4171

I have a whetblade, I’m not sure which one, that I found somewhere, I can’t remember where, that lets me select bleed as an affinity when I set an ash of war to a weapon.

4172

When you apply an ash to an armament, there are whetstones that allow you to choose an affinity other than the default. I have bloody slash on my cleaver, which would normally apply a blood affinity, but I chose heavy instead.

4173

So I found my way to the underground city (and now lake of rot) and am having a great time working my way through. Thanks for the nudge on this! I was getting pretty frustrated with my other explorations.

4174

To be in power stance, you have to have 2 of the same weapon type. The best and easiest, is to start a samurai and pick up the extra uchi in the tomb. Those are actually really good fully leveled. The game will let you dual wield anything, but you won’t get the correct attack set unless they are the same weapon class, i.e. the left bumper on a controller won’t give you the 2 weapons at once combos.

4175

You can also power stance a katana with a wakizashi like Musashi. I think that might be the only exception to the same weapon type rule.

4176

Thanks! I think I already have the thing l, just need to go back to the NPC. I’m easily distracted and this game is nothing if not a million distractions:)

4177

Shame it didn’t grab you, I suspect you may be missing out. I know what you mean about initial impressions, but oddly enough some of my absolute favourite things (games, music, movies) I actually disliked at first. So much so that if I find something I dislike I’ll usually try really hard to get into it, in case it turns out to be one of those special cases. Often it isn’t, sadly, but I recall the original Dark Souls was one of these. I had a very much “fuck this dumb game” response to the tutorial boss, but once I grokked the game and how to approach it, I was hooked.

4178

I love the upgrade system. What’s wrong?

4179

I haven’t taken the time to compare for myself and mostly going off of word of mouth, comparing and contrasting different sorcery staffs seems complicated.

Meteorite Staff has a lot going for it; low requirements, relatively easy to get along with Stone Sling early game, passive bonus to gravity spells. Downside, not upgradable with Smithing Stones. A stat called Sorcery Scaling is listed at 158 and is the highest among all my staves. Oh, and attribute scaling is D for Str and S for Int.

Academy Glintstone Staff requires 28 Int but only scales at B (and E Str) and has a Sorcery Scaling value of 60. It has no passive effects. Upside - can be upgraded with Smithing Stones.

I’m told the Demi-Human Queen Staff is excellent despite low requirements; Int scales at B, Sorcery Scaling is 145. No passive effects and can be upgraded.

I found a Carian Glintblade Staff on a sorceror in a tower in the greater Liurnia area that offers passive boost to Glintblade Sorcery (i.e. the Phalanx spells and Glintblade and Carian Sword. It requires 22 Int, Scales Int at B, can be upgraded; Sorcery Scaling is 135.

Short of an extensive test I can’t decide what to make of them, esp. the mysterious Sorcery Scaling. Does anyone know of a good resource for this information? Typically I would expect that the higher the requirements, the better the Staff, period. But there is upgrading to consider and this Sorcery Scaling business too. I didn’t even get to the Ashes of War bit; some permit them, some dont…

4180

The PS5 loads way faster than the Xbox, Xbox loads are double the length of PS5, and you die a lot in this game so loads will matter.

And again, on PS5 if you buy digital you can download the PS4 version which runs at a near locked 60FPS with slightly slower than PS5 load times but still faster than Xbox Series X load times.

4181

What is there to love?! Every single thing about it is annoying.

To begin with the trivial, the damned blacksmith doesn’t need to have a four line dialogue to be gotten through every single time I want to do an upgrade. Went out of the room to buy stones or grab something? Have fun going through the dialogue again! Tedious.

Again trivial but annoying: why is the merchant for stones on the other side of the area from the Smith? Why can’t he just sell them?

Regular weapons are annoying because of the dumb geometric progression of stones to keep upgrading them. Somber stones are more sensible with the one stone = one level. The regular system makes no sense at all.

The open world means it’s possible to get into an area and find a stone that’s two levels above your current level and be unable to use it because you don’t have the intermediate stone level and don’t know where to find it.

I’ve already complained about the trivial cost of actually doing the upgrade in the thread. It doesn’t gate anything, and there you are at the Smith wanting to use those six smithing stones you finally have but whoops, you’re a hundred runes short, better endure another couple loading screens and an absolutely pointless combat to get them so you can just press the A button again to get that +1.

The game shovels tons of weapons at you but you’ll never use most of them because you just upgraded your weapon to get here and now this new thing means going through that system all over again if it seems kind of cool. Nope.

God, I just hate everything about it. If we want to preserve the “RPG” aspect of the system then weapons should have state requirements and scale on stats, period, no “upgrades”. The current system is tedious beyond belief.

4182

I don’t know about that. Most of the cool rewards I get in this game from exploration are these smithing stones or somber smithing stones.

There’s also a ton of other stuff too, but it seems to me that a lot of the other rewards you find can be exciting or boring depending on the character builds. But smithing stones are pretty universally rewarding for every character.

4183

Damn @Kolbex I had Stockholm syndrome and didn’t even notice it was annoying until you pointed it out. But you’re right, it’s really annoying!

4184

You know what else would be rewarding? If the game repeatedly kicked you in the nuts but stopped for ten seconds every time you found a smithing stone.

I’m sure they could find something else to put on those bodies. It’s only rewarding to find them because the system is so pointlessly aggravating.

4185

I try to avoid the wiki for most things in this game in particular and From games in general, but one thing I rely on it heavily for is weapon effectiveness. When I find a new weapon I usually go and look at its upgrade path stats and more importantly read the comments on its page, which are somewhat surprisingly generally very helpful. Why? Because upgrading a new weapon is so fuckin’ tedious! Before I lock myself into it I want to make sure it’s going to be at least mostly worth it. If it wasn’t for this dumb system I’d just try them myself, which would be the cool and interesting thing to be able to do, but From says no.

4186

I saw a Youtube video where a guy did side by side testing of the Metorite staff and the upgraded Demi-Human staff, using Rock Sling I think, and the Meteorite staff still did the most damage. FWIW

4187

I can’t follow. It is the used system since Demon’s Souls. And I like it that you have to make decissions, what to upgrade and what not. Usually you can buy upgrading materials when you progress deeper into the game. Also, it prevents you to get overpowered by your weapon upgrades. Because in this game, weapon upgrades actually matter.

They toned it down a bit by introducing ashes of war. Before that, you had to use special coals to infuse more or less permanently special upgrade effects like bleed or holy…

4188

Yes, I know, and I’ve hated it in every single game.

4189

Agreed.

Plus not only have they improved it with the Ashes of War system, I also felt more free to experiment with different weapons for longer in this one. Trying the whip, the hookclaws, the straight swords, the spears, the hammers. Having a lot of low level content in Weeping Peninsula and Limgrave meant that I had many many hours of content where i could experiment with many types of weapons before even upgrading any of them to +1.

4190

Why? What did this system provide that made you “freer” to experiment than in the past? Without upgrading, which you say you didn’t, your damage would have been subpar with any of them. But was it subpar because you didn’t upgrade or would the weapon still be subpar even if you upgraded them? You can’t know!