My thoughts on crystal weapons...

This might be OP, but in my opinion they should make it so that the +5 upgrade doesn't use a slab, but rather uses 6 titanite chunks or something. I say this because there's only a limited number of slabs in the game (apart from spending 50 years farming darkwraiths), but we can only use crystal weapons for a limited amount of time. If slabs were a renewable resource, then there would be a reason for crystal weapons to exist.

I don't think this would be OP or anything because crystal weapons could still break on prolonged fights. I know my washing pole (which has 60 duralility, same as a crystal DGM/DGA/DGH) still sometimes breaks before I can get back to a bonfire.

I also don't want to use a +4 crystal weapon, because then the difference in damage between it and the normal +15 equivalent is negligible in my experience, certainly not enough to justify the time spent farming the materials required to replace my weapon after about 15 minutes of use. If I could make it +5 without a slab, i'd still have to farm, but then at least the significantly increased damage would make it borderline worthwhile.

Sorry for the long and rambling thread, I just wondered what everyone else's view on the usefulness of crystal weapons was.

Crystal Weapons are a major folly in Froms thinking. I often wonder if they exist purely for backstabbing people.

I agree, crystal weapons dont really serve a great purpose other than that extra damage in boss fights, backstabing, and as a backup if your main breaks.

Raw weapons are teh weak sauce. But yeah, I agree on the crystals! Can they be repaired with the repair spell?

I actually found Raw to be useful in my first playthrough; when you don't know where to go, and you don't have a good way of farming souls, and you don't have a focused build... that smidgen of extra damage is so welcome. Or at least, that's how it felt at the time

For an early upgrade, raw weapons are pretty good.

I'm not a fan of crystal weapons. They break way too fast, and then are useless. The damage increase isn't worth it, IMO.

I LOVE crystal weapons. Specifically crystal washing pole.

East wood grain ring makes them last a good amount of time longer.

Player trade is also a great way to get the extra slabs if you do not want to spend (waste) hours farming DWs hoping you maybe get one lol.

Of course standard gets the job done for the most part, or heck even elemental if youre not going to scale.

Still, I gotta love my try hard ng5 Washing Pole build Crystal 8)