Board Thread:Dark Souls II/@comment-24721972-20140512132647/@comment-5632187-20140629203117

They don't work around it with Bonfire Ascetics, that's the point of Bonfire Ascetics! Bonfire Ascetics were made so that areas can't be farmed dry without a spike in difficulty. Human Effigies are only important if you're wasting them when you're hitting 5% max HP missing. Save them strategically, and you'll never have to worry about running out of them.

The fact that I have an SM tier list just proves that SM is a functional system. Based on your SM, you're placed in a tier from 1 - 41. Each time you enter a new tier, the amount of SM it takes to get to the next tier increases. It balances out so that people who are at high SMs can only connect to other people with high SMs. And each online play item reaches up or down a specific number of tiers, and only WSS and SWSS become even further reaches with the Name-Engraved Ring on. But apparently, you want the very bad system of "10 levels + 10%". That system was 15 different forms of BAD. SM and the Name-Engraved Ring together make co-op and even PvP 10 times easier.

But you are too busy whining that something changed, so you clearly haven't even experienced eitehr of those things, or you wouldn't be here.