The explanation within the game says "sorceries and magic weapons" are affected by this stat... does this include pyro spells or do pyro spells only get bigger by upgrading our equippable flame hands?

Pyromancy only scales with your glove, Int and Faith do not factor in to damage.

@LordXavierBritish:

thanks for saving me countless hours farming the forest -- are there any pyromancy spells i won't be able to use until I have a certain level of a stat?

the damage that your pyromancy flame does as its r2 attack ,(which deals fire damage) scales with int , and as you upgrade the flame this scaling becomes S ,, but otherwise .. no it doesnt affect you at all ..

no

The above posters are right. It does not help.

Until you upgrade your pyro glove a bit there is no point in getting INT. Later INT can be very useful because the scaling becomes very good, but I wouldn't worry about it unless you are intending to do a LOT of pyromancy and Sorcery.

@Rayeth said:

The above posters are right. It does not help.

Until you upgrade your pyro glove a bit there is no point in getting INT. Later INT can be very useful because the scaling becomes very good, but I wouldn't worry about it unless you are intending to do a LOT of pyromancy and Sorcery.

Int does not effect pyromancy spells AT ALL. Pyromancy is much like the Drake Sword in that its scaling factors are completely nil and its power remains the same no matter what your stats are, and the only way to raise the power is to upgrade the item itself. The only barriers to having good pyromancy spells are a veritable ton of souls to upgrade your glove to max (over 300k iirc, plus buying the spells themselves). The upside to pyromancy is that it gives melee fighters a powerful ace up their sleeve that they don't need to invest any stat points into, freeing them up for end/dex/str. The downside of Pyromancy is, unless you are willing to farm thousands upon thousands of souls, it will quickly be outstripped by your melee attacks anyway.

Sorcery spells are effected by and scale with int, so the upside of them and downside of them are completely opposite to pyromancy: instead of having to invest in souls you need to invest stats into int, and the more you invest into int the better the spells scale and stronger they become.

correct , all int scaling does is affect the r2 attack of the pyromancy flame itself , like with catlysts and talismans you can slap people with them , for instance theres a sorcery catalys that has some dex scaling on it , but thats purely for the r2 attack which is useless ..

the only reason a pryomancer would have high int at all is if they were after the sorceries that require high int to even learn , and even this .. it would be more a case of a high level sorcerer picking up pyromancy to expand their repertoire , a pyromancer themself has to go well out of the useful range of stat boosting to utilize all the other spells , and any other caster can easily pick up the entire library of pyromancy spells , making attunement even more of a useful stat :D

high int has also now been proven to be one of the few good scaling attack stats , however limited to enchanted +5 weapons and the Moonlight greatsword which entirely uses A scaling int , and is reportedly great damage easily ouscaling lifghtning weapons , my enchanted winged spear +5 is pretty amazing considering winged spears arent the most damging weapons anyway ..

but yes .. pyromancy is amazing in that you can even stay at soul level 1 and just upgrade your flame , and deal with a majority of the game easier than any other class with higher soul levels too