The Lord Vessel certainly eliminates any 10 minute journeys to any blacksmith. With it, you can get from any bonfire to Rickert in about 2 minutes, Andre in less than 4 and the Giant in probably 5 or so, depending on how fast you can fight a couple of knights. Vamos is really the only exception.
And since it doesn’t seem very dark souls-like to me to have instant access to anything, I suppose it never really bothered me.
And I also suppose you’re correct that if you want to understand exactly how to max out weapons - a normal thing to want to understand in a normal RPG - you have to look online. But I don’t understand the first thing about it. What you wrote was all news to me. Yet somehow I ended up with a lightning halberd and a fire murakumo. The game works if you just upgrade what you have when you have it. Eventually, assuming you don’t upgrade more than a few weapons (which is a logical approach), you’ll run into blacksmiths who can do something else with a weapon, something the others couldn’t do. Then you see what it costs, buy it if you can or remember and come back on one of your inevitable return journeys that you would have had to have taken anyway.
My main problem with upgrades is that between various things, just about every weapon upgrade I did went from 0 to fully-loaded in one shot. e.g., I went from a plain, ordinary claymore to an Enchanted Claymore +5 in one trip to the blacksmith. I’d rather have more of a progression.
There are a few factors that contribute to this: By the time I’d get an ember and schlep it to a blacksmith, I’d have enough materials saved to substantially upgrade an ascended weapon of the new type. Contrariwise, materials are rare enough that I was never willing to waste them on upgrading something that I didn’t know I was going to push all the way.
It certainly doesn’t if you’re talking about actually getting things done vs making social calls on individual blacksmiths. Make a Lightning weapon (2 different blacksmiths if you stocked up on large titanite beforehand, otherwise add the giant blacksmith or the merchant of jumping in Sen’s Fortress) or make a fire weapon (Satan’s asshole blacksmith, possible to miss entirely without outside guidance), and you are talking about an otherwise tense, well-paced game that has inexplicably included mindless commuting to crafting since the fights are trivial. My point is not that I can’t or won’t do it, or that it breaks the game, but that I don’t like doing it and would rather be able to consolidate upgrade abilities and vendors as you could in Demon’s Souls between the Nexus, vendors near your spawn points and a short elevator ride in 2-2. I don’t see an advantage to the sprawling method currently in place, and the lordvessel represents a half-measure relief.
Damien, that’s a good point. It felt like my upgrades were very incremental and exciting with that first +1 to +5 weapon and shield, and exciting again in that final jump to +15 or so, but in between just huge leaps. Not necessarily broken, but I’m wondering what the intention was in terms of pacing.
Jape
1744
Worked great in demon’s souls. Only 2 blacksmiths and second one required 1min of travel.
I really wish they would port this to the PC; it uses the PhyreEngine so it would be rather easy to make a port to the PC and if they used Steam it would be a couple more millions in their pockets… bloody console exclusives. :(
Agreed, there were few NPCs that were difficult to get to once unlocked. Nearly all were in the Nexus or very close to the starting of a level. Any that weren’t seconds away from the Nexus usually didn’t have much of value, they might have sold some upgrade materials but that’s about it.
The weapon upgrade paths are certainly better in Dark Souls, they’re normalized, things upgrade at +5 or +10 and you have to use new materials to continue from +5 to +6 (and again at 10) so there’s some indication of things being different, a noticeable point of change that Demon’s Souls lacked. In Demon’s Souls different weapons upgraded to different paths at different points, they also used different amounts of materials to upgrade, there didn’t appear to be any consistency. You’d just have to upgrade and check with the special Blacksmith at every step to see if something new opened up. If you upgraded past a branch point you were screwed for that particular weapon, also annoying because many unique weapons are upgraded from standard ones of particular levels.
Why they decided to bury the Blacksmiths I don’t understand, if they wanted them scattered in the world, fine, make the lord vessel take you to a bonfire RIGHT FUCKING NEXT TO THEM.
In general I find the seamless interconnected world to be a drawback to the game. So much more busy work traveling around to do things that were all centralized in Demon’s Souls. Also Getting back to the Firelink Shrine is just annoying at times, where the Nexus was almost always easily accessed.
I know I’d damn well buy it again to play with a better framerate and more pretties on my pc.
I had to become pretty comfortable with burning homeward bones in order to retain sanity. Really makes the homeward miracle seem a waste.
On that note, I miss the beast talisman from DS1. That really made hybrid faith/magic builds a lot easier to manage.
Hanacker
1749
Agreed on both counts. I pushed faith to get homeward but then only used it for farming rats in the painted world.
This is whats killing me in Demon’s Souls. Archstone Shards are 5K from the vendor in the Nexus. I was so accustomed to burning homeward bones for 400 souls a pop that the jump in price kinda floored me. Is there any other vendor that sells the Archstone Shards cheaper? Whenever I kill a boss, and have a nice load of souls, I always forget to buy the homeward equivalent from the miracle dude.
Jape
1751
Couple runs to shrine of storms should fix that missing 20k souls.
I think the Wiki is correct, only Patches sells them. I did try farming them from the rats for a while, but decided it didn’t make sense because farming souls and buying them was easier. Really, getting your faith up and buying Evacuate has the best utility.
You do know you can just run back to the start of the level and use the Archstone there to get back to the Nexus. This only takes a short while as all the enemies on the way back should be dead.
Yes, Evacuate is one of the best spells in the game, enables so much farming.
Thanks for all the tips everyone. I just hunkered down and got the 20000 for evacuate. I’m about 25 hours in and the Dragon God, Storm King, and Penetrator are down.
White soap stone: Zero souls.
Enough titanite to upgrade my knight’s armour: Maybe 5,000 souls?
Enough titanite to upgrade the halberd to +5, making it hit as hard as the Drake Sword (after dex and str scaling): 10,000 souls.
Tag-teaming an invading black phantom, shrugging off multiple backstabs, and smashing him to his death off a ledge (after being routinely slaughtered by BPs in the first game), then killing the Gargoyles: Priceless.
Jape
1756
noticed pretty nasty bug in the game.
was fighting titanite demon in anor londo, killed it and got summoned before i was able to loot it -> demon titanite went poof (exit/reload didnt help either).
Need some real noob-tastic help here.
About 3 hours into the game but completely stuck at on the undead burg. I’m at the first bonfire where you need to kill an archer then run across the bridge and eventually get to a big boss sorta guy down a corridor.
I have been killed about 30 times and levelled up about 6 or 7 times since I’ve been stuck here.
Any advice?
I’m playing a knight with most of my points thrown into dex, str and vit.
Do the enemies level up with me each time I die and they respawn?
Hanacker
1758
Ignore the big boss sorta guy down a corridor and go in the opposite direction of that corridor. You don’t need to kill him and if you’re having troubles you can save him until much later.
Enemies do not level up.
Edit: The big boss is a big black knight with a sword and not a small knight with a rapier, right?
kerzain
1759
What is your problem exactly, the room with three enemies in it? If not, how far past the bridge are you getting? (By the way, there’s no boss in that room, the heavy armored guy is the same as the heavy armored guys you’ve seen before, like on the way to the merchant etc).
If it’s that room: It could be difficult to fight all three at once. You should try dashing up to the entrance of the room, then dashing right back to area in front of the bonfire. This will split the room by pulling only 1 or 2 of the creatures out. Just run fast enough to avoid the bombs being hurled on you and you’ll be okay.
If you’re getting further than that you might be running into the Black Knight down a set of stairs (past the three steel armored guys and the sniper). Don’t bother with him for now, go up the stairs to the left instead.
As mentioned, ignore the black knight. (I assume that’s the big boss sorta guy you’re talking about.) He’s tough at your level, and entirely optional. If you do want to take him on, the key is to backstab him repeatedly while dodging or blocking his attacks.
Beware of splitting too many points between dex and str. A mix can be good to get access to some weapons that require both, but for scaling damage you’ll want to focus on one or the other.
Basically, stats serve two roles: They unlock access to things by meeting certain prerequisites, and they scale your damage output. The former is a this-much-but-no-more kind of thing–that is, if you need 12 dex to get access to a certain weapon, there’s no value at all in having 13 dex. The latter (stat scaling) is where a big investment pays off–every point will make you do more damage.
You want to pick at most one scaling stat to focus on, so you can reap the big damage payoff from going deep.
That said, don’t worry too much about screwing yourself. There are damage options that don’t rely on stat scaling at all that will carry you perfectly well to the end of the game. This is actually one of the most brilliant aspects to the character development system, I think–you can produce a complete wreck of a character, and still keep going by using one of the non-stat-based damage sources.
