DARK SOULS: if you need me i'll be in an induced coma so mvrch comes tomorrow

Hmm. So, I found Blightown and I guess was doing well enough, relatively speaking, once I figured out the first wave of monsters and pests. Got poisoned once, which sucked, esp. since I kept taking the wrong curing purple moss while I wasted estus. But then I more or less got lost or ran out of places to go - the ladders are hard to see - so fell on purpose down to another platform where I saw that giant spider thing stomping around ... and it more or less immediately killed me. I'll try again later.

On the plus side, I don't think the dart guys I killed come back, so there's that.

okay, decided giant spider thing that was apparently impervious to arrows and killed me with one shot was a clear hint that I should go a different direction. Almost made it to the bottom of Blighttown, lower than scaffolds, but inexplicably slipped off a rock or something and fell like 5 feet but still died. Maybe something else is going on?

(That is, maybe something I didn't see killed me and I fell off.) Super glad I found the Blightown bonfire, which I missed the first few times I descended from the Depths.

OK, figured out how to kill that giant spider, but don't know to what end. Oh, wait, I got pyro something! I'll have to look into that. Anyway, now I can get down to the bottom of Blightown OK with minor setbacks (getting lost, getting attacked), but as soon as I get down there I get ganged up on and poisoned to death by either the giant mosquitos or something else I can't see. At least I can understand why some people find this area frustrating.

Oh, and I think I came across a glitch, even in this remastered version, because I thought I had killed all the dart dudes (at least up top) but kept hearing one and seeing one firing at me from a distance. So I spent some time searching for it, and all that time I couldn't find it (and don't think I was getting shot at anymore). Maybe it walked off the edge of a platform or something?

Well, I resorted to a guide today, after mistakenly getting scissored by ghost ladies and then accidentally walking out into "The Valley Of The Drakes" at entry level and grabbing a very heavy sword and getting one-hit by a dragon as a result and getting chased by stupid ogres and still, because I don't know what I'm doing, going back to reclaim my lost 300-or-so souls and what not, and getting one-hit again on the way back...

And the guide told me "um go up the stairs" and immediately I'm meeting friendly carcasses who are obligingly dying in front of me and suddenly the guide is put away and I'm having no problems making short work of this grenadier or that man with a very long shish-kebab and I basically died a couple of times before encountering an ugly black knight who killed me a few times but I rather cunningly upped my vitality and stamina and then made short work of his ass

I wouldn't say the game has "opened up to me" but it has been a really, really long time since I've played a game where the monsters don't scale-- i.e. grinding is good-- and so it is very nice and refreshing to look forward to a future where I might actually get good at this

One of the aspects I'm enjoying the most, in a rueful sort of way, is that pretty much every enemy has killed me at least once, if I do something dumb, or let my guard down, or just don't expect to be attacked a certain way. And when that happens it's kind of funny. But farting around in the bottom of Blightown (which, fgti, looms a little later for you, but not that far off) I'm encountering my first instances of simply being overwhelmed: dying of poison while being hit by ogre things throwing rocks while being poisoned and bit by mosquitos while fire spider-fly-whip creatures beat on me. All more or less in sight of my bonfire, which is located across a poison swamp that slows you down and kills you as you wade through it. It's pretty ott, especially since I don't think there's an easy way to traverse these particular challenges, you just have to do it and be done with it. I think.

On the plus side, I'm inadvertently accumulating more souls each run, so that every time I reclaim my pile of lost souls (never far away) the total goes up, until I just eventually cash out for more leveling.

The most useful item I've found, btw, is the grass crest shield, earlier, which really helps with endurance regeneration, allowing me to run farther, swing more, etc. It's been a big help.

Technically there are rings that let you walk in the swamp without being slowed down, resist poison, items that cure it, etc but it's unrealistic to find all those on your first blind playthrough. And they're not actually necessary, but can make subsequent trips a breeze once you know what you're doing.

Ok, killed Chaos Witch Quelaag on my first try, so I must be doing something right! After ringing the second bell it looks like I am supposed to head back to that Undead castle where the big gate is. but I suppose if I want I can still go from Firelink to Valley of the Drakes or New Londo I think?

Oh, and realized this far in that I can level up humanity or whatever it is those numbers mean without reverse hollowing. For some reason I thought I was no longer a skeleton zombie when I had the white numbers up, but it turns out that nope, still ugly.

Are the number of fires I can kindle limited? That was useful to do in Blightown.

You can kindle all bonfires equally.

the game gives a lot of freedom in how to tackle it, with the master key as starting gift there're at least 8 different choices for 2nd boss to fight (asylum demon being the 1st) after arriving in lordran. obviously the intended, newbie friendly path is taurus > gargoyles > ...

I really wish I remembered there was the giant gate that takes 20,000 souls to hoping. I spent my balance down to like seven.

open not hoping

Btw, a giant dinosaur/dragon monster just started hanging out at Firelink, nbd.

I am doing fine. I can only offer this game 30 minutes or so a day but I enjoyed using a resin+sword to murder a Taurus Demon and was capable enough to dispatch a large boar and found a blacksmith and murdered a big big knight and then was swarmed to death by an army of teenyboppers in the loft of the Undead Parish

I just had to fart around for a while to accumulate 20,000 souls to buy a seal to open a giant garden wall (Kong awaits?), but on my way back to the blacksmith I ... fell off a wall. Fortunately was able to retrieve the souls!

I'm enjoying this a lot, and love learning how the world is connected (even if I don't exactly know what I'm doing, where I'm going, why, and what to do with 95% of what I'm carrying around with me).

Very proud of you guys.

praise the sun!

Yeah I'm kind of curious if there is any future for all the undead t-shirts and undead sun-hats clogging up my inventory, if they're just going to accumulate and prove useless or if one day I might outfit my own private undead squad

Here's a question: I'm constantly being asked to join a covenant (kind of like being recruited for a frat). What does this get me? Does it matter if I'm playing offline? I know I can summon covenant bros like sun dude and others if I'm not hollow, right?

covenants are mostly an online deal, i don't recall offhand what rewards each gives and which are online exclusive

join each and every one you come across

Can you join more than one? It seemed to me that you can only join one at a time.

Most of the covenants are online-based. They have an offline quest line to join (some of which are overly complicated), but you rank up in them through online actions (either coop or invasions of one sort or another). There's one that's just to get cool pyromancy stuff tho.

Xp one at a time, and in this one there are penalties for switching (that only matter if you've started ranking up)

if you've met alvina, join them and i think you get a new merchant immediately.

i don't know if they've fixed this in the remaster but in the original versions, covenants and other plot triggers required a forced reload of the area to activate some of their effects, either by walking to a new area and back or more simply by quitting to the main menu and reloading your save

Fgti those are strictly for fashion. I mean you can sell them, but not for much. Duplicates are useless, although you can drop them for other players if you're online (maybe to suggest outfits?).

I don't think it counts as spoilers to read about how the covenants work :
http://darksouls.wikidot.com/covenants

re: the cool pyromancy one, that's one that definitely doesn't need online in order to level up in and get the loot

xp i looked at that page and it has what I would classify as spoilers, fwiw. especially the notes section

then again, i doubt fgti and josh are as strict as me

Huh. Well, I didn't find that Chaos stuff in Blightown and don't know if I feel like going all the way back in search of pyromancer powers (which I think I got somewhere else? that dude in firelink, that I had rescued from ... lower undead?). Regardless, I've yet to use any magic or fire or whatever. Will I need to learn how to do that, or is it mostly ancillary? Will I need to bother with covenants at all? Is it mostly to summon, NPCs or otherwise? So far fighting bosses I have not summoned any NPCs, nor have even known how to do so (maybe because I've mostly been hollow?). Is that a vital part of the game later, summoning NPCs? Or is every boss/enemy defeatable without NPC/summon help?

xpost I am not playing entirely blind, as the game keeps so many secrets from you that I mostly didn't want to spend hours picking around aimlessly, but I'm still trying to save some surprises. Which is to say, I have yet to encounter any section or enemy that did not kick my ass because I knew it was coming, or hiding or whatever. Each thing has remained challenging enough, even when I had to look up what I was supposed to do.

Every boss is doable without summoning, and it's more satisfying to do so imo (no shame on anyone who feels otherwise though).

Magic isn't necessary either, it's just another way to play the game.

I've seen bits of playthroughs before, and one was all "this game is easy!" and they were just firing off ranged spells from a distance, which seemed ... lame to me. And another was "this boss is easy!" and they kept summoning help, which I thought was lame, too. I'm looking stuff up as needed, when stumped, but I'm not making this easy just for the sake of it. I like the challenge, since so far it's been doable.

You're about to get to my favorite stretch of the game, I'd say (aside from the dlc)

you can ignore all the covenants though i don't see any reason not to join every one you do manage to find

summons sometimes actively make things harder because the ai is crap and having a summon buffs up the boss' hp, other times they are very useful. you do need to be human to summon/be invaded. i suck at these games and like co-op so i summoned human/npc help whenever i could

play however you want to, explore how much you'd like, it will be beatable all the same

the game keeps so many secrets from you that I mostly didn't want to spend hours picking around aimlessly

I don't mind that, but per our discussion of hidden rooms and fake walls, let alone leveling and scaling and the like, there is tons of stuff I literally would never know if I didn't ask or look it up. Which is cool if I wanted to dedicate my life to playing this over and over, but as a new PS4 owner I've got DS2, DS3, Bloodborne, Uncharted, Last of Us, etc. to go. And God of War and Spider-man, when I get them. I know better than to buy Red Dead any time soon, if at all.

RIP Sif! (Remarkably, only took me a few tries.) But man, the forest is not only the first place where I felt bad killing things (wolf, mushroom people, even those giant rolling wildcats) but the first place where I just got my ass kicked repeatedly by NPCs until I reached the shelter of the talking cat/dog thing and joined the forest covenant, which protected me. I don't know if I could have successfully fought my way to Sif and had any estus left, even if in the end I somehow beat Sif with just one estus refill. I think I got lucky, which I think is still more likely than getting good. Sif is also the first time I've had an enemy glitch on me, in this case floating above a ridge where it couldn't hit me but I couldn't hit it. Don't think that helped me at all, though, since when it got free it and I locked on again it promptly killed me.

So I can go back to Undead Asylum? Why? Do I want to do that?

yes you do.

how did you find out?

I googled (more or less) "do I go to Sen's Fortress or New Londo Ruins" after Sif, and the first thing I saw was someone saying Sen's Fortress, but first go back to Undead Asylum, and I was all, huh?

New Londo Ruins looks challenging. I've not faced any ghosts yet, and some of it seems to be in water, which slows you down to a crawl. Oh well. Prepare to die!

sen is the intended way. the water slowdown can be fixed by a ring you get from the asylum (but that's not the best or even second best reason to return) but i don't recall it being much of an issue in new londo. blighttown swamp was much more annoying in that regard

I didn't have much trouble in Blighttown in that regard. Considering you get poisoned no matter what, it didn't matter if I slowed down as well.

I do get the sense that both the swamp and Blighttown, and the forest, are good places to mine for Souls. Depths, too. Though the level requirements are high enough lately that I don't think it's worth wasting time doing that.

I wish I was up to where you guys were at

I just killed a Titanite Demon thing

Is it good and right to always carry 1 humanity and play unhollowed? I read a thing that said "yes"

for what it's worth, sometimes I thought I was playing with some level of humanity then looked over and saw that it was at zero. Other times I thought I was playing at zero and looked over and saw that I had a few. So I don't know what difference it makes.

Hmm, maybe I am confusing hollow with human (because it is confusing). I guess I've mostly been playing hollow, whether or not I'm carrying humanity. I'm not sure what advantage there is to playing unhollowed unless I was online and wanted to fight with other people.

The two gargoyles were causing me trouble so I levelled up my longsword and resin'd it all lightning and unhollowed myself and summoned a friend in to pound those stone losers to death

But yeah, an FAQ I read said that there are benefits to carrying souls (whether hollowed or human). Optimum in terms of benefit/risk was 10, once you're a good player. (Best was 50.) But for beginners like myself, 1 is good. The biggest advantage is that there is a big jump in the frequency of dropped items for players carrying one soul.

I do struggle, though, my gameplay is largely focused on retrieving my stash after a death.

Any early game recommendations for things I should do, not do? I just scored a nice armour set (Elite?) from the garden of the stone knights in the forest level. I have no rings. I have a +5 Longsword and Knight's shield. I've upgraded Vitality and Endurance to 20 and am getting Strength up there next.

From my own recent experience, I would focus on leveling up vitality and endurance, unless you have specific weapon needs that require higher strength or dexterity, for example. Then I would focus on leveling up weapons. But I would also focus on defense, both parrying, which is hard, and rolling, which is very fast and briefly makes you invincible. I I think it's more important to be fast and light and able to roll fast than well armored and heavy. The game design seems to favor defense over offense. As long as you can avoid the enemy you can either slowly hack away at them or bypass them entirely. That's the lesson I took from so many creatures that could kill me with one or two hits.

Are you playing online fgti? If not, then I really wouldn't worry about staying human, unless you're trying to summon npc help for bosses (not sure if you summoned a real person or not).

The item drop thing, sure, but that matters more if you're looking for a particular item. If you're playing through the game (and dying a normal amount), you'll still get drops.

Otherwise, sounds like you're doing just fine!

I think it's more important to be fast and light and able to roll fast than well armored and heavy

grab a 100% physical shield

level up your weapon, don't level up armour, never level up your resistance stat

after you've explored an area to your satisfaction, start running past enemies, it's faster, safer and less tedious than killing them over and over

if you have humanity to spare play unhollowed as much as possible. humanity sprites fully heal you when consumed

never ever consume a fire keeper soul if you find one

What do I do with boss souls?