joest01 said:
I don't know how to react to this. The Capra and Titan demons are more on old knight level than anything in the dragon shrine. The 'sploding dudes are one hit kills but the levels are designed with that in mind. You will be on a bridge and have one in front and one behind you. You will have them come out of rooms left and right if you don't search and clear them first (sinners basement). But yea, of course it isn't hard once you know the level and how to handle yourself.
Check the Mathewhathisface critique for a guy who makes plenty of points about how the game is more difficult than dsk1.
Me? I actually thought the bosses in Dks1 were too easy. Outside of O&S I don't remember one ever giving me trouble (until the DLC, those were nice!!). I am much more challenged and entertained by the Dks2 bosses. Velstadt, Mirror knight with actual pvp'ers jumping out the shield. Orenstein 2. Even the friggen pursuer would kill every DkS1 boss in his sleep.
The one thing I can give you is that the mechanics are so much improved that for a technical player it becomes much easier to dominate. Which to me is the very definition of a well designed difficult game. Ninja Gaiden, Bayonetta, DmC are all able to raise the difficulty levels to such insane heights because they are balanced and fine tuned so well.
DkS2 is not quite in that league but its hella closer than the previous games.
That said, yes, a last giant should have some dignity and not look like from a cheap italian horror flick. And a rat shouldnt look like a dog. I agree that the atmosphere and design lacking. But enemy movesets and gameplay are far from it.
p.s. have you even tried the champions cov. Perhaps you mention in your post. But if you beat the throne duo on your first try while in that cov. Heck if you can melee a mace knight going in blind on your first try I will change my avatar to don knotts.
edit: since you mention melee and ranged. I run full melee but I am not beyond using a bow when I need to. No shield. They have always become useless in later playthroughs. In this game I actually think they are useless from the start. and the fact that you seem to think you can tank a mace knight with a shield has me think you either power leveled or we are playing different games.
Actualy my NG was done entirely in champions covenant ... made NG+ feel like a downgrade until that one exciting moment when freja poped up and stomped me.
As for the mummies: Where? There are 2 varieties of mummy in game: Petrify which are all over Lost Bastille, and exploding which come only in the gutter. They do one swarm at you in the watter before you descend to the gutter at the bottom of Tomb of Saints and then come at you twice on the bridges in gutter. But even on NG+++ they never came from both directions ... just from the front ... first time i had a gratsowrd and simply did the r2 stab to get them, next times I had a spear ready just for safety. Not once did one come from behind, and I checked by turning around because I expected that to happen ... and about knowing the level: dude I learned the levels on the first playthrough precisly because I was going everywhere searching every nook and crany for details and secrets ... which is what you should be doing in Souls game right? Explore? To find lore, secrets, treasure and potential ambushes? Makes sense to you? I wasn't born knowing the game, I just had the instincts and forwsight to explore the locations and could spot places where a trap lay waiting ... many times simply to freak myself out because there was no trap to be found.
You xhould really go back to DS 1 ... if Bed of Chaos is not in your nightmares you are either the luckyest man in the universe, a god of games who should find any game easy or you simply never bothered to go through all of DS. Because that is the definition of Souls dificulty: The Bed of Chaos is the hardest boss fight in any Souls game and would send your beloved pursuer to hell with but a single blow. The Pursuer is easy to dodge or a 100 phis block shield on a tanky build with lots of stamina and chloranty ring solve everything without you needing to move(like on most boses) (keep shield raised, him locked and circle towards his sword arm: he mises several hits, those that hit do no dmg and you can get 2-3 hits in after every combo he does. dodge the telegraphed blue sword.) Actualy that shield, lock circle combo works on most humanoid enemies and boses provided you built a tanky character ...
Actualy, for me, as a technical player, I find the mechanics to be a downgrade from previous souls games ... they made some changes that made me preety angry. First off there are no longer 3 stages of dodge, there are just 2. Keep load under 70% and you can basicaly do the fast dodge no matter what you wear (I saw people in full havels doing it ... made for some crazy sights). That means they took some of the balancing one needed to consider when building his character: no longer do we deal with lights, meds and heavy's each with unique advantages and disadavatages (lights were fast, but died instantly and could be stagered by brathing on them, meds were mobile, but still capable to take a hit or two, heavy's were basicaly imposible to stagger without spells, but couldn'd dodge for shit either), but rather we have noobs (those who go above 70%) and the rest. And you would not believe how easy it is to have both a nice and protective tin can and your long dodge, making it much easier to survive, rather than DS 1's organic risk and reward system. Second: they fucked up the stability mechanic ... it just feels unatural how easy it can be for a friggin hollow in his underpants to stagger a guy wearing full plate ... hitting me with their empty fists. Hold a shield up though and they can't do shit (until you run out of stamina anyway). By that same token: I don;t give a fuck how much food you had to grow that large mister Drakekeeper, when I hit you in the HEAD with a fucking LIGHTNING GREAT ARROW or when I send out a magical gust of wind from my Drakewing Ultra Greatsword into your chest followed by the blade of the sword itself at least fucking flich you pos ... I just unloaded enough concusive force to flatten a truck here ... 3. Tanking. You can't tank in DS and Demons. You can't period. Sure it works on normal enemies, but for boses the shield is useless garbage that slows you down. In fact you are better of just dumping the shield and surviving on dodges. This game though? Ok ... I'll play with the boses you brough up: Ornstein 2 ... really? All it takes to beat him is to lock onto him, keep the shield up and circle to the left ... he will never hit you, and if he does, he bounces back from the shield and you can wail on him. Cirle, stab him while he takes his sweet ass time to get his spear back from stabing, circle again. Repeat until dead. Sincee he doesn't have Smough to help and he lost his lightning powers, he just sucks. Mirror Knight: Slow, ponderous, likes to think aobut the meaning of life while recovering from an attack, which are all easily dogeable (at that point in the game I resorted to throwing my shield away because it felt like cheating). He summons phantoms: 1. it takes him a LONG time to do it and he telegraphs it by first raising his shield up and slamming it 2. run up as he slams the shield so it is in front of you. Proceed to attack like a maniac. While the summoned enemy is in his long as animation for busting our of the mirror you will most likely kill him, or at the very least take most of his hp away. I actualy wish all boses could do this though ... they need all the help they can get considering how inept they are. Velstadt: Ok this one you can't tank (thank god ... a boss that actualy remembers shields should not be a problem for him and isn't a gigantic thing). What you can do is smoke a cigar and have a cofee while he calls for a crane to help lift his bell hammer thingy before throwing your gamepad across the room, getting it and presing dodge. Or you can hang back so he thinks "aha, I shall now do my ultimate super duper multiple black spirit bomb attack and instagib you punny undead" before kneeling and praying to the 10000 undead cherubs to grant him strenght, all the while you are hacking away at his back uninterupted and ukltimatly either stagger him interupting the cast, or completly dodging the spell because it flies in an arc and can't hit you if you are right near him. Mechanicaly this game is broken as hell because of 2 reasons: It takes almost no skill to do the most powerfull moves in the game, just basic reflexes and timing that nay game can teach you and your enemies never require anything but the most basic skills to succeed. Your comparison to bayonetta or DMC falls flat because those games actualy require alot of skill, some millisecond level precision reflexes and deep knoledge of multiple buttom combinations to be able to pull of the moves needed to actualy be good at the game. And the enemies in those games constantly demand from you more and more damage to die, more advanced moves to first make them vulnerable, and they allways bring some friends with different paterns and requierents into the mix: adding an element of priritising which target to engage above all the other layers of challenge. DS 2 never does this ... you almost never face combinations of enemies. The only exceptions off the top of my head are Amana and Drangleic castle. Amana used to be hard, but of course they nerfed it (Nerfing player equipment because it ruined the game? Fine. NERFING AN AREA AND ENEMIES AND BOSSES BECAUSE SOME WHINY PUSSIED COMPLAINEs THEY ARE "TOO HARD" IN A SOULS GAME? GTFO. For the record: I beat Amana NG+ and the Sinner NG+ on the consoles before they were "fixed"). ACtualy this ... this pisses me off to no end: IN DS 1 they nerfed some items and builds because they broke the game and ruined the feel. In DS 2 they nerf entire areas and boses beause whinners say they are "Too hard" ... but leave the insanly easy grinding to 838 and the broken as shit mundane in the game? This right here proves the game is fucking easy, and they want it that way ...
Here is how this should have went if those people were actualy making a Souls game: "OMG Amana is too hard, artificial difficulty, i'm a whiny pussy, nerf plix" Devs:"Say, what do the servers say? What? People are getting past amana, they just die alot. Like Blighttown or Tomb of Giants? Ok" Devs towards the whinners on the forums: "Welcome to Dark Souls, bitches!" "OMG Lost Sinner NG+ is hax, I can't multy task and have the attention span of a goldfish, ner plix" Devs: "Say, what do the servers say? Are people in NG++? They just die alot on this boss, like O&S or Bed of Chaos or Kalameet? Ok" Devs to whinners on forums: "Welcome to Dark Souls, bitches" "Umm hey devs, you do realise that it takes less than half a day to get to level 838 even on NG and that with 99 in each stat mundane preety much becomes able to one shot anything pvp or pve? Oh and Avelyins seems to get way to good a bonus from powerstancing, shouldn't they actualy gave lower damage than crossbows, but fire in volleys to make up for that? So that they are balanced?" Devs:"Is it really true that players can get so easy to level 838? Memory of Jeigh actualy gives that many souls? 4 million souls in under 5 minutes? And how does mundane scale again? Holy shit, with equal stats it gives up about 150 bonus dmg per stat at 99? And wait, how much dmg do upgraded Avelyins do compared to other crossbows? Wait, they do more dmg per shot than any other crossbow and fire 3 at a time with a shorter reload than any other crossbow?" Devs to forums: "It would appear we have made it too easy to reach max level in this game and simply remove any challenge or tension regarding building a character, therefore we have taken steps to reduce the ease with which souls can be obtained in all major farming hotspots our server data revealed. Also none of the Memories will hold bonfire ascetics anymore. On a related note: we didnlt realize the loophole of equal stats on mundane and how well that scales. Therefore we have reworked mundane to offer no scaling if there are equal lowest stat scores. Turns out mundane doing what it was ment to do makes it useless, so we removed it. We were trying new things, they don't allways work we apologize. And since we are nerfing OP player items, after cheching the stats on the Avelyins we decided to rewerk their dmg. The damage they do will remain the one displayed, however now that damage is only achieved when the full volley hits, rather than per each bolt fired. Also we reduced the poise damage of this crossbow, since it fires 3 bolts at lower ranges than any other crossbow, it amde no sense for it to stagger like it's bigger more powerfull but single fire cousing. WE will keep monitoring this weapon and see how it behaves. Thank you for the feedback"
But they didn't do this ... they listened to the whiners and ignored complaints about actual broken things ... because these people aren't making Dark Souls ... they are milking the popularity of Dark Souls with a easy, washed out sequel that more people can enjoy and use smoke and mirros to conceal how little of what made the original good is in this ... too bad they fail. It is still early, but in a few years I will still be PvP-ing in Dark Souls, while DS 2 will quetly go away and be remembered as the first miss of the Souls series.
I'll check the review you mentioned and see what it says. And yes, you can tank a mace drakekeeper with a proper shield. At least on NG and NG+ before they go the clasic difficulty increase way: more dmg. But by then you must have mastered the doge and have high stats to boot. They are still slow, they just attack faster than the Old Knights and do more dmg. But you have more room to move, and the lock onto them, raise shield, move (replace with dodge from NG+/NG++ depending on build) to the side, stab works on them too. Gets funny when there are 2. And since you made me think about mechanics I'll do an adition on this thread tomorow: A boss rundown and how easy/hard they are in both NG and NG+ modes. Also maybe areas if I get the time.
