General Tips on how to beat the Frigid Outskirts Solo

There's no real guide that tells you a couple pointers on how to beat the area without outright telling you what build to use. This is for people who don't want to be handholded but want to be prepared for it. I sure could've used the knowledge.

Introduction

Ask yourself this very important question:

Why are you doing this? The area is poorly designed, it's very tedious to get through, the enemies have disjointed hitboxes which makes dodging them really unintuitive and unfun, it takes up to 10 minutes of just running in an empty field to get to the boss where can get randomly ambushed, the boss is 2 copies of a prior boss that isn't particularly fun to beat, and there is literally nothing in this area worth getting, not even the rewards for the boss itself are worth the trouble.

The best way to beat this area is to pretend it doesn't exist and move on with your day. You will not regret it, it is a 15 minute area that can take you upwards of 3 hours to beat, and the only thing you get from it is the clout you might receive when you say "yeah I beat it", if any exists.

If you are convinced that you MUST beat every area in the game solo like I wanted to (and did), keep reading.

What kind of character did I use to beat FO?

This section is just to give you an idea of what I did, not for you to follow this very specific build. If you want to, I can't stop you, just letting you know this build isn't particularly effective vs. Frigid Outskirts.

My character was lvl 181, and my stats were spread like so:

• Vigor: 42
  
• Endurance: 30
  
• Vitality: 42
  
• Attunement: 10
  
• Strength: 42
  
• Dexterity: 20
  
• Adaptability: 30 (enough for 100 ish agility)
  
• Inteligence: 3
  
• Faith: 15

As you can tell, my character wasn't specialized in damage, and I spread my points into health and armor bonuses because I like making fat tanky characters. Surprising absolutely no one, the game doesn't really care and I still took massive damage.

I was equipped with Full Havel's Armor[darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com] (found in The Gutter) and an uninfused Greatsword[darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com] (found in No Man's Wharf), all maxed out.

Rings were what you'd expect:

• Third Dragon Ring[darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com] (Dragon Shrine)
  
• Royal Soldier's Ring +1[darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com] (Drangleic Castle)
  
• Chloranthy Ring +1[darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com] (Shaded Woods)
  
• Ring of Blades +1[darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com] (Iron Keep)

I should point out that I was a member of the Company of Champions when I beat FO, and I suck at Dark Souls 2. If I can do it with an extra challenge on top and with a build that isn't particularly specialized in anything, so can you, because I know you're better than me.

For those who don't know, all Company of Champions does is extra health, extra armor and extra damage to all enemies. Also I think my attacks sometimes did like 66% of the damage I expected and I'm not sure if this is because the weapon I was using had a sweet spot and I kept missing or another side effect of Company of Champions.

Tips for the area itself

Note: I will be using the Clock Position[en.wikipedia.org] system to give directions.


Here are my general recommendations.

• Leave this area to the very end of your run, you want all the advantages you can possibly get, including all your equipment maxed out, your stats where they should be, the ability to not lose humanity when you die with one of the DLC crowns (explained further below), maxed out Estus, 99 Life Gems, a couple Repair Powders, a single Pharros' Lockstone and any Resin you would want to use (I didn't use any, but in hindsight, I should've).
  
  
• Learn the route. The entire area is large and featureless except for 3 buildings and the gorge before the boss. The route I took went through the first two buildings, then used the third one as a reference point to get to the gorge. Some people recommend skipping all of this and going straight with the gorge, but I do not know that route.
  The easiest way to orient yourself is with the sun. Starting from the coffin when you arrive at the area, find the sun, rotate and make sure it is shining on your 4~5 o'clock, then walk forward until you find the stone circle, or the snowstorm dissipates. If you find the stone circle, count the number of upright stones, pick the one furthest to the right (the third one), put your back to it (outside of the circle) and keep walking. Inevitably, you are waiting for the storm to dissipate, and you should be really close to the first building.
  From it, you can see the second building, if the storm hasn't hit again. If it has, make sure the sun is on your 3 o'clock, and keep walking. You'll eventually reach the second building.
  After you go through it, wait for the storm to clear, look for the third building, and move towards it. The sun should be around your 5 o'clock.
  I suggest not going into this building more than once, it only has one item, it is not particularly worth getting (I even forget what it is, it's 2 Human Effigies) and has an extra enemy that it's better off left alone. Your goal is to get real close to the building, then look for the gorge that should be to your 2 o'clock, assuming that the second building is behind you and the third building is right in front of you.
  Once you see the gorge, it's just a small trek to it, cross the bridge, and you're there, easy.
  
  
• The second building has a Pharros' Lockstone Contraption that activates healing waters. If you want to save up on estus when one of the reindeers inevitably hits you with its broken disjointed hitbox, this is the place.
  
  
• Reindeers do both lightning damage and physical damage. You'd have to be sound asleep to get hit by most of its lightning attacks. They either have ample windup, or can be dodged by running. They can shoot lightning at you (dodge), go up in the air and then shoot lightning at you (dodge), go up in the air, circle you and then shoot balls of lightning at you that home in very slowly (just run off to the side) or they can do a very small AoE (Area of Effect) around themselves that does CRAZY damage and can hit twice in a row (dodge backwards and keep your distance since it lingers).
  As for physical attacks, they have a jump that immediately turns into a ram attack (dodge to the side), a regular ram attack (this is the one that is disjointed, if you dodge too early, it still hits you, if you dodge too late, it'll hit you without the reindeer touching you, your best best is to dodge into them and hope you didn't do it too early, considering that if it tags you while you're not rolling, it causes knockdown), a close range ram where their antlers light up with lightning (dodge towards them and to the side) and if you're standing right behind them, they will use their back legs to hit you (don't stand behind them lol).
  
  
• Reindeers will seemingly infinitely spawn while you're out of any building. If you follow the route I described, you will only have to fight 2, maybe 3. If you've already memorized the route, you can cut a corner when getting to the gorge and jump off a small ledge. The Reindeers are forced to walk the whole path and they never catch you if you sprint to the fog door, at least, they never caught up to me, and I was really fat and slow.
  
  
• If you kill enough Reindeers, they'll eventually stop spawning forever. I beat the area before this happened, and I have no idea how Company of Champions affects this. I don't advise you go out of your way to exterminate them, since there's 3 different "spawns" for the Reindeers (one between the first and second building, another between the second and the third, and the last one between the third and the gorge), and each has their separate counter.
  
  
• There are a couple enemy NPCs in the area that if you follow my route, you can safely avoid. The only one that I accidentally lured once was the one near the third building, because I wasn't close enough to it before I course corrected to the gorge.

Tips for the Boss

The boss of this area are Lud and Zallen, which are exact copies of Aava, the first boss of this DLC, just with less health.

The battle starts with Lud behaving exactly as you'd expect, and the same strategies that applied to Aava, apply to him. Learn his swipe dodge timings, dodge towards him and never get greedy with your attacks, especially since they can do more than half your health in a single hit and and they themselves go down fairly quickly. One hit with the Greatsword I was using was enough per recovery.
Besides the swipes, they have jumping attacks where they run away and then jump at you. Same as before, dodge towards them.
As for AoEs, they can do two. One, they lift up their paws very slowly and then slam it on the ground and icicles start growing out of the ground. Just take like 2 steps back and it can't hit you. The other one is a body explosion, in which they arc their backs for a couple seconds then explode. Dodging twice backwards does the trick (you can also time your dodge right the second the explosion occurs but it's unreliable, I only managed to do it once).
Finally, they have their heavy hitter, which is summoning Homing Crystal Soul Mass. You can tell they're doing this because they run away and then stand still and start roaring while summoning them. You can do 2 things to avoid this, one is to run to the side as soon as the last crystal mass has been summoned, and they won't hit you, be warned though, the Tigers are active before the last crystal mass homes in on you, so you might get swiped while you're running, get ready to dodge in that case. The other one is if you notice early enough, you can run towards them and, if you stand behind them, the soul masses will miss you 100% of the time, leaving you ample time to hit them up to two times in a row (wow).

The meat of this fight comes when Lud falls to 50~40% health. Zallen will start attacking and as soon as his feet touch the ground, he will cast the Soul Mass attack, potentially one shotting you because he will be most likely out of sight.

Here are my tips:

• Lud and Zallen have this weird property where any damage done to them will incur in extra durability damage to your weapons. Equip Repair Powder or use two weapons to mitigate this.
  
  
• Focus on Lud since he's more than half dead, and the odds of you dying because you got greedy with Lud are less than if you weren't greedy and leave them both alive and active, at least to me it was. The way I think about it is, if I kill Lud and I don't get hit, great, if I do get hit, Lud is still close to death or dead, which makes this fight a lot more manageable and lets me heal in peace, however if I don't get greedy, they're both alive, and if I get hit, I probably won't be able to heal. Just go HAM on Lud as soon as you see the second healthbar show up.
  
  
• Use the Spell Quartz Ring +3[darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com] to avoid getting sniped. If you decide to go for Lud when Zallen becomes active, you can be sure the soul mass he always casts won't do much damage, giving you leeway to get greedy with Lud. You can also use this to your advantage when either of them starts casting the AoE, because that also is a pure magic attack, and the damage will be highly reduced.
  
  
• Once you deal with Lud, the fight becomes a lot easier, it's just a repeat of a repeat of Aava, until Zallen gets to 30%, in which case he'll enrage, start healing over time, have higher attack and higher defense. You can tell Zallen is doing this if he dodges to get away several times in a row (2 in fact) and starts roaring. Never let Zallen get far away, because if you can do enough damage, you can run up to it and smack him fast enough so, even if he enrages, he's dead.
  
  
• Worst case scenario, he activated his Rage Mode, and you were not able to kill him for whatever reason. The buff lasts 2 minutes, you don't have to out-DPS his buff. Just take it slow, gets some hits in, keep his health low and wait for it to run out, then just murder the stupid cat. You can try to kill him while the buff is on but I've never managed to.

How to die and not hollow out

All you have to do is:

1) Get all three crowns from each respective DLC. This includes the Sunken Crown, Old Iron Crown and Ivory Crown. They all have to be in your inventory, not in your item box.
2) Kill Hollow Vendrick back in Undead Crypt (the more Soul of a Giant[darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com] you have in your inventory, the easier it'll be)
3) Go to Shrine of Amana's second bonfire, find the bridge that leads to a secret locked door, and once you've killed Hollow Vendrick and are human (use a human effigy if you must), the door unlocks and you can obtain his soul and his crown (off to the side in a chest)
4) When you get to the point of the game where you have the Ashen Mist Heart and with it, the ability to walk into memories, go back where you killed Hollow Vendrick and his clothes should be shimmering. Examine them.
5) Exhaust all of Vendrick's dialogue and trigger a cutscene. If a cutscene doesn't trigger, you must've done something wrong. Check if you have all 4 crowns in your inventory.

Now, while having any of the DLC crowns equipped, you won't hollow out.

The Sunken Crown raises STR, DEX, INT and FTH while reducing VIT, VGR and END
The Iron Crown restores spell uses every 2 minutes
The Ivory Crown heals HP over time.

End thoughts

This area is bad. Don't do it, you've been warned.

This is me, trust me, I'm not happy.

Good luck and remember, video games are for fun, not to get frustrated about!

[genya]

All true. Worst area to the worst Souls-like.

[clarkeveritas]

Nice guide. The beginning of that DLC gives me problems everytime.

[Luca]

OR you could use the same strat Otzdarva used in his no hit run, way more safe and effective

[Icywind]

If you don't want the items you can just hug the right cliff, it will go right through to the ridge before the boss. Though mind you will have a couple of encounters with horse boiz along the way. I beat em on my first playthrough using twin smelter swords, my advice would be kill 1 of the boss duo asap.

[Pride Lizard Pride Lizard]

Just ot let you know, Company of CHampions makes enemies take about 20-30% less damage than normal. Your weapon didn't have a sweet spot or anything, they just take less damage while you take more. It's also likely the crystal stallions respawn infinitely with CoC on!

Also, I'm not entirely sure how their spawning mechanics work, but I decided to go to the last building in this area (for shits and giggles. I've never been there before.) and noticed by the time I got there and left, there were 4 reindeer. The longer 'ya stay the more there are. And you do not wanna get ganked by crystal stallions.

So the best way to do it is, definitely, 2nd building with pharos healing water, then just run straight for the valley with the bridge to the boss. (Or if you know how to run from the start of the area to that valley, do that. I don't. I am a clueless idiot.)

Also, ADP is a good tip. I always get about 25-30 for the DLC because some hitboxes are a bit.. shit. :v

[Skoofy]

this is what happens when you let casuls write stuff in steam forums