The thing is, there are two ways to do better damage: upgrading weapons and upgrading your stats, which in turn affect scaling. If you’ve used Drake Sword for this, good for you. That might be the boost you need to power through the outer gates, across the cathedral and making it to safety in the abandoned basement where you find Andre the blacksmith and a very useful bonfire.

And then end up trapped.īasically, an un-upgraded weapon like the Longsword (warrior starting weapon) or even the Uchigatana (available by killing an early merchant, something new players might hesitate to do) does around 100 damage at this point. Somehow every new player never ever touches a FAQ (”I’m not using a FAQ, I want to figure stuff out on my own”) and still manage to do the simple but very random act of striking the tail of the hellkite drake. At that point, a weapon that’s more than twice as powerful as your basic gear seems like a godsend, and almost like cheating. You can spend weeks slowly crawling towards the cathedral, possibly getting one stop closer with every death. The very first part of Dark Souls, getting through Undead Burg and Undead Parish, can be a tough challenge for complete newbies. But the greatest trap of them all is a weapon very easily accessible early in the game. The hellkite drake on the bridge, the first encounter with the asylum demon, the Anor Londo archers, the Sen’s Fortress elevator, well, pretty much the entirety of Sen’s Fortress. Dark Souls is filled with traps designed to kill noobs. ”I’m using Drake Sword, I’ve upgraded it twice.”

”I’m stuck in Sen’s Fortress/Anor Londo and I’m doing crappy damage!” However, for some peculiar reason the story is often the same. One of the great things about Dark Souls is how it’s constantly bringing in new players, and how the experience of following a new player through trials and death is almost (almost) as exciting as doing it for yourself. If you’ve ever struggled with the game for no apparent reason, you might have fallen into the most devious trap of them all. However, this is something that can’t be said enough. Dark Souls II is almost here and a guide to Dark Souls might be off by about two years or so.

Dark souls 1 dragon scale