easy mode build

[Draculol]

Hi, I just completed all achievements after 3 playthroughs.
The first time I went in blind going for a quality build, took me about 80h clearing almost everything.
Next one was the follow-up in NG+ with some wiki help to find whatever I missed. Took me about 5h rushing all the main bosses.
Today I beat the game with a completely new character to get the third ending, took me about 19h.

Somehow I felt the need to share some advice. This is how to make the game super easy for anyone, playing offline.


TL;DR get a ton of hp, get the mimic tear, get some bleed going.




1/ STATS

like i said, i initially went for quality like i always do, since it let me access most weapons (and i'm definitely more geared towards melee) it makes the game easier to handle.

going for magic is harder to pull off until you actually know the game since it requires more stats and ingame knowledge to be effective.

I would highly suggest starting as vagabond and start leveling vigor asap, until 20~25 before anything else.

Not having enough HP is the number one mistake to do. Everytime I see people running around with 30vig and 60dex or something and it just makes me sad.
If that's you and you die all the time look no further. Any serious first time build, especially if you consider doing some PVP, needs a ton of HP.

It's easy to understand why : everyone maxes out damage, therefore the only way to not die in a couple of hits is to actually have a decent HP pool.
Leveling STR or DEX hardcore early on is pointless. Most of your damage come from your weapon upgrades.
If you do the maths, let's say you kill stuff in 2,1 hits or 2,9 hits. Well even if 2,1 hits looks better, in practice it's still 3 hits to kill stuff.
Damage scaling stats should be the last thing to focus on.

What to aim for stats :

VIGOR. get 20 / 25 ish early on. That should give you enough to deal with Stormwind castle safely and you can start investing elsewhere.
Once you're done getting your requirments and some END, you definitely want to focus hardcore on boosting HP. Aim for 40vig at least and I would recommend to get 50 or even 60 if you're new.
Some talismans increase your max hp but these are %based so they might not seem like much at first, once you get to 50 / 60 vig however this is another story.
Running around with about 2k hp makes the game infinitely easier to deal with and lets you afford to be somewhat careless even in NG+

END. get 20 and be done with it. you never need much more that this, unless you want to perform some crazy 10 hits combos which will just never happen.
The weak ennemies die in a few hits anyway and the big ones have infinite poise or hyper armor and they will never let you land so many hits in a row.
You might want to boost END somewhat for equip load, 25 or 30 seems good enough for endgame.

STR/DEX. it works like in dark souls 1, two handing a weapon grants you +50% STR. therefore if you are primarily 2handing a weapon you should get proper stats to reflect this.
In practice, rather than having a 1 to 1 ratio, you can safely get 20 STR 20 DEX early on, and slowly increase it towards 27 STR / 40 DEX. reaching late game you should be 34 STR / 50 DEX.
I even tried 40 STR / 60 DEX and it still works fine. It seems that you can keep leveling them to crazy levels and it would still benefits you somewhat. not sure yet about the stats hard caps.
However this is like NG+ consideration and probably unnecessary to get much higher (try to not level up too much for the sake of online play)
You should be about lvl 140 in the endgame.

Leveling other stats is boring and unnecessary for that kind of build. You might consider getting 10 faith just to be able to cast cure poison, but even that is easily dealt with using items instead.




2/ EQUIPMENT

your starting gear is more than enough for the first half of the game as far as armors go. one you beat radhan, consider getting his armor. not only does it look cool it also has great stats.
you could also consider doing the volcano quests and get the scaled armor. both are great choices. heavy but not too much, good stats, good poise.
poise and armor will never make you unstoppable, but every bit helps. lowering the damage taken and not getting stunlocked all the time is super helpful, coupled with high HP it makes everything much easier.

in regards to weapon choice I would highly recommend the bloodhound's fang. it was my weapon of choice on my first playthough, being the first strong weapon i found. I thought I would use it until I get something better,but i never felt the need to switch to anything else. It's not that fancy but gets the job done everytime (even in NG+ i'm just R1 spamming everything).
Being a curved greatsword (murakumo type), it might feel a bit slow and awkward to use at first, but it has high damage, good range, good for catching npcs rolling away, strong art (L2 into R2), tends to stunlock most things (unless they have infinite poise of course) and also has built in bleed effect, which you can still improve with a bleed resin even though it's a "special" weapon.
This is great stuff. You get this weapon in the gaol just left of the bridge leading to the weeping peninsula. If you struggle you can even befriend blaidd (get to hear the wolf in the mistwood, get the emote from kale in church of elleh, come back to the wolf) and get him to fight the boss for you. Easy stuff.

You should eventually invest in a bow (any) just to have a ranged option. this is always helpful, if anything it lets you desactivate the fire towers in the catacombs from a safe distance.
If you really hate the bloodhound's fang moveset, just settle for an ultra greatsword. being able to stunlock ennemies is easymode, which is harder to do if you're going for a regular straight sword.

Talisman to consider: increasing HP, Stamina, Equip Load, Poise, Physical DEF (most common damage type)



3/ GENERAL TIPS

- try to play unlocked as often as possible.
it lets you have 100% control over your camera and movements and will just make you a better player in both pve and pvp once you get used to. absolutely necessary to master this.

- explore and take what you can, avoid obvious danger.
you will often get rekt by some random big ennemy on the way. graveyards are full of heroes, don't be silly and avoid the scary dudes.
they will often drop next to nothing and are more of a hassle than a challenge. if you get stuck anywhere just go do something else instead and come back later when you're stronger. don't be lazy and clear most dungeons. you always get some runes and loot (including upgrade materials for your weapons and ashes)

- spend all runes to suicide run
some areas are much harder/annoying than the actual boss. so just spend your runes and suicide run to grab the items. (for instance in siofra river to activate the blue moose boss) don't worry if you die and lose some runes it doesn't matter in the long run.

- be friendly with the crab cook
once you get to liurnia you can meet a dude with a metal mask selling crab dishes. make sure you buy 1. (also buy the medallion to initiate the volcano quest)
buying one there let him move near the capital (where you fight the dung eater), where he will sell you an upgraded version of his prawn dish. once there, either kill him or let the dung eater do his thing. either way get him dead so you get to buy his stuff from the roundtable.
it's a consumable that boost physical def. get a ton of it, it's helpful, it's simple and gets the job done.

- maybe kill the merchants lol
there's no way you'll ever remember who sells what and where, so these friendly nomadic merchants just need to be exterminated. that way you get access to all of them at once in the hub.

- get strong ashes
wolves are fine early on, then get to siofra river via the mistwood and kill the blue moose boss to get the ancestral dude ash.
you just have enough FP to summon this dude with base mind value (as a vagabond). this guy gets the job done until you get the mimic tear.
at which point, well just switch to the mimic tear and gg.

- craft some bleed resin
bleed is insanely effective against everything and is your go to easy strat in most cases. when they are immune to bleed however you can try the dragon resin (very few available ingame do not waste)

- get interested in ranni's quest
not only are these guys the most friendly ones imo, they also lead you to the underground ruins where you'll find great loot and materials. progressing in this quest also gives you key items needed to explore 100%



At this point the build is pretty much done and you have all you need to destroy the whole game. How to make it work better? unequip all unecessary stuff (bow/shield etc) to prevent the mimic tear from derping too much.
Keep the main consumables on hand (bleed resin, crab dish boost). even if it's your last one, the mimic gets multiple copies it can use for free.
i'm serious, going in with a ton of hp/armor, a heavy damage stunlocking bleed weapon + a clone of you (with improved hp) is enough to break all bosses, including the hardest ones.


About the great runes:
I was confused about it until I realized it only works if you burn a rune arc (kinda like an ember from dark3).
However I would suggest you do not rely on it too much, I only found about 40 throughout the entire game and farming those is boring af. Keep it for the very last boss, for which I equipped radhan's great rune because why not having even more hp.

Stuff to look for:
Don't waste the star shards (FP regen), seluvis will trade for them eventually.
2 weapons are impossible to get once you beat maliketh so make sure you get them before for the achievement (if you care)
Maybe once you beat the game consider not going in NG+ just yet, respec at the great library and try wierd, more interesting builds for your next playthrough. Hopefully you won't even need ashes or bleed anymore.

Good luck tarnished.
Thanks for reading my tedx.

[Iudex Gundyr]

Thanks for the read. Good tips.

However i honestly CBA to play without camera lock. Left sore thumb is enough already.

[Draculol]

Thanks for reading, playing unlocked generally means claw grip. That's how you do it. Feels wierd at first and then a whole new world gets available to you, being able to turn the camera around while running / rolling. Don't hurt yourself :)
Playing with lock on isn't wrong though, you just need to see it as a tool rather than a necessity. Playing unlocked helps staying in control against fast moving targets (randomly rolling in pits never feels good) also lets you be less predictable in pvp : harder to get back stabbed, performing deadangle attacks etc.

[predojr]

really good tips, will try to play unlocked too

[predojr]

post it as a guide, in the guide tabs

[Draculol]

followed your suggestion and made a guide out of this, after some rewrite.
hopefully it will helpful to someone.
take care my dudes . thx for the points

[hauspro]

Found this two years later, thx!

[Draculol]

Cool stuff friend, didn't expect someone to unbury this post xD
Try this slightly similar improved wall of text. Good luck be careful out there!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2779462065


If you want to get more in depth try this excellent guide by someone else

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3258935003

[C1REX]

Originally posted by Draculol:

try to not level up too much for the sake of online play

I'm not sure how much of a difference does it make but I'm at lvl430 (Ng+7) and I have plenty co-cop signs everywhere and I get summoned quite often as well when I drop a sign.
I also get insane amount of souls if the team kills an invader.

[Draculol]

Of course it doesn't prevent you from playing and having fun, definitely nothing wrong with that, my first character is also overleveled way beyond 200. The two main reasons behind this advice are (according to how it works in the previous games) :

1 > You tend to play with people roughly around your level and
2> Character builds are meaningless if you max out everything.

Matchmaking / random coop is based on your current level (with some exceptions, also the password system bypasses this restriction). For now because the game is still popular it doesn't matter that much as I assume most people are overleveled anyway.

Over time though people will start playing other games and as the overall population decreases the remaning core players will be the PVP folks who tends to play at lower levels for the sake of having some sort of balance between different types of builds.

This is just some long term considerations + I think it's more fun to make your own build that is dedicated to a specific playstyle rather than the build that does everything. But then again this is just personal preferences, as long as you're having fun you're doing it right !