skulblaka

Twin Pursuers… That was a fight that I did once, just to prove that I could, and I think I completely skipped past it every time after that. I have never found myself in dire enough need of an extra 15 AR to put myself through that again, lmao. It’s amazing the difficulty spike you get with two Pursuers versus one. Solo, they’re some of the easiest proper boss fights in the game. Duo, they’ll slap your shit silly.

scripted invader in Tseldora

Oh, I know you can dual wield them, I didn’t realize you could powerstance them. There is a difference. You can dual wield two of anything, but if you want to stance them, there are some conditions. Wield two of the same class of weapons and have 1.5x the required stats, and hold down your 2H swap button. You’ll get a unique paired moveset.

Again, it totally makes sense that you would be able to do this with crossbows, I just never thought to try. You can’t do it with bows or magic staves, so it just never crossed my mind that it could be a possibility.

I’m not a huge fan of katanas

Very fair and valid. The game has two dozen weapon types to choose from for just such a reason.

I much prefer wide horizontal swings combined with either a thrust or a top-down crush as a strong attack.

I once again recommend that you check into the Crypt Blacksword, if that’s what you like. I know you’re not big on two-handing your weapons this run, so maybe next time. But CBS’ two hand moveset is exactly that, and one hand is also quite good for an Ultra weapon. It stays one of my top 5 pieces of gear in the game, I love it dearly.

That’s a fair point I guess about Vancian magic. I’m still not a fan, but I suppose I understand the reasoning behind it a little better. Because I am the kind of wizard that will find the most efficient mana-per-damage spell in my arsenal and sling that almost exclusively. Elden Ring got a whole lot of Carian Slicer and Glintstone Arc out of me.

Avelyn

Avelyn is a banger, that one used to be a monster in PvP. I kind of forgot it existed though lmao. Don’t think I’ve ever used it myself, even once. But for someone who wants to off-main a crossbow, it’s probably the best one you’re going to get your hands on. There’s an argument to be made for the Sanctum Crossbow I think, that one was my go-to, but it loses out on raw damage per trigger pull and you don’t get it until about halfway through Shulva which if you don’t do that DLC first may as well be postgame.

After poking the wiki about this, I also learned today for the first time ever that you can dual wield powerstance a pair of crossbows. I guess it makes sense that you can, I just never thought to try. John Wick akimbo build incoming.

His katana is funny but I’m not a fan

Aw, lame, that’s the exact reason I like Darkdrift lol. It’s a bootleg Hidden Weapon that you don’t have to cast all the time, or do a no-death-no-bonfire run for the illusory rings. It’s not really useful, that effect does nothing in PvE and in PvP your opponent can still see that you’re swinging Darkdrift if they’re paying attention, it’s not like Hidden Weapon where you could be swinging anything with any amount of range under that spell. But it’s cool as hell though. Darkdrift is mediocre as katanas go in DS2 but a mediocre katana is still head and shoulders above most other weapons. It’s also possible to get a matched pair of them in the same NG+ cycle by abusing a bug, so long as you don’t mind having to murder Agdayne once your business is complete with him. Suppose that doesn’t help you much on this build, but maybe next time? Dub katanas is an easy dex build win.

The ore seller finally got them chunks!

I believe she upgrades one more time to unlimited chunks after you beat Watcher and Defender. It’s worth hitting them as early as possible for that reason. You’ll still have to go hunt down elemental stones and titanite slabs though, stay stingy with those.

… Matter of fact, now that I think about it, now that you have the King’s Ring in your pocket I think you can go fight them right now and just get that out of the way. You’ll need the Ashen Mist Heart and etc. to actually complete the game but I don’t think that comes into play until after Nashandra.

I completely forgor that special equipment can only be upgraded to +5 so I spent most of my twinkling titanite maxing out the robe and kilt haha.

And frequently end up with as good or better stats than a whole +10 regular item. Special items scale a ton per upgrade. A +1 special weapon will often carry me just as far as a +3 or +4 regular weapon. This extends to armor too. Don’t be afraid to invest in them, they’re “special” for reasons. Twinkling Titanite is also relatively infinite so long as you don’t mind farming for it, so it’s not like you’ll run out. If you don’t plan on going into NG+, ascetic the Dragon Aerie a few times when you get there and just sprint through it destroying all the crystal lizards and ignoring everything else, you’ll leave with a few dozen twinklies and elemental stones.

If you do plan on going into NG+, uh, don’t do that. Ask me how I know. 😅

Wouldn’t matter if they’re never in there anyway

Hah, return to monke mana might be my favorite change Fromsoft made for DS3. I was very glad to see it carry forward into Elden Ring. I have a whole rant and a half about Vancian magic, I never liked it, I don’t like it in D&D and I don’t like that they brought it to Dark Souls. I am a wizard, and I can cast exactly three fireballs. I’m not out of magical power after that, I’ve still got lightning bolts and magic missiles that I can sling at you, but I’ve completely forgotten how to cast the fireball I just cast 18 seconds ago. Gonna need a lil nap to address that.

Mana bar just makes more sense to me. I stop casting fireballs because I’ve exhausted my innate supply of magical power, not because “i forgor 💀”

job hunting

Ughhhhhhh. Yeah, been there. Best of luck to you my friend. Imagine a big “Unemployment Defeated” banner coming up when you’re finished, that’s from me.

Durability technically exists in every main line Souls game as well as Bloodborne, it’s just mostly a non-issue (until you forget about it entirely and your main weapon breaks mid boss fight). I think it mostly just serves as an annoyance in Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne, because the game never really goes out of its way to tell you that you need to repair your weapon, and in DS1 you have to go out of your way to buy a whole smithbox about it or go visit a smith in person.

2 solves this by making your gear repair at bonfires, which was a GREAT change and I was a big fan of it. Many people were not. It also didn’t help that durability was bugged for a while to be even worse than it was intended to be. In response to that backlash DS3 technically shares the same mechanic, but durability was buffed to such an extent that I don’t think I’ve ever actually been in danger of breaking any of my gear, unless being hit by acid attacks, so in practice they just removed durability but in truth it’s still there hiding in the background.

In Bloodborne they went back to having to repair your weapon at the smith station in the Hunter’s Dream and the decision baffles me, but you also only ever have to do it like once every 7 hours so it was whatever.

How’s the Crypt been treating you? Did you light the torches?

Nice!!

I never liked the estoc much, myself. I’m not sure why, really, I just never used it over other thrusting swords I guess. I liked the rapier for its parry and mostly stuck to that one when I wanted to go fencing.

Estoc is good though! Nice and fast, and long. Speaking of,

Washing Pole is crazy

Lmao, no kidding. “I am the boss fight now” is a great way of describing it, actually, lol. Watch that durability though. Thing snaps like a twig at the slightest provocation, DS2 is really the only souls game that I find myself actively worrying about my equipment durability sometimes. Keep those repair powders on deck.

Funny story, actually, durability loss used to be WAY WAY WORSE and got patched down. Something to do with how the game calculated durability combined with now running at 60FPS meant that you could break certain weapons literally on a single hit. I think it was because the weapon spent a lot of time inside the enemy model and subtracted durability for every frame it was intersecting. It was REAL bad.

Re: Twinblades, they are definitely 2H weapons. You can swing them one handed but generally you shouldn’t, I wouldn’t advise them unless you’re ready and willing to put both hands on it regularly.

I like the rust swords, I don’t think they’re the best in their respective weapon types but I like wearing them as a paired set, they’re neat.

Shield crossbow I think is just bad, unfortunately, lol.

Nice job on Amana! I don’t hate it as much as I think most of the playerbase does because I’ve learned to game it pretty effectively by now, and I think it’s really pretty. It’s rough going in unfamiliar with it though, and I still usually have some trouble with the big arena near the end with all the red phantoms and snipers. This place also got nerfed in difficulty in a patch, lol.

Crypt is not my favorite area in the game but the boss fight there might be. Good luck! And remember to come back and see Agdayne after you’re finished here to buy a cool sword.

So this fine is being paid to… The French government?

Look, I’m all for trying to punish the corporation for bad practices, but that money should be distributed to the people impacted by those practices, i.e. Joycon owners. Not disappear into the pockets of a regulatory board who had largely nothing to do with this situation and just sees an easy opportunity to profit.

My favorite PvP troll build of all time packed Blue Flame and as many casts of CSS as I could scrounge. Blue Flame is A) a sword, so you don’t expect it to be able to cast spells on its heavy unless you’re very familiar with the game, and B) casts just a hair slower than most staves do so it would fairly reliably throw off people’s roll timing once they did see the CSS incoming. That might have been my most successful blood arena build I ever made. I miss DS2 PvP quite a lot, I think it might have been the best in the series, but I might also be blinded by the rose tinted glasses. I was very active in the DS2 reddit for a couple years after release and again after Scholar came out. It was a good time.

Fair points on the rapiers’ poise damage, personally I keep the Stone Ring equipped pretty much from the cradle to the grave so that’s never bothered me all that much. If your build is otherwise ring dependent though I can see that being a problem. They definitely aren’t group attack weapons either, you need to bait and funnel to be effective with them. I’d argue that DS2 is heavy on the bait and funnel strategy anyway regardless of what you’re wielding, though. Drangleic loves a good gank.

That reminded me that I had a specific plan for the very early game in DS2: specific way to get through the Giants Forest and then I always went to the Tower with McDuff’s hammer.

Through Majula, into the Forest. Pick up the fire sword. Run Forest to Last Giant. Kill him. Parry Purse User to death. Dip into Bastille to grab the chest items, optionally open McDuff. Back to Majula, go to Heide’s. Farm Heide’s for a couple thousand souls and then kill Dragonrider. Skip Ornstein for now, back to Bastille. Wake up McDuff, grab his hammer. 2H the hammer and apply magic grease to kill the Ruin Sentinels. Pick up the target shield on your way out. Now the run begins.

I bet I did that exact set of steps probably a dozen times, lol.

Hm, I’ve never considered their stuff. By the time I’m fighting them by build is so well developed that I turn ignorant to the new options.

Ooh, if this has been your attitude, you’re in for a treat for the DLC areas. Have you been to them before? You kind of give the impression that you haven’t. I know the first time I went to them I walked out with a half dozen new pieces of gear I wanted to upgrade immediately, from each of the three places. Fromsoft always cooks up something special in the DLCs, they’re commonly considered the best areas of their respective games and always have the coolest gear. But, they’re also almost always end game areas, so you don’t get a ton of time to enjoy your new stuff, other than just taking it with you into the next DLC area or into NG+.

I have a fire longsword

Yeah that fire sword is the sword I use on probably every single character I’ve ever played at least through the end of Heide’s Tower, lol. It’s very valuable for the early game and it really never falls off if you keep its upgrade level up to date. It’s boring, but very effective.

This character is a realization of my long-dreamed build of a warrior with a melee weapon (a sword, most probably) in one hand and a crossbow in another, and I’m kinda held back by this vision. As such, I avoid going two-handed or weapon-in-each-hand stances.

Have you considered a rapier?

Regular old rapier is my go-to weapon for casters, for a couple of reasons. First of all, they look swaggy as hell. Second of all, rapier heavy attack is a parry, which means you have a defensive option in your hands even when you’ve got both hands full of sword and staff (or in this case, sword and gun crossbow). That parry is probably one of the most dangerous and ballsiest moves in the whole game, but it also comes loaded with the biggest dopamine dump in the whole game when you actually pull one off.

Rapiers also universally have high critical modifiers, and also additionally benefit from the Old Leo Ring. I think your crossbow should also benefit from the Leo as crossbow shots deal piercing damage.

When I think of “sword-and-gun stance” the first sword that comes to mind is the katana, and the second that comes to mind is the rapier. At least personally.

Several rapiers have something cooler than the parry as their heavy attacks, but I find them a bit lacking, and I usually end up going for the regular non-specialized Rapier that you can buy right in Majula. Spider’s Silk is also a good one though.

I’m glad they didn’t make a good fight for the finale so I can avoid waiting through the unskippable credits /hj

Tell me about it 🙄 I think you can technically defeat Nashandra and then just walk out without taking the Throne, but I don’t remember the specifics. I usually leave her fight for last so I don’t have to be concerned about it, and also so that I can come obliterate her body with my maximum power level.

Besides, Throne Watcher/Defender gear is great, their swords and shields are peak. Defender Shield almost always ends up being my end game shield in sword and board builds. Watcher’s sword is also very cool and powerful.

I recall only moonlight sword and chaos katana as the special drops. I think there’s also crystal spear? I’ll need to do it again to see what can be crafted. Would be nice if Ornifex picked a better place for their workshop

Moonlight Greatsword, Chaos Blade, Crypt Blacksword, and Dragonslayer Greatbow. They also can get you some spells instead, which aren’t as useful here - specifically, Crystal Soul Spear (excellent, off-build), Flame Weapon (also excellent, might be considered), Numbness and Blinding Bolt (both useless for you right now).

Remember that Straid also will let you access some boss soul items that Ornifex doesn’t, and vice versa.

Out of those options, MLGS is good but probably not fit for your build. Crypt Blacksword is damn good but also doesn’t fit the build quite perfectly, however it’s just about the only colossal weapon that I actually prefer to use one handed instead of 2H. CBS was my go-to PvP weapon back in the day. That boy hits like an isekai truck.

Honestly I just consider everything prior to the DLC areas to be almost pre-game. Whatever +10 you like best is fine for running through the base game, all the really really cool stuff is either a boss weapon or a DLC area item.

You could also just try other weapon types. A quality build (STR/DEX focus) has a wide variety of things they can use, most of them only marginally less optimally than a dedicated STR or DEX build, and many of them MORE optimally due to having more scaling stats. Regular old straight swords are considered one of the strongest weapon classes in the game and are great for this. Fist weapons and colossal swords are personal favorites of mine. If you’re getting bored with the claymore I pretty highly recommend upgrading a pair of caestus or claws and just going buck wild with them. Caestus lean toward STR and claws lean toward DEX if you have more of one than the other.

But yeah, base game DS2 has plenty of cool stuff, but they kept back all the real prime stuff for the DLCs. Playing Scholar you will have access to these. At the time in base game that Chloanne starts selling infinites of most of the upgrade stones, you’ll still have more than a third of the game left to go, so don’t worry too much about that. Go ahead and burn through the game until you defeat the Watcher/Defender, bone out of Nashandra’s fight and go enjoy some of the best content and armaments in the game before you come back to dunk her back into the Abyss.

As far as things you can access right now, though, you have some options. Many of the boss weapons are very cool, if you have a decent stock of Dragon Bones. In no particular order, here’s some things I might recommend based on what I’m reading here.

• Smelter Sword fucks, just in general, and you can get a second one later for maximum swagger. STR based, and heavy. You can use the single Smelter sword just fine as a quality build but you’re going to need a lot of stats to dual wield them.
• Arced Sword/Curved Greatsword is largely outclassed by the Warped Sword, which you get from the same Flexile Sentry soul. Warped Sword is largely Dex focused but is just actually the best curved sword in the game IMO, unless you’re doing something silly with Eleum Loyce or the Red Rust swords. Skip Arced though, just use the Murakumo. Note that curved swords replace your kick with a silly backflip-swipe that is useless, I frequently keep a dagger in my second weapon slot for criticals anyway but it’s also useful to switch to it to kick.
• Many katanas are very strong and easy to use. Jokes about Fromsoft’s subtle propaganda about glorious Nippon steel have been in ready supply for most of the Souls series’ lifetime. DS2 is no exception. Darkdrift is my favorite and is available from Agdayne, but you can really grab almost any of them and have a fine time. Don’t invest in the Chaos Blade, it’s really only for PvP. Do invest in the Washing Pole, it’s ludicrously long and repair powders are easy to get a million of.
• Try a twinblade! Specifically, try the Red Iron or Stone Twinblade. I don’t think they’re good dueling weapons in PvP but I love them in PvE. Proc bleed like nobody’s business. Both of these ones listed scale better off of STR, but basically all the others are DEX. If you aren’t very high DEX though I’d recommend the Stone, it’s my favorite of the bunch.
• If you’re really just jonesing for something to spending Twinkling on specifically, the Black Knight weapons are decent targets, as well as the Dragonslayer Crescent Axe is one that I often enjoy.
• Also, don’t forget to upgrade your armor, as well. Many of the best armor sets require a bunch of Twinklies to upgrade. You’ll want those upgrades before hitting Shulva/Brume/Eleum Loyce.

Finally, last note, as someone else said in this thread you can also just take a soul vessel back to the ladies at Things Betwixt and just respec your entire build. Those are limited, but not terribly so, you’ll get probably a dozen of them before everything is over. I used to use them like candy to float points in and out of my health and stamina to equip new and interesting gear, it’s not optimal at all to do that but you really don’t need it to be. You only need as many soul vessels as times you plan to change your mind on your build, and there are still ways to get more if you run out if you want to mess with bonfire ascetics. That’s advanced tech though, don’t mess with those too much. However, do use them to fight the four great soul bosses again and get their NG+ drops. Those souls give you more cool stuff that you may or may not want, but if you don’t want the items just eat them for another 255,000 free souls on top of whatever large amount actually killing the bosses gives. I don’t know how much it is but I think I used to be able to farm up a million souls for the Drangleic gate with like three or four cycles of The Rotten.

I’m going to cut this off here, but I have played this game for an unholy number of hours, please, ask me things about my hyperfixation if you have more specific questions. I love this game more than anyone else that I know. I’m happy to share.

Then you did not speak with programmers regularly, I learned this term probably back in 2008ish

5-10 years ago, you could be pretty sure this was a thing that actually needed checked, since the post about the clutch safety switch was posted by a real person who presumably had the same problem as you and fixed it with this method.

Now, there’s no way to know if that’s actually the case, or if “clutch safety switch” is just a likely string of words to feed someone who is having car trouble. You might get lucky, or you might get sent on eight consecutive goose chases because an LLM fundamentally doesn’t know what factual knowledge is, it only knows how to reorder and regurgitate things that other people have said in other contexts.

It’s a shame Kanye became… well, Kanye, because I used to use Feedback as my morning alarm for years. It was great, like it was made for it.

Ayy, ya heard about the good news?

Y’all sleeping on me, huh? Had a good snooze?

Wake up, n***a, wake up

We 'bout to get this paper

Complete with ear-piercing mic feedback noise.

I changed it back to a default alarm noise several years ago. Shame, that.

GI,GO only matters if people actually stop buying your garbage. It’s becoming pretty overwhelmingly obvious that most people are going to continue buying the garbage no matter how garbage it is, therefore, this is technically cost effective.

The trailer doesn’t really do it justice I don’t think. But that’s fair.

I’ll be honest and say I’ve never played Dungeons of Dredmor (though it’s on my wishlist now after this thread), but the description of it that I’m reading here reads almost spot on like a description of Dungeonmans, which I do know and love very much. I’ll give that a recommendation for you to check out.

Tom is the exact model of how I want to see people get rich. He got his bag and then disappeared off the face of the planet. He’s not in politics trying to enact a cyberpunk state. He’s not in the news every day telling you that if you give your kids a measles shot you’re performing the work of the devil. He’s off on a beach somewhere taking photos because he loves it, not bothering a soul. Tom is an alright dude and I have no problems with him.

Guns? Actually just throwing rocks at high speed.

Nuclear bomb? Throwing a special, spicy rock.

It really is just rock chucking all the way down, projectile combat completely broke the meta

Source: Look at him, and then look at anyone else who has ever had an ear injury.

I literally cannot count the number of times I’ve had to dick around with Windows’ command line to make something work. Not to mention registry editing.

Greater than 90% of all Linux software I’ve ever installed has also been as simple as “just install the thing and click Run”. Building a project from source is different, I still struggle with that (anybody want to help me build Ardour?) but that’s a fairly rare necessity, at least for me.