Dark Souls and grinding done right

[CritialGaming]

I love to grind. I am a grinder. In any game that allows to me to gain an edge in overleveling, you better believe I will sink needless hours into grinding in order to make myself feel OP as fuck for the main story. Final Fantasy, Pokemon, Bravely Default, whatever the game might be.

This grinding that I love has always yielded the same results. I become so strong that the game becomes easy-mode. And I love it.

But Dark Souls, has shown me another way.

Recently in Dark Souls 2 I did an extinction run. Basically Dark Souls 2 is different from any other Souls game in the sense that enemies will actually stop spawning after 10-15 resets. So if you kill all the enemies in an area, reset and kill them again, then repeat this 10-15 times (Depending on the area), eventually the enemies wont come back. This allows you to run through areas with no mobs left in them. Effectively this is grinding, as you gain souls and level up your character to incredible levels.

But Dark Souls is different. As I did this extinction run, I found myself hitting level 100 before I even fought a boss. I was one shotting most mobs, even with my basic mace (As upgrade materials aren't really available yet, short of buying them of course). Yet as I got to the later areas, pushing above level 160, I realized that leveling your character doesn't really ever over power you. Sure I had a ton of health, stamina, and strength. But I was still killable, rather easily.

Bosses that were always hard for me, like the Smelter Demon, were still just as hard. I still had to play at the top of my game to take bosses down. I realized what the real benefit of grinding was.

No matter what level you are in Dark Souls, in order to win big fights you still have to "get gud". By powerleveling, you only effective reduce the time that you have to "get gud".

For example the Smelter Demon fight. My first play through, I was somewhere in the 60-70 range when I fought him. Same build, strength based with a mace. It probably took me four or five minutes to beat him. But when I got to him at level 164, soft capped in health, and strength, I only had to be "Gud" for two and a half minutes.

This is an interesting result. The game never gets easy with insane grinding, it stays hard, it simply just reduces the amount of time that I need to be skillful at any given time.

What do you guys think of grinding in this way. If you guys like to grind, as I do, do you prefer being able to grind yourself overpowered, or do you like the way Dark Souls games do it? Or do you simply hate grinding?

 

[Fappy]

It's hard to compare Dark Souls to other more traditional RPGs. Short of really gimmicky builds, your stats can only take you so far on their own. You rely far more on your own intuition, trial and error, and understanding of the environment/enemies. There's a reason people can complete these games at SL1. Hell, there's even a guy who beat every boss in Bloodborne without a weapon.

Leveling is important for a variety of reasons, but the game is intentionally designed in such a way that X boss should be reasonably difficult for players between levels 30-60, for example.

I do like the way Dark Souls does it, but that doesn't mean I completely hate grinding. I hate gratuitous grinding, but I don't mind padding out levels if it calls for it.

 

[Fat Hippo]

I hate grinding, but I like that Dark Souls gives players the option without forcing them to do it, by allowing them to rely on skill. So if I get stuck on a boss, the game gives me the choice of simply trying until I succeed (my method) or trying to grind some levels to make it a bit easier. It offers you the choice without punishing either way of playing of the game. So I agree with you, Dark Souls does this very well.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

Dark Souls 2 has a couple of issues, one that relates directly to grinding, the kill limit for enemies is probably the worst thing they could do. Mostly because it limits the amount of souls you can gather in a particular area, this has the side effect of locking you into specific equipment, due to your not being able to buy everything. That lowers your ability experiment with equipment loadouts, which is one of the most important parts of the Souls/Borne/Field series.

Although worse still is that most of the enemies in Dark Souls 2 are just cheaper versions of enemies from Dark Souls. This is almost immediately apparent with the basic hollows you encounter in Things Betwixt, but even more apparent in The Forest of Fallen Giants. The latter where you encounter Hollow Soldiers wielding spears, they're very much a cheaper version of their Dark Souls counter parts in the Undead Burg. The Dark Souls 2 Hollow Spear Soldiers have shorter wind ups for attacks, much faster attacks, and are prone to pulling guard breaks on you, then launching a quick attack. Heck their triple spear thrust is a good example of their cheapness, if you're in range you will always be hit by at least one thrust before you can get your shield up.

Dark Souls 2 is very much the weakest game in it's family terms of bosses, as there is only a couple actually pretty good bosses in the whole game. Chiefly The Pursuer, Fume Knight, and The Looking Glass Knight, two of those are optional to game completion too. Dark Souls 2 also has the single most lame boss in the family of games, The Skeleton Lords, who are without a doubt the easiest boss fight in any of the Souls/Borne/Field games. Even The Pursuer is a boss I can routinely take down with out taking a single scratch, this is true of virtually all of the more reasonable bosses in the game. The "difficult" bosses are only "difficult" because they're reliant on strong mobs, like The Executioner's Chariot, there are multiples of them, like The Ruin Sentinels, because they have blatant cheap moves, like Nashandra, or because they have an awful arena, like The Smelter Demon.

Really from mobs, to bosses, to the world, Dark Souls 2 is a let down on every level, considering that it's the sequel to the far superior in every Dark Souls. I mean it's still a good game, Dark Souls 2, but there are so many little annoyances with it, it really is poorer for it. Being able to aim crossbows is probably the single best thing Dark Souls 2 added over the original, but every other change feels like a major hindrance.

All said and done, Dark Souls 2 kind of screwed up the grind, mostly by making so many of the enemies just cheaper versions of enemies from the first game. There's also the problem of placements, in both Scholar of the First Sin and vanilla Dark Souls 2, there are many places that just equate to frustration due to bad mob placement. It's not good in a Souls game where you can't pull enemies individually with ease, especially because at lower levels many of those enemies can take you apart in groups.

 

[Fappy]

-Snip-

I am plaything through DS2 for a second time before DS3 comes out, and yeah, I agree overall. There's a reason I played DS1 and Bloodborne multiple times each and am only just now finishing my second DS2 playthrough. There are just too many Blighttowns in DS2, and what I mean by that is that every other poorly designed zone feels like a slog. To top it all off, DS2's idea of difficulty is to zerge you endlessly with obnoxious enemies. It just gets tiresome after awhile.

Sure, Bloodborne had a huge volume of enemies too, but the player character is much more adept at handling giant packs. That, and the game is just more responsive overall.

 

[Bombiz]

OP I wonder what you think of games like Diablo, Path of Exile, or even Warframe? games where the whole point is to grind.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

-Snip-

I am plaything through DS2 for a second time before DS3 comes out, and yeah, I agree overall. There's a reason I played DS1 and Bloodborne multiple times each and am only just now finishing my second DS2 playthrough. There are just too many Blighttowns in DS2, and what I mean by that is that every other poorly designed zone feels like a slog. To top it all off, DS2's idea of difficulty is to zerge you endlessly with obnoxious enemies. It just gets tiresome after awhile.

Sure, Bloodborne had a huge volume of enemies too, but the player character is much more adept at handling giant packs. That, and the game is just more responsive overall.

Yeah that's something I didn't mention... There are what, four poison areas in the game? Actually I liked blight town, it was an overall pretty interesting area, full of pit falls and difficult to navigate paths. The only area that filled me with dread was The Depths in Dark Souls, mostly because of the confusing nature of it's lay out and being filled with Basilisks... Though I've never been cursed in The Depths, unless I was actually trying to get cursed. Where on the other hand, in Dark Souls 2 I dread every new area after Heide's Tower of Flame, although once you memorize No Man's Warf it's actually cake walk.

If you need to deal with a group of enemies dog piling you in Dark Souls 2 there are actually three easy ways out: 1) Casters can just kite them without much effort, dropping most groups with ease. 2) A sufficiently well stocked bag of crossbow bolts, arrows, or throwing knives can achieve the same result as casters enjoy. 3) Melee characters should avoid shields when facing a group, instead dual wield, use power stance, and play stun frames without mercy, also roll, roll a lot.

 

[CritialGaming]

OP I wonder what you think of games like Diablo, Path of Exile, or even Warframe? games where the whole point is to grind.

Warframe - I hated Warframe, not because of the grind, but because of the game. I don't like shooters, so games like this, Destiny and The Division just dont appeal to me.

Path of Exile - I wanted to like this game. I really did. But I couldn't find a class that I liked, and I felt like the controls were unresponsive and sluggish. It was like trying to play Diablo while waist deep in mud.

Diablo - I fucking love this game. Every season I play until I get to paragon 400-500 at least. Depending on the changes made and what class set I end up with. I have sunk a buttload of time into Diablo 2 and 3.

 

[Bombiz]

Path of Exile - I wanted to like this game. I really did. But I couldn't find a class that I liked, and I felt like the controls were unresponsive and sluggish. It was like trying to play Diablo while waist deep in mud.

to be honest the classes in path of exile don't really matter except for where you start on the skill tree

 

[CaptainMarvelous]

While I like grinding in JRPGs and that, Souls games I always treat the levels as just checkpoints to me using the awesome sword I just found or blitzkrieging someone with spells or wearing Full Havels or something.

 

[Bad Jim]

OP I wonder what you think of games like Diablo

With Diablo 2 at least, (haven't played 3) there is an exponential growth in XP rewards as you progress, so slaughtering low level monsters is not rewarding. You should kill the strongest monsters that you can handle, which for most people means you keep doing quests and progressing through the game. A half decent player will only need to grind for experience before entering hell difficulty.

Also, item drops depend on how far you are in the game, so if you want loot, you will want to progress through the game. Once you have completed the game on hell difficulty there is an endgame where you farm for items and maybe level your character to lvl 99, but this is once you've finished the real game, and is the point where a Dark Souls player would be rolling another character. Which isn't a bad idea in D2 either.

 

[Mahorfeus]

I rather liked Dark Souls II, despite its flaws. I almost never felt any particular need to grind in that game. When I did, the easiest thing for me to do was to just pick an easy boss that gives a lot of souls, pop a Bonfire Ascetic, put on the best silver ring I have, and then just kill it.

But the real grind in DS2 was getting the armor and weapons you wanted from enemies. You know the ones. Those asshole red phantoms have some of the neatest-looking gear in the game, but damn was it a pain to get. It wasn't just them, either. There was this little ornate headpiece I wanted for my character, but only one enemy in the game drops it, and they only spawn X number of times. And the drop rate is abysmal. Bloodborne really nailed the gear unlock thing.

 

[JohnnyDelRay]

I don't really like grinding, and only ever do it out of real necessity. Even then, I'm happy to utilize any exploit in order to get it over with as soon as possible.

In most RPGs though, I try to get the most of what I can out of it, which involves sidequests and a bit of exploration. This usually means I'm inadvertently over-levelled by the time I tackle the main story. In almost any game with RPG elements, actually. So to try and cap this, I end up more recently experiencing with builds that are not so noob-friendly, with low endurance and high crit chance/sneak, or whatever, to force myself to employ a bit more strategy.

Grinding in Dark Souls was always a bit of a gamble as you can lose all those souls you worked so hard for by making stupid mistakes. Gets to a point where next levels are *really* expensive. I did abuse one place in Dark Souls where you can just push decent level enemies off a cliff, this gives you a bit of a leg up about a quarter way through the game and I have zero regrets for using such a stupid bug.

Considering the OP: I know what you're saying is that you never really make things that much easier in Souls games, it's a lot to do with the learning curve and being ready for what's about to come up. Memory has much to do with attack patterns, and enemy locations, to the point you can practically play blindfolded. Levelling up against enemies that don't scale is always pretty much the same: you hit harder, and take more hits, therefore fights reduce in time. Fighting bosses underlevelled is going to take you forever, that's how it's always worked.

 

[votemarvel]

Demon/Dark Souls is what I call frustration gameplay. It expects you to die over and over until you realise that to beat the boss you had to sing an ancient celtic poem, while dancing the viennese waltz, and reading War and Peace.

They are well made games I can see that but I just can't enjoy them. My entertainment time is limited, I wont spend it replaying the same section again and again in a perverse copy of Groundhog Day.

 

[StreamerDarkly]

I didn't think the purpose of the mobs disappearing after 12-15 kills was to limit the amount of grinding you could do, although perhaps that's part of the reason for that mechanic. I always thought it was to reduce the frustration of the tough slog all the way to a boss you're having trouble with. A half-hearted apology for the lack of shortcut or bonfire in close proximity, in other words.

There are some boss approaches in DS2 and in particular DS2:SotFS that just become really grating after the 5th or so time you've gone through it - Iron Keep for Smelter, Sir Alonne's memory, and Gank Squad stand out in my mind. The DragonSlayer approach in Scholar is also pretty bad if your preference is for killing the mobs instead of running past them. Should it be really hard just to reach the boss, possibly more difficult than the fight itself? I think there's quite a wide spectrum of opinions on that question. As far as wasting all your healing items on the trip, it's not as much of a problem in DS2 due to the availability of life gems. I always got into the habit of using the gems on the way to the boss so the estus could be saved for the boss fight.

On your point about being over-leveled, I'd say you can still get a noticeable advantage from it, especially if you level a ton of VGR, but yeah you're definitely still going to be vulnerable to the late game / DLC bosses. On NG+ you'll realize that you're really not that strong at all despite the extra levels.

Of course, if you really enjoy grinding a certain area, you can always burn a bonfire ascetic to respawn a stronger version of the enemies. This is great for farming upgrade materials in places like Dragon Aerie.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

There are some boss approaches in DS2 and in particular DS2:SotFS that just become really grating after the 5th or so time you've gone through it - Iron Keep for Smelter, Sir Alonne's memory, and Gank Squad stand out in my mind. The DragonSlayer approach in Scholar is also pretty bad if your preference is for killing the mobs instead of running past them. Should it be really hard just to reach the boss, possibly more difficult than the fight itself? I think there's quite a wide spectrum of opinions on that question. As far as wasting all your healing items on the trip, it's not as much of a problem in DS2 due to the availability of life gems. I always got into the habit of using the gems on the way to the boss so the estus could be saved for the boss fight.

Nothing beats the slog that is the path through No Man's Wharf to get to The Flexile Sentry, but really losing that fight is an example of inexcusably bad at the game anyways.

 

[CritialGaming]

One of the benefits of my extinction run has been that if I die on a boss, none of the normal enemies come back because I have farmed them out. So I literally get free tries on bosses. Useful for bosses I am just fucking terrible at like the smelter demon

 

[Olas]

I think I might be a crazy person because I actually think the ability to grind/farm souls indefinitely was a fundamental flaw with the first game. But when I made a thread bringing this issue up every single poster told me I was wrong, so I guess I'm wrong. However I do find the discussion about whether Dark Souls games should have easy modes ludicrous, since they've always had easy modes (soul farming/Summoning/hidden OP weapons). Dark Souls is basically as easy or hard as you want it to be. Enjoy your grinding OP.

 

[DrownedAmmet]

snip

I think Dark Souls 1 did a good job of gating you where if you couldn't make it past all the enemies leading up to a boss without taking damage then you probably aren't ready for the boss in the first place

Yeah, Dark Souls is one of the few games where I can kill the same enemies over and over and over again and it never feels like a grind

 

[CritialGaming]

Over the weekend I was listening to people debate the Star Fox invincible mode, and they brought up Dark Souls as an argument. Saying that if Dark Souls had an easy mode, then it would completely defeat the purpose and even the majesty of the game. To which I was screaming at the screen that Dark Souls has an easy mode already.

Spell casting, ranged weapons, over leveling, that one sacrificial ring thing that lets you keep your souls when you die. There are a ton of options that make the game easier and you know what....that's why Dark Souls is so brilliant. The challenge is only as hard as you want it to be, and you can dynamically change your difficulty at any time merely by changing your equipment.