I basically agree. But let me also throw a really obscure recommendation into the ring: Redo!, a short metroidvania about being a lone survivor in a future overrun by biomachines. It’s unique not only in its setting, but also in how crisply it reproduces the cautious pacing and tactics of the early Souls games when you are first exploring their levels.
I expect my high praise to remain somewhat idiosyncratic since Redo! was made by a solo dev and the level of polish shows it, and the experience it aspires to create is also an acquired taste. But personally it hit the spot of exactly what I didn’t realize I wanted. I mostly want to bring it it up since it’s in the Elliot Quest category of modest, secretly inspirational games.
Hollow Knight did nothing for me but I got Blasphmous from Prime and have played it for 90 minutes or so and really like it.
Also Think I have The Surge from PS+ and have never installed and launched it. Greedfall seemed cool but something about the first 5 minutes made me bail. I think it has too much story that wasn’t going to matter.
If you could find a suitably viscous + flammable material, you could certainly slather it on a sword blade, then ignite it. If it remained aflame for any significant length of time, you’d risk altering/ruining the temper, especially at the edge(s), where the material’s most thin and easiest to draw down with open flame.
You’d also have to worry about the heat in the furniture/tang. Probably burning pitch (or whatever) falling on your hand and/or flying around if you tried to swing it?
No real practical plus beyond Maybe You Initially Look Intimidating that I can see. Either your fuel burns fast and woosh it’s done or it burns long and you risk ruining the most key element of Good Blade (the heat treatment), being left unable to effectively cut and/or stab, the hilt becoming unusable/structurally undermined, and injuring yourself with the products of your hella wicked combat cosplay accessory?
I am shrug and these are my thoughts on swords on fire irl.
For extra pedanticism: Fire in IRL combat was almost exclusively done with fire arrows because you only really want to set structures on fire/structures are really the only thing in warfare you can reliably set on fire and setting something on fire is generally best done while being not right next to whatever you’re setting on fire.
Then you’d have to clean all the shit off before you put it away/would be at risk of accidental self shit-bearing skin-break.
It turns out the best thing to do with a sword is stab and/or cut the other person as grievously as possible with it.
Poison arrows have a documentary history stretching back to antiquity (Ovid mentions the horror of being struck by a Scythian arrow!). Additive badness is much handier when you’re sending it over there instead of waving it around your own face/body, as scratch says above.
(I can think of refs to Poisoned Blades but not to any culture or military that systematically used them like Scythians did the scythicon. I am also spottily self-educated, so there could be huge screaming examples hiding inside one or more of my billion blind spots!)
Ugh, is there anywhere I can reset my stats, I put all my points into this and now I’m stuck grinding twitter arguments because I can’t face off against any real bosses
I have started Dark Souls 2 for the first time. I am playing Scholar of the first sin version of the game.
I am making a Sorcerer character, as I never did so before in any other souls game.
I have pumped INT and Attunement, especially.
Everything is proceeding smoothly, but I have reached the Pursuer and he keeps destroying me.
I don’t have many windows to cast my Great Souls Arrow, and I have even less chances to use an Exitus flask if I am damaged.
He’s super fast and when I fast-roll, often he manages to damage me (taking away a lot of my health)
There is not much room to run around in this fight.
Trying to protect myself with my large leather shield is also resulting in taking a lot damage.
Any advice?
On a side note, I see that equipment burden makes a difference, but does total item inventory weight (unequipped stuff) also have an effect?
My character feels a bit sluggish and never snappy like he would on Demon Souls and the other games (although for DaS1 it’s been too long time to say if it was snappier than 2).
Also, is fast roll effective as I expect or should I get used back to use the shield a lot?
Is this the fight up at the top of the battlements, in sort of a narrow rectangle? If it’s that fight, you can use the ballistae at one end, try and get him into a lengthy animation in front of them and run over and trigger them. This is a lot easier to do if you’ve got a summon, since one player can just draw attacks while the other tries to hit with a ballista.
One oddity of Dark Souls 2 is that many animation speeds (including chugging Estus), and how many iframes you get in your rolling animations, is based off of Agility, which is something that you get from Adaptability. Most everybody agrees you need at least 92 Agility (which is pretty easy to get IIRC) and likely you want to get higher than that. IIRC 95 or 96 gives you the “same” roll as medium roll in DS1 in terms of avoiding attacks – so even though you’re fast-rolling, you’re still eating hits, because of this weird-ass system!
Pursuer is really predictable and does the same attack patterns over and over. It’s not too difficult as a “roll-forward” style melee fight after you’ve got the rhythm down, but it might counter a slow ranged casting setup pretty hard. The ballista gimmick is also a pain in the butt and I never managed it personally.
Pursuer is actually a semi-optional boss (you can beat him, or another one, and either gets you to the next location) so some advice might be to give up and try to find the other boss for now.
