Today I restart my DS1 SL1 run. Wish me luck. \0/ Praise the Sun \0/

Well I have a +5 Battle Axe and I've freed Lautrec. Says Play Time is 0:33:35.

If you make the loop from Firelink Shrine through the Valley of the Drakes, through Darkroot Basin, through Undead Parish, and back to Firelink Shrine, then you get a lot of souls naturally doing this. Clearing the undead parish enough to kill the channeler and free lautrec, along with a single lucky drop of 1 shard from one of the baldur knights, gave me just enough souls to buy a Battle Axe and enough shards at 800 a pop to get it to +5 without grinding. <- Did not pick up any of the "dash for" items like the Grass Crest Shield yet. Don't really use them much until I've got FAP ring.

The Battle Axe is the "best" weapon imo for a SL1 run, because it is the most damaging weapon you can wield one handed that also has a decent moveset. It's also almost as strong as the Drake Sword at +5, which is very useful for clearing out some early areas and if you grind large tits in the depths it's one of the best early game weapons.

Finished the "intended" route run through Undead Burg, killing the Taurus Demon and piggy. Says time is 1:00:47.

This is something you want to do reguardless of your route, especially since a +5 weapon makes it easier, since it gets you:

- About 8000 souls
- The Light Crossbow
- good odds of an enemy dropping a "Decent" shield to tide you over without waying a **** ton
- Residence Key (don't need but nice to have)
- Basement Key (need)
- 3 Gold Pine Resin
- random loot

This is a huge boon for like 30 minutes of work, and we have to kill the Taurus Demon on a sl1 run anyways so might as well do it at the point in the game where it really helps. This lets us buy all 3 repairboxes and even some more small tits from Andre, which will be VERY useful if one decides to farm in the depths.

The crystal lizard on the way was also really nice, so he dropped 2 large tits and 3 twinkling tits. <- That will be a lifesaver later.

The Light Crossbow is the best ranged, non magic weapon you get in the game, and it makes early areas very easy once upgraded. Not sure if I'm going to do so but I remember this being crucial to my defeating of O&S on the original run.

Beat the Gargoyles. Says time is 1:06:44.

A VERY easy way to do this is to summon Lautrec and Solaire for this fight. <- I did so because frankly I have no illusions that I'm not going to summon Solaire for O&S so I have no qualms doing it elsewhere. The main rules for this run for me is that not allowed to summon players and not allowed to level up.

Interesting note, a Battle Axe + 5 takes the tail in one hit. Also worth noting that they drop A LOT more souls in the most recent patch (about 10K) versus original patch (about 3 or 4 K). At least if I remember right. <- Speaking of all bosses now drop a bone and a humanity which is very useful compared to how rare humanity used to be.

If you don't want to summon at all, this boss takes a ton of damage from a battle axe + 5 regardless. I probably could have done it without summons (I have before at about level 10 with a worse weapon). Just didn't feel like not taking the free win.

Turns out I was wrong. It's not every boss but some of them drop twin humanities and not a bone?

Killed the Moonlit Butterfly. Game says it is 1:15:42. This is probably the last update for a while since the Depths Large Titanite Shards farming thing comes before the next boss.

Note, this is the last boss you should kill (other than Capra Demon) before getting pyro trainer, because there is a limit to how many titanite shards one can usefully buy to upgrade things, and one tends to want to spend boss souls on pyro flame.

Notes:

- A **** tree grab ohko me. Death Counter: 1.
- Did a suicide run for the Elite Knight set. Didn't actually die.

- Almost had Lautrec dead but he parried me. Death Counter: 2.
- Lautrec killed me while I was trying to parry him.
- Lautrec true final boss. Dude has 800 health and could not parry him for the 3rd time in a row (first two worked).

Finally got the 3rd parry and killed his ****. Basically, my strat is to throw all fireballs and parry him. He drops the FAP ring and 5 humanity and 1000 souls, making it worth it. And he doesn't really do much on the other fight you could summon him for. Death Counter: 5. The Ring of Favor and Protection gives enough extra equip weight that I can use the Elite Knight Gauntlets +3 and remain under 25%, so I did so. <- that plus the health and stamina boost is a huge survivability increase.

And yes, this ring is well worth it on sl1 run. Best ring in game for a reason. Play Time: 1:38:16.


Since I've got 0 souls now, I'm going to do suicide runs for grass crest, red tearstone, and the second and third fire keeper souls. Word of warning: DO NOT go to blighttown, not even a foot inside, until killing Lautrec. This is the immediate trigger for his questline where he kills the firekeeper, and we want his ring. The extra fire keeper souls isn't worth it without his ring anyways.

Speaking of, what is the big deal with under 25% vs under 50%. Well, you basically get 2 extra iframes and the entire animation occurs faster and less clunky with less recovery frames. <- Once you get used to doing well with fast roll, the mid roll feels REALLY clunky.

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First suicide run: Died to ghosts after getting the fire keeper soul. There's no way to get back across that tiny slip of land bridge while 6 of them are camping on it and you can't kill them fast.

On the second suicide run into blighttown, I died before remembering where the soul is. It's an area with 4 or 5 blowdart snipers and I managed to kill 3 of them before dying though.
On the next suicide run into blighttown, I died because one of the fat guys chased me all the way down to the sniper area (I didn't even know they could NOT fall to their deaths) and trapped me between it and the last sniper.
On the next suicide run, now that I've killed all the snipers, of course the dogs had to kill me. The frame rate is so inexcusably bad in this area that the lag made it almost impossible for me to deal with them mano e mano.

Death Counter: 9.

It's at this point that I decided the soul isn't worth it until I have a +10 and this isn't such a hassle. The frame rates have done more to kill me than the enemies, and that is getting frustrating. This is the most broken pos area ever released in a dark souls game, and you know what? I don't even mind the damage. I just can't move anywhere without massive amounts of frame drops.

Was able to get the Grass Crest and the lizard above it without incident. Got 2 Twinkling Tits and 2 Titanite Chunks. Muy bueno. Jumped off a cliff anyways because I had 1 soul (hate you blighttown) and wanted to expedite journey.

While making the suicide death run for red tearstone ring (spoiler: I died going back down the ladder because all the drakes, and I didn't want to use a bone) I had a marvelous epiphan. Why not try killing the black knight in the basin? 3 parries and a blue chunk later I was slightly disapointed . But luckily this inspired a greater idea. ... Since the hardest part of the run there just died, why not do Havel?

2/3's of health down - first death.
2nd death was more immediate.

*10 minutes later* I HAVE HIS RING AND I DID NOT DIE AGAIN.

I am slowly compiling a list of reasons why this game should have gone through more testing before release. That fight is #2. The AI's...... well AI broke at least a dozen times, making it much much easier. The first attempt was basically the same but it got lucky (the second attempt I forgot he was behind the door). Glitchiest ai in this game that I know of now.

And what do I mean by Glitchy? Well the **** thing would stand still and not attack if I circle it enough. A ton of backstab fishing later....

Between this ring and the Favor and Protection ring you can wear up to 22.5 worth of armor without hitting 25%, which is a massive improvement. That doubles to ... enough to wear the entire elite knight set before hitting 50%, and probably enough to wear something better tbh. Wearing only the chest piece and the rest from my starting armor set, I am at 21.5 between that, the wooden shield, and the battle axe + 5. I also have the option to wear the boots and gloves instead of the chest and have the grass crest shield equipped for 21.4.

^ This is actually a milestone, so calling it. Play Time: 2:21:54. (Also I want to take a break without losing this post).

Guilty as charged.

I have not progressed any further because I got distracted playing something else and I didn't really feel like grinding out 8 more large titanite shards. The drop rate on that stuff is so low that I don't even bother with anything other than getting the battle axe to Raw +5 and the light crossbow to +6, which I only do because the net increase in safety to my sanity is worth it.

Speaking of, complaint #3. #1 was Blighttown. #2 was Havel AI. #3 is Blacksmiths.

The Blacksmith that sells you large titanite shards cannot actually do the ascnesion that lets you use them on a weapon. So if you decide that once you've gotten to Anor Londo that you want to upgrade a weapon before fighting the boss, the walk back is a pain in the ***.

Also getting to Vamos in general is a pain due to the bad neighbors.

I managed to get two copies of this card in an arena run in Faeria:



Served to perfectly illustrate everything I think is poorly balanced about the game. .... Still seem to be slightly addicted though, as long as I don't focus on my rank. ... Also happens to be one of my favorite cards so I felt really conflicted.

So in trying to figure out how to describe this, I feel like I have to describe a bit about the game.

Faeria is a game where you get 3 mana per turn and your mana pool doesn't empty at end of turn. You can get an extra 0 to 4 via board control, and the early turns of most games are spent securing at least one extra mana per turn for non aggro players (usually going for 2 to 3 in mid game).

So something that costs 8 mana can be summoned on turn 3 and can be easily summon on turn 4 without real sacrifice. A "downside" does exist, but one can reasonably expect to summon a big dude on turn 4 and 5 without worrying about paying for the cost. Baeru is the biggest mono-blue dude, at least upon summon.

In fact it's very big compared to most minions in the game. So it's big, it's bad, and it can easily come out on turn 4. What does it do?

Well aside from being very hard to kill via combat, it can only move on unowned tiles and lake tiles. Enter the effecT. It's ....... basically land destruction. Notice the blue 3 on the side of the card? That means you have to own 3 lakes SOMEWHERE on the field to be able to summon it, and you can only summon it on lakes. A very large number of cards have this kind of cost in one form or another, and so the effect basically reads "permanently destroy your opponent's ability to summon red, green, and yellow creatures on adjacent lands at the beginning of each turn, while also reducing the number of threshold requirements they meet". <- Running amok for a couple turns this can make your opponent just unable to play their best cards, and it will almost certainly destroy a lot of their "offensive" lands, which is lands withint easy attacking distance of the opposing player.

So why is this really powerful? Well because unless you are an idiot they are going to have a very hard time killing it in combat due to the size. And red and green don't have a way to hard remove it. Blue has a much worse Polymorph (5 mana for a 2/2 that can move two spaces) and yellow has a 6 mana Assassinate. And .... there isn't anything else in the game that will hard remove it. It's also symptomatic of the problem of the game as a whole, where decks tend to run notably more big minions than you can remove, and you can't really kill them reliably by trading, so overall big minions feel a bit too strong even without tacked on land destruction effects. The poster child of this is the below card:



This is the single most complained about card in the game right now, because you can easily chain one Apex Predator into another to make REALLY BIG minions your opponent generally can't handle because you are also going to play things like Baeru in that deck to ensure removal is at a very annoying premium.

The game has thus mostly devolved into Apex Predator, a red burn deck, midrangey control decks, anti-rush, and rush. Basically everything is a polarized matchup where you do really good against X and you do really really bad against Y.

The important question is: Does it have any pve / AI you can earn vs / etc?

Right now it's about the same as Magic Duels. Except way more rewarding for the initial playthrough, and it's not that level of prescripted. It's in Early Access, and they've said they would like to do a lot more with the single player, but they have to get the rest of the game working first.

Since you can level up against the AI, and leveling up gives you rewards, you can earn about 50-60 packs total against them though by getting to level 30 before one is forced to do pvp for more. <- You wouldn't be able to do your dailies in solo, but there's only one daily that isn't really fast and "do X a total of Y number of times".

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To be frank, it's very hard for f2p games to make money without pvp being the main way you get rewards, so I'm not going to defend it as if I consider this a problem. Once there is an example of a completely free card game that lets you play against the ai only and still get everything at a fair pace without being an absolute bore to play (looking at you Duels), I'll reconsider the position.

Hex, Infinity Wars.

"an example of a completely free card game that lets you play against the ai only and still get everything at a fair pace"

No. Not Hex.

You are not going to unlock everything in the game at a reasonable rate by playing Hex pve. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a good pve. It has a really good pve where you can get lots of content. But that wasn't the point at hand.

Not even going to touch infinity wars because I know nothing about the game but your fist example doesn't work.

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Hex PVE IS good and if you were looking for something like that, then no Faeria doesn't have that. It sounds like they want to add it in the future, but right now there are just the 14 ai decks to play against.

I feel like you're talking out of inexperience. Once you have your head around hex you can blow through the frost arena very quickly resulting in easy gold to buy the missing pvp cards.

I also want to add Spellweaver to my list of f2p card games that let you play against the AI and gain rewards at a fair pace.

Honest Question: Anyone give a **** about my soul level 1 run? I don't think so so stopped posting about it. Might do one big mega **** post once it's done. .... Maybe also one after O&S. But the micro stuff seems pointless.

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I have been playing Orcs Must Die. <- I might have known what this was in the past, but I didn't when going in recently. It's a cross between a 3rd person fps and tower defense. You place traps and run around frantically trying to shoot anything that makes it through. It feels like a very good game, but on at least Normal Difficulty (the default) I am ignoring a large number of the traps because they don't seem to do much without upgrades, and upgrades are very expensive. A few cheaper traps like Poison Spike Traps feel a lot better than a lot of your other options. I think? it will force me to use that stuff on hard, and I at least certainly hope so.

Game is VERY fun though. Setting like 40 spike traps in a corridor and watching the waves die is priceless. Would recommend. Would Will kill orcs again.

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It's official. I am now extremely excited for 3 games..... in September. Maybe No Man's Sky in August. Probably some other games coming in September that I'm excited for but forgot about. The Last Guardian is not one of them. I know that that is going to be bundled with Ico and SOTC at some point next year and I will wait patiently.

^ Speaking of, XCOM 2, one of the games I really want NOW, is coming to consoles in September.

^ July and August are almost devoid of anything good, with No Man's Sky being the only hope. Luckily my backlog is ......... never going to end is it?

I mean, the SL1 run does more or less read like a shorthand walkthrough, which aren't in short supply.

Why does mjack keep posting his reviews in delusional's thing?