is kicking my ass! I have died quite a few times just falling into lava, and the other times he nails me when I'm dodging (a few times it looked like I was clear but still registered as a hit). I really don't know why I'm struggling with this fight! Not even the
The Sinner or Smelter Demon
gave me this much trouble....granted I summoned Lucatiel to be a diversion both times.
Why does it seem harder and unresponsive to initiate the sprinting animation while in combat? Is it related to agility? Because I have 30 adaptability even -_-
Really liking Dark Souls 2, but there are so many issues that Dark Souls 1 didn't have. Really odd normal enemy difficulties, some of the enemies that drop a lot of souls are completely brain dead while the smaller grunts are usually more dangerous. Most of the boss fights in Dark Souls 1 took place in arenas. There have been a lot of bosses in Dark Souls 2 where random damage/death pits exist, those pits are usually more dangerous than the boss itself.
Almost no areas in Dark Souls 1 felt lazily put together, the cohesion and thought behind the environment and design of each area is what made that game incredibly unique. Some areas in Dark Souls 2 feel like they were added in for shits and giggles, where enemies are complete jokes and there's a gimmick in the environment that slows down traversal.
Dark Souls 2 is a great game, easily one of the best action RPG's last gen, but it feels really rushed. Dark Souls 2 is a lot of design ideas thrown together with some thought put behind those design decisions. Dark Souls 1 amounted to a few main design decisions being crafted and polished to the extreme.
Does anyone know how or where I could get a box and the game cover for the game? I got the Black Armor edition, but I hate having to use the steelbook (it came to me dented and had a hinge broken). I liked the way they did the Dark Souls 1 CE, where the tinbox had an actual game case in it.
I think the regular box art looks pretty rad, so yeah.
Almost no areas in Dark Souls 1 felt lazily put together, the cohesion and thought behind the environment and design of each area is what made that game incredibly unique. Some areas in Dark Souls 2 feel like they were added in for shits and giggles, where enemies are complete jokes and there's a gimmick in the environment that slows down traversal.
Dark Souls 2 is a great game, easily one of the best action RPG's last gen, but it feels really rushed. Dark Souls 2 is a lot of design ideas thrown together with some thought put behind those design decisions. Dark Souls 1 amounted to a few main design decisions being crafted and polished to the extreme.
Weird. Cause you can flip "Dark Souls 1" and "Dark Souls 2" and that's how I'd think about Dark Souls 1. The latter half of Dark Souls 1 (post Lord Vessel levels) are just blegh. I've never enjoyed going through them, where as each area in Dark Souls 2 is interesting in some way.
I don't understand how having a "gimmick" in a level is bad level design. It makes level traversal refreshing each time. I don't want the game to just be a slog of combat. I want to engage with the levels as much as enemies themselves. (Edit: As long as the gimmick is well done, which I felt most of the ones in Dark Souls 2 were very well done vs. Izalith enemy clusterfuck and Tomb of the Giants frustration-hell).
On a similar note, I really do hope Dark Souls 3 and so on stop relying so much on humanoid bipedal enemies all the time. It's just becoming more and more "samey" and less interesting the more. The enemy types just blend together and are slowly become just palette swaps at some point. And you don't see them make cool spins on bipedal enemies enough to warrant using them constantly. There is a really really cool enemy type in U
ndead
C
rypt
that was only used once in the whole game:
the big knights that dual wielded tower shields.
It slowly just makes the game less and less refreshing to play when all you do for most of these enemy types is circle strafe and win.
Weird. Cause you can flip "Dark Souls 1" and "Dark Souls 2" and that's how I'd think about Dark Souls 1. The latter half of Dark Souls 1 (post Lord Vessel levels) are just blegh. I've never enjoyed going through them, where as each area in Dark Souls 2 is interesting in some way.
The post Lord Vessel criticisms are the exact way I felt about DS2 post-Drangleic Castle. It wasn't the difficulty as by that time I mostly breezed through the areas except one or two bosses, but there was something about the areas after the Castle that just didn't do it for in terms of level design even if one or two were pretty. Maybe I was just burnt out on the game in general, but after starting a new build I'm enjoying the early part of the game again. Just like I did with DS1 - starting new builds and getting bored post-Anor Londo.
In terms of design and atmosphere I think I liked Undead Crypt the best of the later areas, the look of it felt very Demon's Souls, very muted colours, almost no colour just a very dark steel grey, almost black palette, it wasn't that great of an area to play through, but the atmosphere was very DeS.
Weird. Cause you can flip "Dark Souls 1" and "Dark Souls 2" and that's how I'd think about Dark Souls 1. The latter half of Dark Souls 1 (post Lord Vessel levels) are just blegh. I've never enjoyed going through them, where as each area in Dark Souls 2 is interesting in some way.
I don't understand how having a "gimmick" in a level is bad level design. It makes level traversal refreshing each time. I don't want the game to just be a slog of combat. I want to engage with the levels as much as enemies themselves. (Edit: As long as the gimmick is well done, which I felt most of the ones in Dark Souls 2 were very well done vs. Izalith enemy clusterfuck and Tomb of the Giants frustration-hell).
On a similar note, I really do hope Dark Souls 3 and so on stop relying so much on humanoid bipedal enemies all the time. It's just becoming more and more "samey" and less interesting the more. The enemy types just blend together and are slowly become just palette swaps at some point. And you don't see them make cool spins on bipedal enemies enough to warrant using them constantly. There is a really really cool enemy type in U
ndead
C
rypt
that was only used once in the whole game:
the big knights that dual wielded tower shields.
It slowly just makes the game less and less refreshing to play when all you do for most of these enemy types is circle strafe and win.
A gimmick that makes traversal thrilling, exciting, or tense every time is a great gimmick. That hasn't been the case for Dark Souls 2 personally. The shaded woods? Awesome, love it. Black Gulf poison statues? Annoying, not implemented well. There's a metric shit ton of venom spit statues that you have to sprint past, sometimes you get pelted, most of the time you don't.
There's a lot of hit and miss going on, whereas Dark Souls 1 had a lot less misses.
A gimmick that makes traversal thrilling, exciting, or tense every time is a great gimmick. That hasn't been the case for Dark Souls 2 personally. The shaded woods? Awesome, love it. Black Gulf poison statues? Annoying, not implemented well. There's a metric shit ton of venom spit statues that you have to sprint past, sometimes you get pelted, most of the time you don't.
There's a lot of hit and miss going on, whereas Dark Souls 1 had a lot less misses.
Eeeh, I see your point, but even still, I think the Black Gulch stuff is the only "annoying" gimmick that I could think of when I remember each zone in the game (and personally didn't find it too annoying or anything considering how small the area is itself).
A gimmick that makes traversal thrilling, exciting, or tense every time is a great gimmick. That hasn't been the case for Dark Souls 2 personally. The shaded woods? Awesome, love it. Black Gulf poison statues? Annoying, not implemented well. There's a metric shit ton of venom spit statues that you have to sprint past, sometimes you get pelted, most of the time you don't.
There's a lot of hit and miss going on, whereas Dark Souls 1 had a lot less misses.
Disagree with a whole less misses. Dark Souls 1 misses were concentrated in the last parts of the game in one area compared to 2 so it's feels like more. Nothing about the trex butt area is good.
Eeeh, I see your point, but even still, I think the Black Gulch stuff is the only "annoying" gimmick that I could think of when I remember each zone in the game (and personally didn't find it too annoying or anything considering how small the area is itself).
The Gutter and Black Gulch are just awful, cheap, lazy, annoying levels. They're not even difficult, just bullshit. Almost made me quit the game after 40+ hours. Killed the Rotten on my first try (praise the sun) and I'm never going back there.
Disagree with a whole less misses. Dark Souls 1 misses were concentrated in the last parts of the game in one area compared to 2 so it's feels like more. Nothing about the trex butt area is good.
Dark Souls 1 in hindsight feels like From made the game bigger than anticipated and just plain ran out of resources at the end.
Dark Souls 2 feels like they had a much clearer idea of what they were laying out, with relatively few poor ideas evenly spaced through the game. (The thing they overestimated this time was their technical ability.)
: Stay in his face, keep your shield up (or roll), and circle to the left. back off when he jumps to darkslam. Not sure what else there would be to it really, he's pretty easy.
The terrible triplets: take some friends with you. Fight the first one on the platform, do not jump down. After he's dead, one or two may jump up to tangle. As long as it's just one, try to work on him and don't jump down. As soon as two jump up, get out of there, bait their attacks in the larger arena, and look for openings. Lightning works well.
Fight the first one by himself, than when it comes to fighting the other two the best advice is to keep them in your site all the time and be patient. Don't attack till they both present openings.
Okay, I'm going through the game as a covenant of champions member now and ranking up in that covenant might just take ages. -.- Awestones are so rare! I got one killing all the Old Knights in Heide's Tower of Flame to extinction and 3 more from invading NPC phantoms which seem to give you one 100%.
I also don't know how the points system in that covenant works at all. I cleared most areas up to the main bosses, killed the Lost Sinner and have 1 point! I feel like it will take at least like 5 playthroughs to rank up to 3 since nothing but npc black phantoms give you a sure awestone and the "normal" enemies that have a chance of dropping one do so very very rarely.
If you have 6 STR, buy a Mace from the blacksmith in Majula, two hand it, and go to town. 4 attacks in a row stagger the sentinels, which is doable after their twohanded overhead and twohanded horizontal swipe. If you have 18 STR and want to make that fight a complete joke, buy two Maces, dualwield powerstance them. The L2 attack with powerstance maces will stagger them in one hit. If you time it right, you can just keep doing this over and over until they are dead.
Hey i found a cool method for defeating the ancient dragon, gonna test it later. Comes from a wiki so maybe take it with a grain of salt
Big Toe Method
When the battle begins run to the back of the ancient dragon and stand in between the big big toes (talons?) of one of his back legs. If you are standing in in the right spot, he will only ever use the stomp attack. As soon as he begins to telegraph the stomp attack, immediately run over to the big toes of his other back leg. rinse and repeat until he falls.
Side note: I just beat him using this method and the only time he used a move that wasn't a stomp attack was when he used Breath of Fire after I just entered the room.
Plus the attack you do out of rolling is pretty awesome.
On the subject of PVP: I'm overall finding it frustrating that the longer weapons seem to have more of an advantage in pvp than they did in Dark Souls 1. There are very few medium-short weapons you can actually get away with now. Find myself doing better with my Drangleic greatsword than any of my shorter weapons. I do decent with the falchion though.
Does the scaling on the Murakumo or Arced Sword ever get better than C/A? I ended up going with the Mirrah Greatsword over either of the curved greatswords because of that.
So what kind of bonus damage does it get with, say, 40 dex?
Is it just me or is the scaling system all kinds of confusing? It seems like some weapons with even the same scaling rating get different levels of bonuses to their damage. Does each grade represent a different percentage increase times the scaled stat value based on the weapon's base damage? How does it work?
In character creation you could flip between genders as you wish while making your character and keep settings, so I think they designed the character creator for it to be a toggle rather than a separate set entirely.
So what kind of bonus damage does it get with, say, 40 dex?
Is it just me or is the scaling system all kinds of confusing? It seems like some weapons with even the same scaling rating get different levels of bonuses to their damage. Does each grade represent a different percentage increase times the scaled stat value based on the weapon's base damage? How does it work?
There are differences within each letter. I don't recall the exact limits (they should be on a wiki), but say that for example (made up numbers) a B scaling might have between 35% extra damage and 55% extra damage from your stats. One weapon with B scaling can thus give you 36% extra damage from that stat while another with B rating might give 49% extra damage from the stat. Just made up numbers for the example.
There are differences within each letter. I don't recall the exact limits (they should be on a wiki), but say that for example (made up numbers) a B scaling might have between 35% extra damage and 55% extra damage from your stats. One weapon with B scaling can thus give you 36% extra damage from that stat while another with B rating might give 49% extra damage from the stat. Just made up numbers for the example.
Wish there were some consistency in the system. Saying something has "S" scaling has absolutely no meaning as that "S" may end up being less of a damage bonus than another weapon's "B," for example.
I feel like it will take at least like 5 playthroughs to rank up to 3 since nothing but npc black phantoms give you a sure awestone and the "normal" enemies that have a chance of dropping one do so very very rarely.
