Do crossbows (and even regular bows) get good in the late game or am I just missing something? Basically my thought process is this:Ģ-handing: Cool for access to the different moveset (those reaper heavies) and using charms but there's basically no statistical benefit to 2-handing a weapon with no STR scaling so why bother?Ĭrossbow: Is it just me or do ranged weapons just suck in this game? bows, crossbows, and throwing knives all seem pretty garbage, seems like their only use is pulling aggro. I should be a straightforward dex build but I'm getting tripped up on what to put in my offhand (if anything at all). Right now I'd like to do a poleaxe build because halberds are my favorite medieval weapons and also that S-scaling Voulge looks really good. It's a safer option, but also slows down your pacing in general.I've been playing this game on and off for the last couple of months but I havn't been able to get much farther than the Red Hall because I can never settle on a build I'm happy with. Shield-based builds lets you mitigate attacks easily, but slows you down and introduces another dimension of stamina management, and blocking attacks means you get less stamina to counterattack with. Eventually, you'll start being able to oneshot enemies, which makes your playstyle focus even more on getting the first hit in, being more focused on strategic movement and timing your attacks than twitch reflexes. The focus on equip load (to be able to actually lug those things around) means these builds also get able to don heavy armor, and this means they can afford getting in melee range with enemies. Greathammers and greatswords have huge AoEs and deal lots of damage, but the animations are pretty slow, so builds centered around those are all about timing attacks. but long-distance is what their attacks are the best at, anyway. Focusing on magic stats means they don't have a lot of points to spare for armor, so they tend to have to dodge a lot and stay far away from enemies. Pure magic builds has great power (once you get spells like Wildfire) but builds up Fatigue (max stamina debuff) really quickly, so they need to keep energy phials at hand and manage their resources carefully. I think S&S kinda has the same thing as Dark Souls with your build basically being the built-in difficulty setting, your playstyle decides what's hard and easy and some playstyles/builds have different weaknesses. Weapon paths are fair, though, and you won't need to allocate into anything irrelevant to get to the next weapon upgrade.

Gray pearls are available incase you screw up with stat allocation, but they're very limited, so you need to know what you want to build into. Most provide attribute points, weapon-oriented skills provide accessibility to a larger arsenal, and you have your potion skills which gives you additional resources after every resting point (Basically extra Estus/Ashen Estus uses). There arent any 'gamechanger' skills I can think of at the top of my head the giant skill tree is very simple when looking at individual skills. In contrast, a dagger-centric build is definitely more of a challenge build, and it feels like an endurance round with every boss you fight. From personal experience, being a pure mage is pretty much the game's 'easy mode', as long as you're capable of managing your resources. In terms of viability, there's definitely a glaring difference between different builds.

Salt and sanctuary poleaxe