What affects poise and item discovery rate?

What affects poise and item discovery rate?

Certain armor increases your poise stat. Usually, most light armor and some medium armor have no poise, but as you progress through the game, you will be able to find heavy armor which raise your poise stat. The starting class: Knight, has a full set of heavy armor while the Warrior Class has a Helmet with poise. No other starting class has poise.

Item Discovery is affected by 2 things. The first is humanity, for each point of humanity you have in your humanity counter next to your Health, your Item Discovery will increase, up by 110 where it caps at 10 humanity counter. The second method is through a ring located mid-game, which will provide a static 200+ Item Discovery.

Don't forget a certain headpiece which also increases item discovery rate.

Though it doesn't stack with the ring.

And a certain ring, a certain spell, and a certain shield that raise your poise.

You're also forgetting a certain action...

To raise your poise you can do 4 things:

1. Wear heavy plated or chainmail armor. Plated armor usually provides the most poise.
2. Equip the Wolf Ring. This gives you +40 poise as long as you wear it.
3. Use the pyromancy spell Iron Flesh. I forget the exact numbers, but I believe it gives something from 60-80 poise while it's active.
4. Use the special secondary effect of Havel's Shield. Again, I'm not sure of the exact numbers on this but I believe it gives anywhere from 70-100 poise while the effect is active.

To raise your item discovery, you can do 3 things:

1. Stock up on soft humanity. Soft humanity is the number of stored humanity that displays next to your health. Having more soft humanity will incrimentally increase your item discovery stat up to 10 soft humanity. Any more soft humanity after the 10th will not add any more item discovery, so there's no need to go to 11 or more as it won't benefit you at all.
2. Wear the Covetous Gold Serpent Ring. This will just about double your item discovery rate while you wear it.
3. Wear the Symbol of Avarice helmet. This gives the same amount of increase to your item discovery as the Covetous Gold Serpent Ring.

You should also note on item discovery that there is a hard cap on the stat at 410, meaning once you boost it enough you can't boost it any higher. This maximum cap can be achieved by using 2 of the 3 above methods at the same time. What this means, though, is that you should not use all three at once, since the third won't be contributing at all to your discovery rate.