Dark Souls II | Dark Souls | Demon's Souls

Great info there. Wish I'd seen this thread sooner. Stupid college work.

Losing a bit of life down to 50% seems a good compromise between those that complained about Dark Souls' full HP in Hollow form and those who thought Demon's Souls' outright 50% penalty was too harsh.

Not sure how to feel about limited time summons. It'll probably help fight ganking, which is good. No one likes stupid 3-man gank squads.
I imagine it won't do much harm to most players who main get summoned for boss fights, as the sign pickup tends to be right outside the door. But a potentially long fight like O&S might get ugly if they do decide to let you disappear during those. Article said they weren't sure.
It would also probably suck to lose out on whatever the item you get for helping does. Now that I think about it, it would probably encourage people to twink and take the fun from low level players by slaughtering their bosses quickly.

Like the idea of a covenant that will auto-summon an ally for you when you're invaded. This seems like a great way to play host for people to fight one another. Wonder if red phantoms are limited on time too? Would make for an interesting cat & mouse while one player who doesn't want to fight hides from his invader to try to beat the clock.

That's actually my least favorite part of the game. I equate twinking to PvP against newbies with picking on toddlers. No one is impressed. I'm not saying that experienced players shouldn't play with newbies. Fighting harder opponents is how you get better. But like the game itself, you have to have a steady progression in difficulty. If a newbie is still mastering the concept of Blocking because it's their first couple hours into the game, you don't throw a twink at them, backflipping around in full Havel's. They won't learn anything except "Don't play online." which just diminishes the player base. Honestly, I really hope that they find a better way of locking twinks out of low level games. Maybe attach a level requirement to equipment so that you'd have to be a minimum SL to use certain things. Nothing crazy, of course. If people had to be SL 40/50 to use Giant's gear, for example, then they wouldn't be able to pick on SL7 newbies.

As long as middling and high end equipment have enough of a stat requirement to keep people from twinking it'll be much the same.

Those stats frighten me a little bit.
Looks like they're adding in stats just to have stats. Why split up Stamina and Equipment load?
A little confused as to why Fire damage is scaled off of Int. Does that include weapon-based damage? If so, it seems anti-twink, which is good, but it'll suck if Str/Dex builds can't put any useful amount of Fire etc on their weapons. I'd rather it just scaled with level, personally, if that's the case.

You invade people within 10% under and above your Soul Level (excluding Forest and Darkmoon Covenants which have no level restrictions at all).
A twink is someone who min-maxes to a large degree, but in this context it's someone who does that purely for PvPing against low-level players (or alternatively to slaughter bosses for them, which is nearly as bad).

Note: I'm not saying there's anything wrong with min-maxing a character for PvP. When I'm making a PvP character that's exactly what I do. I've got a fairly min-maxed Claymore/Mage, Str build, and Dex heavy Ornstein cosplay. Going Darkwraith and hitting up people in the Kiln or various community-organized fight clubs is the best thing in the game most of the time, when you're not hitting 3-man gank squads.

What a twink does is in this case though (and if you see someone use it online in the context of Dark Souls, then this is what they mean. This is a specific flavor of griefer.) glitch high end items through to a fresh character (Bottomless Box glitch, may have been fixed) and only level them up just enough to use specific ones just so that they can invade people with fresh characters. If you've ever tried to block a +5 Lightening Zweihander when all you've got is a half-broken Buckler, or to use your +1 Longsword to try to hurt someone using Darkwood Grain Ring to ninja flip while wearing a full set of Havel's Armor (This was fixed finally, Praise the Sun.), then you can guess how that works out for the invaded party.

Reading your post again, I don't think that is what you meant, so I apologize for the mistaken assumption. Like I said before, I equate it with picking on toddlers and it really burns me up to see people brag about having done it.
PvP, whether dueling or the wonderful Cat & Mouse you get to play when not dueling, is awesome in this game. I've walked into as many ambushes as I've sprang on other people. Township's great for that, btw.
And there's nothing wrong with a little deception...(Music's kind of annoying, so I advise you to keep it low.)

Tomb of the Giants is a fun place to invade. Especially with the Ring of Fog.
Or you can dress up like Patches and kick them off of cliffs.

Mostly Stamina and Equip load, yeah. If anything, equip load should have been a derived stat from Strength and Stamina.
You're right about Agility being something people asked for, but again, I would have been more comfortable with it being attached to different stats. Maybe having weapon swing speed derived from Strength (power) and Dex (control). Heh. Might even be interesting if some derived stats like that would have ranges of effectiveness. Like, if you gouged Strength without having enough Dex to add control your swings would take longer to recover from. Maybe have to keep them within a range of 15 points or so. That would probably be just an unneeded complication though.

I don't see the stat splitting really having an effect on PvP, as I would expect the community to just up the average level to compensate. Say, SL 150 instead of 120.


Was so mad last week. Turned on my PS3 to see I had been selected for the beta as well only to get a "This code has already been redeemed." message. It seems they only used a single code for all invites, and people quickly leaked it even to uninvited friends.

I think they're having another wave later, so here's hoping on that one.


I think I get what you're saying about attack direction. Dead angling is easier and more widespread now?

KHFM Proud mode, eh? If you wanna be really proud, then also go for the trophies for finishing under 15 hours and not changing equipment while you do it.

You do have a good point about Str, but I still think that if the split was balanced right between Str and Sta it would work out better than just having another stat in there. But maybe not. I don't claim to be an expert.

Arrows have weight, eh? Bugger. Honestly, that seems like just a waste of time. I can walk around with 1,000, or I can make 5 trips to the vendor/storage to do the same thing. Oh, well. Not a huge thing.
Speaking of weight, I don't think I saw a Carry Weight or whatever like you had in Demon's Souls (hereafter DMS), so does that mean there's no limit to what you can haul around like in Dark Souls (hereafter DKS)? While it did tend to get annoyingly cluttered, I much preferred that to DMS limits on carrying weight. That's probably mostly because of that one time I beat down Executioner Miralda, climbed down that long ladder, and then couldn't carry the stuff down there, so it despawned. 


I'm actually not completely crushed about not getting into the beta on the first go. I've had the big Terraria update and GTAV to keep me busy. That won't stop me from camping out on their facebook on the 26th.


KHFM has a EXP Zero ability? Cool. I haven't actually played the Final Mix or 1.5 versions, so I don't know much about what they changed. My brother has it though, so I'll play it soon enough. In the meantime I'll avoid spoiling anything for you.

Sephiroth and the new guy are in FM1.5. They have announced KH2.5FM for next year, btw.
If you're not changing equipment, then I won't say that you can't win at all, but it is highly unlikely. Doable? Yes. But not likely. Best of luck if you want to try it. I'd suggest just finishing the game first though.


Smaller UI, huh? Can't say I care for that. I assume they're collecting feedback from the participants? Make sure and let them know it's a problem for you if you can. If you say something it may still not change, but if you say nothing it definitely won't.

Didn't see anything on r/darksouls and nothing within the last month about in on their Facebook page.