Unveil Miracle makes Bell Keepers farming easier

[CtenosaurOaxacana]

So the only way to +rep Bell Keepers covenant offline is to kill the Mad Warrior mob,
that sometimes appears opposite the bell tower in Belfry Sol,
and he also only appears if you're currently in their covenant.
Unfortunately, he only rarely appears, maybe 10% chance or less,
and you need 100 kills total to max rank.

There's a way to avoid going completely insane, going up and down the bonfire ladder,
over and over, just to check and see if the bastard appeared.
Credit to this reddit post, but I'll elaborate bellow:

1) Get the Unveil miracle from Straid in Lost Bastille for 2.2k souls, requires 13 faith to use, and a chime obviously. Unveil makes a glowing eye that rises up and moves towards nearest enemy, it's a way to detect or check if any mobs are nearby.

2) First, clear out everyone in Belfry Sol itself, the three guys behind you in the Iron Keep bridge area (where that one guy can break the platform), & finally most of the lava room surrounding the bonfire. You can skip the guys on the farthest wall that leads to the last part of Iron Keep, but you need to wipe the captain archer down near the lava and everyone up on the platforms. Yes, this means killing everyone like 10-15 times so they stop spawning.

3) This is worthwhile and necessary so the Unveil doesn't worthlessly 'detect' these mobs you already know about. Because now, when you use Unveil at the bonfire, it will either rise straight up and go nowhere, or it will rise up diagonally and go through the nearby grate towards the belltower up above IF the Mad Warrior has spawned. He appears as a random mob, not an invader, so you don't have to go up there for him to appear, he'll either be there already or not.

4) Keep sitting and getting up from Belfry Sol bonfire, checking with Unveil every time to see if Mad Warrior has spawned. Mad Warrior only spawns like 10% of the time(?), so it will save your sanity from having to go up and down the ladder and running back and forth to see if the bastard's even appeared. Now you can know for sure from the bonfire!

P.S.: Strongly suggest equipping a Clear Bluestone ring while spamming Unveil at bonfire. Considering how much the bastard needs to be farmed, this will save a lot of time in the long run.
Also, I wouldn't recommend bothering with Delicate String ring for this. That ring only increases chances of *invasions*, and mad warrior technically isn't one. It's more useful for trying to get Forlorn to appear in various places, possibly.
Also, consider keeping a manual tally between rank 2 - 3 so you don't lose track...
it's 70 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kills.

[JellyPuff]

The fastest way is to just read out your system's memory-usage. Have a system-monitoring tool on-screen (e.g. RivaTuner), teleport to the Belfry Sol bonfire and do not move the camera. Note the memory-usage. Climb up and see if Mad Warrior spawned. If not, the previously noted memory-usage will be your baseline. Use Aged Feather and again, do not move the camera after getting teleported to the Belfry Sol bonfire and compare the memory-usage. If it's about the same, go check for Mad Warrior to confirm, he's not there.

If done properly, you can now just keep sitting at the bonfire, until the memory usage goes up, compared to your baseline (like ~20-30MB). This will indicate, that Mad Warrior has spawned.

There are a couple of things, which would require to establish a new baseline memory-usage. These are restarting or quitting the game, teleporting to a different location and de-spawning/farming off regular mobs between runs.

Edit: There are more useful tips, like these on the DS2 wikidot, which is the most accurate DS2-wiki. It still hasn't been updated in ages. The biggest inaccuracies, i've seen there, are the exact damage formula's for buffs. The lower-tier one's are completely off, but at least the wiki acknowledges that. They will also link to Reddit-posts of such data-collections.
http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/

[CtenosaurOaxacana]

Originally posted by JellyPuff:

Edit: There are more useful tips, like these on the DS2 wikidot, which is the most accurate DS2-wiki. It still hasn't been updated in ages. The biggest inaccuracies, i've seen there, are the exact damage formula's for buffs. The lower-tier one's are completely off, but at least the wiki acknowledges that. They will also link to Reddit-posts of such data-collections.
http://darksouls2.wikidot.com/

I agree that wikidot to be the best reference for DS2 SotFS,
and it looks like it goes into great detail on both methods and another PS3 method,
on the mad warrior[darksouls2.wikidot.com]'s page.

I suppose this is a worthwhile alternative, if one doesn't mind messing with 3rd party software, or doesn't have an incentive to clear out the surrounding mobs. I'm presuming this would work regardless of # of other active mobs nearby, right?

But while it might not be desirable to go to trouble of clearing out the lava platforms near the bonfire itself, I do strongly recommend people clear out both belfrys with +item discovery gear, whether farming mad warrior or not. Since the bell keepers are the only mobs that drop the 5-min buff +100 discovery coins.