My friend beat him the hard way too with his high block knight - I couldn’t even come close. The first attemt that way I got him to 1/3 so I tried many more times - none of them even close. I had the eagle shield +5 (73 stability?) and decent endurance 20ish stat and I also have the ring of favor and protection on (I think I did for that fight too—maybe not). I’m sure it can be done that way, but if you see that jut I’m talking about - I think that it’s intentionally there to help you kill him. There really is no other reason for it to be there.
In this game, I’ll take any trick I can get. Call me a wimp if you must! ;)
Tried PvP last night for the first time since breaking level 100. Wow. I mean wow. Whole new world of different strategies and weapons, epic fights, and good sports all around. Lots of bowing and “good show” type messages after all the fights. Went 6 for 6 until I hit an ugly losing streak :)
Winning in PvP brings back that early game elation of wasting a tough boss. I keep thinking that adrenaline pumping surge is gone, and then I’m running backwards up the steps of a giant cathedral with 3 dudes in kabuki clothes blasting crazy lasers all over. Feeling is back.
Also, anyone have the experience of seeing a red/black phantom fighting alongside a white phantom and a human? That was the end of my winning streak.
I haven’t tried him that way since the patch, so it might not be so feasible with a medium shield since they got nerfed. Actually, it’d be doable, you’d just need a bit more stamina and patience.
Can anyone explain exactly what poise (or armor) and stability (on shields) do? How they relate to each other? It’s surprisingly hard to get a clear answer, or does no one really know?
It was pretty great, all three of them came charging across the bridge in Anor Londo, the white phantom swung at me with a greataxe, I rolled away, and the tracking from his swing brought the axe down on the red phantom. Took 75% of his HP, and I finished him off and got ~50k souls, then his buddies got me. Crazy times, the patch fixed multi so much you can get invaded while invading :)
I certainly don’t know for sure, but my guess so far is that stability primarily affects deflection, ie the ability to stop combos or interrupt heavy hits (and I think there’s a hard ceiling there where at least one move of bigger enemies is always going to be unblockable), and subtracts from the ability of a hit to stagger you when the shield is employed.
Poise seems more a general measure of the inertia of your character relative to being hit, which affects how much stamina is going to be subtracted from you for a hit and how much you’re going to be moved by the impact. For instance, the crystal cave golems are no big deal in heavy armor because you can block their hits with a reasonable expectation of staying where you are give or take a foot or two. In light armor, you can expect to be swept off a crystal bridge even if your shield takes the entire hit and you have plenty of stamina (which means you use your superior speed to avoid the hit in the first place, ideally).
What the overlap between the two is remains unclear to me, although my wife’s light armor/Havel shield build seems just as viable as my heavy armor/eagle-relevant element shield build in terms of being able to endure raw damage overall. I don’t understand well why most shield users would care about upping the attack damage of their shield which most shield upgrades seem focused on, but I guess it has something to do with parry which I don’t do as a greatshield user.
Poise affects how much damage you can take before being staggered. I’m not sure how the numbers relate exactly, or what the timeout is between hits.
Stability affects how much of the damage blocked by the shield gets converted into stamina loss. I think it’s a percent? So 60 stability = 40% of damage is drained from stamina.
Edit: As L_K notes above, it looks like there’s more to it than that…I don’t know if knowing the exact relationship would help much though, because a lot of the numbers are pretty hidden.
Poise is the measure of your resistance to stunlock. When your resistance is overcome you get stunlocked. Like status effects (poison,bleed, etc…) a little bar is filling up, its just invisible for poise unfortunately. A extremely rough guideline is
< 20 - stunned by any hit
20-40 = light weapon resistance (rapiers, claws)
40-60 = medium resistance (spears, swords)
60+ = strong resistance (greatswords, axes)
Multiple hits with any weapon will eventually stun you, now matter how high your poise, leading to my thinking that a bar is filling under the hood.
Stability is a little easier. It measures how much of your stamina gets taken away when you block a direct hit on your shield. The higher the stability, the more stamina loss is mitigated.
So you don’t see any change in stamina reduction for higher poise? I’ll have to check again this weekend. I guess it’s just a matter of experimentation. I also wonder how to measure the impact of the various magic spells in terms of what you need to endure them.
LK, that is totally possible and didn’t even think about that as an outcome. To make this morass murkier, I think that equipment with higher poise or stability actually reduces the rate of stamina regeneration :)
Poise also, on top of what he said, affects how much damage you take when getting hit during certain moves. With high enough poise, you take less damage while getting hit while attacking or casting spells.
It doesn’t seem like stability is linear either, I think I see a huge difference between shields in the 50’s and shields in the 70’s.
I doubt anything in this game is simply linear, even the stat leveling in only linear when you look at it in small ranges. The slope changes at certain points. Someone at From Software has a gigantic spreadsheet for all this I’m sure. :)
Some do, certainly the Eagle shield can be increased in stability quite a bit. But for instance Havel’s shield and others will primarily upgrade the damage statistic.
Charles, how do you measure how much poise cuts in damage relative to the straight damage/elemental resistances that usually come with armor that increases poise? I assumed the damage reduction was a product of the overall increased resistance and the inability to get a critical hits.
I’ve been trying my hand at PvP and one thing that I’m noticing is that I keep getting back stabbed by people in front of me. Is there some exploit going on, or is it just lag messing with me?
That sounds like lag, yeah. I’ve had that happen a few times, and it’s deeply frustrating. It’s one of the reasons why they had to nerf the homing abilities - spells like homing soulmass and crystal soulmass ignored lag entirely, which made them perfectly effective even when you were playing somebody who lagged so badly they teleported all over. It’s one of the reasons why I reserve a special hatred for anybody who relies solely on those spells for PVP, and try to go out of my way to fuck them up.
Just ate some shit in the Tomb of the Giants. Going down for retrieval at low level, carefully taking down or evading the giant skeletons, die trying to strategically jump down from precipice to precipice. Fuck me. All my humanity…
Helped a few people take down Pinwheel though and then took him down myself. Won the Mask of the Father, which is great because it scares my girlfriend and even moreso because I based my current character’s face on hers.
