/dsg/ - Demons/Dark Souls General

>want to kill a tougher mid-early game boss before you're barely out of the tutorial
>complain and shitpost on Veeky Forums instead of just playing the game for a little bit longer and actually learning how to beat the mobs

IS HEIDE'S TOWER THE CUPHEAD OF DARK SOULS?!

>Complaining about DS2 being too hard.

See last thread when we were discussing textures being the least of DS2's problems. This is what I meant.

Unless you're like, actually retarded DS2 is like the easiest of the 3 dark souls games. SOTFS barely did much to fix that either all it did was stack on a few more slightly harder enemies.

I can't even.

TEN?
Try THIRTEEN!
And sometimes the game wants you to fight TWO enemies AT THE SAME TIME!
It's IMPOSSIBLE!

thanks for the attempts, I summoned another dude who ended up dying but I somehow managed to finish the job. Cheers.

>My ass, you aren't.

Old Dragonslayer drops the same number of souls (and does about as much damage) as ruin sentinels, Pursuer, and smelter demon.

Think of it this way. When you beat dragonrider, you unlock a secret new hard optional level called "Heide's Tower Pt. 2". You are not entitled to a second boss fight right after the first, you just transformed the area into one of a higher difficulty.

>Dragonslayer
>tougher mid-early game boss
And these are people pretending to be competent. I should have known only Reddit was left when the traditional acronyms were nowhere to be seen.

Don't forget all those red phantoms that ambush you on NG+.

tedious != hard

Really sorry wasting your time like that. Out of practice and whatnot. Burned an ascetic to kill him myself tomorrow.

>you can waltz through the entire game with just a Greatsword 1-shotting every enemy in sight
Ah yes, very tedious.

That's not what tedious means though. DS2 is only tedious if you're dying or under-equipped. It's the least tedious game because you can always do multiple things, if you get bored with one area, just go to another. It's all optional but also all progress.

You're still on this?

I mean whatever helps you sleep at night pal. If it really means that much to you to not admit you're shit at literally the easiest fucking game in the series then go ahead.

>guy wearing karla's 1h a GS can outpoise me, a guy using a CGS 2h and with 33.79 poise
what the fuck happened to this game

I see now. Even the PvEfags left, it's all just let's players pretending to have any authority over these games.

You're going to come back a few months from now and realize how wrong you were and how much you actually like DS2.

Or you'll quit because you don't have the time to get over your bad first impressions.

Either way, you're just embarassing yourself. DS2 has legitimate flaws but having the heide knights wake up so that there's actually new things in the area between you and the old dragonslayer is not one of them.

That ogre behin the wall in aldia''s keep is fucking designed to break open the other one isn't it?

>oh no
>I complained about an easy level being hard
>now everyone is calling me out for being the shitter I am!
>better pretend to be an oldfag
>that'll teach them to call me out for being shit

>DS2 has legitimate flaws but
I keep hearing this, yet you're not willing to admit any of them.

Are you sure you were in hyperarmor frames? Latency can fuck that up sometimes.

>fucking around in invasions, carrying a small buckler and crossbow
>hit and run using crossbow across the entire map
>crossbow does shit damage but fun to fuck around with people
>some guy comes in R1 spamming
>parry him
>shoot him in his face
>still do shit damage

I remember when this general used to mock this very behavior.

It's proof that 90% of players in the "community" are just there to get attention, and they would have never played or cared about the games if they weren't popular enough to make memes of. When your interest in the game is that shallow and hollow, once the sources of attention start to die down you get more and more desperate to keep going.

Guy must've been from brazil or china if that's the case

Making the game play faster requires precise timings and extraneous button presses to animation cancel after every action. Given that the ability to do so is technically part of the game, they should have reduced recovery frames in the first place to save the extra wear on my R1 button.

If someone is having difficulty at any part of the game and comes here for advice, I'll help them.
If someone is having difficulty in the second fucking level of a Souls game and their first reaction is to blame the game, they're shit and evidently someone has to remind them.

Shut the fuck up. You're killing the threads.

probably the same dude that killed /bbg/

God forbid someone actually plays the games here, that might disrupt the RP.

>I keep hearing this, yet you're not willing to admit any of them.
It wasn't relevant to the specific question, but if you want to hear them, sure.

>Really poorly explained story and controls
DS2 has a lot of depth to the combat (animation canceling, quick attacks/quick rolls, unique weapon tracking, unique counter modifiers, sliding scale, independent control of iframes) that weren't in DS1, but it is extremely poorly explained how any of this works, and players would only figure it out through talking to other players or stumbling across it while practicing. The story is also very poorly explained, that's one reason Aldia was added. There's no Frampt equivalent in DS2 and the most notorious example of failed player pathing is the lack of any guidance after you get the ashen mist heart, or king's ring. The tutorial is bare-bones and none of the stats are explained (and most players are unaware that hitting select would explain the stats for you). Same goes for the torch mechanics, and how nearly every level in the game has unique torch bits, but they're horribly obscure.

>Strange visual design choices and awkward animations
DS2 was (I think) their first attempt at in-house motion capture animation for the entire game (DS1 had a few, like gestures, that were mocap but they were outsourced) and it shows. A lot of animations, while "realistically slow" were also very awkward and clearly didn't have enough mocap points. This is really obvious with humanoid mobs like (yes) the heide knights and falcolners. Some of this was also fueled by the fact that Makoto satoh, Miyazaki's preferred visual designer, was replaced by Yuzo Kojima, who basically wanted to make a high fantasy spiritual successor to Evergrace. Instead of being dark, the colors were vibrant and kitchy on purpose, kind of like Final Fantasy 7 vs Final Fantasy 10. The graphics were, mostly, heavily gimped from early builds because they were struggling to meet 1080p 30fps on consoles.

hahaha you died during an invasion
>your souls are now where you died, not where you invaded
this is stupid
>die as a white, no souls lost
>die as a covenant invader, no souls lost
>die as a blue, no souls lost
why is it that only red orb invaders have to waste time going to pick up their shit?

I don't think it's meant to be a punishment for reds, as much as it's supposed to be a minor incentive for the others.

Quickest way in ds2 to farm twinkling titanite

>Quickest way in ds2 to farm twinkling titanite
uninstall ds2

Rule of thumb of invading, always expend your souls before going in.

Archdrakes at Shrine of Amana.

>Archdrakes at Shrine of Amana.
The priestly dudes with the warhammers?

Newfag to Dark Souls here.

Does Demon Souls share any continuity with it? Or is the universe and everything much different?

Completely different. Dark Souls is Miyazaki's lawyer-friendly way of making a multi-platform version of Demon's Souls. They share similarities because Miyazaki's a hack who constantly recycles ideas, but that's about it.

Yup. I've gotten good drops from the priestesses as well.

Different universe, but the games have a lot of gameplay similarities and share many themes.

>stitched together level design
DS2's world was designed like DeS's world, but with a fundamental problem: They still had mid-level bonfires and there was no obvious warping from the hub world. This means that most players were completely unaware (again, player pathing issues) that there were so many pathways you could take from Majula. But the worst part is that each level was designed separately, and then seemingly stitched together with some horrible transition areas (iron keep and earthen peak being the most notorious) that didn't fit the world. While the game tried to justify this with the plot being about how your character was losing his memories and "wandering" the continent, it meant that the best part of DS1 (world design) was the WORST part of DS2.

>Quantity > Quality approach
DS2 was made mostly by old school PS1/PS2 devs, and cramming as many bosses, NG+ content, areas, weapons, mechanics and items into a single game disc. This meant that each one got less attention, so you end up with a lot of weapons that are just the same as another weapon, but with a slightly different moveset. This made a lot of weapons not feel very "special" to obtain.

>Soul memory
Even after agape ring soul memory means that hackers that invade with hacked stats will drop an extremely high amount of souls and wreck someone's character for matchmaking. It also makes co-op with friends needlessly complicated. Name engraved ring barely helps.

>Shadowbans
Awful. This might be blamed on Bandai Namco more than From, but is a legitimate problem with the game as-is.

Quickest from NG: Kill all the pursuer's in lost bastille, then kill all the crystal lizards in huntsman's copse and earthen peak. You can also farm them 3 at a time with a bonfire ascetic in shaded woods.
Quickest in post game: burn an ascetic at dragon aerie, run through and kill all the crystal lizards.

Holy shit i got invaded at archdragon peak and the invader died in a 1v1 with fucking hawkwood. I wasnt even trying to gank them. I was waiting for them to kill hawkwood so we could 1v1. How can someone be THAT bad at this game.

WHAT THE FUCK IT HAPPENED AGAIN TO ANOTHER INVADER
HAWKWOOD IS TOO GOOD

Why does my character randomly decide to ignore me telling him to dodge?

Are you staggered?
Do you have enough stamina?
Did you queue another action?

None of the above. I'm strafing around a boss, tap the button, then get hit. And it's not a case of me pressing it slightly too late, it just doesn't come out.

>waifufags with infinite i-frames turned on

>Graphics
DS2's graphics are extremely well optimized. They're also very low and simple. It runs on the same engine as DS1, but with different lighting and models, resulting in a game that actually runs MUCH better than DS1 did, even on the same hardware. The problem is that DS1 came out in 2011, and DS2 came out in 2014. When DS2 came out the game engine was already 6 years old (DeS and Ninja Blade used the same one) and despite constant 60fps, modern rigs just weren't able to get better graphics out of it. There was a low cap to how good you could make it look. The high base brightness level also fucked with some areas where using a torch made them actually darker.

>Bosses
DS2's boss AI was very poorly organized, and while most bosses have "second phases" or gimmicks of that kind, they're only subtle in a sense of unlocking a new move. The few good bosses it does have, however, are like proto-DS3 bosses with proper phase changes, estus punishes, and rollcatches. The problem is that those bosses are hidden behind MANY bosses that can be trivialized by just side strafing.

>Stats pt.2
I want to draw particular attention to how movement speed and animation speed was on a sliding scale in DS2, something most people didn't realize, so when you play through the game at 70% equip load it feels AWFUL because while you can "mid roll" technically, your walking speed and stamina recovery is heavily gimped. It was not explained properly how the sliding scales work. The same is true for separating iframes out with the agility stat, rather than also being a function of equipload. While that's a good idea in theory (give players independent control of the two) it doesn't work well in practice.

>twinking

nigga this is sl120

I've seen quite a few people recently using the Repeating Crossbow. What gives with that? Is it actually decent as a crossbow or what? I know the WA is all but useless.

>Tryhard edgelord faggot twink invaders
Youre much more cancerous than they will ever be.

Isn't that Farron Keep?

>meta faggotry
You deserve everything bad that happens to you and more.

Some people actually play on NG+. Surprising, but it does happen.

To the guy who gave me advice against Twin Princes last thread wrt Profaned Flame, I tried hitting him with it and it never worked. Even at points where I 100% saw the attack hit both dudes, only Lorian took damage. I did manage to double up with CBV a couple times, but just whacking them with a Chaos Longsword was the easiest.

Blatantly not twinking, guy's using an AGS, who even infuses dark at twinking levels anyway? You don't have the points to get decent damage.
Because I want to try out a new build, all of a sudden I'm an edgelord, and I deserve to get memed on by hackers.
You've gone soft on me /dsg/

There's literally nothing wrong with being an edgelord.

I just based my assumption on the location you were in. All the +3 rings being in the DLC areas on NG removed most of the reason to play NG+/+ on a melee.

>level design
DS2's levels are designed mostly based on concept art. You have wide open rooms with enemies positioned how they "should" look, but not always with consideration to gameplay. Some levels (FFoG, Heide's, Bastille, Huntsman's copse, the gutter, NMW, Doors of Pharros) are clearly and cleverly designed with classic bonfire shortcuts and encounter rooms in a very DS1 style, lots of exploring to find items, minibosses, and enemies that both populate AND properly fight back against the player in groups. These basically come off as augmented DeS levels, while other levels (Shaded woods, Brightstone Cove, black gulch) are essentially gauntlets of very rough enemies with no real way around it. Often times these levels will have clever -ideas- (such as the statues that spit poison when you walk in front of them, or shaded wood's invisible hollows) but there's no cohesiveness in experiencing those ideas in the context of a -level-. The levels are not challenges themselves, they are receptacles for enemies. Imagine irithyll dungeon, except instead of positioning the jailers so that you can sneak behind them or avoid line of sight, they are just standing there guarding the keys and you have to actually run away to draw aggro. This is one of the main complaints people have against Iron Keep, which blocks off progression until you basically kill all the enemies first, usually by drawing them one at a time. It's not the group encounters that are a problem really,

>Covenants
A lot of covenants are straight up broken or impossible to level, like blue sentinels. part of this is that DS1 was not really intended to be played online all the time, the online was just optional or faster. But DS2 was built under the assumption that -most- players would play online and therefore they wanted to make the covenants special by having hard rewards that required literally hundreds of hours of gameplay to get.

Okay, either we got different results with the same procedure, or I was just hallucinating hitting the both with Profaned Flame. It was a good amount of time ago, so it's possible I just remember incorrectly.
It's strange, I could have sworn it works. Either way, it gets Lorian's health down from range enough that you can hit Lothric freely with CBV.
There isn't anything wrong, you're just really opening yourself to ridicule, especially in the event you lose.

>everyone else seems to think you suck, so I do too
Faggot.

Here's the final word though:

NONE of those problems, even at their worst, is enough to invalidate all the great things DS2 did to improve over DS1. And that's what makes DS3 particularly egregious, is that it mostly threw all of those improvements out the window while also not including the best parts of DS1.

Yeah, using Profaned I was able to stay at a "safe"medium distance and I got a lot of hits in with it. If it hit Lothric too, I definitely would have done enough damage to win easily. The sword did less damage, but since I could hit both with it, it was more effective.

I'm planning on doing another pyro character soon mostly to get all the rings and I can check again then.

I'll admit I like DS3's password matchmaking the best sure it helps twinkers but it makes co-op actually easy and both players can have their own builds and not have to worry about staying within the range of the host. Tho if you're co-oping with your level 120 friend in a level 20 area on the first playthrough then there's a bit of a problem.

Now if only DS1 or DS2 had password matchmaking and no the name engraved ring doesn't count all it does is give you several server options and a slightly higher SM cap.

Post your results in the thread, if you would. I'd like to know if I fucked up.

I thought it scaled you down to the hosts level. Did I just make that up?

Now that I think about it, I must have been locked on to Lothric for it to work. And now that I think again, Seething Chaos might be another pyro choice to fight the two.

No it does.

Try it. Seriously I think it actually scales you don't too much sometimes. If you're a higher enough level you'll do absolute shit tier damage no matter what.

>I must have been locked on to Lothric for it to work
Oh my God maybe I am retarded after all

>2/3 times I've invaded aldrichfags have killed me
this is at 120, how are they still retarded

>mfw non STR builds try to compete

Password phantoms are scaled down but end-game gear is end-game gear, especially when it comes to spells.

DS2 desperately needed 2 things:
>Sharp/Heavy/Refined infusions (to balance out multiplicative elemental weapon buffs)
>Password Summoning

suck my dregs, lunkhead

>invading at SL120
>invading at Pontiff's of all the fucking places
You answered your own question.

>going for ds2 trophies
>sunbro-ing it up helping people fight the dragon boss in aldia's keep
>only 10 more to go
feels good man.
Shame I have to play till New Game++ to get all the spells and stuff, because no way am I doing 500 victories in blood whatever covenant.

Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to have losses subtract from your points?

>be aldrichfag
>moundmaker is also attacking the host, but he keeps unlocking his camera
This shit makes me worry to no end.

Do all of the invaders get the reward if the host dies? Or only the side that kills them gets it? Like if a random invader kills the host do the aldritches not get jack shit or vice versa?

I will never understand why the invaders and aldritch don't just team up to gank the host especially when the host has a gank squad of his own alot of the time.

it's the only place with embers
I would rather be literally anywhere else

If the host dies, everyone wins except blues. I don't understand it, I give the Aldrichs room, I make sure not to hit them WHATSOEVER, and the shits turn on me.

That must have been it, I should have specified that earlier. If you can get summoned for it, try it again.
You really want to pump Medals out, go to the King's Gate Bonfire.

Everyone gets their rewards if the host dies, aldrich and invader fights only happen because of autistic pride or trolls.

>summoned in front of fog gate
>guy has ogre and invader
>summoned just in time to have the ogre grab me and eat me while the host skedaddles into the fog gate.

Are you a purple?

Are you wearing undead ring?

I ALWAYS kill purples and I kill reds who wear that dumb ring.
There is NO such thing as end game gear. Jesus shut the fuck up about down scaled phantoms. I'm betting most of you who cry about down scaled phantoms don't even pvp or are not particular good at it.

Down scaled phantoms are the easiest targets for me to kill during invasions die to having no fucking health.

Why is this general filled with so many incompetent whinners?

Everyone wins if the host dies, but Adrichs win twice if you both die.

king's gate, eh?
Alright, I'll try there.
Thanks friend.

>There is NO such thing as end game gear.

t.Splitleaf user

Does ds1 have the same pvp/co-op pool for ng and ng+. I'd like to use my mage as my main pvp character after I finish the single player.

Also does spawning items get you banned since I forgot to get the master key on my old pyro fag before going ng+.

You're probably breaking one of our rules and deserve it.