Which areas gave you the most trouble? Which didn't? Why?

@cap

"I don't get how people can have problems with the Shrine of Amana. The game provides more than enough means to breeze through it"

It's self inflicted. That's the beauty of the souls games, everyone can have different experiences and still enjoy the same game. On my second play through as a pure bowman and Im loving it. Try taking on multiple enemies up close with nothing but a bow and tell me its boring.

@zevvion said:

No, it won't. And yes, there is. The mage on the left can be killed freely. Then you can reset your position and kill the licker that is near the mage on the right. Then you can heal if you need to in between bolts of the final mage and you can take pick your time to kill her. So long as you do it in one or two hits (and you should definitely be able to if you're a melee only character) you will have enough time to roll back to the small island rock and fight the two knights, who truly aren't that hard to fight especially if you are a melee character as they'll most likely die in two hits. Just don't waste time blocking or rolling and immediately crank out to swings and you're left only fighting one of them which is easy, possibly even getting both in the same attack as they seem to remain close to each other.

I have done this several times now. It is really not that hard. There are tons of area's in the game that are harder. This is relatively easy, simply because the entire area is 100% predictable to the very steps you take. And yes, I died tens of times my first time through Shrine of Amana, but I was never frustrated by it, simply because each time you die, you learn another pattern that brings you closer to being able to get through it.

I can only speculate as to why (perhaps the size of the weapon I was using? idk), but all I know for sure is that every time my sword touched the right mage, the knights immediately came running and were on me before my stamina was recovered enough to run away/block/retaliate.

I had no trouble anywhere but the Shrine of Amana. I was a tanky build, so the smelter demon was a joke, but I can't imagine that those fucking homing soul arrows would be any easier as any other build. If there happens to be some rebalancing patch, which I don't think is necessary for most of the game, I hope they turn that place down a bit. There's always that one area in Dark Souls that fucks you unfairly. In the first one, it was those 2 great archers. In this one, its the homing soul arrows.

The only thing that needs to change on them is the degree of homing. Those fuckers can damn near make ninety-degree turns.

@soldierg654342: I didn't have any trouble, using a bow. But I understand the problem with pure melee fighter whorefuse to use such things as "arrows" or "tricks" or whatever keeps him away from his trusty sword (or mace, or hammer, or axe, or whatever). But the homing isn't that bad... What you have to do is rolling when it's close enough. With some practice, they miss every time, even in the water.

I don't even necessarily think the homing is a problem, but there are two other factors in play that I think are actively unfair. Most of what make's Dark Souls fair is that the enemies operate under the same rules that you do. Here, the movement speed of the Knights is not inhibited by the deep water, and the homing soul arrows have practically no range limit. Not only can the mages actually continue to fire at you AFTER they've been clipped off the screen by the draw distance ( you can cross the long bridge over to the locked door where the King's armor set is and the mage all way over by the giant Ogre can STILL fire at you), and also the missile itself doesn't dissipate after traveling a great distance like your magic does.

Shrine of Amana didn't give me too many difficulties, but that’s mainly because I have a decent bow. I lost 100 thousand souls in the Undead Crypt thanks to those pyrmoancer ghostie buggers and Iron Keep beat me up pretty bad too. All in all, I'm just not very good at these games.

@gatehouse: Iron Keep is the first area in the entire game where I started to notice the dramatic decrease of enemies as I kept dying over and over again. At one point there was almost no one left, which all in all was perfectly fine with me because it made running back to Smelter that much easier.

@humanity: Iron Keep, Sinner's Rise and Earthen Peak are rather lonely places for me....

I ended up crafting a upgrading a bow SPECIFICALLY for Shrine of Amana. Nothing else was nearly as difficult.

I didn't know you had to fight the ancient dragon.

I just had a friendly chat with him, he seemed like a pretty cool dude.

It's totally optional

Shrine and Iron Keep were my big sticking points for my DEX build. Shrine I tried to tackle by rolling and charging at the magic users, but kept getting stunlocked by the demons, magic, or melee dudes. Finally gave up and used my long bow to take out the magic guys from afar.

Iron Keep I had no problem on my first go through, then died stupidly on the last enemy in the bridge room. After that it was a comedy of dying to the katana-wielders, getting knocked off by the archers, and getting abused by hammer guys in the second half. Also the Smelter Demon kicked my ass repeatedly and I had to come back to him because I was doing almost no damage.

I had a couple hard bosses outside of those, but otherwise the hardest area was probably the Forest, just because of low starting stats and getting into the timing of shields, rolls, and all the rest. Once I had a +10 weapon, higher stats, and was better at rolling/blocking the game wasn't that bad outside of the two aforementioned areas.

I'm going through with a magic character now, and strangely had a lot of trouble with No-Man's Wharf, which I beat first try with my DEX guy. Limited spellcasts and tons of enemies ganging up on you.