the final super secret area is a pretty nice touch
exactly as out-there as it should be
I’ve started pumping faith for no reason now that I’m level 80 something because my stamina is just past getting a sixth katana hit and I got sick of having more health and dex
It raises so many questions for me though. (One of the biggest ones is: What’s the point?) I’m hoping the game will answer some of them! There is a bit of disquiet in exploring it in the same way that comes with walking though someplace familiar that has hollowed out and changed. I’m also easily spooked, though. Felt a little sad to come across the corpse of the giant, but at the same time wondered why he would be there after hundreds or thousands of years had passed. In that same vein I’m wondering why places like Carim are still around after not being mentioned at all in Dark Souls 2.
I need to respec my build and make it into something either more interesting or more streamlined. I’ve dumped a few points into the odd stat here and there cause I keep telling myself I’ll play something more interesting but mostly just stick to my katana.
I did think the approach to that area was really well handled. wasn’t sure I knew what was coming but started to have a pretty good idea.
For once I think Dex builds are strong? You get a strong Dex weapon right off the bat, then in the late game the S scaling on Chaos Blade looks absolutely sick. I’m currently running a mixed build with Refined Exile Greatsword (B/B scaling) and envy the efficiency of them (and hate that I have nothing to spend my special titanite on). But katanas are so boring, so I think on a second playthrough I’ll go STR and main Meat Cleaver, which is like a supersize katana.
yeah, I used uchi for literally the whole game with a few abortive efforts to switch and I’m considering whether I want to use my chunks to pump another one at this point for like a 10% boost. I’d rather get my faith high enough to do the lightning buff… but I’m about seven points plus the miracle ring shy of doing that, and I’m at the same boss as you. I do have a good lightning resist shield though… the tree crest? something like that? I got it from the room with the frost guy in lothric.
meat cleaver was the only “never going to raise my strength high enough to use this” weapon I couldn’t bring myself to sell because memories
Ah, OK, I didn’t notice that particular chest in frost guy room, I only got the other one and left. It’s lighter/less stable than Lothric Knight Shield and upgraded with Twinkling, hmm. That’s probably not enough to sustain full turtle mode but you can probably use it to block the lightning strike at least, if you don’t know the timing yet.
I didn’t play DkS3 at all in the past few days, just been writing posts about it here instead. I need to go back and beat that guy and the final boss before I leave on a trip to Korea on Saturday. Or just never beat that guy, since honestly his design sucks.
yeah, I have to go to Montreal on Friday and want to put this thing to bed…
and this optional boss is very terrible. The regular final boss was pretty easy by comparison, he was actually kind of disappointing after the penultimate mandatory boss, which was relatively similar but more fun.
the first phase of this fight is just tedious and sometimes you get cooked, the second phase would at least be interesting without it.
Yeah, this is my feeling as well. The first phase definitely overstays its welcome. The area is one of my favorite visually in a Souls series game and such a fantastic contrast to so much of it as well, it’s just kind of disappointing that the boss goes from interesting to tedious really quickly.
If either of the phases were simply their own boss I think it would feel more balanced. I don’t remember which, but there is at least one boss in the other Souls games that does that right? Beat the first phase and then on all subsequent fights, start on the second phase?
OK. I beat Camera King. That guy was the Kratos of Souls bosses: a badass asshole with cheap attacks and absolutely no redeeming qualities.
It took about 30 tries judging by my Ember drain. The first phase is really annoying, but eventually trivial when you have enough practice with it, by the end I could reliably take it down in a minute while spending 0-1 Estus. The main trick is to make sure to always stand facing him at medium range, don’t get under him except briefly to take a swipe, or you just will not be able to either see or block his pokes.
The second phase is the real problem. I tried again four or five times to play dynamically and intuitively: this always ended up with my getting killed while the boss is still at 90% health. It’s hard to say exactly what is so difficult about what he’s doing, it looks like the same shit every Souls boss has always done. But he just always gets me, it’s something like RNG in terms of how many milliseconds he waits before attacking, even for individual swipes within a combo (or if it’s fixed delays, it’s really hard to get used to). In the end the patient turtling was a success, there were exactly two of his attacks that I knew how to roll into and punish with a single R1, every single other attack I blocked.
Also: that one waist-level Ornstein lunge is the cheapest attack of all time. It tracks laterally and gives zero shits about either blocking or roll iframes. It is the grab attack from the Bloodborne singing brains in spear form.
EDIT: aand compared to that, the actual final boss may as well have been standing there for 30 seconds in between each attack, clear time 32 hrs.
sure did have fun getting knocked off the rafters of the cathedral by the giant fucking greatsword knight a hundred times
Snipe them and make them be the ones that fall.
I just retreated from each one and they fell off the beams.
Never. They shall be defeated in honorable combat
Ready to talk more about this game now that I know how spoiler tags work on the new SB (I wasn’t sure if they were that easy so I quoted a Felix post to make sure). I’ll only be using them if I feel like I’d be spoiling something really specific and really neat about a certain part in the game.
On the one hand, Smouldering Lake is a very boring area to look at. On the other hand, without doing the Dancer skip (not sure if that counts as a spoiler w/o context) , it’s also the first area where you can reliably farm Large Titanite Shards. Shards drop like candy in that place even with base luck/no Rusted Coin (my starting class was Pyromancer, so my LUK is, like…7? 8?).
In terms of encounter design, Smouldering Lake is pretty decent. Just a little boring to look at since so much of it is just corridors with fiery roots…not as cool (hot) as Lost Izalith’s gigantic open lava cavern IMO. I like the aesthetic mood Smouldering Lake is going for, though, with the war between DS1 Black Knights and DS1 demons. All those poor Taurus/Capra demons, that Black Knight behind the illusory wall is a real motherfuckin’ G.
The longer I play this game, the more I respect how they balanced leveling/upgrades for early game. I feel like the starting class in DS3 matters a lot more than in most past Souls games (thinking mostly of DS1/DS2 here) because it’s generally harder to skip around and treasure-hunt for weapons and other equipment (rings, spellcasting catalysts, infusion mats) than it is in other Souls games. Without doing some fairly wicked skips, you better really like that Hand Axe/Longsword/Mace (disclaimer: I love the Mace), because you may be “stuck” with it for at least the 1st two bosses.
With miracles and sorceries you can hybridize fairly early on because you can buy catalysts+basic spells from Grandma without giving her any ashes. But if you want a Pyromancy Flame early, you’re gonna need to either roll Pyromancer or haul ass to the Undead Settlement (not too long a slog, but stull).
I respect that design decision because it seems to lead to some cool unique minor advantages early on. I only have 2 “alts” but they’ve already led to some interesting class-specific scenarios. Most notable one I can think of is rolling Cleric for miracles ASAP. That way you can buy Force from Grandma and use it to knock Sword Master Saber (the Light Rail Avenger behind Firelink) off the cliff rather than having to whittle him down. (Though it’s not too hard to whittle him down because he has crappy poise; with my Knight alt I literally just did repeated R1s on him while I watched TV.)
Invading in this game (Cracked Red Eye) honestly looks (I haven’t tried) like next to no fun for the invader. People roll so deep in this game that half the time you’re invading against a dude with 2-3 phantoms backing him up. Example: I was summoned to co-op at the entrance to the Cathedral graveyard. Host had me + another phantom, he got invaded in the graveyard. Host and the other phantom attacked the invader normally with fast/medium weapons, and all I did was cut off the invader’s roll angles literally by spamming charged Greatsword R2 fishing for a knockdown. Poor invader couldn’t do shit. Maybe From should make it so that rolling with more phantoms allows you to be invaded with multiple phantoms (to at least match host’s numbers)? I’m not sure if DS3’s networking architecture allows them to do that easily, though.
Though I maintain a soft spot for giant weapons, my fav weapon right now is probably still the Butcher Knife. Though I’m disappointed Mildred isn’t wearing her sack in this game. Maybe it’s her sister? Incredible STR scaling in a game that already heavily favors STR, decent enough poise damage for human-sized enemies, fast enough attacks to get safe hits on huge, unstaggerable enemies, and a great balance of speed and horizontal/vertical coverage. Plus it’s light enough that if I run around in Master’s rags I can stay in the fastroll threshold and get maximum benefit from the Lloyd’s ring. Eventually I may put real clothes on, but the Master’s rags + loincloth pair so well with my awful skin from the Dark Sigils I’ve accumulated. Free level ups aren’t free! Dammit, Yort, warn me next time!
One last thing: certain questlines seem real easy to accidentally bug out, or at least sequence-break. I think I locked myself out of Siegward’s questline because I was never properly trapped by Patches. He just kinda randomly showed up at Firelink one day! If I go over to the well outside the chapel, Embered or not, I get no interaction with Siegward, despite having slain the demon with him back in Undead Settlement.
Some questlines seem a little better buffered against strange sequence breaks, like Anri’s. I talked to him at the church bonfire after exhausting his dialogue in Catacombs, but I never ran into Horace. The way I understand it, there are several ways it could go later if you do/don’t encounter and/or kill Horace in Smouldering Lake? Overall, Anri’s questline seems far less reliant on doing exactly the right obscure thing at the right time like Siegward does.
Honestly, I find most NPC questlines far more tedious than entertaining, because I don’t really care about unpacking the lore. Though I am somewhat dismayed by not being able to progress with Siegward because as I understand it, he does some cool stuff later on in the game. Or at the very least, he does something more compelling than “hey you mashed A next to me a couple times when we met, now you can summon me for a boss fight and MAYBE I’ll be smart enough to deal some damage before the boss kills me?” (Lucatiel, Solaire, I’m looking at you guys.)
Regarding the questline you think you broke, you didn’t. I met Patches at the bell tower too and still could go on with Siegward. The only thing that matters regarding him at the cathedral is that you find Siegward and provide him with armor (which you have to buy from Patches, which means you could only be in trouble in Patches doesn’t want to sell you stuff due to another questline. And then you have to meet him thrice more at other places. It’s gotta be done before you kill Yhorn though.
That’s kind of characteristic of the titanite design in this game, it does contain shard tiers behind particular thresholds, but as soon as you cross them it’s just raining shards and you can almost instantly upgrade your weapon to the next multiple of 3. Even slabs in the endgame are just handed out like it’s 1999. (I got a slab as a random drop from the third winged knight I killed – possibly insanely lucky there but I assume the drop rate can’t be that low – and there are like 5+ slabs lying around in the world.) From seems to have changed its design philosophy around character speccing, with this shard abundance and the existence of respecs, any particular build is not that much of a commitment and you can change to any other weapon without needing to start another save file.
Hmm, I can’t agree with that one. The first boss sure, but the Firelink merchant even without any ash upgrades sells 5 basic weapons. As you know, there is also the samurai NPC outside Firelink for an Uchigatana, and there is also a Deep Battle Axe in a chest in High Wall, both of which are excellent choices that I’ve seen other players quickly switch to from their starting weapon.
I’m exhausted by NPC questline anxiety in this series. It’s just dumb, and the effort to stick to them isn’t worth the modest rewards in lore and items. I didn’t bother with any of them in this playthrough: I didn’t look very thoroughly at all for NPC hiding places and didn’t bother helping Siegward with the fire demon in his first appearance (I had a fire-infused weapon so it was annoying to do so). So by the midgame DkS3 was very Lonely Game for me: I completely stopped meeting any talking NPC whatsoever out in the world for the entire last 2/3s of the game. The only NPCs in existence for me were the starting ones plus Patches and the pyromancy trainer. I guess I missed out on Toast gesture and a Slab from Siegward, but whatever.
Yeah the main thing that annoys me about NPC questlines is the idea that I can’t advance too fast in order to not break their sequence. That’s really aggravating because most of my PvE playstyle in this game is “okay these guys are too real to die to/get stunlocked without recourse by Butcher Knife R1 swings, I’m just gonna sprint past em to the nearest bonfire unless I am forced by a long lever pull/large door open animation to clear them first”. Not terribly fond of the idea that I may miss out on something that MIGHT have tangible rewards (though I don’t recall any questline item rewards I had a BURNING yearning for) simply cause I didn’t want to put up with figuring out how to pull the Irithyll staircase skeletons one by one without dying.
(No, I don’t have a bow. Bows are extra equip load that could go towards an even more unreasonably huge greatsword! Body pulling is the One True way to pull IMO. And I certainly don’t have a shield. Shields are for jerks who can’t fastroll. What’s a “parry”?)
I feel the same way except I actually managed to do all of the NPC questlines in this one without really trying
Here’s an album I’ll be adding to of screenshots from the game.
