Artificial difficulty doesn't exis

That one fast dash move they do is only after they stop moving for like a second and a half. If you see them stop moving, you know that move is coming.

Because the hollows come all at the same time. DaS is the least fair because it doesn't give you as many tools to deal with multiple enemies and 4 direction rolls are cancer.

No no, I think he's talking about that move where they swing left to right like a mad man. Honestly I think he's probably trying to kill them as fast as he can and getting fucked by that move.
Now the Spear Heide Knights are real motherfuckers.

>articial difficulty
ah yes, the mating call of the eternal scrub

I beat the whole game with caestus at sl 30 git gud

Tell me about it.
>performs a 3-move combo that ends with a drawn-out, telegraphed finisher
>move in to capitalize on the opening
>he instantly cancels his finisher animation and performs a 2-frame attack and hits me before I can land my first hit
So many DaS2 enemies ignore the most basic fundamentals of enemy design in action games.

>because it doesn't give you as many tools to deal with multiple enemies
What does DaS2 give you that DaS doesn't?

The hollows in the church are piss easy, just keep blasting them other magic.

A shitton more items, both offensive and defensive, and multidirectionnal rolls. And it's much easier to pull enemies one by one.

*Them with magic

People who suck at video games complained about "ambushes" in dark souls 2, which really meant they charged head-first into mobs of enemies with no plan, and cried when they didn't come out on top

>[enemy] is easy, just cheat

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Friendly reminder that if you:

- summoned
- used shields
- used magic of any kind
- used backstabs
- used any weapon upgraded with twinkling titanite, demon titanite, or dragon scale
- used chaos or lightning weapons
- used any armor with poise
- used Mask of the Mother
- used Havel's Ring
- used the Wolf Ring
- used the Hornet Ring
- used the Dark Wood Grain Ring
- used the Rusted Iron Ring
- used the Ring of Favor and Protection
- used any consumables aside from the ones found as loot
- grinded or farmed any mob
- kindled any bonfire
- leveled vitality above 27
- didn't kill the Stray Demon immediately after unlocking the Undead Parish lift, with a weapon upgraded no higher than +5
- used the stairs in the Capra Demon fight
- killed the Gaping Dragon by attacking his tail
- used the spider shield in Blighttown
- used poison arrows against the Anor Londo archers
- killed Ornstein first
- didn't let Artorias buff
- didn't cut Kalameet's tail
- parried Gwyn

You didn't actually beat Dark Souls.

t

Dark Souls 1 had Blighttown with toxic darts, 15FPS which killed the platforming, the Tomb of the Giants, New Londo with the (use items to be able to actually hit enemies lol)

DS2 had what? You being stupid and running from one knight to another instead of fighting them one on one? The only issue you should have if you killed Dragonrider is the spot at the bonfire, the knight and soldier both gets activated there

Would you like me to list DS3's artificial difficulty too?

The problem with ambushes is not the difficulty. The problem is that they force you into a very boring tedious playstyle where you play a game of chicken.

Having to spend 90% of the game circle strafing around groups of enemies to bait out attacks and poke them is not indicative of good enemy design.
You can build challenging moments by making the player engage in crowd control (and every Souls game does this), but if you lazily slap ambushes around every other corner it gets old fast.

>If you play the game as designed by the devs, you are playing it wrong.

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I know, I've watched someone struggle at the beginning of FotFG, where that round room is with the tree at the center and hollows pretending to be dead, waking every single one up by rushing in and running around the tree to the point the enemies stopped spawning. It was fucking embarassing.

Actually I can think of one artificial difficult are n DS2,apart from Iron Passage on the way to the bonus boss in the DLC
In the area with Straid, the mobs outside there. They can explode and throw you into one another and fuck you up very fast

But I really do struggle to find any issue in DS2 that cannot be resolved by hitting one enemy with an arrow, pulling them to you and fighting them.
It was the same in DS1 with a lot of the group fights. Even if you want to count the hollows before the Gargoyles, just kill the channeler with arrows, then fight the hollows retreating backwards as needed

Certain playstyles will fuck you up, sure. Like having 0 armor and base health while swinging a fucking Zweihander there but that's being retarded

Eyyy this the new and upgraded version of the
>some retard agros every mob in forest of the fallen giants
meme?

>But I really do struggle to find any issue in DS2 that cannot be resolved by hitting one enemy with an arrow, pulling them to you and fighting them.

[game] is easy, just cheat

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Oh actually that area with Straid in SotFS was fixed, all the explodey guys are docile. Makes it a good starting spot for farming them skulls that attract enemies for the Chariot boss.

But I agree, you gotta use the enviroment to your advantage, whener I do the church hollows I run back and get them from around the corner, if I have a spear I just stab them.

What about the area in the Bastille where you open a door and a clown car of knights pour out if you take so much as two steps in, while not giving the player any indication that they're there or any chance to scope out and understand the enemy placement before aggriong them?
Or the part in the woods where you open a door and a group of enemies drop out of inaccessible high-placed doors and ambush you without warning?

Slap on havels
Equip BKGS
Press R1 occasionally using your estus flask

There you go a perfect guide to beating Artorias "the hardest and most fair boss in DS1" of the abyss.
The greatest thing about DS2 was the amount of people trying really hard to pretend that DS1 was perfect with no flaws

You mean the area that's right next to two extremely open areas with stairs you can use to abuse pathfinding or a narrow corridor you can backpedal into and both areas also have explosive barrels thatthe enemies will use to commit suicide.

Yeah absolutely unbeatable, in unrelated news I never beat sens fortress because that one stairway that has a boulder on it is impossible, I try to run and the boulder hits me no matter how fast I try to run as soon as I get to it.

Not the user you replied to be that part with Rosabeth is pretty fucked if you don't have a fast way to kill them.
Sure, you can pretty much jump onto the walkway but it's actually somewhat hard to do

Rosabeth's area I agree but the part at the Bastille isn't bad - as soon as you walk in you see a soldier moving towards you and hear him too. Back the fuck out or run into an unknown area to fight - your choice.

That Bastille area gives you so much room to move around in, but from what I've seen most people simply back up from the door to the constrained area behind them, which they forget there's rubble they can drop down from.
Now that Woods area is straight up a legit ambush, I'll give you that but its about as surprising as walking into the Capra room for the first time and getting attacked by dogs, you instinctively put your shield up but Capra's overhead smash just ignores it completely. There's no way to know the first time and that's okay.

>abuse path finding
Abusing the game's broken AI doesn't excuse the piss poor enemy design.
Again, you have no indication of what to expect before entering that door. You're forced into a reactive situation where you have to play chicken, backpedal and take potshots, as opposed to giving you a chance to observe the group before entering and planning a proactive approach.
Also your second paragraph is complete non-sequitor not related to the argument at hand, but even then you're explicitly shown that the boulders are an obstacle before being in any danger yourself. They place a snake man in the opening who is guaranteed to get hit by the boulder, which perfectly shows the player what their obstacle is and gives them ample time to observe the boulders and come up with an approach. You can play proactively and not reactively.

Yeah that area can is kind of bitch especially if you go to it early, good thing is you only have to do it once and it also has explosive barrels

>you're not a TRUE dark souls fan until you've refused to experience more than 5% of the game

>goblin slayer but you are the goblin
Heide Knights have some batshit retarded movesets compared to hollows though

yeah except the hollows die in one hit and don't do alot of damage
their numbers are offest by them being the shittiest mob in game

>Again, you have no indication of what to expect before entering that door.
Except the soldiers literally right next to the door who you can see as soon as you enter and look to the left. You can only blame the game so much for your own ADHD and the constant need to run dick first into everything.

Like it or not kiting enemies in open areas/picking them off in chokepoints is 101 for the souls series, up until lategame when you have enough poise and HP to run dick first into every encounter and actually have a realistic chance of winning

>killed ornstein first
I don't get this, I've always found mega ornstein way easier than mega smough because ornstein has no charge spam and his butt slam aoe is smaller

>don't do a lot of damage
You can't fool me you six-eyed piece of shit, I heard you doing your jig on the way up!

Dark Souls 2 replaced the concept of engaging fights that required pattern recognition and smart planning with

>DURR PUT 70 ENEMIES IN EVERY ROOM SO PLAYERS HAVE TO BAIT AND POKE EACH ENEMY DOWN ONE BY ONE. OUR GAME IS LIKE SOOOOO HARD WE SHOULD USE IT AS OUR WHOLE SALES PITCH.

In short: B team.

user, the moment you walk into the door you see a royal soldier run to you, you hear him moving before you even get through the door

If you have brightness at minimum then and no sound then I Can understand

The hardest part of the fight is the first phase, and you have far more windows to attack Ornstein than Smough.

Ornstein has that one charge attack that leaves him open for 2 years after it inevitably misses. If all else fails you can just run and roll until he does that, get a cheap hit in and kill 100% safe and you enter phase 2 with full estus and life, just boring as shit.

DS2 and 3 did have bullshit moments where yo udid have enemies jumping in your back. In DS3 you could make it trough with quick reflexes, but in 2 you'd just die unless you pump a lot of stats into adaptility or simply know where they are to roll away before you get hit in the back.

For one, you cannot even see the soldiers to the left until you've aggro'd the soldiers straight ahead.
Two, the encounter is very clearly specifically designed to have the player focus on the soldiers ahead and be ambushed by offscreen soldiers to the left. Even if they play defensively and draw the enemies out into the open, they'll still be caught off guard by the fact that 7 soldiers just came crawling out of the door when you thought there were only two to deal with. Which again, forces you into a reactive position, not a proactive one. Granting the player opportunities to think proactively is paramount to separating challenging level design from frustrating level design.

But cirlestafe backsatbbing every encounter was the issue of DS1 since it was so easy to do and so safe once you actually got the backstab. It's harder to do in 2 because enemies skate all over the place to keep tracking you as you circlestrafe and will mob and and knock you out of the backstab setup animation if you try to do it in large groups.

>see an enemy
>see that the room is open
>rush into the enemy get blindsided from all the angles you ignored
>whine about it on forums
Remember how DS1 had enemies you literally couldn't damage before you walked past them since they were behind closed doors and the ambush point was ahead? In fact it was such a fun thing the devs did it twice in a row in the lower undead burgh.

Don't blame the game for your own stupidity and don't pretend that the series was ever For Honor 1v1 duels in every encounter

>see enemy ahead in a room
>see it's on a lower level
>cannot see the stairs fully or the rest of the room
>hmm there's also a walkway to the left and right

LEEEEROY JENNNNKIINS

Son, you got fucking nobody to blame if you play Dark Souls 2 with the mentality that you're a fucking superman

>explosive barrels you can bait the enemies into attacking for easy multi kills
>2 arenas that are open
>1 chokepoint corridor to spear with
>or just fuck it and run past them to the boss fog, the tried and tested souls method of clearing every encounter if you just want to get to the boss
No, really the player had no options for dealing with that encounter, every fight should be a 1v1 duel against an enemy that is easy to backstab circelstrafe and you should never have to do anything else, the epitome of great and fun encounter design.

To be fair, DS2 shouldn't exist either

>So many DaS2 enemies ignore the most basic fundamentals of enemy design in action games.
Because it's not an action game, it's an action RPG. It doesn't have to be a fair fight because you can come back later with better stats or equipment.

Someone post the Dark Souls 2 version of "a tale of two adventurers" for this confused user.

Got a kek from me, good b8

We're talking about DaS2, not DaS1.
Nowhere did I paint the scenario that the player would rush headlong into the room. Even if you play defensively and carefully you will still draw out more enemies than expected.
And again with the whataboutism. DaS1 has its problems but we're not talking about DaS1. Talk about the game you're defending.
Bringing the enemies out into the open and out of the choke point gives them more opportunity to swarm you.
And what if the player doesn't have a spear or long reach weapon? They'll find themselves trading hits because the knights' attacks will clip through eachother in the chokepoint. Dark Souls 1 was praised for giving the player freedom to approach situations with any build or weapon and come out on top. If you're forced to bring a specific weapon type to deal with a scenario in DaS2, then that is a failure of the level design.
Though it's ironic that DaS2fags praise their game for variety of weapons and builds but then turn around and command you to use specific weapons to deal with unbalanced and poorly-planned scenarios.
Also running to the boss fog is ineffective, since enemies can damage you during the animation, leaving you either dead or at a deficit for health upon starting the boss fight. Do you even know your own game?

>We're talking about DaS2, not DaS1.
And I'm telling you thats how encounters in the entire series work, go play Dynasty Warriors or something if that's not what your into.
>Even if you play defensively and carefully you will still draw out more enemies than expected.
I expected to find 900000000000000 enemies in every room after the tree in FotFG, you on the other hand are trying to look for excuses for why your retarded ass died doing retarded shit.
>choke point gives them more opportunity to swarm you.
Yes with their amazing 3 second windup greatsword swings that prevent them from moving as soon as the animation starts.

Yeah open areas are bad if all you try to do is circlestrafe backstab but enemies are so slow that you can run circles around them, the main limiting factor being the amount of space available for kiting.

Was DS2 your first action game or something, this is some very basic bitch tier shit that you seem to struggle with.

Lunastra can give me pawjob anytime she wants

>see one enemy
>go towards it """"""""""""defensively"""""""""""
>see another enemy
>alright that's it this game will never make me engage in a larger than 2v1 encounter despite most early game encounters being 3v1 or more unless you bow cheese
>NOW is the time to run in dick first
>Shit it wasn't 2v1 better blame the game for my death
DS2 came out 5 years ago, how long are you gonna stay salty for?

Not a single argument to be found here. Just deflections, and hominem and straw manning? Why do you keep bringing up circle strafing and leeroy jenkins shit when I've never mentioned anything like that? You have no actual defenses here.
Nothing out of the norm for Dark Souls 2 contrarians, I suppose.

>Why do you keep bringing up circle strafing and leeroy jenkins shit when I've never mentioned anything like that?
Because you are saying that's what you are doing.
It's YOU claiming that YOU walked into the room and YOU got blindesided by enemies YOU say YOU saw and then chose to ignore then YOU died to them.

You are engineering a scenario in which you were stupid and died so you can point out how the encounter are bad, but then later you try to backtrack and claim you are a 9001 IQ godgamer who saw it all coming and it's really not an issue.

What the fuck are you even saying here, did you run dick first into the bastille and died, or did you not get your story straight, you can't bait by pretending to be retarded then later claim that no that didn't happen but somehow your point still stands.

That's literally not how the encounter functions. You don't even know what you're defending. This is a waste of time..

>trying to act aloof now
Jeez, what next? Stale webms?

Show me the post where I suggested that the optimal strategy was backstab fishing or YOLOing into the room.

go back to your /vg/ containment board

Show me the post where you said anything other than
>I walked into the room and then was attacked by more enemies than I expected.
That is, explicitly yololing, and the only reason you would get swarmed by enemies who are slower than you and have slower attacks than you if you intentionally run into a group of them to try and backstab fish.

I specifically mentioned that the first group of enemies are triggered upon taking even one step into the room. Taking one more step triggers the second group. That isn't yoloing, that's progressing at a patient and careful pace. Are you supposed to literally just not move once you open the door and wait for the enemies to start coming at you on their own accord?

>agro enemies
>BWAAAAAAAAAAA unbeatable game
Alright I have misunderstood you, mein bad.
You are just so incredibly bad at the game you are incapable of dealing with more than 3 enemies at once.

Should have said so from the start, we could have saved all this time and given you the good old git gud and been done with it. Enjoy being proud of being unable to beat a fairly average game in terms of difficulty, have it marked on your grave
>here lies user, still salty about DS2

Now get your last word in, I'm done

make me kike

FUCK YOU AND FUCK SOUL MEMORY
I just wanted my weeb armor and you niggers racked up my level so far up because your drops weren't as often as I wanted them. I eventually killed you faggots so much that you stop sapwning which led me to using bonfire ascetics to bring you back, bringing my SM even higher.
Fuck this game.
bellbroing was still the most enjoyable experience I've ever had, only beaten by being a grapefriend in the beginning of DaS3

Your level of conversational understanding is like that of a whiny 6th grader. I have never once suggested that it was "unbeatable" or even all that difficult to deal with. It's just poorly designed and intentionally frustrating so BAMCO can push the "prepare to die" meme.
But whatever, you keep eating your shit and enjoying it, who am I to tell you what to do?

Is this a joke? You are supposed to take the knights on in tiers: one, then two, then the Heides. Of course you're going to get chased by every mob in the area if you just run right past them you fucking loon.

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>prepare to die
>DS1 prepare to die edition
>DS2 scholar of the first sin
It's ok user, it's ok, if you believe things enough they will become true

Did you just play the game for the first time last week? The marketing was loaded to the brim with prepare to die nonsense. Yes it did start with DaS1, but that marketing hit its peak during the period leading up to and after 2's release. It's pushed so hard in-game top with things such as the opening cutscene with the hags.
There's even a worldwide death counter for Christ's sake.

I don't remember the 2nd one personally, but if the first one gave you trouble, you just fucking suck.
First of all, there's a window that you can look into, where you cam see all of the knights.
Second, that building is connected to a narrow bridge. You're supposed to funnel them on the bridge, so they can't surround you, and beat them down as they run into you.

Dark Souls 2 hate threads are an easy way to farm (You)s

Prepare to die was a marketing campaign created by bandai namco, it was not how the game was designed. Dark Souls 2 however was negatively influenced by "dark souls is good because it's hard" and this affected the gameplay and level design

If you try to funnel them on the bridge without a weapon that has long reach then you're gonna run a high risk of trading hits. Again, if you have to use a specific weapon in order to overcome an otherwise normal encounter, then there's an issue with the design.
And again, from an experienced player's perspective that encounter is NOT that difficult. I've done it dozens of times without issue.
I'm arguing from the perspective of a new player, who can't really anticipate just how many enemies will be drawn out and might be overwhelmed for the mistake of taking a whopping ONE extra step into the room and having 6 knights sicced on him, leaving to a frustrating experience.

Of course it wasnt and of course DS2 "Scholar of the prepare to die even more" was made just to be an unfair unbalanced game full of cheap kills that the player has no way of avoiding.

>I have never once suggested that it was "unbeatable" or even all that difficult to deal with
Why are you obsessed over an encounter that's by your own admission not even remotely challenging? That just doesn't compute user, you either had an axe to grind with the bastille or you breezed past it and it's nothing remarkable

Lunastra is just fucking cancer, it doesn't matter the mh entry you play

You sound like a little bitch .

Of course those hags make fun of you, their backyard is filled to the brim with other smelly hollow hobos, you even walk in dressed like one.

No example will prove that artificial difficulty exists because as a concept it's meaningless. It's just a type of difficulty that the one who uses that word doesn't like. Sometimes other things too maybe, but they have nothing in common so the word carries no information basically.

>if I cant do this perfectly my first time without knowing the encounter and without taking any hits whatsoever its fucking broken

Go back to playing kirby man. More up your alley.

You don't get the point. Once more, I'm not arguing from my perspective. I'm arguing from the perspective of a new player who is not given ample opportunity to act proactively in this scenario. And again, like I said, the difference between proactive and reactive level design is the difference between rewarding and frustrating experiences. This is an important difference to understand, and these types of scenarios are littered all over the game. I'm just using the Bastille encounter as an example.

So? You still start the game with NPCs saying "prepare 2 die lululul" at the very beginning. Just because there's a flimsy justification doesn't mean the end result is any better.

>It's YOU claiming that YOU walked into the room and YOU got blindesided by enemies YOU say YOU saw and then chose to ignore then YOU died to them.
Stop being obtuse. If you walk through that door and right out again in order to pull aggro and play it safe you're going to end up with 5+ guys swarming through that door. Good design shouldn't require you to pull out a bow every single time you see an enemy. Good design should reward caution, but it should not instill fear. That spot is designed to screw with you in spite of caution.
Will you also defend pre-patch Shrine of Amana? In case you forgot, those fuckers had a range longer than your visibility of them while you run around in precarious shallow water trying to dodge the homing magic and all the other enemies over the place. And then you accidentally roll out of the homing magic into the aggro of the ogre.

>die for the first time in DaS2
>Welcome to Dark Souls cheevo
k

Ah so you didn't struggle with bastille but a hypothetical "new player" who isn't a godgamer did so you want to help them right? Your not bad your just, asking for a friend.

>swarming through that door
That only one of them fits through onto a walkway where they can't even fit past each other 1 dude sure is a swarm.

Dark Souls 2 couldn't into enemy design, so it just copy pasted enemies to compensate.

Maybe I did struggle with that encounter on my first playthrough, I don't remember, I played the game day 1 and that was 5 years ago.
Though I don't understand why you have such a hard time empathizing with the perspective of a new player who doesn't already have every nook and cranny memorized. I understand how the scenario work, I think it's poorly designed and the conclusion is that it makes the game more frustrating than rewarding.

>leveling vitality

Ok that's good, the first step is admitting that you have a problem, the next step is trying to improve. I get that this has been a harrowing experience full of flashbacks of where your godgamer skills failed and you died but maybe, if you are really strong you can go back, try it again and see how much you have improved!
You will never conquer your personal demons unless you face them, and that bastille room has left a mark on your soul, I can see it from the way you are still triggered by it 5 years after the games release.

Be strong user, you can do it, we all believe in you.

That they can only go through the door one at a time doesn't mean they don't swarm through it. Just look at the footage here of a guy new to the game on release, 12:28. He reads the warnings, is cautious, takes two steps in and sees he's walking into trouble. His attack plan is retarded but he manages to survive because the issue is a matter of poor design above all.
youtu.be/WaQVn1OLw4E?t=12m28s

lol okay nerd

Imagine typing all this out because you don't want to believe that Dark Souls 2 has sub-standard enemy design.

It's almost identical to the mannerisms of retards like hbomberguy.
I guess birds of a feather flock together.

>constantly jumping attacking into groups
I mean he could have pressed literally any other form of attack that doesn't leave you open for 20 years but sure I guess you proved your point bad players die when they play badly.

It.s okay, we can talk about your "new player" friend instead if you want to, I misspoke by implying you didn't beat DS2 with 0 deaths on your first playthrough.

No seriously though I can't imagine the mental gymnastics needed to try and justify how a "totally not hard at all" area that is just a room with a some dudes in it stuck to you so vividly that you feel personally offended enough to shitpost about it 5 years after the games release. If you wanna play the "its a bullshit area card" you also have to admit that the bullshit had some effect one you in which case you took part in the process of gitting gud

early game sotfs compared to original is absolutely retarded for a new player. Forest of the fallen giants have like 2 times the amount of mobs, Heide's tower was filled with those bullshit knights too, they even added a fucking dragon before the Dragonslayer boss fight.

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>I mean he could have pressed literally any other form of attack that doesn't leave you open for 20 years
I did point out that his attacking style was retarded because he's retarded.
>I guess you proved your point
My point was that the design was shite, which it is, but just because the design is shite doesn't mean people are going to die there every time. It gets brought up without fail every thread because it's a standout moment in the game, crystalising the essence of how not to design a level.
>bad players die when they play badly
Clearly not as he somehow survives the ordeal.

It gets brought up by people like you, who by their own admission, had no trouble with and are just pointing it out for the sake of all the blind deaf and stupid new players who don't seem to really comment on the situation.
It's never any of these new players that struggle, it's always, without fail, people who claim the area is a non issue that whine about it.

Shits hilarious but predictable and sad