Right now I’m running Cloth and Leather, I’m able to get through levels 1-9 of the Crucible pretty consistently, but I’m not able to beat the boss; I’m also running into problems with multi-hit combos, I’ve got so little Poise that I can’t Parry or Dodge my way out of them.
So I figure it’s time to bite the bullet and accept that I need a Mesh/Heavy armor set, but I don’t really know how to build into them for maximum effect. (Truth be told, I don’t like medium or heavy roll very much, so I’ve been avoiding them.) I guess what I’d like to know is just how much Poise and DR I actually need to be able to do things like Parry mid-combo and beat final bosses? Should I just try to max them out and see how that works, or are there diminishing returns?
I’m not looking for a cheese build necessarily (though I may need one, that’s at least not where I’d like to start), I just want something where I won’t get auto-killed in three hits; I’m a pretty mediocre player, I got through the campaign just fine on Normal Mode, but I’ve been playing end-game on Easy, I figure it’s time to build around my weaknesses.
Any tips or tricks for building into Mesh and Plate armor would be welcome. Thanks in advance!
I tried cloth and leather and went through the same issues of getting trapped in combos and not having much survivability. I also didn’t like the heavy roll at first. I did a complete 180 and only wore plate for multiple builds. Not having my own combos interrupted was wonderful. Being able to either roll or parry out of combos was great too. For instance, echo knight likes to punish aggression with a 4 spins to 1 overhead combo. If you get hit by the initial attack in cloth or leather you are dead. You will flinch on each hit, preventing any action, eventually get staggered, and if you somehow survived the spins, be killed by the overhead while you are still staggered. I swore by plate for the longest time. You get used to the heavy roll and there isn’t a single boss move that you can’t avoid with it. Shove is a game changer and totally worth the roll. The slower movement speed is annoying at first, but you can overcome that easily with rings (willow cap or agility), frantic legs facet, or movement speed leg enchant. Most of my builds use willow cap so speed is not ever an issue for me.
All my new builds are mesh. This still allows me to get hit by that first spin and parry the second, shutting down the whole thing. Most of my attacks do not get interrupted unless I am swarmed by a crowd. I still go heavy roll / shove, but have about 10 points to put somewhere else compared to plate. You can easily reach 75-80% DR using exalts + durable facet + durability enchant + damage reduction % of durability on chest with mesh, where plate gets 85-90%. I also like to do that same setup with stamina regen on pants, reaching 60-70 regen. If you embrace the heavy roll, heavy roll downside enchant on plagued legs is a no brainer if you want an extra enchant, though I keep my legs and chest magical to increase the chances of exalting hitting the durability enchants. I would go for a minimum of 250 health before buffs.
Summary - Mesh is best. Plate only gives a minor advantage unless you need the poise for slow charge attacks. Embrace the shove. Love being heavy. Win.
To answer the first question, I would suggest one doesn’t need much poise at all. For me, armour is mostly about incoming damage, not poise, and I’d consider the bulky facet a good deal if frantic, rapid and durable weren’t so strong.
Mesh does have great fashion. I found it strong enough defensively (even without the durability-based godmode) that with some health regen gems and the in-combat regeneration on cursed chests, I hardly had to avoid enemy hits. I agree that a stamina boost and a solid health pool are all that’s needed to make heavier armour easy.
As to why I think poise is unnecessary; I tend to run three leather pieces with no helmet on Unspoken. One hit from a boss tends to be around half to most of my poise bar, and it is still possible to dodge away mid-combo after nearly every hitstun. The only enemies to combo me are torn grubhosts and groups, so those I avoid. I find rust bears to be terrifying since their bleed would stop my dodging. Both have nearly ended my run.
I know it goes against the original question, but perhaps the reason leather/cloth aren’t working is a matter of distance to the enemies. To hear about the Crucible Knight having combos opened my eyes, as for me he generally has single attacks to whiff-punish; his teleport-explosion is the only combo move at my distance, and hard to time as well.
Since you like quickstep: So did I, until I found that it removes access to rolling attacks, which are sometimes very good (stabs on some two-handed swords, the i-frame aerial dodge on one bow). You get the running attack instead.
The shoulder barge turns any ledge into the deadliest weapon in the game, oneshotting bounty targets that I’d otherwise be doing no damage against early on. So normal roll it is: full moveset, no shoulder barge to tempt me to cheese big enemies.
I thought poise defense and stagger were separate, where poise defense determines how many hits it takes to make you flinch, not the number of hits to make you stagger.
Ah! I may be using the terms improperly, and always thought one was a function of the other. I’ll try it out. Thank you.
What I meant to say is that hitstun (flinch?) is not the end of the world, since escape is possible against most combos whether you flinch or not, but the stagger after having your white bar fill up is.
use the durability based resistance on cloth armor. i love light builds, but was playing only heavy for the same reasons as fishypixels.
then i discovered the durability godmode, and returned to light builds.
i’ve defeated EK on pestilence 4 with stupid modifiers wearing cloth and 1-handed sword with no shield.
durability based resistances let your bathrobe go up to around 65-70% and it’s enough.
dodge to never get hit → don’t need poise, parry only the obvious charge or slow swing attack, watch him carefully and don’t get baited by the spin attacks.
if it wasn’t for the durability resists, i would say that fast would have no advantage over heavy. but the fast dash is awesome. if you can also cheese the resists.
Figured I’d test this. I controlled for damage resistance by using two chest pieces with identical armour but different poise:
mesh lv. 6 at 150 armour and 10 poise
leather lv. 11 at 150 armour and 5 poise
The difference was small but visible: Poise does affect the white stagger bar.
I verified my results with a full suit of plate (at 33 poise), with and without Stone Tusk Ring again to control for armour. Physical resistance does not influence incoming poise/stagger damage.
For the same move by a Risen sword-and-board fellow, the 33 poise set resulted in about half the build-up of the white stagger bar compared to the 10 poise chestpiece. I’m eyeballing this but could count pixels if exact figures are desired.
In the process, I discovered by coincidence that poise is capped at 50. To verify, just slap a few mottled gems on common plate and garnish with enchantment power.
I was fortunate that Eleanor offered Poise Shield. This spell triples poise (can be seen in inventory, verified with the same helpful Risen gentleman) and is subject to the cap of 50 too. Leather has 11 with all four slots, so with the spell it has the poise of plate. One piece of Mottled Granite and Poise Shield is enough to reach the poise cap in leather. This may, finally, be a definitive answer to the original question in this thread. (Addition: The large vial of defence adds 20 poise as well.)
Finally, my Risen assistant was glad to remind me of the peculiar property of guaranteed knockdowns (his stab with a long windup, his shield bash) to bypass the poise system entirely and result in a direct knockdown. This is also the case with runes that have the knockdown property, such as Fierce Dash.
What I did not test is how poise interacts with animations. In some Souls flavours, poise is active only while players are performing certain animations, with poise multipliers or poise resistance specific to the move (usually boosted on slow, heavy weapons).
Aight did some testing as well. Poise defense essentially determines how big your stagger meter is, and stagger resistance determines how much damage that meter takes. So for instance, wearing a full leather set, the training dummy staggers me in one hit. Full plate, it gets very close. I took a cloth set with 32% stagger resistance, and the stagger bar filled up nearly the same amount as plate. What’s not clear is how flinching works. With cloth, when the dummy hits me, I don’t get staggered, but my character does flinch, preventing any actions or movement for a brief moment. While plate’s stagger meter is filling up around the same amount, I can still move around etc when hit by the dummy.
Thank you for that. This is a serviceable level of understanding. It seems to my eyes that plate is worth slightly more than 32% stagger resistance[1], but I have no explanation for the flinch either.
It might be that
there is a threshold and you got very close to it by coincidence; but that feels unlikely, as the target dummy does tons of stagger and I have been flinched by lesser foes
armour weights react differently
the enchantment only reduces one ‘type’ of stagger damage and your original theory of the two being decoupled is true after all.
Not sure. There may be better explanations.
(As an aside, I am currently using the Midnight Blade and a shortbow with very similar runes. Great minds think alike.)
Using your 32% figure and assuming poise is a linear scale and not a percentile reduction, we can estimate the base poise value. Let a be the stagger damage dealt by the dummy and b the base poise. Then, eyeballing, we have:
a = 0.75 (b + 33)
0.68 a = 0.78 (b + 5)
… which gives a base poise value of around 50 and a stagger damage value of the dummy of around 60. Not very precise though. ↩︎
Yeah I’ve been trying to make a build and character for each main stat combo (have 8 right now). Dex int doesn’t really have that many options. Midnight Blade is the one really interesting weapon, but the recovery of lightning slam kinda sucks. Since it is a unique weapon, I don’t have a lot of options for increasing the attack speed enough to shorten that recovery significantly (may need to go rapid gloves instead of durable with quick facet, but the increased healing has worked well with lifesteal). All the other runes on it are basically utility. Piercing dodge only does a little more damage than a regular attack, so I’m not sure why it should cost 100 focus. I’ve basically turned it in to a parry build, which is generating a ton of focus and doing respectable parry damage, and now I’m just trying to figure out what to spend the focus on.
Okay, having given a heavy build a try, I think it might just not be for me. I’m dying way, way more often than I was with Cloth and Leather, I can’t get out of the way of enemies quick enough, I can’t make space, I can’t isolate, and the moment more than one enemy gangs up on me, I die.
Maybe I need more practice; maybe I need to full send it, skip mesh, and go straight for plate; maybe I need a cheese build.
Anyway, I’m not having a good time. I hate copy/pasting builds, but at this point I’m thinking about doing just that.
Edit: And Poise doesn’t work like I thought it was supposed to, I’m still getting staggered by combo attacks, hitting parry still does nothing even with 22 poise.
Well they made updates to parry so you can’t spam it. It’s very difficult to correct bad timing mid combo. Like a missed parry timing can sort of screw you out of being able to parry later in a combo. For spacing, you may have gotten in to the habit of using dodge for that with normal rolls. That stops being effective with heavy rolls. You will only use them to avoid damage, not create space. Just run to create space.
I might just have to come to terms with the fact that I suck at this game, that’s all. No worries, I’m sure your strategy and advice works, end-game may just not be for me.
