Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin

[Malleus]

Yeah, you could get this with some more practice. And you should, so you can fight Alonne!

[Gryzemuis]

I got him this afternoon, on my 2nd try of the day. I will upload that to YT tonight. A 6-minute .flv movie is ~2GB. With my slow ADSL, it'll take 5-6 hours to upload.

I hope you didn't get dizzy. When I looked back my own movies, I noticed I do a constant circle-strafing. Not that it helps a lot with this boss. But anyway. It's one of the benefits of my setup (trackball in stead of mouse), I can keep circle-strafing forever and ever. I wonder why I don't get dizzy myself during play.

I'm happy I beat the Fume Knight in my own way. With a shield. And by using the RPG-elements of the game, in stead of just depending on my own reflexes.

In the movie in the previous post, you can see that I was gonna get him. And then he played a last trick. In the end, he pretended to be staggered. So I hit him a few times to finish him off. That was dumb. Raime recovered quickly, and I was out of stamina. That caused a few bad events, and bad decisions by me. I couldn't rely on my shield, because I was so low health that even when I would block a hit, the extra dark/fire damage getting through my shield would be enough to kill me. So I had to play extra defensively: keep my shield up too long while back away, not having enough stamina and getting staggered by the fireballs, and then I had to heal. Normally there is enough time to heal after the fireballs. But the stagger slowed me down by 1-2 seconds. The End.

Yesterday I did 2 tries with the 2 NPCs. That went better than expected. We could get to phase-2 quickly. So the NPCs both had a lot of health left (75%+). They died when Raime had ~20-25% health left. I soloed him until I needed just 2-3 more hits to finish him off. So I went for the kill. Never go for the kill. I knew that. I turned out after 3 hits he still had a slither of health left. I had no stamina. I died.
In today's successful try, he tried the same trick again. This time I didn't fall for it. Also I explicitly stopped looking at the boss's healthbar when he reached 25% or so. I just kept fighting him in the same way. When he finally sank on his knees, it was almost a surprise.

Two years ago I killed Elena. I can't remember how. I tried that fight last week a few times. Seems impossible. I think I could only beat her when she summoned skeletons twice. As soon as she summons Velstadt, I'm done.

[Malleus]

I hope you didn't get dizzy. When I looked back my own movies, I noticed I do a constant circle-strafing.

I do that too. It has an advantage, that when you need to dodge, you already have a direction set, so the dodge is only one input (the dodge button). Otherwise you have to press direction+dodge which is a two button input, and therefore slower. Also, some attacks can be avoided just by strafing.

And yeah, that's why I re-render my videos in Vegas, so I only have to upload a few hundred MBs.

[Renzatic]

Enjoy

Now ain't that a bitch?

[Gryzemuis]

Now ain't that a bitch?

I've played hunderds of hours of Dark Souls games. I'm used to getting killed while the boss is almost down. It is part of learning a fight. It's happening less and less. But it still does. Before this attempt, I had an attempt with 2 NPCs where I got him to 1% or so (a few more hits). I got greedy, and tried to finish him off in 3 hits. Of course after 3 hits, he was still alive, I had no stamina, could not block or roll, and died when he swung at me.

The good thing was: 2 years ago I could not get through phase-1 ~50% of the time. So I couldn't even start to learn phase-2. Very frustrating. With this tanking setup, I could get through phase-1 every time. My estimate is that I needed 30-40 tries this time to kill him (I had 21 videos on my SSD). All those 40 tries I made it to phase-2, with 9+ sips of my Estus. That was amazing, compared to the frustration of my previous attempts.

So I died. The next day, this was my second attempt:

[Malleus]

Nice! Alonne will be easier, since he only deals physical damage. He does have an unblockable attack though, so watch out!

[Gryzemuis]

he ded

[Gryzemuis]

So Sir Alonne was dead the next day. To my surprise, I also killed the Burnt Ivory King (with the help of the 2 NPCs and the 4 knights). I then gave Lud & Zullen a try. First attempt I took 3 phantoms to the boss fog. That wasn't so bad. I then saved my game (by force). Restart the game, the 3 NPCs were gone. So I tried them solo. That looked undoable. So I brought the 3 NPCs again, and killed the 2 bastards. I then went and killed the Gank Squad. With cheese, because 3 vs 1 isn't fair anyway.

I'm going for the achievements. I've got them all done, besides: collect all sorceries, miracles, pyromancies and hexes. Almost done. Some of those can only be finished in NG+. Looking good. However, to get all the hexes I have to kill Darklurker.


Edit: Darklurker is dead too. The first NPC in the first Dark Chasm of Old seemed impossible (the Havel guy in the Drangleic one). But poison-arrows did the trick. After that, it wasn't so hard. Darklurker almost went down on my first (blind) try. My gear has a lot of Dark and Fire resistance (thanks to my preparation for the Fume Knight). At the first try, I got her (them) down to a few hits. It seemed she exploded when she died, killing me. Third try was good. All bosses down now. Time for NG+ and finish the achievements.

[Malleus]

Awesome! Ds2 is quite friendly when it comes to achievements. The only difficult one is the sorcery collection, since one of them is a reward for the bell covenant, and it's a bit tedious to farm if you don't do multiplayer.

[Gryzemuis]

I did the Bell covenant yesterday. There's a trick. You need 30 invader kills, but the Dark Phantom NPC the Mad Warrior also counts as a kill. So you need to enter the Bell area lots of time, to see if the Mad Warrior has spawned or not. If he spawned, kill him. If he didn't spawn, sit at the bonfire and try again. The trick is to use the Unveil miracle. So I needed the +5 faith ring, use 2x spice to lower the faith requirment of Unveil, and use the +1 attunement ring. But first despawn (kill 12x) all enemies in the Bell area and the surrounding of the bonfire in the Iron Keep. Then the only NPC that Unveil will point at will be the Mad Warrior. Just sit and stand a lot of times at the bonfire, and go 30x to kill the Mad Warrior when Unveil indicates its presence. I lost track of time, but it took me 1-2 hours to despawn the NPCs in the Iron Keep, and then 1-2 hours to kill the Mad Warrior 30 times. Total 3-4 hours. An afternoon of my life wasted.

Getting 30x Sunlight Medals is more work. I've killed the Falconers in the Shaded woods a zillion times. Got 16 sunlight medals now. I temporarily join the Covenant of Champions to make sure they don't despawn. Slowly I'm learning and using all the tricks of DS2. As I wrote when I had just started my first Dark Souls game: the games are awesome, but some mechanics are really off-putting. With a few (relatively small) changes the games could be a lot more fun, and a lot more appealing to a lot larger audience. But alas.