My rant of Dark souls

Hey there my name is Ashton, and here is my little rant. OK first off this game is fantastic, I love the experience of always having to watch my back and think through my decisions its a great game play mechanic and I love it! However what I really wanted to talk about was invaders, I see the interest but when I play a game( on the PS3 btw) I like to you know have a good time....invaders ruin this for me. Now I am a decent dark souls player when I play video games I like to relax and I usually am under leveled in any RPG but you supposed to have fun right...wrong invaders wouldn't be such a problem for me if I don't know STOOD A CHANCE...level 39 last humanity haven't found a bonfire in quite a while 12.5k(not a lot I hear but for me it is!) and this douche canoe comes out of no where shouts at me(?!?!) I fall over and he stabs me repeatedly which only took 2 seconds. I guess my point is I wish they had done something to make this less of a problem like giving you an option whether or not you want them in your world, or have a level limit maybe I don't know I feel as if this invader nonsense(because they are always over level) is completely out of my control and wish I could actually fight back instead of this ruin my gaming experience of what is an amazing game!

Its not a hard choice - Just go hollow or play off-line if you don't want to be invaded. If you're human - summon help.

didn't understand anything after the invaders ruin it for me sentence..

However stick at it! Hard at first but if you wanna not get invaded then go solo and do the game properly on your own as a hollow

and well there will come a time when you welcome the invasions to make things more interesting and as a fun challenge

To my knowledge there is a level bracket that both the host and the invader need to be in to allow for invasions (there are exceptions based on items or covenants). In terms of reducing invasions in your world there a number of options (assuming you don't want to play offline). If you remain dead in the game (not in human form) you cannot be influenced by other players except under the gravelord method, which is very rare. You can also join the Way of the White covenant (available from Reah or Petrus of Thorolund); there has been rumors about this covenant that it reduces invasion frequency, though I do not believe that this has ever been confirmed.

berkut pretty much answered it all:

- Invaders are the same level as you (give or take a few).

- If you don't want to get invaded, either play offline, or play hollow.

If you're playing online and human because you want to summon people to help you, then you really can't complain about invaders. You need both for the game to be balanced. If you're not summoning people, though, may as well play hollow or offline and save yourself the hassle of invaders.

Now, about invaders themselves: like I said, they're the same level as you give or take a few, or they can be any level bellow you. The way invading works is you have a range around your level you can invade, and you can invade anything above your level also. So if you're getting invaded, they can be any level bellow or around yours. They just seem so much higher because their gear is much better than yours and their stats are perfectly planned.

As someone who invades a hell of a lot myself, I know it's tough for some of the people I invade! The majority of you don't even stand a chance. But personally, that's not what I'm into. I like to invade groups of people who are really well equipped, and I don't mind if they're much higher level than me. If I'm invading a noob, I often just suck their humanity then leave without killing them. But I don't think many invaders are as generous as I am!

So yeah, either play offline or hollow, or just stick with it! Eventually you'll be good enough and well equipped enough, that you'll enjoy getting invaded and potentially even invading others yourself.

The invaders are not over leveled, their equipment is. This is because of the stupid BB glitch ( I use it, but not for invading noobs at the Burg, I actually try to protect them, and use it for my new builds). But a lot of people actually love invading noobs and beat the crap out of them. Dont worry friend if you dont want to get invaded by these grievers stay Hollow. If you need help beating a boss add me and Ill help you. Im soul level 50.

ashes5000, I felt pretty much the same when I started Dark Souls. I played offline for a while but it wasn't as fun as online so I stayed hollow and played online, and after I'd kill a few bosses in a row I'd go human (can't be invaded in an area you've already killed the boss in) and backtrack, kindling all the bonfires I'd touched, then I'd spend my souls and suicide before moving on.

Anyway, if invaders are ruining Dark Souls for you just stick around here a while and you'll see many of them endlessly complaining about the unfair treatment they receive at the hands of the players they invade. It's enough to make your head explode.

I have to agree with Ashes. The invasions you experience before reaching Anor Londo seems a bit pointless in that you normally don't have a chance against someone in upgraded equipment at that level.

I think they should have made it a bit harder to become a lowlevel darkwraith:

A. Do something against that BB glitch. Make it impossible to play online if you cheat.

B. Make it a requirement to solo the bosses to become a darkwraith.

C. Enable dark moons to invade sinners no matter where they are in human form. Even if they killed the boss in the area.

Mike-Lassen wrote:I have to agree with Ashes. The invasions you experience before reaching Anor Londo seems a bit pointless in that you normally don't have a chance against someone in upgraded equipment at that level.

I'd disagree in terms of invasions before anor londo, I think once you get to Blighttown (especiallyi if you over level above 30) then it's wholly conceivable someone has actually finished anor londo, got an upgraded lightning weapon, havels, giants armour whatever. So I think anything past depths is possibly legitimate, whereas anything before is more than likely not.

The places where it is likely to be BB glitch is Burg and Parish and Depths, since the level people will be to invade there (at most 20) is too low for the skill level of a lot of these low level invaders.

Your supposed to hate invaders, and it wouldnt be called invading if you had a choice.

Mike-Lassen wrote:
I think they should have made it a bit harder to become a lowlevel darkwraith:

Defeating four kings at a really low level is no walk in the park

Lol, when you've just started to play Dark Souls you don't play "for fun" as you mean it, you play for the torture and the following senses of achievement you get from overcoming sth. Which is some different kind of fun actually. Hope you get what I'm trying to say with my cheesy english

Stay hollow and farm up a big pile of humanity items from the Rats in the undead parish. Start at the bonfire near the sunlight altar, jump down the ladder (don't climb), kill 3 rats, climb up, reset, repeat. It's boring but having a lot of those items will make deaths to invaders a lot less frustrating since you can just pop one and get your humanity back. You can then summon people during the ~15 minutes before a darkwraith can invade you again (other covenants may be a different story). You will also learn more from the invasion fights because you won't be in a blind panic about losing your humanity/souls.

Also, if you get invaded and are worried about it, retreat back towards the last bonfire you passed. If you die, you'll be that much closer to your bloodstain when you respawn at that bonfire.

Lastly, dying to an invader is not "losing" the game or something to get upset about. Even the best players can be killed quickly if they make a mistake, that's what makes the game great. There are no unkillable lvl 999 guys with a million hp like in other MMORPGs.

zRegulas9z wrote:
Defeating four kings at a really low level is no walk in the park

Definitely not, but it is so much easier if you can summon help.

xXDaemonarchXx wrote:Your supposed to hate invaders.

Quoted for truth. This is why I don't get upset about any tactic they might use, whether it's spamming something-or-other or hiding behind a door using Fire Tempest or whatever. I assume the invader will try to get every engine character in the area to gang up on me so he can 20v1 me, and I assume if I summon help he'll go online and complain about getting "ganked" or "farmed." And with the exception of the last part I think that was From's intent. I think they made the Red Sign Soapstone for a reason. Maybe they even placed it high---above everything else---for a reason. Wouldn't surprise me with From.

This is why when I get an honorable invader I'm so utterly impressed with them. Or at least I will be when I DO get one.

callipygias wrote:ashes5000, I felt pretty much the same when I started Dark Souls. I played offline for a while but it wasn't as fun as online so I stayed hollow and played online, and after I'd kill a few bosses in a row I'd go human (can't be invaded in an area you've already killed the boss in) and backtrack, kindling all the bonfires I'd touched, then I'd spend my souls and suicide before moving on.

Anyway, if invaders are ruining Dark Souls for you just stick around here a while and you'll see many of them endlessly complaining about the unfair treatment they receive at the hands of the players they invade. It's enough to make your head explode.

So you have the right to complain about being invaded by a guy who is ALONE and CAN'T HEAL (ok, if they have humanity it's no longer true) and invaders who get spawn killed by 3 guys with OP gear don't have the right to complain ?

That's what pisses me off with "PVE players", if you want the advantages take the disadvantages with it.
And, when you bought the game, you were warned : "prepare to die".

Keep it civil folks.

Also this is basically a thread about pvp, so it's going in the pvp forum. Please put things in the right place, the title not having 'pvp' in it doesn't mean that this rant isn't directed at a pvp aspect of the game, so that's where it belongs.

Ta.

IMO, for new players, invasions in the early levels have become completely absurd. When most of us started playing, we were very rarely invaded in the burg, parish, blight town, or even Sen's. I remember being invaded twice in these areas in my first playthrough -- once in the parish, and once in Sen's -- and both invaders were carrying level appropriate gear. I won both times and had a lot of fun (it was a cat and mouse type situation rather than a two-second OHKO invasion).

Nowadays, a new player is instantly greeted by a lightning claymore wielding phantom in heavy armor as soon as they step out of the first bonfie. With starting gear, the only way for the host to win is to score an immediate backstab followed by chain-backstabbing. On the other hand, the invader only needs to score one ordinary hit, an inevitable stun, and a second hit for the kill (or just one backstab). If you're just starting in the Souls franchise, you will have no idea how to pivot stab or chain-backstab, so you literally have zero chance. You won't even get any useful experience from such a match, because it's over so quickly.

Even with my experience (I'm no pvp superstar, but I at least know the game), I've found starting a new character and being human is brutal and almost always deadly (I don't bb glitch, and I don't think that should be a requirement to play the game online).

I guess this is a long winded way of saying that I empathize with OP. The attitude that "you shouldn't enjoy invasions" or "it's part of the game" made a lot of sense when all of the experienced players here were starting to pick up the game, but now BB-glitched early invading is a cruel joke.

When I first started, I tended to play in offline mode until I passed the Depths. That seems to be the cutoff point for rediculus invasions. I remember the first time I ever saw an Avelyn was when an invader in the Depths used it to kill me on the balcony of the giant rat room from down below. It was pretty awesome, but still pissed me off, lol.

You just can't disagree with strangejoy.

Very good post.

I agree 100% with strangejoy.

I play sunbros mostly, and coop in the burg/parish a lot. So my sympathy is with the hosts, particularly noobs. That said, I don't think it's that bad there. There are a lot of good folks there who are happy to be summoned to help, and frankly a lot of the invaders seem to have that overpowered equip as hand me downs or duped off some buddy's account, or they've just plain washed out of the harder PvP areas in the game. Plus you can get through the burg in like 5 minutes with a halfway decent summon, with 1/2 that time spent ahead of where the invaders appear anyway so running to the boss fog gate is usually trivial. The most dangerous invaders tend to be the folks with full power pyromancies/gloves, but those can be gained pretty easily without even glitching so there's not much that could be done there. Case in point, a buddy and I were cooping new chars last night, and had no problem with the invaders even in our starter gear (cleric mace ftw), until the great combustion folks started showing up.

I'm all for giving new people a fair shake to get into and enjoy the game, but you can always go hollow if you're sick of invasions, and anyway you have to start dealing with PvP sometime. It's not like a lightning washing pole giants guy is suddenly going to be a walk in the park just because you hit sl 30 in Blighttown or something.

Plus there's Way of the White, which nearly everyone is in at that point in the game. It makes invasions few and far between, and even if you die you get like 15 minutes before the next one. If you can't make it through the burg in 15 minutes with summons helping you have bigger problems than griefers

I just got my game back, so I'm back to haunting Sen's!

But yeah, what I saw today was not pretty.

Well before I get into it, I just want to say: I beat the whole game today, and didn't get invaded once! I only went human after I got the lordvessel though, and I stayed at SL30 the whole time... So yeah, not a great example. I don't even want to know what it's like getting invaded in areas before Sen's, because what I saw in my time invading today was pretty depressing. Here's a couple hosts I ran into:

- BKGA & Spiked Shield
- Xanthous Set
- Lightning Reinforced Club

Those are just a few I can remember--and let's not even get into the phantoms. What's wrong with the items I listed? Not that they're OP, I don't care what anyone uses, but they're all items you can not obtain before Anor Londo (the Kiln, even, in the BKGA's case). These are hosts, in Sen's, which means they either haven't been to Anor Londo yet or they're on NG+... And by the way they were playing, they didn't strike me as people who were in NG+.

I used to think the BB glitch wasn't so bad. Partly because I can get end-game gear at low level without ever using it, and even though I'm at end-game, my gear isn't terribly overpowered. But judging by the hosts I saw today, I don't even want to know what it's like getting invaded at lower levels. It ruins the game for new players, without a doubt.

Indict them whenever you have the chance and i will shove a sword down their throat whenever possible. Theres a covenant for dealing with reds and we may have a bad rep around here, but hunting griefers is what i do.

About the person saying that you can use basic gear to chain-stab some high leveled invader to death, I started as a hunter to help my friend through the game, we got invaded and I backstabbed the invader 6 SIX!! times with my +0 sword. He still had atleast 1/4 of his HP left.

I have NEVER been able to kill a OP equip invader with a backstab. the only method that seems to work is backstabbing them off a ledge. Don't know what items you guys are using but my backstabs are doing maybe 150 damage at +0.

The burg and the parish nearly soured my friend to the game he was ready to give up. This just seems unacceptable to me, these people can't be that talented if I can backstab them 6 times without chaining, this was swing miss, backstab stuff! I just do not get the impression they are in NG+ and the vast amount of them are BB'ing.

Luckily as soon as we got to the forest these invasions seemed to stop and now its been smooth sailing into Blighttown, I just have to shake my head at how many new players this might turn away. When I played my first run the only invader I met was someone using shotel in the depths, and that wasnt very bad as they had basic gear besides and only got lightening through a resin buff.