Board Thread:Dark Souls II/@comment-67.60.216.72-20140425185609/@comment-1961216-20140427040342

You can't gimp yourself in DS2 because you can readjust your stats with Soul Vessels, as long as you don't kill / piss off the Fire Keepers. You get a good couple Soul Vessels each playthrough and it ought to be sufficient for trial and error.

Spells in either Dark Souls require a dedicated weapon in order to use. It's of negligible weight and can just be thrown in your last free hand slot. The three kinds of spells are:

Sorcery (INT stat, catalyst or staff weapon)

Miracle (Faith stat, talisman / charm weapon)

Pyromancy (scales a little with INT and Faith, uses Pyromancy Flame)

To use a spell, you select that spell on your menu, switch to the relevant catalyst weapon, and attack with it.

You need to raise Attunement in order to unlock spell slots, and in Dark Souls II, to speed your casting and increase the number of casts you get per slot. You will want at least 2~3 spell slots, but I don't know how much Attunement that is. I do know that the first spell slot is unlocked at 10 Attunement.