Sanctus...

Lets face it, the Sanctus is...pretty bad. It's damage reduction is decent, but at 63 stability upgrading it is a waste of a slab. If you want to use a shield chances are your using anything else. Hell, I'd be happy with even 65 stability.

To make up for this though it has a special HP regeneration ability, but it sucks terribily. I surmise the reason for this is with the advent of poise, armors that actually provide defence and powerful vitality builds the creators thought the 8 hp per second of the Adjucators sheild would be way too powerful. I would agree with that, but it does have a requirement of 18 faith so it would still take a notch out of the vitality builds stats. Still thats probably not enough.

I think the hp regen of Sanctus should scale with faith. This would prevent it from being abused by anyone with a gaints set and high vitality stat. Something like a faith stat of 10-19 gives 1hp per sec, fai 20-29 gives 2 hp per sec, fai 30-39 gives 3 hp per second....you get it. Probably up to 50 and 5 hp per second. This would give players a reason to make faith builds besids Wrath and I feel is still a very balanced mechanic. It would also give the grass crest some competition with faith builds.

I hope you guys agree! Let me know if you think this is a good idea.

I do agree, I have never and will never use it, I never use any shields with anything less than 100% damage reduction!

The Crystal Knights shield is a decent shield to use, good stability for a medium shield and good defences!

Prior to the GSoA my favourite shield was the Bloodshield! But that is before I learnt more about the game and shields etc..

It depends on your build.. but a lot of people do use shields like the Effigy that only do 90% damage reduction and so on.. What is the current HP regen rate for the Sanctus??

i love sanctus but it sucks so bad. the only time i find myself using it is when im cosplaying as leeroy.

I should have mentioned this before lol. The current regeneration rate of the sanctus is 2HP every OTHER second which in my opinion is even worse than 1 hp per second. You wont even be able to notice it unless you never leveled vitality.

I still use it all the time lol even though a grass crest shield would be waaaay more benificial.

You can stack it with replenishment and the ring of the sun princess for something like 13 or 14 hp/second. It can make a difference, although I usually just use it if I'm running through cleared level.

This is not listed on the shield's stats page, but the Sanctus and the Gratshield of Artorias are the only shields with a 100% Curse resistance, the Crystal Shield on the other hand has 0%. I assume that crystal weapons were originally supposed to inflict Curse status, but the feature was removed sometime during the development process, probably because it was too punishing. What we are left with is two sources of Curse, in aoe and cloud form, where shields are kind of useless in both instances. The Sanctus would have seen a lot more love if they had left the Curse status available to players.

So sanctum is took for farming eod I guess?

the curse thing is kinda cool, but completly useless in pvp lol. Thanks for sharing though I would have never known otherwise.

Grab 8 vitality, get cursed, and put on Power Within. Grab a sanctus, and you've pretty much got your HP unmoving. with this set-up, you can then keep you health exactly where it is with PW, and then put on bellowing and the red tearstone, and do MASSIVE damage with CSS.

^This.

I'm getting pretty tired of this "this piece of gear sucks, here's how I would like it to be modified to suit my purposes"-attitude. Instead of wanting things changed, try and find use for them how they are now. The Sanctus has proved very useful for ultimate glass cannon builds, with Power Within and the Red Tearstone Ring. Were the Sanctus any more powerful, then it would throw this tactic completely out of balance. In fact, if Sanctus were stronger, it could probably counteract Power Within completely on a build with 50 Vit--that wouldn't be a problem at all, would it? 50 Vit, 50 Fth, full giant's, casting WoGs with PW on... sounds great.

I enjoy buggy's stuff. His is really unique and thought out.

With lingering dragoncrest ring, the sanctus makes you survive a lot more when power within is on. Perfect for glass cannon builds.

Otherwise it sucks.

The reason the HP regen probably wasn't buffed for the Sanctus was because of how abusable HP regen was in Demon's Souls. There were multiple effects that gave it; a ring, a shield, and a weapon upgrade path, the two latter scaling with upgrades so that the more you upgraded them the more HP regen they gave. Going against someone stacking these effects made PvPing a nightmare because no matter how much damage you did, they'd passively heal it up in a matter of seconds. So they probably wanted to stop this abusability and left HP regen in very minimal forms in Dark Souls with fairly weak effects and only 2 ways of getting it on a shield and a miracle, both of which do not scale (you may have to double-check me on Replinishment, but I seem to recall it only restoring 600 HP regardless of your talisman's magic adjustment).

I believe it simply heals as much as a normal heal, and that depends on your scaling.

The thing about power within doeeeees sound pretty cheap if you can get 5 hp per second back. Im not an expert on said pyromancy but I put it on to see if it would be OP and I took 11 damage per second with an unupgraded pyro flame(from what I gather this does the least damage). Even if one could get 5 hp back from sanctus they would still take 6 hp per second. That doesn't seem too broken to me considering they would have to put 50 into faith. Your opponent would just try to stay away till it ran out as usual anyways. Plus glass cannons could still use it at the minimum 18 faith requirement and get 1 hp per second if they didn't want to put too much into faith.

I'd disagree that the 8/second would be to powerful. Thats 80 hp in 10 seconds, to regen even a single hit from an unbuffed uchi would require 30 seconds. The fights in dks are much shorter than in demons, 30 seconds is a very long time. If anything the regen should have been stronger to compensate for the increased potential damage.

You just struck a nerve on that particular day... It wouldn't be so unbalanced to buff the sanctus a little more, you're right, but all I meant to say is that it isn't needed, and it would just be one more thing that would needlessly add potential imbalance. There are not many things in Dark Souls that regenerate health (because From didn't want a repeat of Demon's Souls, yes) so stacking them might not be such an issue. Dark Souls's stacking problem, in my opinion, is really stamina. Grass Crest Shield + Cloranthy Ring + Mask of the Child + Green Blossoms = regain your entire stamina bar instantly. Being mindful of your stamina is a pillar of Demon's and Dark Souls's gameplay, so to have all these stacking effects completely negate the bar is absolutely retarded. So I'd hate to have strong health regen on top of that, too (imagine Mask of the Child + Cloranthy Ring + Sanctus + Replenish...).

All you were doing is proposing an improvement to the game, and that's fine. I just wasn't too warm on the idea of improved health regen to begin with, and even less fond of it being tied to faith builds (imagine the above combo of health & stamina regen, on an opponent using Darkmoon Blade and WoG? Again, no thanks...). It wasn't a bad idea, I'm just not fond of it personally.

If its balance we're talking about, I'd prefer that faith had no damaging abilities or weapon buffs, only regen abilities and/or shield spells, while int gets all the damage and utility spells like repair and hidden weapon. IE faith has low damage but allows one to tank like a champ with varied potential self buffs, while int is high damage and sneaky but more fragile as well.

Sounds like rock, paper, scissors! I haven't thought it through completely, but I'm inclined to agree that it would improve balance. Might make things a bit less interesting (would take away options), but it would be more balanced.

The self buffs currently are for pyromancers sadly. All faith has is replenish and magic barrier, and its so slow to cast unlike power within. And I think, WoG being the exception, every other damaging miracle is fine!

Lightning bolts, emit force and gravelord sword dance are so slow that no one ever consider using in PVP unles for a video or something

People probably would use them if they had to--and by that I mean: if WoG wasn't such a huge crutch. Got a Fth build? Use WoG! Why wouldn't you? Without WoG, or if it wasn't so overly better than every other Fth spell, I think people would be pretty good at using them by now, and dueling against Fth builds would be much more interesting.

They're even slower than css, and much weaker. GLGSD is just like fire tempest, devastating in good hands, but the spears suck.

I wasn't complaining about the balance in dks, I have no problem with any weapon/tactic (most of which I use) except hacking and the dragon machine gun.

I was saying that I would prefer faith didn't have any damaging miracles, only defense and support. The 1 self buff rule would still apply but it gets more spells like gmb, flash sweat, and replenish to regen stamina faster or resist physical attacks (probably only to 50% reduction for that), It would also be an easier system to balance for both pve and pvp. Kill elemental paths, faith is for tanks and healers, int is damage, pure melee is versatile. Maybe keep pyromancy as non scaling but attach stamina costs to cast, but up the number of casts to compensate.

Forum Pirate wrote:I was saying that I would prefer faith didn't have any damaging miracles, only defense and support.

This exact scenario was what we had in Demon's Souls. They had a single, highly situational damaging miracle, and everything else was defense and support. As a result, there were only three real reasons to spec into Faith at all:

1. Get more damage out of a +5 Blessed Weapon on an HP Regen build
2. Push a Talisman of Beasts
3. Be able to cast Second Chance in PvP

Outside of those, Faith had no practical applications. Any generally useful thing a Miracle did could be done with items. Healing was done with items, status removal was done with items, and even stealth, which was one of the few niche things Miracles could provide, could be done with items. The best Miracle a pure-faith build got, other than the universally useful Second Chance, was Anti-Magic Field because it put everyone else on the same level as a Faith build; ie: no spells.

They may have gone a little overboard putting in quite as many offensive Miracles in Dark Souls, but providing Faith with something besides "items in spell form" was ultimately an improvement.

There's another way of looking at that scenario, though. You basically said Faith was underpowered in terms of usefulness because so many of its uses could be replaced by items. So, rather than give Fth offensive spells to compensate, From could have taken away some redundant items and have only Fth have those uses.

For example, From could remove Green Blossoms and have it be a Fth spell that boosts stamina regen instead (and while we're at it, get rid of the Mask of the Child and nerf the GCS and Cloranthy ring). Having stamina regen become a Fth spell would definitely make that stat more attractive to players who want to rely on melee rather than offensive spells.

Power Within could probably be a Fth spell, too.

I liked that faith model better. I'm not saying faith should only get miracles that arn't helpful. I even made recommendations for self buffs that resist types of damage other than magic and aid stamina regen. Perhaps even impede enemy stamina regen. If an item would grant the same benifit, remove the item or strengthen the miracle to compensate. If faith isn't differentiated, its just "other sorcery" and that is in direct contention with the much touted variety the community never shuts up about.