I’m going to start from scratch tonight. Any cool websites with tips/tricks for this game anyone care to recommend?
Word to the wise : it’s *considerably *easier to spell/miracle/crossbow snipe in this game than DS1.
Equip whatever casty/shooty thing you wish in right hand, equip binoculars in left. Hold left bumper for the zoomed view, aim, fire. No need to exit the binocs and hope like hell that you didn’t move the camera ever so slightly any more, stay in “first person view” and it’ll shoot dead center of the screen.
If you haven’t found the binocs yet they’re somewhere in Majula. The real fight starts here ! Gorgeous view. Try right, then try down, therefore hidden path. 
Kinthalis : there’s always the wiki, but it’s kinda spoilerriffic. This page of it is a good place to start though.
Not only that, but there is a total of 3 of them you can get in one playthrough, IIRC.
And there’s also a “better” version you can find called the Ring of Soul Protection that does the same thing, but ALSO protects against petrification that is repairable for 6000 souls. I believe there’s two of those. So all told, you can die a total of 5 times in a row and never lose souls or humanity, so lnog as you remember to swap out the broken ring for a non-broken one.
Of course, it would then cost you 21,000 souls to repair all of those rings to use again, so you’ll have to decide if that;'s worth it. Typically, I always wear a ring to protect from death, because Effigies are NOT unlimited, and later on, there’s another use for them besides the two you start with (restoring humanity and burning at a bonfire to prevent invasions,) so the less I have to use for the first use means the more I have for the third. It’s spoiler-y, so here you go:
There’s three portals to the Abyss that are hidden, and once you find the third, the man you find there let’s you join a covenant to go into the Abyss. Each time you do it costs 1 effigy. Each abyss portal is a very small area with a few tough phantoms to defeat, and a fire to light. Lighting the fires is how you go up in rank in this covenant, and the last Abyss location has a tough boss, too. Beat that boss to get the final rank in the covenant.
For crossbows, you don’t need to do that. You can aim crossbows like regular bows in DkSII now. You just have to make sure to “two-hand” the crossbow after equipping it by pressing “triangle” (or whatever the uppermost button is on a 360 controller…and I don’t know what key that is if you’re a weirdo using a keyboard + mouse on PC, :p)
After that, you can aim it with the left trigger button like a regular bow.
Also, keep in mind that crossbows have NO stat scaling (opposed to bows which have a combo of STR and DEX scaling.) So they are the BEST weapon to infuse with Raw.
Raw infusing takes away any scaling bonus and adds more base damage. Since there is no scaling to remove, it just results in straight up more damage. Almost every other weapon is better off NOT getting a Raw infusion, because by the time you get to even mid-level (say, 50’s-60s) you almost certainly have at least one stat that’s decently high (Str, Dex, Int, of Fth,) and a weapon that either naturally scales with one of those (like a club for Str, curved sword for Dex,) or is infused with an element that scales (Magic for Int, Lightning for Fth.)
A spoiler I would really recommend reading when you’re getting to the end-game. You should read it around the time you find an item that will open the doors which has previously told you to Show the Symbol of the King. Fair warning; end-game spoilers.
The Ring of the King will open 4-5 certain doors in this game. One of them leads to a very long downwards pathway from the inside of Drangleic Castle, a short distance from the first bonfire in the area. At the end of it, there is a mist door leading to the boss Throne Defender and Throne Watcher. If you do these bosses last, you’ll have to fight the game’s final boss right after and they are tough. For anyone not looking for a very painful, very drawn out fight, I would strongly recommend doing this boss fight as soon as possible.
I feel the whole “end game” stuff is a little odd and not intuitive:
[spoiler]After meeting the Ancient Dragon, you have to go back to the “Giant Trees” in Forest of the Fallen Giants to enter their memories.
I guess you technically only need to enter the LAST memory to get the Giant’s Kinship, which is what triggers the FINAL boss after fighting the Throne Defender and Throne Watcher. But it’s not clear at ALL you have to do that. I had to ask online where to go next.[/spoiler]
I’ve been playing around and grinding rather than really progressing as much as I could. The funny bit is tat what everyone was complaining about - limited souls, needing effigies etc. - is a nonissues for me. The ability to hop into other players and earn souls + humanity in a team has been a really easy win, and let me get up to SL 63 even before finishing Forest of Giants & Tower of Flame.
I’m mostly going for Str/Vit/Fth so I can wear decently heavy equipment and change between lightning bolts and big weapons. I haven’t put a single point into Stamina and might never be able to. One thing I dislike is that I want only my active equipment to count against my weight limit. All readied weapons and tools, however, counts for weight and that sends my encumbrance soaring. Definitely some good options for players who want to split their points widely with the new Mundane equipment.
I liked a lot of the new concepts. I think many players got into this with two annoyingly incompatible ideas: that this would be (1) More Dark Souls just like the first and (2) that it would be really fresh and new. From Soft instead polished the experience of playing, but also designed the new world very differently. I don’t mind that it’s not as depressingly eerie or eerily depressing. This isn’t a dead world like Lordran, rather it’s a sleeping one that can still be saved. The area you explore is probably intended to be a much larger realm (implied at any rate), but the focus of the story is smaller. This isn’t the tale of how you saved or at least preserved a dying world or anything like it. It’s the story of how you might help renew this small corner of the world, and whether or not you care about the people there. People (& undead) went to Lordran to take something away - but others went to Drangleic looking for hope, or a chance to start anew.