Remember: Dark Souls is not a Tournament Fighter

I wasn't saying they should dead angle, I'm saying that these are large heavy weapons and any attempt to block them without putting ones entire body into the block is doomed to fail, from a realistic perspective. the point was to illustrate that the moves appearance isn't a valid basis for change when things like balance have to be considered (having to manually turn to face swings from such weapons to block them would be horrible for balance, and having it done automaically would take controll from the player.)


I'm still agianst the weapon swapping thing. Choosign a good setup and punishing them for using a crappy one is fine, but then denying them the ability to swap with a 2 second swap animation on top of having to simaltaniously run in fear and navigate the menu to find an appropriate weapon is horrible.

That would be what makes it like the boc. it wouldn't be about being prepared and cautious, it would just be "oops, wrong gear, dead. try again." You can, if you pay attention, see all thetraps in sens. you cannot reasonably know that the only way to hurt an enemy is slash damage until after a horrible failure of a fight, just as you cannot reasonably determine the location of the insta kill pits in the boc.

That's why maybe with the blocking, you receive more stamina damage the further round in the blocking angle you go. That way it represents well the idea of being harder to block, but it does't ruin the point of a shield like false dead angles do at the minute.

Having to run in fear and scramble to change weapon when some massive thing is trying to kill you? I can tell you don't like the idea but to me that sounds like a massive thrill ride and adrenaline rush. I'd personally love that, but to each their own.

See I never got the hate on the pits with the BoC. They don't randomly fall from underneath you. If you're not going bat out of hell on it (as you shouldn't be because souls punishes you rushing things), then you won't fall as the ground breaks BEFORE you walk onto the area that drops. I don't think that's the bad part of the boss design, I just think the orb idea is terrible and the fact you literally kill a tiny bug is rubbish- they should have made it multistaged but meh they ran out of time with it.

I think you're misunderstanding the wrong weapon kinda thing- strike, stab and slash are always negligible (though I'd prefer it if they weren't and one was better against some enemies like on demons souls), but it's more for elemental weapons for me. If you try and kill a boss that shoots lightning with a lightning weapon and then need to change weapons mid fight as a result, honestly you deserve it in my opinion.

yeah, untill you're hit, because you are avoiding a pit, to be sweapt into a different pit for an instant death with little/nothing that could have been done because you wern't in one of the few "safe" places to dodge you have no way of knowing how to identify untill after you're swapt into the pit.

that was just an example (also in demons there were enemies that were borederline immune to any non-thrust damage.)

That doesn't make it less true. "oh, what, you don't have a curved sword for chasing down the dodgey thieves? sorry, dead, try again" or "oh, you have a katana and a zweih, and they have a spear, kitedm dead, try again" are the same type of thing, and very real possibilities. The example actually in dark souls is the skeletons you need devine weapons for.

As i said, thats fine, right up untill the 2 second swap animation that gets you butchered. tou're already dodging, navigating the terrain as you flee, figuring out which weapon to use and trying to find it in the menu all at one time, and you want to add a 2 second swap animation?

Well I'd love to add that. As they say "Go hard or go home". Souls is a crushingly hard PvE focused game, I want to get killed, I want to get things wrong and be penalised for it, because it's what makes souls, souls. As a veteran you know you're gonna walk into DkSII finding it easy anyways as you're used to the combat style, I'd be glad for some added features to get my death count rising

Is it really a stretch to find a 2 second window do change weapon in? I think there's very few encounters in dark souls in which you couldn't get yourself a decent window to change weapons- or if not you just take some damage while changing weapon..

Even if you do die, it's not like this is gonna cause you repeated death. You'll either lose a lot of health and hence need to heal or die and then you'll know where you went wrong.

again, go hard or go home is fine. i prefer tough games. i do not like being killed by/for things I couldn't possibly forsee *and* get insufficent time to respond too. with a 2 second weapon swap time, there is a lot of room for "insufficent time to respond to" to insert itself and suck fun.

with the exception of the boc, dark souls is incredibly fair. you either have decent indications that something is coming up and thus can seek out a way to deal with it (traps, curse frogs, knights and sentinels), or you have a reasonable (if short) amount of time to adjust your strategy (gargoyals, O@S, ceasless.) I fail to see how one could reasonbly tell the player what the weakness/effective strategy is aganst a specific enemy without stating it outright or using zelda esque glowing weeakpoints, and while running away to weapon swap or reasses is perfetly valid, a 2 second swap delay is straight unfair consideringg the mountain of things that must already be considered/navigated for one to get the space to swap normally. and yes, in mid combat, potentially with multiple foes, 2 seconds is and extremely long time.its not as though you can know your weapon is ineffective before you get thrashed for attempting to use it, which means you're fleeing an active engagement. a ugs swing is much faster than 2 seconds and often one doesn't have time to do that against faster or multiple enemies.

"2 seconds is an extremely long time"

It's really not In any situation in souls running away and getting 2 seconds window is not hard.

mid combat, it really is. especially if you're complerely stationary to do a weapon swap animation. try to stand still for 2 seconds after engaging a silver knight, see how that goes. and thats not even accointing for the fact that one is likely to get hit at least once in the process of discovering that their weapon is less than ideal.

I think you're ignoring the fact you can run away to get those two seconds. Run down a few corridors or to the other side of an arena and you'll get the time

To me this kinda swap would work just like on monster hunter when you use whetstones- it'll take time, but long as you run and get yourself enough space you should be able to pull it off

and you seem to be forgetting that they can follow you, and that (as i said) you probably have already taken at least 1 hit in discovering that you're weapon is not suited for the current task. the result of turning and running could quite easily be an arrow or sword or sword to the back, assuming you lived that long.

once you've memorised it, like with the boc, its not a big deal, but the first time or 2 its just cheap deaths. not failed challenges, but cheap f**k you deaths pretending to be challenges but that you really couldn't have done anything about.

with the exception of the boc, dark souls is incredibly fair.

I think that's mostly true.  I'm not amused by enemy attacks going through the walls as that's a hard lesson to learn , and the camera angle can be pretty dodgy with lock-on (say you're fighting a painting guardian on raftors, he falls off while you are mid swing at him, and when you began your swing he was on the raftor in front of you...however lock-on will drag you to your death even though you gave no input that should have taken you sideways at all).  Still, these events are very few and far between and represent *low* points in Dark Souls, not something we want to increase.

The 2 second weapon swap animation is therefore a terrible idea, as it does in fact represent simple trial and error gameplay.  The only way to avoid it turning into that would be to give enemies reasonable tells as to what weapons would work the best before engaging them, which would turn Souls into something like a puzzle game.  While I guess that could work, it's kind of a different genre heh.  Obviously a 2 second weapon swap would be questionable in MP.  "Build order loss" shouldn't happen unless a build is completely focused on easy-to-counter options and the player didn't build in alternatives to cover that.  A 2 second swap would result in a lot more build order losses which is foul.

Probably the worst thing about trial and error gameplay is the tedium though.  Souls already has *too much* tedium, especially in farming.  It'd be nice not to increase it further by forcing a player to constantly backtrack to swap weapons (or die), only to run back in.  If one doesn't just rush to their death, that goes from "fun, engaging combat or just a run-by" to "more time spent running to switch weapons than actually fighting or progressing"; not a good trade.

Thing is though you're both blowing your points way out of proportion. You're also both insisting you'd die if you tried this- but you wouldn't. At most you'd take a hit or two with normal mobs or one hit in a boss fight. It's not gonna kill you unless you try to do it without making space- in which case you deserve to die.

Forum- you know as well as I do how easy it is to dodge a couple attacks and run- whether it be to get space or to get back to a bonfire. It's undeniable, and if I asked you to make yourself 2 seconds of space in almost any given fight, you know full well you'd have no problem doing it.

Me- You know you wouldn't need to swap weapons all the time. It would happen at most twice or 3 times in a playthrough due to people having resistance (so what maybe from a fire weapon in izalith, from magic in dukes.... I'm now out of problems). Having to swap a weapon twice in the game wouldn't create tedium- you wouldn't have to do it constantly. But having it in PvP is where it would become truly into it's own as you wouldn't be able to insta swap weapons and go outside your chosen set up without being punished.

Depends on the enemies. 2 hits from the large clubor rock throwing dudes, for example, could kill you, same with the knights, the sentinesls if you're somewhat fragaile, the giant skeletons and bone dogs, and in places like the tog or with enemies like the knights (who have bows) it could quite easily border on impossible to get the space to switch, and so you die.

I couldn't do it in the tog at all. besides that however, I have essentially memorised all the locations of everything, so yeah I can make 2 seconds pretty much anywhere.

If I'm going into new areas, with new emenies, this is no longer true. I don't know the layout, i don't know if they have ranged attacks or charging attacks to catch me (running from silver knighsts at this very moment can get you shot. ents and channelers and archers can all kill you if you try to run away without looking at them) so I have to look at them to avoid them, which means I can't see where I'm fleeing to (or what I'm fleeing into) and when i haven't memorised the area then no, I'm not likely to be able to create 2 seconds for a stationary weapon swap animation.

cheap deaths are cheap deaths, no matter how spaced out they are, and you connot know that. Were i running magic weapons in dks right now, I'd have a ton of trouble with the catacoumbs, I'd be completely useless every time an opponent used gmb and I'd be incapable of the dlc. if its a magic zweih and my catalyst, then I'm now a poor match against all of the knights, the thieves, the dogs, the giant skeletons (both kinds,) the bonewheels, the rats, the channelers and gwyn.

Thats more than 2 or 3 times.

in pvp, as meln said, type order deaths. A death simply because you were not built to stop that type of build. In a 1v1 pvp setting, this is not a good thing. its not a test of skill, its if you got lucky enough to get someone that your preasent build can handle.

The menu swap gives you the ability to deal with bad typings.

Moalover wrote:- you want organized pvp? you have courtyard, oolacile township, kiln (forget arena, that was a big fail).

The arena concept was so enticing, but you're right, the execution of this "mode" was a mess.

I've said since the beginning, From should have implemented an "arena ring", which would have worked like any other covenant ring.  You could have had a couple of different rings for 1 v 1 or 2 v 2.  Put it on, then go on your way, farming or exploring, or whatever you want.  When the system matches you up with some partners/opponents, you get whisked away for a fight.  If the coding was there for covenant rings to do the same thing, why not this?