Very late here, but Dark Souls II has two different stagger mechanic, and something like... 5 different "Hyper Armor" events. Dark Souls II was the first game to introduce the posture system, later featured in Sekiro. There is an hidden meter that, when depleted, puts the character in the guard broken state, where a critical attack can be performed. Most enemies have absurd values of Posture, Hollow Infranty (the first enemy you see in the Forest of Fallen Giant) has 4400 Posture and regens 2,2 posture per second. Plus, your attacks deal an average of 5 posture damage per hit. Basically unusuable against normal enemies. Bosses however use Posture as their default stagger mechanic, while having persistent Super Armor (which prevents Poise stagger OR poise damage, depending on the Super Armor event type). As for Armor events, they are all triggered by TimeAct, FromSoftware's proprietary animation metadata format (what is usually referred to as "frame data"). There is event 110500, "Super Armor", which disables Poise stagger, 110210 which disables Poise damage (and as a result, Poise stagger lol), 110600, "Ultra Armor" (shitty name I came up with in my Discord for the memes but was accepted by the PvP community, what to say) which disables Posture stagger and 111900, "Hyper Armor", which changes the poise damage multiplier from 1 to a value that depends on the specific weapon that enabled this event. Hyper Armor basically reduces poise damage by a certain percentage. Some attacks can have a property, commonly referred to as "Hyper Stagger" which will always stagger regardless of poise. Does not get through armor events as far as I am aware though, but I haven't run extensive tests on this.
I wonder if anyone can explain to me how poise in DS2 works I can have 40 poise with the giant’s ring and still get staggered wit one straight sword attack, even in the middle of a heavy attack from an ultra great sword Is it due to them having the stone ring? I thought in DS2, hyper armor existed when using heavy attack with certain classes of huge weapons On my end, I usually always stagger people (between characters I PVP on, I am SM 400k-1M) THe only time I dont stagger is if I use a small halberd or rapier on someone in heavy armor (and I assume the giant’s ring too) while I did have the stone ring on
@@aceclover758 Poise in DS2 works like poise in DS1, and hyper armor just reduces poise damage taken. If the poise damage amount is high enough though you are still going to get staggered. Stone ring helps a lot with that.
I like how the 3 spells that deal 130 poise are Sunlight Spear, Chaos Storm, and Great Gravelord Sword Dance. It’s like they chose attacks representing Gwyn, Witch of Izalith, and Nito on purpose.
It's interesting how the developers have tried for years to encourage players to wear complete sets (not necessarily from the _same_ set, mind), rather than being partially naked. All in very subtle ways. In DS1, it's by multiplying poise regen the more clothing you wear. In Bloodborne and DS3, it's by just giving you more defense for having a complete set.
@@MatthewTheUntitled The person you're responding to is correct. Every piece of poise-granting armor you equip shortens the length of your regen timer by 10%, allowing the player character and some NPCs to get their poise refilled in roughly 3.28 seconds at the fastest, instead of the full 5 seconds. This effect of armor on the regen timer is shown in the video, and you'll find it in the parameters under corectSArecover.
I kinda wish they used poison and bleed in a similar way. It always boiled down to exposure time more than actually stacking the effect because of the countdown effect.
@@thehuckleberry8349Yeah, if you're good at quickly moving though the game, sometimes it's better to start a new game than continue to try the four kings with a shit build.
There is something so funny seeing all these buffed characters and creatures and even lord Gwynd himself competing for a spot in the poise category and then there's Gwyndolin next to them, just existing
Definitely noticing some sense of humor beginning to seep its way into this series. Can’t say I would have missed it if it weren’t there, but I kind of like the levity. Makes it easier to digest all this juicy, juicy knowledge.
The balder knights are actually geniuses because they take advantage of their lack of poise to parry you. Because you know they will stagger at every hit, some players would resort to spam, and that's a free riposte there.
I also think they weren’t given poise to make beginning of game easier For me, the game started to get harder in terms of enemy combat when they had high poise
The Spear Demons in Anor Londo have a similar tactic, where they get easily staggered, but after recovering they will often jump back and attack with their spear so you can't reach them. In fact, the best way to deal with them is waiting for them to recover from their staggering and then attack to stagger again, preventing them from doing basically anything.
@@aceclover758 It definately makes a difference. Balder Knights are a much more forgiving knight type compared to Lothric knights. And 90% of that is the lack of poise.
@@1911odisea Metal is technically just a specific type of stone. Gargoyles are also not made entirely of stone, as evidenced by their wings and muscles, and the fact they can fly, as well as the fact that equipping their tail builds all three statuses.
@@ootdega Metal shares almost no properties with stone. The gargoyles *are* made entirely of animated stone, the muscles are carved and the wings are magical. It's arguable that they have Titanite cores or are infused with Titanite somehow to make them animated, but that's not conveyed by their model as far as I can see.
I seen "Dark Souls" poise and was like "sweet! he's gonna talk about poise in all the Souls games." Then realized it was all about DS1. Not disappointed, because I know there's a lot of great stuff to talk about. But yea, I can't hide that I was also just as excited to learn about Poise from all the games :)
I contemplated doing a comparison video like that, but then realized how deep I wanted to go into DS1 and backed off. Hopefully the overview towards the beginning satisfies that itch a little, and then of course there's the opportunity to do more episodes for the other games. :)
@@illusorywall Love the video, can't wait for you to potentially one day break down how it works in the two sequels, and of course Elden Ring, eventually. Keep em coming!
Maybe you can do that video after elden ring. Comparing the systems from all games, assuming it's not super weird and the community has the elden ring system figured out quickly
@Captain_Morgan you can get backstabbed by basically just walking, and since most people just equip oneshot weapons it becames dumb, that’s why when i get invaded i just roll of to a cliff no mather what if is to avoid to deal with that
Ds2 poise is more natural I think. It's passive as well as in ds1 but you're getting a slowdown if you hit anyway Plus if you swing giant ass weapon it reduces poise damage you take by half
So my takeaway from this video is that I should find Iron Flesh before going up the stairs in the Undead Asylum in order to mitigate against the rolling boulder.
For any who might be wondering about the weirdness with poise damage multipliers (mentioned at 34:58), this bug most likely stems from the way decimal numbers are stored in binary. Without getting into the specifics too much, most modern programs store decimal numbers in a format called floating point, which, instead of storing the numbers like a normal integer, stores whether the number is positive or negative, a fraction, and an exponent to raise that fraction to. This format gives floating point numbers a wide range of possible values, but can, in some cases, introduce very tiny inaccuracies. For example, when adding 0.1 + 1.1, instead of getting 1.2 like expected, I got 1.2000000000000002, which is technically incorrect, but in most applications, an error small enough to ignore. However, in the case of Dark Souls testing if the running attack's poise damage meets or exceeds 32, because the number needs to be exactly enough and no less, the minuscule inaccuracy is enough to make the poise damage come up short.
The "Poise Damage and Safe Points" chapter sounds like it took some ridiculous testing and work, and that was after you elucidated basically every enemy's poise health. Dude, hats off, this video is a goldmine.
I really appreciate the primer on how the community's understanding of 'poise vs hyper armour' is not something that fully lines up with the games and developers. I remember shortly after dark souls 3 came out and some people who tinkered with cheat engine came to the r/iamverysmart conclusion that 'the devs are so incompetent they forgot to turn on poise' because its implementation didn't line up with their expectations from previous games.
Oh totally. We learned nothing, collectively, from the launch of Dark Souls 2. 😅 But I think we've *finally* taken the hint and will be more open-minded if it winds up being something like hyper armor again in the future. Or at the least hopefully this video will help with that.
From this video it seems that DS3’s poise was Demon’s Souls’ system, but with a variable for how much you could tank while swinging. This is in line with how DS3 overall feels like an attempt to bring back and refine Demon’s Souls mechanics (FP, the overall pace, the binary HP difference between the post-boss kill and post-death forms, the separate level up area). Granted, some of that was in DS2, but not in as complete a way as DS3. Given that anyone who played Dark Souls on Xbox or PC and who didn't have a PS3 likely didn't play Demon's Souls, I'm not surprised that the response was so vitriolic, as it was an unfamiliar throwback. I mean, it didn't help assuage the resentment of DS1 purists that Bloodborne had just come out, also took the pace up a few notches (even compared to Demon's Souls) and brought back the separate level hub, and had a bunch of people who wanted to play it but couldn't, and so wanted to use DS3 as a proxy (to wit, look at the sheer number of mods that incorporate Bloodborne weapons and movement mechanics). I kinda figure it's a fool's hope that Elden Ring will solve this, given the response to backstabs being adjusted, my only real hope is that enough people take one look at the screaming and go "eh, I'm just gonna play the game, it's neat" that they don't have a lasting impact on the perception of the game.
Tbf theyre not iamverysmart, theyre just giving benefit of a doubt that fromsoft was accidentally incompetent rather than intentionally retarded. When everything is filled with fast-twitch rollcatching cherry tapping bloodborne bullshit, what we want is passive poise, not selective hyper armor that only works with some armors + weapon movesets.
The game design of the original Dark Souls is such a wonder to me. Such a masterpiece of an RPG. Played Dark Souls 2 all the way through, and a little bit of Dark Souls 3 but neither really catpured or delighted me as much as 1 did. Something magical about it that is tough to describe, but these breakdowns do such a brilliant job of demystifying some of those elements.
Mention of DkS1's intuitive poise reminds me that the Zwei carried me through PvE hard because everything was split between "staggers for followup kill" or "I'm going to die if I miss" lol
I always would stagger Artorias by throwing knives at his face while he powered up. lol Great content as always, Illusory Wall! I hope we get to see something similar on Dark Souls II & III in the future!
Great video, man! One thing that surprised me when playing is that sometimes it's better to have less poise. Fighting Sif with heavy armor, his circle sweep attack only staggers you and doesn't throw you back, making it so you can get hurt twice. If you wear lighter armor, you'll take some more damage form the first hit but then get i-frames as you're floored.
The bed of chaos works the same way Too much poise and instead of her arm swipes immediately flinging you, they just stagger you, so the 2nd arm swipe can hit you and kill you
another really interesting video !! i hope you've a video on gravelording planned. as the probably most obscure and weird mechanic in the entire game, it'd be really interesting to finally find out how that works!
This brings me so much joy. I’ve been doing a dark souls 1 play through and I’ve already been watching this series along with it. Perfect timing IllusoryWall, love your videos man edit: I just can’t believe the systems in this game. Good job this is amazing stuff edit 2: I like the poise in DKS1 because of how consistent it is. I’ve found that in pvp you can counter most things if you just play smart and slow. I think backstabs are not great but it is nice to have an ability to punish enemies when they make mistakes. I find that in Bloodborne for example it’s very hard to punish in pvp even when an enemy should be open enough for some kind of large attack. In my years of playing dark souls 1 I have definitely started to prefer very low or zero poise builds. Toggling is a very useful strategy in pve and pvp and will change your experience. I think a few big changes would need to happen to fully fix the pvp in DKS1: capping poise around 50-60, removing the hornet ring, and making backstabs slightly harder to land. Even then I have always enjoyed the gameplay and pvp in DKS1 so it’s just a dream. Also just as a side note: IllusoryWall was not joking about kicking. It’s a very useful tool in pvp and pve
The idea that toggle escaping is an intentional mechanic is very interesting and I'll be curious to hear more about it whenever you cover it. My understanding was that toggling simply has a higher priority than certain other actions (rolling, stagger, etc) and therefore finds itself at the front of the queue if two actions are both queued up in the same window -- the same process that leads to stuff like halberd running R1s being interrupted by deep water, or backstabs interrupting the parry animation to get a guaranteed wakeup hit, which I think are much more obviously unintended. Is there something in the code or in the debug menu that makes you think toggle escaping was a design decision and not just a consequence of how the action queue works?
Even if there is an actual DS developer saying it was "intended", I will hardly believe it. I assume the reference to it being "intentional" is exactly because toggling has a higher priority than almost everything. Once again we run into the problem of "what is a bug?". I would call it more of an exploit in that case.
@@singami465 I was trashtalked for saying backstab is easily exploited and poise makes the game easier. All they said is to learn to toggle cancel to avoid getting stunlocked or repeatedly backstabbed because it's "an intended feature". You would think I missed a soapstone message but it's not even mentioned anywhere in the game.
Been saving this all week to watch before bed, gonna sleep great tonight. Your presentation style is so comforting. Thanks for another excellent video.
good fuckin video this is what made pvp so deep, visually identifying what armor your opponent was wearing, calculating their poise, wearing them down with d hits and timing your break during a trade was a mechanic that never resurfaced
Stellar episode yet again Illusory, thank you. The somewhat dry humor is ironically quite funny and enjoyable. On the topic of Dark Souls 1 poise, I think honestly the main reason it was considered bad by so many is because of how easy backstabs were (as you demonstrated). However, if backstabs were less effective, it would be a great stat due to the 120 soul level meta. Assuming the rune level (?) meta of Elden Ring PvP will be similarly fair, the fact that passive poise makes a return there will be great for the PvP. Elden Ring's backstabs are borderline useless in an active combat scenario, even more so than Dark Souls 3, so it won't be an issue.
I never really comment on anything but I have to give props for this episode. The humoristic elements really helped to digest all the data and the tankiest enemy section was a very fun way of presenting the results and also made me appreciate the enemy variety in ds1. And just like always the series is delightfully nerdy and niche, thanks for the awesome work
Ah, dang. So I sort of glossed over that but just realized I missed something (and learned something new in the process here)! I sort of wrote that off as a body-part-specific stagger that's guaranteed, like hitting Quelaag's body but specifically for arrows. This is technically true, as an arrow headshot to someone like Havel will stagger him without breaking his poise. What I missed however is that arrows hitting the extremities does increase the poise damage a little bit. My old testing + the wiki only mention 20 poise damage for arrows, but I'm finding now that headshots and lower torso/ legs actually take 22 poise damage in many cases. That minor distinction seems irrelevant when the headshot is a guaranteed stagger regardless, but I did find a fringe case. The Crestfallen Warrior has 21 poise, meaning LEG shots are also a stagger for him due to 22 poise being drained, while shooting his upper body won't! King Bore assisted with a closer look and this all stems from a "parts damage multiplier" that applies to arrows hitting certain pieces of body covered by armor. It seems everything is set to work the same way asides from some variations within helmets. Body - takes 100% poise damage Arms & Legs - take 110% poise damage Head/ Helmets - take 110%, 130%, or 150% poise damage depending on what it is But again that last part is mostly irrelevant due to being a guaranteed stagger regardless, so that just feels like a remnant of the devs experimenting with something that didn't wind up mattering for poise (and they really only cared about its effect on actual damage for that). But the interesting part again here with poise is the extra 10% damage that happens to arms and legs from arrows. I'm gonna edit the wiki. 😅
@@illusorywall It is interesting that the devs apparently wanted to have headshots work much like legshots, but then decided afterwards to just make them guaranteed poise breaks. And they didn't remove the extra poise damage, because they didn't need to. This kind of game design archaeology is fascinating.
@@illusorywall Oh, partsdamagerate affects almost every portion of the attack. Giants' Shields are part of their body, but have a damage multiplier of 0, and any effect that uses Buildup or direct damage will be mitigated as well - they can't be poisoned, bled, Cursed, poise-broken, or damaged, as long as you're hitting their shield. All body part multipliers use the same mechanic, so a Poison Arrow will poison a Butcher in one hit on headshots. The poison won't deal extra damage itself, just more buildup.
And here I thought this channel couldn't get any better. This was your best vid to day. Your entertainment value is climbing up to match your level of knowledge. And that's a very high level! Congrats on your success and thank you for the amazing videos!
Really liked the video. Poise has always been a mechanic that was only somewhat understood by most, despite being very useful, so it makes for a very interesting topic. I also found the humor really helpful in longer videos like this where you mainly talk about raw data and not much else. Would love a video of the history of misconceptions surrounding DS3's poise. It felt like immediately after release, every few hours someone would release a new video explaining how it ACTUALLY works.
I think Dark Souls 1 has the best poise system of the available options. If I wanted to make an ideal system I would extend it to branch anti-stagger into 2 methods: "light" and "heavy". We already sort of have this with dodge rolls versus heavy armor for reducing incoming damage, but I think it could be cool if integrated with anti-stagger. To start I would have two stats instead of one. First would be Poise, it would scale off of agility and be buffable by magic/debuffed by equipment weight. Second would be Inertia which would scale off of strength and be buffable by magic/buffed by equipment weight. Poise would remain as a variable that staggers you when it reaches zero and retain the all-or-nothing delayed regeneration, but the timer would be shortest (one second) with no equipment weight and longest (five seconds) at a 'maximum' equipment weight proportional to strength. Inertia would be a static value that is subtracted from incoming poise damage before it is applied. Finally, I would add another "dodge" button called "momentum shift" or "finesse". This would function like a riposte, but would be available regardless of equipment or stagger state as a counter to an attack. Successfully executing a "Finesse" would reduce incoming damage inversely proportional to Inertia, instantly refill poise, and end a stagger. The window for a "Finesse" would shrink and require an earlier execution as your equipment weight increased. In this way a "light" anti-stagger build would utilize dodge rolls and finesse to reduce/negate damage and avoid getting staggered, but if they were hit they would stagger easily and recover quickly. This would be a high skill/one on one combat tactic. A "heavy" anti-stagger build would use their Inertia to negate or at least severely reduce poise damage and their armor to reduce incoming damage since they would fat roll and have ineffective "finesse". However if they were hit hard enough to overcome their Inertia and break their Poise the stagger would be longer/more catastrophic. This would be better as a low skill/grind tactic and help prevent getting ganged up like at the capra demon. A "medium" build would wear armor to reduce their incoming poise damage, but would still retain enough finesse effectiveness to augment their combat strategy. It'd be like a more forgiving version of the "light" build without reducing the player to a walking boulder. I would design the armor philosophy so that generally more defense comes with more weight, but higher tier/endgame/expensive armors would be lighter for the same level of defense as early game armors. I would make poise damage scale off of weapon weight and user strength. I would design the weapon philosophy of the game so that pointed/bladed weapons deal more damage while blunt weapons weigh more (and subsequently do more poise damage). Great weapons, would follow this philosophy, but be on an elevated level of poise breaking overall. Pole arms regardless of weight would have a buff to poise damage due to their leverage, but would debuff the character's roll speed due to being unwieldy. Bows and staves would also debuff roll speed for the same reason, but without the additional poise damage (it's immersive and discourages close quarters use of ranged weapons). The deciding factor on a stagger versus fall (full knock back) would be a comparison between the final blow's poise damage and the character's Inertia. If the poise damage of the poise-breaking hit was double the Inertia or more it would trigger a fall. Stagger time would be 10% of poise regeneration delay and would regenerate 10% of poise. Fall time would be 40% of poise regeneration delay and would restore 50% of poise. This would require stun locking to be not just consecutive, but somewhat weighty attacks. In this way stagger/fall would be like a less effective passive "finesse" if the player fails to finesse the previous attacks and cannot tank them with Inertia. I know these numbers would probably need to be tweaked with play testing, but this would be my first pass on a richer combat system that I think would allow more emergent tactics while having some kind of low-skill fairly useful entry tactic.
I just want to compliment illusory wall for his high quality footage, great examples and demonstrations, excellent camera work and in-game acting. It’s all very inspiring, as some one who wants to make informational technical videos of my own.
Would love to see a breakdown of poise in the other two Dark Souls titles. I had heard people talk about how it wasn't as good in the 2nd and 3rd games but had no idea why until this video. Really cool stuff.
The editing on this was fantastic man. All the damage numbers tied to animations, quick cuts to other stuff and back again. It was all perfectly simple to follow. Great video.
If you’re doing pvp 31 poise setups are used for dwgr (flip) or light roll builds and 61 poise is for mid roll builds. Basic 31 poise setup: mask of the mother (for hp), knight armor, elite knight gauntlets, hollow soldier waist-cloth Basic 61 poise setup: Mask of the mother, giants chest plate, elite knight gauntlets, giants pants OR mask of mom, giants chest piece, steel gauntlets, cleric leggings (this setup is seen in the video) Hope that helps people!
Illy, your videos are always amazing an interesting, but I just want to say that I specifically appreciate the time and effort you put into the way you present your information. You make 40 minutes feel like 4, and the humour or originality you inject (such as the Tanky awards) have a real charm to them that also makes the information, which could potentially be dry, extremely easy to remember and apply down the line. I always look forward to your videos, so just wanted to say thank you and good job.
Very good video, as always. I really enjoyed the Pois Bois bit, particularly how you lined the contenders up. I hadn't thought about how "Poise" as a term has very different meanings to From and the players, to the point that whenever From has changed it fans have said it's broken or turned off (I think that's what folk said about DS3). I remember there being a lot of confusion and conflicting theories about how armour in DS3 worked in general. Looking forward to the batshit theories about armour in Elden Ring.
For anyone curious about the distinctions in fighting games: - "Armor" is the ability to tank a limited number of hits without flinching - "Super Armor" is the same thing for some reason - "Hyper Armor" is the ability to tank an unlimited number of hits without flinching
I agree on your sentiment of instant Poise Recovery in DS1 playing in favour of PvE, as having that consistency in breaking enemy Poise is one of the things I enjoy the most about its gameplay. As usual, DS2 basis for the Passive + Active Poise makes sense, after all a decent armor should be able to sustain the broken sword of a mad hollow, but the incredibly slow Poise Recovery you mentioned and the high Poise Damage value of mid-tier weapons like Straight Swords (which can be further enhanced with the Stone Ring) made the implementation almost unseenable. At least, ER seems to be going down this route again. The main problem with DS3 Poise is simply how the game shifted from the slower gameplay of its prequels to the fast-paced action of Bloodborne: the majority of enemies, not only the generic trash mobs, get easily stunlocked by a Straight Sword, which can dish out a tons of R1s with very little Stamina Consumption, meanwhile attempting to poise through an enemy attack is never recommended as even Heavy Armors barely offer any defense, with some end-game enemy also dealing absurdly high amount of damage for non-Bosses. Buffing Armor Stats to DS1 levels would be a bad idea though, because having access to high Defense and rolls with many I-frames that also consume little to no stamina is an absurd concept, but what could have been done was giving a major Defense boost only when the Super Armor portion of heavy attacks are triggered.
In DS3, it's so frustrating when your endgame character can't even take a hit from lowly hollows without stopping on your tracks. I know it sounds silly but sometimes it really made backtracking previous areas a chore.
Most people really underestimate heavy armor and damage reduction in ds3. Don't get me wrong, we are no where near the damage reduction of ds1 (equipping the stone set instantly makes the whole early game trivial), and i would never recommend going for a fat rolling build in ds3, but heavy armor actually reduces damage taken by more than most people seems to notice. I just did the dancer early with just the dark hand and i was confindent that armor wouldn't change almost nothing so i went with the bare minimum like the master set and made sure to have every slot equipped with the lightest piece of armor on to recieve the minimum defense boost while still getting the boost damage from flyn's ring, and of course i was 2 shotted and 1 shotted by most attacks. Later i realized that with the full Lothric Knight set i was still under 70% equip load and that + fire stoneplate ring made most of her's attack a 3hit ko and none was able to one shot me from full hp ( i had like 20 vigor) I know i know, that is what damage reduction is supposed to do, but i was really surprised how it really changed things and wanted to share this experience
I always thought that a more fun, less lecture-styled presentation style would do wonders for this series, and this video just proved it. IMO your best one yet.
Floating points strike again! In a hobby game I'm making I keep finding a similar thing, enemies stay alive at "0" health because 1 + 1 != 2 with floating points. Great video!
@@Fedethedangerous95 there's a video by Tom Scott on the channel Numberphile all about that. Basically, just like how we can't write 1/3 as a decimal without a rounding error (ie .33 is off by ~.003), binary numbers count in powers of two and some numbers have the same 'infinitely repeating' problem that we have in base ten with 1/3.
the way you speak and present information is so relaxing and enjoyable, i could listen to you talk about anything. Keep up the good work, ill get all my friends to sub, family too
its shame the majority of the community dont know about this channel, these videos dont get the views they deserve and would love more deep-dive ds content in my life!
Hey dude. I just want to thank you so much for researching the poise dmg all these years back. I wasn't aware that this was you, but I used it soooo much throughout the years as the local "knows all about dark souls" guy 😅. So thank you for that.
I think the topic I would most like to see tackled next would be spellcasting speed, especially in DSII where it is an actually visible stat. For instance, I would like to know: -How much is each individual point of Cast Speed “worth”? -Does Cast Speed affect all spells? -Does casting time incrementally decrease with each individual point of Cast Speed gained or does it only suddenly increase at certain preset intervals? If the latter, do different spells use different intervals? -Is the amount or percentage by which casting time is affected by Cast Speed consistent across all spells affected by the stat? -Does Cast Speed have a soft or hard cap where increasing it shows diminishing returns or stops having an effect? Do different spells have different soft or hard caps? -How much Cast Speed would you need to match Jester Thomas? -How do spellcasting tools with increased spellcasting speeds interact with Cast Speed? -Do all spellcasting tools have different spellcasting speeds or is it only those that state so in their description?
In Dark Souls, casting speed only affects "attack spells" - Soul Arrow, Lightning Spear, Fireball, etc. Buffs and heals aren't affected, and neither are debuffs like TWoP. In Dark Souls 2, it affects the speed of all spells you can cast.
Also, for DS2, each spellcasting tool has its own spellcasting speed stat, although only a few have noticeable differences. Both Pyro flames have a flat 100, and most catalysts and chimes are in the 120/135 range.
Another great episode! I’d love to see one about the enemy detection mechanics in DS1 (Like how the noise of hitting a wall could attract nearby enemies in the undead burg, stealth affected by different types of equipped armour, etc)
Ah, the trusty old Black Iron set. Simple, straightforward, reliable. The takeaway from this video is that the cape on the Balder Knight set robs it of its poise. Because we don't get a cape, but we also don't get staggered as much.
These videos are such a great way to visualise the mechanics in these games and help me to understand them better. Thanks for all the great videos Happy New Year!
A really good breakdown of perhaps one of the most famous and infamous mechanics in DS1, i really enjoyed it man I wonder how Elden Ring's PvP will play with it's stagger/stagger resistance mechanics considering that weapons don't combo
One added benefit of those extra -5 poise hits from the fire pillar spells: they will (naturally) refresh the poise reset timer. Thought that would be worth mentioning when they came up. Also without going into much detail, the weirdness discussed around 35:20 is from how floating point numbers behave. And on the final thoughts, I think a combo of DS1 and DS2 would be best. The reset timer is extremely fast in DS1, and it only gets faster when you equip poise armor, but it seems as if poise recovery in DS2 is a flat amount over time, which gets weird when someone has high poise values.. so maybe the fast reset/lockout timer of DS1 but then a percentage of max poise is recovered each second once the timer runs out?
Just regular DS1 poise is best. The thing that was exploited in DS1 isnt the poise itself, but how low risk high reward backstabs (and even to a degree deflect ripostes) were with little counter. Multiple mods prove that simple things like requiring a hard break to open backstabs or wearing a shield on the back giving DR to the backstabs extra damage based on the shield effectively gutted 80% of the cheese.
Man I don't even want to imagine how much time and effort went into all this research. Awesome video and very informative. Absolutely helps me understand why I like DS1 poise well over the others
The all-or-nothing regeneration timer is an interesting detail that I definitely wouldn't've noticed on my own. I'll make note of it for next time I work on an action game with variable stagger mechanics
I know this comment was from a year ago, but a middle ground approach to stagger mechanic would be to have 4s of no regeneration then 1s of rapid regen. Then it would take between 4-5s to Regen fully depending on how much stagger was applied. Keep the general feeling to the DS1 mechanic but somehow make it a little more "organic" with timings.
I managed to beat DS1-3 and BB, but im not a pro in those games by any means. This video as all of your others give nice additional insights into those games and allow me to relive the magic of those universes in entertaining ways. Thanks!
I do like hyperarmor; it makes sense that your giant sledgehammer isn't going to be interrupted by some guy with a dagger. However, I don't think it has to be completely mutually exclusive with passive poise, since it also makes sense that you're not going to be as bothered by getting hit in general when you have full plate armor. As with many things (like Soul Memory), the way it works in DS2 is *almost* not garbage, if only they just implemented it in a better way. That poise regeneration thing really epitomizes this idea, where they *could* have made it work in a way that made any sense at all, but instead... didn't.
This video has been extremely interesting and informative! I have had a surface-level knowledge of Poise in the various dark souls games but it really is obfuscated like you said. Here’s hoping to see follow-up videos on Poise in the other Souls games
@RUM002 Gaming a little late but it uses the ds1 poise system and the hyperarmor from ds3. So you can use heavy armor to passive poise a enemy and hyperarmor poise to trade
I'm a big fan of DS1's poise. I've never really been into the DS1 pvp, and in PVE it really makes the heavier armor feel so great to wear. You can just completely ignore so many of the less threatening enemies and it seems like a reasonable trade for the much slower rolls. It also makes the equip load breakpoints more like delineations between distinct "classes" which is something that is missing in the other games.
I love your content and I love the data you provide! I am really happy you found a way to add comedy and some meme potential! If that makes you happy than please by all means keep adding it to the content you make. You give off a sincere and kind vibe and your jokes and editing make your content feel complete 10/10
it got removed from the network test, but it was in the creator test. equip load being connected to strength makes strength builds seem fucking awesome now too.
@@anchoviesonnachos7074 the heck are you smoking mate, the passive poise was definetely in the CNT. In only couple of hours of PvP I managed to meet several dudes with heavy armor and the dagger weapons which was quite frustrating to deal with.
Love the video! As for my preferences, imo the biggest issue with DS1 "passive" poise isn't the poise backstabs. It's the fact that it actually hurts heavy tank builds more than it helps them. Heavy armor requires a lot of Equip Burden, so the most efficient way to play a poisetank in the game is actually LIGHT weapons with heavy armor. This is why the Havel Gold Tracer setup is so powerful and overbearing, whether it's in PvP or the Four Kings boss fight. By comparison, using heavy weapons with heavy armor is extremely stat demanding and inefficient, and it forces Poise Boys to sacrifice other important stats like HP and Strength to afford their armor (defying the point of being a heavy tank build). The benefit of Dark Souls 3's weapon-specific hyperarmor is that is allocates poise to the weapons that need it most. That is why Ultras are even remotely viable for PvP. And because Ultras need less armor to effectively "poise" through enemy swings, it also addresses the issue of equip burden. It makes heavy weapon setups more stat efficient and usable, while denying the power of poise to weapons that don't need it (like daggers and curved swords). All that said, I like the idea of a hybrid system. One of the biggest issues with DS3's weapon hyperarmor is that tiny hits can reliably stagger outside of hyperarmor frames. As a lot of people complained about when DS3 launched, this can turn some mob enemies (eg. packs of rats) into a potential infinite stunlock if you get cornered. And to my chagrin, the lack of passive poise also pushes ganks in PvP to spam projectiles since they reliably stagger and make it incredibly difficult to approach. I'd love to have just enough passive poise to deal with four people chucking firebombs or Deep Soul spells, instead of getting staggered for every hit. But I don't want it to be possible to passively poise through anything bigger than a 2H curved sword, because that starts to throw a wrench in weapon/build balance. Paired with the weapon hyperarmor system of DS3, this could be the best of both worlds. And I'm hoping Elden Ring aims for that.
I thought about writing something like this, but you went into great detail, better than I ever could. The only thing I can think to add is that the "active Poise" of DS3 makes certain weapons a bit shittier than they would otherwise be due to their Poise usually only activating while 2-handing (ALL Greatswords do this, which sucks since they're slow).
There's gonna be a lot of reductive comments saying "Dark Souls 3 doesn't have poise", but this is exactly the sort of response regarding what it offered and lacked that I was hoping to see.
7:23 good use of subjectivism there, a person can dislike passive poise (i think i prefer active poise myself), but one cannot say it is "bad" if it is working exactly how it was intended to work. good job!
I feel like I should mention that the way poise works as an armor stat in ds3 is that it serves as defense for the hyper armor 'poise hp'. So you need to swing heavy weapons to get the effect, but wearing heavier armor while doing so can let you poise heavier attacks(or more attacks as the case may be).
You are probably the GOAT of video game mechanical analysis at this point. Aside from the TAS community, but those types don't do it solely for love of the game, so you still win
It might be interesting to see something like enemies having basically the reverse of our armor poise bonus. Meaning, enemies have base 5 (less in special situations), but the weaker an enemies is, the longer their timer gets. A more armored enemy would be able to take a few hits and shake it off, keep going easier, a rat or barely clothed hollow is going to be taking a lot more actual damage per hit from a weapon, and isn't going to be able to keep taking hits the same way.
Very late here, but Dark Souls II has two different stagger mechanic, and something like... 5 different "Hyper Armor" events.
Dark Souls II was the first game to introduce the posture system, later featured in Sekiro. There is an hidden meter that, when depleted, puts the character in the guard broken state, where a critical attack can be performed. Most enemies have absurd values of Posture, Hollow Infranty (the first enemy you see in the Forest of Fallen Giant) has 4400 Posture and regens 2,2 posture per second. Plus, your attacks deal an average of 5 posture damage per hit. Basically unusuable against normal enemies.
Bosses however use Posture as their default stagger mechanic, while having persistent Super Armor (which prevents Poise stagger OR poise damage, depending on the Super Armor event type).
As for Armor events, they are all triggered by TimeAct, FromSoftware's proprietary animation metadata format (what is usually referred to as "frame data"). There is event 110500, "Super Armor", which disables Poise stagger, 110210 which disables Poise damage (and as a result, Poise stagger lol), 110600, "Ultra Armor" (shitty name I came up with in my Discord for the memes but was accepted by the PvP community, what to say) which disables Posture stagger and 111900, "Hyper Armor", which changes the poise damage multiplier from 1 to a value that depends on the specific weapon that enabled this event. Hyper Armor basically reduces poise damage by a certain percentage.
Some attacks can have a property, commonly referred to as "Hyper Stagger" which will always stagger regardless of poise. Does not get through armor events as far as I am aware though, but I haven't run extensive tests on this.
Glad I chose to watch this video today so I could see this comment!
@@Lore_Keeper Thanks :)
@@LordRadai Yeah sames, I feel so lucky being late to the party and saving this vid til now
I wonder if anyone can explain to me how poise in DS2 works
I can have 40 poise with the giant’s ring and still get staggered wit one straight sword attack, even in the middle of a heavy attack from an ultra great sword
Is it due to them having the stone ring?
I thought in DS2, hyper armor existed when using heavy attack with certain classes of huge weapons
On my end, I usually always stagger people (between characters I PVP on, I am SM 400k-1M)
THe only time I dont stagger is if I use a small halberd or rapier on someone in heavy armor (and I assume the giant’s ring too) while I did have the stone ring on
@@aceclover758 Poise in DS2 works like poise in DS1, and hyper armor just reduces poise damage taken. If the poise damage amount is high enough though you are still going to get staggered. Stone ring helps a lot with that.
I like how the 3 spells that deal 130 poise are Sunlight Spear, Chaos Storm, and Great Gravelord Sword Dance. It’s like they chose attacks representing Gwyn, Witch of Izalith, and Nito on purpose.
It's so perfect that it has to be intentional imo
Yes, indeed.
Too bad we can't use that special aoe move from Nito
What about abyss spells?
@@aghavvahswrath of the nito
Wearing more pieces of poise-granting armor reducing your regen timer is such a mindblow for me.
Heaviest armor reduce stamina regen. It is not bound to the poise stat.
It's interesting how the developers have tried for years to encourage players to wear complete sets (not necessarily from the _same_ set, mind), rather than being partially naked. All in very subtle ways. In DS1, it's by multiplying poise regen the more clothing you wear. In Bloodborne and DS3, it's by just giving you more defense for having a complete set.
should be the opposite tbh
@@MatthewTheUntitled The person you're responding to is correct. Every piece of poise-granting armor you equip shortens the length of your regen timer by 10%, allowing the player character and some NPCs to get their poise refilled in roughly 3.28 seconds at the fastest, instead of the full 5 seconds. This effect of armor on the regen timer is shown in the video, and you'll find it in the parameters under corectSArecover.
I kinda wish they used poison and bleed in a similar way. It always boiled down to exposure time more than actually stacking the effect because of the countdown effect.
12:57 "We couldn't see her, because she was invisible"
That made me think of something I would hear in a Nintendo direct. (:
Smough is still alive too
@@leaflizard8485 menacingly
She’s so cool!
@@leaflizard8485 That slow pan combined with the laugh totally made me picture the camera panning to a waving Smough.
Or a DS2 fan introducing their girlfriend
Illusory wall: Interesting and useful.
LimitBreakers: Interesting and useless.
With their powers combined, all data will be covered!
Let's be real, there is a lot of uninteresting and unuseful data we will never see.
Zullie: Both at once.
Ymfah: Putting all of this to practice in an actual runs.
@@cloudbank3106 Bonfire VN: Putting this to practice in enemy v enemy throwdowns
This is why i like the DS community, everyone knows everyone
Chase the bro use it for pvp and beat like 99% people he came across.
I learned a staggering amount of info from this video.
*gold award*
i think you can take pills to increase cerebral poise
Punny Gold Award
ha
Whoever the developer is that wanted to make the 4 kings staggerable, you deserve the world ♥️
it kind of fits with the fact they have such "annoying" attacks
It not even hard :/
@@blade6357 No definitely not hard, just very annoying with some builds
@@thehuckleberry8349Yeah, if you're good at quickly moving though the game, sometimes it's better to start a new game than continue to try the four kings with a shit build.
There is something so funny seeing all these buffed characters and creatures and even lord Gwynd himself competing for a spot in the poise category and then there's Gwyndolin next to them, just existing
Gwyndolin and Pinwheel are on the same wavelength and are silently judging everyone else around them, lol.
The tankiest enemy award was such a fun way to present that data. Great video! It helps that it sounds like the commentary was done with a smile.
Seriously! Illusory Wall’s videos are so charming and wholesome, and they just brighten my day every time
My favorite thing stays the "zero poise enemies" bus.
Didn't he forget about the Havel ??
I thought that the Havel would have the highest poise tbh
@@pheonix6012Havel is an NPC, not an enemy. He gets his poise from the Havel Set he wears
Definitely noticing some sense of humor beginning to seep its way into this series. Can’t say I would have missed it if it weren’t there, but I kind of like the levity. Makes it easier to digest all this juicy, juicy knowledge.
It's always been there, in my opinion.
@@lillyclarity9699 yeah, confidence is helping it show up more.
Bahahaha ma come ti esprimi
The balder knights are actually geniuses because they take advantage of their lack of poise to parry you. Because you know they will stagger at every hit, some players would resort to spam, and that's a free riposte there.
I also think they weren’t given poise to make beginning of game easier
For me, the game started to get harder in terms of enemy combat when they had high poise
Ai is defiitely a genius
The Spear Demons in Anor Londo have a similar tactic, where they get easily staggered, but after recovering they will often jump back and attack with their spear so you can't reach them. In fact, the best way to deal with them is waiting for them to recover from their staggering and then attack to stagger again, preventing them from doing basically anything.
@@aceclover758 It definately makes a difference. Balder Knights are a much more forgiving knight type compared to Lothric knights. And 90% of that is the lack of poise.
Wow, it's thematically so appropriate that the three creatures with the highest poise are all made of stone.
Havel moment
@@nazmussaquib4686 Havel's Greatshield: "Allow me to introduce myself"
Gargoyles are also made out of stone, yet they placed pretty low and titanite really is more of a metal.
@@1911odisea Metal is technically just a specific type of stone. Gargoyles are also not made entirely of stone, as evidenced by their wings and muscles, and the fact they can fly, as well as the fact that equipping their tail builds all three statuses.
@@ootdega Metal shares almost no properties with stone. The gargoyles *are* made entirely of animated stone, the muscles are carved and the wings are magical. It's arguable that they have Titanite cores or are infused with Titanite somehow to make them animated, but that's not conveyed by their model as far as I can see.
Crazy how after all these years im still learning new useful stuff about this game, gotta remember the poise regen cooldown decrease from armor.
Just goes to show after all these years we still gotta git gud lol
@@jaboihomano150 it is a lifelong quest
Same
You couldn’t possibly imagine how happy I am to see this video pop up. We’ve all missed you man.
Damn dude it hasnt been that long
@@wazzup9179 yeah no shit dawg he just uploaded not long ago so naturally I figured I’d have to wait another several months for another in-depth video
@@JackQNielsenparasocial
I seen "Dark Souls" poise and was like "sweet! he's gonna talk about poise in all the Souls games." Then realized it was all about DS1. Not disappointed, because I know there's a lot of great stuff to talk about. But yea, I can't hide that I was also just as excited to learn about Poise from all the games :)
I contemplated doing a comparison video like that, but then realized how deep I wanted to go into DS1 and backed off. Hopefully the overview towards the beginning satisfies that itch a little, and then of course there's the opportunity to do more episodes for the other games. :)
@@illusorywall I did yea. There was a perfect amount of references to the other games!
@@illusorywall Love the video, can't wait for you to potentially one day break down how it works in the two sequels, and of course Elden Ring, eventually.
Keep em coming!
Maybe you can do that video after elden ring. Comparing the systems from all games, assuming it's not super weird and the community has the elden ring system figured out quickly
I love how poise in DS1 works, never touched PvP but it felt the most natural.
It felt very consistent and it was very easy to get advantage or. So it really worked well.
@Captain_Morgan git gud
@Captain_Morgan you can get backstabbed by basically just walking, and since most people just equip oneshot weapons it becames dumb, that’s why when i get invaded i just roll of to a cliff no mather what if is to avoid to deal with that
Ds2 poise is more natural I think.
It's passive as well as in ds1 but you're getting a slowdown if you hit anyway
Plus if you swing giant ass weapon it reduces poise damage you take by half
then how do u even conclude that
So my takeaway from this video is that I should find Iron Flesh before going up the stairs in the Undead Asylum in order to mitigate against the rolling boulder.
For any who might be wondering about the weirdness with poise damage multipliers (mentioned at 34:58), this bug most likely stems from the way decimal numbers are stored in binary. Without getting into the specifics too much, most modern programs store decimal numbers in a format called floating point, which, instead of storing the numbers like a normal integer, stores whether the number is positive or negative, a fraction, and an exponent to raise that fraction to. This format gives floating point numbers a wide range of possible values, but can, in some cases, introduce very tiny inaccuracies. For example, when adding 0.1 + 1.1, instead of getting 1.2 like expected, I got 1.2000000000000002, which is technically incorrect, but in most applications, an error small enough to ignore. However, in the case of Dark Souls testing if the running attack's poise damage meets or exceeds 32, because the number needs to be exactly enough and no less, the minuscule inaccuracy is enough to make the poise damage come up short.
The "Poise Damage and Safe Points" chapter sounds like it took some ridiculous testing and work, and that was after you elucidated basically every enemy's poise health. Dude, hats off, this video is a goldmine.
I really appreciate the primer on how the community's understanding of 'poise vs hyper armour' is not something that fully lines up with the games and developers. I remember shortly after dark souls 3 came out and some people who tinkered with cheat engine came to the r/iamverysmart conclusion that 'the devs are so incompetent they forgot to turn on poise' because its implementation didn't line up with their expectations from previous games.
Oh totally. We learned nothing, collectively, from the launch of Dark Souls 2. 😅
But I think we've *finally* taken the hint and will be more open-minded if it winds up being something like hyper armor again in the future. Or at the least hopefully this video will help with that.
Well maybe it was because putting poise on weapons instead of armors made no sense at all ...
From this video it seems that DS3’s poise was Demon’s Souls’ system, but with a variable for how much you could tank while swinging. This is in line with how DS3 overall feels like an attempt to bring back and refine Demon’s Souls mechanics (FP, the overall pace, the binary HP difference between the post-boss kill and post-death forms, the separate level up area). Granted, some of that was in DS2, but not in as complete a way as DS3.
Given that anyone who played Dark Souls on Xbox or PC and who didn't have a PS3 likely didn't play Demon's Souls, I'm not surprised that the response was so vitriolic, as it was an unfamiliar throwback. I mean, it didn't help assuage the resentment of DS1 purists that Bloodborne had just come out, also took the pace up a few notches (even compared to Demon's Souls) and brought back the separate level hub, and had a bunch of people who wanted to play it but couldn't, and so wanted to use DS3 as a proxy (to wit, look at the sheer number of mods that incorporate Bloodborne weapons and movement mechanics).
I kinda figure it's a fool's hope that Elden Ring will solve this, given the response to backstabs being adjusted, my only real hope is that enough people take one look at the screaming and go "eh, I'm just gonna play the game, it's neat" that they don't have a lasting impact on the perception of the game.
Tbf theyre not iamverysmart, theyre just giving benefit of a doubt that fromsoft was accidentally incompetent rather than intentionally retarded.
When everything is filled with fast-twitch rollcatching cherry tapping bloodborne bullshit, what we want is passive poise, not selective hyper armor that only works with some armors + weapon movesets.
The game design of the original Dark Souls is such a wonder to me. Such a masterpiece of an RPG. Played Dark Souls 2 all the way through, and a little bit of Dark Souls 3 but neither really catpured or delighted me as much as 1 did. Something magical about it that is tough to describe, but these breakdowns do such a brilliant job of demystifying some of those elements.
I just started DS3 but have the same issue... doesnt really grab me like demon's ,dark souls and bloodborne...
Mention of DkS1's intuitive poise reminds me that the Zwei carried me through PvE hard because everything was split between "staggers for followup kill" or "I'm going to die if I miss" lol
I always would stagger Artorias by throwing knives at his face while he powered up. lol
Great content as always, Illusory Wall! I hope we get to see something similar on Dark Souls II & III in the future!
The fact that there's still so much content made about these games all these years later is a testament to how great they are. Great work as always!
Wow, I didn’t realize there was such consistency in DS1 poise. PvP and PvE.
wow that was such a great video! i have countless hours in this game and i never knew most of the things you mentioned, keep up the good work!
Loved the showcase of enemies and characters. What an amazing models this game has.
Great video, man! One thing that surprised me when playing is that sometimes it's better to have less poise. Fighting Sif with heavy armor, his circle sweep attack only staggers you and doesn't throw you back, making it so you can get hurt twice. If you wear lighter armor, you'll take some more damage form the first hit but then get i-frames as you're floored.
The bed of chaos works the same way
Too much poise and instead of her arm swipes immediately flinging you, they just stagger you, so the 2nd arm swipe can hit you and kill you
I love how andre is as tanky as the literal lord of light
another really interesting video !!
i hope you've a video on gravelording planned. as the probably most obscure and weird mechanic in the entire game, it'd be really interesting to finally find out how that works!
This brings me so much joy. I’ve been doing a dark souls 1 play through and I’ve already been watching this series along with it. Perfect timing IllusoryWall, love your videos man
edit: I just can’t believe the systems in this game. Good job this is amazing stuff
edit 2: I like the poise in DKS1 because of how consistent it is. I’ve found that in pvp you can counter most things if you just play smart and slow. I think backstabs are not great but it is nice to have an ability to punish enemies when they make mistakes. I find that in Bloodborne for example it’s very hard to punish in pvp even when an enemy should be open enough for some kind of large attack. In my years of playing dark souls 1 I have definitely started to prefer very low or zero poise builds. Toggling is a very useful strategy in pve and pvp and will change your experience. I think a few big changes would need to happen to fully fix the pvp in DKS1: capping poise around 50-60, removing the hornet ring, and making backstabs slightly harder to land. Even then I have always enjoyed the gameplay and pvp in DKS1 so it’s just a dream. Also just as a side note: IllusoryWall was not joking about kicking. It’s a very useful tool in pvp and pve
> removing hornet ring
The idea that toggle escaping is an intentional mechanic is very interesting and I'll be curious to hear more about it whenever you cover it. My understanding was that toggling simply has a higher priority than certain other actions (rolling, stagger, etc) and therefore finds itself at the front of the queue if two actions are both queued up in the same window -- the same process that leads to stuff like halberd running R1s being interrupted by deep water, or backstabs interrupting the parry animation to get a guaranteed wakeup hit, which I think are much more obviously unintended. Is there something in the code or in the debug menu that makes you think toggle escaping was a design decision and not just a consequence of how the action queue works?
i was curious about this assertion also
Even if there is an actual DS developer saying it was "intended", I will hardly believe it. I assume the reference to it being "intentional" is exactly because toggling has a higher priority than almost everything. Once again we run into the problem of "what is a bug?". I would call it more of an exploit in that case.
@@singami465 I was trashtalked for saying backstab is easily exploited and poise makes the game easier. All they said is to learn to toggle cancel to avoid getting stunlocked or repeatedly backstabbed because it's "an intended feature". You would think I missed a soapstone message but it's not even mentioned anywhere in the game.
YYYYEEEEEESSSSSS!!!!! Another 40+ minute video about the greatest game ever made created by the greatest youtuber of all time...
Been saving this all week to watch before bed, gonna sleep great tonight. Your presentation style is so comforting. Thanks for another excellent video.
good fuckin video
this is what made pvp so deep, visually identifying what armor your opponent was wearing, calculating their poise, wearing them down with d hits and timing your break during a trade was a mechanic that never resurfaced
I love how comforting these are to fall asleep to, like a sibling telling you stories as you drift away
Thank god I’m not the only one
Stellar episode yet again Illusory, thank you. The somewhat dry humor is ironically quite funny and enjoyable. On the topic of Dark Souls 1 poise, I think honestly the main reason it was considered bad by so many is because of how easy backstabs were (as you demonstrated). However, if backstabs were less effective, it would be a great stat due to the 120 soul level meta. Assuming the rune level (?) meta of Elden Ring PvP will be similarly fair, the fact that passive poise makes a return there will be great for the PvP. Elden Ring's backstabs are borderline useless in an active combat scenario, even more so than Dark Souls 3, so it won't be an issue.
I never really comment on anything but I have to give props for this episode. The humoristic elements really helped to digest all the data and the tankiest enemy section was a very fun way of presenting the results and also made me appreciate the enemy variety in ds1. And just like always the series is delightfully nerdy and niche, thanks for the awesome work
what about headshots with arrows?
Ah, dang. So I sort of glossed over that but just realized I missed something (and learned something new in the process here)! I sort of wrote that off as a body-part-specific stagger that's guaranteed, like hitting Quelaag's body but specifically for arrows. This is technically true, as an arrow headshot to someone like Havel will stagger him without breaking his poise. What I missed however is that arrows hitting the extremities does increase the poise damage a little bit. My old testing + the wiki only mention 20 poise damage for arrows, but I'm finding now that headshots and lower torso/ legs actually take 22 poise damage in many cases.
That minor distinction seems irrelevant when the headshot is a guaranteed stagger regardless, but I did find a fringe case. The Crestfallen Warrior has 21 poise, meaning LEG shots are also a stagger for him due to 22 poise being drained, while shooting his upper body won't! King Bore assisted with a closer look and this all stems from a "parts damage multiplier" that applies to arrows hitting certain pieces of body covered by armor. It seems everything is set to work the same way asides from some variations within helmets.
Body - takes 100% poise damage
Arms & Legs - take 110% poise damage
Head/ Helmets - take 110%, 130%, or 150% poise damage depending on what it is
But again that last part is mostly irrelevant due to being a guaranteed stagger regardless, so that just feels like a remnant of the devs experimenting with something that didn't wind up mattering for poise (and they really only cared about its effect on actual damage for that). But the interesting part again here with poise is the extra 10% damage that happens to arms and legs from arrows.
I'm gonna edit the wiki. 😅
@@illusorywall It is interesting that the devs apparently wanted to have headshots work much like legshots, but then decided afterwards to just make them guaranteed poise breaks. And they didn't remove the extra poise damage, because they didn't need to.
This kind of game design archaeology is fascinating.
@@Bluecho4 they wanted to make sure people were more likely to be stunned if they took an arrow to the knee
@@illusorywall learning something new is really the best part imo
@@illusorywall Oh, partsdamagerate affects almost every portion of the attack. Giants' Shields are part of their body, but have a damage multiplier of 0, and any effect that uses Buildup or direct damage will be mitigated as well - they can't be poisoned, bled, Cursed, poise-broken, or damaged, as long as you're hitting their shield.
All body part multipliers use the same mechanic, so a Poison Arrow will poison a Butcher in one hit on headshots.
The poison won't deal extra damage itself, just more buildup.
And here I thought this channel couldn't get any better. This was your best vid to day. Your entertainment value is climbing up to match your level of knowledge. And that's a very high level! Congrats on your success and thank you for the amazing videos!
I don't think I've ever caught myself cocking my head and saying "Wait, really?!" more throughout the course of a single video than this one
I appreciate the time taken to break down and clarify terminology before getting right into the data. Good form.
Will have to return to this video later, but the stat breakdown 6 minutes in is really useful for understanding how poise works in combat. Thank you!
Really liked the video. Poise has always been a mechanic that was only somewhat understood by most, despite being very useful, so it makes for a very interesting topic. I also found the humor really helpful in longer videos like this where you mainly talk about raw data and not much else.
Would love a video of the history of misconceptions surrounding DS3's poise. It felt like immediately after release, every few hours someone would release a new video explaining how it ACTUALLY works.
I think Dark Souls 1 has the best poise system of the available options. If I wanted to make an ideal system I would extend it to branch anti-stagger into 2 methods: "light" and "heavy". We already sort of have this with dodge rolls versus heavy armor for reducing incoming damage, but I think it could be cool if integrated with anti-stagger.
To start I would have two stats instead of one. First would be Poise, it would scale off of agility and be buffable by magic/debuffed by equipment weight. Second would be Inertia which would scale off of strength and be buffable by magic/buffed by equipment weight.
Poise would remain as a variable that staggers you when it reaches zero and retain the all-or-nothing delayed regeneration, but the timer would be shortest (one second) with no equipment weight and longest (five seconds) at a 'maximum' equipment weight proportional to strength.
Inertia would be a static value that is subtracted from incoming poise damage before it is applied.
Finally, I would add another "dodge" button called "momentum shift" or "finesse". This would function like a riposte, but would be available regardless of equipment or stagger state as a counter to an attack. Successfully executing a "Finesse" would reduce incoming damage inversely proportional to Inertia, instantly refill poise, and end a stagger. The window for a "Finesse" would shrink and require an earlier execution as your equipment weight increased.
In this way a "light" anti-stagger build would utilize dodge rolls and finesse to reduce/negate damage and avoid getting staggered, but if they were hit they would stagger easily and recover quickly. This would be a high skill/one on one combat tactic.
A "heavy" anti-stagger build would use their Inertia to negate or at least severely reduce poise damage and their armor to reduce incoming damage since they would fat roll and have ineffective "finesse". However if they were hit hard enough to overcome their Inertia and break their Poise the stagger would be longer/more catastrophic. This would be better as a low skill/grind tactic and help prevent getting ganged up like at the capra demon.
A "medium" build would wear armor to reduce their incoming poise damage, but would still retain enough finesse effectiveness to augment their combat strategy. It'd be like a more forgiving version of the "light" build without reducing the player to a walking boulder.
I would design the armor philosophy so that generally more defense comes with more weight, but higher tier/endgame/expensive armors would be lighter for the same level of defense as early game armors.
I would make poise damage scale off of weapon weight and user strength. I would design the weapon philosophy of the game so that pointed/bladed weapons deal more damage while blunt weapons weigh more (and subsequently do more poise damage). Great weapons, would follow this philosophy, but be on an elevated level of poise breaking overall. Pole arms regardless of weight would have a buff to poise damage due to their leverage, but would debuff the character's roll speed due to being unwieldy. Bows and staves would also debuff roll speed for the same reason, but without the additional poise damage (it's immersive and discourages close quarters use of ranged weapons).
The deciding factor on a stagger versus fall (full knock back) would be a comparison between the final blow's poise damage and the character's Inertia. If the poise damage of the poise-breaking hit was double the Inertia or more it would trigger a fall.
Stagger time would be 10% of poise regeneration delay and would regenerate 10% of poise. Fall time would be 40% of poise regeneration delay and would restore 50% of poise. This would require stun locking to be not just consecutive, but somewhat weighty attacks. In this way stagger/fall would be like a less effective passive "finesse" if the player fails to finesse the previous attacks and cannot tank them with Inertia.
I know these numbers would probably need to be tweaked with play testing, but this would be my first pass on a richer combat system that I think would allow more emergent tactics while having some kind of low-skill fairly useful entry tactic.
I just want to compliment illusory wall for his high quality footage, great examples and demonstrations, excellent camera work and in-game acting. It’s all very inspiring, as some one who wants to make informational technical videos of my own.
Would love to see a breakdown of poise in the other two Dark Souls titles. I had heard people talk about how it wasn't as good in the 2nd and 3rd games but had no idea why until this video. Really cool stuff.
I just wanted to say, this is my favorite dark souls 1 video on the platform, great analysis
I've never clicked on a notification so fast
and just to type that comment of all things
I like his videos but it's pretty cringe to admit to getting THAT excited over a video upload
The editing on this was fantastic man. All the damage numbers tied to animations, quick cuts to other stuff and back again. It was all perfectly simple to follow. Great video.
If you’re doing pvp 31 poise setups are used for dwgr (flip) or light roll builds and 61 poise is for mid roll builds.
Basic 31 poise setup: mask of the mother (for hp), knight armor, elite knight gauntlets, hollow soldier waist-cloth
Basic 61 poise setup:
Mask of the mother, giants chest plate, elite knight gauntlets, giants pants OR mask of mom, giants chest piece, steel gauntlets, cleric leggings (this setup is seen in the video)
Hope that helps people!
Illy, your videos are always amazing an interesting, but I just want to say that I specifically appreciate the time and effort you put into the way you present your information. You make 40 minutes feel like 4, and the humour or originality you inject (such as the Tanky awards) have a real charm to them that also makes the information, which could potentially be dry, extremely easy to remember and apply down the line. I always look forward to your videos, so just wanted to say thank you and good job.
Very good video, as always. I really enjoyed the Pois Bois bit, particularly how you lined the contenders up.
I hadn't thought about how "Poise" as a term has very different meanings to From and the players, to the point that whenever From has changed it fans have said it's broken or turned off (I think that's what folk said about DS3). I remember there being a lot of confusion and conflicting theories about how armour in DS3 worked in general. Looking forward to the batshit theories about armour in Elden Ring.
Thankyou for these dissected videos!! I cant tell you how much I enjoy them and even re watch when you dont upload these types for a minute
15:25 & 16:36 I love the inside joke that Smough mocks and goads Ornstein when they’re together
For anyone curious about the distinctions in fighting games:
- "Armor" is the ability to tank a limited number of hits without flinching
- "Super Armor" is the same thing for some reason
- "Hyper Armor" is the ability to tank an unlimited number of hits without flinching
I agree on your sentiment of instant Poise Recovery in DS1 playing in favour of PvE, as having that consistency in breaking enemy Poise is one of the things I enjoy the most about its gameplay.
As usual, DS2 basis for the Passive + Active Poise makes sense, after all a decent armor should be able to sustain the broken sword of a mad hollow, but the incredibly slow Poise Recovery you mentioned and the high Poise Damage value of mid-tier weapons like Straight Swords (which can be further enhanced with the Stone Ring) made the implementation almost unseenable. At least, ER seems to be going down this route again.
The main problem with DS3 Poise is simply how the game shifted from the slower gameplay of its prequels to the fast-paced action of Bloodborne: the majority of enemies, not only the generic trash mobs, get easily stunlocked by a Straight Sword, which can dish out a tons of R1s with very little Stamina Consumption, meanwhile attempting to poise through an enemy attack is never recommended as even Heavy Armors barely offer any defense, with some end-game enemy also dealing absurdly high amount of damage for non-Bosses.
Buffing Armor Stats to DS1 levels would be a bad idea though, because having access to high Defense and rolls with many I-frames that also consume little to no stamina is an absurd concept, but what could have been done was giving a major Defense boost only when the Super Armor portion of heavy attacks are triggered.
In DS3, it's so frustrating when your endgame character can't even take a hit from lowly hollows without stopping on your tracks. I know it sounds silly but sometimes it really made backtracking previous areas a chore.
DS3 downgraded armors to basically dmg% resistance skins like every other games out there ...
Most people really underestimate heavy armor and damage reduction in ds3.
Don't get me wrong, we are no where near the damage reduction of ds1 (equipping the stone set instantly makes the whole early game trivial), and i would never recommend going for a fat rolling build in ds3, but heavy armor actually reduces damage taken by more than most people seems to notice.
I just did the dancer early with just the dark hand and i was confindent that armor wouldn't change almost nothing so i went with the bare minimum like the master set and made sure to have every slot equipped with the lightest piece of armor on to recieve the minimum defense boost while still getting the boost damage from flyn's ring, and of course i was 2 shotted and 1 shotted by most attacks.
Later i realized that with the full Lothric Knight set i was still under 70% equip load and that + fire stoneplate ring made most of her's attack a 3hit ko and none was able to one shot me from full hp ( i had like 20 vigor)
I know i know, that is what damage reduction is supposed to do, but i was really surprised how it really changed things and wanted to share this experience
I always thought that a more fun, less lecture-styled presentation style would do wonders for this series, and this video just proved it. IMO your best one yet.
Floating points strike again! In a hobby game I'm making I keep finding a similar thing, enemies stay alive at "0" health because 1 + 1 != 2 with floating points. Great video!
why does that happen though? I've taken a couple programming courses that scarcely, if ever, addressed that
@@Fedethedangerous95 there's a video by Tom Scott on the channel Numberphile all about that. Basically, just like how we can't write 1/3 as a decimal without a rounding error (ie .33 is off by ~.003), binary numbers count in powers of two and some numbers have the same 'infinitely repeating' problem that we have in base ten with 1/3.
this is the only channel in my list which has notifications on, your videos are always top-notch👌
As a poise nerd, this didn't disappoint, always extremely in depth, great work!
the way you speak and present information is so relaxing and enjoyable, i could listen to you talk about anything. Keep up the good work, ill get all my friends to sub, family too
This is an amazingly insightful video! I’d love to see the same thing for 2 and 3
I was not expecting to see a new video from you this morning. Thank you for making my wednesday a little bit better!
its shame the majority of the community dont know about this channel, these videos dont get the views they deserve and would love more deep-dive ds content in my life!
Admiration of hard work is not something common
Hey dude. I just want to thank you so much for researching the poise dmg all these years back. I wasn't aware that this was you, but I used it soooo much throughout the years as the local "knows all about dark souls" guy 😅. So thank you for that.
I think the topic I would most like to see tackled next would be spellcasting speed, especially in DSII where it is an actually visible stat. For instance, I would like to know:
-How much is each individual point of Cast Speed “worth”?
-Does Cast Speed affect all spells?
-Does casting time incrementally decrease with each individual point of Cast Speed gained or does it only suddenly increase at certain preset intervals? If the latter, do different spells use different intervals?
-Is the amount or percentage by which casting time is affected by Cast Speed consistent across all spells affected by the stat?
-Does Cast Speed have a soft or hard cap where increasing it shows diminishing returns or stops having an effect? Do different spells have different soft or hard caps?
-How much Cast Speed would you need to match Jester Thomas?
-How do spellcasting tools with increased spellcasting speeds interact with Cast Speed?
-Do all spellcasting tools have different spellcasting speeds or is it only those that state so in their description?
In Dark Souls, casting speed only affects "attack spells" - Soul Arrow, Lightning Spear, Fireball, etc. Buffs and heals aren't affected, and neither are debuffs like TWoP. In Dark Souls 2, it affects the speed of all spells you can cast.
Also, for DS2, each spellcasting tool has its own spellcasting speed stat, although only a few have noticeable differences. Both Pyro flames have a flat 100, and most catalysts and chimes are in the 120/135 range.
Another great episode!
I’d love to see one about the enemy detection mechanics in DS1
(Like how the noise of hitting a wall could attract nearby enemies in the undead burg, stealth affected by different types of equipped armour, etc)
Ah, the trusty old Black Iron set. Simple, straightforward, reliable.
The takeaway from this video is that the cape on the Balder Knight set robs it of its poise. Because we don't get a cape, but we also don't get staggered as much.
These videos are such a great way to visualise the mechanics in these games and help me to understand them better. Thanks for all the great videos Happy New Year!
A really good breakdown of perhaps one of the most famous and infamous mechanics in DS1, i really enjoyed it man
I wonder how Elden Ring's PvP will play with it's stagger/stagger resistance mechanics considering that weapons don't combo
Your videos get liked from me as soon as I hear the 8-bit theme. Thanks for your hard work and Praise The Sun!
One added benefit of those extra -5 poise hits from the fire pillar spells: they will (naturally) refresh the poise reset timer. Thought that would be worth mentioning when they came up.
Also without going into much detail, the weirdness discussed around 35:20 is from how floating point numbers behave.
And on the final thoughts, I think a combo of DS1 and DS2 would be best. The reset timer is extremely fast in DS1, and it only gets faster when you equip poise armor, but it seems as if poise recovery in DS2 is a flat amount over time, which gets weird when someone has high poise values.. so maybe the fast reset/lockout timer of DS1 but then a percentage of max poise is recovered each second once the timer runs out?
Just regular DS1 poise is best. The thing that was exploited in DS1 isnt the poise itself, but how low risk high reward backstabs (and even to a degree deflect ripostes) were with little counter. Multiple mods prove that simple things like requiring a hard break to open backstabs or wearing a shield on the back giving DR to the backstabs extra damage based on the shield effectively gutted 80% of the cheese.
Man I don't even want to imagine how much time and effort went into all this research. Awesome video and very informative. Absolutely helps me understand why I like DS1 poise well over the others
The all-or-nothing regeneration timer is an interesting detail that I definitely wouldn't've noticed on my own. I'll make note of it for next time I work on an action game with variable stagger mechanics
I know this comment was from a year ago, but a middle ground approach to stagger mechanic would be to have 4s of no regeneration then 1s of rapid regen. Then it would take between 4-5s to Regen fully depending on how much stagger was applied. Keep the general feeling to the DS1 mechanic but somehow make it a little more "organic" with timings.
This was a really fun episode and you still kept it wildly informant! Always excited for your content, stay rad
Gosh the editing on this video was really great! It was so fun and kept me really into the video, thanks for the really great video!
I managed to beat DS1-3 and BB, but im not a pro in those games by any means. This video as all of your others give nice additional insights into those games and allow me to relive the magic of those universes in entertaining ways. Thanks!
I do like hyperarmor; it makes sense that your giant sledgehammer isn't going to be interrupted by some guy with a dagger. However, I don't think it has to be completely mutually exclusive with passive poise, since it also makes sense that you're not going to be as bothered by getting hit in general when you have full plate armor. As with many things (like Soul Memory), the way it works in DS2 is *almost* not garbage, if only they just implemented it in a better way.
That poise regeneration thing really epitomizes this idea, where they *could* have made it work in a way that made any sense at all, but instead... didn't.
This video has been extremely interesting and informative! I have had a surface-level knowledge of Poise in the various dark souls games but it really is obfuscated like you said. Here’s hoping to see follow-up videos on Poise in the other Souls games
Hyped that we getting poise back in Elden Ring
@RUM002 Gaming a little late but it uses the ds1 poise system and the hyperarmor from ds3.
So you can use heavy armor to passive poise a enemy and hyperarmor poise to trade
I have never gasped and clicked on a video I didn't know I was looking forward to.
Until today, thank you Illusory Wall.
I knew it. I knew those little torch bastards were staggering me too much to be possible without BS.
it’s crazy that the crystal cave map is finally being released, when it was first seen at the beginning of halo infinite
I'm a big fan of DS1's poise. I've never really been into the DS1 pvp, and in PVE it really makes the heavier armor feel so great to wear. You can just completely ignore so many of the less threatening enemies and it seems like a reasonable trade for the much slower rolls. It also makes the equip load breakpoints more like delineations between distinct "classes" which is something that is missing in the other games.
I love your content and I love the data you provide! I am really happy you found a way to add comedy and some meme potential! If that makes you happy than please by all means keep adding it to the content you make. You give off a sincere and kind vibe and your jokes and editing make your content feel complete 10/10
Your channel is so well done, I wish your videos were longer!
babe, wake up! New Illusory Wall vid just dropped!
I desperately hope we get DS1 or DS2 Poise in Elden Ring, which thankfully, it seems like it had in the network test from my experience.
it got removed from the network test, but it was in the creator test. equip load being connected to strength makes strength builds seem fucking awesome now too.
@@anchoviesonnachos7074 the heck are you smoking mate, the passive poise was definetely in the CNT.
In only couple of hours of PvP I managed to meet several dudes with heavy armor and the dagger weapons which was quite frustrating to deal with.
I wish I hadn't seen this.
been waiting for another one of these. Very nice
Love the video! As for my preferences, imo the biggest issue with DS1 "passive" poise isn't the poise backstabs. It's the fact that it actually hurts heavy tank builds more than it helps them. Heavy armor requires a lot of Equip Burden, so the most efficient way to play a poisetank in the game is actually LIGHT weapons with heavy armor. This is why the Havel Gold Tracer setup is so powerful and overbearing, whether it's in PvP or the Four Kings boss fight.
By comparison, using heavy weapons with heavy armor is extremely stat demanding and inefficient, and it forces Poise Boys to sacrifice other important stats like HP and Strength to afford their armor (defying the point of being a heavy tank build).
The benefit of Dark Souls 3's weapon-specific hyperarmor is that is allocates poise to the weapons that need it most. That is why Ultras are even remotely viable for PvP. And because Ultras need less armor to effectively "poise" through enemy swings, it also addresses the issue of equip burden. It makes heavy weapon setups more stat efficient and usable, while denying the power of poise to weapons that don't need it (like daggers and curved swords).
All that said, I like the idea of a hybrid system.
One of the biggest issues with DS3's weapon hyperarmor is that tiny hits can reliably stagger outside of hyperarmor frames. As a lot of people complained about when DS3 launched, this can turn some mob enemies (eg. packs of rats) into a potential infinite stunlock if you get cornered. And to my chagrin, the lack of passive poise also pushes ganks in PvP to spam projectiles since they reliably stagger and make it incredibly difficult to approach.
I'd love to have just enough passive poise to deal with four people chucking firebombs or Deep Soul spells, instead of getting staggered for every hit. But I don't want it to be possible to passively poise through anything bigger than a 2H curved sword, because that starts to throw a wrench in weapon/build balance. Paired with the weapon hyperarmor system of DS3, this could be the best of both worlds. And I'm hoping Elden Ring aims for that.
I thought about writing something like this, but you went into great detail, better than I ever could. The only thing I can think to add is that the "active Poise" of DS3 makes certain weapons a bit shittier than they would otherwise be due to their Poise usually only activating while 2-handing (ALL Greatswords do this, which sucks since they're slow).
There's gonna be a lot of reductive comments saying "Dark Souls 3 doesn't have poise", but this is exactly the sort of response regarding what it offered and lacked that I was hoping to see.
7:23 good use of subjectivism there, a person can dislike passive poise (i think i prefer active poise myself), but one cannot say it is "bad" if it is working exactly how it was intended to work. good job!
This is going to be legitimately helpful knowledge going into Elden
Always great to get another illusory wall video!
I feel like I should mention that the way poise works as an armor stat in ds3 is that it serves as defense for the hyper armor 'poise hp'.
So you need to swing heavy weapons to get the effect, but wearing heavier armor while doing so can let you poise heavier attacks(or more attacks as the case may be).
The quality just improves with every video. Great job with this, IW!
Now I really want to see DkS3 poise broken down in this manner.
You are probably the GOAT of video game mechanical analysis at this point. Aside from the TAS community, but those types don't do it solely for love of the game, so you still win
It might be interesting to see something like enemies having basically the reverse of our armor poise bonus. Meaning, enemies have base 5 (less in special situations), but the weaker an enemies is, the longer their timer gets. A more armored enemy would be able to take a few hits and shake it off, keep going easier, a rat or barely clothed hollow is going to be taking a lot more actual damage per hit from a weapon, and isn't going to be able to keep taking hits the same way.
Finally a new Video from you. Been waiting for long. Don't miss "elden ring dissected"