Zombieheadbutt

@Marz: LOL, I'd feel unclean until I got rid of the curse. I'm OCD like that. If this wasn't the first time I'd ever been cursed I would already have been carrying around a few Purge Stones. Didn't know there was something capable of cursing in The Depths.

I'll take a look later. To prevent twisting my controller in half I had to stop for a bit. Hopefully you guys are right and I won't have to go far.

The Depths is kind of hard to articulate in words. The fire I use in down a long hallway full of slims and two torch wielding undead. The exit from the frog area? You might be thinking of the other hole you can fall down thats a sewage drain.

...I may have hit it. I've put in a little over 20 hours and I think I've been doing pretty well. The game can be very overwhelming at times. The world is freaking huge and the enemies seem impossible at first glance...but I persevered. I was running around in The Depths trying to get a feel for the area and run up on a soapstone message. "Be Wary of Fall". I was like, "Ok, another sewer drain I have to watch for. Nope, this guy put the sign one inch before the hole and I fell down into a miasma of curse spores from the frogs. I killed everyone of them but the last one and somewhat got caught in a highly concentrated cloud of the spores and died instantly.

Now I'm cursed with no Purge Stone and about 6k of souls at the bottom of a pit I can't seem to find a way back to without falling down the hole again which will kill me because of my newly aquired curse halving my health. I may have finally hit my limit. Argh!

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. :)

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!

I'm actually still a little confused about the stats and some of the other mechanics.

I'm at work right now so some of these questions might be a bit vague:

• Under the stats for a weapon there is an additional section with stats like "ParaBonus" with icons beside of them. What does this do? Someone said it allows the weapon to scale with your stats. Does that mean a weapon with an "A" scales better than a weapon with a "D"? If sword #1 has the exact same stats as sword #2 but sword #2 has a better class of "ParaBonus" for STR does that mean #2 will have a higher ATK bonus if your strength is above average?
• Beside the stats for weapons there is a set of brackets with "+" and a number in them. Is this the "ParaBonus" that I mentioned above? For some reason I was thinking in terms of something like D&D and imagined it was a "off-hand" bonus or penalty.
• The benefit of weapons like a club or an axe isn't very clear to me. Is it just a a different set of attributes attached to them or do they do something unique the other doesn't other than animate attacks differently. For example, can a club break a shield, etc.
• I'm still confused on what I should be doing with my character's base stats. Someone mentions that END is a safe bet because of the Drake Sword "not scaling" (ParaBonus?). As much as I love to play stealthy and agile characters it seems like a big ass bulky character is really the only way to go. Does anyone actually duel wield daggers or something like that?
• Humanity seems pretty difficult to come by. I don't think I've unlocked the ability to play in other people's games just yet so any time I do something idiotic like roll off a cliff (shut up!) I have to spend a good deal of time waiting and hoping. When I do finally get a point it seems like it comes out of thin air. I don't seem to pick it up or it drops. Huh?

I've actually scoured the internet looking for some of the answers to these questions but I've had no luck so far. Their instruction manuel was the first trap I fell victim. I wanted to play Demon Souls so bad it hurt but I only had a PS3. I didn't realize the base game was so in-depth.

I made a post last week describing my current rig and what I could do to get ready for Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.  I refuse to play it on a 360.  I'm not a PC purist but I do believe some games are better on certain system.  Never going to play a 3rd person shooter on a PC, etc.  So, I bought a new CPU cooler and got the temp. down to around 40C with no load and 45C with full load using Prime95.  I got my E6300 @ 1.8Ghz up to about 2.6Ghz stable with a temp. of 55-58C at full load and put the OC on the memory at 2.50 so it came in close to 1000 MHZ.  I also replaced my over voltage 2 gig RAM with 4gigs of RAM. I also, today, installed a EVGA GTX 550 Ti 1gig (Fermi).
 
Now, its still weird.  Every time I try to benchmark with 3dMark Vantage it locks up. (Note: it did this before with a GT 9500 1gig).  It will either freeze the system and hitting the ESC key just gives me a black screen.  I can run Fallout: New Vegas on Ultra settings and it runs pretty smooth but I keep what appears to be frame skipping every so often.  I can't narrow down whats going on.  I thought maybe I was having some really bad ghosting on my monitor but I can't recreate it on the desktop by moving windows around. Something as simple as closing Steam is slow.  Things my computer should annialhate with my specs can be choppy, even Facebook games.  I get mini-freezes that are annoying to the extreme.   
 
So, anyone have any guesses?  A poor power supply?  Motherboard finally giving out?  Processor still to slow?  Harddrive issues? 
 
TL:DR: Shits messed up and Winter is coming! (Skyrim)

Well, I dusted my rig and promptly broke my old heatsink reapplying new thermal compound.  Doh!  I replaced it with a Antec Kulhler 620.  For the price and simplicity its pretty good.  Managed to get the temp. down to 48C at full load.  I got my E6300 1.8Ghz up to 2.6Ghz.  It was unstable at 2.8Ghz and I wasn't comfortable messing with the voltage on such an old board to stabilize it.  
 
Now, I just gotta pick a decent video card.  I'm toying with a Geforce GTX 460 SE for $129.99.  I know its a castrated version of the standard GTX 460 but for the price and performance it seems like a really good deal.  Looking around I now see how far behind I've allowed myself to get in the video card department and I'm ashamed. :(  I haven't tried a ATi card in years and I've never liked having to mess with their drivers.  Has ATi changed at all in recent years other than having been bough out by AMD?

@Zombieheadbutt:  Do you have a set budget? how much are you willing to spend?