Prepare to Die Again - Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin

[SilentSnake]

As some here might have heard about from me, I beat Dark Souls for the first time a little bit ago. Now I'm delving into the sequel - specifically, the Scholar of the First Sin version - and it's fascinating to see the differences. The tone of the game feels less dark medieval and more fairy tale so far, and I kinda dig it. Also, taking a drink of Estus takes a bit longer, humanity works more similarly to how it was in Demon's Souls, and the starting area feels more involved with more to explore.

I started with a Cleric build - I wanted to actually use spells this time, but also hit things a bunch - and just beat The First Giant. I'm excited to dig into it more.

 

[Fyonn]

I've had a long and swing-y relationship with Dark Souls 2, but I've ended up on "yeah it's pretty good." Life gems are a pretty good addition, since they let you heal in anticipation of damage instead of in reaction to damage.

 

[Patrick]

Get your agility up asap! It governs how good your rolls are & how long it takes to drink estus.

 

[ASandoval]

Honestly my favorite Soulsborne game. Fairy tale is a good description, and I love that aspect of it. Also I kind of like its hub and many spokes world map, even if it is a little less ambitious than the first game.

 

[estragon]

Can anyone comment on how the performance of this is on PS3? I played Demon's Souls and thought the performance was fine, then Dark Souls on Switch. So, I'm not looking for a perfect 60fps or whatever, but I'm wondering if this might struggle even more than Demon's Souls because it was pushing things as a later game on the system, or if it's basically more or less comparable to Demon's.

At some point I expect to own something that can play the remaster, but I'm just curious if performance is bad enough (=significantly worse than Demon's) to hold off on this until that happens or if it's good enough.

 

[ASandoval]

I might be misremembering but I'm pretty sure DSII stays locked at 30FPS pretty consistently on the PS3. I don't remember it any real drops or performance issues, whereas I clearly remember both Demon's and the original Dark Souls struggling at times.

 

[dosboot]

I think Dark Souls 2 is an amazing 10/10, but it wasn't until the 2nd or 3rd area that I could finally stop my brain from automatically musing on negative comparisons to first game, so I'm glad to read that you've gotten a warm impression, @SilentSnake. Evidently I can't tell what really "matters" to me when there are straightforward analyses to be made, which is something I've noticed with lots of sequels.

Regrading "I want to actually use spells, but also hit things a bunch". I've started from this place before too, and I've yet to create a Souls character that I've really liked along those lines. It feels like each spell charge has a lot to live up to when placed on an otherwise competent character like that. It doesn't help that sometimes support spells make only a minor difference or no difference in how things play out. Big spells with fewer charges have an aesthetic shortfall where you aren't using them enough to feel like your character's play has the new "personality" that you've maybed envisioned at the start.

 

[YangusKhan]

If I remember correctly, Lightning Spear and its upgrades were absurdly powerful in launch DS2, but got nerfed in subsequent patches and I'm assuming Scholar carried that balance forward. Regardless, Force and Wrath of the Gods are always fun, and I've used Magic Barrier too, situationally.

 

[Ludendorkk]

In the first few months of the game, literally every player ran with Lightning Spears because was so OP

 

[Mommi]

Get your agility up asap! It governs how good your rolls are & how long it takes to drink estus.

You can also ignore this if you want. You have to sink a ton of levels into it and it's honestly in the realm of frame-counting nonsense for fighting game people. You can surely beat the campaign without the 1/10 of a second boost, and 30 levels worth of HP will do a lot more for you survival, especially early on.

 

[Oathbreaker]

I think agility is only really worth paying attention to if you lean into rolling to stop damage. If you do it's worth getting Attunement to wherever you want it for slots and Adaptability the rest of the way so Agility says it's at 105; that's where it matches the Dark 1 fast roll. Every stat gives a little HP in this game and elemental/status resistances actually mean something (though still not as much as they should) so getting a better roll can be worth it. Adaptability giving agility at least prevents it from being the awful stat Resilience was in Dark 1.

Probably my favorite part about Dark 2 is the ability to actually buff every weapon combined with being able to make just about any weapon have inherent element. So weapons with inherent element can be further buffed to skew their damage heavily toward that element. iirc the damage scaling was changed too so split damage isn't just subpar by default, which other Souls games made worse by not letting you buff them (at least not without exploiting bugs). My favorite build was a Dark/Pyromancy caster running around with a Dark-buffed sword that was upgraded to have inherent Dark damage. It even had the stats for stuff like Great Magic barrier so it absolutely tore up PvP.

Can anyone comment on how the performance of this is on PS3?

It's significantly better than Dark 1 for the most part. It drops a bit from time to time but never so severely as Blight Town or the lava area.

 

[Issun]

DS2 is where I learned to love the roll. It helps that it's also much more viable than it was in Demon's or Dark 1. You could tell they were really starting to lean towards the whole "dodging uber alles" thing that they perfected in Bloodborne.

So what I'm saying is yes, you should get dat Agility.

 

[jpfriction]

Experimenting with powerstancing two weapons is pretty fun in this game. If you meet the stat requirements and equip two of the same type of weapon you can switch stances and unlock some new moves like a crazy dual club attack that stuns pretty much everything, including bosses.

 

[SilentSnake]

Well, I was just on a Journey.

Spoiler

Beat The Pursuer, got enough souls to get a depetrification branch, hopped into the Gender Coffin, got to the Lost Bastille, found another branch, discovered the Shaded Woods, amassed a bunch of Warrior souls to buy me the ring that prevents some falling damage, found the Grave of Saints, beat the Royal Rat Vanguard, and landed in The Gutter.

Whew, there's a lot to this game.

 

[Paul le Fou]

Powerstancing is also only in DS2, so if it sounds interesting now is the time to try it. There are also some crazy combos you wouldn't expect, iirc, like, whip+halberd or something silly like that?

I also played mace+lightning Cleric in DS2 and I guess the build worked but I have zero memory of how it worked before I got a very late-game (or rather, DLC) item, the Crown of the Iron King, which has an absurdly powerful effect on it - semi-regularly gives you back some percentage of your spell charges. The thing is, it rounds up, so spells with only 1 charge get refilled every, what, 90 seconds? and suddenly, your lightning-buffing spell goes from "once per bonfire" to almost infinite." This is also especially good with the best lightning spells - I think the top one has 3 charges, but you get one back every 90 seconds, and that's a lot more lightning for your buck. I had the starting mace for like, half the game, until I got the blacksmith's hammer, which I of course made into a lightning weapon. Played heavy armor and shield. but still got my rolls to a pretty high agility for basic defensiveness. You get a lot more levels to play with in this game than DS1 (and, in case you didn't know, you can respec yourself.

Well, I was just on a Journey.

Spoiler

Beat The Pursuer, got enough souls to get a depetrification branch, hopped into the Gender Coffin, got to the Lost Bastille, found another branch, discovered the Shaded Woods, amassed a bunch of Warrior souls to buy me the ring that prevents some falling damage, found the Grave of Saints, beat the Royal Rat Vanguard, and landed in The Gutter.

Whew, there's a lot to this game.

Yeah, I think DS2 is the "biggest" Soulsborne game, as far as total number and variety of environments goes and the ways it spreads out in different disparate directions. I know it has the highest number of bosses too (though I feel like it's more quantity than quality where the other games have a higher quality overall).

 

[Patrick]

You can also ignore this if you want. You have to sink a ton of levels into it and it's honestly in the realm of frame-counting nonsense for fighting game people. You can surely beat the campaign without the 1/10 of a second boost, and 30 levels worth of HP will do a lot more for you survival, especially early on.

I think agility is only really worth paying attention to if you lean into rolling to stop damage. If you do it's worth getting Attunement to wherever you want it for slots and Adaptability the rest of the way so Agility says it's at 105; that's where it matches the Dark 1 fast roll. Every stat gives a little HP in this game and elemental/status resistances actually mean something (though still not as much as they should) so getting a better roll can be worth it. Adaptability giving agility at least prevents it from being the awful stat Resilience was in Dark 1.

Good points! I rely heavily on rolling, so it makes a huge difference for me. If you lean in to blocking it might not be as useful.

 

[Paul le Fou]

As a longtime shield user and proponent, I still definitely leveled agility because unless you have a late-game greatshield you never don't have to roll at some point. Knowing when to block and when to roll is part of playing with a shield!

 

[SilentSnake]

Got a fair bit of progress tonight. Beat the Prowling Magus, then Duke's Dear Freja for my first Old Soul! I was kinda nervous I would run out of torch before I was able to beat it, but I didn't, so that was a huge relief. Then I went back over towards the Lost Bastille and beat the Ruin Sentinels fairly easily. Now I'm exploring Belfry Luna and fighting gargoyles...again. As if I didn't have enough in the first game.

Gotta say I dig how extensive the game is. Lots of places to explore, and lots of areas to unlock.

 

[estragon]

I'm trying this out for the first time. I'm trying to do things relatively blind, because Demon's and Dark 1 were such a focus of gaming discourse that by the time I played them I knew so much about them by osmosis. The main thing I know going into this is that you want to raise ADP so you get a better roll, there is a unique system for dual wielding, and that a lot of people think this is the worst game in this style.

I'm currently at the point where I have a few choices: I can go after the boss past the red dragon in Heide's (have beaten this boss a few times before as someone else's summon), I can explore Hunter's Copse, and I have two separate entrances to the Bastile (post-Pursuer and post-boat).

Generally, I like a lot of major the changes here. I understand conceptually why Estus flasks as the primary source of healing in DS1 is arguably better balance, but I honestly don't care about that so I prefer just being able to buy as many healing consumables as I want. So, I'm glad easily obtainable health consumables are back, and the slow health regeneration rate of the gems is a nice way to distinguish them from Estus. The flipside of this seems to be that bosses tend to punish you more for healing at the wrong time and normal encounters are more likely to have enemies in overwhelming numbers, so I think overall it's a different type of difficulty rather than necessarily a reduction in difficulty.

I think that the ring that keeps your Max HP depletion from going down too far is introduced just a bit later than I'd prefer. I guess you could do a suicide run to get it almost immediately if you know what you're doing, but for me all the enemies in that area were quite hard at the start and because I didn't know where it was I didn't know to just do a suicide run for it. Even now, much later on and with better equipment and a higher level, the knights doing the chill out pose like the one that was blocking that chest are among the harder (or at least more tedious) normal encounters in the game.

However, on the other hand, this Max HP depletion encouraged me to try multiplayer a lot early on. That has never been a viable option for me before, because I played Demon's extremely late in the PS3's lifecycle, and I played Dark on Switch in periods when the userbase didn't seem very active. I did some coop in Demon's to powerup a covenant for lightning spells, but it involved basically letting the Switch run on the TV all day long while I did other stuff, with short breaks to do the coop every once in a while. Here, I'm playing on a PC and it's wonderful to consistently get summoned. I want to solo the bosses myself because learning the fights is one of the pleasures of these games, but honestly it's also a fun break to join a party of 4 that just destroys everything easily and then pushes your Max HP back up to its full value when it's over. It also provides a kind of preview of the level and the boss at reduced difficulty that makes you more prepared to do it yourself later alone.

Anyway, I'm having a lot of fun. It's too early to say, but so far I'm liking it less than Demon's but more than Dark 1.

 

[Regulus]

normal encounters are more likely to have enemies in overwhelming numbers

This is mostly a Scholar of the First Sin thing. They redid most of the enemy placement and it spends a lot of time throwing swarms at you (probably to take advantage of the performance increase). To be honest, I thought it was mostly for the worse, but I didn't think the encounter design was all that thoughtful in the original DS2, either.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I personally think it's the worst of the series, except the worst of a very good series is still a very good game in this case. DS2 is the odd child out from the series in a lot of ways, which sours a lot of people on it, but not all of those differences are bad things.
~There are more crazy builds, more (and more unique) weapons and armor to play with (like the set of two greatshield doors!), more random powerful items for different builds (like a hat that slowly restores spell charges), than in any other game of the series.
~Plus, unique mechanics like power stance, and the iteration of dark magic; there was leveling your rolling iFrames (my hottest take is that even if the implementation ended up being janky, the core idea of being able to level up your rolls to make them better was a good one).
~The QOL improvements over DS1 were leaps and bounds. The weapon-forging system is iirc the simplest, most flexible (and most user-friendly) of them all.
~Even if they're all glued together weirdly and randomly, there are some really cool environments.

I think one of the things that spring to mind when I think of what I didn't like are that it felt like it leaned a lot more into more cheap-feeling "fuck you" difficult-for-difficulty's sake game design than most of the other games. It kind of comes close to actually embodying the "You Died" "git gud" design mentality commonly ascribed to the series.
~"More enemies" seems to have been a standard operating guideline, despite the fact that it just makes things more annoyingly hard instead of interesting, leaving you to deal with tiresome huge mobs of enemies more often than in other games.
~There are things like invisible enemies and having spells volleyed at you with little warning and little space to hide, more death gauntlets iirc, and a lot of the bosses way feel overtuned, difficult in ways that feel less approachable and solvable in a fair way than bosses in the other games.
~"More enemies" was applied to bosses too, sadly (Remember the epic battle in the other game where you fought two guys? Well, here, have three at once! They're not even particularly important! Remember fighting that one guy before? You probably don't because he was extremely forgettable, but here he is again anyway, except with a friend! Remember the two gargoyles from DS1? Here's a ton of them all at once!).
~While there are more bosses than in any other game of the series, they also strike me as the least inspired batch overall. Don't get me wrong, there are some great fights in there, but a lot of that roster is filled with iterations of "big guy with weapon" or rehashes of past stuff, and there are also a lot more forgettable clunkers along the way.
~The punishing HP-loss-on-death mechanic didn't feel great for me. Early on, it makes things really difficult, and later on it's almost completely negligible.

 

[fanboymaster]

I feel like the biggest issue I had with DS2's general "more enemies" philosophy is that, and I can't recall if this was the way they were positioned or the way they AI works in DS2, it's difficult if not impossible to actually lure individual enemies away from a group. To my recollection, at least in the vanilla release, if you drew out one enemy whatever group was "supposed" to fight alongside it would inevitably follow. Actually approaching the encounter was uninteresting in most ways because there wasn't really anything you could do to at least swing the tide in your favor. Game's not awful or anything but it does feel like a lot of its changes are either ornamental or detrimental.

 

[R.R. Bigman]

I think Dark Souls II is maybe not a bad game, but a bad time for a lot of it. I‘ve never played Scholar, so I can only speak for the original. I will give DS2 credit in two areas, though. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had in multiplayer with covenants, and it has the most unique “story” in the series. There‘s a villain! Who is also the final boss instead of some rotting patriarch figure you have to put out of their misery! There’s even another completely separate villain behind the scenes! It‘s something different, which is appreciated.

 

[estragon]

I had an extremely helpful example of getting a preview of a boss in multiplayer during my last play session. I kept seeing messages about needing fire for a boss I had never seen in the Lost Bastile, and also I wanted to restore my health before giving it a go, so I left a message and got summoned to take it on in a group. Much to my surprise, that player already had a key to open up the doors in that area, which turned out to provide access to a way to light up the boss room. My initial plan was just to wander in there with a torch, thinking the boss would probably give up the key. Instead, I realized I was probably missing something and needed to backtrack a bit.

I did find the key, but I'm wondering if there was a way to have found it without having to use a branch to de-petrify a guy? I thought they couldn't possibly have put the key to light that fire behind a door that you can only open if you happen to have a spare branch. I could definitely have been out already if I had used a branch to open up that blocked bonfire in the prison cell. (It feels like kind of a trap really, because there's another bonfire really close to it just past that area... As soon as I saw the petrified guy in front of the bonfire I thought, "They are screwing with you, don't give in and de-petrify this guy," and I'm glad I restrained myself...)

I still haven't gone back to that boss in the dark room yet though, because going to the area with the key also lead me to the belfry, and to the gargoyles, and there's a lot of rooms I still haven't explored there yet... Relative to DS1, generally I am enjoying the feeling in DS2 of always having 2-3 different areas I could explore. It feels very expansive without being overwhelming. I know that DS1 also can be quite open if you know what you're doing and pick the Thief Key gift and that it opens up in the back half, but DS2 is giving me more of the pure joy of exploring these areas and not being quite sure where it will take me.

I feel like the biggest issue I had with DS2's general "more enemies" philosophy is that, and I can't recall if this was the way they were positioned or the way they AI works in DS2, it's difficult if not impossible to actually lure individual enemies away from a group. To my recollection, at least in the vanilla release, if you drew out one enemy whatever group was "supposed" to fight alongside it would inevitably follow. Actually approaching the encounter was uninteresting in most ways because there wasn't really anything you could do to at least swing the tide in your favor. Game's not awful or anything but it does feel like a lot of its changes are either ornamental or detrimental.

I'm playing Scholar, and yes, in general, the aggro seems set way higher in DS2. If an enemy knows about you, it tends to follow you forever rather than give up once you love a certain area, and also they're much, much, much smarter about not tripping and falling to their death on the way. Also, some mobs seem to be chained together, so if you try to draw one out a whole group is alerted, even if they're not positioned close together. Or, alternately, they have conditions that provoke them. For example, you kill one enemy and two other enemies who were chilling out before come charging at you. This is a big change from Demon's and Dark, where it was much simpler to lure out just one enemy or pick them off at range with no consequences.

Personally, I don't mind the rooms with a horde of enemies or the tendency toward mobs being smarter and more aggressive. I had to adjust, but in general I've found it to be manageable. What I don't like so much is that there seem to be more HP sponge enemies as normal encounters. Flexile Sentry is definitely one of the easier bosses in the series, but I didn't expect a near facsimile to pop up as a standard enemy in the very next area. It's not very hard, but it is tedious just because it has a big health bar. Also, I could do without so many Pursuer appearances for similar reasons. I've pretty much mastered it by now, but it just takes a long time.

 

[estragon]

Once you really get going in this game it feels like there's constant boss fights, but many of the bosses seem easier (or at least more fair, and simpler to read/avoid) than the toughest normal enemies in their area. I don't think this is necessarily bad, but it feels like a lot of bosses are being used as events or flavor rather than as challenges, for better or for worse.

I'm thinking here of Skeleton Lords, Belfy Gargoyles, and Ruin Sentinels. Maybe this is a quirk of this section of the game, or maybe it's just a coincidence that I've done all these types of bosses in a row... I could certainly see having ended up doing Skeleton Lords after more of a break, if I hadn't decided to try Hunter's Copse instead of moving forward in the Bastile area after realizing I had found a vendor for infinite Large Titanite Shards before finding someone who sells infinite normal Titanite Shards... Although maybe that's just how it is because by exploring Hunter's I only found someone who sells her own limited amount. It fixes the bottleneck for now at least, but it feels pretty late in the game to still have a restriction on buying the most basic upgrade material...

 

[estragon]

I absolutely understand why it would get cited as cheap and how builds with no ranged options would struggle, but drawing a bow and looking for the barely visible shimmer of white movement against a backdrop of dense white fog to shoot an arrow to draw out the the forest phantoms on my own terms instead of getting stabbed in the back or caught in an ambush was extremely fun, for me.

I get why people who play these games primarily for bosses would not like this game as much, but as someone who mostly likes exploration and normal encounters and mostly just tolerates the bosses, I'm still loving DS2 (currently: finished the Sinner and the Rotter, at Iron Keep and Doors of Pharros in the other routes).

You can also ignore this if you want. You have to sink a ton of levels into it and it's honestly in the realm of frame-counting nonsense for fighting game people.

I think this is maybe precisely the opposite of how I experienced Agility.

When I ignored Agility, that's when it was in the realm of frame-counting nonsense, because there is an extremely narrow window to dodge. I could barely ever get it to work. But if you actively raise Agility, it finally stops being frame-counting nonsense because it become possible to dodge fairly intuitively without having to get your timing down to Daigo Chun-Li parry levels of precision.

 

[Ludendorkk]

Yeah, the Agility boost isn't huge but I'd say it's well within what an average player would notice. I think that piece of folk advice is well-earned

 

[Regulus]

Going from 85 agility to 92 agility literally doubles the amount of invulnerability during rolls. I would say that's actually pretty significant. You need 96 just to match the midroll in the original Dark Souls.

 

[Adrenaline]

DS2 is fine but there's lots of small changes I didn't like, such as having to raise a stat to get a decent roll as mentioned and the fact that it takes 12 years to drink an Estus

 

[estragon]

DS2 is fine but there's lots of small changes I didn't like, such as having to raise a stat to get a decent roll as mentioned and the fact that it takes 12 years to drink an Estus

It's kind of funny that you gain what feels like a bajillion levels in DS2 compared to Demon's and Dark, but most of the extra levels probably need to go to a stat that lets you heal and dodge like in the other games, so it's kind of a wash.

I would definitely prefer a version of DS2 where the whole Souls economy is tweaked to basically be like the others (i.e. you could always heal and dodge competently by default but gain fewer levels overall).