All posts by Matsczon
You need to get every upgrade of every ring, so you're likely missing out on a lot more than just the wolf ring. I highly recommend you go for the other "gather all the things" achievements while you're at it, since the covenant grind is the worst part of those achievements by far.
The covenant farming pretty much objectively suck. For the playthrough I did for the platinum I honestly think I spent longer farming silver knights than I did playing the rest of the game. On the plus side, an all int/fth build has immense damage output against basically everything, and you will by default have the best spells since you're getting every spell.
On the topic of the rings, you're not farming in NG++, are you? There's really no reason to since you can just farm everything in NG and then rush through NG+ and ++ to get the upgraded rings.
I believe I mentioned this in the original thread, but Scholar is much more of a way to re-experience II for veterans of the game than a definitive and perfected version of the game, which makes it baffling that you can't play the vanilla game on PS4 and Xbox One.
If you're willing to pay for the original, I would say you should give it a try, as it might boost your enjoyment of Scholar.
The games are just like this. PtD, Scholar, and Fire Fades might look like they're the same thing for each game but they're all very different (PtD is primarily a PC port, Scholar is a revamp, and Fire Fades is just a GotY edition) because reasons.
Also, I would ask that you refrain from making new threads for every slight change of topic. It's difficult to follow and runs the risk of flooding the discussions page so other threads that might be posted aren't easily visible.
None of the From games really work as traditional sequels, aside from maybe Demon's Souls to Dark Souls due to all the early 2000s RPG jank they got rid of. The games simply change too much in core gameplay and design philosophy to be that way.
Dark Souls II is definitely not for everyone, but it also sounds like you have some fundamental misunderstanding of the game, which is quite common. II is very slow, both in the macro (resource management, progression, planning for future situations, etc.) and micro (combat, exploration, etc.) sense.
The actual combat is much slower than the other games, both because everyone is absolutely slower, but also because it expects you to juggle multiple enemies at once while also not overstepping into the next pack. That's basically impossible to do in the first game since enemy encounters are so clearly defined and you either have groups of very weak enemies, or a few large ones, with the notable exception of places like the Duke's Archives where groups of enemies that are dangerous on their own will pull in a pack, which... isn't great. This can definitely cause issues since retrying an area after a death in II will take longer than in the other games.
In terms of the macro stuff, you're expected to use a variety of tools to make your life easier. You can beat the game with nothing but whatever weapon you decide will be your only one, but the game is absolutely expecting you to make your life easier by using all the tools available to you, and enables it with easy access to upgrade materials and many branching paths in the early game to explore for loot. This in turn means that the game is happy to put you into situations where you need to adopt strategies that are more thought-out than "hit the enemy until it dies and don't die." This is in stark contrast to the other games where using strategies like long-range sniping with bows, applying status, or funneling enemies into chokepoints, are entirely optional and sometimes not even beneficial compared to just fighting them head-to-head.
The game really doesn't expect you to fight every enemy either. In the original game you have the Heide Knight in the Forest of Fallen Giants to teach you that, since they stuck him in a big arena but made him passive unless you hit him, accidentally or intentionally. In Scholar there's the, admittedly far worse, ogre in the stream who will patrol back and forth and only aggro if you hit it or get spotted while near the water. While both the other Dark Souls games have that idea as well, I'd say the gap between a tough optional enemy in Dark Souls and a tough optional enemy in Dark Souls II is huge.
That brings me to my final point, Scholar is, in a truly baffling decision by From, a reworked game for experienced players that is the only option for playing the game on PS4 and Xbox One. Nowhere is this glaring issue more obvious than the fact that part of the tutorial in Scholar is locked behind a petrified hollow, requiring you to obtain a very rare consumable that newbies will at best maybe find being sold for an extortionate sum from an early merchant. If you can, you absolutely should play the original game first. Even with its performance issues, it is still the game that was designed for Dark Souls players going into a very different experience, and not the game that was designed for Dark Souls II veterans to get to re-experience the game.
Again, I will say that Dark Souls II is not for everyone, and if you don't feel like you'll enjoy it then you've at least given it a try. It is definitely the most polarizing of the From Souls-likes.
Huge soul dump, early Rite of Kindling, Gravelord Sword, one of the Pinwheel masks, and you can then fairly easily run to Vamos to upgrade a weapon of your choice (including the lucerne or great scythe from the catacombs themselves) all the way to fire. If you want replenishment and/or Reah you can also go get them a lot quicker than if you had to go through the catacombs normally.
The skip makes the early game smoother for very little effort beyond having to not get blended by the bonewheels. Even if you don't do it early, a lot of the loot in the catacombs is quite specific, so just not bothering is a valid alternative for what can be a pretty slow area to go through otherwise.
Dark Souls' defense system works in such a way that armor penetration is a function of how much damage you deal relative to your opponent's defense stat. The more damage you deal, the less it will be reduced by said defense. While this has a number of implications, what you're experiencing is what's referred to as split damage.
As the name suggests, split damage means that your weapon's attack rating is split between multiple damage types, and those damage types have to calculate independently against their relevant defense types. This means that the armor penetration is worse, since you're dealing less physical damage against the same physical defense, for the benefit of also dealing some magic damage against the opponent's magic defense. As a general rule of thumb, a weapon with split damage needs a substantial advantage in attack rating to actually do more damage than a weapon with only one damage type.
The benefit of the magic path is that it adds intelligence scaling at the cost of physical base damage and scaling. The main advantage of the path is that it lets you use intelligence as a melee damage stat, which can offer you some versatility without having to put a huge amount of levels into stats that don't benefit your sorceries. Alternatively, if the weapon is capable of reaching high enough physical damage in spite of the magic path, it can overpower the physical defense of an enemy while also exploiting the, hopefully, lower elemental defense to deal more damage than a purely physical variant would. People tend to favor the former use case, especially as all but the highest base damage weapons tend to struggle with overcoming the physical damage penalty of the elemental upgrade paths. Whichever way you want to go, the scaling elemental paths require that you invest in the relevant stat to be competitive with other upgrade paths.
For future reference, there's little to no reason to use the magic or divine paths unless you're doing an intelligence or faith build respectively. The one exception is that weapons with the divine effect (not to be confused with the upgrade path) prevent skeletons from reanimating without having to kill the necromancer they're linked to. If you are doing such a build and you're in doubt, it's never a mistake to keep a weapon on the standard path. Worst case you have a high base damage weapon that only has to worry about physical defenses, and most of the time you'll be able to benefit from stat scaling, weapon buffs, or both.
Ultra greatswords hit a lot slower and a lot harder than greatswords, while usually having more favorable two-handed movesets, at some cost to their one-handed movesets. Both ultra-sized weapons as well as axes and hammers sacrifice versatility for raw damage, but ultra greatswords retain some of that versatility, namely in wide swings and long-reach but narrow heavy attacks, making them less risky to use while still providing massive damage per hit. They're also somewhat faster than other ultra-sized weapons, which further reduces the risk of using them.
Assuming you're talking about the first game, the BKGS has higher scaling and better motion values (as in the BKGS attack animations scale better with the weapon's attack rating than the BKS attack animations) so it will always do more damage than the BKS. The only thing of real note is that the BKS has a high attack rating for a greatsword, so the damage gap between it and the BKGS is smaller than the gap between something like the bastard sword and zweihander. This is especially true at high strength since ultra greatswords tend to have better strength scaling but worse dexterity scaling than their greatsword counterparts.
You should absolutely not skip any of the games if you enjoyed the first one you played. The games are very different from one another and so the opinions are equally varied, there are even people who adamantly believe that the first game is outright bad and II and III are way better.
However, remembering that the games are different is important. This is especially true for II, which wants you to play with a completely different mindset than the first game. For example: Where the first game would show you a large group of enemies and wanted you to pick them off one or a few at a time, II is much happier to have large packs of relatively weaker and more predictable enemies that you have to manage all at once. Similarly, II tends to be happier to toss you into situations where taking it slow, paying attention, and using all the tools available to you are key to succeeding, rather than the first game's attitude of making situations primarily reliant on reactive play with alternative solutions to fights generally being helpful but unnecessary.
You can farm all of the base game covenants offline. The droprates are, for some inexplicable reason, extremely low, so I wouldn't recommend it unless you really want the rewards.
They're not mutually exclusive weapons, as they don't even use the same upgrade materials, so you could just use both.
If you really need to pick between one or the other, I'd say thorned provides more versatility and damage output, assuming you can handle the higher stat requirements.
As Chizbulz said, it comes down to the heavy armor and powerful weapon, which enables you to get close to them where they get a further damage penalty for hitting you with the hilt of their sword. Facetanking becomes less viable as you reach higher NG+ cycles, which increases the difficulty significantly. That said, Four Kings aren't terribly difficult as far as lord bosses go, as they generally don't do that much damage compared to Nito or Seath.
By the sounds of things you picked deprived on a blind playthrough. Either you knowingly brought this unnecessary challenge upon yourself, or this is very weak bait, so I'm not sure why you even posted this.
The soul logic does not work because in Dark Souls III alone you have six items that are not directly related to the boss that drops the soul to make it. According to you, Oceiros's soul making Seath's signature weapon and sorcery is little more than symbolism and an affinity for Seath's magic. Meanwhile, when it comes to Aldrich's soul, it confirms Gwyndolin 100% to be the son of Priscilla even though the miracle, which is a real weapon in the original game with no relation to faith or even any kind of magic, is directly attributed to Aldrich. Making assumptions about the lore in order to fit your pre-existing theory is not a reasonable way to look at lore implications, but that's the only way I can see your logic working.
Sister, niece. Also it was never stated that Gwyndolin thought of her. Aldrich dreamed while devouring Gwyndolin, and in that dream perceived the form of a young, pale girl in hiding. They never expand upon the mechanics of a sapient, cannibalistic, pile of slime's ability to access the memories of those it consumes. It might have been directly thought about by Gwyndolin, it might have been a formative memory Aldrich found, or perhaps Aldrich rooted around in the deepest recesses of Gwyndolin's mind and accessed a memory even Gwyndolin could not. Maybe it was in fact the manifestation of some connection between Gwyndolin and Priscilla's souls. We simply don't know, and as such every opinion on that topic is speculation.
All of Gwyndolin's artifacts reference the moon. None of them reference Seath. In fact, Seath is only related to the moon by the names of the Moonlight Butterfly, whose magic is stated to be crystalline in nature, the Moonlight Greatsword, that has no direct relation to the moon, and the Old Moonlight sorcery, which is a memory of Midir's that manifests as the Moonlight Greatsword.
I'm not saying it's weird that he opposes the Darkwraiths. I'm saying it's weird that he does that and then seemingly doesn't interact with the abundance of humanity they harbor, if we assume that he, and his magic, does in fact have this inherent connection to the Dark.
The Darkwraiths got an entire undead capital drowned because they were too dangerous to even their fellow men. The Dark caused at least two major nations within Lordran to collapse, and the Abyss consumes the Chosen Undead if they're not protected from it, in spite of the supposed connection to the Dark that Kaathe claims. Furthermore, all manner of spellcasters who use the Dark are consistently depicted as at best having an uneasy relationship with the wider world and often being outright heretical. All this in mind, it's not a stretch by any means to suggest that the danger that Priscilla's lifehunt posed was far more pressing than the moral or emotional qualms about banishing a crossbreed into the painting, relative or no.
Gwyn had already linked the fire by the time the Firstborn left Anor Londo, as made evident by Sunlight Blade being left as a farewell by him on Gwyn's coffin. By all accounts, it would seem that Gwyn never found out his firstborn was disinherited. Additionally, Gwyndolin doesn't seem to have had much trouble justifying Gwynevere as the Queen of Sunlight, so I'm not even sure that Lordran would be agnatic in nature. That is assuming that Gwyndolin would even lose his claim to the throne over his upbringing in the first place. Nothing seems to imply that him being male was ever kept secret. So I would go back to my statement that the guy who was so scared of the status quo breaking that he threw himself into the fire of creation to prevent any change might have been more concerned with adhering to tradition than doing what was best for his son.
Also what GEONE said. Speculation is all well and good but without overwhelming evidence that also disproves other possibilities, such as the numerous clear parallels between the Firstborn and Nameless King, you absolutely cannot put it down as fact in an article. Speculation can be included if it's clear that it is speculation and it has a solid foundation. For example, I could see making mention that Priscilla might be related to Gwyn, on account of his messy family tree, but anything more specific, such as implying that she had a child with Gwyn, is simply far too speculative.
None of the things mentioned makes it any more likely that Priscilla is Gwyndolin's mother than the generally more accepted theories of her being Gwyndolin's sister or niece, which are all speculation at the end of the day and it's equally possible Priscilla has no relation at all to Gwyn's family.
The soul logic doesn't work unless you also want to claim that Sif is the child of Artorias, the Old Ones excluding the Duke's Dear Freja are descendants of the original Lords, Oceiros and the Duke's Dear Freja are descendants of Seath, and various other situations I'm sure exist where an item tied to a character returns in the form of a boss soul weapon or spell. What it does imply is that Gwyndolin had some kind of relationship with Priscilla. As the head of the covenant who punishes those who betray the gods, it's entirely possible that said relationship was as mundane as jailer and prisoner. Furthermore the soul and miracle are explicitly stated to belong to Aldrich, not Gwyndolin, where as the bow made from the same soul is explicitly stated to belong to Gwyndolin.
Gwyndolin's catalyst describes him as a "Moon sorcerer" and scales with faith, which is very distinct to the Moonlight Greatsword's high intelligence requirement and scaling. If the moon was indeed intrinsically connected to sorcery, and not just the magic element that multiple miracles throughout the series draw upon with no apparent relation to Seath, then surely the catalyst of a moon sorcerer would scale with intelligence instead of faith.
None of Gwyndolin's artifacts nor his soul makes mention of the Dark, but rather the somewhat dubious terms "Darkmoon" and "Dark Sun" which are little more than fantasy jargon, as neither term is ever expanded upon beyond the very basic relationship to the magical element and Gwyndolin. Additionally his covenant actively hunts down sinners, and Darkwraiths in particular, without interacting with humanity itself. To me that seems odd if his power is related to the Dark. Additionally, it seems unlikely that he'd have any connection to it through this supposed heritage, as Priscilla's size and relation to the gods would imply she is half-god rather than half-human, and her only connection to the dark is the occult modifier on her dagger. This is similar to the occult effect of Velka's rapier, in spite of her most definitely being a god. Gwyndolin is also weak to the occult status himself.
The idea that Gwyn raising Gwyndolin as a daughter was to prevent him from taking the throne as a crossbreed seems awfully convoluted when Gwyn, as well as the gods at large, is portrayed as someone who stuck to traditions regardless of the consequences.
I imagine it's either the theme of Dark Sun Gwyndolin, which is also used in the Moonlight Butterfly fight, or Nameless Song, that plays during the credits of the first game.
If you're specifically looking for a song from III, then Aldrich's theme also has a similar sound, although the instruments are far louder relative to the voice in that song.
Those are the ones that I can think of off the top of my head.
You can eventually get Firelink Shrine back, but you shouldn't worry that much. The Undead Parish bonfire serves as a substitute until you can get Firelink Shrine back.
While euthanasia is a whole can of worms, I think with the fair lady the main thing is that it's definitely not your right to say she should die because she's in pain.
On top of that the egg burdened would suffer from her being gone, there's no guarantee the death you give her is any less painful than that of the sickness, and her dialogue seems to imply that she wants to continue living, even if she mistakenly thinks you're Quelaag and is therefore ignorant of her sister's death.
Generally the reasoning is that the high sorcery damage makes it easy because a lot of enemies die in one or two hits. Sorcery is definitely the most accessible playstyle in regards to simplicity, but in III specifically I find pyromancers and faith builds to be stronger over the course of a playthrough due to the high investment you need to truly demolish things, which combines with the relative lack of utility sorceries to make intelligence builds not actually that strong in the early game. The fact that enemies are so aggressive in III also makes it a fair bit harder to cast spells safely from a distance, as barely any enemies will just slowly meander over to you while you kill them.
In Dark Souls III specifically casters also have to deal with the FP system, which makes spell slotting and usage a lot more complex than just "put on big thing because it do big damage" that the other games tend to fall into a lot of the time. (Seriously, the only time I've ever seen it apply in the first game is when I've done base level or spell-only challenge runs, otherwise just mindlessly slotting the biggest hitters you have works out fine.)
Comparing NG+ to a difficulty setting doesn't make any sense. Personally, I think the games overall are fine as they are, as difficulty is largely dependent on your ability to adapt to a playstyle you're comfortable with, once you're past the teething stage of trying to take down eight dudes at once or struggling with basic controls, of course. The only one I could maybe consider an easier option for is Sekiro, but at the same time that game is inherently designed to be much more niche than their other games, so it might have alienated just as many people even if it did feature an easier difficulty.
Also, I don't know if I actually trust From to handle a hard difficulty setting that well. There's a reason Dark Souls II is the best NG+ by a landslide, and it isn't because it handled numbers better than the other games. Similarly, there's a reason why the end-game chalices in BB are considered utterly insane.
The games all feature very different takes on the genre. Personally I'd go for DSR as it's the most "pure" experience without being the ridiculous fever dream that is Demon's Souls and its whacky mechanics, or the old gen version that runs like crap and is probably pretty hard to get nowadays. I'd also say it's the easiest in terms of difficulty.
Otherwise just get whichever version you can. They're all good games, just in different ways.