guigui wrote: ↑Fri Oct 04, 2024 1:03 pmNo bonfire in DS1 or 3 looks harder though because it also means no level up. Anyone tried it yet?
I blame you for this.
I took another stab at a No Souls/Soft Humanity spent, No Bonfires or Estus Used run, this time as a Hunter. They're runs I wanted to do at some point and I figured why not check off those boxes by trying to do them all at once? This means:
• No levelling up, attuning magic, drinking estus, and so on.
• No buying anything from merchants, no trading Humanity to open the Lost Izalith shortcut, no way to repair items ever. The lack of repairs is not a major practical issue as items last a very long time before ever becoming at risk of breaking so long as you avoid corrosion attacks (Gaping Dragon's acid, the bite attacks from clams). Covenant rewards you get simply from joining such as the Dragon Head Stone and being able to get the Dark Wood Grain Ring by very briefly joining the forest covenant are allowed as you don't have to spend anything to get these. I also won't upgrade the Dragon Covenant at all with dragon scales (which are too obnoxious to farm with melee anyways).
• Healing is only possible with Humanity items which are rather slow compared to Estus. There's also the Evil Eye Ring which helps for minor injuries, and the limited use Divine Blessings and Elizabeth's Mushrooms. You can also heal by using a Homeward Bone, but those are limited in use and I need a few to escape boss areas and I'm trying to avoid using the Dark Sign as it loses all my Humanity.
Hunter has 14 Dex and 12 Str to start, letting you use a huge variety of weapons. Started with the Master Key for convenience, ran down to Ash Lake to get the dragon head so I could look cool and burn people to death by yelling at them. Cloranthy ring is also one of my faves and grabbing that early's always nice. Unfortunately going here early does require spending some humanity to deal with poison and fall damage, but that's fine.
Roasted the zombie dragon for the Astora Straight Sword (useful in the catacombs much later) and the Dragon Crest Shield, then back to the Undead burg, grabbed the Uchigatana, realized it cost way too much stamina to be useful, burped fireballs at the Taurus Demon and Solaire (thanks for the Humanity), forgot to go the reverse direction to open the gate where the bridge drake is, but screw it, I'll never need that shortcut anyways. Rescued Lautrec, killed the Gargoyles, kicked Lautrec off the ledge, equipped FAP, killed everyone else around Firelink, pissed off Andre and ran like hell past the Titanite Demon. Andre gets a bit dumb if you run into the forest at which point you can more or less safely breathe fire on him or lure the Titanite Demon into hitting him. Ran to the forest covenant, got some gold pine resins from the shrooms, kicked samurai dude and ninja boy off the ledge, ran far enough to reset the area and got the flippy ninja ring. Also grabbed the Wolf Ring for the poise boost.
Back down to Blighttown, got the Shadow Set for the poison/bleed/low weight, then proceeded to fight Quelaag. She's a nuisance with unupgraded weapons and has tons of resistance, immune to fire, etc. However, a dual wielded halberd or a long sword buffed with Gold Pine Resin hits respectably hard, and after like 6 resins I got the win carving her up. Beat up the fair lady for her soul (sorry) and then dealt with Ceaseless Discharge.
I was a bit low on Humanity items to heal at this point so it was time to open up the way to the Depths so I could farm them. First thing was to go to Sen's for the Gold Serpent Ring to boost drop rates. Dragon face, yelled at serpents to roast them, takes a number of shots but eventually works and two-handing a shield really reduces the stamina damage from blocking hits. Opened the shortcut, rescued Logan then pelted him in the cage with Dung Pies to murder him. :3 Got the Lightning Spear, I tried to avoid using it for fear of durability issues. Was using the FAP ring + Cloranthy mostly.
Ran down to where the Capra Demon was, murdered mage boy along the way, opened up the shortcut, couldn't quite murder ms shopkeeper in one hit with a lightning buffed halberd so she proceeded to yell at me for the rest of the game. Capra Demon took a couple tries, lightning spear was too narrow to hit things, so used a wider hitting longsword buffed with resin to fry the doggos for the win.
Into the depths, killed a bunch of butchers, killed some random pyromancer in a barrel, found a giant rat and screamed at it and hurt its feelings until it spontaneously combusted, then slid down the waterfall to open the shortcut. At 30+ humanity you're basically curse immune, making the Ring of the Evil Eye easy enough to get and giving me a handy, albeit slow source of healing up minor scrapes. Humanity farming here requires killing the Gaping Dragon though, so once I killed the sorcerer and his rat friends (along with the shopkeep~), I puffed fire at the dragon to kill it and proceeded to farm.
To farm Humanity in a no Estus/no Bonfire run, this is the best spot for most of the game. The route is to kill the rats around the Blightown gate, run up the passage and kill all the rats in the upper areas, then run to Blighttown. You have to run to the ledge where you jump to get the Iaito to respawn all the Blighttown enemies, so once there, run all the way back and kill all the rats again. I did this for a while until I had 30 Humanity stocked up. With 10 soft Humanity and the Gold Snek Ring equipped it's about 6 Humanity per run if you're lucky.
Back to Sen's with the Lightning Spear, took on the golem, turned out I'd never really used the Dragon Head Stone much at this point in the game and it still was quite handy, hitting him at a safe distance while backstepping. Was easier to use than the Lightning Spear too, and eventually roasted him. Anor Londo was an exceptional nuisance; if you don't find the shortcut in Sen's fortress you'd think a no bonfire run here is awful as you'd have to do all of Sen's each time. Getting across the walkway with the archers without poison arrows is a pain as always, but eventually I got in and looted the place, opening all the shortcuts in the process. I murdered the giant blacksmith and realized I forgot completely about what he had: the best freakin hammer I could ever ask for. Even un-upgraded, it hits like a freight train, though I have to be careful what I equip to be able to dual-wield it and still fast roll. Orstein & Smough took several tries; I kept getting stabbed by spear boy while trying to breathe fire or smack the fat dude. Eventually I got the kill on Smough by being fairly aggressive about trying to hit him. Big Ornstein is easy by comparison as he's slow and nicely telegraphs everything, so it was an easy matter to toss Dung Pies at him for toxic, then carefully fire breath and hammer him down as opportunities arose. I think I beat him without taking any damage.
Sif (sorry pupper ;w;) went down on first try to getting bonked with the electric hammer. I then decided I wasn't going to be finding anything better at this point so tried 4 Kings, the hardest boss in the game. I'd get a feel for if my DPS was high enough to poise tank with Havel's Set as usual or if I'd need to adjust my plans. As expected, the gimmickiest of bosses was obnoxious as all hell, and without Power Within my DPS sucked. My DPS also sucked because I had to heal with slow Humanities, and he decided to do two grabs followed by his close range blast, all of which are a pain to avoid with full Havel's and considerably eat into my DPS. I tried using the Crystal Halberd + Gold Pine Resin from Anor Londo, but needing to buff repeatedly combined with the slightly weird hitbox was not working well. I was desperately low on healing, but Humanity was so slow that effectively I couldn't heal in the fight as I'd just get hit again. And that was assuming he didn't open the fight with magic, which forced me to block as it'd otherwise chase me forever and hit me on a second pass if I dodged. 4 Kings sucked. My damage sucked. Not being able to upgrade weapons sucked, even with such a fairly powerful weapon. I tried ditching the FAP ring and experimented with Cloranthy for the stamina and thus damage buff, or the DWGR for the better dodges, but I was still struggling to dodge and maintain DPS to avoid being overrun!
Then I remembered something I never use: the Red Tearstone Ring. Normally, the damage boost isn't worth being a 1 hit kill. You have such little health at the trigger threshold it's usually more trouble than it's worth, but in this case I couldn't reliably heal AND I needed as much DPS, so its disadvantage was essentially a non issue. Tried it on 4 Kings, took a few attempts to learn their attacks, but holy hell my attacks hit so hard. It was like 350 for normals, 510 for heavy attacks. The main problem, aside from them using magic, was their melee attack where they do these wide horizontal swings with extended hitboxes. You have to dodge left and then right, but the timing's much more strict than their forward stab or diagonal slashes. Eventually though, I had a run where, for the first time ever, I beat them without poise tanking, and without taking any damage from them, hammering away. My DPS was so good the third king didn't spawn in by the time the second one died. It was crazy.
I just have 3 Lord bosses left, Priscilla, and the DLC. My plan is to do the BOC and Catacombs to get them out of the way (BOC first for the Sunlight Maggot as I hate going without a light source), then do the DLC, followed by Priscilla and Seath. I don't remember how Homeward Bones work after you deal with Seath's prison or with the DLC (I may need to use a bonfire to warp out from the DLC), but if I lose Firelink Shrine as a warp point, it'd be best that it's right before I need to kill Gwyn, instead of being stuck with the prison as a warp point and running from there to BOC or Nito each attempt!