- get a controller if you have one, much better than kb+m for this type of game
- take combat slow and get used to the pace. only attack when you have an opening
- dont freak out about dying and losing your souls. you'll have lots of chances to get more souls and it's not like DS games arent generous with them. they are no doubt hard games and punishing but they're (usually) not overly punishing for the sake of making things unpleasant for the player
- practice rolling, dont rely on your shield
- know that you dont always have to lock on to an enemy. sometimes it is easier to fight without locking on. you'll get a feel for this more as you play
- 90% of the time, when you get to an enemy encounter that you think is obnoxiously difficult, there is some kind of secret or way to make it more manageable. for example you might come to a bridge with 5 enemies on it and you wonder how you kill them, but if you look around you'll find there's a secret path to get around to the side of the bridge so you can sneak past the enemies or take them out from behind. shit like that
- use summons when you need them, this really helps on tough bosses
- google what the different attributes do and figure out what you want to specialize your dude in as you level up. i find the best way to do this is to pick a weapon or weapon type and build your guy around this (i.e. heavy weapons vs light ones)
- dont freak out about decisions you make leveling, as i said before the game is hard but in terms of overall design it's not punishing. you can always recover from a build that you dont like or whatever, the game is generous with souls and you can even farm them at certain points
- sorceries make the game ez mode in the early levels
Thanks, will definitely take this into account as I play.
Giant_Aspirin posted...
i second everything Rommy posted but i'll also add
- increasing Vigor (HP) is almost always a good use of a stat point - lookup the 'softcaps' of stats -- the point where the returns diminish greatly. - note that almost all weapons can be infused to alter how they scale with stats - that's another thing, weapons scale with certain stats. on the weapons stat screen there will sometimes be a letter ('S', "A', 'B', 'C', etc) under a stat which indicates how well the damage scales with that particular stat. - do NOT kill NPCs that are not hostile towards you
This, too. Out of curiosity, what's the penalty for attacking non-hostile NPCs? ---