Yeah, it’s not clear whether it’s the optional first encounter (in which case, run away) or the later required boss battle (which I was assuming).
all the advice here is good but also buy a mace, early SOTFS is full of armoured guys who resist magic and dealing with them makes a sorcerer start twice as much of a pain unless you have a way to deal blunt damage
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I am fighting it as second boss. As the wiki would say, “accessed by going up onto a high bridge that leads to the Bastille”.
I encountered another time earlier on, on a square area out of Cardinal tower, but I escaped and when I got back to that place, Pursuer didn’t appear anymore. Pity, because there was more room to run and avoid his attacks.
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What could a good trade off be among agility and adp?
92 surely is a scary amount to go for…
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You can check the formulas and chart at Agility | Dark Souls 2 Wiki . For what it’s worth Attunement also raises agility, at one third the rate. An efficient bare minimum for the early game would be 88 agility, which gets you as many iframes as DkS1’s slow roll.
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OK, I beat the Pursuer. It took me some pattern memorization and rolling to the right. I also needed to pump ADP a bit, because I needed long invulnerability duration during my rolls. Now I have 98 Agility, which I will probably keep raising because that fight was quite traumatic 
Are shield and armor very important in this game? The way I am shaping my Sorcerer, I would be tempted to say “not much”, especially the shield… but maybe I am just suffering of Bloodborne syndrome (and rolling overuse)
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I never once touched a shield because 1) i played a sorcerer with catalyst in left hand and longsword in right 2) most shields give you chip damage and you should not be resigning to damage unless poisoned. blocking just sucks in this game unless you’ve specifically built for massive stamina and regen.
armor is important though, since your iframes are fixed, so you should basically get as close to 70% weight as you can to maximize damage absorption. the tradeoff in DKS2 is that you run slower and recover stamina slower the heavier you are. so it just depends on how fast you like to be
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Thanks for chiming in. 
In the meanwhile, I am at No Man’s Wharf and I am loving it, also because of the tension coming from the lack of bonfires around.
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Dark Souls 2 remains, I believe, the only Souls game where you can dual-wield shields, which is hilarious and great. I created a character purely to do this and be a summon for other players, so that I could do the MMO tank routine of drawing aggro and then just blocking while the other player pours on the damage.
It was also the last Soulsalike with the Poise Monster being a viable build, I had a lot of fun playing it that way.
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In Demon’s Souls, the spiked shield explicitly had attack damage on it I think. There was also that shield in Dark 1 that could shoot the beams instead of parry, I think? I remember you could equip two shields, but my original idea back when Dark 1 was a fresh release was to equip two shields and then equip the armor set that did damage when you rolled.
It didn’t work out. I never played 2, so if there was a viable dual shield build, that’s awesome
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either 2 or 3 has shields specifically for dual wielding but i think it requires like 60 STR because they’re just two halves of a huge door
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This is 2, and this is the build I made. It’s extremely stupid and probably not “viable”, it’s fun as hell though.
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Has anybody tried the Hexer class? Is it more fun than a pure Sorcerer?
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I think the dark fog spell is supposed to be really strong and attainable early on
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That one could be useful also in dlc, I was reading around that dlc is very hostile to casters, as pretty much everybody has magic resistance.
For now it’s too early to say how I will stack DS2 against the other Souls games, but I am enjoying it a lot.
One thing I notice, is that graphically it’s the worst one. I don’t know if it’s the palette, associated to other things, but it’s clearly worse than Dark Souls for the Switch and Demon’s Souls for the PS3.
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big disagree, the dynamic lighting in DS2 looks great, I think majula, lost bastille, the gutter and huntsman’s copse all benefit from whatever’s going on with raycasting and whatever universal lighting i don’t know the technical lingo for. also DS2 has the most human-looking character models in the whole series, I’ve made some quite attractive women in that game
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it’s the worst in motion but conversely it seems to screenshot the best, the palette is quite varied whereas the other games (pre-sekiro) seem more interested in finding the beauty in exploring subtle shades of murky green or brown
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maybe it’s the little squat your character does but something about holding up a greatshield in DS2 makes it feel like you’re a mini-fortress, makes me imagine a potential evolution of the series toward something slower and more strategy-like
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