Yeah Sheva of the East’s iron roundshield has the “heavy” deflect property so even big enemies like the serpent men bounce off with their attacks
another weird overlap: the heater shield (smallest 100% physical medium shield) doesn’t have the extra parry frames that small shields do, but does have a quicker parry recovery than other medium shields
shields are less stamina efficient and “optimal” than two handing and attacking but like. who cares. they have cool heraldry on them and shit. I like being able to hold up a little wall and no-sell an attack.
Looking through this wiki and I really don’t remember ever hearing of this when I was last pouring over all the mechanics of this game:
During certain grab attack animations, damage can be reduced by mashing buttons. There is typically a range of potential damage reduction depending on how quickly buttons are pressed.
Rapidly tap any one of the eight shoulder or face buttons. Tapping the d-pad or other auxiliary buttons will not work.
Certain grab attack animations will end more quickly depending on the rate of your button presses, with roughly 15% damage reduced with the slowest possible button presses, and up to roughly 80% damage reduced with the most rapid button presses.
In special cases, certain grab attacks can also have their damage negated entirely. The consistency of triggering these is not yet certain, but it is known to be possible.
I think shields are best thought of as part of the learning process; the risk/skill hierarchy looks like: block->evade->parry. It’s even clearer in the similar games without stamina, like God of War: long evade->block->short evade->parry.
You’re doing really good if you can maintain functionality of these pieces between expert and novice play but I think it’s totally valid to have even big mechanics as ladders to higher skill replacements.
yeah imo “just use a two hand weapon” advice is only useful on your second run through any given souls game. so much of the difficulty comes from unexpected enemies and traps and the ability to block is the best mitigation against the unknown when reflexively dodging will often result in a pit death or rolling into an even worse situation. obviously bloodborne is exempt from this but there’s still a “recover from some shit you didn’t even see coming” mechanic with regain
like i’m trying to imagine someone doing their first trip through sen’s fortress with like, a claymore and nothing else and that sounds like the most intensely frustrating experience lol. carefully walking into an unknown room shield up in case you suddenly trip an arrow trap is a good idea!
tho i guess dark souls 2 gives the big guts greatsword an almost shield-worthy block stat so i guess you could lean on that (and Big Muscles) in a first playthrough if you really wanted to
It’s pretty annoying that a lot of weapons just get bad blocks instead of shitty parries. Like I don’t want to block 30% of damage, I want to parry at a disadvantage. That 2h a weapon gives me two block buttons is stupid. I think souls 3 fixed that with a 2h parry katana, right?
i just learnt about this in bloodborne today, crazy
another thing i didn’t know before: in the rafters of the big church in old yharnam, there’s an oil urn hanging from the ceiling, which you can cut down to set fire to the crucified beast below, and kill or scare away most of the creatures down there
ok, so dark souls 1 has this great feature that nobody ever uses where an item dropped on the ground, once it disappears, may spawn in the same spot in another players game. if this player doesn’t find it, it goes to another player. and if this keeps going enough, it becomes a unique enemy most players have probably never seen.
so like, what if people started hiding coins in hard to find places?
it’s a bummer that the conditions for vagrants spawning is something that never really intuitively happens. seen exactly one since dark souls first came out and i thought it was the most amazing thing because i had already replayed the game many times and here we have this mysterious little egg crab who shouldn’t be where they are.
I remember the first vagrant I ever saw really surprised me, but it went down very easily. Then the next one I saw destroyed me with magic missiles or something.
What were those floating white circles that would sometimes appear? Something to do with way of the white?
Those are in the remake, yes. They are ‘hostile’ in that if you stand your ass directly in front of them for a few seconds they’ll poke at you, but they don’t really fight per se.
