@ape_dosmil: You disagreed with the opinions of arts and humanities majors smugly pontificating on complicated financial and technical topics and/or supported somebody being allowed to voice such disagreement. As such, you are literally and directly responsible for the holocaust and must be purged, Nazi.
Note: This should not be taken as a defense of anything the crew has expressed. Listening to them talk about the areas of my expertise often feels like listening to 13-year-olds ranting about what’s wrong with the world, and I find myself skipping those conversations when it gets to be too much.
@av_gamer: This is my problem with this mess. “People make mistakes/we’re not going to rush to judgment” is a bad look for a website prone to sanctimony and moralizing.
@nem: The original ending was patched out such that you couldn’t get it and have the DLCs. The only remnant of that ending is that the best ending is still locked behind multiplayer (no, they didn’t fix that; they made a different ending accessible in single player) but from what I can tell nobody in the games press found that ending anyway.
@janman: You’re doing great on your first run! You fought through this faster than I did when I made my first run through and I was a souls veteran.
Here’s a quick guide to the stats. Each stat has a soft cap and a hard cap. Every stat except Endurance has a point of diminishing returns. Vitality hits the point of diminishing returns at 30, and every stat except Endurance hits this point at 25.
The soft cap is the point past which any benefit to the stat is minimal to non existent. The soft cap for every stat except Endurance is 50. Endurance’s soft cap is at 40, past which it will not grant any stamina. The hard cap is 99.
Strength, Skill, Bloodtinge, and Arcane are the stats used for determining weapon damage and each weapon has a stat requirement in order to use that weapon. Each weapon has scaling, denoted by a letter underneath a picture of the scaled stat. Scaling goes from D to S. The better the scaling, the greater the increase in damage with each point invested.
Strength weapons do high on hit damage but have longer attack animations in their transformed state. The Kirkhammer, accessible by beating the Cleric Beast, is the earliest weapon with an A in Strength scaling. Skill weapons trade high on hit damage with quicker attacks. They have a higher DPS, but require a riskier playstyle, as the player needs to be close to the target to take advantage of openings. The Threaded Cane is the earliest available weapon with A scaling in Skill, and is the most accessible high scaling Skill weapon. Bloodtinge is used to scale firearms damage, and scales the damage output of two weapons’ transformed states (Chikage and Bloodletter). This stat is a trap stat for new players, as firearms are mostly useful for parries; it’s used in specific trick builds. Arcane increases your likelihood of finding enemy drops, and is a requirement for using hunter’s tools. Arcane is a stat to put points into later, if ever, during a first playthrough. It scales elemental damage, not physical damage, and weapons with Arcane scaling will only benefit if slotted with an elemental blood gem. Ludwig’s Holy Blade is THE early game Arcane weapon, and is a good weapon for “quality” (lower health, 25 Str, 25, ski) builds.
@ducktales_moon: Cheating a single player game and then representing yourself as having played or beaten the game is deception, and the disabled manage to beat this game just fine. I could probably find a video of men older than any at Giantbomb beating this. Cheating at a single player game, suggesting that you’d prefer to turn death off in a game with three+ mechanics tied to player death, and then suggesting that your doing it “to beat the fight like the designers intended” makes you look like an idiot and a massive tool. If somebody isn’t enjoying the gameplay of a video game, but they want to see the content, they can just watch a video. If all they want is the “I beat the game!” star to show off, just cheat to get the achievement directly. The gameplay is designed to kill the player as a way to teach them combat skills. At the end of the game, the player looks like a badass, because they know how to clear out enemies quickly and get away if they can’t. It looks and feels fantastic. This looks like shit, and Rorie clearly doesn’t appreciate the core loop the game puts its players through. He doesn’t want to learn the bosses or enemy tells. It’s not a game for him. That’s fine. What’s not fine is watching 40 year old men pat themselves on the back for cheating through a video game designed around challenge as though they’ve accomplished something while sneering at people who dare to think they’ve cheapened the experience while doing so. If I wanted to watch somebody suck at games I’d watch DSP.
@ducktales_moon: If you can't be bothered to learn the boss's tells and strategies then just turn on god mode and suck your way through. The "play it your way" language isn't fooling anyone who played through this game. Each enemy has a specific set of attack rhythms and the perilous attacks take 1+ seconds to execute. Unless the player is retirement age or older, their reaction times should be well within the functional window for a game like this. Lady Butterfly is an especially bad boss to use as an example of a reaction-speed-intensive boss, since her attacks are long and flowing and she can be stun locked with repeated dodge counters.
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