adwild1982 wrote:I have finally made the brave choice to try and get in to Dark Souls 2 and i am looking for any advice and guidence you guys can offer.
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DO NOT GET ATTACHED TO YOUR SOULS. Even with the fact that enemies eventually stop respawning when you kill them enough, do not chase after your bloodstain in a single-minded fervour. It would be great if you got those souls back, but if you really want to accumulate souls, you'll be doing other things.
1) Choose whether you want to be the kind of player that blocks or dodges. Rolling works on a different system compared to the previous games, where there were multiple tiers of roll speeds. Now it's a more gradual progression. If you want to use a shield to block hits, feel free to put on heavy armour; at 70% equip load, you'll crash into the ground when you try to roll. If you want to dodge, don't even equip a shield at all, and don as light a set of armour as you can, to put yourself at 20-30% equip load. This will give you a very nice roll that will let you dodge a lot of things once you get comfortable with the timing. You can then put that free hand to work holding another weapon (you can even choose the swordsman as your starting class if dual-wielding sounds up your alley). Remember that you are completely invincible for a certain number of frames during any roll; many enemies are going to have very powerful attacks that you can effectively sidestep with the right timing.
2) Put down your summon sign. Each time you die, your maximum health will go down, eventually leaving you with 50% of your original max. HP. You can get an item, human effigies, to reverse hollowing; never do this. You will want to hold onto effigies for a late-game side dungeon. Instead, use the white sign soapstones. You'll find a large and small one fairly early in the game, and by putting them down, you can get summoned into another player's world. Doing this will not only give you the chance to become human, but it will let you get bonus souls, since the enemies will eventually stop respawning, and refill your health/estus flask/spell uses. If you put down the large summon sign, you will need to help the summoner kill the boss to revert to human. If you put down the small summon sign, you will be in their world for a set time that decreases with every enemy you kill. If you live until that time runs out, you'll return to your world and become human.
3) Summon. Once you become human again, you should hopefully see summon signs around the place, usually before a fog door or at a bonfire. Take no shame in summoning if a section of the level or a boss is giving you grief. Dark Souls 2 isn't good enough to be worth pushing through and trying to solo everything like the first game is.
4) Get a ranged weapon. Whether you choose miracles, sorceries, or plain old archery, have something that you can attack at range with. Ranged weapons can pull individual enemies, deal with annoyances at a distance, whittle down an enemy's health as they run towards you, and are useful in PvP if you want to try and coax some action out of a player that's just waiting for you to get close and smack you to the ground.
5) Get a weapon or a weapon type that has a set of attack animations that you are comfortable with first,
then look at finding a powerful weapon of that type or upgrading. All enemies and bosses in Souls games are pattern based, and if you can survive everything that they throw at you while dealing any amount of damage, the amount of damage you do doesn't even matter. Don't just look for the weapon with the greatest set of numbers.
