2: I followed the glorious and heroic tradition of hiding in corner and shooting it with arrows. This dragon is smarter than previous examples and merely gives you a large titanite shard and flies off.

3: Siegmeyer became sort of a favorite from Dark Souls 1 and his final event involved him rushing ahead and leaping into a pit of monsters (and poison) that you had to follow and keep him alive..which was kind of a pain in the ass. It was a fun little inversion. Have not seen much more of him but I feel like I've been especially bad at finding NPC events.

Most NPC events in this game seem to be labyrinthine but at least they're involved. I didn't finish a single one properly on my first run.

Now I'm trying to parry and the timing in PvE is brutal. You need to start really incredibly early like in DS2. If anyone here is even competent at it please tell me how.

I feel like everything after the first area was some form of giant that didn't give a shit about my wimpy parry swipe so I quickly went for shields that let me enter special stance without manually switching to 2handed. It did seem important to learn the timing for the Lothric knights though because those guys are real pieces of shit later in the game.

@milijango: If my gameplan is to parry something, I at least bring a tool designed for it. These shields were in the previous two, but the buckler and target shield are my go-tos for parrying because they have the longest active frames during their parry animation (or at least, did in the previous two games). The trade-off is that they don't block anything well, so if you miss the parry you're still in for a world of hurt if you try to block with it. It could be helpful to watch YouTube videos regarding how to parry in the first couple of games if you need to know where the active frames begin and end since both shields I mentioned largely retain their parry animation from previous games. As for the act of parrying itself: for quick swings you want to initiate the parry animation right away. For slower, heavier weapons, wait until the swing animation has started a bit before attempting the parry.

@fredddi43: Abyss Watchers? I used the Pontiff Knight Curved Sword which Greirat sells. It doesn't have great stats (I had to ditch it for the final boss) but the curved sword moveset worked pretty well against most enemies. I remember his overhead slams and rush attacks being very easy to dodge and exploit.

I swiped one of the Dark Swords that drop in that area and it kinda turned into my main weapon for the rest of the game.

I usually use larger weapons and kinda wanted to in this game but either they swing way slower or everything else is way faster. Whichever it is it just felt real silly to keep using them.

I've mostly been using a Heavy Battle Axe

Just beat the Dragonslayer Armour, easily the hardest boss yet

got through my first playthrough a few days ago. My advice for anybody rolling with a heavy/slow weapon is to level up some sort of faster axe or sword alongside it. Most bosses only give you short attack windows and you really want to be doing maximum damage during those. I almost went mental trying to fight Aldritch with my Zweihander. Also that Anorl Londo (mid-game area) reveal was pretty well done i'd say. The way that area carefully places one familiar thing after another until you go "holy fuck its THIS place!" is really satisfying

Also the swamp area is totally Oolacile/ the Forest from Dks1 right?

Just gonna leave a hot tip here for people getting the game next week. You can sell Soul Caches to the vendors for the same amount they give you, which is much faster than using them and tells you how much you'll get.