Don't go hollow: Dark Souls 2

The Game Room
21

So far most of the bosses are pretty easy to beat by abusing their AI. Basically just press up against their bodies and strafe to the left in circles. Almost nothing they try to throw at you can connect. I had a really tough time with the Pursuer though, that prick.

I’m currently in Lost Bastille fighting the 3 sentinels. I’ve died a couple of times but I think I should be able to take them pretty soon. I may be over leveled (63 I think).

All in all a good game. I think it’s very very similiar to the first one and the fanboys are really splitting hairs when they talk about how radically different it is. If you didn’t like the first you will not like the second so don’t bother.

ETA: So far no one has been able to prove conclusively that ADP has any effect on anything movement/roll related. It’s basically like flushing points down the crapper it appears.

22

Well, we know for sure it has an effect on Estus drink speed (about .5 second difference between min/max) and of course natural poise. You’re right that we haven’t proven that it does anything with rolls.

Edit: According to the official guide, Lost Bastille is SL 55-65.

23

I’ve got the guide too and I’d just like to add that it’s well worth the money and is bookshelf quality just like the guide for the first one. I’m glad they made it look like the first guide so they look nicer together on the shelf. The maps are worth the money alone

24

The maps are nice (I try to go through an area blind the first time, then maybe look at it after beating a boss to see if there’s any good items or secret areas I missed.)

But I’m upset that they seriously reduced the information regarding weapons.

The first one had all weapons with their base stats, AND all their upgrade paths. The one for Dark Souls 2 only gives base stats. It’d be nice to know what weapons scale better normal vs lightning vs fire, etc…

25

The consensus in the SA thread on the game is that while it doesn’t visually change the rolls or speeds them up (that’s equipment load) it does affect the number of invincibility frames on the roll.
There’s a YouTube video of testing the same roll against the same wide swing from what appears to be a boss. Low Agility roll gets hit early in the roll, 80ish agility get clipped as they exit the roll, and 99 Agility rolls through the hit safely.

Fake ETA : ah, found it.

Also I got a big downer today. I thought the Steam store page said it came out March 25th. I’ve been all hopped up since yesterday, like a little kid. Long time since that happened for any game.
Fucken bassards, it’s *April *25th. Goddammit.

26

This game is pretty great. Also kind of long. I’m like 20 hours in and I just defeated my first old one. I’m going a little slow because I’m co-oping so obviously we have to do every area twice. That said, this game is pretty big.

To be fair, we’ve been hopping around a lot. We could have beaten the Bastille a lot earlier than we did, but it looked scary so we avoided it.

The game seems to be ramping difficulty pretty gradually. It’s a lot more of a learning curve than the first game, which brick-walled you with the Taurus Demon pretty much immediately. Obviously everybody has their own personal opinion on which bosses are hard based on build and personal playstyle, but there definitely seems to be a natural progression of difficulty this time, even with levelling up.

I really like hexes, but I’m not sure about some of them. Great Resonant Soul, even at higher dark than lightning does about the same amount as my lightning spear. However, it takes 1k souls to cast and has fewer casts than lightning spear. Not worth it. I’m playing with other hexes to see what works. Dark and Resonant weapon are great spells for a spellsword character, though. I’m not sure how they compare to, say, Crystal Magic Weapon, but the damage increase is good. Especially Resonant Weapon which for 2k souls turns you into a wrecking machine.

27

More Stuff You Should Probably Know Before Jumpin In stuff I picked up from the SA thread (little in the way of spoilers, but best be careful I guess) :

About chests :

Hitting chests with weapons destroys them AND the loot inside. Monsters swinging at them also do, so pull them away from the Incoming Shiny. Not sure how one’s supposed to Mimic Check these days.

On falling from high places :

Was percentage-based in DS1. Not true here - fall from X height, get X straight damage. Try Vitality :slight_smile:

On Covenants :

Sadly, there isn’t a straight equivalent of the Nito covenant in this game, which even though it was janky as hell was probably my fave in DsK1 just on general concept. The new one that sort of works the same way is the one warned about earlier in this thread which makes your gameworld harder, not some poor random shmoe’s.
There are now TWO equivalents of the Forest Cunters, which combined with the fact that being hollow is no defense against invasions any more is probably going to make life hell in those two particular zones. Playing offline through those parts works though.
Sunbros are back, dickwraiths and bluepolice too.

On soul memory :

So this is apparently the mechanic regulating ganking in PvP - on top of your character’s level every single soul you earn is tracked and added up ; with players with large disparities in Soul Memory being excluded from meeting (including in co-op, which is a bit sad). Important : the counter ticks up when you earn the souls, not when you use them. So if you die and lose your stain, whelp.
[/quote]
Speaking of co-op and PvP

If you disconnect from the internet/quit the game while invading someone or getting invaded, you’ll wind up on a shitlist that precludes you from co-op play at all, apparently forever. Also of note : there’s apparently a miracle that heals everything in an area, friend or foe. Trolls be trolling by casting it during boss fights :slight_smile:

About NG+

Apparently From has changed its philosophy from “NG+ is there just to dick around with your uber stuff and try out the final boss gear for a laugh” to a more Diablo-esque “NG is to learn the game, the Real Dark Souls Begins in NG+” as not only do merchants sell more/different/better items in NG+ and ++, but some boss fights are noticeably different and the soul memory/pairing up mechanic is more relaxed. So, kind of like “real” Diablo was about Hell.

Finally, a guide-dang-it thing that’s more of an actual spoiler. Not a HUGE one though, more like knowing about the Drakesword trick in DkS 1 :

There’s a spear weapon in the game that is utter crap at first glance, but if you hit a wall or something with it until it breaks, which takes a long time because it has high durability, the crappy bits fall off and it becomes a decent weapon with a unique moveset and infinite durability

28

How to check for you-know-whats

[spoiler]One hit won’t break a chest. I guess if you have something crazy like a twinblade it might break it, but even a single swipe from my Claymore +7 doesn’t break a chest.

Either way, mimics have slightly different mechanics now. The iron chest ones will eat you the second you open the chest. The wooden ones give you a couple seconds to dodge first so that it’s not quite as big of a deal if you don’t test it.[/spoiler]

You mean vigor, but HP is for chumps :p. Also, the cat ring helps for the couple areas you need to fall.

I can confirm that doing the PvP areas is a complete pain. It’s made up for, slightly, by the fact that you have a grace period after getting invaded. That and the areas are very, very tiny. But when it comes down to it, you can’t take literally two steps in those areas without being invaded.

And forget co-oping there due to that. It’s a shame too because those areas have nice bosses and at least one has a key that helps immensely with the real boss of the real area.

29

Fixed your coding as I thought you might have meant it, Kobal.

30

Yep, thank you !

31

Hmm, just realized something : the name of the/a place the game takes place is is Drangleic. That’s more or less “Grand Ciel” inversed, meaning Large Sky in French.

What *is *it with Japanese game designers and French, anyway ? It pops up fricking everywhere and it never means a damn thing.

32

I’ve been messing around with the early areas using various classes. Starting a fresh, “official” run today as a Deprived. Psyched.

33

So how exactly does the no-respawn mechanic work, anyway ? Is it a zone-wide thing where you go from full zone to empty in one fateful chillaxing by the fire, or is there like a hidden counter per individual spawn and once you’ve killed that guy 20 times he and only he doesn’t come back ?

Could you conceivably find a bonfire, kill a guy, rest, kill the guy, rest etc… and slowly but surely depopulate a zone one spawn at a time ?

34

It’s enemy-by-enemy. Yeah, if you wanted to be interminably bored you could camp the bonfire and clear a zone one enemy at a time, but I can’t imagine how long that would take.

35

Ouch.

Deprived is MUCH harder of a start this time around. But it is the easiest class to tweak to whatever you want, since it’s the only one that starts at SL1, AND its overall low stats.

I finished my first play through last week as a Knight. Still wasn’t thrilled about mixing sword and miracles. My Lightning Spears never did anywher NEAR as much damage as I saw pure Faith/Cleric or even mixed Sorcery/Miracle/Hex casters doing. It seems FromSoft increased the scaling on elemental damage and spells a LOT, but obviously at the cost of base damage, so it’s a LOT less worth it to just “dabble” in spells in Dark Souls 2 than it was in the first one and Demon Souls.

Even Pyromancy is “nerfed.” Because while it still doesn’t have stat requirements like in 1, it’s harder to upgrade your flame (you now need souls AND a rare upgrade material.) In addition, from what I’ve read, all fire damage* scales with Int and Faith, now (both weapons AND spells.)

I’m not sure of the specifics…I think it scales with whatever the greater of the two is. I don’t think it’s the lesser of the two, because I had some pyro spells going, and my Flame Swath averaged ~500 damage on enemies that weren’t resistant to fire with a +10 Pyro Hand, and I had 22 Faith and 3 Int.

*In fact, all elemental damage scales with some stat, now. Fire is some mix of Int and/or Faith, Magic is Int (like in Dark Souls I,) Lightning is Faith (so it is a mix of Dark Souls I Divine and Lightning damages,) and Dark is like Fire, some mix of Faith and Int scaling.

And I think Bleed status effect scales with Dex, and I’m not sure if Poison scales with anything.

36

Copy-pasting from the Something Awful thread, as it’s informative (and I kinda don’t want to go and dig it up when the game comes out on PC :o ) :

[QUOTE=A goon]
I see a lot of misconceptions about stats and scaling, thought I would take a stab at it:

Hexes and Dark Damage - Scales on the LOWER of INT or FTH. 6 INT / 30 FTH has the same scaling as 6 INT / 6 FTH.
Pyro and Fire Damage - Scales on the AVERAGE of INT and FTH. 6 INT / 30 FTH has the same scaling as 18 INT / 18 FTH.

For both Hexes/Dark and Pyro/Fire Soft Cap on damage scaling is at 30. The increase gets cut by 75% after 30 so unless you need INT or FTH for other purposes it’s not worth it. Scaling is a much smaller part of the damage with Pyromancies so INT/FTH are not as important. It also means high FTH and INT players can benefit from pyromancy with less investment than hexes.
EVERYTHING ELSE (STR, DEX/Poison/Bleed, INT/Magic, FTH/Lighting)
Attack value is 57 at 10 STR, DEX, INT, or FTH. It goes up 1.3 pts per point from 10-20, 2.2 from 21-30, 3.8 from 31-40, 1.5 from 41-50, ~0.7 from 51-0.

The important thing to see here is that each point from 31-40 raises scaling at more than twice the rate of 10-30. The actual damage increase is proportional to this. Your attack value will be multiplied by a scaling factor based on the scaling E-S. Scaling is a range within each letter, so a fire infusion will still lower your other scalings even if the letters do not change. DEX scales at 60-65% of STR. While an A scaled weapon on STR might add 1.2x attack value, for DEX it will only add .7-.8. This means on weapons with mixed scaling you should raise STR to 40 first.

Fire, Dark, Magic, Lightning all offer the same bonus damage for the same scaling. I don’t know if Bleed/Poison suffer from the reduced DEX scaling, but both employ radically different mechanics than the other attack types. They can be effective with good DEX, but require certain weapons/builds/strategies. Unless you’re willing to research or to trust someone’s advice it’s best to stick with a more straight-up infusion.
What you should take away from this:
(1) For Hexes/Dark, get 30 INT and 30 FTH ASAP. For Pyro/Fire, who cares? For everything else, your priority should be to get SOMETHING to 40, I don’t care what, probably STR.
(2) There are few reasons to take a stat over 40 - and the only reason to take a stat over 50 is so you can power stance something ridiculous and something else ridiculous.

The final note, scaling does not outpace elemental infusions as in DS1. 40 FTH will do just fine with minimum STR for a weapon and lightning infuse, even better with a weapon buff. Similarly, Hex/Sorcery players should use Dark/Magic weapons. Maybe have a regular, Raw, or Fire weapon in your pack for the rare resistant critter.
[/QUOTE]

37

For those not aware, there is a 1.03 patch coming soon.

Here is a link from Reddit that translates the original Japanese link.
And for those that can read Japanese, here’s the original FromSoft link.

Highlights include:
[ul]
[li]Moonlight Greatsword can no longer be enchanted and buffed. Attack animation has been slowed / adjusted.[/li][li]Reduced damage from the Ring of Thorns and Ring of the Old Sun.[/li][li]Increased casting time and decreased damage for Wrath of Gods.[/li][li]Increased defense for Lucatiel, Benhart, and Manscorpion Tark.[/li][/ul]

I found another Reddit Post that lists bug-fixes and some “back-end”/functionality changes:
[ul]
[li]Successful Online coop with white / small sigh stone will now revive you back to human.[/li][li]Failing to create multiplayer session no longer disables use of online items such as white soap stone.[/li][li]Response time of start menu / bonfire menu has been improved.[/li][li]Summoned players no longer fall under the ground at Earthen Peak.[/li][/ul]

I’m excited about ALL of the functionality/bug fixes (especially the always going human after a co-op and improving the menu lag on the PS3.)

The changes in the various damage/spell casts/etc… I’m about 50/50 on. Yeah, it sucks that things like Chaos Storm take longer to cast and might do too much damage, but there’s a LTO of things in Dark Souls 2 that are much more powerful than their Dark Souls I equivalent, so overall I tink it’s good.

ESPECIALLY increasing those damned NPC defenses. Since there’s achievements/trophies for doing NPC quests, which REQUIRE summoning them for X battles and having them live, it’s sorely needed.

Now, of only they can improve the NPC path-finding. Simple enemies can traverse three walkways and two ladders to get me from across a map, but the NPC Phantoms have a hard time if I go down a ladder and run to a fog door too quickly

38

Here’s a translation by someone who can read Japanese and didn’t use Google Translate:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/693331-dark-souls-ii/68980039

39

It’s finally here on the [del]master race gaming platform[/del]PC ! 7 minutes to launch, strap in !

40

Have a good time, PC gamers.

I finished it last week; about a third of the way through my second play through, but it’s not holding my interest quite as much the second time around. Not sure why - I think I got through about six runs of DS1 before I got a little bored.