What changes would you make to improve Dark Souls?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dhndOXgSXI

Hello folks, in this video you can hear 5 changes I would make to improve Dark Souls. I'm wondering what changes you would make that would make the game better and more enjoyable...

Vary enemies and their positions everytime you hit the bonfire.

Wave goodbye to every glitch/mod/hack or whatever that destroys the games  

Turn all Divine Blessings and Elizabeth's Mushrooms into Dung Pies.

Make the shortsword faster than the longsword.
Make greatshields have a way of doing advancing guards.
Make the UGS's, (or at least one of them) do vertical swings.
Make the Claymore lighter and faster, but decrease it's power.
Make the Bastard Sword longer, heavier, and more powerful.

Make armor have bonuses for matching sets
Have weapon bonuses for different armor sets.
Ex.
Black Iron Armor (Tarkus) would give a slight damage boost for UGS's.
Black Leather Armor (Thief) would give a slightly higher critical modifier with small swords.
Black Hemmed Gold Set (Quelaana) would add a slight Chaos effect to pyromancies.
Black Sorcerer's Set (Griggs) would increase the duration of passive sorceries.

The amount of humanity/souls you have determines how easily you are detected by enemies.
Summoning someone will share the amount of souls gained.
Group invasions: NOTE, this would only work under a couple of circumstances.
1. The invading group must be numerically equivalent to the number of phantoms+host in the world. Therefore, a group of three invaders cannot invade anyone other than a host with two summons. However a group of two invaders could invade a host with one or two phantoms. Maybe there could be a specific covenant where you use an orb, you're paired with another in the covenant, then you search worlds together.

2.They are split throughout the level in completely different areas.
Pretty self explanatory.

3. You must initially use 3 humanity to do so.
This could be donated by one person or all three.

Oh, and more co-op party spells.

SadPanda wrote:
Group invasions: NOTE, this would only work under a couple of circumstances.
1. The invading group must be numerically equivalent to the number of phantoms+host in the world. Therefore, a group of three invaders cannot invade anyone other than a host with two summons. However a group of two invaders could invade a host with one or two phantoms. Maybe there could be a specific covenant where you use an orb, you're paired with another in the covenant, then you search worlds together.

2.They are split throughout the level in completely different areas.
Pretty self explanatory.

3. You must initially use 3 humanity to do so.
This could be donated by one person or all three.

Oh, and more co-op party spells.

That's an interesting idea, but I could see that ending really badly- especially with stuff like griefing trios

Gas bomb; drench a foe with gas and ignite it with a lightning or fire weapon.

I would like the ennemies to have less predictable attacks

I'll focus mostly on PvP, since PvE is pretty much done for. Especially with the sequel around the corner.

Balancing:
-Remove Poise from Hollow Solider and Warrior Waistclothes, Eastern Gauntlets and Leggings, Leather and Hard Leather Gauntlets.
-Add Poise to Hard Leather Armor and Painting Guardian Waistcloth.
-Lower Poise damage of Spears, Katana, Straight and Curved Swords.
-Increase Stamina consumption upon blocking heavy Str weapons with Small and Medium Shields.
-Make Magic and Strong Magic Shield last the same amount of time as other weapon buffs.
-Raise Tiny Being's Ring HP boost to 20%.
-Remove Ring of Favor and Protection HP boost completely.
-Make weares of Calamity Ring a number one priority target for all enemies.
-Lower the damage gained from Gold Pine Resin buff from 150 to 100, or make it the same as Charcoal Pine Resin.
-Slow down movement by 25% with raised shield.

Mechanics:
-Remove infinite stunlock. Max stunlock will be 2, or three hits, depending on the weapons reach. Short weapon = 3 hits, long weapon = 2 hits.
-Add the HP bars of other players somewhere on the screen, so that they can see each others HP. Summons and host only, of course.
-Make Resonance Rings have different colours, depending on the Miracles they're associated with.
-Remove Aux build ups on phantom hits, in rolls and Criticals.
-Enable Bleed to deal damage through rolls, staggering the target and ending it's roll, effectively negating the rolls i-frames.
-Remove gaining additional points into defences from soft Humanities.
-Remove Elizabeth Mushrooms and Divine Blessings.
-Enable Lloyd's Talismans to prevent a phantom from getting healed by the host if he/she gets hit by the Talisman.
-Make Chaos Pyromancies tied to the Chaos Servant Covenant.
-Disallow players to drop items to one another (sorry Ash).
-Add a 1 second invulenrability to backstabs after stagger animation.
-Disable menus when character is in any kind of animation, or movement.
-Enable Gravelord Black Phantom enemies to spawn on NG and enable Gravelords to infect more than three worlds.
-Also, make Gravelords receive an Eye of Death for every players death by the hands of their respective Black Phantom enemies.

General:
-More phantom colours. Darkmoons, Forest Hunters and Gravelord invaders are all blue. I suggest making Forest Hunters green, Gravelord invaders black, or dark greyish and Princess Guard pink (just for the lulz).
-Make titanite Chunks of all kinds purchasable, however for a huge amount of Souls.
-Fix all glitches and exploits.
-Fix the "Limbo", in which you're cut off the online and bonfires for a few minutes.
-Make consoles of all modders explode in their face.

I only have one.  It's the same one I've wanted since we first started discussing this:  A coop ring.  When you put it on, it summons you into a random world.  In each world there would be some sort of coop touchstone at each bonfire, and at the boss door.  This touchstone connects with people wearing the ring, and brings them into your world.  It would increase the availability of coop partners tenfold.

The coding is already there, since the Forest Hunters and Darkmoons do it for invasions.  Just adapt it for coop.  Even if the ring only worked for people in a certain covenant, I'd be happy.

AnCapaillMor wrote:Vary enemies and their positions everytime you hit the bonfire.

I love this idea. It's nice to know that other people have thought of this.

SadPanda wrote:Make the UGS's, (or at least one of them) do vertical swings.

Make armor have bonuses for matching sets

I love both of these ideas as well. Never liked the movesets of UGSs because of the R1 attacks.

As for my ideas, I would bring back the ledge-climbing from Demon's Souls and add the ability to grab onto ledges to prevent falling. It could be very limited to avoid turning the game into Zelda, and could consume stamina at different rates depending on your equip load or something.

Also, I'm among those who want at least one multi-tasking catalyst/talisman/pyro flame. I could imagine each spell-casting tool being able to cast all three types of magic, but be stronger or weaker depending on the type of magic being cast.

i agree with many idea's ive seen in this topic and video. like matching armor set bonusses, no more exploits, random pve enemy locations upon use of bonfire and so on. With that said great idea's everyone!. however wouldnt it be nice to backstab someone performing a backstab as to punish them for leaving their own back wide open? i know this might end up being a BS train but still their back is wide open right?

Uparkaam wrote:Turn all Divine Blessings and Elizabeth's Mushrooms into Dung Pies.

More to be available but have them disabled during co-op or PvP

I also want a greater sense of adventure. For example, in LoZ: OoT, after you leave Kokiri Forest, you have acsess to a world of exploration. You could go to Kakariko village, Hylia Lake, Hyrule Castle, Town Square, and more. After that first hurdle, you could do anything. And they kind of did that in Dark Souls, but everything seemed confined. You're always trapped in sewers, caged in walls, wandering through narrow passageways, walking through a crowded area, and kept away from open areas. I would've liked a field with a lot of natural animals to fight and a large area to explore. Even in Demon's Souls, it was always a cramped linear path.

I'd make armor actually work.  Instead of just damage reduction, there should be some sort of clang chance where a physical attack is completely blocked or deflected by your armor.  To balance it, armor should degrade a lot faster, and below a certain (fairly high) condition the clang effect is lost even though you do keep normal damage reduction.  You could have a lot of variety in this by having some armors/clothing only clang or soak certain types of attacks.  Magic that is described as effective against metal armor/scales would ignore/pierce any such materials, but could be soaked a few times by robes or other high magic resist gear.   Alternately, such soft magic resist gear would not deflect thrust or bashing attacks.  This could also encourage the use of more interesting or obscure weapons that deal damage not blocked by most gear.  Finally, to reduce situational hot swapping I'd add a short animation whenever you change clothing so people aren't able to instantly wear 10 suits of Havel's armor in a row to exploit the clang as each one is degraded.

Another thing I just thought of...covenants need altering. For example, as of now, you can go for trophies and join every cov then join the one you mainly want to use. Make it so each new playthru, you can ONLY join 1 cov making people who trophy hunt create more builds. Or, make it so that depending on what covenant you belong too, decides on your weapons being created. For example, if you are chaos cov, you cannot create a divine weapon, only chaos ones.
Reason for this is, a lot of people create 1 build to do everything. They PvE to create the build. Once done, they PvP or invade, or co-op with ONLY that build. People keep saying they want the game to be more difficult. What's more difficult then only being able to create certain weapon types. BTW, this does NOT include boss weapons.

befowler wrote:I'd make armor actually work.  Instead of just damage reduction, there should be some sort of clang chance where a physical attack is completely blocked or deflected by your armor.  To balance it, armor should degrade a lot faster, and below a certain (fairly high) condition the clang effect is lost even though you do keep normal damage reduction.  You could have a lot of variety in this by having some armors/clothing only clang or soak certain types of attacks.  Magic that is described as effective against metal armor/scales would ignore/pierce any such materials, but could be soaked a few times by robes or other high magic resist gear.   Alternately, such soft magic resist gear would not deflect thrust or bashing attacks.  This could also encourage the use of more interesting or obscure weapons that deal damage not blocked by most gear.  Finally, to reduce situational hot swapping I'd add a short animation whenever you change clothing so people aren't able to instantly wear 10 suits of Havel's armor in a row to exploit the clang as each one is degraded.

That sounds like a really cool idea. I mean it would be hell for FROM to implement but damn would that make pvp really interesting...

Though there's a risk that a massive luck factor would come into PvP as a result in terms of whether you get a 'clang' or not.. Could make the competitive PvPers of this world pretty mad

twigsterxd wrote:Another thing I just thought of...covenants need altering. For example, as of now, you can go for trophies and join every cov then join the one you mainly want to use. Make it so each new playthru, you can ONLY join 1 cov making people who trophy hunt create more builds. Or, make it so that depending on what covenant you belong too, decides on your weapons being created. For example, if you are chaos cov, you cannot create a divine weapon, only chaos ones.
Reason for this is, a lot of people create 1 build to do everything. They PvE to create the build. Once done, they PvP or invade, or co-op with ONLY that build. People keep saying they want the game to be more difficult. What's more difficult then only being able to create certain weapon types. BTW, this does NOT include boss weapons.

I've constantly said that covs need to limit more things to try and make people pick and choose more carefully. I think linking stuff like top level armour sets, weapons and spells to certain covenants would be ideal as well

Ash Lake PVP.

Carphil wrote:Ash Lake PVP.

YES.

I want to pvp in the valley. And to have a force summon covenant, that way I can force people to my world.

Soul of Stray Demon wrote:I want to pvp in the valley. And to have a force summon covenant, that way I can force people to my world.

I don't agree with forcing people to PvP. You could be maxed gear and force a newbie into your PvP.

@Serious - sorry bro. Never heard you say that once. Must be the threads I don't read lol

But invading is forcing people to pvp, I'm just making them the invader instead, it's a nice thing that way if they die they at least stay human.

befowler wrote:Finally, to reduce situational hot swapping I'd add a short animation whenever you change clothing so people aren't able to instantly wear 10 suits of Havel's armor in a row to exploit the clang as each one is degraded.

I think this should be put in with or without the armor suggestion. I feel like the point of 2 slots for each hand is so you can make a complete build without having to menu swap. And it does seem silly to picture someone changing their rings between a parry and a riposte.

Soul of Stray Demon wrote:But invading is forcing people to pvp, I'm just making them the invader instead, it's a nice thing that way if they die they at least stay human.

Invading someone and forcing them into your world for PvP are 2 different things. While being invaded, the host still has a chance to get ready. Being forced into yours or someone elses world would suck for the person being forced because they would have no time to get set up. Especially if they get forced into a gank squad.