Dark Souls III Catch-All 2.0

DanB wrote:

At last, I finished the Silver Knight grind for the Concords. Along the way I earnt about 7.1Million Souls. Which means I killed around 631 silver knights in order to gather 20 concords (for a drop rate of about 1:31.5). Finally I never have to do that again.

Congrats. Silver knight grind was the hardest thing in the game! A true test of will. Glad you didn't go hollow. I finished mine a couple of days ago before wrapping up ng an moving on to ng+ to focus on +1 rings, mound makers and warriors of sunlight ranking. I was originally dreading the mound makers as I have never been much for PVP, but it's been surprisingly fun dueling and invading for the covenent items.

Yeah, I've just this moment finished NG+ and have started NG++. Just 1 gesture and the +2 rings to do and that will be it! I did a 'no summons' run for NG+ but I want to speed throug NG++ so it'll be summons all the way

DanB wrote:
Clusks wrote:

Lorian and Lothiric, seriously...can seem so unfair when he just spams the teleport attack, had about 10 goes at him and could only get him to the second phase twice.

If he flash teleports to right beside you the the lock will stay on him 80-90% of the time. If he teleports and the lock is removed then you typically know he is far away and going to do one of the slam attacks, spin the camera to find him. The teleport and slam on your head is the only one that you can't easily read. Basically the lock tells you everything you need to know.

I'm kind of used to getting him past his first phase, but I haven't quite worked out the 2nd phase yet, I usually have to waste one estus flask just before the fight because of all the enemies in front of the arena I have to run past.

Clusks: Have you tried taking a right in front of the boss? You don't have to run through all those enemies.

Phase 2: I usually manipulate phase 1 such that I put the killing blow in at the end of the room where phase 2 will begin. When phase 2 begins I try not to be right on top of the boss, back up a bit so you can see his first cast. Let the first of the homing shots strike towards you before working your way back to the boss. If you're right on top of the boss when those homing shots come in and you can't see them they will often all strike you. Once that danger is out of the way, try to stay closer to him as then he won't fire off the magic quite as much. Then it is really just the same as the first phase but a bit faster. Also the 2 and 3 hit combos he does can be 1 strike longer which can throw you off.

Hyetal wrote:

Clusks: Have you tried taking a right in front of the boss? You don't have to run through all those enemies.

There is another way?

Thanks for the tips, I currently have 10 Estus flasks, so want to ideally keep about 6 of them for the 2nd phase (at the least.) It's the teleport and smash down attack I can just never seem to dodge.

Whoop!

I have all the achievements. Overall It was much less arduous than I thought it might be.

In summary

NG: Went with a melee build run and explored everywhere. Did what quests I could but didn't see many to the end as most are a bit too obscure to figure out yourself. I did complete the End of Fire ending though. My playtime for this run was about 60 hours

NG+: This took the longest. Here I went with an all bosses, solo only melee run plus I did all the covenant stuff needed for the achievements. In the main the covenants were fun but as I never got summoned for the blues I had to grind out the concords which was tedious. I also did all the quest lines which were possible in a single pass so I ended with the usurper ending. This run was fairly solid, mostly fun and it was nice to spend some time with the PvP as I had basically ignored it in DS1 and DS2. Even with the 10+ hours of grinding my run time was around 40 hours here.

NG++: Again I just stuck with a melee build but this time I just critical pathed the game, aiming to only go to the places where the +2 rings were and skipping all non-essential bosses. I spent this whole run embered (having accumulated about 300 of them in the previous 2 runs). Seemingly my PvP skills were well honed as I dispatched every single PvP invader who turned up (11 of them iirc). Killing the 3 back-to-back Aldrich faithful who turned up at one point was immensely satisfying. I additionally only wore the way of the blue patch throughout as I figured it would be nice to enable some blues to get some concords. I also summoned liberally for the bosses which really let me speed through the game. My final playtime for this run was about 11 hours. It really underlined how compact and well designed the game world is, you never really have to cover much ground going from place to place, even though it feels quite large and detailed. I'm fairly sure that in total I died less than 10 times on this run, my first death was leading in to Irithyll Dungeon after killing Aldrich, up to that point I really thought I might be able to complete it as a no death run!

Brownypoints wrote:

I also wish they had some more truly dark areas (dark or blindly white), a challenge run co-op area akin to the optional bosses of the 3 DS2 dlc areas, a few more puzzles and better thought out shortcuts.

I entire time I was playing I was just waiting for the Sen's Fortress type area. I was really bummed that there wasn't one. I can't remember a single trap actually?

There are arrow traps in the Catacombs of Carthus

DanB wrote:

Whoop!

I have all the achievements. Overall It was much less arduous than I thought it might be.

In summary

NG: Went with a melee build run and explored everywhere. Did what quests I could but didn't see many to the end as most are a bit too obscure to figure out yourself. I did complete the End of Fire ending though. My playtime for this run was about 60 hours

NG+: This took the longest. Here I went with an all bosses, solo only melee run plus I did all the covenant stuff needed for the achievements. In the main the covenants were fun but as I never got summoned for the blues I had to grind out the concords which was tedious. I also did all the quest lines which were possible in a single pass so I ended with the usurper ending. This run was fairly solid, mostly fun and it was nice to spend some time with the PvP as I had basically ignored it in DS1 and DS2. Even with the 10+ hours of grinding my run time was around 40 hours here.

NG++: Again I just stuck with a melee build but this time I just critical pathed the game, aiming to only go to the places where the +2 rings were and skipping all non-essential bosses. I spent this whole run embered (having accumulated about 300 of them in the previous 2 runs). Seemingly my PvP skills were well honed as I dispatched every single PvP invader who turned up (11 of them iirc). Killing the 3 back-to-back Aldrich faithful who turned up at one point was immensely satisfying. I additionally only wore the way of the blue patch throughout as I figured it would be nice to enable some blues to get some concords. I also summoned liberally for the bosses which really let me speed through the game. My final playtime for this run was about 11 hours. It really underlined how compact and well designed the game world is, you never really have to cover much ground going from place to place, even though it feels quite large and detailed. I'm fairly sure that in total I died less than 10 times on this run, my first death was leading in to Irithyll Dungeon after killing Aldrich, up to that point I really thought I might be able to complete it as a no death run!

Any estimate on how long Darkmoon farming alone took you? I just finished farming Watchdog stuff, and I think I'm about to start on Darkmoon. Were you just farming the two knights near the Anor Londo bonfire before Aldrich?

carrotpanic wrote:

There are arrow traps in the Catacombs of Carthus

I guess those skeleton balls are traps too.

Damnable Bear wrote:

Any estimate on how long Darkmoon farming alone took you? I just finished farming Watchdog stuff, and I think I'm about to start on Darkmoon. Were you just farming the two knights near the Anor Londo bonfire before Aldrich?

Yeah I just did the 2 knights on the stairs, it would have probably been more interesting to run from the Sulyvahn bonfire and do 6 knights on the buttresses.

In total I spent 3 gaming sessions farming the concords, so it was probably around 10 hours but the final 3 hours after I re-specced for luck I picked up the most concords. So I might have been able to half that time in retrospect. You can pickup 3 concords (iirc) on each run so I think I only had to farm 24 of them.

My luck build was basically:
INT: 43 + sage ring
ATT: 30
LUCK: as much as I could
Attune Crystal Soul Spear
Equip sage's crystal rapier, CGSR+1, Symbol of Avarice
You can kill each knight with 2 or 3 CSS (chug the ashen estus between if needed), so you can kill 2 of them in about 20 seconds. At this point I was earning 4 concords and hour, there about.

Edit: it's not that it changed the drop rate but more that casting is substantially quicker

Hoo boy... That whole farming for trophies thing is why I never 100%-ed any Souls game. Bloodborne made me kill one guy maybe three times to get an extra Ritual Blood at one point and for that I was thankful.

DanB wrote:
Damnable Bear wrote:

Any estimate on how long Darkmoon farming alone took you? I just finished farming Watchdog stuff, and I think I'm about to start on Darkmoon. Were you just farming the two knights near the Anor Londo bonfire before Aldrich?

Yeah I just did the 2 knights on the stairs, it would have probably been more interesting to run from the Sulyvahn bonfire and do 6 knights on the buttresses.

In total I spent 3 gaming sessions farming the concords, so it was probably around 10 hours but the final 3 hours after I re-specced for luck I picked up the most concords. So I might have been able to half that time in retrospect. You can pickup 3 concords (iirc) on each run so I think I only had to farm 24 of them.

My luck build was basically:
INT: 43 + sage ring
ATT: 30
LUCK: as much as I could
Attune Crystal Soul Spear
Equip sage's crystal rapier, CGSR+1, Symbol of Avarice
You can kill each knight with 2 or 3 CSS (chug the ashen estus between if needed), so you can kill 2 of them in about 20 seconds. At this point I was earning 4 concords and hour, there about.

Edit: it's not that it changed the drop rate but more that casting is substantially quicker

Interesting. I'm wondering if I should save that to be the very last thing I do, after Nameless on NG++, since You get the CGS+2 from that. I'm also planning on re-joining Rosaria's Fingers for that playthrough so I'll be able to respec easily. Do you think that's a better plan? Because right now I'm at the end of NG+1 and probably will try to finish Mound Makers before I head to NG++.

Damnable Bear wrote:

Interesting. I'm wondering if I should save that to be the very last thing I do, after Nameless on NG++, since You get the CGS+2 from that. I'm also planning on re-joining Rosaria's Fingers for that playthrough so I'll be able to respec easily. Do you think that's a better plan? Because right now I'm at the end of NG+1 and probably will try to finish Mound Makers before I head to NG++.

That was my initial plan, that I'd save the grind until I had the CGSR+2. But I decided that I didn't want to finish my play throughs on a boring grind, also the CGSR+2 is among the very last of the rings that you can gather and I just wanted the grind done and dusted. Instead I waited until I'd completed Sirris's questline in NG+ and then respecced at Rosaria.

Yeah I might do that too. I'm unsure how much difference the CGS+2 will make versus just changing some specs, probably not much in the long run. Maybe I'll sandwich that into this NG+ run then.

DanB, what level were you at while doing your NG++ run? Was it easy to get summons? I'm going in at SL125 on Xbox One and am hoping to lean on summons to get through it quickly.

acetate3 wrote:

DanB, what level were you at while doing your NG++ run? Was it easy to get summons? I'm going in at SL125 on Xbox One and am hoping to lean on summons to get through it quickly.

I hit SL130 at the end of NG+ and stayed there (oddly enough I did not spend a single soul during my NG++ run)

Summons seemed kind of sparse in NG++ to be honest, there seemed to be many fewer than I saw during NG+ (SL125) but to my understanding you can summon across new games. They seemed so sparse at one point that I was worried I was soft banned but once I saw that there were plenty of summon signs after the Sulyvahn fight I figured not.

That said if I waited I was always able to summon at least 1 person for each boss fight although I did have to wait for ages for a sign one to appear for the Wolnir fight. Plenty of signs near the 'hard' bosses like Nameless King though.

from many pages back in danb's post about finishing the game:

DanB wrote:

As I say it really enjoyed it, it's mechanically solid and there seems to be a lot less hitbox bull crap to deal with this time around.
I'm very curious to see what the next/first balancing patch might bring. I assume poise will be re-enabled but who knows what else?

Better hitboxes, you say? That's one of my main complaints with DS2 specifically as I'm finishing it up for the first time. They removed poise?

DanB wrote:

I'm not too enamoured of the world so far, it feels very 'I'm in a grey castle/cathedral'. Beautiful as the game is (thank you new graphics card), not too many areas stood out to me visually in the way that areas in DS1 and DS2 still stand out in my mind today. Of course that may change once I'm more used to the game.

ugh, the environments being less interesting is a big downer. I've never been a fan of the way souls games look in most instances, and know its not any better makes me slightly less interested.

I recall hearing poison gets a lot of use in DS3. Is that true? I'm so ready for poison to not be a thing after DS2.

I recall hearing poison gets a lot of use in DS3. Is that true? I'm so ready for poison to not be a thing after DS2.

Not true. Poison is bad/ineffectual.

Generic poison is really really slow and doesn't actually take off that much health.
However..... the

Spoiler:

Storytellers staff

takes percentage of health off, so it is great for bigger mobs.
My pyromancer only used his pyro skills for bosses, mobs was wiped out by

Spoiler:

storyteller poison, hidden body and slumbering dragon ring

. I loved going through an area, looking back and just seeing 7 or 8 rapidly (ish) disappearing health bars.

tomaytohead, you might have been thinking of Bleed. Poison is absolutely worthless, but Bleed is actually pretty damn good. Lots of already-awesome weapons just happen to have Bleed on them, so it's a good icing on the cake.

Bleed procs also scale with Luck, so if you have a Luck build then Bleed is even better.

DanB wrote:
acetate3 wrote:

DanB, what level were you at while doing your NG++ run? Was it easy to get summons? I'm going in at SL125 on Xbox One and am hoping to lean on summons to get through it quickly.

I hit SL130 at the end of NG+ and stayed there (oddly enough I did not spend a single soul during my NG++ run)

Summons seemed kind of sparse in NG++ to be honest, there seemed to be many fewer than I saw during NG+ (SL125) but to my understanding you can summon across new games. They seemed so sparse at one point that I was worried I was soft banned but once I saw that there were plenty of summon signs after the Sulyvahn fight I figured not.

That said if I waited I was always able to summon at least 1 person for each boss fight although I did have to wait for ages for a sign one to appear for the Wolnir fight. Plenty of signs near the 'hard' bosses like Nameless King though.

Your experience sounds similar to my NG+ run. I didn't see any symbols until Sulyvahn, but after that they appeared fairly frequently. Thanks for the info!

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Better hitboxes, you say?

Yeah that hitboxes function better than either of the 2 prior games I'd say. Except mimics who can still grab you from stupid angles.

https://imgur.com/gallery/4k4uDsd

mrtomaytohead wrote:

They removed poise?

Yeah gone and never coming back. Basically replaced with different recovery frame timings. It does make for quicker combat and there is less tedious stat fiddling but it does render the heavy armour kind of useless.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

ugh, the environments being less interesting is a big downer. I've never been a fan of the way souls games look in most instances, and know its not any better makes me slightly less interested.

I've warmed to it a little, and I have a better appreciation of the different areas but I still don't think each area feels as distinct as they did in previous games. I certainly wouldn't let it put you off, the game is great.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

I recall hearing poison gets a lot of use in DS3. Is that true

Poison is poor/boring this time round, it is not longer the glorious proc that it was in DS2. Toxic functions like DS2 poison but there isn't a convenient way to get people with it.

Bleed is just this free damage + stagger build up.
Really makes some bosses cheese.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

They removed poise?

Yeah gone and never coming back. Basically replaced with different recovery frame timings. It does make for quicker combat and there is less tedious stat fiddling but it does render the heavy armour kind of useless.

To be clear Poise is still a stat in the game but it does something completely different and more subtle, affecting invincibility frames. I wouldn't go so far as to say heavy armor is useless. I've dabbled with it and the damage absorption is definitely superior but you need to boost equip load enough to get under 70% so you can still roll or get strength up to where you can use the most stable heavy shields. Basically they have eliminated the viability of cheesy 'classic' builds like Giant Dad and Havel Mages as you can not attack through a blow except for at the very end of heavy weapon attacks. You need to block or roll.

I'm more worried about getting poisoned while going through the game, not poisoning others. In DS2 I died more than a few times to poison from enemies / those spitting statues.

In general, I hate status (negative?) effects in video games.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

In general, I hate status (negative?) effects in video games.

Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra wrote:

In Love: When in love, all your stats are increased by 1 at first. With time, your love will increase and so will the bonus. However, when this bonus reaches 10, you will soon become affected by the Heart Broken ailment.

Heartbroken: All your stats will decrease by 1 for every level of severity (which will increase over time). However, this ailment, as opposed to Weakness, cannot be cured in any way except by receiving healing at a Temple.

Spoiler:

Old school video games say love is doomed and that the only way to move on is through religion.

Hyetal wrote:

Clusks: Have you tried taking a right in front of the boss? You don't have to run through all those enemies.

I'm so glad I found this out, as it made things a lot less stressful getting up to the boss.

And today I managed to beat Lothiric and Lorian after too many attempts to count. In the end, I barely had to use any estus flasks, as I think I was just more frustrated than anything and took my anger out on both of them.

So just Archdragon Peak to go before the grand finale for me, I'd probably say Dark Souls 3 is game of the year, but then there is Overwatch

mrtomaytohead wrote:

I'm more worried about getting poisoned while going through the game, not poisoning others. In DS2 I died more than a few times to poison from enemies / those spitting statues.

In general, I hate status (negative?) effects in video games.

Poison is generally no risk to you in DS3