kensei

I mean I'll not do squat with her reward but every build should be able to take out everything but with different strengths / weakness. Final phase seemed literally impossible with a ranged attack and I was vastly over levelled.

Vigor is absolutely fine at 15 until the Academy as long as you have okay armour. I slowly worked it up to 30 across Caelid, Atlus and the Capital though tacked on the scarseal for an extra 5. If you've heavy armour - I'm mostly in Radahn's at the moment, you can trade some vigor from endurance. Anyway, some absolutely brutal stuff in this for pure strength builds. Also who the hell thought Was a good idea?Resorted to arrows in the end, pure melee seemed impossible.

The flask of wonderous physick is wonderous. Gives a boost to stats, a free hit, extra heal or even saving souls on death if you find the right bits for it. Definitely make sure you are using it. I should add why I find bows a faff now: changing weapons is annoyingly fiddly now, especially under pressure.

An upgraded bow is viable but generally too much faff for me. Summon to distract for some openings, bomb in and dodge as needed usually.

So after getting my ass repeatedly handed to me by floating Crucible Knights, I understand why they are a nightmare for my strength build. The entire build is based on 1. Stun 2. Poise 3. Closing distance. Crucible Knights do not get interrupted. You can hit with a two Colossal Sword Dual attack and they will not flinch. Instead they'll pile on in probably with a combo or worse a fucking instakill grab. On the flip side, they seem to poise wreck me even in heavy armour. They also have huuuuuuuuge range on the their weapons which makes closing distance hard. Greatshield? They have a lot of attack combos many of which are similar so you don't know if it's a two hit or three hit. And they can still bust the endurance bar because they hit like a truck. Barricade has been nerfed, so only five seconds which may or may not cover a stupid combo. And that's why having boss enemies floating about as normal enemies is zero craic. When From put Taurus Demons out and about in Dark Souls, you could at least stun lock them and take them in two hits at that point.

Meanwhile in Argentina

Or if you just need MAXIMUM POWAH for any reason. Only normal damage blades can get buffed. Anyway, I had one coop session for this by if I am at that I'll be playing it literally forever. And regardless of how many you have, one roadblock can burn through them at an astonishing rate. Been there with my thousand blood vials in Bloodborne. I just don't like the mechanic for what it is.

The problem is a boss can crush you 20 times without breaking a sweat. So as asked: which attempt are you going to use it for? Option 2 is you farm them ridiculously easily, and you just pop them like candy - see humanity in Dark Souls. For somethings like greases - consumable is okay. It's a bit if risk reward but not too rare. The Rune Arc is a mechanic for bearing big bosses. Should have been rolled into the special flask mechanic imo.

@Cheyenne I am not sure the target market really wants a really complex RPG system. It looks fine. The graphic seem to range from quite impressive to meh. My concern is that there seems to be a huge number of systems and that can easily end up a mess. The combat looks a bit Avengers-y mindless. But there's not a huge amount to go on. I suspect the thing that would actually work best given the structure of the books is something like Persona: Hogwarts Edition.

So I'm not done with it and I have played a lot of Souls. It's just - last week it felt absolutely essential and this week the shine is off a bit. I really don't need another tree demon spamming magic at me except in a constrained environment without a stake or grace nearby and I seriously can't be fucked with a Crucible Knight wandering about as a normal enemy or Jesus another fucking chariot. New areas are open and while there's great stuff - Windmills! - there's also a bunch of things that are a bit too copy and paste to what went before. Some visual variation in indoor areas would probably help. I can see why there isn't - the game is already impossibly massive. 70ish hours is probably about my first DS run. I haven't played a game that long since BOTW and have two games worth already. DS would have used some of the ideas here once though, while Elden Ring is running variations of them because it needs to fill an open world. I understand why and it works to a point. but I think it does become overstretched, particularly once you start hitting duplicate and doubled up bosses. When I finished DS1 I immediately bombed in and did it again with a different build. Zero chance of me doing that here - it's too exhausting. Leaning towards DS1 remaining the best one due to tighter design.

France look very good but have they done an Ireland and peaked a year too early? I'm also comforted by how close we got to them in Paris. At home we might have scrapped it. Wales allowing Shaun Edwards to go seems even more insane in retrospect.

Mimic is hard to beat, even with the nerf, though. It'll use whatever items you equip for free, so you can get it to heal itself and apply appropriate blade enhancements. I imagine it's be pretty straightforward to get it to proc bleed or similar on other builds.

So it'd be nice of England won and we took the Championship, but it would also be nice if England got beat and England got beat. I think I am satisfied either way.

Stones are comically cheaper now. That should allow you to get a variety of weapons to a usable state and proc a few weapon arts. Look for some caves and catacombs to trial a few different options. High Dex will apply bleed fast, and it's notably powerful I'm this one. If you are getting one shotted you need vigor. I'd recommend at least 30 for mid game areas and I'm rocking a talisman that's giving me another 5 too. Sword and board is as viable as it ever was, strong against some things weak against others. Mages spamming Hadoken can do one, of though.

It's not "buy the game to support the devs". It's "the only people who will actually be hurt by this are the devs". Also the pay point there is absolutely spurious. I was paid for my work last month. Losing my job would cause serious problems for my family, especially as I'm the only earner at the minute.

I am tiring of this a bit as well. It's not that it's got worse - I've just entered the Capital and it's visually amazing, it's just I'm pushing 79 hours and that is a lot of Souls and I'm nowhere near the end. Last week I was non stop playing this. This week I'm like yeah, I'll take a break for a bit.

Unbelievable Jeff. Just keeps the pressure on everyone else, even drags Brentford back in a little. Need to follow it up with points in the next two. Four would do. Still worry without Bamford.

Holy fucking shit

Bamford and Phillips back was my hope for staying up. We're done. Meslier is now off too. It's insane.

I was going to respond, but sorry my eyes just rolled out of my head.

How very Protestant of you. The stated reason for this is try and cause some sort of financial impact: "Don't fund hate". If it was actually successful in its goals, it would cause minimal financial impact to JK Rowling and quite a lot of financial impact to people just doing their jobs. I don't particularly think this will be successful, especially since if you look at polls of the general public Rowling's comments are certainly not on some sort of extreme. But modern media is made by hundreds of people with varied opinions most of whom you know nothing about, and funded by people whose views that this forum would hate, even on the left. Harry Potter has zero to say on trans issues and I'll be shocked if this game does either. Just seems like windmilling without any care about who gets hit by the flailing arms.

So don't buy it if you don't want to. The "I don't want to fund hate" is spurious. Rowling has more than enough money to fund whatever she wants. Harry Potter will keep trucking on regardless of the success of this game. The people most impacted by its failure will be the people making it. If you want to play it and aren't because of your views on Rowling, just be aware of the people it'll most impact. It's not your actual target. I have been through IT firings when things are not going well and they are no fun at all. Even in job markets where it's not catastrophic. My understanding of the gaming sector is it's worse in terms of failures impacting both employer and employee.

I'm sure J K Rowling will miss the second billion. Wait, no, she'll not notice. The developer or QA tester with a mortgage and family will definitely miss their job though.

I have areal soft spot for DS2 but it is janky as hell

The dip in quality in the last third of DS1 is greatly exaggerated. Duke's Archives is in there for a start. Then there's the DLC which was incredible. So far I think DS is a tighter design. That's the nature of the size of the thing. From could spend time tweaking bonfire placement, enemy placement and shortcuts much more easily there than they could here. But the open world adds so much more freedom that you won't hit a roadblock in the same way and exploration is even more rewarding. And it's banked genuine improvements to the combat and the field bosses on horseback are genuinely new fights that could sometimes go stale. The best thing I can say about this is that it captures the feeling of the first Dark Souls in a way none of the sequels did.