Dark Souls 3

Also, if you are any good at pyro, the charm spell on the BKs makes the whole climb a joke and one of the best XP farms in the game.

Lenas_sl said:

[BEWARE BUG] The Defense stat is (almost) completely useless!! : darksouls3



You seem to have known about all of the bosses and the path through the game ahead of time. Wonder if that has anything to do with it. First play thru I was over 50.

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I had yesterday off of work and decided to dive into NG+ for fun. My build is not optimal, but I am basically doing a 40/40 Pyro build rocking the Sunbro or MLGS most of the time (Ith Sword early on), or at least 40/40 is where I am at now. First play, I absolutely crawled through the game because I was doing it spoiler free and I checked every nook and cranny (plus I died a fair amount with a generic all 20s sort of setup) and cleared out every last inch of the game. This time, I am doing my best to clear all of the stuff out and after a day of play, but not farming extra souls. In a single day of play, knowing where everything was and having my character basically set how I wanted, I got all the way up to both the Archives and Nameless King fights before I logged off for the day. There is absolutely no way in hell you could do complete sweeps of any prior game in this series in that amount of time, but I also agree that playing it cold the first time should have taken much longer than Noodle's run seems to be going.

Observations while playing NG:
Monlight Greatsword, if you have the stats, is one of the few boss weapons worth using. It is relatively good on the stamina damage ratio and the built in shot ability is really handy. It also has one of the better reach and hitboxes of the larger weapons I have tried out. Wolnir's GS is not bad either, as an alternative when fighting magic resistant enemies, but you are probably better off grabbing the Sunbro sword and using a shield at that point. Every other boss weapon either suffers from poor movesets, too much split damage (/cry Dancer Blades), or just plain sucking overall.

Embers that do not drop off of farmable mobs are somewhat finite in the game. I kept track of all the ones I looted off of the ground and bought from vendors. It ended up being around 52 total, so if you intend to Vorph it and play entirely offline, that's how many times you can rekindle before you have to farm.

Faith is garbage in this game, aside from Pyro builds. Even if lightning hit like it did in early DS2 (spoiler: It doesn't), the casting times on the spells blow on the entire school and the mana efficiency is fucking terrible. With the relocation of the primary Dark spells into Pyro, plentiful homeward bones (that you won't even need after the darkened shrine), and minimal amount of lightning weak enemies in the game, there is no reason for anyone not doing Pyro to pump this stat at all. The whole spell line needs a redesign, as the first spell you get (mini heal) is both the most mana efficient and the only one castable in combat. /fuckingthingsucks.gif

Sorcery is fun, but like someone else stated, its just too much fucking work to make it functional. A 30/30 pyro does as much damage as a 50+ int Sorc, and the Sorc has to be nearly at the end game to even get a fraction of the gear they need. Having said that, the bulk of the people who invaded me during my NG+ run had fuck all for magic resist, likely because no one would bother with sorcery, and I was able to do fucktons of damage to them with the magic based MLGS, so there is some merit in using a magic scaling weapon, if you are doing the pyro thing. Also, Hidden Body and Spook let you bypass a TON of annoying bullshit in this game for the low investment of 18 INT.

Pyro is super OP, but its mostly three spells that are the most outrageously good. Dark Balls (or whatever its called this game) is a spell that you get fairly early and has one of the best mana to damage ratios in the game, even at the minimum stats needed to use it (20/20), especially since even the small amount of dark resistant enemies still take a good amount of damage from it. Its pretty much too slow to bother with in PvP, outside of group ganks. Great Chaos Fireball is hands down the best spell in the game, if for no other reason than that the lava pool secondary ability will either sap endurance or chip nearly as much damage as the main hit. Its fast to cast and does FUCKLOADS of damage, even to enemies resistant to fire. The lava pool can and does fuck people up in PVP, especially since it expands out farther than >30% rollers can go in one roll. I fully expect it to get nerfed, since it is the best spell to use both in PvE and PvP. The charm spell, in the areas it works (stairs before Two Princes being the major one), is ridiculous and I have surprised a couple gankers by charming stuff they were hiding behind as well.

For me, DS2>DS1> DeS>DS3>BB but it comes down to personal preference and saying something is the worst FROM game is like saying a blowjob was the worst one, i.e. still better than 99% of the shit out there. I doubt I will touch this game after this NG run until all the DLC hits, though. Balance, liner design, and over use of the "can't roll swamp lol" areas are what knock it down a little for me.