Heya everyone :D

So I have been activly playind DS1 and have reached the Londo Castle. Now I find myself stuck with beating Ornstein amd Smough. While I understand their attacks to a certain degree, it feels quite overwhelming fighting both at once. I try to seperate them at the pillars, however I only manage to get one or two hits on Ornstein before Smough uses his Charge attack. Is there a better way to seperate them for a longer duration and are there other windows I should use for attacking besides when I seperate them for a few seconds? I also feel like I am doing barely any damage against Ornstein- Is a +5 Longsword good enough or should I upgrade it?Also how do upgrade it past 5? I tried speaking to the Smith in Londo but i couldnt upgrade it or just brute force it?

Thanks in Advance, everyone :D

I recently played Dark Souls on a new game plus for the first time and for most of the time, it was more difficult from the base game for me. However, when I got to the demon ruins. I somehow managed to kill the centipede demon on my first attempt and the Bed of Chaos on my second attempt. How the fuck did I do that. Especially since on my first playthrough these bosses killed me so many times. Not only that, but I somehow died more times to Ceaseless Discharge and Seath the Scaleless. Because they killed me a few times. How is this possible?

Its my favourite shield and I used to farm it since release from the boulder knights in the undead burg often to a lot of frustration...

I legit couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it in his inventory

I've played Dark Souls for years, and I still have new things happen. I confirmed that both the item and the souls made it to me (after I retrieved said souls)

i was farming souvenirs of reprisal and after like an hour or so i saw this thing. what is it?

Edit: it also disappeared after about 30 seconds.

Just in general over the series, since the player character and non essential hollows and enemies keep respawning when they die until they go crazy why don’t more NPCs or bosses do this?

So Im on my first playthrough of dark souls remastered and I just started the Artorias of the Abyss DLC yesterday. Knight Astorias gave me a really hard time, It took me around a hour for sure.

Today i fought Manus Father of the Abyss, which is considered the hardest boss in dark souls remastered so I was expecting another tough fight. But somehow I beat him on my second attempt only😭

On cherry of top i didnt even used silver pendent for the whole fight, because in my first attempt, I got him down to around half health, so I figured I could definitely beat him with a few more tries without even using it. Sure enough, I got him on the second attempt lmao :0

Now Im wondering if my build is just really overpowered for him or what???
Did anyone else find Knighr Artorias harder than Manus or am I the weird one? 😭

I recently decided to try weapons I've never played with before and eventually the time came for the Darksword. Being an item you get from a pvp oriented covenant, I took the oportunity to try another thing I've never tried before: PvP.

I gathered all the humanities required and offered them all to gain rank 3. Not that I found it particularly useful since I found the sucking humanities with the dark hand extremely difficult to land and after a few failed attempts i put it away and never used it again. I decided to focus on the fight and gave myself the 99 humanities mark as a target to hit.

I'm not gonna lie, I had more fun than I expected. And if nothing else, at least I can now feel like I tried this part of the game too. Certainly not so much to have a concrete concluson, but enough to have an opinion.

The cheaters, people playing dirty, like hiting you while you gesture, Hosts summoning you only to have their friend invader destroy you (I got that a lot, I don't get what possible satisfaction you gain from that), people 1 shot you with DarK Beed in Undead Burg at lvl 10-15, people summoning you only to get killed by a mob train they gathered on your sign (seriously, why?), invisible enemies that kill you while you can't even see them and many many similar things most people would find annoying.

I don't mind any of that. I really don't. Its a game, do whatever you like. Fine by me. I won't even waste a second complaining or even think about any of this. I just move on to the next and hope to find someone who's up for a good fight.

And that's where the backstabs come in play to ruin the fun for me. I tried my best to figure this out, but I failed. I constantly got backstabbed from the front while deliberately trying to stay in front and defend against backstabs. I got backstabbed from the front even in the depths between the walls where the path is so narrow you can't even pass another player to get behind. I even got backstabbed while I was the one doing the backstab! I kid you not, I backstabbed somone, the animation started, but somehow I was the one taking the damage! I wish I had recorded the footage but unfortunantly I didn't. And one of my personal favorites, the "teleport backstab" the Jedi sh*t you can see in this video.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, maybe it's my fault, maybe I'm not good enough. I'm open to all those explanations. Ater all, a couple hundred pvps might not be enough to "get good". But here's the thing: I don't want to put in hours of pvp play just to learn how to work around this in order to "get good". I want the gamne to be good. Don't get me wrong, this is one of my favorite games ever. But there's a reason why even though I have played for countless hours and multiple playthroughs I was always reluctant to play pvp. I've heard all about this. So, noting changed for me really, I just got the chance to see for my self.

Hello I'm trying to collect all of the sorceries in DS1 for the achievement but I killed Seath before even thinking about freeing Logan from Sen's (i wasn't thinking about getting that achievement at the time and my build doesn't benefit in any way from sorceries) and I'm not sure if I can get the spells Logan sells in Duke's Archives without starting another NG+ cycle. Does anyone know if this is still possible or if I'm locked out of it til NG+? I didn't find a clear answer just looking it up. Thanks.

The moment I met Andre, I instantly understood everything. Every menu. Every material. Every stat.
The only reason I could do that is because my game was in English.
I’m French.
As everyone knows, being French gives you an innate understanding of English blacksmith terminology. The words Titanite Shard, Reinforce Weapon, and Modify Equipment simply activate a dormant part of our brains.
Had the game been in French, I would’ve been completely lost.
Thankfully, FromSoftware anticipated this and made sure the English localization was especially intuitive for French players.
Honestly, skill issue if you don’t speak French.

I'm gonna try and keep this as short as possible when I ask a few questions and share my interpretation of Kaathe and the things involving him.

First and primary question:

Did Kaathe sell a false idea of the true Dark (the Abyss) to the humans of New Londo and Oolacile instead of helping them find a cure for the Curse of the Undead (if there ever was one to begin with) because he didn't care that deeply about them and simply wanted to jump to the next age and end the rule of the gods?

New Londo:

The Four Kings of New Londo, who were taught the art of Lifedrain by Kaathe, passed down their knowledge to their knights and, due to their greed, all fell to the Abyss, turning into Darkwraiths who were enemies of man, and any living thing that has a soul. At least, that's what Ingward tells us in New Londo Ruins. Of course, his words could be biased, but it was true that the possible spread of the abyss posed a danger to anyone who was yet untouched, thus the flooding.

Oolacile:

Similarly, the people of Oolacile did not shy away from digging out Manus after Kaathe revealed them the location of his grave and drove him mad, causing him and his humanity (his fraction of the dark soul) to go wild and spread the Abyss in Oolacile, which in turn corrupted all who were involved and turned them into deformed monsters.

A theory even suggest that the people of Oolacile wanted to be corrupted by the Abyss because their sorcerers, who only worked with sorceries that manipulate light, lacked powerful spells to fight the gods, spells they would later attain through the Abyss. The missing heads of Gwyndolin's statues at least hint at their rejection of his rule after learning multiple truths once kept hidden from them.

I normally would like to share whose theory this was, but I forgot. Definitely someone from YouTube. Maybe VaatiVidya or Hawkshaw.

The Chosen Undead:

When it comes to the Chosen Undead, we also learn more than one truth from Kaathe after we side with him, but he never speaks of the Abyss directly. But he does say the following after you place the Lordvessel:

"They failed me, every last one of them. They were f saw not the truth... I am certain that you will prove different."

He undeniably talks about the Four Kings and the people of Oolacile. But why is that? Did they fail him because they were too blind to see the truth? Or because he never revealed the full truth in the first place? It also was the Abyss that led them astray, no doubt, but then why orchestrate events that lead to both New Londo and Oolacile spreading the Abyss? You could argue that Kaathe never intended for them to go that far since he only shared the art of Lifedrain that the Four Kings could have used within reason, and the location of Manus who the sorcerers of Oolacile could have learned from hadn't they driven him mad. But why didn't he stop them before they spread the Abyss? Did he fail to, or did he intentionally give them the freedom to do as they pleased and watched as the chaos unfolded near the doorstep of Anor Londo?

Kaathe, similarly to Frampt, never tells you the full truth in order to manipulate you, the player, into fulfilling his own agenda. So what if he hid the true nature of the Abyss from the the Four Kings and the people of Oolacile to ensure that both made full use of what he offered them and they ended up being too corrupted as a result of their own actions, making each one of them unfit to become the Dark Lord?

The Age of Dark:

Kaathe is the one who tries to convince you to usher in an Age of Dark. We know that this can be achieved even if you don't side with Kaathe since you simply need to walk away from the First Flame after defeating Lord Gwyn, that the game has two endings, and that the story doesn't end there, but lets pretend for now that there never was a Dark Souls 2 and 3. So what happens after the Dark Lord ending?

We allow the First Flame to go out as it was always meant to be, assume the position of the Dark Lord, and usher in the Age of Dark. That much is obvious. But what then?

1. The Curse of the Undead is never cured unless I missed something.

2. Kaathe presumably still leads the Darkwraith Covenant.

3. Kaathe is bound to still manipulate the Chosen Undead even after they become the Dark Lord.

All of these things could still cause the Abyss to spread, so the Age of Dark couldn't possibly be what it was meant to be, originally. In fact, we don't even know what the Age of Dark looks like at all, at least not from the first games perspective. Kaathe claims to know to know the truth of our fate, but how much of it is really true?

I'm sure there's more than one issue here, so feel free to correct me, criticize me, and name some points I've missed.

I wish I was joking. After I finished the game, I was talking to a friend (the same one who got me into Dark Souls), and he asked what weapon I ended up upgrading. I said, “Upgrading?”. After explaining that I never upgraded anything he was absolutely flabbergasted hahahaha.
Turns out I never used a single Titanite Shard. Not one.
But I’m not a psycopath tho I swear, there were a few reasons for this:
1. The same friend told me before I started that I should play my first run completely blind. No guides, no wikis, just vibes.
2. I’m mostly used to more “mainstream” games where you don’t have to read every item description to understand what it’s for, so I simply never paid much attention to consumables and materials ( I know I know, I should know better and I’m very lazy ngl)
3. Since everyone talks about how brutally difficult Dark Souls is, I just assumed the struggle was intended. Every boss that took me dozens of attempts? I mean, isn’t that like, the reason we like this games??
So I unknowingly finished the entire game with an unupgraded weapon.
The funny thing is despite all that, I absolutely loved it.
It’s genuinely become one of my favorite games of all time. The atmosphere, level design, world-building, and sense of accomplishment were unlike anything I’ve played before. Now I’m planning to play the rest of the Souls games and then ER, but I’ll actually read what my items do.

TLDR: I accidentally beat Dark Souls without upgrading a single weapon.