@Mikey856 Hey man, saw your earlier post.... and any mention of Sekiro always piques my interest!
If you enjoyed Nioh1, and also platinum'd Bloodborne, personally I think you'll be fine with Sekiro. I platinum'd Nioh1 - and would say the skill/difficulty level is probably on par with Sekiro.
IMO - Sekiro is arguably the finest offering in FromSoft's portfolio, and my personal favorite from their output. There is such a beauty to its simplicity, essentially forcing you to 'get good' and overcome the challenges by playing the game in the way it is encouraged you play it (full agression, keeping the pressure on your enemies and utilising the parry system)
Unlike Elden Ring, there are no opportunities for summons or massive over-levelling.... no cheesy builds or spirit ashes.... so when you beat a boss in Sekiro you know it was because you were skilled enough to do so. So euphoric when you nail one of the Skill-check bosses (Lady Butterfly?) and I highly recommend.
(NB No hate at all on ER, I love that game and have just finished by second NG run in prep for DLC!)
After a little break from gaming in general, I was able to finally get some time with DS2 and make a little progress into Heide’s Tower. It’s been a little tougher here and I’ve been grinding a lot of levels. I think my build is all over the shop now. 😅 I may need to respec, but I’ll just roll with it for now. I’ve got mainly a Hex build and a little bit of Dex for now and have picked up the famous rapier. So far it’s not as OP as I was led to believe, but it’s early days and I’m still figuring it out. I’ve been working on ADP too @colonelkilgore
Weirdly the most challenging fight I’ve had so far has been the Armorer Dennis Red Phantom. I must have died 20 times to that guy. I finally just used a ‘seed of a tree of giants’ and let the 4 turtle warrior guys just kill him for me. 😅
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Oh, and I have been playing around with the Covenant of Champions @BlAcK_SwOrDsMaN
I actually think I like this mechanic where if you kill enemies enough times (it seems to be around 10 or so) then they stop respawning. It’s nice to have the option to clear and area out so that the march back to the boss is enemy free if you want it that way. And then having the option to just join the Champions Covenant when you want to farm is nice. It’s the best of both worlds actually. Does Dark Souls 3, Sekiro, or Elden Ring have this mechanic?
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Th3solution I'm only familiar with Dark Souls 3 out of the Souls games you've mentioned - I've only beaten Dark Souls Remastered, Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne and Demon's Souls Remake in terms of the Souls games and as I've said before - quite happy to leave it there. But anyway, back to the point, afaik the mechanic is non-existent in Dark Souls 3, sorry to say, it's a Miyazaki-helmed game, so I presume he wished to re-apply a general framework of Dark Souls mechanics to the game, despite the much faster, Bloodborne-style, frenetic combat that that game has.
"Even in the face of death, the samurai stands unwavering, for honour is a blade sharper than steel".
@Th3solution to be fair sol, I think Heidi’s Tower was a bit of a step up in difficulty from the Forest of Fallen Giants iirc.
I think I remember the Armorer Dennis RF too… nice solution 😉
I can just imagine Sol's character skipping off to the mountains like in the Sound of Music! 😂 😉
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
So I spent an embarrassingly long time at Heide’s Tower. I was having so much troubling to those Heide Knights and big brute knights that I decided to just clear the whole map, as I alluded to last week. So I grinded the path to the boss from the bonfire over and over until enemies stopped spawning. It took a really long time and then 3 red phantoms popped up right at the very end by the dragon too, so there was a whole other challenge there. I suspect they were a consequence of my over-leveling so much. After all that, I was able to grind out many, many soul levels (I don’t even know because I lost count) and was able to go into the boss fight with full health and full health and so the boss Dragonslayer was pretty easy. And I’m overleveled now such that all of Old Man’s Wharf has been fairly easy also. I think I only died once or twice there.
So I should be set for a while, with my rapier up to +3 and my whole arsenal of spells from Dark Orb to a variety of Souls Arrows (I have the regular, the Heavy, the Great, the Great Heavy) and also Yearn. My character has turned more into a mage at this point and I wasn’t really planning on that. Nevertheless it’s working out quite well to have a pokey-stab-stab option and a pew-pew option.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@HallowMoonshadow So you’re saying I shouldn’t get to attached to the despawning, eh? 😅 Because yes, I am enjoying that.
But taking the game as a whole, I think I’m far enough along to make an informed assessment and I’ll say that I really do like it. I don’t have any major complaints against it and it certainly ‘feels’ every bit a Dark Souls game, even though it doesn’t have the Miyazaki charm and panache. I do think it gets a little out of control with the mobs, but I have usually found a way to cheese / kite them around such that I can funnel them through a choke point and/or pick them off from a distance.
A minor complaint is the fact that your health bar decreases by a certain percentage every time you die until you restore your humanity through a human effigy. I just got the ring (I think it’s the ring of binding) that minimizes that effect, but still, as someone who played a lot of DS1 and Demon’s Souls in hollow form and didn’t worry about dying a lot, now I have to either deal with trying to survive in half health, or more aggressively use Human effigies. But I don’t like to get too low on those because there’s a finite number of them in the game and I don’t want to run out. So what I’ve been doing is staying in hollow form through until the boss, and then pop and effigy before the boss so I can go in with full health, and also have the option to summon as well. But then when I inevitably die soon after the boss, I end up doing the next area hollowed. It’s also annoying that the human effigy no longer restores you health, just your health bar. So you have to then use estus to get back to a full tank, or a bonfire, healing spell, etc.
As you warned, the bosses are fairly uninspired, as far as artistic design. I think I’ve beat five or so now, and they aren’t all that interesting looking.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@Th3solution Let me and @HallowMoonshadow when you get to the infamous 'questionable' level design of one particular section.
Glad you are mostly enjoying it. I did too, and played it on PS4 after I had played Dark Souls 3. I still think it is the weakest of the series though. Some of the bosses were laughable bad. The DLC is excellent however, and probably better than most of the main game.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
@HallowMoonshadow Yeah, I think I’m going to end up using that ring a lot. There’s a lot of good rings in this game and you get fairly early access to them. So far I have the Ring of Blades to add attack power, Leo Ring since I’m maining the rapier which increases the stabbing potency, and the Corinthy for stamina and the Life for the health regen. I also bought the Evil Eye for health recoup per enemy defeated, but haven’t used it as much as I thought I would.
I might have forgotten, but I felt like the health penalty in Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls was negligible comparatively, except for if you get cursed in Dark Souls, which is probably the most annoying mechanic I’ve encountered in the whole series due to the scarcity of the purging stones to reverse it. Being at a permanent 50% health from curse was worse, but having the full hollowed penalty in DS2 isn’t much better. With the ring making it closer to 75-80% I can live with that.
Speaking of, I’m so annoyed at myself that yesterday after I posted that I played the final stretch of the Old Man’s Wharf and used a precious effigy so I could summon for the boss and on my way through the short walk to the ship I accidentally rolled off the boardwalk and suffered one of those infamous Souls instant gravity deaths. 🤦🏻♂️ So I burned through 2 effigies for that boss 😂. It was worth it though because the NPC summon made the boss an absolute joke.
@Th3solution good to hear that you’re feeling pretty positive about Dark Souls 2 after getting to the point where you’ve sunk a decent amount of time into it. Pretty much agree with most of your thoughts, particularly the missing charm and panache that Miyazaki’s absence no doubt precipitated.
It always felt to me like a Souls game set in a different dimension… obviously that’s not the canon explanation but on a personal level Drangleic always felt like a completely different place than Lordran and Lothric (which genuinely feel like the same place separated by time). But regardless of the location feeling separate (together with the missing charm and panache) it still felt like a Souls game and that is ultimately what I was after when playing it.
A little word of warning in relation to the despawn. I really wanted a specific armour set… I think it was called the Llewelyn set, the parts of which are a low percentage drop from an enemy type that only appear in one small location within the game… I think there is around six of them in total. So I farmed them until they despawned, used a bonfire aesthetic and farmed them some more and kept repeating this until I had the complete set. Problem was that when I then had to fight the boss from that area during my ng+ run… that boss was then ng+7 as a result of my bonfire aesthetic use! That was a stressful day 😅
@colonelkilgore Haha! The bonfire ascetic is an interesting mechanic. I don’t remember the other Souls games having that either. I tried one of them at the first Heide’s Tower bonfire and uh, yeah — it added to some of my struggles in that area. But it does make it possible to fight even bosses multiple times, and collect their respective souls again, which is nice. But for the regular enemies, I’ve used the Covenant of Champions as my method to make them start respawning again, if I want to farm. I used the covenant in the Forest of Giants at one area that was a good early farm spot by the bonfire and it worked well. It just takes the enemies up to an NG+ type of difficulty, but at least they’ll respawn indefinitely. And then having the ability to abandon the covenant whenever I wanted to take things back down to normal was nice to have. Being stuck on an +7 would be brutal! 😅
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
@colonelkilgore Ah, well these words and names they use are all made-up fantasy words anyways, so traditional grammar, spelling, and pronunciation don’t apply 😄.
Besides, I am absolutely tempted to decorate my house with a Dark Souls bonfire aesthetic. 😅 How cool would that be! Especially if there was a maiden with the calm, melodic yet slightly creepy voice of Evetta Muradasilova playing in the background and everytime I walked in the door she said “Welcome home, good hunter. What is it you desire?" And then when I left for work each morning it said, “Farewell, good hunter. May you find your worth in the waking world."
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
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