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It's 2025 and we re still talking about something like Ds2 adp... And wonky hit boxes, don't forget those.

Is the voice tts?

I just remember ds2 having horrible weapon durability. Like I remember needing two weapons to make it to the next bonfire at all times lol

Great explanation.

"I hate ds2 it's so clunky and slow" Or maybe you just have extremely bad habits?

This channel is a hidden gem!!!

8:54 The options for someone giving out advice is short (to level ADP to get agility for I-frames), or you give an at length break down on how agility functions and the best ADP/ATTN combination for their desired breakpoint. You can't really say just use a combination of the two until you hit it either because Attunement has it's own breakpoints you want to pay attention to. I think Attunement was at it's best in DS2, it also providing agility was just a bonus so you don't have to put as much into ADP. Personally when I replayed the game I kept a tab with all the combinations of ADP and Attunement to hit certain breakpoints and cross referenced it with the wiki for Attunement breakpoints for extra casts. It's a bit much to just drop on a player who's issue is most likely they just want a roll similar in I-frames to DS1.

I Just ignore it cos ita never a requirrment for enithing , mas i like max variety when playing. Só i spread my stats , inknoenits notnoptimal

Im sorry but that pursuer attack is still bs

27:39 thats rather stupid, as i am literally guts

Bandit sucks

very cool video

Thanks, this is just what I was looking for!!!

Bro, I thought Adaptability was the most controversial-- no, other Theos, everybody already knows that one is the worst mechanic.

*Attunement* affects rolling? WHY FROM!?

The additional information helps, but the fact that it needs an entire video of content to be able to fully explain it with very, very little available in-game - and after this much time has passed since the game’s release - illustrates how bad of an idea agility was. As is “it does a ton of things that are almost entirely useless - oh, and also this one thing that is nearly vital.” Unfortunately, saying “the other Souls games have janky grabs too” doesn’t mean DS2’s are any better. FromSoft is known for having poorly designed grab animations across its games. That doesn’t make 2’s somehow immune to criticism. Moreover, “you can see that the hitbox is nicely aligned with the sword” rings pretty hollow when, in the video where the player gets hit by the Pursuer, the hitbox is very much not aligned in the frame that hits the player.

I now have a higher appreciation for agility then before. Didn't hate the stat but was indifferent, seeing all the little ways it contributes was fun and the video reminded me I need a little more agility on my current character. Forgot the break point was 92 not 90!

That pursuer stab at the beginning 😂 bro every time some bs like that happens I have to convince myself It was me imagining things and not the game being jank to maintain my resolve. Otherwise the local Walmart is making big profit on controllers

.

You can backstab dragonrider?! 😧

The entire Pursuer section can be summed up as Git Gud XD

this is why i prefer sprinting & strafing (no lock on) than dodging, and so makes ds2 and ds2:2(er) more bearable

I need to check my characters stats now to see what I did. Because I never had problems with hitboxes and dodges with exception of two bosses

I gave DS2 a lot of shit for years because the first thing that happened to me when I first tried it was being "teleported into" the ogre's grab in the tutorial area (the one that protects the ring). At that point, DS2 was already infamous as "the worst Souls game", so I just saw that infamy as confirmed with that. When I actually gave the game a fair chance in 2023 and knew about the AGI breakpoints (as well as the technical reasons for the janky grab visuals), it went a lot better. I do think AGI and ADP were flawed concepts because they were communicated terribly ingame (the description is about as useful as Luck in many other games, ala "Affects many things"). And even once you actually know what the stats do, that isn't much better. Like, in the Pursuer clip: Without the technical breakdown and the hitbox viewer, how do you as a player in the moment learn from this? It could be that the "hitbox is just broken" (I know it isn't but let's assume a player without that knowledge), it could be that they just mistimed their roll OR they could assume their ADP stat just wasn't high enough. In my mind, unless you know the exact i-frames and what you are usually capable of (from using i-frames in other games, like DS1, 3 or in my case Monster Hunter), you can end up building distrust in the game's function, because a usual constant just got made into a variable. That's how it was for me at least - which is why I had so much more fun with the game coming back in 2023.

Using the Bandit Axe it's worth going up to being able to 1H it eventually because of the 1H moveset having deceptively long range and a quick vertical hit.

Equip load affecting stamina regen is also why the Blossom Kite Shield is a trap. The weight offsets its stamina regen effect unless you're under 25% with it on.

Can I translate this video and post it to a Chinese website called Bilibili to make it accesable for Chinese people? It will be marked as reproduced with original link provided. Many DS2 players in China still know nothing about AGL.

This helped so much, thank you for the explanations.

In an alternate reality where agility was implemented better it would have been a part of every souls game. Honestly as much as people swoon over naked, lvl 1 hitless challenge runners, it really isn’t great design when a single mechanic can invalidate all other aspects of the game without any investment.

Can someone with hitbox visualizer help me with a question - does Fume Knight, in their second phase, still have hitboxes where his other sword used to be? Mainly because it feels like a lot of his big swings still hit behind his hands.

Love the video but video games should be this convulated whatsoever

THANK YOU!

the most comprehensive and calm "skill issue" i've ever seen delivered, its nice to see some retribution for the years of hate against ds2s mechanics

This is a bit disingenuous. For starters, you still gain s past 99 agility. Secondly, you claim the hitbox is nicely alinged, while showing that the hitbox is significantly larger than the sword. That is objectively a bad hitbox. There are plenty of instances and even videos in which there isn't a single frame of animation where the sword makes contact with the player model, even the tips of their feet. On top of that, "clipping your feet" is not something that should be happening with a dodge roll animation. The good Souls games all have dodge animations that are visually very clear to the player where their hitbox is, because the player model is neatly tucked into a ball during the roll. In Dark Souls 2, they pursued realism over good gameplay, so the roll animation was motion captured, leading to an animation where your feet stick out significantly behind your body during rolls. Since Dark Souls games lack locational damage, this means you take full, often lethal damage from attacks that never connected with you in a way that's reasonably visible to a human being in real time. This happens occasionally in other titles, but those are outliers while in DS2 it is a common occurrence. In well designed games, certain parts of a character model will be given intangibility in animations like that, so as to match what humans are able to perceive reasonably. The fact that you need slowed down footage with a hitbox visualizer is proof of this. This exacerbates the issue, because the oversized hurtbox of the grab attack compounds the visually unclear and poorly designed roll hitboxes. Further, you claim that avoiding attacks is panic rolling. Panic rolling refers to spamming rolls repeatedly when being attacked repeatedly, noto attempting to use a dodge roll intuitively. A dodge roll should not function like royal guard, especially in a game without a just dodge mechanic. The purpose of a dodge is to quickly get you out of danger. The intuitive way to do this is to dodge away from an attack, not directly into their attack or in an attempt to phase through their model. Rolling "early" is only a problem becauze enemies don't properly commit to attacks, and have an invisible lazy susan beneath their feet that allows them to rotate mid-swing. The fact that you unironically are telling people "the dodge is well designed because you're intended to literally throw yourself into a giant sword swing right as it's about to hit you" tells me that you're arguing in bad faith instead of trying to be fair to people who correctly deduced that Dark Souls 2 roll mechanics are bad. You're not telling people why the mechanics are good, you're telling them how to properly cope with bad mechanics. Speaking of which, the fact that this video needs to exist in order for people to know how their basic dodge functions, due to agility being completely unexplained in the game or manual, and still didn't even correctly identify all the break points should tell you what the problem with adaptability is. Nevermind that even were it properly communicated to the player, it still serves no purpose beyond being the "dump points into this to unlock dodging" stat as sprinting or strafing are almost always better than dodging prior to the 9X breakpoints. Dodge rolling already received significant nerfs due to the changes to roll mechanics and endurance splitting; agility was a redundant mechanic that brings nothing positive to the game. Overall, the info you present is good, but the framing is a disingenuous attempt at disguising apologia for poor game design.

ATTUNEMENT? man i defend this game a lot but come ON

Vindication for hating adapt

The video was very interesting but talking about the Pursuer grab it just felt like you had to bring up that the player was bad every few sentances, if it was me in the clip I'd be mortified XD

Really cool and informative video! Thank you for the clear and concise explanation. I wouldn't call agility's other function "useless" though, more like bonuses. Also I think the biggest thing I took away from this is that there wouldn't be a problem with that interaction if the attack wasnt paired with a grab. If the player had just taken damage normally then it would be so much easier to see and accept that they just rolled way too soon.

Ds2 is currently my first souls-like, I've made good progress through the main game and my agility has been at 90 (I think) since I started the game. Haven't touched adaptability nor attunement and I don't feel that I've been missing out on anything in particular

Never learned how AGL works because I never googled it or asked anyone, just played the game for 300 hours. Its my fave in the series. Y'all wouldn't be so mad if you didn't insist on learning everything about the games you play from google instead of just vibing it out.

Understanding how animation queues work certainly helps me understand the situation better, and I'm glad we can empirically decent DS2 since it was the first game in the series I played and the one I've been wanting to revisit the most recently. But I've seen Fume Knight's hit boxes, and they are absurdly out of scale even when taking his particle and flame effects into account. He's the biggest exception to this defense.

This comment section is a fucking circus. People with actually no eveidence beyond “trust me bro” or “fromsoft intended” and then saying some goofy-ass shit and expect to be taken seriously. If you want to actually know that you’re taking about, open up the games parameters and figure out how to read the info. Until then, sit down shut up and actually learn. Jesus christ

AGL also affects parry timing

The music coming in after the first Pursuer goes down. Yes.

For the record, having AGI set to specific values when stats are below or above the proper amount mathematically is NOT an oversight on FromSoft's part. This is intentional as a way to prevent issues that could potentially occur if a players stats were to somehow become below or above the "recommended" stats. I.e. if any AGI value below 85 were allowed, there is a possibility a player would have an awful experience with, say, 2 I l-Frames instead of the default 7. There is even a possibility some type of glitch resulting in a negatuve stat value could softlock a character entirely and they wanted to prevent that. This is just a simple boundary set in the code to prevent any possible issues, not bad math.

I have to disagree with your saying that backstep i-frames don't matter, though this entirely depends on if your playing mainly PvE or PvP. In PvE it doesn't matter much because there isn't any latency (unless your in co-op) so every animation and attack should remain consistent so finding places where you can back step consistently isn't too bad. Whereas in PvP latency can really throw those timings off so any extra i-frames you can get can really make the difference. I personally would often make builds with 108 AGL just to meet a higher backstep i-frame breakpoint for that reason. Its also important to know that in DS2 backstep parrying someone who was R1 spamming was a fairly regular occurrence so being able to somewhat reliably backstep through an attack mattered quite a bit.

In that pursuer example, i do see with the hitbox visualizer how the player did get hit, but I can't blame people for thinking its an unfair hotbox due to how they decided to play the animations. Ideally the moment the non-invincible player gets hit by the sword, their current animation would be interrupted by the grab animation to make it clear that's the moment they got hit.

Extra i-frames on backsteps are not useless for PvP.

dks2 is still my favorite of the trilogy. i always thought people's complaints about key features meant that they lacked critical information about how such features work. i can see now that even i in my hundreds of hours didn't know the full inner workings of agl. i always took myself to 105 or 110 agl by the end of my build, as it really helped in pvp to have the extra frames. i also liked the clean multiple of 5. but in pve, i always found my self circle strafing around attacks because i learned the blind spots for enemy hitboxes. you showing the active hitbox for pursuer makes this abundantly clear. while i still agree that having a stat that you have to level in order to get a comparable i-frame data to the other fromsoft games was a poor decision, i do think they could've leaned into this sort of thing at the top end. like, what if they didn't make a stat whose main function is i-frames, but instead tacked it on for heavy investment. what if they had a souls game with the standard 11 frames, but with every 10 points of luck giving an extra i-frame (up to some hard cap). it would fit the theme of luck, as dodging an attack is considered lucky, as well as dodging attacks being a core to thief-type builds, who tend to want a decent luck stat for their status buildups.

I had no idea this was a stat at all, so this was very informative.