cinemandrew

@Maniax2: Focus more on equipment progression, rather than level progression. leveling up your equipment has a much greater effect on your damage/defense than putting a few points into this stat or that stat. If you try to stay lower level, you'll also find it's much easier to summon phantoms to help with boss fights, as well as be summoned by others to farm the hell out of those bosses, and get tons of souls and humanity. You will want to up some stats as needed, and those will depend entirely on your build. I would say your two priorities as a melee focused character should probably be endurance (so you can effectively carry heavier gear, and block more damage), and vitality (mostly for pvp, but still useful for pve, obviously). Based on your weapon preference, you'll probably end up needing a decent amount of dexterity, but I would hold off on investing any more in strength or dexterity than you need to hold your weapon of choice. Once the next patch drops, check out the changes, and see if it's worth it to start pumping points into either of those for the scaling.

Another note on staying at low level: I've come to notice that when playing with others at lower levels, I tend to encounter more skilled players. At higher levels, when I do manage to find someone, they're usually not very powerful, and often not very skilled either. I think there's a lot of newer folks out there who get stuck on a boss, or an area, and then decide that grinding 15-20 levels is the solution. That's what I did on my first character, and it sucked. My build was crappy, my weapons and equipment hadn't been improved much, and I found myself stuck on a boss with no humanity. I started a new character with a solid build in mind, and decided to try to stay relatively low level, and it's made the game so much more enjoyable.

Everything sounds good here. Really hoping the input delay stuff works. It's really strange, I played my first character for something like 40 hours before I started to notice the input lag, and now that I've started a new character, I'm noticing it all the time. I also hate that when I quickly spam the roll button in a moment of panic, I end up rolling two, or three times when I only wanted to roll once. Does anyone know if From Software made it that way intentionally? I'm generally more reliant on my shield rather than rolling, so I'm not great at precision timed dodging.

I go with stats for the most part. I will sometimes switch to a cooler looking armor set or weapon if I'm backtracking through some of the beginner areas.

@Fear_the_Booboo: I picked up Dungeon Defenders and Orcs Must Die in the last couple days, and so far I prefer Dungeon Defenders. I've been playing solo, and it's fine. You'll probably have to put the difficulty down to easy your first time through each map, and you'll definitely be spending a lot of time grinding xp, but it's fine. Probably more fun with others, but I generally prefer to play solo, rather than with strangers.

@SpencerTucksen: I saw it in the theater with a few friends of mine. We were the only ones there. We all hated it.

@mnzy said:

From the ones actually running right now: Bored to death.

Ted Danson is so much fun to watch.

@CptChiken: In the past 3 months, my grandmother passed away after a 2 year battle with cancer, and then about a month after that, my dog died suddenly in the middle of the night. I cried when I heard about my grandmother, but when I found my dog, I cried, I screamed, I yelled, I punched a wall, and here I am, about 2 months later, still not over his death.

It's not that it's more painful, necessarily. It's more that I had time to prepare with my grandmother. I knew she was dying 2 years ago. All I knew was that my dog had gotten sick that night, and we were going to take him to the vet first thing in the morning. He was gone within a few short hours. I had no time to prepare, no time to accept it, and most importantly, no time to say goodbye. You have to deal with all that emotion at once, combined with the knowledge that it's already too late.

Granted, my situation is unique. I had a very long time to come to terms with my grandmother's passing, and I had extra reason to be upset about my dog's sudden passing. About 18 months prior, he had suddenly become partially paralyzed. He couldn't walk, stand, or even control his bladder. For a year and a half, I spent almost every day working from home so I could take care of him. I did therapy, and we eventually got him standing, and even walking again (though he was still very unstable). After an unfortunate incident, he severely injured his back paws, and for 3 months I worked to undo the damage. His paws were almost completely healed, and then he passed away. I'm fairly certain that if I had unwrapped his bandages that morning after I found him, his paws would have been fully recovered.

So, I would probably say that his death was much harder on me than my grandmother's, but that's not entirely true. I just had to process it all so much faster.

@Kyle: Chrono Trigger is on PSN as well.

1. Killed the Capra Demon.
2. Entered the Depths, killed the butchers, and freed the NPC.
3. Immediately retreated to the safety of Firelink Shrine, and quit while I was ahead.
4. Just started the game up again and spent about 30 minutes wandering around the Depths/Sewers. I managed to kill the massive giant rat, fell down 2 trap holes, got lost, and found the bonfire. I was amazed that I made it through all that without dying or getting cursed once.

Not a bad day. I'm particularly proud of my last session, even though I didn't make any major progress. It's always nice to spend some time with Dark Souls that doesn't feel like you're just beating your head against a brick wall. I'm pretty cautious to begin with (especially in new areas), but reading about everyone else's horror stories on the forums has made me even more paranoid. When I fell down the first hole in the Sewers, I was sure I was going to be instantly slaughtered by frogs as soon as I landed. Fortunately, they were actually pretty easy to deal with.

EDIT: I also killed Kirk. Forgot to mention that.

@supaman900s: I may have inadvertently summoned someone and not realized it, I suppose. I'd hate to think I'm that absent-minded, but it's easy to get distracted with this game.

@LordXavierBritish: You're probably right. Thanks for the help.

Also, in the spirit of this thread, I'd like to offer my own beginner advice, since this took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out. When you loot humanity off of an enemy, you have to go into your inventory and use it in order to activate it. I had 9 of them stocked up, and was wondering why my humanity counter wasn't going up each time. Doh. In the same vein, I'm finding, it's a good idea to keep a couple of them in your inventory, so if you do lose all your humanity, you've always got spares.