Dark Souls

[Alan]

I figured I'd put my Dark Souls posts somewhere other than the FFXIII thread.

[Alan]

You should play Dark Souls!

It's the best game I've played since...Demon's Souls. I went to explore a new area, and within 2 minutes of arriving I fell through a floor, losing half my health, and looked up to see the area boss one shotting me with a gigantic hammer-axe-thingy from across the room. I lost all my humanity and souls (the game's currency, which are fair game for losing unless you spend it on either items or leveling up), and couldn't recover them unless I got to the boss without dying. I wanted to find an alternate path that didn't involve me losing half my health, so I went exploring the rest of the level. I inched forward bit by bit, carefully looking around every corner, and backtracking to the bonfire to heal as I painstakingly learned the level.

Then I ran into a Black Knight (the enemy on the game's cover) that destroyed me, thus causing me to lose all the humanity and souls I'd dropped against the boss - permanently.

Instead of feeling enraged - you kind of get used to this sort of thing after a while - I felt strangely relieved. Now I had nothing left to lose. I died against the Black Knight again and again, finally killed him, then encountered a second. This time, I knew how to fight it; and killed it on the first try. I managed to find a couple other items, but sadly, no other way of getting to the boss.

So I dropped through the floor, avoided the telescoping hammer-axe, and was killed by an explosive firebomb AOE attack.

I dropped through the floor again, and was killed when the boss flew in the air and sat on me.

Then I was killed by the hammer-axe again. Then the firebomb. Then the firebomb. Then the firebomb. Then the axe.

Along the way, I learned the range of the firebomb, the range at which it would attack me with the hammer-axe, and how to manage range and direction so that I wouldn't die within a minute. And I killed that motherfucker. It was the most satisfying thing I did in a game since...

I can't really remember. It may have been the most satisfying gaming moment of my life.

Here's a clip of someone fighting that boss. My experience was eerily similar. The real action starts at the 5 minute mark.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIN_bfaD7Qw

[Alan]

http://tap-repeatedly.com/2011/12/19/da ... ths-1-133/

Related article for me to read later.

Edit:

As with Demon’s Souls, it’s often amazing to turn around and realize how little physical progress you’ve made, despite the sensation of having battled through endless adversity.

This happens frequently in this game. I remember going through the first real area (past the tutorial level); after what felt like (and may have been) a long, terrifying hour I reached the next bonfire (basically a checkpoint that respawns all non-boss enemies), I turned around to go back to the starting area to check something out. And then found that it takes less than 5 minutes to get from the starting bonfire to the second bonfire once you know where the enemies are.

Edit 2:

As with its predecessor, when you engage with a boss demon in Dark Souls, chances are you’re in it for the long haul. There’s no escape, no retreat; so if it kills you, you have little choice but to return again and again unless you want to abandon all the souls you dropped. Moreover, you keep adding to that soul pile every time you re-engage the boss – whatever you collected on your umpteenth journey toward its lair. So 700 souls becomes 1,400, becomes 2,100, becomes 2,800, and on and on… provided, of course, you have the approach down to a science and don’t get yourself killed on the way. To die on the way would be a reprieve of sorts, because you’d have to accept the loss of all the souls and you’d be able to go to bed. But if you don’t, if you just shut the game off, there’s a good chance you’ll have lost your approach mojo by the next day, so one wrong move and your beautiful collection of souls are gone for good.

[Alan]

Here's video of the area I just finished. I think this guy was on the verge of a breakdown. You too can experience Dark Souls!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1EB39pW ... re=related

[Alan]

These two articles describe really well three aspects of Dark Souls that set it above and beyond other RPGs (and games in general I've played) - the difficulty, the level design, and the storytelling:

http://savetherobot.wordpress.com/2012/ ... -fortress/

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/729 ... an-crumble

Difficulty/level design

Let’s take an example: the section named Sen’s Fortress. Jayson Gegner praised it on Twitter as “Dark Souls’ gameplay design & level design in microcosm,” and he’s right: almost every design decision that makes Dark Souls great can be seen in this sequence.

And you won’t even see it coming. You may look straight at Sen’s Fortress a hundred times before you learn what it’s for or even what it’s called. Dark Souls has an “open world,” although you’d be better to call it a semi-open world. It is not like Bethesda’s contemperanous Skyrim, where you can start walking in any direction and find something to do; instead, you have a handful of choices at any one time, and you have to figure out which one is best.

Your first big choice in the game is to go up, or down. Nobody points you to the trailheads: you just realize after poking around that these are your options. Which is better? Nobody tells you. There is a guy sitting nearby who tells you that your job is to ring two bells, but he doesn’t say why, and he doesn’t tell you where they are. You’re on your own.

Why would the designers give us these options when all but one of them leads to disaster? Because if we make the decision, we own the consequences. When we talk about “open world” games, we think of words like “discovery” and “freedom,” and sometimes we conflate the terms: if we can discover the game on our own, then we must be free. But there’s no freedom in Dark Souls. The designers let us discover and experience the place on our own, while hooking us on an invisible leash to keep us more or less on task. Yet we still feel like we’ve conquered this space, because we put it together ourselves—unlocking our own shortcuts, discovering how the levels connect, and making our mental maps of the entire world. (Here’s one simple way From Software could have ruined the whole game: by giving us an on-screen mini-map.)

The traps in Sen’s Fortress—the darts, the boulders, the axes—reinforce something you knew from the beginning of the game: the very ground you walk on is treacherous. This is something you don’t see in, say, BioWare RPGs, where the space you walk through is mainly there to pace out the encounters. In Dark Souls, you have to pay attention to the floor. You can fall off the edges of cliffs, or shimmy along a narrow ledge to a treasure. Without going as far as Prince of Persia, Sen’s Fortress makes you aware of the physical space you’re in by making it treacherous—and it’s treacherous in a different way than the cliffs up to Undead Burg, or the shaky platforms of Blighttown, or the invisible pathways of the Crystal Cave, or the tree roots of the Great Hollow (where falling can be the easiest way down). Anor Londo lets you stroll across broad, flat, wide-open bridges, but it also forces you to shimmy up flying buttresses and sneak around narrow ledges—which tells you that this place is grand, and you don’t belong here. In the same way, the traps and catwalks of Sen’s Fortress give the environment its own character, and brings a new texture to your experience.

When you get to the roof, you’re supposed to feel nervous as hell. In fact, when you first set foot up there, you’ll see a metal giant. If you’re like me, you will stand dead still to see if he’s going to attack you—yes, he’s maybe a hundred feet away, but who knows? But he ignores you, and once you’re at ease, you can creep around the rooftop, fighting knights (who are tough but familiar), sneaking around corners, and the whole time feeling torn between two impulses: the urge to explore what’s up here, and the fear that you’ll get killed and have to start over.

When I caught sight of him I backed up and raised my shield: was he going to attack me? Then I noticed what he was doing: he was hard at work throwing boulders down a hole. I had seen the device that caught the boulders, the tracks they rolled down, the holes where they broke through the walls, the lizards they crushed. I knew that the tracks ran through the entire Fortress, and now I could see the giant creature that kept the boulders rolling, moving like clockwork: lift, turn, drop, lift, turn, drop. He’s the coldly beating heart of this puzzle box, the engine that drives the entire machine, the creature that just keeps dropping rocks on your head to see if you’ll quit. He’s the most obvious metaphor for a game designer you’ll ever find. Is he making your life miserable—or richer, and more exciting? That’s for you to decade.

Bonfires usually appear out in the open, with the consistency of highway rest stops. But once in a while, the designers decide to hide a bonfire, or block it off with a gate. In Sen’s Fortress, you have to look for a gap in the wall on the rooftop that lets you drop down a few feet and land in a balcony, where you’ll find the level’s only bonfire. You might miss it at first because, for one thing, the gap is hard to see from where you’re standing, and for another, the first time you reach that part of the roof, a grenade drops right in your face and sets you on fire, making you scramble as you try to figure out where it came from and how to escape.

That’s a good joke! The first giant you see on the roof will startle you, but he won’t hurt you. But there’s a second one who makes his presence known by throwing those grenades that burn off most of your health. Once you get a handle on where he’s aiming, he becomes predictable and easy to evade—but he’s still a nuisance. You can make your way up to his tower and try to kill him, but if you haven’t found the bonfire yet, this is a dicey proposition: it usually takes two or three runs to beat a mini-boss, and if you whiff it on this one, you’ll have to take on the whole fortress before you can try again.

But like I said, find the bonfire, and the entire dynamic changes. Now you have a waypoint at the edge of the roof. You’re gotten past the hardest parts of the region. You don’t have to mess around with swinging axes or dark tunnels or lizard men. You finally have time to explore.

The boss fight that ends the region is the easiest thing you’ll encounter. The Iron Golem that guards the exit may look tough, and he has a few tricks: if you get too close to his hand, he might pick you up and throw you right over the side of the building. But as with most of the bosses in the game, there’s a simple way to beat him: hide behind his legs and whack at his ankles until he’s dead. Once you’ve tackled the rest of this place, the boss is just an encore.

When you beat him, you’re done. Sen’s Fortress has changed from an out-of-the-way building, to the next step in your quest, to a nigh-insurmountable challenge, to an old friend. You’ll probably still remember every nook and cranny of the map, but now you’ll have a shortcut—a prison cage that acts as an elevator—that lets you skip all the challenges in between. There may still be a few corners and secrets you haven’t checked out: the chutes at the end of a few hallways that drop you down to the bottom, or the pit where that creepy headless Titanite demon hops around. You can tackle that at your leisure.

We tend to fixate on challenge because it’s that’s how we cope with it: we try to measure it and gauge it, we wonder if we can handle it, and then we slowly prepare to confront it. We lower our expectations and, at the same time, raise our skills through practice, until finally the mountain that looked so high from the base seems kind of small and cozy once we’re at the top. Things are only difficult until we understand them. To people who have beaten Dark Souls, the game doesn’t really seem that hard—hence the expression, “the real Dark Souls starts here,” meaning, in the much harder New Game Plus.

In music, film, and literature, difficult works provoke the same kind of response. We talk about them in terms of whether we can deal with them: War and Peace is too long, Ulysses is too opaque, Lars Von Trier’s films are too disturbing. Audiences may balk at a work because it’s unfamiliar, complicated, opaque, taboo, exhausting, unpleasant to the senses, and so on—but in every case, the audience has to think about that barrier and make sure they’re ready to cross it. We wonder, are we the problem? Or is the work failing us? Is it challenging because the challenge is key to the form, the message, and the experience—or is it challenging because the artist is a jerk? If the artist has a message to send us—well, to paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn, why couldn’t they just send us a telegram?

The primary language of Dark Souls is difficulty. The game paces and varies that difficulty with the same craft that goes into its character builds, sound effects, and environmental design, and with the same purpose: to explore distinct, exquisitely-realized variations on one unified experience. What starts as a dare is revealed to be the reward.

Storytelling

Dark Souls has been praised for its backstory—or as Tom Bissell put it, for not telling you what the backstory is. To a limited extent, Dark Souls practices environmental storytelling. The game takes place in a ruined civilization—you can see that just by looking at the buildings. The few characters you can talk to are faded ghosts from a better time; that’s why they seem helpless and in fact, rarely even move around. The few bits of backstory you pick up come from quick dialogues and from the loading screens, where objects flash by with a few breadcrumbs of exposition attached. Big Hat Logan? Anor Londo? You only have a dim idea of what these mean.

Dark Souls is one of the most engrossing games I’ve ever played. No matter what I’m doing, I feel “in the moment.” I imagine this is how a feral cat feels, prowling the same neighborhood night after night, looking for fights—and like the feral cat, I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about how it all came to be. Where most RPGs try to pile on history to give their stories weight, Dark Souls—for all the evidence of its history—keeps you focused on the here and now, rarely giving you a reason to reflect.

Still, there is a story here, and I counted two pieces of lore in Sen’s Fortress. First is the name: Who is Sen? I have no idea. So far, I haven’t found another reference to him anywhere. More compelling is an archer who we find on the rooftop, guarding a tower. When you approach him, he doesn’t stand out from the other knights and guards you run into up here. But if you close in and engage him, you’ll notice he has a few more tricks up his sleeves than the average bad guy: he can jump and roll, he’s tougher to kill, and his armor’s really shiny. The real tell comes when you kill him and loot the body. He’s carrying a weapon named Ricard’s Rapier, and this is how you learn his name.

Even on the Internet, I can’t find much lore about Ricard. But I’m fascinated enough by where he ended up, out here by himself, guarding some tower, with nobody but a few ghouls and lizards to keep him company. It expands the story just that little bit more: “Something bad happened here—and here’s a guy who suffered.”

And a comparison with TES's dialogue driven storytelling:

Successful high-fantasy fiction is not an easy thing to write. I've been writing fiction for 20 years and couldn't land a convincing line of high-fantasy dialogue if you locked me in a Welsh castle for six weeks. If Skyrim were a big fat fantasy novel, its dialogue would be perfectly serviceable. The problem is that Skyrim is not a big fat fantasy novel. As in all the Elder Scrolls games, the player-controlled character in Skyrim speaks silently, in on-screen text. Thus, in every encounter, you look over your dialogue options, pick the thing you want to say, and listen to the response. Skyrim's conversations frequently twist and turn to the result of becoming "dramatic," and this is, without fail, a disastrous fate for these conversations to court.

When you combine high-fantasy characters with limited animation with affected writing and artificial performances, the quality of the material becomes irrelevant. It probably wouldn't matter if Skyrim's characters were working with a kilo of uncut Tolkien. Nothing framed in this way can be dramatically interesting. Why bother, then, with trying to generate drama in this very specialized way?

I ask these questions as an admirer of Skyrim. Everything else in the game — from the beautiful simplicity of the user-interface system (at least when compared to previous Elder Scrolls games) to the crunchiness of the combat to the graphical fidelity of the environments — has improved upon previous Elder Scrolls games, so why hasn't this? Are we not at the point where dramaturgical incompetence in a game as lavishly produced and skillfully designed as Skyrim is no longer charming?

Incompetence is a strong word, and I use it in a considered manner. That is, I use it in light of what happened to the RPG between the release of Oblivion and Skyrim, which was the appearance of From Software's Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Both games work Skyrim's high-fantasy register; both games feature enchanted weapons, spellcraft, scary monsters, and sought-after loot. But the capital-S Storytelling in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls has been restrained to the point of apparent — and only apparent — nonexistence. The NPCs in the Souls games have 1 percent as many lines as the NPCs in Skyrim and speak in a faux-Shakespearean dudgeon higher and more stylized than the characters of Skyrim, and yet none of the stuff they say winds up feeling like overwrought bullshit. This is because the characters in the Souls games serve two purposes. The first is mechanical, as when they have something to sell or teach you. The second is atmospheric, as when they cryptically hint at things you might soon encounter. The NPCs of Demon's and Dark Souls are never primary vessels for storytelling. The primary vessels for storytelling are the nonpareil environments and the player's experience within those environments. We can be sure that From Software has a long and complicated bible that spells out its games' (doubtlessly quite formidable) lore. We can be equally sure that character and location sheets were at some point drawn up and iterated upon and revised and consulted, but all this work is wisely withheld from the player. Why? Because no one cares. Not really, they don't. And they don't care because it's not important. Dense expositional lore has no place in video-game stories — especially stories that go without highly wrought cinematics — and it seems increasingly clear that video games are neither dramatically effective nor emotionally interesting when the player's role becomes that of a dialogue sponge. More simply put, the stories of Demon's and Dark Souls are told in a way that only video games can tell stories. They don't suffer in comparison because there's no comparison to make. The story of Skyrim functions like that of a fantasy novel with digital appendices — and these digital appendices are the only reason anyone's reading it in the first place. If you threw most of the fantasy novel away, it wouldn't matter, because it's not nearly as good as an actual fantasy novel — and as fantasy cinema it's a pathetic joke.

[Dave]

I'm sure next holiday season Best Buy will have it for $5 or whatnot, and I'll pick it up then!

[Jonathan]

I'll lean on my friend with the PS3 to pick it up.

[VLSmooth]

Alan, is that you?

DARK SOULS (ダークソウル) RTA(Speedrun) #1 Player:twilight(1:26:28)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9ymysN3qQ8

ps. I've tried Dark Souls thanks to Alan. The above is damn impressive.

[quantus]

I'm not sure that watching that makes me want to play the game...

[Alan]

http://geek.pikimal.com/2012/02/01/gett ... e-tension/

Difficulty, in this sense, is not even so much that the game itself is nearly unbeatable; the difficulty is actually derived from the game’s straight faced honesty towards its player. There are often no easy ways through a zone, and taking chances can return great rewards or great losses. Also, failure is a very real hazard- more so than in many, many other games. Characters important to the overarching narrative can be killed or will die if not rescued or treated properly. The fear of derailing a long, potentially rewarding side quest by dispatching or failing to save an important character is real and the consequences are far reaching.

As far as promoting the narrative, this narrative device forces the burden of storytelling on the player, asking them to infer their own conclusions about the world and the events happening around them, as well as placing the blame of loss and defeat squarely onto their shoulders.

As Vinny discovered, when you attack an NPC they don't forget, even after they kill you and you respawn. And thanks to autosave, you can't undo it unless you pay souls to an NPC who appears after you kill the 3rd boss to "absolve your sins." If you kill a merchant, that merchant stays dead until NG+. You can choose to kill plot-NPCs, with the consequence that you are barred from certain covenants and get less in-game guidance about what you're supposed to do.

It's the first open-world game where I've truly felt like I had to live with the consequences of my actions.

[Alan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHmXXPpEc1g

Hahahaha. This video series is fantastic. It's some guy who's pretty bad at the game playing while his buddy who's beaten it makes unhelpful observations.

[Alan]

About time I revived this thread because Dark Souls is still the only game I ever play. I haven't beaten it yet (I could at this point pretty easily, I have just 4 bosses left) because I've more or less completed my PVP build and have been doing that pretty much exclusively, and if I beat the game now I'll have to go through several areas of NG+ (New Game +) in order to be able to invade other players again.

Multiplayer in Dark Souls is unique. There is no external matchmaking - everything is woven into the lore of the game world. There are really 3 types of multiplayer interactions - indirect, cooperative, and PVP.

Indirect multiplayer basically consists of being able to see faint outlines of other players running around in their own games - these outlines pop in and out randomly. You can also interact with bloodstains, which show you the last few seconds prior to another player's death, which can clue you in to a dangerous foe ahead. And orange soapstones allow you to leave preset messages for other players, with the intent to help or mislead.

To coop, you leave a summon sign with a white soapstone, and players who have restored their humanity (you run around in one of two forms, human or "hollowed") can summon you as long as you're near their level (10 +/- 10*level). But being human opens you up to invasions from other players.

This is where the covenant system comes in. There are 9 covenants in the game (loosely arranged along the lawful/chaotic good/evil grid, though "good" and "evil" depend on your interpretation of the game's lore.

Two covenants allow you to actively invade other players' worlds by using an item. The Dark Wraiths use a red orb to invade anyone from 10-10*level up to max level (~710) in order to steal humanity. The Darkmoon Blades use a blue orb to invade players who have "sinned" in order to obtain Souvenirs of Reprisal (unclear what level restrictions there are, different things are posted in different places, but I've invaded players as low as 50 and as high as 244). Dark Wraiths have to be human to invade, Darkmoon Blades can be human or hollow.

Two covenants allow you to equip a ring in order to be put on a list to be summoned into the covenant's "home" area to fight intruders. The Darkmoon Blades have Anor Londo - players who have killed the goddess of Anor Londo and plunged the area into eternal darkness are constantly invaded by Darkmoon Blades whenever they enter Anor Londo in human form. The Forest Hunters have Darkroot Forest, and are summoned to kill any non-Hunter player entering the zone in human form. When being summoned via rings, there are no level restrictions for who you invade.

The last two PVP covenants operate under their own rules. The Gravelord Servants use Eyes of Death to infect 4 other players' worlds with buffed extra mobs that respawn until a player interacts with the Gravelord sign in their world (signifying the Gravelord's current location in the Gravelord's own world) in order to invade the Gravelord's world. If they kill the Gravelord, the infection ends in all the affected worlds. If the Gravelord kills the invader, they get more Eyes of Death. The Path of the Dragon covenant allows players to place a Dragon Eye sign down - essentially challenging any player to accept a one-on-one duel. The winner wins a Drake Scale. With enough Drake Scales, a player gains the ability to turn into a dragonoid.

And there is of course a red soapstone which allows you to be summoned as an "invader" for people in the 10+/-10*level range.

The de facto soul level range for PVP builds is 120-125, since at that soul level range you actually do have "builds" that force you to make decisions. There are 8 statistics (Vitality, Attunement, Endurance, Strength, Dexterity, Resistance, Intelligence, and Faith) which max out at 99 - however the diminishing returns really kick in after 40-50 (depending on the stat). I have a dex/faith build:

SL 122
Vit 40
Att 16
End 40
Str 16
Dex 40
Res 12
Int 11
Fai 30

Endurance of 40 for any build is pretty much required (for stamina and equip load), and Vit of 40 is pretty close to the minimum for a SL 120 PVP build. My character (for PVP purposes at least) is built around the use of two weapon buffs (Darkmoon Blade and Sunlight Blade) which add a fixed amount of damage (unaffected by weapon speed); this goes well with my fast-attacking Rapier. The caveat is that I have a minute to kill my target before my advantage wears off.

As with any game with PVP, there are griefers and anti-griefers, campers (or farmers, as they're known in Dark Souls) and duellers. Some people get their kicks out of staying at a low soul level while upgrading their equipment to endgame potency, and invading n00bs in starting areas to OHKO them. So some players camp their high level endgame equipment toons around n00b areas in human form waiting for griefers to invade them. I've kept out of that aspect of PVP.

I'm currently in the Darkmoon covenant - I use my blue orb to invade in the Forest (by invading in the forest as a hollow I end up fighting alongside the Forest Covenant) and keep my Darkmoon Covenant ring on so I can be summoned to Anor Londo as well - so my primary targets are farmers.

Farmers in Dark Souls basically farm in two areas. Anor Londo and the Forest. Since those two covenants will constantly be summoned to invade them, they just need to show up. You get the most souls - by far - PVPing. Farmers will typically summon one or two white/gold phantom (another player using their white soapstone) and gangbang invaders. As Forest/Darkmoon, you invade one at a time, if you can survive for ~5 minutes usually another invader will be summoned to help. Killing farmers is incredibly satisfying. It's especially satisfying when, after I've killed someone who has two phantoms helping him, I get PSN hatemail from the farmer accusing me of cheating or being cheap.

So much fun. But at some point I'm gonna have to put my PVPing on hold to finish the game.

[Alan]

Here's a guy griefing low level players in a pretty entertaining way. He's using a pyromancy "Iron Flesh" which severely limits movement and makes you vulnerable to lightning, but substantially boosts all other defenses and poise (which protects against stunlock).

Tonberry-style invasions

[Jonathan]

What I think you just said: PvP & coop intersect in a weird way. It is perfectly ok for the dude being invaded to bring along a friend or two, but invaders only spawn one guy per five minutes. You are not max level, but you have progressed to some kind of soft cap limit for max level, and are able to take down two or three lower level players who are planning to level via easy PvP kills due to the number imbalance.

[Alan]

Yes and no. Most players I fight are in the same level range as me (100-140), since the matchmaking tries to match you with similarly leveled players first before expanding. Since I'm fighting 2-3 similarly leveled players I always target the host, because if he dies I win, and his phantoms get desummoned. Most farmers who group gank are pretty bad 1v1 - there are farmers who do fight 1v1 exclusively. They tend to be pretty decent.

At some point I'll start invading or laying down my red soapstone in the dueling areas where you find the most skilled players. I'm still too chicken for that though. But since the only reason to adhere to the soft level cap is to duel, at some point I will.

[Alan]

Dark Souls coming to a PC near you!

http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/games/89564 ... s-promised

[Alan]

I am now one boss away from beating the game for the first time.

In the meantime, I'm leveling up a second character - it's going to be a mage build.

SL 80
Vit 30
Att 16
End 20
Str 11
Dex 16
Int 50
Res base
Fth base

It's basically a glass cannon build, I'll be using Intelligence-scaling weapons so I'll be able to hit hard with sorcery or melee, but will be limited to light armor and won't really be able to take any hits. This will be a Darkwraith character, so I'll invade people level 52 and up.

So far I'm only at level 25 or so, so it'll take a little while before it's ready. Once it is, I'll beat the game with my other character so I have someone to PVP with as I do my NG+ runthrough.

[Alan]

I am now one boss away from beating the game for the first time.

In the meantime, I'm leveling up a second character - it's going to be a mage build.

SL 80
Vit 30
Att 16
End 20
Str 11
Dex 16
Int 50
Res base
Fth base

It's basically a glass cannon build, I'll be using Intelligence-scaling weapons so I'll be able to hit hard with sorcery or melee, but will be limited to light armor and won't really be able to take any hits. This will be a Darkwraith character, so I'll invade people level 52 and up.

So far I'm only at level 25 or so, so it'll take a little while before it's ready. Once it is, I'll beat the game with my other character so I have someone to PVP with as I do my NG+ runthrough.

This has turned out to be my favorite build. Slightly different than I originally planned - I took Str to 16 in order to one-hand the Moonlight Greatsword, so Vit is down to 25.

With the new arena, SL 100 looks to be where the duelling action is, so I may end up bumping Vit by another 20 eventually. The DLC was accompanied by a patch that nerfed heavy-armor builds, so this build works pretty well for toe-to-toe fighting now.