If you have a lot of insight, and you noticed the game get harder. That's why. At 15 insight the game starts to get more difficult. Enemies will get new abilities and their will be different patterns.

Oh my goodness I thought I was going crazy....

Is this permanent? If I were to, say, dump a bunch of insight on items and nonsense would the game get easier?

@oldirtybearon: It's not permanent until you reach a specific point in the game.

Holy crap these are weird games.

If you think that's weird go look at some of the later bosses

@bocam said:

would that specific point, say, be blood moon for the blood god?

Yeah or at least that's when it happened for me

That's why I keep spending my Insight to keep it at a nice level. Didn't know the magic number was 15 though. I figured it was 10 or something.

@kishinfoulux: 15 is only the start.

When you have 10, the price of all items the bird bath messenger dudes sell in hunters dream are doubled or more. I went to buy some poison cure things, and they were all the sudden 1300. I bought some crap from the insight one above, and then they were back to 600.

Now that's super interesting. I've been hoarding insight to see what the store sells as I get more, but I didn't notice the price changes of items with the store skeletons.

Guess I'll need to go on an insight spending spree

My god I'm in NG + with 90-ish insight. No wonder.

How much insight do y'all think is the "cap" for either difficulty or seeing the..."things"

I'm sitting around 50 and not sure if I should stockpile more or if I'm ok and can spend the excess. I don't mind the difficulty ramp, and wanna be able to witness all the crazy this game has to offer.

Have!'t played the game, is there a benefit to insight?

I haven't been consuming my Madman's Knowledge just out of curiosity, so don't have as much Insight as I probably should. I have no idea if there is any benefit to not consuming them, apart from not upping the difficulty sooner.

So this is a purely user-controlled phenomena? The difficulty doesn't scale any other way, even in New Game+? If someone spends all of their insight they are playing at the easiest difficulty at all times?

Huh, that definitely explains why everyone levelled up as as soon as I beat the Vicar Amelia. I just assumed it was some story thing related to her transformation, but I didn't understand why Brad was fighting the levelled up versions of the enemies in the Quick Look before he'd beaten her if that was the case. Have we figured out it's a case of your previous maximum insight? Or does it fluctuate with your level?

Not that I've heard. Just remember if you want to use that Insight vendor you have to have, at least, 10 Insight. It's pretty dumb so if you're shopping and spend Insight to where your below 10 you can't shop again until you have 10 again.

It also generates additional enemies. Verified this with a friend last night in co-op. I've been rolling with 40+ insight, he's been under 10, and in the zone with the witch boss I had additional enemies (those guys who rise out of the ground with red lighting).

We also co-op fought the boss twice, once for him, once for me. My boss was more difficult. The stranger thing about those fights though was that in both instances the two of us were seeing a different number of the "side enemy" in that fight. The host would see 1 while the person answering the bell would see 3.

I help out on a lot of bosses so at one point I had about +60 insight and the enemies were all pulling out new moves and doing a very good job of almost killing my character. The werewolves some of the most fierce but the bosses in general seemed very over powered. I've been spending a lot of insight too just to run it down a bit, very useful for buying armour and the like.

There is. The higher your Insight, the less your Beasthood scales. Thus less damage you do while in Beasthood.

Time for me to waste some Insight then. I think I'm near the end of the game and, for the first time, got over 20 Insight. These enemies that were easy before now take longer to kill and when I kill them they have these two snake things that jump off their dead bodies. Kinda sucks.

Insight doesn't affect enemy health. Those snakes are the result of those enemies being affected by Frenzy. When Frenzied, they become 'beastlier', which totally is a word, and upon death those parasites pop from their heads.

How are they becoming frenzied? Also, in that same area there are these big brain-like enemies that are easy to kill. Yet, all of the sudden, I'll die instantly. My health is full and the next thing I know I'm dead. Any idea why? I ended up just avoiding those guys (or maybe there is only one?) after that happened to me 3 times. It's in one of those Nightmare areas. I think it might have something to do with me becoming Frenzied but I'm not sure.

@handlas: Well yeah, that's Frenzy. Didn't you see the Frenzy bar fill up on your screen? When that meter fills, you become Frenzied and a large amount of your health is lost. You can survive it if you are at full health, but anything near 80% of your health will likely instantly kill you.

The more Insight you have, the less resistant to Frenzy you are. So if you are having trouble, try lowering your Insight. Also, you can use sedatives to negate the Frenzy build up. Consequently, sedatives also lower your Insight by 1 with each use.

Those enemies are also vulnerable to Frenzy, so that's why. If they become Frenzied, they will drop the torch and start acting all 'beast like'. You can kill the creature that is inflicting the Frenzy on you later in that area. I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure if you kill him, those area's no longer cause Frenzy to walk through.

Yea I saw the bar but it's rather bullshit because it just fills up automatically with no reason as far as I can tell. Simply being in the area of those things causes it. If I try to fight that creature it's literally instant death for me. I guess it got harder because I got more insight then and, thus, it filled up faster without me noticing. I wonder why they feel the need to put these types of areas in the Souls games. I mean, that area has poison and frenzy crap... argh. Luckily I got past that particular nightmare area but I'm in the next one which is also causing me trouble.

@handlas: Yeah, I had high Insight in that area too and had to use a sedative, midway of fighting one of those things. There is also a giant one in the building up high. Once you get to him and kill the lever to kill him, that should remove the Frenzy from being inflicting in those area's where it appears to be coming out of nowhere. I'm pretty sure that thing is what caused that.

Has anyone found any benefits at all to carrying a large amount of insight? Other than the 40+ giving you "eyes", it just seems to be a resource that you gather and....do nothing with. The insight vendor has woefully few goodies for us to spend it on.

I'm honestly curious how many unique mechanics can actually be traced to insight. For me, it began and ended with the Cathedral Ward, but I had such high insight throughout the entire game that I guess any one of the things I saw/heard could have been a result of this bizarre resource.

what the fuck? why consume insight then?

Well you can do a few things with insight as people have mentioned:

to buy some armor items from the insight vendor
to buy 2 types of shards for upgrading different weapons
to buy usable items ike fire paper and other stuff like that from the insight vendor

Insight is also needed for summoning people for co-op (if you want help with killing bosses or want to do chalice dungeons with other people).

My current insight atm is around 45 but I have about 30 small madness skulls and 3 greater madness skulls in my inventory that I havent opened because i dont really want to scale the bosses any further. Have killed 13 or 14 bosses in the game so far and some of them have been touch and go. This is my first souls game and i definately dont want to make it any harder for myself. Maybe if i get to new game+ then i can see what happens if i increase the amount of insight that i have significantly.

Btw I found that a good way to resist frenzy is to equip the resistance runes (if you have found them in your game). There is one rune which gives 200+ resistance to all types of resistance and another which gives about 100. In addition there are some armor items which give a pretty good amount of resistance. Think my current resistance to frenzy atm is about 450.

I wonder if any of this is true. I certainly haven't noticed a difference. I had like 70 at the start of NG plus, spent 40, noticed no difference at all with anything.

A friend was having a hard time with Logarius and he dropped his Insight super low and it made no difference.

It makes difference in ambiance (you hear more crying and howling, hear certain bosses speak different lines etc.), enemy moveset (they get new moves as Insight increases) and enemy placement in a few very select places. Everything else is entirely unclear right now. Some have said it increases enemies on screen, but I have not seen that myself at all. It does decrease your resistance to Frenzy and it decreases Beasthood. You can call that a difficulty increase, though I never used Beasthood myself, and still found the Frenzy area's manageable at 60+ Insight. Others claim it increases enemy damage, but that is straight up false. Same for enemy HP.

Difficulty increase seems exaggerated at the very least. The most notable enemy moveset changes are still found around Cathedral Ward. No one has seen that many other enemies do it. I would argue the affection to Frenzy is most meaningful. I have to use Sadatives a bunch, whereas I don't really at Insight <10 in the Nightmare area's.

I'm betting that's the intended effect. Insight strikes me as kind of an insanity thing; the more you have, the more your eyes are open to the crazy shit happening around you. The more you think 'did I really just see that?'

Being sucked up by one of those blue portal things and then returning with high insight is pretty interesting...

I definitely noticed a difference in the chalice dungeons with insight. I was stuck on a boss in a Layer 4 chalice for two days. My insight was at 99 so I decided to spend it and go back with 5 insight. Holy crap it was like night & day. After I got rid of my insight I was able to take down the boss I was stuck on, as well as the rest of the Layer 4 & 5 chalice bosses.