They're all the same. Start with whatever looks coolest honestly. I like Bandits because they have sweet armor and get that poison resist shield without having to suicide run the drakes in the Valley of Drakes. Lots of people like Pyromancers because they start at SL1, which gives you more flexibility when you're leveling up early on. Deprived also count for that because they have even stats, but I can't stand starting with no armor.

As for the souls, you really really need to save up 20,000 for the Crest of Astoras to unlock the door in the forest so you can farm those NPCs. It makes the game FUN again when you can easily stack up souls to buy necessary things like arrows and curse cures instead of farming the same area a hundred times for only 1,000 souls.

What I do on a new character is just not level up or buy anything I don't have to so I can get 20,000 easily before I get to Andre the Blacksmith to buy the crest.

I just beat the game and I have to say that the song during the credits was incredible to me. It captured all the thoughts and emotions I had about finally making it to the end, like a "I made it through hell now I can finally relax" feeling.

You can trade a cracked red eye orb iirc to Snuggly the Crow for the item that removes curse.

Well, I was starting to get really burned out on Dark Souls. Not because I hit a difficulty wall or anything like that. Just all the grinding I was going to have to do for the crafting achievements.... Then I discovered the soul glitch. Hate all you want, but if anything removes some of the grind, I'm 100% going to do it.

Now a whole new level of fun has been introduced. I'm a very min-maxy type RPG gamer, so the fact that I now have my stats just high enough to enjoy all aspects of combat with one character instead of several, and have the game still be challenging is just fantastic.

The only sad part is I've pretty much wrecked my ability to do co-op, but my experience was it only worked roughly 10% of the time anyway.

Hardest Game On Earth ......

Took me 105 hours to complete on the hardest difficulty -.-

There's no difficulty.

Patch should be up soon, it's already up in japan. Now we simply wait.

If your game's best attribute is "you die a lot," then it's probably not a very good game. lol

'You die a lot, because you svck' is actually what DkS's message is. Learn from mistakes and you will be ok, but you must make those mistakes first.. which will kill you. A lot.

It's fun, we swear!

I am most heartened by the news of this patch. Hopefully co-op is less broken/fixed

Is it the dragon head glitch? I've heard of people using it to spew unlimited firebombs/throwing knives/dung pies at people they invade.

Or my personal favorite, the Rainbow Crash, where they spew unlimited Prism Stones that overload the game and makes it crash for the Host.

Omg, that's evil! -goes and tests it immediately-

-fails to invade anyone-

*F DkS servers.

Im not. I find the nerfing of pyromancy very dissapointing. Seriously if your going to have bosses who spam UNBLOCKABLE AoE attacks, then I sure as hell am going to use iron flesh to counter it.

Lol! If the patch fixes match making I'll be happy. I hope the patch doesn't screw w/ my old builds too much.

Also found this on gamefaqs, a guide to how poise works, thought I'd help spread it around cause many of us are curious.

------------------CREDIT TO EWGF for post, info and testing. This is a repost! ------------

There has been a lot of talk about Poise, and adding poise, and building a loadout around it... but nobody really knew what it actually did or how it worked. I was fortunate enough to invade Toast from wikidot today, and he left me to my own devices and allowed me to test my theories on Poise... and I can provide you with some solid data. Thanks again Toast for your help and incredible patience.

1) Poise is a meter as suspected. Identical to a status build-up meter, but it regenerates much faster... it's actually much more like your stamina while blocking, except it refills pretty quick. Increasing your Poise increases the size of this meter.

2) Whenever you resist a hit-stun by being hit, you're Poise meter empties by a variable value (determined from a composite of weapon and swing).

3) When your Poise meter empties completely due to taking successive hits (or a big hit) you are prone to hit-stun for a very brief period. This period is like 1-2 seconds. Probably less then 1 second in fact.

4) Damage probably does not factor into the amount of build-up you get (as Toast could crush my poise fairly easily with a unmodified Claymore). It's by weapon-type and swing type. Weapons are rated the same if they share a type. A Bastard Sword and a Claymore can both be resisted by the same amount of Poise (aside from special R2s that vary between weapons, also, there may be some special cases). Swings are mostly rated the same... but some WDs/WRs/R2s can reduce your poise much more then a vanilla R1.

5) The properties of some swings can be altered by increasing poise. For example, Greatsword 2h R2 has a knock-back property against low poise. If you add a fair bit of poise this instead becomes a heavy stun. If you add even more poise... even this stun can be resisted.

6) I'm uncertain how long it takes a sizable Poise bar to refill from nearly empty. It looks like like 4-6ish seconds. It's pretty hard to test. A test like this is like trying to see how long your it takes your stamina to refill from empty... without emptying it 100%... while the bar is invisible.

I tested a few breakpoints to find some jazz, see what I could puzzle out. I didn't test everything... I couldn't. I didn't have the stats to wield everything, nor did I have it all on me. Adding poise also appears to be additive... not diminishing, which means you'll probably never want to stack it to high-heaven unless you're some kind of idiot.

- 40 poise seemed to stop most non-issue light stuns. Nothing that will combo you, but junk like Katanas, Barbed Swords, etc. This would probably be the minimal amount to have if you're using any larger weapons.

- 53 poise stops one 2-handed Claymore swing. Probably the most important breakpoint in the game.

- 55 stops one 2-handed Murakumo swing. Might as well go for this if you have 53. This will likely be the most common amount of Poise for sensible players that use it. Anything beyond here is cake icing.

- 76 stops one 2-handed Zwei/Gaxe swing (R1 swings only). This is probably the most you should ever go for. You'll need 106 poise to resist even 2 Claymore swings, which doesn't seem reasonable. Increasing Poise beyond 76 however will start turning certain Zwei/Gaxe (and like other) knockdowns into stuns.

Other issues.
It seems Poise may potentially suffer from the same issues as Bleed build up, aka you can damage Poise with a Phantom Hit. This is good and bad. It means that if your Poise meter empties during a Phantom Hit, you won't get stunned... however on the flip-side, you can take some Poise damage from a Phantom Hit during a roll (or what-have-you) and then have it break on a clean hit immediately afterwards that normally wouldn't have broke your Poise.

What?! That sounds hilarious.... *goes to try it.*

Edit* Yes! That is amazingly colorful.

Any idea when the patch is supposed to hit the states?

Got to the Four Kings in NG+ a few days ago, haven't been playing lately though. I was really surprised at how easy Garfield and Odie were this time around. Brolaire died like five seconds into the fight, but I managed to get them on that try. Can you continuously start NG+'s so that you'd basically have some sort of ridiculous high number like NG++++++++++++++++++++++++ or something?

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q235/Lomoru/DarkSoulsOnline.png


I think the difficulty stops increasing after like 8 playthroughs. At least in Demon's Souls it did.

You can keep doing them over and over again forever though.

Sorry doublepost.

Ah, cool. I've heard the difficult doesn't really spike all that much from NG+ to NG++ and so on, though.

Well, again from Demon's Souls, the first NG+ is the big jump. Like 40% increased difficulty, with each + after that being an additional 8% harder still. So NG++ would be 48% more difficult than NG.

I hate hate hate the Demon Ruins. It's too the point where I just want to play a new character.

Why what's wrong with your build?

I could see pure pyro having some probs but nothing an elemental weapon wouldn't solve.

I love it!

I finished the game just a few hours ago. I made sure to kill everyone worth killing beforehand. And I went with the Dark Lord ending even though I gave Frampt the Lordvessel (On mistake. Had planned on joining the Darkwraith first time around.)

Now I've just rung the first bell in NG+ and leveled the Gravelord Servant covenant enough to get the Great Gravelord Sword Dance miracle. I'm curious, if I leave the covenant (which I intend to do) will I still be able to use the miracle? Or is it like the Sunlight miracles?

Edit* Nevermind, five seconds spent on google gave me the answer. I can.

Secondary question: I've pretty much figured out what I need to do in order to get the remaining stuff from other covenants, though I'm a bit worried about the Darkmoon Blade. Does it take my level into account when summoning me to face a player in Dark Anor Lodo, and is there a tethered cap for invading the guilty? I,e could a level 50 character invade a guilty level 1 character.

I think the level scale is much larger than in co-op. When I tested forest hunter faction, and went fooling around in their territory in human form. My SL120 character faced two
low level characters with Drake Swords and stuff what you have during level 20-40. It was massacre.

Well maybe not. I've heard different things about the Forest Hunter faction not having restrictions on their invasions, and even that invasions themselves have no upper limit (meaning a SL1 character is capable of invading EVERYONE up to SL712).

> On my 6th attempt at Ornstein and Smough
> Kill Ornstein, Smough on last bit of health
> Finish him off with a fire orb
> He has no health left but he's still alive wtf?!!!
> He does AoE stomp attack, I roll out the way
> I roll into a pillar
> I die