Dark Souls 2

On reddit they now linked the durability bug to framerate. The higher your framerate is, the more damage is dealt to your weapon's durability

I mentioned that a couple days ago. It's only hitting corpses and friendly (e.g. Rat covenant) targets that you have to worry about though. Normal fighting, hitting walls, etc. don't seem to cause the issue. And I still wouldn't expect to ever see it get fixed, unless they decide to do the logical thing and make corpses and friendlies deal no durability damage at all.

So I confirmed the absolutely absurd advantage clerics have early game. Heal+mace early game is so far and away better than other starting sets it's insane. I rolled a sorc while back after starting a cleric and had the hardest time. I died so much. Then I realized cleric is better statwise for hex so I rerolled and just plowed everything. First titanites going to upgrade mace and it wrecks shit for the first 1/4 of the game with no str investment. I'm pumping int/faith while relying on mace to tide me over and it's just all around amazing. Even on my str character, I can't seem to let go of the mace. Got claymore+10 and have tried several other weapons and while the moveset is so good on claymore, the damage just doesn't match the mace.

It feels boring to use a starting weapon forever but what other options are there?

Also one question: my str char is going str/faith now. Should I be imbuing and what imbue to use? Lightning? How much faith makes it worthwhile?

Mace can be used until you beat the game, strike damage is OP. In reality you could beat the game with any set of starter weapons. At the end of the day, people choose the weapons they choose because of 1) moveset and 2) looks.

Faith builds use lightning. Softcaps for int/fth are 40 but it'll probably be worth your time to go up to 50 if you're dedicated to the build.

With a str/fth build my favorite weapon would probably be a +10 lightning mastodon halberd.

Go with 50 faith for no other reason than because Dragon Chime shits all over everything else. The number two is Priest's Chime, and it's not even close at all really (it's found barely a third of the way through the game, even less if you know where it is and make a beeline for it right away). Strength, on the other hand, you can just stop at whatever your weapon's req is, assuming you choose one of the good ones.

And as good as a mace is as a starter weapon, it can still be replaced by something vastly better in the first hour or two of NG. Referring to the barbed club that's made with Flexile Sentry's soul. Same moveset, more damage by default, and waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more damage once infused.

I think claiming Heide's Tower + Fisherman's Wharf + Lost Bastille all cleared within the "first hour or two" of a new game is a little unrealistic for most people.

Well, yes, it certainly assumes prior knowledge of the game and where exactly things are. But it's doable if you ignore FoFG and go straight to Heide's, and that's what I did on my faith character. No point in putting it off when you've got a strike weapon to clear out Heide's with ease.

I'll amend it to 'first few hours of NG' since I did sort of forget about needing a branch for Straid. Oops.

Regardless, it's a great weapon that easily outclasses a plain old mace, whether it takes you 3 hours or 30 to get it.

I started over as a Sorcerer build. Early game clearing is really tough due to the lack of shield and the limits on spell uses. But bosses are easy mode. I one shot Last Giant, Pursuer, Dragon Rider, Dragon Slayer, and Flexile. First boss that I died to was Ruin Sentinels which was a bit harder for me as a Sorcerer than it was as melee. I have to say that the one boss that seems much tougher as magic was the Medusa boss. I never even knew she had ranged attacks and those caught me off guard. Still haven't beaten Smelter Demon solo. I think I could have this time around but I summoned Lucatile because I wanted the trophy. So it wasn't solo but it wasn't as cheesy as summoning players in.

I just made my way through Shaded Woods and what a pain in the ass that place is as a Mage Build. I had to go melee for those invisible stalkers of suck and also burned about 20 life gems... But I got through...

There's also the small detail of being able to upgrade a mace to +10 fairly early while not being able to get Barbed to +5 til late, late, LATE in NG.

Also, I'm surprised I haven't seen a single mention of Humonculous Mace. Is nobody playing on PC? Better base dmg than mace but lower STR scaling. Still a fantastic starter weapon if you don't go cleric.

Angelwatch_sl said:

I just made my way through Shaded Woods and what a pain in the ass that place is as a Mage Build. I had to go melee for those invisible stalkers of suck and also burned about 20 life gems... But I got through...

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You know about the trick to use binoculars to aim spells right?

DavivMcD_sl said:

There's also the small detail of being able to upgrade a mace to +10 fairly early while not being able to get Barbed to +5 til late, late, LATE in NG.

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Barbed club pulls ahead long before +5.

I don't know the exact numbers for interim upgrades but a lightning mace +10 is 168/168, while a lightning barbed club +5 is 306/87 with a 122 bleed effect on top of that.

Also, if you don't do bell covenant pvp, you find that chunks are rare enough that you have to choose between using them on your mace or on your priest's chime until quite late in the game as well. Using otherwise-worthless dragon bones solves that dilemma.

Even without the bug, DS2's durability system is extremely flawed. Pretty much all light weapons have like 40 durability which means they'll break long before the next bonfire in most areas. A rapier will barely last through certain boss fights like the gargoyles or sentinels. Coupled with the fact that they tend to do less damage per swing but attack faster, thus exacerbating that problem, it just feels broken and I've never bothered to finish any of my dex playthroughs. Anything under 60 durability feels wrong, the weapon simply will not last even if you avoid hitting walls or corpses. You can only bring so many repair powders, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to build for sorceries and bring the Repair spell (which you don't get until you're more than halfway through the game anyway). Such bad design, they clearly didn't even consider PvE for dex weapons.

It stops scaling as rapidly at 40. Almost all of the stats do this at a certain point. Int/dex/str/faith/attunement are 40 iirc, end/vig/adapt are 20? And I think vit is just flat 1.5lbs increase forever.

Ronne_sl said:

It stops scaling as rapidly at 40. Almost all of the stats do this at a certain point. Int/dex/str/faith/attunement are 40 iirc, end/vig/adapt are 20? And I think vit is just flat 1.5lbs increase forever.

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Pretty sure vit goes to just 1 lbs. after 20. Also, I glanced at the scaling charts exactly once and seem to recall that str for example scales better from 40 to 50 than it did from 30 to 40. I'm pretty sure it is no longer linear scaling until 40, then a massive drop off after that... This system seems more complex. But I'm not an expert, this is just what I recall seeing on reddit from someone who was testing these things.

Does anyone here like adaptability? I put a ton of points into it just because of the resists.

Int should be taken to 50 for the same reason as faith--Staff of Wisdom is a much better weapon than the second best one. The gap between Wisdom and Amana isn't as large as the gap between Priests Chime and Dragon Chime, but it's still significant. I would never go past 50 unless I had nowhere else left to spend points on anything useful. If you want to use Soul Geyser just spice it down to 50.

Attunement should definitely be 50 as well if your SL is high enough that you've considered 99 int. Endurance past 20 is actually quite good still when combined with third dragon ring. Faith 30 soft-caps both fire and dark bonuses, and 50 is ideal if you want to use lightning as well. Str/Dex I wouldn't go beyond minimum equip reqs. unless your melee weapon of choice scales A or better with one of them. Adaptability should always be 20 minimum, and up to 39 if you want the full benefit, but that's not really necessary when you have 50 attunement. Vigor is 30 hp per point to 20, then 20 hp per point to 50; 20 is more than adequate for pve, I'd only spend more if you pvp a lot. Vitality is worthless to a caster since Lion Mage's set + black mask are so light as well as being the ideal armor. I'd only spend whatever you need to get below 50% load with your normal equipment.
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I like adaptability for the agility; the resists are pretty useless since they only cover poison/curse/bleed/petrify. Ideally you want a combination of ADP and ATT that gives around 105-110 agility. 20 ADP and 50 ATT is 107 agility, which is where I stopped. A character that heavily favors melee will have about 110 agility with 39 ADP and base ATT; I would probably only raise ADP from 20 to 39 after everything else needed was done though. The difference between base and 100 agility is night and day when it comes to rolling i-frames, the difference between 100 and 110 is more subtle but still noticeable.

Bearer of the FPS curse

Not unless you're one of the fags that think the game stops at SL 150. FROM obviously intends for people to continually level, continue adding NG++'s and PVP up to max level. Naysayers claim everyone will have the same fast rolling mage havel avelyn build at 838, but I don't think so. I know I definitely wouldn't.