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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2072 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 3, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Vidya thread.

49.4% of players have the "Defeat the Paintress" achievement. 49.0% of players have the "Go back to Lumiere" achievement.

0.4% of players have quit the game mid-cutscene and never launched it again.

be me, Dark Souls 2 fan (though I haven't played it in several years)

enjoy using Heide Spear, which has innate lightning damage, on a character whose dump stats are attunement, intelligence, and faith (which are useful only for magic)

notice that a new wiki has been created for the game

idly check out the page on scaling

mfw lightning damage scales with faith

mfw the meta tryhards say that there are "low returns on melee weapon scaling", so you're supposed to go for weapon upgrades and temporary buffs instead

Maybe I'll start a new playthrough with a character for whom faith is not a dump stat.

Yeah, the Dark Souls game mechanics are very counterintuitive. In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work. In Elden Ring, you can one-shot (up to phase transitions, which are often hardcoded) every boss in the game by doing the correct buff incantations, which basically renders the entire game trivial. And it's not like this is some glitch or exploit -- it just falls out of basic understanding how buffs stack and doing the obvious thing.

Then again, this is hardly unique to Dark Souls. Basically every single-player game is like this, in the sense that actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower, rather than the baseline expectation.

I've never really found this complaint really compelling. In fact, I'll top it: You can beat most parts of all DS games by summoning another (often ridiculously overlevelled) player and letting them do everything for you. You don't even need to know anything.

DS is imo very clearly, very deliberately designed to accommodate large differences in player skill without resorting to outright different difficulty levels. That's also the reason why I usually say that DS games are better grouped as high casual, but not quite hardcore.

In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work.

That's mostly an inversion of reality in practice; Plenty of bad players who don't know how the game works follow some online guide for an OP build to do exactly the stuff you're complaining about. Better players deliberately avoid the OP things bc they don't need it and just do a run with some weapon/spells they like. Even better players deliberately use gimmick gear (not me, sadly) or other limitations.

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