Anybody else excited for DS3?
How will you play?
Solo?
Co-op?
Invade?
Str build?
Dex ??????????
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I am personally super hype for ds3. I've been fortunate enough to play in one of the stress test betas and can say without a doubt that this game will deliver. I personally plan on playing solo with a strength build however may co-op at some point later on. Not too long now until release! Can't wait!

I've always started with a DEX build with the Souls games but gradually end up becoming a fairly balanced build between DEX INT & STR with more investment in DEX by the time I finish.

Exception being my character in Bloodborne which I ended up going 50 to all stats except stamina because I spent too much time on that.

Expecting really good things for DARK SOULS III so far.

Solo/offline, as for build i'll just use whatever I like as i've seen almost nothing of the game so far, so I know pretty much nothing about the weapons in it

Just finished Bloodborne DLC 2 days ago, I am hyped for this, and hope (but looks highly unlikely) they fix the input buffer.

I'm planning to play solo and then co-op. I'm planning to start as pyromancer since it looks like the easiest starting class so be able to build a battle mage. Maybe I'll start as a Knight or a warrior too.

At least no such things as spell cast limits are there

No.

DS is even worse than Undertale

/me runs

Never played a Dark Souls game before, but i will pick up this one. I'm very excited to play this and tell myself why i paid $60 to get my butt kicked while in osu! i can do that for free.

pvp is just as garbage as dark souls 2

RedPanda wrote:

pvp is just as garbage as dark souls 2

Every time I see someone with these sorts of blanket statements/opinions I always think they're the sort of person who in general, probably isn't satisfied with anything in their lives.

Faust wrote:

RedPanda wrote:

pvp is just as garbage as dark souls 2

Every time I see someone with these sorts of blanket statements/opinions I always think they're the sort of person who in general, probably isn't satisfied with anything in their lives.

Want me to go in depth on why I dislike this PvP? Unless you can't understand any of it like the average dark souls player cx

By all means.

*Chug chug chug chug chug*
*Run run run run run*

Meanwhile being a Blade of the Darkmoon...


I'm fine with the honourable duels down at Sulyvahn's crib tho.

I had hoped for Blue Eye Orb but nope.

Darkmoon Blade invasions have traditionally not been as good as the other PVP/Invasion-based Covenants so yeah.

I've achieved my 30 ears and received that sweet and tasty Darkmoon Blade that I will possibly never use anyways, so buh-bye to that covenant, buh-byyyyyeeeeee. I found the best way to farm ears was to get a friend to summon you and make your friend spam Dried Finger to get people to invade him.

Combat-wise it's too soon to say. The infinites that have been found have been patched out and From seems to be spitting out more and more patches. Dirty Estoc, Dark sword and R1 spammers are easy to deal with since you can parry or roll away after the second R1 hit of any weapon so I haven't had any problem with anything. The combat is definitely faster than Dark Souls 2. One thing I don't like so far, combat-wise, is how shit the parrying dagger is; it's so fucking bad I have to result to using the caestus for parrying.

Estoc r1 meta due to jewsoft turning poise off.
Darksword r1 meta due to jewsoft turning poise off.
Since poise is useless at the current moment, wolf ring is useless since you'll always have enough poise to tank attacks at the end of your roll, and if you can't it leads to more phantom range.
Due to no poise everyone taking a passive playstyle.
Estus healing impossible to punish due to hyper armor when drinking and backstabbing estus does not work.
Backstabs are actually pretty useless in PvP since you can't get them 99% of the time, and if you do it's usually because of a priority bs (aka the guy fucked up)
Taking the route of using dedicated servers resulting in extreme phantom range. Say what you want but I've experienced extremely consistent PvP using P2P.
Hyper armor resetting in ganks so you'd always get stunlocked to death.
Speaking of ganks, it's now extremely hard to win against a gank. We see average 3v1's and possible to summon more, run away to use mobs and they just use seed.
No other option of healing other than estus and miracles. Host has 100% health and 14 estus, invader has 70% and 7. A build should not have to invest stats into faith just to heal (also applies to pyro).
Now we see FUGS has reduced base damage and no reason to use it any more. It was obviously better than pre-patch but the same issue was with DS2, and every weapon is now equally as shit.

The game is probably as fast paced as demon's souls which makes it a huge improvement to DS2's clunky design, but at it's core it's basically DS2 PvP with faster gameplay. I don't hate it by any means, but it gets boring very quick like DS2 did. DS1 was definitely my favourite. But in terms of PvE this is definitely my favourite so far.

I like the fact that poise is non-existent. I prefer to wear cloth instead of armour so in 1, I was always forced to wear something like Havel Gauntlets just to achieve the poise threshold. Even with poise being shit, it doesn't matter anyways; you can roll or parry out of the 2nd R1 hit of any weapon so R1 spammers are actually irrelevant if you know this; backstab is a good punishment against people that perform a failed parry.*
Even if there is no poise, certain weapons have a lot of hyper armour on them now on certain frames of their attack; just adds another element of skill.

*When a person parries, you can run and phase through them to perform an easy backstab.

Anyways, since we're in the topic of PvP; what are your guy's builds?
My main build right now is SL120:
36 Vigor (The first softcap for Vig is 27 & the second softcap is 39; always good to go above 27 Vig since health scales up as a percentage with Ember form, FAP ring & Life ring)
14 Attunement (2 attunement slots for Tears of Denial miracle; if you've played Demon Souls you'd know how good this is and how you may want it for every build)
40 Endurance
15 Vitality (No points in Vit since I always wear light armour and I never use shields because they're ugly and I prefer the look of weapons that can parry, like the parrying dagger; basically I never go over 70% equip load since Havel's ring is enough and the only kind of heavy shit that I equip are weapons)
30 Strength (I was going to settle for 27 so I could just get the 40 str by two handing, but I decided that I wanted to meet the stat requirements of certain weapons and be able to one hand them like BKGS and BKH)
40 Dex (It's a quality build)
9 Int
18 Faith (15 Faith to meet the requirements of Tears of Denial and 18 Faith to meet the requirements for the Dragonslayer swordspear)

For rings I use Havel's, FAP, Cloranthy and Hornet.
Basically I made the build so I can use most weapons in the game apart from high Str requirement weapons like FUGS and other weapons that require Int and Faith. Using only 1 weapon gets boring so I want to be able to change when I want to.

Almost there with my 30 Concords.
The drop-rate is obscene, though I can still get roughly 3-4 in about an hours time of farming the Silver Knights at Anor Londo bonfire with 300+ item discovery.

As for PVP, generally it's been good for myself.
Poise non-existant? Well there are always ways to work around, and why even wear the Wolf Ring in the first place lmao.
Almost half the weapon arts have hyper armor (noticeably Farron Greatsword) so you're relatively safe should you happen to exchange blows.

The addition of certain rings like the Carthus ones and the Clutch series gives a lot of viability to go either extremely offensive or just plain versatile since you now have the option to get more i-frames and even be invisible while rolling (Now imagine if they'd brought back the Dark Wood Grain ring so you can wear all 3)
Knight Slayer ring also a good consideration for almost any weapon when dealing with heavy blocking. Put on Estoc and you'd likely guard break on the 4th to 5th hit or so most likely.

Most of the weapon movesets have been given better treatment this time round, the Scythe is amazing when all you do is play unlocked while swiping to achieve massive dead-angling.
Previous games (Bloodborne aside) every single Scythe was literally a farming tool. You fucking plough the ground in front of you.

I tend to worry less about the current limitations and exploits since there's always a way to punish those.
As I have while earning my 30 Vertebra Shackles..

The Farron Greatsword is a gimmick 'look cool' weapon that is in definite need of buffs. It's weapon art is literally one of the easiest things in this game to parry; I haven't ever failed once in parrying every single person using the FGS weapon art and I don't even have to try. Slap on a Hornet ring and have fun one-shotting FGS users.
Knight Slayer ring is irrelevant since kick is always an option; it's a waste of a ring slot and if you're spending more than 2 hits against someone blocking, you're risking yourself of getting parried and even new players can parry that.
Why would you want 30 vertebra shackles? It's not like Warmth is a good spell; Bloodlust is the only thing worth getting.

Anyways, how were your guys experiences with the bosses on your first playthroughs? From what I've seen, most people had the most trouble with the Nameless King and Pontiff Sulyvahn which surprised me at first; I beat Sulyvahn on my 2nd try and I found the Nameless king quite easy to fight against, only thing tough about him was he hit hard and he had a shit ton of health; he also only took me 2 tries to beat. Personally I died and had the most trouble against Crystal Sage which makes me feel lonely because apparently no one else did. Of course now that I have done several playthroughs, the Crystal Sage is one of the easiest out of all the bosses but on my first playthrough I really did have a tough time. I remember I had something around 15 or so hollowing when I first fought Crystal Sage, then when I finally beat him I was at max 99; can't remember how many Dark Sigils I had at the time. Pissed me off so much, he was the only boss in my first playthrough which I said fuck it and summoned some random dude to help me. Not sure why I had so much trouble, it was probably because I was fighting him with +1 weapons since I was trying out and using several weapons at once.

My favourite boss fight of the game is between Soul of Cinder and Abyss Watchers but they still don't beat Artorias, who remains my most favourite boss in a Souls game. Still, what really matters is the DLC; the best bosses and content of every Souls game has always been in the DLC and I've heard that DS3 is having 2. Can't wait.

The Farron Greatsword shines most when you play unlocked, then you gain a lot more freedom and can take full advantage of the Weapon skill, which is pretty reliable so far since it uses Stamina instead of FP so you can conserve it for any off-hand/secondary Right-weapon.
You can't parry a FGS if they start angling the swing that way and if you do you just get hit by the sweep.

In the first place, if you manage to parry the FGS that way they very likely weren't very good PVP players at all, haha.
I mean they'd have to be initiating the move in front of you, and that's just asking for it.

I mentioned Knight Slayer ring because of the added pressure.
When you go full ham with the Estoc you wouldn't give a damn about stopping, moving forward for a kick anyway, you just mash that sweet R1 till they eventually break. Make full efficiency of the DPS and low stamina consumption.
Case being, when used against people wielding ultra-great shields and shields that don't allow parrying.
I'd say it's a viable choice since the chances are they like to turtle a lot.

30 Vertebra because I want the Platinum trophy, but I get what you mean.

Bosses for this game were good, save the Gimmick Wyvern. I don't hate it, but well. I don't know if I want to even consider that a 'Boss"
The game holds your hand, and you just do what it says. Broken straight-sword plunge attack the head if you want.

Abyss Watchers, Nameless King, Pontiff and Twin Princes were good stuff.
All of them are tests both individually and as a group, though Abyss Watchers might be a pushover compared to the rest due to shit poise.
Abyss Watchers for coolest first impression though. I mean it's such an action-ey fight fest you just cannot dislike it.

Latter 3 can mow your group if they aren't very careful, Nameless 1st stage AOE fire breath can make a Phantom use every Estus available before the 2nd phase if you're unlucky enough.

Pontiff has rather erratic move-sets and his plan is just ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK, also his wide-swings. Only that he and his Phantom are telegraphed to the same movements.
I'd say Twin Princes test your co-ordination the most out of all the bosses, thanks to teleport spams & ranged spells.
Even though he's well-telegraphed, he hits like a truck so you're made to stay highly keen on dodging, though less so if you have a partner.
Looking forward to the DLC coming out later this year.
I actually would like to fight Velka.

Even if you dead angle with FGS it's predictable as fuck; if you miss that L1, you'll get punished for it. Nothing changes, it's still a gimmick sword.

I don't know how it's like to fight Nameless King with other people or any other boss apart from Crystal Sage since I never summon whites. Seriously, I've only died to him once and I've fought him 5 times; twice in my first playthrough, once in a different character and two more times in New Game+ and New Game++; Orphan of Kos, Kalameet, Artorias and Manus are harder than him in my opinion. After I beat him once I've never died to him since; same applies to every other boss apart from Champion Gundyr.

Boss-wise, everything after Wolnir was a cake walk for me; only bosses I died to after Wolnir were Pontiff, Soul of Cinder, Gundyr and Nameless King and the hardest out of all of them was Gundyr since he was the only one who actually killed me more than once. Once I got a Carthus curved sword drop from one of the skeletons and received the ashes you get down at Carthus-whatever-it's-called, I saw it's massive base damage, bleed and tested if I could buff the bleed even more with a Carthus Rouge. Once I saw that it could, I upgraded that Carthus curved sword as high as possible and bought a shit ton of Carthus Rouges from the handmaiden. Back in DS1 I used to always just use the Painting Guardian Sword for PvE because as far as I remember, it had the best scaling out of all the curved swords and it had a bleed effect making it a weapon that just eliminated bosses; finding that Carthus curved sword was a complete holy shit moment because my reaction at that moment was "Holy shit, it's Painting Guardian Sword 2.0," and I was completely right. Not sure if anyone's found this or not but seriously, Carthus curved sword buffed with Carthus Rouge completely eliminates bosses. I tore apart the Princes and Aldrich under a minute in my first try and every other boss apart from Gundyr, I only just died once. Even New Game+ second phase Nameless King, who has the most health out of any boss got eliminated under a minute. Try it out, it's what I use to breeze through PvE in New Game+ and so forth.

I'll probably be playing the DLC in a New Game++ or a New Game+++ so I'll see how the Carthus Curved Sword fares against the bosses there.

Tactically, the appeal is whether you bait the L1 into another L1 because obviously your opponent is going to distance away from the 1st swing, or immediately rush in to punish you.
As mentioned, FGS weapon art has hyper armor and no matter what the other player does to you while caught exchanging they'll have no choice but to tank AT LEAST 2 hits, that's if they decide to back out after the 1st L1 swing.
I'm no genius at PVP, but I've seen some stellar usage.

That said, if some fool does it to close distance to you at the wrong angle after the first sweep, it's extremely liable to punishing especially from any kind of spear. If they don't hit the second L1 fast enough they'll suffer for it. (2nd L1 swipes opposite from the 1st as insurance)
Perhaps the biggest glare.

My build, which is currently an OP build (high investments in STR, DEX etc) is made simply to clear the game a third time at this point, since I decided to boost my SL after going enough PVP.
I got all the bosses before I spiked the SL on NG+, but eh none of them gave any real trouble, and I tend to go in shield-less and rely immensely on evasion.
But then once you're in the zone you tend to read their moves well enough to smooth through everything.
An exception was the Dancer whom I believe I died twice to, since I decided to Greatsword (and that's slow as fuck)

I really, really hope that this is truly the last Dark Souls game. It's good and everything but still not as good as the first. 2 and 3 were never meant to exist since Miyazaki intended for Dark Souls to be a standalone game with no sequel. That's why we had two endings for 1; what happened after either ending was meant to be left for our imagination but when the disgusting pile of shit that is Dark Souls 2 came out, which Miyazaki never wanted, it took away a bit of the magic that Dark Souls had in its story and ending.
All fires no matter how strong, will eventually fade; that was the theme of Dark Souls 1 and it was supposed to end with Dark Souls 1. 2 just ignores that and assumes that you linked the fire in 1; all Dark Souls 2 ever was, was Bandai Namco's way of getting more money by taking advantage of a successful title. What Dark Souls 3 is, in my opinion, is Miyazaki's way of fixing the things Dark Souls 2 fucked up, since the actual existance of 2 completely fucks up the endings he had for the first.
Linking the fire in Dark Souls 1 was considered the bad ending, because all you were doing was fuelling a fire that is eventually going to fade, you're prolonging the age of fire which is supposed to end; the good ending was becoming a Dark Lord and ushering in an age of darkness, a new age, an age of man, giving way for new things, a new era.
What are the endings in Dark Souls 3? You either link the fire; end the age of fire with the firekeeper or become a Dark Lord, last two basically being the same endings so in the end, there are truly only two; you either prolong the age of fire or you finally end it. Sound familiar? Yeah, because it's the same fucking shit from Dark Souls 1. Main story-wise, there is nothing new in Dark Souls 3; what it is, is a fix to the great lore of Dark Souls 1 that was fucked up by Dark Souls 2. This is how Dark Souls is meant to end; with no definitive conclusion, an ending that is left to the player's imagination.

If Bandai Namco decide that they want to force Fromsoft into making another Dark Souls game like they did with Dark Souls 2, then I'll be incredibly disappointed. They should finally stick with the theme of the game and let Dark Souls die like Miyazaki intended when Dark Souls 1 was made; Dark Souls 1 remains as one of my most favourite games of all time but each sequel that releases scratches away the beauty of the game bit by bit. Dark Souls 1 is still miles better than either 2 or 3 because it made a world, it's own world, it's own lore. Dark Souls 1 is it's own game while 2 and 3 aren't; they rely on the previous lore and a world that has already been created by a game that was never meant to have a sequel. Honestly, if I were to ever recommend someone to play Dark Souls, I would tell them to play the first and only the first. One of the great things about Fromsoft's games is how good they are at creating a completely new world with its own unique lore; sequels should never be a thing. Make another game set in a new world, with new lore; they did it with Bloodborne and the game was successful so surely they can do it again.

Miyazaki initially didn't intend for DARK SOULS III to be the finale, but eventually he changed his mind and I think that was a good decision.

It's just right to end with a trilogy, even if the 2nd installment is kind of considered a stain.
Of course Bam-co had to jump on the franchise when it saw the explosive popularity it had in the West.

DARK SOULS II wasn't an abhorrent game to play, but it was by no means close to what the original game had going for.
I do think it had it's own shine to it, though it felt more catered to the mainstream audience with it's direction/mapping.

Hopefully the 2 DLC's that are scheduled will be the final two pieces and then everything can simmer down nicely.
Expecting something good for their new IP too.

Honestly neither DS2 or 3 has managed to grab me in the way the first one did, I have yet to beat 2 and 3.
Believe i'm close to the end of DS2 and like halfway through DS3.

Gumpyyy wrote:

Honestly neither DS2 or 3 has managed to grab me in the way the first one did, I have yet to beat 2 and 3.
Believe i'm close to the end of DS2 and like halfway through DS3.

Same, but Dark Souls itself falls in comparison to Demon Souls aswell. Demon Souls, best souls.

Demon's Souls eh.

Memories of fighting False King Allant. What a cunt he was.

Also, Firestorm.

Naw it was all about the Storm Ruler fightclubs.

How come every hacker I come across are Russian?

my laptop can only run dark souls 1 and 2.

damn you slow pc

So ideas popped into my mind and I decided to attempt in making Faith builds viable in PvP. This is my first Faith build in DS3 so far but I think I can improve it in a lot of ways. Sunlight spear is kind of useless and just there to lure the enemy into a false sense of security to get them closer; the casting of spear and stake look similar so they can be mistaken at first glance, then Lightning stake with a poise talisman once they're close and if you get a perfect, point-blank hit, it should take away 50% to 100% of their health away. Perfect hits with lightning stake are kind of hard to come by and I didn't really get any footage because anytime I try to record anything from this game it looks all shitty, but I got them here and there during invasions; I just decided to record this duel after verifying from a few invasions that lightning stake can one-shot if hit perfectly. Emit force is shit too but it's actually a good way to finish off enemies as long as you're good and can aim/predict. Overall though, Faith is still shit, you have to be an idiot to get hit by lightning stake but well, there are a shit ton of idiots in DS3 anyways.
http://plays.tv/video/572d7584e3b613862c/trying-to-make-faith-builds-viable-?from=user

Why don't you ever use paragraphing ?

So it turns out poise was never turned off, but in fact it just isn't poise at all.

https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls3/com ... damn_sure/

Wha-what? Wasn't this already known a long time ago? I already did my research/testing and knew that poise affected roll i-frames around 1-2 weeks after western release. The DS3 Reddit's kind of slow and unreliable it seems.

DS3 roll already has enough i-frames to dodge the world though so poise still isn't worth it.

It was thought that poise affected if you could tank an attack at the end of your roll but that was equip load. The idea of it recovering your i-frames is new.
Even skorbrand_ (Did the full analysis of Dark Souls 2 poise) couldn't find anyway on how poise affected your character.
Fromsoft and bandai namco have both stated that poise "Works as intended", yet haven't stated what poise exactly is so they're being vague.

What interests me is the game describes poise as: “The ability to withstand attacks without breaking form.” The current poise as explained right now means nothing to this statement. It also doesn't explain why there is a value within the game that when turned on, makes poise work similar to dark souls 1.

That's probably because the coding for DS3 is a cut and copy of the coding from DS1; nearly everything is the same from the animations to the movesets. But Fromsoft actually learned from before and they knew that poise in DS1 was a horrible mechanic and decided to leave that value turned off, because poise in 1 really was a horrible mechanic. Why has From never replicated the poise mechanic from 1 onto their other games? Because it was bad and people seriously need to learn and admit that it was bad.

That's the reason why we, as the community came up with terms such as Giant Dads, Giant Moms and Havel Monsters. Poise discouraged diversity in armor sets and just made plenty of armor in the game worthless. I could load up my sl125 character on DS1 right now and find maybe 2-4 people with the exact same armor set up within a few invasions. It gave birth to R1 spam heavy builds such as DMB Falchion because they could just poise through Ultra Greatsword hits like they were nothing and everyone and their mothers just loved to backstab fish and poise backstab. Like what the fuck, these weren't really thoughts I realized while DS1 was still new but now that several years have passed since then, it really is stupid knowing that you could just tank through a massive fucking sword then wreck the guy's face in with your small, dinky one.

Fastforward to PvP in DS3, if you backstab fish then you'll get called out for being a noob; if you press R1 more than 2 times you'll get parried; if you get hit by an Ultra Greatsword, Greataxe or Great Hammer then you'll get staggered, like you should, and you deserve to get hit by those two R1s totalling 900+ damage for being bad.

Honestly I think the only people that complain about poise in DS3 are people who've never played Demon's Souls, which didn't have poise either yet it has the most fun PvP out of the series. I'm in the percentile of people that doesn't want DS1 poise to return but rather have it change to something different and with more impact than it currently has. Right now I'm thinking it would be okay if it acted like some sort of damage reduction thing, where on certain frames of your attack, damage inflicted towards you is decreased.

The one stupid thing in the game that more people should complain rather than poise is how it easy it is to chug. In DS1 you'll get punished hard for healing, you'll get interrupted or you'll get backstabbed and that's how it should be; using humanity takes as long as my dick and that's how it should be, there's a good reason the player holds it up to his face for a million years. But in DS3 you can't interrupt it and it's hard to punish, once that animation starts they will get the heal no matter what, so Fromsoft pls fix.

Never cared about Poise, so good for me I guess.

Though, in DS3 instance why does Poise play a part at rolling-invincibility ? Or I shouldn't think so much.

In summary, poise in DS3 works like this:
You have a constant value of i-frames in your rolls depending on your percentage equip load. When you get hit, that value decreases, decreasing the amount of i-frames in your roll. After some time, that value will replenish back to it's original value. Poise determines how much that value decreases per hit and how quickly it replenishes.

Interesting, makes your character sound like 'organic' doesn't it.

I'd like to know what it's like to get hit by 50 hits from a dagger and have no i-frames at all.