Playing Dark Souls for the first time in a while after I played it to death

ftfy, this build is fucking unbelievable.
I always did some form of faith build or strength build and I always went for midroll. Even with havel ring I'd be fucking myself because I always went with defense numbers and rule of cool. If you look at poise and only change equipment when it looks cooler or has better poise (Knight and Elite have exact same numbers, so obviously go all elite sans the chest piece, for example) you get this build that feels like you can't be punished for any dumb shit you do. Also if you pump health right along with endurance you get this safety net where since you can't run you have to get hit, but the hits will bounce off you, and the only point of the rest of the health bar is to give you magic pixel for the heal. I can only imagine this build with faith pump instead would be a monster with healing casts and other fun shit.

I would just go with whatever you like, whatever deals a lot of damage really fast. I've been using halberds and dabbling into greatswords because of stamina management, but overall halberds are doing me better with the fact that I have such low investments in either strength or dex. Go for weapons that look cool and deal high damage, that's always my motto. It was by pure luck I got the gargoyle halberd, and now it's probably going to carry me until I get to giant land. Killed Kellogs on my first try with this build and it was barely a problem, only partly was about to die due to her body explosion, but at 24 vit you can tank that shit I guess.
You just fucking trade, and then when you're done trading you continue to strike because you have stamina to keep rolling out punches.

even my armored core build was fucking EZPZ
you keep enemies at a distance, you wear heavy armor so you don't need a shield or rolls in general, upgrade a cross bow and you'll be doing greatsword tier damage at a range, level int and you'll be doing halberd damage at a range. The only skill involved is making sure you have good maneuvering at closer ranges so you can get back to out fighting, or have a good damage output that things getting close to you only buffs you up.

I too love playing against nothing but hackers.

Is this bait?

Just did a quick rough planning. It's basically going ham on VIT, END and STR with some DEX if I feel like picking up a halberd or UGS.
I like messing around with the big weapons but actually going through the game with those might be interesting. Heavy weapons are also a lot more fun in DaS1 as two-handing and heavy attacks make a world of difference, something that kept being narrowed down that by DaS3, it's borderline counterproductive to do anything but R1 spam.

nah man, don't do that autistic shit, just go. Start with knight and just even out your vit and end and go from there, make it happen. Become Giant.

Which one is better, though?
Havel, Giants or Stone?

Giant has best phys def in the game
I was shocked to see that the other heavy armors do not have very good poise at all comparatively

My entire life is a lie

Become
Giant

Become
Unstoppable

That was one of my least favorite things about that game, the only reason to two hand was if you didn't meet the STR requirement yet or the weapon had a two handed move that was better for crowd control. I don't know what they were thinking with that.

I'm surprised you made it *THAT* far

also this has nothing to do with poise but I just tanked a fucking hit from the sens fortress boulder ball and only lost maybe a quarter of my health. Big armor is so fucking good holy shit.

I'M FUCKING INVINCIBLE

I actually just remembered I did a NG+ heavy sorcerer build with all the leftover souls and shit I bought from making a LVL1 run first.
Medium-rolling with all maxed out Havels, maxed out moonlight greatsword, maxed Tin crystallization catalyst, 50 int and whatever the fuck else.
Not only was I FUCKING INVINCIBLE I could also fuck everything into submission with 2 spells.

This just in, havel ring is apparently fucking useless for this build early on because you're already fatrolling and with armor, a shield, and a side and main arm, so you have no use for that extra 30% in EL, and that slot can be taken up by a better ring, like a defense ring or a ring of great trades (Evil Eye)

You should update that to an armored core build, which is basically the same thing, but you have a cross bow and a dragonslayer bow for alternate and back options, and you do runs locked off instead of rolling.

Nice one.

Habeeb it.

Will Ringed City redeem STR builds like how Old Hunters did for ARC? I'll count not adding more broken DEX weapons as a 'yes'.

At least they're bringing that heavy armor that was found in the unused data and the interlocking greatshields from DaS2.

(Checked)
Fucking hate how the 0 Int one got popular when 1 Int flows better and still gets the point across.

But I've been plodding through DS1 (Offline due to fuck paying for 360's gold which might be dead actually). Building up my deprived has worked out well, three attunement slots, 15 int (thank god the Ivory Catalyst facilitating a decent Great Magic Weapon and fall control is so worth it), 31 Strength with a wasteful 18 Dex (pumped it for a Black Knight Weapon I didn't get, at least I'm using it to use the Black Bow for occasional shits and giggles). Could use a bit more End and Vit but I'm doing good with Stone chest and legs, with Havel's Gauntlets (for some reason I love the chain wrap) and Sack +6 (for weight). Rocking a +10 Great Club and Grass Crest, with the Fap Ring and Havel for walking about and Lingering if I use Great Magic Weapon and Power Within.

It let me crush Lautrec and spear asshole into paste, then smack O&S into oblivion first try (took three hits to kill Ornstein in stage one)

I like it, it's fun to just crush everyone in your way. There's the good ol' Zweihander you can pick up quickly and that can carry you till you find the Great Club (or grind out the infested Barbarians for the Large Club which trades a bit of damage for a sweep one handed which has it's uses).

I wouldn't put too much stock into the early Demon drops (You could go Thief with Black firebombs to get the Greathammer but have to deal with being super weak for a Strength build start, or farm humanity before you fight Taurus). The Dragon Tooth has a small amount of scaling but requires huge amounts of souls to upgrade something that will be on par with a Great Club. Smough's at least offers the best health steal and realistically you're only gonna get to the soft cap for strength to two hand it.

Where the fuck did you get that Giant poise number?

Took me ages but I found that thing goes really well with the Black Sorcerer Cloak and Oswald's manchette/pants, like you're some Jack the Ripper type.

Yeah, I'll likely use those for NG and maybe start with a Reinforced Club because those things are stupidly strong early on and then kill two rocks with one bird by using it to make Smough's hammer.

Side note, was looking at some DaS3 unused content stuff and apparently dataminers spilled the beans on the next DLC. Now, all this could be bullshit but the numbers are:
Areas: 4
Bosses: 4
Weapons: 10+
Spells: 10+
Armor sets: 7+
Average play time: 8-10h

I got the number from the fextralife, mayne.

Upon further inspection it seems that havel does have the better poise, but I will look for if the poise ranks up at all when I try to upgrade it.
Spoiler warning: it doesn't, the wiki lied to me.

sage because I forgot to sage last time, even though that's not really how it works anyway. On my pursuit of Super Poise-man I realized that because of my low stat investments other than poise related, lightning refinement is my best option at this point in the game. I looked at the numbers and it took me from 200~ +74 to 207 phys and 207 lightning, meaning I essentially doubled my output this way. Halberd is probably the best route I could have gone because I get the range and damage over greatswords and spears respectively, keeping that nice speed too. And because my poise is being tied completely to my armor and not my attacks, the speed allows me to make up for what little damage I lose by not being fully strength based. I think no shield and high poise might be the best way to play any souls game, but then again, 2 and 3 are kinda broken in that regard. Kinda weird how fast you get all of the heavy armor so early in the game, this is basically stage three that you are given the highest poise numbers.

I think it goes well with the stone set, almost like a psychotic druid (Pyromancer hood for everyday Druid). Though I think since I have fap and Havel's equipped I'll see if I can rock Golem's helmet, I think it works well.

Also I'd say to not bother with the reinforced club since you can just run and grab the Zwei, pump Strength up to 16 (not that hard unless you go thief so you can use Black Fire bombs to get the hammer in which case you'll still want to dump into Strength regardless). Just grind souls and upgrade the morning star you get for free to +10 to ascend it to Smough's Hammer.

There's no need to go TOO crazy with poise. You'll need 81 if you plan of eating a great fireball, but >76 to eat the great weapons. That's all easy enough to get with the later armor's (and depending on how big your balls are you can go get the stone set after saving up enough souls to buy the Crest fairly early. Shit pays for itself anyways.) Before you get those you can just supplement whatever you got with the wolf ring.

You don't need to eat a combo, just one and then break their poise with a heavy weapon.

my quest for poise ended when I got the havel set. My quest now is to see the extent of endurance and vitality and to see how that fares when I'm unmoved.
I always get the stone set really early and then I get the havel and giant shit right after, but I usually midroll so it's left mostly to the wayside. I realize now that havel's shit is great for being the rock.
you don't, but when you can't move you're going to take one hit, and that at least creates an opening that I can use to wail on anything.

Torn between a pyro run or doing a Black Iron Tarkus or Havel cosplay the next time I play DS.

I've never played this series, what is poise exactly? Is it combat stances?

Poise is essentially your defense against being staggered/stunned. Higher poise means you can move and attack much more before being stunned. It comes at the cost of wearing heavy armour though.

They removed this in DS3.

Poise is a measure of how much damage you can take before having your actions interrupted. Strength based characters rely on this because their weapons are often slow, so they need to be able to take a few hits until they can get an attack out.

Poise lets you take hits without flinching, so you can take a big smack from the blackest dick and you won't move, while also being able to continue your own animations like attacking. As you get hit your poise decreases until your poise is broken, but it refills back after it's broken or a couple of seconds of not being hit. This is all an invisible numbers game though, I wish there was a mod to add a poise meter that decreased and increased accordingly.

get a load of this fucken NOOB

I feel like shit, but I also feel like I wouldn't have done it without that.

Havel is pretty good, if a bit overkill. You could perhaps dick around with Stone or Giant to get a medium roll if you're lacking a few endurance points. I'd say keep poise around 100, nice amount of wiggle room for getting smacked and if you got a medium roll, you're golden.

And eating a combo I meant a 3 hits in a row. Anyone who attacks is going to roll away from you while you swing. They'll either try to go in and you'll get them with a follow up swing before they can hit you, or your poise will refill.

I was once like this, a babe requiring something to fall back onto. The fatroll has so little I-frames that unless I git gud I will fucking die when I try to roll. Mid-rolls have so little downsides you become too attached to them and start rolling out of everything. Worse than blocking in my opinion, but both of those things are pale before taking the brunt of every attack head on.
nigger I'm playing my pirated version, you think I'm going to deal with backstabbers and cowards? DS1 has probably the worst netcode of the three.

Is this min-maxed enough to do a poise build?
mmdks.com/8kax

why can't you niggers just have fun and do whatever feels good

I've done that over 10 times.

but min-maxing is fun

With 1.5k HP all a build would need is 77 poise to tank one hit from you and you die in the meantime.

My Township duelist would smoke that easily. (Old gear is in picture I managed to get it up to being able to poise 1 twohanded hit with ultra weapons and increase the health a lot).

To be honest I'm a natural min-maxer. It just comes natural to me. In fact I often have to go out of the way to not min-max.

DS games are infested with hackers, the best competition or cool matches you'll get is planning it out.

Citation needed, last I heard the PS3 emu barely works much less something that can run BB.

Because he is a literal fucking nigger and has to feel big and tough around whites.

DaS3 artbook is being released in Japan at the end of this month.

amazon.co.jp/DARK-SOULS-III-DESIGN-WORKS/dp/4047331945

Bumping again, trashed new london with my heavy halberd knight, I love this character so much.