skulblaka

Honestly I just consider everything prior to the DLC areas to be almost pre-game. Whatever +10 you like best is fine for running through the base game, all the really really cool stuff is either a boss weapon or a DLC area item.

You could also just try other weapon types. A quality build (STR/DEX focus) has a wide variety of things they can use, most of them only marginally less optimally than a dedicated STR or DEX build, and many of them MORE optimally due to having more scaling stats. Regular old straight swords are considered one of the strongest weapon classes in the game and are great for this. Fist weapons and colossal swords are personal favorites of mine. If you’re getting bored with the claymore I pretty highly recommend upgrading a pair of caestus or claws and just going buck wild with them. Caestus lean toward STR and claws lean toward DEX if you have more of one than the other.

But yeah, base game DS2 has plenty of cool stuff, but they kept back all the real prime stuff for the DLCs. Playing Scholar you will have access to these. At the time in base game that Chloanne starts selling infinites of most of the upgrade stones, you’ll still have more than a third of the game left to go, so don’t worry too much about that. Go ahead and burn through the game until you defeat the Watcher/Defender, bone out of Nashandra’s fight and go enjoy some of the best content and armaments in the game before you come back to dunk her back into the Abyss.

As far as things you can access right now, though, you have some options. Many of the boss weapons are very cool, if you have a decent stock of Dragon Bones. In no particular order, here’s some things I might recommend based on what I’m reading here.

• Smelter Sword fucks, just in general, and you can get a second one later for maximum swagger. STR based, and heavy. You can use the single Smelter sword just fine as a quality build but you’re going to need a lot of stats to dual wield them.
• Arced Sword is largely outclassed by the Warped Sword, which you get from the same Flexile Sentry soul. Warped Sword is largely Dex focused but is just actually the best curved sword in the game IMO, unless you’re doing something silly with Eleum Loyce or the Red Rust swords. Skip Arced though, just use the Murakumo. Note that curved swords replace your kick with a silly backflip-swipe that is useless, I frequently keep a dagger in my second weapon slot for criticals anyway but it’s also useful to switch to it to kick.
• Many katanas are very strong and easy to use. Jokes about Fromsoft’s subtle propaganda about glorious Nippon steel have been in ready supply for most of the Souls series’ lifetime. DS2 is no exception. Darkdrift is my favorite and is available from Agdayne, but you can really grab almost any of them and have a fine time. Don’t invest in the Chaos Blade, it’s really only for PvP. Do invest in the Washing Pole, it’s ludicrously long and repair powders are easy to get a million of.
• Try a twinblade! Specifically, try the Red Iron or Stone Twinblade. I don’t think they’re good dueling weapons in PvP but I love them in PvE. Proc bleed like nobody’s business. Both of these ones listed scale better off of STR, but basically all the others are DEX. If you aren’t very high DEX though I’d recommend the Stone, it’s my favorite of the bunch.
• If you’re really just jonesing for something to spending Twinkling on specifically, the Black Knight weapons are decent targets, as well as the Dragonslayer Crescent Axe is one that I often enjoy.
• Also, don’t forget to upgrade your armor, as well. Many of the best armor sets require a bunch of Twinklies to upgrade. You’ll want those upgrades before hitting Shulva/Brume/Eleum Loyce.

Finally, last note, as someone else said in this thread you can also just take a soul vessel back to the ladies at Things Betwixt and just respec your entire build. Those are limited, but not terribly so, you’ll get probably a dozen of them before everything is over. I used to use them like candy to float points in and out of my health and stamina to equip new and interesting gear, it’s not optimal at all to do that but you really don’t need it to be. You only need as many soul vessels as times you plan to change your mind on your build, and there are still ways to get more if you run out if you want to mess with bonfire ascetics. That’s advanced tech though, don’t mess with those too much. However, do use them to fight the four great soul bosses again and get their NG+ drops. Those souls give you more cool stuff that you may or may not want, but if you don’t want the items just eat them for another 255,000 free souls on top of whatever large amount actually killing the bosses gives. I don’t know how much it is but I think I used to be able to farm up a million souls for the Drangleic gate with like three or four cycles of The Rotten.

I’m going to cut this off here, but I have played this game for an unholy number of hours, please, ask me things about my hyperfixation if you have more specific questions. I love this game more than anyone else that I know. I’m happy to share.

It is right and just to destroy men who have sold their souls to evil.

Yes but he also has his ass on backwards, look at my man’s knees

Jokes aside I would be incredibly down for them to tie those two settings together like they’ve teased about forever

Give us Ciri in 2077 make a whole game about it

Cryptobotany stories exist, Vita Carnis is one lol

A quite good one in fact

Then you did not speak with programmers regularly, I learned this term probably back in 2008ish

And here comes Bernie Sanders with the steel chair!!!

5-10 years ago, you could be pretty sure this was a thing that actually needed checked, since the post about the clutch safety switch was posted by a real person who presumably had the same problem as you and fixed it with this method.

Now, there’s no way to know if that’s actually the case, or if “clutch safety switch” is just a likely string of words to feed someone who is having car trouble. You might get lucky, or you might get sent on eight consecutive goose chases because an LLM fundamentally doesn’t know what factual knowledge is, it only knows how to reorder and regurgitate things that other people have said in other contexts.

“As above, so below” is a pattern that’s almost universally recognized for a reason. The galaxy atom model may not be accurate, but lots of things in the world rhyme at different scales.

This does, however, lead to the existence of “local groups”.

Meaning that, there is a local group of celestial bodies that we may theoretically be able to visit at some time in the future, which are held somewhat together by gravitational forces which help to counteract the expansion of space. But anything outside of that local group will be expanding away from the group at greater than the speed of light.

Meaning, effectively, that the universe is going to be / is already separated out into small pockets of local neighbors, who will never be able to reach other local groups unless they invent some sort of much faster than light travel. The universe is very, very large, but the percentage of the universe that is physically reachable by us is quite small, no matter how many generations we spend on the journey.

Personally I find that to be one of the more disappointing true facts about the universe.

What do you mean, that’s a whole new potential customer market

I’ve been playing Phoenix Point recently, and while a lot of the game feels a little half baked in comparison with XCOM2, I have found that I really really like their trajectory based shots. Gone are the days of missing a 60% shot on a guy in no cover or missing a 90% shot with the barrel of your gun touching the ayy’s forehead. If they’re in the aiming circle they’re getting shot. On the other hand, getting them inside the circle is a bit more of a project, because shots will hit intervening cover. So you might only have half of an arm and some fingies visible past cover on your target, but if your guy has good aim you can still hit it.

Anyway, good game, I recommend it on sale if you’re an XCOM fan, I bought it at full listing price but I feel it’s probably not really worth that. It’s Julian Gollop (main creator of classic XCOM)'s response to the new-Xcom we got from Firaxis.

I first heard this song in between rounds watching my dad play Delta Force on his clan’s server sometime in the early 2000’s. Somebody had put it as one of the between-round songs for shitposting reasons and it became a running joke between them for a couple years after.

The only other place I’ve heard this song was 20 years later, in between my own rounds of Space Station 13. Somebody had put it as one of the between-round songs for shitposting reasons. Things change but they stay the same.

This is the fundamental difference between a privately owned and publicly traded company.

A privately owned company is likely still owned by the guy who started it or someone he’s directly involved with, who is still in it either just purely for the love of the game or because he genuinely wants to create a quality name that will live on beyond him.

A publicly traded company is owned by a school of rabid pirahnas that want to shake all the loose nickels out of it, and will pursue any self-destructive tendency if it generates a short-term return.

Rich folks who got that way by being real entrepreneurs generally tend to understand the value of hard work and personability. Rich folks who got that way by trading someone else’s value, don’t.

It’s a shame Kanye became… well, Kanye, because I used to use Feedback as my morning alarm for years. It was great, like it was made for it.

Ayy, ya heard about the good news?

Y’all sleeping on me, huh? Had a good snooze?

Wake up, n***a, wake up

We 'bout to get this paper

Complete with ear-piercing mic feedback noise.

I changed it back to a default alarm noise several years ago. Shame, that.

The cool thing that you don’t hate, up above, is a bunch of floppy drives and flatbed scanners. They also aren’t supposed to make tunes, but they do, and it’s cool.

This is me with Christmas. To this day I cannot get properly into the “holiday spirit” that seems so easy for everyone else.

Nowadays I also recognize the holiday season as the capitalist hellhole that it is, and that probably also plays a part. But I’ve been shy of the holidays for a lot longer than I’ve been economically aware.

Yep. My gaming group will come back and race DS1 speed runs every couple of years, we started calling this the Londo Shuffle. You can full tilt past every archer in the place with one brief pause for timing, and one brief pause to make the one guy on the balcony gravity himself.

GI,GO only matters if people actually stop buying your garbage. It’s becoming pretty overwhelmingly obvious that most people are going to continue buying the garbage no matter how garbage it is, therefore, this is technically cost effective.