i should effectively finish unpacking today so i indulged with some dark souls 2
in this build i run i spent my souls unwisely on purpose. i went for cool armor over everything, like being able to cast spells or dodge roll. i bought the elite knight set instead of the ring that mostly negates fall damage, etc. the i bought the even pricier alva set after spending enough money at the armor vendor to unlock it
my chest armor was a lucky drop, i didn’t grind for it, but i did go out of my way to get the matching helmet which is a guaranteed drop from a knight in the gutter. the alva gloves and leggings fill out the set. i use the handaxe more than anything, but i also carry the craftsman’s hammer to use against knights. offhand i toggle between a shield, a light crossbow, and rapier (recent addition to use as an ace in the hole in pvp)
the bridge by the iron keep bonfire was the ad hoc pvp hot spot in the original release’s heyday, so much that they added npc invaders in scholar of the first sin
the iron keep stands out as an overtly videogamey area for a souls game. the visual design is pretty garish and generic, and it also serves as a natural xp farm. in level design terms there are lots of callbacks to anor londo in dark souls 1 - lots of catwalks, sheer lethal drops, cathedral architecture, etc, except it forces you to either pay very careful attention to line of sight or be ready to dispatch a silver knight every two seconds or so until you’ve taken out six to eight of them. and of course it looks like a bowser’s castle track from mario kart
no man’s wharf looks a lot better. i grinded the knights in bowser’s castle for a bit and leveled the stats i’m concerned with at the moment up to 20, 27 for vigor, i have exactly 1500 base hp now. the knights drop expensive armor so i headed to no man’s wharf to sell them to gavlan
environmental storytelling lore
the guys with the huge hands drop pyromancer gear (working class swamp magicians in the era of ds1, long since made an academic subject and then professionalized in the time of dark souls 2 – but this area is a bunch of warehouses on a wharf in a pirate’s cove and dress like old school swamp pyromancers) implying they learned hexes and mutated themselves to physically resemble manus of the abyss, a “primordial man” unearthed by scholars in oolacile (they studied him and learned the art of flesh warping figured out how to give themselves dozens of eyes and then laughed themselves to death while the physical force of their nihilism caused their city to gradually slide into a bottomless pit)
unlike manus these guys cower from the light of torches and die in two or three blows from a hand axe
he’s a gyrm, who are dwarf-coded but not short
he sells poison shit. the area before iron keep is full of annoying poison shit. it’s really a dick move for an invader to invade there and use poison consumables. it’s the second poison area in a row, players are all going to be taxed on their anti poison items unless they’ve been grinding
he was holding his own with a morning star, except that a morning star on its own isn’t enough to actually trigger bleed in dark souls 2, you need a supplemental source of bleed because it builds up slowly and starts dropping off quick after a few seconds, and he made the mistake of chasing the invader further into the level
it was a crazy session actually, i’m only going to play ds2 pvp on sundays from now on, for about half an hour i got chain-summoned into bell keeper pvp like in the peak playerbase era
ok time to unpack