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Son of Thunderbeast
Sep 21, 2002
It refers to players of quality, who have gotten gud. A quality build just means you can equip and beat the game with whatever, like a broken sword hilt run is technically a quality run

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Elissimpark
May 20, 2010

Bring me the head of Auguste Escoffier.

Item Getter posted:

When people say Quality does it just mean having high scores in both Str and Dex?

Yes.

LazyMaybe
Aug 18, 2013

oouagh
Yup, a quality build gets both physical damage stats up high in order to be able to use a wide range of weapons well, mostly. Won't be as optimized as a build that uses just dex or just str, but you get to play around with more stuff.

Cavauro
Jan 9, 2008

'Quality' refers to low quality of character, for those who are afraid to commit to strong but divisive ideals.

LazyMaybe
Aug 18, 2013

oouagh
(for the record the reason it's called Quality is because there's an upgrade type in Demon's Souls called that that works like Refined in ds3)

Moola
Aug 16, 2006
I want to like the Ithryl rapier, but the range is so short and the ith straight sword is so much better as a light 1h frostbite weapon

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
The king is dead. Actually killed him with 1 HP left. First time that's ever happened to me in a Souls game, I think.

Not a fan of Lothric Castle. It's basically just the one major setpiece surrounded by a bunch of minor ones. The dragons are kind of a misfire but I actually do like the other encounters, because they're playing with more interesting ways to modulate the difficulty. So instead of just "what if you had to fight a million billion really difficult enemies and died in one hit?" it's more clever stuff like the snipers throwing charms to turn off your estus and the wizards buffing/healing the warrors (or like how the jailers back in the dungeon have the heath drain mechanic). But also on some level it feels really discordant to be fighting what look and feel like the hollow soldiers from the Undead Burg or the Forest of Fallen Giants here in an endgame area.

Also I think I discovered the secret of the pus of man, which is that they seem take extra damage if you can smack them in the snout of the actual blob monster rather than targeting the puppeted hollow. Of course I only learned this by trying to get some free hits in from above on the ones under the bridge and it would still be a nightmare to do it in a normal context. Like trying to punch a shark. Either that or they just have gently caress all for frost resistance and I was seeing that proc without realizing it.

LazyMaybe
Aug 18, 2013

oouagh
also if you set them on fire they get stunned for a bit.

Horace Kinch
Aug 15, 2007

John Murdoch posted:

The king is dead. Actually killed him with 1 HP left. First time that's ever happened to me in a Souls game, I think.

Not a fan of Lothric Castle. It's basically just the one major setpiece surrounded by a bunch of minor ones. The dragons are kind of a misfire but I actually do like the other encounters, because they're playing with more interesting ways to modulate the difficulty. So instead of just "what if you had to fight a million billion really difficult enemies and died in one hit?" it's more clever stuff like the snipers throwing charms to turn off your estus and the wizards buffing/healing the warrors (or like how the jailers back in the dungeon have the heath drain mechanic). But also on some level it feels really discordant to be fighting what look and feel like the hollow soldiers from the Undead Burg or the Forest of Fallen Giants here in an endgame area.

Also I think I discovered the secret of the pus of man, which is that they seem take extra damage if you can smack them in the snout of the actual blob monster rather than targeting the puppeted hollow. Of course I only learned this by trying to get some free hits in from above on the ones under the bridge and it would still be a nightmare to do it in a normal context. Like trying to punch a shark. Either that or they just have gently caress all for frost resistance and I was seeing that proc without realizing it.

Headshots on the Pus of Man will stagger them all day (as will fire damage), and this extends to Iudex Gundyr too, since he's a larger Pus of Man.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
Mirroring my feelings on Duke's Archives in 1, I really liked the Grand Archives for the most part. A few bits and pieces felt unnecessary (a little too much faffing around on the outer rooftops, some of the secrets are just kind of annoying) but it was fun and didn't overstay its welcome. The run up to the Lothric bros. was actually suitably epic-feeling and there's obviously some big "walking up the stairs to Dracula's tower" vibes going on. I just wish the brothers themselves meant anything to me. They're kind of robbed of any punch when their motivation is "leave us alone, we don't wanna link the fire :smith:" and it's like, hey, what a coincidence I don't really want to either.

Also went ahead and cleared out Ariandel minus the bosses. I can see why people were (IIRC) a bit underwhelmed. I liked the opening areas well enough (could maybe do with less tree spam) but then the corvian village is just aggressively bland and fighting through the 20 some-odd Millwood dudes in the mountains was just a boring slog. The fly guys' grab attack is some top tier "frames? what frames?" bullshit. Platforming down to the bottom area while dodging explosive great arrows is some needlessly sadistic bullshit. Overall it's another area that's just kinda there in a game where a lot of the areas are just kinda there. I do appreciate Friede's "hi, hello, now gently caress off" turning to "sigh, here we loving go" because the player just won't stop sticking their nose into things.

War Wizard
Jan 4, 2007

:)
The areas with Followers and Millwood knights are better with Jolly cooperation. I find if you put a summon sign down in the Village you're nearly guaranteed to help someone with an invader.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
The place was a ghost town last night in terms of signs or even invaders. With the exception of Friede, of course. It's a non-stop party around her bonfire.

Elissimpark
May 20, 2010

Bring me the head of Auguste Escoffier.

John Murdoch posted:

I just wish the brothers themselves meant anything to me. They're kind of robbed of any punch when their motivation is "leave us alone, we don't wanna link the fire :smith:" and it's like, hey, what a coincidence I don't really want to either.


I felt guilty on my first run though because I accidentally didn't link the fire; I could almost hear Lotheric's "gently caress, seriously?"

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
Lmao, Gravetender. So anyway I ended up having a really good first try at Friede but ate poo poo towards the end, then proceeded to struggle a bit. Thankfully I got help from Gael and...also Gael. I wonder if it's the same dude who invaded me early on in Lothric Castle roleplaying as Lorian. :allears:

Then I made my way down to the Demon Prince fight and ate poo poo on the first try at 5 loving percent health left on him because he did the giant fuckoff chaos sun and even though I was a mile away from it the meteors still managed to come right for me and killed me in one hit. <:mad:> Then I reloaded and while I was waiting for Lapp to spawn in I saw a second summon sign...Slave Knight Gael! It must be the same guy, following me through the DLCs! :woop: What a friendly co-op buddy, always showing up when I need him most. :downs:

Anyway, stupidity aside, the Dreg Heap averaged out to...eh. I liked exploring the swamp (yay DS2 representation), but the angel gimmick wasn't great. It'd be one thing if there was an umbilical cord or some magic tendrils or whatever clearly connecting the angels to their hosts, but instead it just turns into some Yakety Sax bullshit. I actually somehow made it down to the Prince bonfire without killing either of them (I found the route to the second one, made note of it, then dropped down to said bonfire :goleft:), then said gently caress it and looked up spoilers because I didn't feel like warping back to the start and running the gauntlet over and over trying to find them and then have to run through the swamp at least one more time to loot everything anyway. It also then renders the swamp area kinda flat and uninteresting because by design it has to be really basic and mostly-unthreatening to fit the angel setpiece in there. IDK, I'll say this at least: They finally made a platforming-heavy section that didn't play like absolute rear end.

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Jun 2, 2021

UltraShame
Nov 6, 2006

Vocabulum.
I'm running Blue Sentinel, and farming for Sunlight Medals at a boss.

Just had a co-op player connect with "impossible stats" and before I could mash the kick button, 35,000 souls flooded into me. Is this something I need to revert to an old save for? I don't really PVP unless I'm invaded, and this is the first time I've encountered a cheater in co-op.

GodFish
Oct 10, 2012

We're your first, last, and only line of defense. We live in secret. We exist in shadow.

And we dress in black.
I'm at Untended Graves/Archives currently, when should I go do the painting dlc?

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

GodFish posted:

I'm at Untended Graves/Archives currently, when should I go do the painting dlc?

Now. It’s roughly Lothric Castle level of difficulty

RPATDO_LAMD
Mar 22, 2013

🐘🪠🍆
You can't go wrong doing all the DLC right before/after the base game final boss.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
Dunno if the Ringed City really did it for me. It's like a perfect encapsulation of all the worst parts of DS3. Gimmicky encounters, repetitive encounters, enemies that really shouldn't respawn but do, enemies that vacillate between being total chumps or an absolute nightmare, tedious runbacks... And once you see the whole area laid out before you it manages to feel so small, even with all the horizontal and vertical space they employ.

On the one hand, I feel a bit disappointed because the rando I summoned for Midir ended up doing most of the work. (Red Tearstone ring, clearly knew what he was doing.) But considering how many times I got summoned by the same 3-4 people desperately trying to beat him maybe I dodged a bullet. I was starting to dial it in over the course of trying and failing to help others, and I get the general strategy, but ultimately it's just a drat tedious fight and too RNG-heavy. Big "Sinh flies back and forth across the arena 20 times then finally lands and kills you in one hit" energy.

Oddly enough my favorite experience has been the church. My church fight was a tense battle against another player and I ultimately came out on top. Then in the process of putting down my sign for Midir I proved myself to be a pretty decent motherfucker of a spear. Between some very lucky Ringed Knight drops, the freebie you get, and all the passive summons I already got 10 spear ornaments for the first upgrade.

All that's left is Gael and the Soul of Cinder.

Aipsh
Feb 17, 2006


GLUPP SHITTO FAN CLUB PRESIDENT

John Murdoch posted:

Dunno if the Ringed City really did it for me. It's like a perfect encapsulation of all the worst parts of DS3. Gimmicky encounters, repetitive encounters, enemies that really shouldn't respawn but do, enemies that vacillate between being total chumps or an absolute nightmare, tedious runbacks... And once you see the whole area laid out before you it manages to feel so small, even with all the horizontal and vertical space they employ.

On the one hand, I feel a bit disappointed because the rando I summoned for Midir ended up doing most of the work. (Red Tearstone ring, clearly knew what he was doing.) But considering how many times I got summoned by the same 3-4 people desperately trying to beat him maybe I dodged a bullet. I was starting to dial it in over the course of trying and failing to help others, and I get the general strategy, but ultimately it's just a drat tedious fight and too RNG-heavy. Big "Sinh flies back and forth across the arena 20 times then finally lands and kills you in one hit" energy.

Oddly enough my favorite experience has been the church. My church fight was a tense battle against another player and I ultimately came out on top. Then in the process of putting down my sign for Midir I proved myself to be a pretty decent motherfucker of a spear. Between some very lucky Ringed Knight drops, the freebie you get, and all the passive summons I already got 10 spear ornaments for the first upgrade.

All that's left is Gael and the Soul of Cinder.

Do soul of cinder but first, but honestly Gael makes up for whatever shortcomings you have for the DLCs

MechaSeinfeld
Jan 2, 2008


Midir is long and fairly tedious, but what do you mean by rng? Once he’s dialled in it’s just like 5 minutes of smacking his head once after baiting it and sprinting away from his fire and lasers. It’s an oversimplification of how I fight him but apart from doing the most damage of all bosses all the time, he’s really predictable.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.

MechaSeinfeld posted:

Midir is long and fairly tedious, but what do you mean by rng? Once he’s dialled in it’s just like 5 minutes of smacking his head once after baiting it and sprinting away from his fire and lasers. It’s an oversimplification of how I fight him but apart from doing the most damage of all bosses all the time, he’s really predictable.

Maybe being in co-op was making his AI especially fucky, but I saw a lot of instances of him doing the same attack multiple times in a row, which was just goofy. (Not his basic stuff, stuff like his quick charge, his jump away, or his big tantrum.) And maybe it's not strictly RNG per se but the fight is fundamentally different if he decides to go apeshit on the lasers or not. Also perhaps there's some tell I never clued in on, but it seemed like he could option select between capping off a combo with a regular horizontal fire breath (which opens him up for a good few hits) or he'll rear up and do the ground fire.

Edit: And I guess in a more general sense, RNG in that he has to decide to let you hit his head and sometimes he just doesn't for a while.

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Jun 3, 2021

MechaSeinfeld
Jan 2, 2008


sorry I misread. You’re right, having an extra person means he gets way less predictable + gets way more health, so yeah. not enjoyable at that point.

No Dignity
Oct 15, 2007

MechaSeinfeld posted:

sorry I misread. You’re right, having an extra person means he gets way less predictable + gets way more health, so yeah. not enjoyable at that point.

If only there were a solution to this...

Guillermus
Dec 28, 2009



multijoe posted:

If only there were a solution to this...

*cough*pestilent mist*cough* :haw:

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
Spicy hot take time: Gael was alright. Soul of Cinder was alright. TBH I probably unintentionally did the same thing I did in DS1, where I basically walked into Artorias overleveled/geared and was suitably not immediately blown away by how awesome he was and was instead more like "oh neat".

To my sensibilities DS3 as a whole averages out to...eh, alright I guess. For every thing I really like there's another thing that feels worse. I want to say it feels like their hearts weren't in it after a point, but maybe that's just me projecting. I got really swept up in DS1 and DS2, but 3 just didn't recapture that same tantalizing feeling for me. :shrug:

I think I like the core combat the best out of the three games and might even be inclined to replay it sooner rather than later on that basis, but that was never the main appeal of the series for me, frankly.

Edit: Probably doesn't help that 3 is pretty meh when it comes to my favorite build type. Basically once I had Vordt's Hammer at +5 and Havel's gear retrieved there wasn't anything particularly cool waiting for me after that. Ledo's hammer is cool, but it's merely competitive with Vordt's rather than markedly better. I never even got around to trying the Quakestone.

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Jun 4, 2021

Horace Kinch
Aug 15, 2007

Now try a Pyromancer run.

Horace Kinch fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Jun 4, 2021

Mesadoram
Nov 4, 2009

Serious Business

Same here. Felt like a little bit of that magic was gone. I cannot pinpoint why.

Son of Thunderbeast
Sep 21, 2002
I think a major contributor to that feeling is the very linear nature of the world layout. The areas themselves are pretty large and spacious (the cathedral was especially impressive to me) but there's very little off the open world aspect of the others, where you maybe run into a wall and have to decide if you want to keep trying this path or maybe see if there was another path or area to explore.

codo27
Apr 21, 2008

The main thing for me is I'm presented with multiple routes, and in taking the less obvious one, my adventuring is rewarded. That stayed intact, so I felt the game had much of the same spirit as the others and I dont pay much mind to these kinds of criticisms of it. Its biggest shortcoming are the first couple of areas.

Last Celebration
Mar 30, 2010
Yeah, I get the complaints that the world doesn’t feel interconnected anymore but I was pretty happy with DS3 when looking at each level on its own merits, cause honestly a lot of DS1 levels don’t feel as vast and sprawling as a good deal of 3’s, like Lower Undead Burg is just a long corridor with a shortcut to Firelink (admittedly pretty neat) which is only really matched by the endgame version of the tutorial level.

It’s not exactly a fair comparison cause DS3 is a gen later with Dark Souls I and Bloodborne under From’s belt (not trying to diss 2, I just genuinely have no idea how much staff overlap there was) so of course it’s feistier and it’s probably partly because the game can be a long chain of levels and not an interconnected web that has to make sense that makes up the difference.

The Protagonist
Jun 29, 2009

The average is 5.5? I thought it was 4. This is very unsettling.
I think it's worth pointing out, DS1 is literally the only fromsoft game that has that windy interconnected nature everyone loved. They haven't done it since.

No Dignity
Oct 15, 2007

Bloodborne wasn't quite as intricate but Yharnam still had pretty cool interlocking design

Horace Kinch
Aug 15, 2007

The Protagonist posted:

I think it's worth pointing out, DS1 is literally the only fromsoft game that has that windy interconnected nature everyone loved. They haven't done it since.

And it's a crime. I keep coming back to DS1 because there's so many different ways to tackle it. I wish more people still played though.

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

The Protagonist posted:

I think it's worth pointing out, DS1 is literally the only fromsoft game that has that windy interconnected nature everyone loved. They haven't done it since.

Bloodborne and Sekiro both have lots of interconnections

Also, King’s Field 2 and 4

skasion fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Jun 4, 2021

RPATDO_LAMD
Mar 22, 2013

🐘🪠🍆
A huge windy interconnected-everywhere world only makes sense if you can't fast travel to every bonfire. What's the point of discovering all sorts of clever shortcuts between different areas if the world if you can already instantly warp to your destination instead of having to explore?
So blame bonfire warping for the loss :v:

Son of Thunderbeast
Sep 21, 2002

RPATDO_LAMD posted:


So blame bonfire warping for the loss :v:

I do! :argh:

E: and i don't even mean windy and interconnected, ds2 wasn't like that but it was still huge and sprawling and not anywhere as linear as 3

War Wizard
Jan 4, 2007

:)

RPATDO_LAMD posted:

A huge windy interconnected-everywhere world only makes sense if you can't fast travel to every bonfire. What's the point of discovering all sorts of clever shortcuts between different areas if the world if you can already instantly warp to your destination instead of having to explore?
So blame bonfire warping for the loss :v:

I'm reminded of DS2 and the bonfire immediately next to a knock-down-tree shortcut. Zero reason for it. Never used it once.

Sakurazuka
Jan 24, 2004

NANI?

The Protagonist posted:

I think it's worth pointing out, DS1 is literally the only fromsoft game that has that windy interconnected nature everyone loved. They haven't done it since.

Because it was insanely difficult to do and that's why a bunch of later areas and bosses were half finished

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Samuel Clemens
Oct 4, 2013

I think we should call the Avengers.

DS2 is weird because a lot of levels feel designed with shortcuts in mind but just as many don't. Makes me wonder if the decision to allow warping right from the start wasn't made until halfway through development.

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