Caltrops - Demon's Souls - Re: Slowly getting the hang of it

Forum Overview :: Demon's Souls

by Lizard_King 01/15/2013, 3:28pm PST

fabio wrote:

- leveling. Or rather, don't. I take it new players level their stats every chance they get because there's nothing else to spend on and you don't want to lose your souls. Now I realized that going to level 15 while still doing the undead burg was a big mistake. Dump that shit into equipment buffing, buying shards as a way to "bank" my souls. I imagine that the cheapest PvP twinks are running around at minimal level carrying end game equipment.

In the early going, yes, there are many more things than raw leveling that will vastly improve your offense and defense. Investing in shield, weapon, pyromancy pretty much turns any build into a rock star quickly.

Things I wish were different: flexibility. Specifically when it comes to magic. Unless you start out with the right class, then you come across useful magic way too late for most first time players to bother investing in it. The first blacksmith selling a catalyst is extremely easy to miss (dude in a cell, near the ghost ruins that no sane new player would do over the undead burg) and the only faith spells I've found are a heal a homeward spell.

The better faith vendor is a little less buried than the better versions of the magic vendor, but faith is not as overwhelmingly effective in PvE although it has some really nice moves if you flesh it out with the covenant miracles, and they are effective even with relatively modest (20-30) investment in faith. However, Magic really gets in gear once you get the Dusk Crown and the Bellowing ring (same is true for pyro, incidentally), as they net you a 40% damage boost, and then it's either a question of making a beeline to 40-50 INT or a more balanced int-end-vit combo. One easy mistake to make is over-investing in attunement before you have really effective spells to fill it with.
It's a good idea to consider pyromancy the training wheels for the other two, as you can get it pretty quickly and it will carry a "weak" build that doesn't have the tools to show off its faith or int investments yet.

Things I'm pondering: What stats to level when I get around to it. So far Dex doesn't seem worth it. I have yet to find a weapon that has a large Dex bonus over Str (except the bow); usually they're about the same grade. Meanwhile there are plenty of useful weapons that rely on a minimum Str. Then there's Endurance and Vitality seeming better than either of those.

My favorite characters are both dexterity oriented. Earlier weapons that do really well with dex would be the uchigatana, the iaito, and the balder side sword (all of which are prized primarily for their flexible and effective move sets rather than raw damage). Then there's the scythe and great scythe in terms of raw damage output, and doing hundreds of damage per arrow is nothing to sneeze at either. Anor Londo has the painting guardian sword, which hybrid dex-magic or dex-faith builds love to enchant in order to completely ruin your shit in mid-upper level PvP. Ultimately, the DLC area has access (note, you have to kill a non-hostile NPC or trade away a valuable item, recommend the former) to the absolutely fantastic Gold and Silver tracers. The former is the premier bleed-inducing fast damage weapon (as opposed to the scythes being premier slow high damage dex weapons), and while the silver's poison is pretty useless, the fact that it has 160 critical multiplier along with S scaling for dex means you do the most ridiculous backstab/parry damage imaginable, even moreso if you add the hornet ring.

Because it's featured in a lot of dex weapons, it's good to understand bleed and how it works (typically 2-4 consecutive hits will build up the meter, sometimes even through a shield block depending on the shield, at which point the opponent will take an additional (.1)(bleed number listed on weapon) meaning anywhere from 30-50% health. It requires stylistic adaptation to using combos more often and stop and start attacks a lot less.

To answer your question, you can't go wrong with vit and endurance. I would try to think of weapons in terms of movesets that appeal to you, check them out and see if there's a good variant of that moveset, and then go to town. If you end up liking a high base damage weapon like the gargoyle halberd, you can get amazingly far with a hybrid build that just stocks a fire and lightning version of that weapon and is good at most everything. If you end up liking a more specialized type of tool like a black knight weapon or the pure dex ones, then it's a question of how quickly and deeply you want to specialize because they are amazing at 40 of their prime requisite. And, of course, consider what you want to do for shields and armor alongside that.