Dark Souls Remastered: Why the Deprived is the best class for new players

 Welcome back, my beautiful freaks, to Sean's Workshop!

Once again, I know I'm late to the party, but I've been really into Dark Souls Remastered, and since there are people like me who are still picking up the game even now, I'm going to give my two cents on this. 

The Deprived is the best class for new players, in spite of what experienced players say. And there are a ton of good reasons for why this is true.  In fact, some of those reasons are why other players say this class is a "challenge for experienced players".

You cannot rely on armor.  Armor in Dark Souls Remastered is different than armor in the two games that come after. Yes, you gain defenses to physical, elemental and magical damage, but you're still going to take a lot of damage from anybody. The biggest thing about armor is poise, a stat that makes it less likely you're going to get staggered from enemy attacks. But on a first character, during the first 2-8 hours of the game (depending on how much you're dying), you don't want to rely on poise. You want to know how to block and roll, and the deprived offers opportunities to learn how to do both, since you have to do both.

Shields are important, but not all shields are created equal. The Deprived starts with the plank shield, a small shield. It has pretty good resistances to physical, ranged, elemental and magic damage, but it doesn't have 100% physical damage resistance, meaning you're going to take chip damage from oncoming melee hits from enemies. And even though you get a better shield in the Undead Burg early, you learn all you need to know about shields in a relatively safe environment, where you have abundant bonfires and estus available.

Weapons have wind up. The club is a good starting weapon; it has the third highest damage output for a starter weapon, with only the mace and battle ax doing more. And while it is relatively quick in attack, the club has start up lag that you need to account for. There are weapons faster than the club and there are weapons that are slower than the club, but the club give you what you need to make the decision of what kind of weapons you want in the future.

Keep on rolling. The Deprived is a class where you have to roll to survive, at least until you bet a better shield and some armor. Luckily, since its equip load is so low, the Deprived has the fastest roll in the game. This will get you through the Undead Asylum and part way through the Undead Burg until get your hands on the Hollow armor pieces. And if you return to the Undead Merchant (male) in the early areas of the Burg, you can buy some chain mail armor, both of which drop you down to a mid roll, which is the roll the game is built around. And if you're getting a fat roll, you need to either buff your endurance or take off heavy bits of armor, because a fat roll can get you killed.

Stats are for upgrades. And the biggest thing I like about the Deprived is that you are lacking in nothing. With 11s in all your stats at the start, you have access to 1 attunement slot and the intelligence and faith to use basic sorceries and miracles. You also have some good stats to start out with for strength, dexterity or quality builds, and a good amount of stamina and health to build upon. And resistances, the one stat nobody builds on, starts at a good level too. 

So yeah, the game starts out tougher for the Deprived, but before long, that difficult start doesn't matter for anything. My Deprived character, Rain, is about to head into Blight Town after finishing off the Depths, and I've built her into a low level quality/sorcery build. She's using a claymore, a long bow, and some weapon buffing sorceries as I build up her intelligence for higher tier stuff.

Rain the Deprived

Now, obviously I'm not an expert. But thanks to both walkthroughs and the lessons I've learned from playing Rain, I've gotten farther as the Deprived class than I've gotten with any other.

But for now, stay beautiful freaks, and don't you dare go Hollow!

Dark Souls Remastered: Why I like it despite not liking the hardest modes in games

 

Welcome back, my beautiful freaks, to Sean's Workshop!

Okay, so I know I'm late to the party. To quote CircletoonsHD, "I'm so late that it seems like I never got an invite to the party, showing up to Dark Souls' house a decade later with a party platter." But, as explained previously, I didn't have the hardware nor funds to play it.

But now that I've played it, I get the appeal. And unlike early adopters, I have access to a decade of information in the form of wikis and youtube walkthroughs and build ideas so I won't get lost and so I understand what to do and where to go.

Which is why I'm doing this entry and one major mission statement; Dark Souls Remastered is great and fair. Let me explain.

Dark Souls isn't hard. The rules of Dark Souls are different than most games. There's no such things as "invincibility frames", so things like rolling aren't used to avoid damage at the last second that games like Wind Waker and Devil May Cry allow. The combat is slow paced and everybody follows the same rules. Everyone has the same rules regarding wind up and attack, from the player character to the common enemies to all the bosses, everybody has the rules. You can parry, and you can be parried. You can backstab, and enemies can backstab. 

Dark Souls is built around its difficulty. There's no damage sponges in Dark Souls. Yes, bosses have greater health than you, as to higher "level" enemies. But everybody plays by the same rules regarding attacks and dodging. Even the most difficult bosses require you to fight the same way; blocking, dodging and striking, and then getting out of the way when they get ready to attack.

Dark Souls tells you how to play through the gameplay. Yes, there are a few tutorials in the early game that teach you the controls, as you'd expect from a modern game, but all the battles, all the boss fights, how to navigate the world, all taught through gameplay. For example, the Undead Asylum teach you how to fight human sized enemies and how to handle boss fights with the Asylum Demon. The Undead Burg teaches how to handle the ambushes and how to use items in battle, and the gargoyles teach you to handle fighting two bosses at once. Blight Town teaches you how to handle poison and toxic damage, and you're rounded out with a skill check with Ornstein and Smough. And if you can beat Ornstein and Smough, you're capable to handling the rest of the game. 

Dark Souls is robust in how it handles classes/builds. Now, yes, you have classes that determine how you start the game. The Warrior is a different experience than the Sorceror or Pyromancer in the beginning, but as you level up, you can build anything you want. Want a giant weapon wielding magic user? Go ahead. A katana wielding cleric? Done. The possibilities are endless.

That said, I ended up creating and abandoning several characters before I settled on the one for my first playthrough; a bandit with the master key that I intend to make a Giant Dad(yes, I'm going for the meme. Sue me, it looks fun!)

You can experience as much or as little of the story as possible. Dark Souls has a massive amount of lore, but very little of it is necessary to see. You get a goal at the beginning, to ring the bells of awakening and then go link the fire, but beyond that, all the story is in the item descriptions. You don't need to talk to anyone. But if you do? Well, there are entire youtube channels dedicated to the lore. My favorites are Vaatividya, The Ashen Hollow and the Silver Mont. 

And finally, a personal note; 

Dark Souls is a good allegory for living with depression.

This videos what actually made me interested in Dark Souls in the first place. Without rehashing the entire video, Dark Souls shows you how the whole world is against you and is dead set on destroying you. And speaking from experience with living with Bipolar Depression, I know how that feels like. Every failure feels like a quiet death, setting you back to where you started. 

And yet, you keep getting back up. You keep trying again, and again and again. You push forward, heading to the next bonfire, which is a small victory in and of itself, all so you can spend your souls and move forward stronger. You only go hollow if you give up. You build upon those who came before you, learn from their mistakes as well as yours, and gain strength from them lifting you up.

But we see those who succumb due to losing their purpose, their reason for going on. The Crestfallen Warrior, once you ring both bells of awakening, lost his purpose in mocking any undead who come through Firelink Shrine. Siegmeyer of Catarina loses his purpose when you save his life again and again, and goes hollow in Ash Lake, to be slain by his daughter. Vince and Nico of Thorolund go hollow when their ward, Reah, is trapped. Reah herself goes hollow when she teaches you all her miracles. Laurentius of the Great Swamp goes hollow if you show him Izalith Pyromancies and he can't find Quelana. 

All of these people show that, if you lose hope, lose your purpose, you lose yourself and die a little death. But if you don't lose hope in yourself, if you don't give up, you can succeed where others have failed. 

And that's what battling depression is; you keep fighting, or you lose a bit of yourself to darkness. And if you give up entirely, you "go hollow", not enjoying anything you did before, and even possibly contemplating taking your life. 

I've been hollow; I've had days in the past when I didn't know why I got up in the morning, when I just floated through my day, just going through the motions. But I did just that; I kept getting up. Kept moving through the day, looking for a purpose. Many of these blog entries were written when I was hollow, trying to find something, anything to make me feel whole again.

I still don't have a purpose today. But thanks to people carrying me when I was down and the efforts of my doctors, I'm no longer hollow. I've regained my humanity, as is the mechanic in Dark Souls. And like the mechanic where, the more humanity you have, the easier it is to find items, I see more opportunities ahead of me. I live knowing that sometimes, the quest for meaning is the quest to keep a man going.

So yeah, I love Dark Souls. It kicks my ass every time I boot it up, but does so in a way that is not cheap, and that every time I take damage, it's my fault. Just as a difficult game should be.

But for now, goodbye and stay beautiful freaks!