@@zoey6186 I play all sorts of games, I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into exclusively dark souls 1 content. I do have a bias towards fromsoft games though.
If I remember correctly, there's only enough dragon scales in the entire base game to fully upgrade one weapon without farming. That means all hydras, undead dragons, and ash lake scales obtained.
This is true of most forms of titanite if you exclude the DLC. The primary differences between dragon scales and other forms of titanite are the location/number/strength of the enemies that drop them, their drop rate from those enemies, and the fact that you can't obtain them from crystal lizards.
@@ifmyfacewuzjello I guess I was counting the shops you could buy almost all of the upgrade mats from. Or at least the ones that matter. You'll almost never need anything more than a +10 weapon throughout most of the game and just upgrade as you get chunks, no need to farm. Dragon scales are just way too random across the map and if you want more than one weapon, you're screwed.
@@zacharyconrad2469 Right of course you can buy the standard titanite, twinkling, and green shards. The ability to buy twinkling titanite is one of the things that makes it such a solid option. Really the issue is that for every other kind of titanite there is an enemy that a normal player would encounter through the course of normal gameplay that drops it. The only sort-of exception to that is white chunks but most players will kill at least a few bone towers or little pinwheels and possibly get one to drop in normal gameplay. Pretty much no one ever kills the drakes in the valley of the drakes for any reason other than they know that they can get a scale from there and they're actively trying to. They're not like other enemies that obstruct your forward path through the game, they're tucked away in an area with almost nothing else going on and they're really threatening enemies. The long and short of it is I agree with you but for different reasons.
@@ifmyfacewuzjello also not everyone is going to find ash lake or valley of the drakes, or even kill both hydras or undead dragons. It's just a dumb way to lock a lackluster weapon type. Not to mention the grind for the dragon covenant.
I think it’s at least worth mentioning the crystal ember increases both scaling and base damage. If you use it on some weapons like the Demon’s Great axe it’s durability only gets reduced to 90 which, if you’re going to use exclusively on the remaining boss fights I think that amount is more than sufficient to finish and beat the game. But on weapons like washing pole, yeah not so bueno. I realize this is a pve tier list however, in PVP this thing instantly jumps up to SS due to the fact that you can create a backup save with the weapon at full durability and then just reload when it breaks. And then there’s the whole dropping mechanic where people can just come into your world and drop 99 crystal great clubs if they wanted( not that this should have an impact on its grade). All of this to say that it’s main weakness can easily be circumvented. Very cool bideo tho👍🏻
You're pretty much correct across the board. Obviously much stronger in PvP for reasons, but as far as using the weapons for bossfights and the such like that was mentioned in the video.
I saw a great farming method for dragon scales; run to tower where RTSR is from the cave bonfire, climb tower and let the drakes all come together at the base ...then do a plunge attack onto them ...bone back and repeat.
That would make it easier and less time consuming, but it would still probably take forever and you can't use rtsr for this because you'll die so an int build would still have a hard time with this. The drakes are pretty tanky so most builds wont be able to oneshot them with a single plunge.
How would you rank the infusions for PvP? I know you mentioned that this was a PvE tier list so how would the other infusions change based on that? For example I'm making a faith build with minimal str/dex for weapons i want to wield. I know SLB and DMB with +15 would be best in most cases but in the event I can't buff a weapon/don't want to would it be better to just have that +15 or an elemental weapon in my back pocket for those moments?
The best infusion for PvP tends to be the one with the highest AR which is usually Chaos. Magic enchanted lightning and divine are not extremely uncommon but they tend to be on the weaker side. Occult I have very little experience with. Generally speaking in pvp all the split damage weapons move down a notch. You can get a build that has 40 dex with only small cuts to other parts of the build if you want a functional pure physical weapon on a faith build usually but you do have to make some concessions.
@ifmyfacewuzjello Thanks for the response. I'm doing a little testing myself and I'm noticing the condition seems to be, buffs are stronger if you can use them, but infused weapons will be stronger if you can't/don't apply a buff. I did a brief test against the Sen's Fortress Man-Serpents. Unbuffed, my barbed ss did only about 55 damage a swing to them. Buffed with SLB it was about 250 a swing, this was all 1 handed. My alternate side arm is a divine hand axe. Which did around 130 a swing. This was done with 12 str/dex and 30 faith. I'm gonna do more tests as well with other infusions to see what nets me the most damage. All infusions generally have their place, Fire tends to be the most resisted damage type as the most meta Armor combos tend to offer higher fire defense. But with the trade-off that fire has higher AR. And lightning is the inverse, lightning defense tends to be lower across the board in PvP but lightning has lower AR than chaos. Infusions that give magic damage are a bit strange. They tend to compete with Chaos in terms of AR but lose a bit of physical AR in comparison. And the benefit is that much like lightning, it's defense tends to be lower than fire, but just not as low as lightning. However, Crown of dusk is also common in PvP which lowers magic defense even below lightning so it's a bit situational but magic type infusions can potentially do the most damage. But also the least if GMB is involved. But that's another thing entirely.
You mention it later on in your comment but its important obviously to note in testing that pvp resistances are vastly different to pve. Remember that physical resistance comes from base armor (from levels) armor that you wear AND humanity so low AR weapons lowered further by split damage will sometimes do much less than expected even if you set your sights low. Also divine's secondary damage type is magic so make sure you aren't hitting something that is abnormally weak to magic when youre testing damage. Usually best to just do the tests against another player. GMB is rare enough that you shouldnt worry too much about it although the existence of gmb makes sunlight blade more reliable overall.@@realmshifter9102
Getting dragon scales isn’t that bad. You only need one of them and invest 4.8 million souls in giant armors in Anor londo with the blacksmith (which mean getting 600 of them) to perform material duplication glitch. And getting 4.8 million souls isn’t that bad too : you just need to invest three thousand souls into wood arrows (to get 999 of them) and perform the consumable multiplication glitch that allows you to multiply the number of consumables you use in one go so you get exponentially more
Jokes aside, in the base game without glitches the dragon scales are easily one of the most obnoxious things especially for a melee build. If you include glitches it still doesn't move them up though because dragon weapons are pretty bad due to stat scaling.
Thanks for the tier list! I wish the embers were more balanced for the pve. I always new the raw upgrading is terrible. Also any interest in doing a tier list with shields? In pve I got an idea of what shields are useful but in pvp I'm clueless (mainly because I suck).
When I tried out a faith build I assumed it would be best to use divine weapons as they’d scale off faith, ended up doing like 75 damage a hit to the dlc bosses. Would you recommend instead that I just go down the normal physical upgrade path if I was to do it again, even if I never really take my strength/dex stats much beyond the what’s required for the weapon? I find a lot of guides are very confusing/not straightforward about what weapons to use and what best to doin regards to them.
The DLC bosses have exceptional non-physical resistances. For a build that is focused on faith you have two options depending on how much collecting you want to do. One is to just use a standard upgrade path +15 weapon and buff it with either sunlight blade or darkmoon blade for bosses. The other is to do the same thing but have a secondary weapon that is either chaos or lightning upgraded. Again, it depends on how much you want to invest into collecting resources. Faith scaling weapon upgrade paths tend not to be worth using because as mentioned in either this video or another magic resistance is a fairly common trait and doubly so for the dlc. I would highly recommend a standard upgrade path weapon with sunlight blade.
Split dmg weapons are good if you do not have good stat scaling eg. high vit, high endurance and minimum dex, and str for a weapon build in an NG walkthrough. RAW has the same dmg as normal+13 but lower scaling only use case is for early-mid NG when going for High end,vit, and minimum stats and you still do not have a large emblem. Likely will out damage normal+10 early game. Can be used for early weapons you will replace anyway. As you get higher NGs+ likely you will have more stats so at 40 points in DEX/STR "normal" path will likely be almost always/99% of the cases better AND can be buffed becoming MUCH better. NG+ and up to NG+6 get higher and higher defense enemies so split dmg will get worse and worse. Now there are a few exceptions like slimes in the depths that have 1500 Phys defense but less than 100 fire so split dmg has few niche uses- Holy is basically for the catacombs PVE best paired with high AR Blunt weapons as undead have a lower defense to blunt/strike dmg. So likely an Str weapon like a club. Usually Skeletons etc- have above-average thurst defense so many of those weapons will be very terrible with split dmg. Occult is against very few enemy types and even then questionable. Chaos is better to fire with high humanity and worse with low. Lighting can be good against lower lighting res enemies even if you have good stat dex, str stat scaling and more enemies are weak to lighting than fire. And very good with high fat, high end but minimum dex, str. Split dmg weapons benefit more from high AR and also using higher motion modifiers moves eg. two-handed attacks, and heavy attacks. As in the DS1 weapon motion modifier, basically multiplies AR so your Effective AR can more easily overcome enemy defenses. Sadly holy and likely occult only modifies final damage after the EAR-defence calculations are already done so if the enemy had 2 high defenses against your 2 dmg types that low dmg will get modified by 10-40% which is not that much. Imo dark souls 2 had the most balanced infusions and most of them scaled so all of them had use even in NG+. And as the video said DLC bosses all have very high elemental resistances so split dmg is almost fully useless. Crystal path: Only use is with high durability weapon used only against bosses. Likely can be useful in higher NG cycles so you can create more of them. I never used dragon path so will not comment.
I'll answer these in the order mentioned: Split damage weapons are mostly strong until you consider the DLC wherein they are absolutely terrible, like really really bad. Raw is bad, it takes so many large shards all those souls that you used to buy large shards could have been spent levelling up the few levels it takes to make normal upgrades better. Even base stats have the same effect as like one or two upgrade levels. This is generally agreed upon. Also generally agreed upon. The slimes aren't really capable of chasing you and if you're scared of them then firebombs or pyromancy are a worthwhile investment. The critical bonus to thrusting weapons usually is enough to offset the resistances of skeletons so as long as you backstab them it is hardly an issue, and with a thrusting weapon you are generally critting every enemy that you can. Divine weapons are generally not worth the time it takes to get them beyond the occult club being downgraded into a divine club if you really want one. This is true. Lightning is the best split damage type specifically because of how many enemies have low lightning resistance compared to the other elemental types. It is only occasionally better than +15 and when you consider all the enemies that you will be fighting +15 is better overall than lightning especially considering that it can be buffed. 2handing in dark souls 1 also gives you a bonus to strength and weapon AR though, the higher AR from having a lightning weapon usually doesn't offset the multiple resistance penalty. In addition to the fact that there are very few enemies that actually have holy or occult modifiers to begin with. Dark souls 2 infusions were kinda OP in my opinion but I didn't play too much of it so idrk. The DLC changes the entire tier list in a lot of ways, whether you consider it or not makes a huge difference. Crystal weapons are the best weapons in the game but only on a technicality. Dragon weapons are very expensive in a lot of ways, if you try them I think you'll agree.
When Shidieded alsoshidieded uploads a new Dark Souls tier list I know its gonna be a good day.
Let me know if there's anything you want to see a video on. Thanks for the encouragement!
@@ifmyfacewuzjello Are you only interested in doing DS1 videos or just fromsoftware games in general?
@@zoey6186 I play all sorts of games, I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into exclusively dark souls 1 content. I do have a bias towards fromsoft games though.
@@ifmyfacewuzjello I really liked the weapon tier list you did for DS1, maybe you could do a similar thing for DS2 or 3?
@@zoey6186 Ds2 is something I only played early on in its lifespan, same with ds3. But I know some people who I could get involved to make those.
Enjoyed the video man! If you’re looking for more tier list ideas then I think boss weapons would be pretty cool
And rings!
@@gabrielokeefe3695 I might actually do rings that seems alright
Another way to deal with crystal weapon repair issue is via duping glitch. Once a weapon is at risk, just switched to a duped copy.
While literally true it isn't exactly in the spirit of the game.
If I remember correctly, there's only enough dragon scales in the entire base game to fully upgrade one weapon without farming. That means all hydras, undead dragons, and ash lake scales obtained.
This is true of most forms of titanite if you exclude the DLC. The primary differences between dragon scales and other forms of titanite are the location/number/strength of the enemies that drop them, their drop rate from those enemies, and the fact that you can't obtain them from crystal lizards.
@@ifmyfacewuzjello I guess I was counting the shops you could buy almost all of the upgrade mats from. Or at least the ones that matter. You'll almost never need anything more than a +10 weapon throughout most of the game and just upgrade as you get chunks, no need to farm. Dragon scales are just way too random across the map and if you want more than one weapon, you're screwed.
@@zacharyconrad2469 Right of course you can buy the standard titanite, twinkling, and green shards. The ability to buy twinkling titanite is one of the things that makes it such a solid option. Really the issue is that for every other kind of titanite there is an enemy that a normal player would encounter through the course of normal gameplay that drops it. The only sort-of exception to that is white chunks but most players will kill at least a few bone towers or little pinwheels and possibly get one to drop in normal gameplay. Pretty much no one ever kills the drakes in the valley of the drakes for any reason other than they know that they can get a scale from there and they're actively trying to. They're not like other enemies that obstruct your forward path through the game, they're tucked away in an area with almost nothing else going on and they're really threatening enemies. The long and short of it is I agree with you but for different reasons.
@@ifmyfacewuzjello also not everyone is going to find ash lake or valley of the drakes, or even kill both hydras or undead dragons. It's just a dumb way to lock a lackluster weapon type. Not to mention the grind for the dragon covenant.
Which is also completely useless.
I think it’s at least worth mentioning the crystal ember increases both scaling and base damage. If you use it on some weapons like the Demon’s Great axe it’s durability only gets reduced to 90 which, if you’re going to use exclusively on the remaining boss fights I think that amount is more than sufficient to finish and beat the game. But on weapons like washing pole, yeah not so bueno. I realize this is a pve tier list however, in PVP this thing instantly jumps up to SS due to the fact that you can create a backup save with the weapon at full durability and then just reload when it breaks. And then there’s the whole dropping mechanic where people can just come into your world and drop 99 crystal great clubs if they wanted( not that this should have an impact on its grade). All of this to say that it’s main weakness can easily be circumvented. Very cool bideo tho👍🏻
And it can still be buffed with dmb lmao I get a hardon for the extra damage so I ALWAYS go crystal
You're pretty much correct across the board. Obviously much stronger in PvP for reasons, but as far as using the weapons for bossfights and the such like that was mentioned in the video.
@@ifmyfacewuzjello you can also use crystal weapons on PvE challenge runs, just savescum when you had a good bossfight
I saw a great farming method for dragon scales; run to tower where RTSR is from the cave bonfire, climb tower and let the drakes all come together at the base ...then do a plunge attack onto them ...bone back and repeat.
That would make it easier and less time consuming, but it would still probably take forever and you can't use rtsr for this because you'll die so an int build would still have a hard time with this. The drakes are pretty tanky so most builds wont be able to oneshot them with a single plunge.
How would you rank the infusions for PvP? I know you mentioned that this was a PvE tier list so how would the other infusions change based on that? For example I'm making a faith build with minimal str/dex for weapons i want to wield. I know SLB and DMB with +15 would be best in most cases but in the event I can't buff a weapon/don't want to would it be better to just have that +15 or an elemental weapon in my back pocket for those moments?
The best infusion for PvP tends to be the one with the highest AR which is usually Chaos. Magic enchanted lightning and divine are not extremely uncommon but they tend to be on the weaker side. Occult I have very little experience with. Generally speaking in pvp all the split damage weapons move down a notch. You can get a build that has 40 dex with only small cuts to other parts of the build if you want a functional pure physical weapon on a faith build usually but you do have to make some concessions.
@ifmyfacewuzjello Thanks for the response. I'm doing a little testing myself and I'm noticing the condition seems to be, buffs are stronger if you can use them, but infused weapons will be stronger if you can't/don't apply a buff. I did a brief test against the Sen's Fortress Man-Serpents. Unbuffed, my barbed ss did only about 55 damage a swing to them. Buffed with SLB it was about 250 a swing, this was all 1 handed. My alternate side arm is a divine hand axe. Which did around 130 a swing. This was done with 12 str/dex and 30 faith. I'm gonna do more tests as well with other infusions to see what nets me the most damage.
All infusions generally have their place, Fire tends to be the most resisted damage type as the most meta Armor combos tend to offer higher fire defense. But with the trade-off that fire has higher AR. And lightning is the inverse, lightning defense tends to be lower across the board in PvP but lightning has lower AR than chaos. Infusions that give magic damage are a bit strange. They tend to compete with Chaos in terms of AR but lose a bit of physical AR in comparison. And the benefit is that much like lightning, it's defense tends to be lower than fire, but just not as low as lightning. However, Crown of dusk is also common in PvP which lowers magic defense even below lightning so it's a bit situational but magic type infusions can potentially do the most damage. But also the least if GMB is involved. But that's another thing entirely.
You mention it later on in your comment but its important obviously to note in testing that pvp resistances are vastly different to pve. Remember that physical resistance comes from base armor (from levels) armor that you wear AND humanity so low AR weapons lowered further by split damage will sometimes do much less than expected even if you set your sights low. Also divine's secondary damage type is magic so make sure you aren't hitting something that is abnormally weak to magic when youre testing damage. Usually best to just do the tests against another player. GMB is rare enough that you shouldnt worry too much about it although the existence of gmb makes sunlight blade more reliable overall.@@realmshifter9102
Getting dragon scales isn’t that bad. You only need one of them and invest 4.8 million souls in giant armors in Anor londo with the blacksmith (which mean getting 600 of them) to perform material duplication glitch. And getting 4.8 million souls isn’t that bad too : you just need to invest three thousand souls into wood arrows (to get 999 of them) and perform the consumable multiplication glitch that allows you to multiply the number of consumables you use in one go so you get exponentially more
Jokes aside, in the base game without glitches the dragon scales are easily one of the most obnoxious things especially for a melee build. If you include glitches it still doesn't move them up though because dragon weapons are pretty bad due to stat scaling.
Can't you just dupe upgrade materials at andre's by buying 999 of a weapon? That's how I duped twinkling titanite on my glitched runs
@@calvin8464 yes but I used to play on the switch and it was easier
Thanks for the tier list! I wish the embers were more balanced for the pve. I always new the raw upgrading is terrible.
Also any interest in doing a tier list with shields? In pve I got an idea of what shields are useful but in pvp I'm clueless (mainly because I suck).
You want a PvP shields tier list? If so, I will make this.
@@ifmyfacewuzjello i would love to see a pvp shields tier list. i've re-listened to this video a couple times now (:
@@everyreverie3 Alright I'll make this
When I tried out a faith build I assumed it would be best to use divine weapons as they’d scale off faith, ended up doing like 75 damage a hit to the dlc bosses. Would you recommend instead that I just go down the normal physical upgrade path if I was to do it again, even if I never really take my strength/dex stats much beyond the what’s required for the weapon? I find a lot of guides are very confusing/not straightforward about what weapons to use and what best to doin regards to them.
The DLC bosses have exceptional non-physical resistances. For a build that is focused on faith you have two options depending on how much collecting you want to do. One is to just use a standard upgrade path +15 weapon and buff it with either sunlight blade or darkmoon blade for bosses. The other is to do the same thing but have a secondary weapon that is either chaos or lightning upgraded. Again, it depends on how much you want to invest into collecting resources. Faith scaling weapon upgrade paths tend not to be worth using because as mentioned in either this video or another magic resistance is a fairly common trait and doubly so for the dlc. I would highly recommend a standard upgrade path weapon with sunlight blade.
The you for explaining this
Split dmg weapons are good if you do not have good stat scaling eg. high vit, high endurance and minimum dex, and str for a weapon build in an NG walkthrough.
RAW has the same dmg as normal+13 but lower scaling only use case is for early-mid NG when going for High end,vit, and minimum stats and you still do not have a large emblem.
Likely will out damage normal+10 early game. Can be used for early weapons you will replace anyway.
As you get higher NGs+ likely you will have more stats so at 40 points in DEX/STR "normal" path will likely be almost always/99% of the cases better AND can be buffed becoming MUCH better.
NG+ and up to NG+6 get higher and higher defense enemies so split dmg will get worse and worse.
Now there are a few exceptions like slimes in the depths that have 1500 Phys defense but less than 100 fire so split dmg has few niche uses-
Holy is basically for the catacombs PVE best paired with high AR Blunt weapons as undead have a lower defense to blunt/strike dmg. So likely an Str weapon like a club. Usually Skeletons etc- have above-average thurst defense so many of those weapons will be very terrible with split dmg.
Occult is against very few enemy types and even then questionable.
Chaos is better to fire with high humanity and worse with low.
Lighting can be good against lower lighting res enemies even if you have good stat dex, str stat scaling and more enemies are weak to lighting than fire.
And very good with high fat, high end but minimum dex, str.
Split dmg weapons benefit more from high AR and also using higher motion modifiers moves eg. two-handed attacks, and heavy attacks.
As in the DS1 weapon motion modifier, basically multiplies AR so your Effective AR can more easily overcome enemy defenses.
Sadly holy and likely occult only modifies final damage after the EAR-defence calculations are already done so if the enemy had 2 high defenses against your 2 dmg types that low dmg will get modified by 10-40% which is not that much.
Imo dark souls 2 had the most balanced infusions and most of them scaled so all of them had use even in NG+.
And as the video said DLC bosses all have very high elemental resistances so split dmg is almost fully useless.
Crystal path: Only use is with high durability weapon used only against bosses. Likely can be useful in higher NG cycles so you can create more of them.
I never used dragon path so will not comment.
I'll answer these in the order mentioned:
Split damage weapons are mostly strong until you consider the DLC wherein they are absolutely terrible, like really really bad.
Raw is bad, it takes so many large shards all those souls that you used to buy large shards could have been spent levelling up the few levels it takes to make normal upgrades better. Even base stats have the same effect as like one or two upgrade levels.
This is generally agreed upon.
Also generally agreed upon.
The slimes aren't really capable of chasing you and if you're scared of them then firebombs or pyromancy are a worthwhile investment.
The critical bonus to thrusting weapons usually is enough to offset the resistances of skeletons so as long as you backstab them it is hardly an issue, and with a thrusting weapon you are generally critting every enemy that you can. Divine weapons are generally not worth the time it takes to get them beyond the occult club being downgraded into a divine club if you really want one.
This is true.
Lightning is the best split damage type specifically because of how many enemies have low lightning resistance compared to the other elemental types. It is only occasionally better than +15 and when you consider all the enemies that you will be fighting +15 is better overall than lightning especially considering that it can be buffed.
2handing in dark souls 1 also gives you a bonus to strength and weapon AR though, the higher AR from having a lightning weapon usually doesn't offset the multiple resistance penalty.
In addition to the fact that there are very few enemies that actually have holy or occult modifiers to begin with.
Dark souls 2 infusions were kinda OP in my opinion but I didn't play too much of it so idrk.
The DLC changes the entire tier list in a lot of ways, whether you consider it or not makes a huge difference.
Crystal weapons are the best weapons in the game but only on a technicality.
Dragon weapons are very expensive in a lot of ways, if you try them I think you'll agree.
im ur 69th like
im so proud