Dark Souls 2

I don't care about the price TBH. My issue with it is more the trailer than anything else. It doesn't get me as much excited about it compared to Artorias of the Abyss.

It look meh to me. I will buy it and it might be great. It's just to me DS2 was a huge let down overall.

DavivMcD_sl said:

I wouldn't hate those fucking poison statues as much if poison resist actually did jack shit. Or any of the resists for that matter. When you can't tell the difference between 50 and 400+ there's something wrong.

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yeah, the person responsible for those shitty statues in the gutter and black gulch really needs to die a horrible death. They add nothing and a terrible bore to clear out.

DLC doesn't bother me. There's, obviously, demand for it and From was pretty up front that they'd do it if the demand existed.

I just finished NG+ and started right into NG++ to finish the platinum. The platinum isn't too bad but you really need a dedicated play through to get it. The NPC trophies are best done on NG (Lucatiel and Benhart) just to knock them out. Same with getting the Sunlight Spear Miracle (takes 30 sunlight medals to max out Sunbro covenant). I found that medals are farmable in Things Betwixt on NG++ (and I'd assume NG+ too but I don't remember them dropping or not dropping). As I've mentioned the problem trophies are the Miracle one and the Pyromancy Trophy. Both require extensive covenant grinding to get all the spells for (can't remember the ones off hand) and that doesn't include the Sunlight Spear Miracle for the Miracle trophy which is "reasonable" compared to the others. However, they can be vendor bought from the Chancellor Ghost in the Castle but they're not available until NG++ and that's where I'm at right now on my goal to platinum.

I bought the season pass.
This may be the last money they ever see from me, though, if they disappoint again. If this doesn't fix the game, they move down to EA and Ubisoft ranks in my book - pirate everything, forever.

What needs to be fixed in this game? Honest question

DS1 DLC was pretty fucking awesome(Khalameet boss is still my favorite) so I have no problems giving them my $25.

This guy is spot on. It's a long but really well made critique of DS2. I think it was posted in this thread about a month ago.

Dark Souls 2 Critique - YouTube

Noodleface_sl said:

What needs to be fixed in this game? Honest question

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My main gripes are the durability bullshit, the lack of real invasions, the excessive stupidity of Bellbro and Rat Covenant mechanics, the lack of Armor and resist effectiveness, the stupid as fuck double click bug, the stupid as fuck random target switching, the inferiority of weapons that aren't strike (I'd love to see someone datamine the pdef of all enemies, I'd be surprised if their armor vs slash and thrust wasn't generally better across the board)

and most of all, the Soul Memory shit. It's a broken mechanic through and through. The game as a whole is great and I disagree with many things said in that video, it's the culmination of all these small and large issues that made me play this not even half as long as Dark Souls 1. The world is good, activated short-cuts definitely are there, most areas are fun to play through - the gutter is a whole lot better than Blighttown was imo and an excellent example of how good the Torch play can actually be. What I saw in another video, basically that players explored a new area without a torch, and once they had it cleared, they just walked backwards and lit all the torches in the area, is absolutely true and that's what I did in my first NG. I sure as fuck didn't bother doing that again in NG+.


Fixing it is not that hard either.
Durability needs to be fixed before we can even think about balancing it. the FPS bug is basically unacceptable and it's insane this wasn't caught by them in the 6 weeks between releases.
There needs to be a complete red eye orb in NG+ and an infinite source of cracked red eye orbs in NG. You can't claim invasions are part of the game, and then eliminate them in NG through making CREOs limited in supply.
While I definitely hate Belfry areas, they can stay in. But it is a really shitty mechanic when you consider that bellbros get free titanite chunks (Soul Memory issue), therefore they're stronger for their soul level than someone who bought these things.
Double click bug needs to be fixed, plain and simple
Random target switching should be disabled
Weapon balance is a bit harder, obviously.

And Soul Memory absolutely must be limited to souls spent to level up your character and add a flat amount based in equipment quality, i.e. the first time you upgrade a weapon to +1, you gain 5k SM, +2 6k, and so on. I easily have a million soul memory spent on equipment I'm not wearing. That puts me a whole bracket up. I lost 400k to double deaths, I spent a lot of souls on merchants besides buying titanite so that puts me yet another bracket above. I'm at least 2 Levels higher than my character's actually at right now.

I wonder what From software is working on, since they outsourced this. or are they just counting money at this point?

The durability issue bothered me a lot more on my first time through. Since then it hasn't really affected me too much. The one spot that I do get a bit concerned with Durability is when I finally reach Duke's Dear Freja since there is so much trash. Luckily she's an easy boss if you summon the NPC so I just pop a repair powder and move on. But I'm not using low durability katana like weapons either.

I just made sure to use each bonfire and only Wharf was ever an issue with the weapons I used.

Needless_sl said:

This defeats the purpose though does it not?

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What is the purpose of SM? I thought it was to prevent SL1 characters with +15 equipment from destroying SL1 characters with +0 equipment. And the way the game works now that's not even required, because you don't get access to the better titanite shards without killing a few bosses and unlocking the higher areas, which already forces tens of thousands of souls on your character.

There would need to be something to counteract people stripping their shit off, then putting it all on when they get summoned though lol

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That's exactly what the system I propose does. If the character at some point acquired a +10 weapon, he has for example 100k soul memory even with a SL of 1 and wouldn't be matched against fresh characters anymore. What the game does now is that every +10 item you acquire increases your Soul Memory by around 20k, so an armor set you decided not to wear anymore? that's 80k SM not improving your character. Assuming you didn't buy any shards and chunks. If you bought the stuff, we're looking at around 200k per set? Insanity.

It could be poor scaling as well but that sword scales A/A for str dex, it should be out damaging a +10 mace on a character with base stats by a large margin by that logic.

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I'm pretty sure most enemies simply have insane armor values vs slash and thrust, and very low armor vs strike. The mechanics are there to see for us, just the numbers are missing.

pemulis_sl said:

I think he's talking about durability taking a double hit on PC because of the increased fps. Durability otherwise is easily remedied with powder, which is why it's in the game...

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and each powder you buy increases your SM by 2500.

Noodleface_sl said:

What needs to be fixed in this game? Honest question

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For me, a lot of the mechanics are poorly designed and need to be adjusted. Don't care so much about the multiplayer shit or the story/campaign.

- Weapon damage scaling is significantly skewed in favor of strength as it gives 50% better scaling than dexterity point for point. As a result, many dex weapons are either underpowered or just not worth raising your dex above the requirment for.

- Too many weapons have the same movesets. It seems most classes of weapons have two different movesets where each weapon has one or the other, and then some of the weapons have a mix of the two. Means whatever weapon has the best stats is usually the best, with hardly any weapons being noteworthy for their moveset as almost all of them share it with quite a few other weapons. DS1 had many more weapons with unique movesets that defined them.

- Fully 50% of the game's weapons and armor sets are just too underpowered to be worth using under any circumstances.

- Lots of hitbox and range issues in both PvE and PvP.

- Weapon durability needs to be doubled across the board. Many weapons are fucked in PvE because they have like 40 durability which won't last from one bonfire to the next in half of the game's areas, and the solutions (Repair spell, knuckle ring, infinite powder merchants, fully upgraded spare weapons) don't become available until far into the game. There's no point whatsoever in some weapons just arbitrarily having too little durability to last through an area, it doesn't add anything to the game or present any form of challenge, it simply makes some weapons worse/unusable. It's just a pointless chore and a poorly designed system that doesn't match the gameplay. Also get rid of the thing where a weapon's special buff/spell costs a huge chunk of its durability, just give them a fucking cooldown or charges that refresh on resting or something.

- The poise stat is nearly worthless and can pretty much be ignored. Needs to be reverted to the way it was in DS1.

- Agility is stupid.

- Parry/riposte mechanics need to be loosened up a little and be more like in DS1. Get rid of the thing where you have to wait for a mob to fall down and then have to step forward before you can riposte it. Also add a few more frames to the parry window.

- More twinkling titanite and petrified dragon bone. You only get enough of these to upgrade a single fucking weapon throughout the entire campaign unless you use a bunch of ascetics in one of the endgame areas where they drop from mobs. You can't +5 a boss weapon until you reach Aida's Keep, or a twinkling weapon until Shrine of Amana, both of which are like in like the last 20% of the game. This means a lot of weapons that you can get very early on are essentially worthless for regular playthroughs and only become viable for PvP or NG+ runs.

- Hard to put a finger on the exact solution, but I feel like not enough builds are worthwhile. There's just something missing. Not enough of the weapons feel like they're worth building a character around, magic feels shallow and boring, archery isn't really something you can do as the main part of a build unless you want to do a gimmick run, and scaling coefficients mean your stats don't matter enough in damage calculations. With most weapons, your stats make up something like 20% of your damage and the rest is from the weapon's base damage and your weapon buff. There's no real point to light armor because there's no fast roll, and no point to heavy armor because the game uses the PoE armor system where anything that hits hard basically ignores your defense stat. It makes one's actual character feel unimportant and the whole game just feels like you are the weapon or spell you've picked as it'll perform more or less the same no matter how you've built your character. There's just something really off about DS2's build dynamics, your choices are too irrelevant. Every character ends up with one of the same three or four stat configurations and the only thing that differs is your choice of weapon, and each magic school basically has one spell that's best which makes the rest obsolete.