Oh yeah, i'm actually at the catacombs now but i stopped to go fight the boss in the level before and got stuck on him and haven't played in a few days lol. But yeah, definitely some annoying traps but haven't seen any dumb platforming yet.

@oursin_360 said:

Hmmm, maybe. I actually don't remember how the camera fares in that area, but I could see it becoming an unnecessary annoyance.

So, the reason why I found it odd that there hasn't been a Sen's Fortress in each games is because I thought it was one of the most beloved areas in Dark Souls. I thought the Catacombs would be this game's version of Sen's Fortress, but obviously, it doesn't go far enough. Also, the Catacombs looked kind of drab, whereas Sen's Fortress, I feel, had more varied scenery.

Man this boss kinda just killed my momentum in this game, I just can't beat him at all. Pontiff Sullivan I've even looked online for tips and seen a guy beat him with the same armor, weapon and fighting style as me but I just can't do it. I've blown through maybe 10 embers, and now don't even bother wasting them. Hardest, most annoying boss i've fought in a dark souls game. Only thing harder for me were the mace knights in DS2, i never could reliably beat those dudes. I've played maybe an hour in the last 2 days after pretty much playing 40 hours straight lol. I'm not sure if it's just the slight lag i've been having or what but i just can't dodge his move sets reliably, i even found a ring that raises my I-frames but the armor it takes away is almost not worth it. First time rage quitting in a dark souls game too. I've gotten him down to almost dead a few times but goddamn if the margin for error on this dude is the smallest of all time, with his damn near infinite stamina, well not as bad as the mace knights though. Too bad running past him isn't an option lol.

I've probably fought him more times than all the bosses combined in DS 1 lol.

@oursin_360: fuuuuuuuuck this boss

I'm playing on the Xbox One and the framerate dipped into single digits during this fight. When he summoned his phantom there was a noticeable delay between my inputs and the corresponding action on screen. I think the fight would be somewhere in the "excruciatingly tough but fair" spectrum were it not 100% crippled by the game's unfortunate performance.

Summoning Anri ended up being a major help, but ultimately my strategy came down to equipping the Dragon Crest Shield, which surprisingly blocks most of his attacks, and circle-strafing to my right at point blank range. Pine Resins and Magic Weapon can help boost your damage, but it's imperative that you get CLOSE. Some of his attacks will whiff right over your head, giving you two or three fast shots.

Good luck!

Can you back out when respeccing and not waste one of the 5 opportunities? I want to just mess with the sliders...

@chatmonchies: Yes, you can cancel it without using a tongue or a slot. It does not use a tongue until you confirm to respec, at which point it takes one of the 5 slots away.

@oursin_360: Constantly move to his straight sword hand and roll in that direction too when he attacks in phase 1, he has not got infinite stamina and has pretty low health.

@sterling - Excellent, thanks.

@inevpatoria said:

I had this thought too, but then tried levelling up my shields and you get more stability. It's not a lot, admittedly, but it does help.

I think one of the main differences is that there's a bigger stability cliff between the greatshields and regular shields this time. You can certainly turtle about with a huge shield, but they weigh so much and you don't get a good one for a long time. If you use Great Magic Shield (which has pretty low stat requirements), you'll suddenly see huge boss attacks doing next-to-no stamina drainage, and you can eat a whole 4-attack boss combo and then attack afterwards. It's a really useful spell, and you can get it about half way through the game.

I'd also like to add that a lot of enemies get knocked back when hitting a shield. Even late game mobs like the dagger wielding ones in Archdragon Peak, which can be a royal pain in the ass with their fast combos, are open for sweet punishment after hitting your shield once. Against the kind of dudes that won't ... well, I still like to have my medium shield at least held up while circling them, in case one of their attacks does end up connecting. While that drains plenty of Stamina (still talking regular shields here), it beats losing health, at least.

Thanks for the tips! I'll give that spell a try. Might as well try to hunt down a greatshield while I'm at it.

Anecdotally, I have not found this to be the case. Some of the smaller mobs, like dogs or the thralls, will stagger after connecting with the shields, and the regular skeletons within the Catacombs do as well, but basically everything else just goes into a canned three-to-four hit combo animation. And if you tank the first hit, the enemy tracking is such that you are more or less locked in place and forced to withstand the rest of the combo.

I don't mind evading, but it's just tiring having to do that for every single enemy in every single encounter, nevermind situations where you're forced to fight more than one enemy at a time. Combined with the game's wacky system for dealing with situations where you and an enemy trade blows (that is, you will be staggered 100% of the time while they are not), it's made for a pretty frustrating experience.

I'm still going no shield because that's how i roll lol, but yeah it's rough and i don't really get fps drops but i do get slight input lag and the input delay.

Will give it a shot, i've gotten close a few times to killing him but i always get hit by something either one of those combo's or his AOE attacks. And i have no health really even with ember since i'm all stamina and dex.

Teleporting bosses will delay their teleport if they know you're running on low stamina. Risky, but if your stamina regen and attack speed is good, you can keep a boss right where you want them.

@oursin_360: That boss is where i finally abandoned my glass cannon build. I went back and did some bosses and areas i had skipped and came back to him with 20 vitality and a shield i had my sweet sweet revenge. Unfortunately becouse of that the difficulty spiked on that boss for me and the rest of the game after that became easier.

I knew my all out greed tactics would bear fruit eventually ;)

I actually managed to beat the mage boss with her teleporting only once with this "tactic".

Deacons of the Deep down. I guess it wouldn't be a Souls game without a crappy puzzle boss. Patches dressed up as Siegward was a cool surprise. I just wish I could figure out how to get over where he said the treasure was. Onward to Irythyll Valley! I already killed the crazy crocodile thing on the bridge, so there's that. I wish I had more time to mess around. My game actually crashed in the character creator the first time and I ended up just playing anyway. Now I feel like I wish I'd gone back and made my character properly.

Well maybe you could kill two birds with one stone. If you delve deeper into the mysteries of getting over to Patches treasures in the cathedral there just might be something there to change your apperance aswell, who knows.

Man, I'm finishing up my second playthrough now and I think I figured out why people have such varying views on the difficulty of this game. The PvE in this game is horribly unbalanced. My first playthrough was a heavy weapons wielder and I found it exceptionally difficult to find an opening to hit some of these bosses with a big slow weapon. I died 10+ times to multiple (sulyvahn, dancer, dragonslayer armour) bosses. My second playthrough I've focused on pyro/hexes. Not only am I killing bosses on my first try, I'm beating them in like 15 seconds with great chaos fireball, a fully upgraded pyro glove + witch's ring + great swamp ring. I'm doing like 750 points of ranged damage despite only being level 60, and paired with short casting times from the sage ring, this shit is a joke. I haven't even been using the fire clutch ring but that would add even more damage. They really should remove ring stacking.

I also played the through first half of the game with some very basic light weapons and it was comparatively a breeze. Slow heavy weapons are harrrrd to use.

They did but it wasn't nearly this bad. I'm seriously killing bosses in half a minute without using a single flask. On my second playthrough. It's pathetic. I killed the Dancer with maybe 12 fireballs with a +7 glove at level 50. That guy was a pain in the ass on my first playthrough

From really needs to fix the Blade of the Darkmoon covenant. Farming Proof of a Concord Kepts is no fun.

Wish I could say. On Xbox, the servers have been largely unresponsive since launch.

@dudeglove: I've definitely ran into some special lag since the rollback on PC. Sometimes connectivity is bad and enemies will just sit there as you murderize them as a phantom, that's fine I guess. But now the damage doesn't even register, and I've sat a good couple minutes in the Grand Archives before enemies decided to move again. I can't imagine how annoying that'd be in a boss fight.

Hard to say what the cause is but I think I'll just take a break until the next patch.

Mimics in this game are absolutely terrifying. Worse than bosses terrifying. Their grab attack very nearly one-shots me embered up with 20 vigor. It also has some serious range and AoE. I swear they've caught me at the end of a backwards roll that I started as they started their grab. Don't even think of rolling to the side the homing is so good. I've died more often to mimics than bosses! It doesn't help that every second chest is one of the fuckers.

I've also kind of hit a wall. There is only one apparent path forward, and it's into a boss (Yhorm) I feel under-equipped to deal with. After peeking at the NPC cheat sheet thread, I feel like I've missed a whole lot.

@sinusoidal: Beating him the normal way is insane(but possible), but you explore that room and its contents a little and you'll be able to deal with him no problem.

I just got to Anor Londo. I fucking love how the game lets you slowly see it coming. Asshole archers, spinning staircase, BOOM, giant fucking entrance doors. Loving DS3!

Completely stuck on Aldrich. His ranged spammy magic attacks are bullshit. And then when I finally do get in close he either teleports away, or spams his crappy arrow bombardment AoE and I die. Gah. Between Aldrich and Pontiff I'm starting to see the DS2 side of DS3 and not liking it much.

Aldrich was one of the bosses in the game in which I felt I'd only "figured him out." Like, with quotes. Not actually figured him out. As in, I knew what his attacks were, and I sort of kind of had ways to manage them, but it never really become an actionable plan. When Aldrich eventually fell, it seemed more like I'd been the beneficiary of good RNG rather than having systematically adjusted for his four or five major strengths.

@sinusoidal: Just because you're finding it hard doesn't mean it's got a DS2 side to it.

@sinusoidal: If you roll in a tight triangle when he starts his phase 2 arrow stuff and just keep rolling until he stops, you'll never get hit. I had a ton of trouble with Aldrich, but I beat him pretty quickly after figuring that one out.

I just spam roll and try to gain some space. As soon as he hits the archer pose, I get right out of there. Its RNG dependent, certainly but you can definitely delay his teleport if he recognises your stamina is low. What I find with bosses like that is to identify their strongest attacks and defend against it. Use that as a base and then work backwards towards understanding the other attacks.

If all else fails, most bosses can be rushed and staggered.

@sinusoidal: It might help to know that the arrows are not an AOE in the normal sense. Try running away when he lifts his bow.

@sinusoidal: Like others have said, if you're close to him when he starts his arrows, get out of there. I've found that the arrows don't track too well once he starts firing them off; they're pretty directional (at least if I recall correctly). If he ever tried to do it when I was some distance away from him, I'd roll to the side, then get hits in from the back.

(What I hope is) Good advice in here. I'll give it a shot after work today. I do seem to at least be doing a lot of damage to him fairly quick. I just need to survive phase 2.

Took out Aldrich tonight. It was a bit ridiculous. I died miserably with and without summons a dozen times. Last time, somehow went in and just wrecked him. I don't feel like I learned anything about the fight, I just got good RNG. Disappointing. He only fired arrows off once second form. The dodging tips did help. Still can't dodge them 100% though.

The follow-up fight though: Dancer. Great boss. Fucking destroyed me and didn't feel cheap. I spawned him without leaving first to spend my souls from Aldrich, so I had 70k souls of incentive sitting in a bloodstain in there to beat him. Allllmost beat him a few times solo, tried a summon and got him first try. The poor Sunbro died right before I killed him though. Seriously, a smidgen of life away from death he got caught in one of Dancer's second-form swoop-swoop-swoop attacks. Died. I was sad. And more than a little panicky. Then I rolled in and finished him in two hits. Praise the sun! Emotional roller coaster!! This is why I come to these games.

Obviously this is something that needs a bit of setup you'd have to do through the game. But something that helps with learning Aldrich is doing Anri of Astora's questline up to Anor Londo, at which point you can be summoned into Anri's world to help fight Aldrich. Then you can die when you want to try the fight over again and it just pops you right in front of the summon sign to try again. No downtime running inbetween the silver knights and up to the boss.

Finished the game last night. Overall very impressed. I spent more time co-oping The Grand Archives and the Nameless King than with anything else. Not my favorite level design in a Souls game, but definitely better than 2. The optional areas were some of the standouts. Archdragon peak was awesome. Smouldering Lake's beginning area was a great fuck-you souls moment. Untended Graves felt a bit lazy. I did like how it looks like the regular old enemies, but they're 10x harder. The Grand Archives were also great. Even after co-oping through them a dozen times over, I still found a couple things I missed later on. As I type this, I remember a hallway I forgot to explore in Lothric Castle...

I tried out a bunch of weapons and definitely had the most fun and best results with refined Gotthard Twinswords. The rolling attack is super fast, and you can follow up with some devastating two-handed blows. Great for stopping Estoc abusers in their tracks. Doesn't do much good against the fair number of cheaters I encounter on PC though. Pretty tired of invincible soul arrow spamming Rosaria's Fingers. If you're going to cheat to farm your covenant items, just cheat the covenant items into your inventory already.

I bought the all the dlc for this and I haven't touched it. Wanted to save it for a second playthrough but too many games man.