blocking his attacks leaves you with not enough stamina to do anything especially if you run into him early (I tried this the first four times I died to him) but it’s a good tip for some other enemies
pursuer is why I started relying on the shield less. the further I’ve been getting in the less it seems like you can just block through enemy attacks and fight back in general
shield is great for normal guys but I want that off hand to be full of sword or spear asap
any way you cut it running into that asshole first after last giant is going to suck. i don’t use lock on all the time, sprint to avoid attacks etc and at that point in the game I had to use the summon from the dark hallway, try it multiple times until I barely beat him and then he still ganked me in lost bastille a billion times anyway when I was much stronger lol
If he does impale you with the curse attack the projectile attack he does gives you a great opportunity to heal and damage him because you have to get close to him to avoid it and he takes forever to stop shitting out projectiles. I died to the projectiles a lot until I realized this, then it was kind of a free opportunity
Blocking still works up till the final boss with a sufficiently heavy and upgraded greatshield.
DkS2 is the game that taught me about how good greatshields are (EDIT: called it “easy mode” initially but I agree that’s an exaggeration), I invested in STR because clubs are strong against all the armored enemies and eventually noticed the side benefit of equipping bigger shields is actually the main benefit.
I went for them on first playthrough of DkS3 and Elden Ring later, and it helps even more with their multi-phase bosses where it’s useful to turtle back and observe how their new behaviors work before taking any risks
all the clubs I have with armor and a giant shield and my bow makes dealing with equip load awful
And yes I didn’t say blocking was useless there’s just lots of bosses and guys who I have blocked and then not had enough stamina to attack. I have literally heard this “shields are easy mode” shit 100 times and it’s annoying. In my experience they’re helpful obviously but there are a lot of situations where I have to stop focusing on blocking and just dodge so I can actually get hits in
yeah shields are easy mode is the ds2 ‘you know you can dupe items’ of demons souls, I hear it so much
nothing is easy mode! it’s just situationally useful, like every other tip in this game
shields are another thing that DS2 has a reputation for nerfing super hard when imo it’s more accurate to say it’s the first souls game where theyre balanced even a little
there’s no non-cosmetic reason to use anything but a heater shield in demons souls or dark souls and that kinda rules but probably needed to be tweaked
if you want to block stuff super good you should want to use a great shield, if you want to parry super good you ought to have a buckler, and a medium sized shield should be OK at both & weigh in between without excelling. The first couple souls games have dinky lil shields that can repel the biggest giants & riposte the swordiest swashbucklers
talking about shields, you recover stamina faster while you aren’t guarding so one thing i’ve ended up doing with pursuers (and a few other series enemies) is trying to walk around his attacks (while guarding) and then dropping guard during the little gap before the next hit
my goal is to just outwalk him rather than dodge (because with pursuer you can) but the shield is nice to take the hit if i fuck up, i don’t have the guts to do this without protection. if i block only one of his attacks (and this depends on your shield stability and stamina so it doesn’t work as universal advice) i can attack him once or twice before getting a little bit of distance and redoing the thing
ngl every strategy has some kinda learning curve
Thats 99% of how i beat dark souls 1 the first time (as my first souls game), circle strafing & timing guards against every boss
i beat artorias with a heater shield+15 & 40 endurance lol
(i like that its also like the bread & butter strategy in sekiro like literally the only difference is u hold guard to restore stamina[posture] instead of releasing it. same basic rhythm though!)
but this is what im saying!! You only have a small selection of decent shields at the point where daphny is and they arent even close to 40 end.
this is my only point really yeah
oh i was just kinda rambling about how busted shields could be in the first game and going into a reverie thinking about dark souls like im prone to do. i still think its easier to dodge him even with low agility or w/e
you don’t have to fight Pursuer either if he gets too annoying. or i mean u can put him off for awhile, at least
it would be 100% easier to block his shit if you came back after no mans wharf with some levels I imagine. I was obstinate and just kept fighting him like a moron because he killed me on the gank platform in the forest earlier so I had a grudge…it’s just one grudge after another…one texture after another
yeah even if you can beat him hes mostly an alternate path to the same level you can get to from the wharf & you need at least 1 stinky old tree branch to continue that level regardless
You get so many chances to kick his ass in vengeance i hear ya
yea if you’re at lost bastille you might as well go back and fight him because hes all over that area anyway especially in that HORRIBLE NO GOOD COURTYARD i spent an hour trying to figure out how to traverse
I’m thinking one thing lurking in the background is the shield Stability stat is a bit like DkS2’s infamous Agility. Like if your agility happens to be one or two points too low, rolls don’t work properly, so people get wildly different results from seemingly identical situations and tactics. That can happen with shield stability over the entire Souls series to some degree.
I don’t know what kind of weird math is behind this, but for some reason a shield with 60 stability vs. one with 57 stability doesn’t have 5% improved stamina consumption on block, it feels closer to 50%. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and it’s also hard to learn that from noncommittal build tinkering, given you usually have to invest +2 upgrade levels into a shield before it gains 1 point of stability.
You say shields are especially broken in DkS1 and I take you at your word there, but in my first DkS1 playthrough I actually believed shields sucked. I didn’t pick heater shield at first, and I wrongly assumed upgrading your shield had a similar benefit to upgrading armor (so not really called for unless I have plenty of extra titanite). Even after realizing maybe I should try a shield for Bed of Chaos given its gigantic hitboxes, I went with a +0 medium shield and didn’t have enough stamina to keep running after hits, so it barely helped. I happened to have a different initial experience with shields in DkS2 and only became a heavy shield user from that point on.
hard to be a shieldbearer
i call that the sugar cookie shield cuz that’s what it looks like in-game just a big barely textured sugar cookie.
it’s my favorite looking shield but it has horrible stability so i’m only using it because it’s light. it was really nice early on though when my choices were like that the buckler and the crimson parma
i like the light blue painted wooden kite shield you can get early on, i usually wear that around on my back for awhile cuz it looks nice