So I'm wondering what covenant to join. My problem is, that to use the Sun Guys, Princess's Guard or Darkmoon covenants I need a bunch of Faith. Problem is that I leveled Vit and End to around 20 and am using the drake sword. Soon enough I'll need to focus on Str and Dex to be able to use better weapons, so I can't really spend a lot on Faith...

Will I rack up souls like a madman later on or should I choose carefully? What covenant should I join? I'm a Knight and though to make a paladin with the miracles the Suns and the Guards would give me, but I'm not so sure now. Way of Light seems boring and not worth it. The forest people don't really give me all that much. Gravelord and chaos servant I don't really like, the dragon stuff looks interesting but also seems kinda useless in the long run and the last covenant seems really interesting, but also rather endgame (and evil)

any ideas, suggestions, whatnot? I'm confused

If you want to join the sunbro help somebody co-op a boss. every time you do that it reduces the faith requirement to join by 5. It's a fun covenant for pve. Also, don't focus on strength and dex, pick one of the two based on what weapon you like and whichever stat it scales with. Drake sword scales with nothing, so get rid of it for something else.

@DelroyLindo: thanks. trouble is though that in the end I'll need 50 faith to cast the miracles with the sunbros and almost as many with the guard. so I'll still need a bunch of faith regardless

hm. is going for a faith / sunbros / divine combo build viable? then i can drop str entirely. right?

@Atta: You could do that and then replace your weapon with something like the Divine Murakumo which gives a small stat increase by Strength and Dexterity (so some extra points in that you have already given wouldn't be wasted) as well a good increase in damage through faith.

what would be the "next" good weapon after the drake sword? is it a named weapon or should I buy, upgrade and modify one. just wondering if I should start investing in raising stats already, since with the drake sword it will not have an immediate effect

also...is ANY of the covenants useful if you would choose not to go the faith route?

@Atta: It depends what kind of fighting style you like to do. I personally had the drake sword as my secondary (so it was my second right hand weapon I could jump to when fighting a big enemy that I had a chance to wail quite a few hits on since in the early game it does quite a lot of damage and is pretty useful) but I found that having a spear as my main was much more useful as I focused on building up my defence at first ans the spear has the useful thing of being able to attack while keeping your shield up.

I would advise not to specialise yet into a specific weapon (like not to upgrade things loads) but I would reccommend getting to about +5 on a normal weapon (which isn't that hard to do since you can buy Titanite from the first blacksmith) - possibly +10 if you really like it and are able to - which in turn means when you can specialise you will have a weapon you can upgrade into a more specialised role at the ready (for instance, I later moved to a Halberd and then could turn my spear into a lightning spear when I got to the right blacksmith for certain enemies weak to lightning attacks).

Generally though, I used the early time as a chance to get used to different types of weapons and only upgraded when I had a surpluss of titanite (or souls) to do so. I instead focused on upgrading armour. The Knight amour (and especially the Elite Knight armour) is pretty good and actually worth upgrading into. Since you will likely be changing armour at a much slower pace than weapons, they seem to be the more useful area to start upgrading into early on and can last a long time. (I am near the end of the game and have only used 4 different armour sets; Knight Armour for the early stages, Elite Knight amour once I aquired it for the rest of the first half of the game, Black Knight amour as my new main and then the Havel Set as my secondary for specific fights).

As for Covenants. I don't know much about them because I don't play any of the online parts and I generally like mixing around my fighting style (which I can do since I am not going into PvP and don't lose out much from messing around with my levelling) but I chose Chaos for the pyromany attacks.

@Dixavd: nice. very good tips. thanks. i actually started upgrading my elite knight armor since i figured i'll use that for a bunch. as for play style i am kinda imitating matt rorie. having a longbow to lure or go ranged as the alt left handed weapon. the drake sword is my main and a spear without upgrades for fights taking place in corridors. I was going for a tank build first so I upgraded my END to resist a few attacks and be able to counter with the drakes sword. up until I found havel, which means I can also dodge a bit now. been going great.

how do you like the halberd? is it actually useful? I found the wide attack range was somewhat useless because usually you are in very tight spaces. also usually you should stick to luring one or the most two enemies at once. or do you have a different strategy?

A good all round sword is the 'Black Knight Sword', it scales a bit with Str and Dex whilst also having a nice reach and already pretty powerful attack without bonuses. 2 handed it swings directly up and down which makes it good for hallways or if you want to keep the shield out its R2 attack is a straight stab which is good for the same thing, its huge reach also means it sort of bugs and still hits things infront of you even if it does hit a wall.

I should put the console one back in and see what I had, I used that sword until I made either the Greatsword of Artorias (Which I kept for the catacombs on new playthroughs) or something else. Slow weapons are quite easy to use if you can get the enemy timing down to a tee, they hit really hard thus only needing one or two hits to kill anything.

@Dark: i didn't really get into the upgrading stuff yet. the only soul I currently have is from the butterfly anyway. also i'm not finding a lot of materials yet, except for the ones you buy at the blacksmith.

i decided to hang around the darkroot gardens a bit and get some souls. with the covenant or not. then see what paths open up. also tried out the halberd an hour ago. never again ;)

@Atta said:

what would be the "next" good weapon after the drake sword? is it a named weapon or should I buy, upgrade and modify one. just wondering if I should start investing in raising stats already, since with the drake sword it will not have an immediate effect

also...is ANY of the covenants useful if you would choose not to go the faith route?

The next "trap" weapon would be the Lightning Spear in Sen's Fortress.

It's in a... treasure chest, downstairs, somewhere.

I'd highly recommend upgrading your own weapon though. The Drake Sword basically trains you to be lazy, and the Lightning Spear, while nowhere near as bad in that regard, doesn't help.

As for Covenents, I highly recommend going Darkwraith. Read a walkthrough though - if you follow the story like you're led, you WILL miss out on it. Granted, you lose the ability to sell items if you join the Darkwraiths, but it's a worthy sacrifice IMO.

@Atta The black knight sword is actually better than the drake sword even before upgrading, it starts out with at least 20 more damage plus the bonus from strength. It upgrades on twinkling tritanite which you can get by killing the little glowly lizards before they run away. You only need to kill one of them lizards to upgrade the sword to level 2. The Drake Sword teaches you to be very lazy and it may lead you to think 'the game is just hard' until you figure out that its actually outdated and an easy upgrade makes things 100 times easier.

@Terramagi: @Dark: sorry duders. forgot to answer. thanks!

well I upgraded my spear to +5 and am thinking of getting the moonlight butterfly spear. looks good. and thanks for the black knight sword tip. I'll try to get one. if not I may roll with a zweihander or something similar soon. I agree that the drake sword teaches you to be lazy. immediately after getting it I died and lost 7 humanity. never got close to that number again...

thanks again!