I'm still a little confused as to how the upgrade system for Dark Souls work. I've gotten a shard here and there and I can upgrade a weapon to +1 (12 hours in) but I'm not sure if its a waste or not. Upgrading a regular spear seems silly. Why does anyone not just upgrade the Drake Sword? It doesn't scale but its base states are pretty good until late game.

The Dark Souls wiki page is pretty uninformative to the uninitiated. I need certain shards to upgrade certain weapons? How do I tell the difference between a raw weapon and something else? Its easy to see a Drake Sword is a special sword so I guess its magic? Why would I ever downgrade a weapon?

Before I have mental breakdown, where is a good guide for this? Should I just start upgrading my winged spear?! Argh!

well i think http://darksoulswiki.wikispaces.com/weapons and http://darksoulswiki.wikispaces.com/Upgrades are pretty much everything u wanna know, i HOPE =)

and when u upgrade normal wepons , the do get very powerful + scale with ur stats and its not that expensive to do that.

I'm still a little confused as to how the upgrade system for Dark Souls work. I've gotten a shard here and there and I can upgrade a weapon to +1 (12 hours in) but I'm not sure if its a waste or not. Upgrading a regular spear seems silly. Why does anyone not just upgrade the Drake Sword? It doesn't scale but its base states are pretty good until late game.

The Dark Souls wiki page is pretty uninformative to the uninitiated. I need certain shards to upgrade certain weapons? How do I tell the difference between a raw weapon and something else? Its easy to see a Drake Sword is a special sword so I guess its magic? Why would I ever downgrade a weapon?

Before I have mental breakdown, where is a good guide for this? Should I just start upgrading my winged spear?! Argh!

Quick bits of advice:

1) Do not waste any resources upgrading the drake sword. It's nothing but an early game crutch.

2) Aim for eventually making a Lightning + 5 weapon. Use whatever base weapon you like the feel of (as long as it can actually be upped to Lightning)

3) You'll find a couple of upgraded weapons down the line. You can downgrade them to Weapon + 10 or + 5 and upgrade it to something else.

4) Definitely use the links up above, especially the second, and familiarize yourself with that upgrade tree/chart thing

After a bit more poking around and looking through those links I've finally got a remedial grasp on how the weapon system works. The only question I have left is why are there negative values in the stats on some weapons in the column that is usually used to tally ParaBonus? A shield I have right now has a -68 in the second column. I can't for the life of me figure out how that is possible since the weapon itself has a STR ParaBonus of C and a DEX Para Bonus of C. How does it tally a negative number?

Thanks for all the help guys. Up until now the fun of Dark Souls has been exploration and the challenge of it! Now I can add min maxing to the list. :)

After a bit more poking around and looking through those links I've finally got a remedial grasp on how the weapon system works. The only question I have left is why are there negative values in the stats on some weapons in the column that is usually used to tally ParaBonus? A shield I have right now has a -68 in the second column. I can't for the life of me figure out how that is possible since the weapon itself has a STR ParaBonus of C and a DEX Para Bonus of C. How does it tally a negative number?

Thanks for all the help guys. Up until now the fun of Dark Souls has been exploration and the challenge of it! Now I can add min maxing to the list. :)