I understand the design reasoning behind dark soul boss runs, some of them are quite good. As mentioned above, the run to the gargoyles is great because the hollow hallway is a unique challenge and the run itself once optimized is only about 2 minutes long. However, some of the runs are just long, uninteresting, and needlessly obnoxious when you are already struggling with the boss itself. I greatly appreciated sekiro abandoning the runs.
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Capra Demon seems impossible until you learn a trick that makes it one of the more manageable bosses.
This is probably what scratchmonkey was hinting at, but if you run to the right and then up the stairs on the left and out on the narrow ledge, all three of them will often follow you. You can kill the dogs up there and Capra will fall down. At that point, you can get in a free jump attack and then run up the stairs again (and again).
I donāt know whether you are attempting to avoid any such hints, though.
I think my mistake might be that Iām trying to run for the stairs to the left right away. It pretty much guarantees I eat a hit from one of the three of them.
Iāve managed to get your strategy going once! I just, uh, didnāt make it.
So long as I manage to survive getting onto the stairs and taking out the dogs, I think I can handle it. Itās justā¦doing that part, haha.
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Arguably youāre ahead of the curve there anyway, since you went to the gargoyles first. I forget if you can even get that far without fighting the Capra demon if you donāt take the master key.
Oh, I did take the master key, and learned my lesson before fighting the Taurus Demon about digging around where Iām not supposed to (namely that knight with a huge club who hangs out in the lower section of that tower).
Took a break from Souls-ing and played one of the Musou games. Full on brain-shutdown, pushing buttons to make the numbers go up. Some cheap dopamine for a rough week.
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Oh thatās Havel. Heās cool.
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Yessss
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Wanting to describe the shit Iāve found goofing around in Dark Souls makes me sound like an unhinged 5 year old rattling off shit.
āAnd then I went underground and there were naked people crying and I saw a ghost on the water and got scared and rolled into the water and then I ran past the big rock demon and got attacked by some trees and then I went back to the shrine and the floor was snoring and thenā
I guess what Iām saying is that this game is pretty good.
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Yeah thatās exactly why DkS1 is still the best game From has made. And the most memorable storytelling moments are still ahead of you.
DkS1 especially has the largest number of head-explody moments like āI canāt believe they really went thereā¦ like they donāt even care that this could be mistaken for terrible game design for XYZ reasons, this idea/experience generates so much enthusiasm even just from thinking about it that they had to put it inā.
Iām thinking of (donāt unspoiler this Grandpa until you beat the game!) the curse system, the Ash Lake entrance, the firelink flame going out, the Anor Londo archer, and the way key bonfires in Senās Fortress and Blighttown are hidden. Like the sheer guts to take all those design risks at once, because the overriding imperative is that the gameplay always tells a meaningful story, never becomes rote, and is perpetually on the knife edge of a counterfactual narrative which in fact other players do experience and also in fact some of them quit playing over it
Demonās had many of those too, but after that they sorta started to forget thatās what these games used to be about
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I never get tired of listening to someoneās first play through of a souls game, keep it coming.
I went and picked up a copy of DS3 with the DLC for a grand total of $11 at GameStop and Iāve been playing a fist flinging strongman cleric of god named BURTON, heavy caestus and miracles only. He looks like this and is desperately hoping for someone to drop a hat so he can cover his cold head:
I went for an early dancer kill so I could grind my (at that point flaminā) caestus up to +9 before heading into the undead burg. Got a couple of lucky armor drops from the lothric knights that helped immensely and I was eventually able to punch her to death at like SL 15. I was never a hardcore souls player but doing the DS Remastered platinum trophy run (which includes two NG+ sequence breaking speed runs) was really fun so now Iām always on the lookout for ways to break the games ok subsequent playthroughs.
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extremely strong argument well articulated
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After years of playingā¦I wanna be diplomatic so Iāll say āperfectly adequateā open world games, Iām geekinā pretty hard playing this and constantly realizing āholy shit, they hid a little thing in this corner that Iāve run by a dozen times.ā
I mean, I completely missed the first merchant entirely, and didnāt find him til after I beat the Bell Gargoyles. And I only just realized (maybe because Iām bad at reading the terrain) that thereās a stairwell off to the side of my little Firelink Shrine heckler that spirals off to an elevator, and I only noticed it because I saw a message on the ground there from atop the little aqueduct.
I canāt imagine how much fun it was to make this game. To hide little item-holding corpses and weirdos on the edge of little paths you gotta seek out to find. And to just, yāknow, craft the most rat bastard moments imaginable.
I ran past that titanite demon into the garden area, and came across an item and just, sighed. I could see 'em, those grassy tree fuckers, waiting for me. I knew I wasnāt gonna survive it. There was a fog door next to me. I wasnāt gonna survive what was behind that, either. So I went in there, grabbed the thing, and ate shit trying to roll out of the way of the ambush I knew was waiting for me. Thatāsā¦thatās great!
All this, and I get the fun of having picked the master key, so Iām constantly finding myself bumbling into shit Iām not even close to being ready for.
Gonna spend some time trying to get backstabbing (Iām bad at it!) and maybe even parrying (Iām abysmal at it!) down.
Kinda bummed I let the whole āgit gudā culture thatās ginned up around this deter me from playing it for so long. It aināt easy, but itās not insurmountable, either. Just gotta keep at it and learn from fucking up!
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tips so you donāt pull your hair out wondering why it might not be working:
- backstabbing is easy when you unlock and just walk behind them. only human-sized enemies and a few beasts can be backstabbed, and some humanoid enemies in heavy armor canāt be backstabbed either. every non-boss enemy in the game can be walked behind because their turning speed is slower than your rotational speed at point blank, and itās made more difficult with camera lock.
- parrying only works on humanoid enemies at point blank, and the parry window is almost immediately after you press the button. if you parry too far, or too early, youāll get a pseudo-guard that drains a bit of health, but the benefit is still that you only consume the amount of stamina for the parry.
Itās also completely viable to ignore both of these mechanics especially if you play with a two-handed weapon so donāt get too hung up over it imo
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Camera locking was a huge, huge part of my problem with the Capra Demon - I was trying to lock on to do a plunge attack, or āproperlyā guard, and wound up moving way too slowly to run around him when I needed to hustle back upstairs.
Locking on is handy, but Iām realizing thereās a certain, uh, fuzziness to blocking where you pretty obviously donāt need to be absolutely face-to-face for it to work.
Love how much Iām able to learn from those handful of guys up on the hill from the shrine (though I keep fucking up and getting hit by those firebombs - Iāll figure out how to get to that guy unscathed more times than not soon enough!).
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I had zero issues with those two later dudes everyone complains about but the Capra demon and those damn dawgs were so much trouble. It didnāt even occur to me to not try to use lock on til someone here suggested it. Itās such a weird fight in that itās designed to break a basic control mechanic. Like a merv dropping chaff.
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Now that I kinda know what Iām doing, Iām debating starting over with a different class. Dunno if thatās a bad idea or if I should just keep going with the thief Iāve got (given the options, I went with the one that looked cool and had a key 
)
1 Like
highly recommend pyromancer for having the best stats and the only lv1 class, meaning early levels are cheap
itās totally worth it imo
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May give that a go. I didnāt wanna do any magic after feeling dirty as hell using the Royal for the brief time I dabbled with Demonās Souls, but I may just anyway.
Also figure maybe Iāll leave behind the master key. And, uh, binoculars. Dunno why I thought I would be able to use those.
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pyromancies are significantly weaker and less practical than sorceries but they donāt require any stat to scale damage, insted you upgrade the hand itself like a weapon, but the real reason to pick the class is the decent physical attributes with the added bonus of two spell slots just in case you want to fiddle with magic.
and like, you can access all of the starting gear in locations fairly close to firelink. the starting stats and equipment donāt matter after the first third of the game. by then youāll have found new gear or spells and have departed too far from the starting stats for it to matter
I personally always use master key because i know exactly where to get the items i want for my build and prefer to do them in sequence as fast as possible while skipping a surprisingly large number of bosses. if itās your first playthrough you might as well just go through every area in order and see a lot of cool dungeons and bosses. itāll just take a lot longer and be more balanced (difficult) based on what upgrades you can access without āsequence breakingā
anyway sorry for being overly excited to infodump about dark souls itās not every day i get to interact with a newer player
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