarious and ineffectual. The condensed bursts of fire with the huge downtime inbetween means i'm never tight on stamina from dodging, while i can always expect that they are just completely bottomed out. Out of all my Dragon Remnant duels, and excepting a few builds where i'm still not sure what was going on, it was dual-stanced avelyn builds that always tried to pull some bullshit on me, they never wanted a straight up fight because they knew they wouldn't win. Hey, and i never lost to a dual-stanced avelyn. It's a huge threat if you're a caster, not if you're melee.

I've actually found the rare bow-user potentially much more threatening, since their rate of fire forces me to bottom out my stamina when dodging. (Definitely starting to feel the limits of that OKS shield's durability when fighting people with beefy stats and fully upgraded weapons.)

[Bjorn]

Like i said though, you don't even need to equip it unless you're specifically corpse running.

 

I actually didn't realize it worked that way. I had just assumed that if you had a bloodstain out, and you died, you lost it even with the ring on.  That does mean that there isn't the ring downside to it. 

 

 

I've actually found the rare bow-user potentially much more threatening, since their rate of fire forces me to bottom out my stamina when dodging. (Definitely starting to feel the limits of that OKS shield's durability when fighting people with beefy stats and fully upgraded weapons.)

 

Doing PvP with a bow is surprisingly entertaining.  It's usually not been enough alone to win, but it's a fun way to mix things up.

 

Do you have a Greatbow?  It's loads of fun in PvP even when I lose.   The key is patience.  Once you're holding your shot, you can't move but you automatically pivot with the target you are locked onto (and it's a fast pivot).  So you just hold the shot until an opening arises.  A mage will start casting or a melee fighter will try to roll into you, and you just release right as their attacking and blast them.  The shot knocks them to the ground, which isn't necessarily enough time to fully regen your stamina bar, but you get enough back to prime another shot.  It's fun to watch people try and figure out how to handle you, especially once you've already knocked them down once. 

 

For my whip character I got a pair of Spotted Whips (Asceticed the boss again to get a second one), and farmed enough bone to upgrade both.  A single L2 power stance attack has so far automatically procced poison on everyone I've hit it with.  Then I switch to my regular whips and just harass them as their health drains. 

[Winnipeg Fats]

I'm not in front of the computer, but posting here because we live in the future.  Are whips dex-based?

[Bjorn]

Yep, all of them are.  My experience so far:

 

Spotted Whips: Fantastic!  Being able to proc poison in a single strike is crazy useful, even in PvE.

Old Whips: Made of tissue paper, but hit like a falling piano.  Only useful against some bosses and PvP.

Bloodied whips: Best all around whip, but a rare drop.  Less damage than Old Whip, but durability will actually last for awhile.

Whip: Meh

Notched Whip: Terrible? I think.  I may end up Asceticing that bonfire to get another one and see if two of them full upgraded on a 40 Dex character are actually interesting.

[Winnipeg Fats]

I may Ascetic to get a second spotted whip then.  Where does the Old whip come from?  Dual whips also looks BAD ASS, so there's that...

[Dosed]

I know everyone has been just dying to hear about my recent adventures, they're way more exciting than Bjorn's 1 vs 20 high end PVP experiences, and I'm sorry for the radio silence but I was going through a rough patch. I used my Stinky Twig of Yesterday on the statue lady this time through which led me to the Shaded Woods area, and boy does that place suck a load of butts. It's a very, very different area to the rest of the game and those rasta lion men hit like a train filled with buses. I'm also not a massive fan of the cursed pots thing. It's just irritating, not interesting. 

 

Thankfully while I was cleaning my bathroom I was listening to The Crate and Crowbar and they said that the game gets back on track after that area. It's a shame because I really like the aesthetic and atmosphere of the place just not the game experience. 

[BadHat]

Well, I decided to try something interesting with a new character, so I thought I'd try and complete a no bonfire run first time through... with a twist. I'm trying it with the WickfutENB graphics preset, which changes the lighting to be closer to pre-release footage. The most notable change is that dark areas are actually dark, in many cases pitch black without a torch. As if this weren't exciting enough, I decided it'd only be right to start as a deprived with no gift (also disabled the pre-order items because they're lame anyway). I've barely started and it's already pretty tense, but I love how carefully I have to consider my options, and how valuable every item I find feels. Ought to be fun... at least until I have to deal with the trek to Undead Crypt.

 

 

Did you, or a phantom if you summoned one, get cursed?

Lots of enemies have very rare combos or attacks that seem to be more likely to occur on NG+, in the Company of Champions or if the right condition is met otherwise.

 

Don't think so, not that I noticed anyway.

 

This has been kicked around online, but someone deciphered the Dark Souls II list of banned words. It's real glorious.

 

This is the best. It's so specific, but does it even need to be? It's already sensitive enough to censor the "nig" out of every "knight".

[Golden Calf]

Glad to see they got goatse