The way weapons get their stats required at high tiers make any form of cross class leveling or build transitions impossible. As it is at lvl 21 , your weapons demand 42 main stat or 26/26 if its a dual stat weapon, that is 32 out of your 60 skill points allocated to just allow you to pick up a weapon and if you realistically add at least some distribution in your auxiliary stats, it makes trying any different weapon at this point pretty much impossible, it would take you tens of levels to catch up.
For example, I really enjoy big two-handed weapons, so I started pumping strength ,especially after getting unique sword. Unfortunately, after that I found no pure strength two handed weapon, only one-handed swords. Every two-hander needed str/int ; str/faith ; str/dex .
And as it stands , at lvl 21 with 42 str I have no heavy weapon to use despite having more then a dozen two-handed swords/halberds/maces and to use any of them will take 6 levels on top of lvl 21.
That will help, but I still feel that this system of itemization is a bit too rigid. It makes you feel like you have to hit those check marks of required stats before you hit threshold levels and leaves you with pretty much 0 wiggle room, you have to level you main stat/s and some hp/weight/ stamina, so from level 2 you are already pigeonholed into your build.
I guess if the intended experience is to constantly respec each and every time you find something new then, fair, but for an RPG it feels a bit weird .
That would not be their intention since they didnât consider it until a ton of players demanded it. From what I can tell, and I could be wrong, but Iâve made 12 characters now and it felt like they just intend for you to start over. Once you know what youâre doing, similar to Dark Souls 1 with how the map wraps on itself, you turn a 15 hour experience into 2. I didnât think it was that demanding to âstart overâ when itâs not a time consuming experience.
Also if you have a character that can complete the crucible then youâll have a bunch of exp potions and you can just skip a new guy to level 10 in like 2 gulps.
On the contrary, the devs donât want easy respecc and want playersâ choice to matter. Iâm with them on this. I think itâs a lazy solution and trivialize playersâ decision, even at a cost.
The way weapon scaling and requirements work is very restrictive and doesnât offer much of an opportunity to create unique designs, the standard Souls formula with lower requirements and variable scaling is more interesting. It also doesnât help that everything feels like it has been standardised according to a formula. Weapons are 16 / 22 / 26+26 / 42 and they scale exactly equally with both stats, all weapons within a particular category have the same damage just with a different scaling attribute and a random variance on drop.
The weapons themselves are interesting in the sense that they have unique basic attack movesets, if you ever use those, but the way scaling and attributes are handled currently has no âsoulâ to it.