Is the saw cleaver really that powerful? It’s a good weapon but personally I found the axe to be just as good in the early game. If I start a character with military background or violent past that axe is pretty tough.
Any of the [whatever] spear faith spells are mad good for PVE and are great boss killers.
If you get really stuck on an area try exploring another one instead, the game is pretty non-linear especially early on if you got the skeleton key and you might find shit in the other areas that will help you out.
Don’t be afraid to run past shit, there are a lot of areas where you can just look at all the enemies, go “fuck that shit” and just run past them all, it takes a bit of practice and it’s not your go to option in new areas but sometimes it’s worth the risk.
Start off by focusing your skill points into Vitality and Endurance…the more build specific points can be invested later when you are more comfortable with the game. Also, the first place you should go is a place called Undead Burg, it is the designated “beginner” area of the game, so you shouldn’t run into anything too difficult and it will allow you to get a feel for the game’s mechanics.
Dont know much about clerics. DS1 is the only action rpg that i have no interest in the magic stuff at all. It all seemed relatively boring. With that said, since i play ds1 like every day for at least 3 hours, here are some tips.
- Choose the master key when creating your character. Fuck all that other noise. Most of it you can get later, and or its irrelevant
- Choose pyromancer or warrior. Warrior if youre looking to wield heavier weapons early in the game, and you can get the pyromancy glove within like the first hour of the game or less
- If you want a quick easy first run through of the game, which may relieve certain frustrations that would cause you not to continue, you can get the black knight halberd within the first 10 minutes of the game. You can youtube search that. You just need the master key, your 4 humanity, and be prepared to restart the game a few times until he drops it.
- You can also get the gravelord sword in like the first 10 minutes of the game. Its super easy. The catacombs will fuck you in the ass in the beginning, but once you get use to it, its so easy to just run through that place, get what you want and dip. Check out youtube videos on getting the gravelord sword early.
- You can do a whole lot of shit before fighting the gargoyles.
My usual path in a new ds1 build, is go straight to darkroot basin and get the black knight halberd, because i love that weapon. Before that, make sure you grab the 3 humanity at fire link shrine. Once you have done that, go back to firelink shrine and there is a hidden place with homeward bone and shit, go there and get that. From here you can run around and get the stuff down in the graveyard. Watch for the huge skeletons. After that i usually go into the catacombs to get the gravelord sword, just to have as a strong, lighter option, that allows you to kill pinwheel really quickly, by double handing. After pinwheel, i run through the tomb of giants, get the skull lantern, and then homeward bone back to firelink. I trade the skull lantern with snuggly for the hidden mist ring, or whatever its called. Makes certain levels way easier.
From here i head up to the undead burg, do all that stuff. You can get the drake sword here. Kill the taurus demon, go to the other side behind the dragon, open that door and light the bonfire. This will lead you up to the undead parish. In the undead parish you can get the basement key for the lower undead burg, which leads to the depths.
Ugh, i’ll stop here. I could go on for a lot more.
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**Make sure you do not rest at a bonefire in difficult areas. Like rest at the firelink shrine before going into the catacombs or tomb of giants, and when you get what you need, homeward bone the fuck out of there. What can really get you caught up in dark souls is resting in an area that is kicking your ass, and you waste hours just trying to get out of there. This is especially true for the tomb of giants, which without cast light or that skull lantern, is impossible until you memorize it. **
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Make sure you get the rusted ring before going down to blighttown. Makes it much easier.
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Depends on your build, but you rarely need to block in dark souls ever. So its easier to get your strength and dex up to a point where you can two hand your favorite weapons, and then dumb the rest into vitality and endurance. Also, the bk halberd is super easy to upgrade to +5 within the first like 20 minutes of the game, and will murder every boss you encounter. lol. Gravelord sword is harder, because you need demon titanite, and those guys can be a bitch.
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Its always better to stay light. Mobility is the name of teh game in dark souls. I use stone armor just for shit like the depths, for low level enemies, but you will eventually find that being lighter on your toes is worth it way more.
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Watch your soft humanity. As a new player, you will die a shit ton, and if you keep losing soft humanity, you will quickly find yourself without it, unless youre murdering npc’s early on, and i doubt that. Only kindle major bonfires you will use a lot. You dont need to kindle all of them. I generally kindle the ones i can warp too, that are worth it, and like 1 or 2 outside of that.
I have way more tips, but i’ll leave it at that for now. LOL. Just ask if you need any help.
Usually within the first 30 minutes of my dark souls 1 runs. I have the bk halberd +5 (quick run down to the great hollow for twinkling titanite, and the one in dark root basin. I’ll either upgrade it at the blacksmith in the catacombs, or the easier one to get to in the undead parish), 4 soft humanity, a shit ton of undead souls to consume, the gravelord sword +1, 22 strength, 18 dex, and dumping the rest into vitality and endurance.
Overpowered as fuck in like 30 minutes, and you can still easily die in the game, even being that powerful early on. It just makes a shit ton of stuff easier, and once you get the game down, you can do weaker runs for the fun of it.
Guy asks for advice on a Cleric build…
Everyone tells him to increase Health and where to find nothing but Melee weapons… 
In addition, @J-ride:
As a Cleric I’m assuming you’ll place emphasis on Faith based spells to an extent. There’s a man in Firelink shrine that sells a few good Faith spells. Heals, buffs, ect ect. You should look into those as well, Heal spells are very helpful especially early on in the game when you might be low on flasks half the time.
Faith/Cleric builds are super fun, but may be a little harder for new players to grasp early on. You should definitely use body buffs and weapon buffs when you can. Some notable spells include:
Force
Great Magic Barrier
Gravelord Sword Dance
Lightening Spear
Sunlight Blade
Wrath Of The Gods
Pretty much any healing Miracle
To me, the main advantage of playing within the Cleric-style archetype has been their balanced offensive capability between Faith based spells AND melee combat, with a smaller focus on the latter aspect. The starting weapon you get as the Cleric is a great example of what works great in terms of melee weapons.
Try to get Astora’s Great Sword, it’s a fantastic melee weapon for Clerics and it also perma-kills Skeletons since it does Divine damage. Divine damage scales with your Faith, so using weapons with the Divine attribute never hurts. It’s also really nice because you can acquire it in the first ten minutes of the game. Again, assuming you have the master key.
If you don’t care about his side quest, you can also get an EXCELLENT Talisman by killing Solaire in the Undead Burg. It has one of the highest damage outputs in the game for something that you can acquire that early on.
Honestly, you could have a pretty sick Cleric build within the first hour of your playthrough. In terms of stats, again, try to put at least a few points into attunement after every boss until you have a good amount of slots. You don’t want to be stuck later in the game when you can only level up once every 3 bosses trying to get more spell slots. Vitality and Endurance are always important too, but I would put points into them sparingly. Endurance caps out at 40, so make sure you hit that number at some point because you might as well.
At the beginning, I would focus your stat allocation with the following priority:
1.Attunement
2.Faith
3.Endurance
4.Vitality
In terms of Strength and Dex, look up the weapons you think you’ll be using and put in what you need to use them. Also keep in mind that two-handing a weapon lowers its stat requirements by half, unless you’re using a staff or Talisman.
@J-ride My best advice is to go in blind. Take pride in the fact that you’re a scrub at the game right now. It’s when the Souls series are at their most fun - slowly progressing in the Souls series while getting rekt along the way is a huge part of the charm. Your first playthrough should be done as blind as possible.
Going to pre-order DSIII on Steam to test it out on my rig. 100% sure I’m going to go with the PS4 version anyway(mainly for trophies) but I want to see how it runs on my rig. That and, with the discounts on Steam i’d be saving like ~30 bucks compared to getting it on PS4. Steam refunds will be my savior.
FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS
^Co signing this.
If someone asks for help, I have no problem sharing advice, but it is undeniable that Souls is at its best when doing everything blind and alone for the first playthrough.
Cleric is a bad first class to use, it’s a hard class to use especially as a first time player. Bandit is a much easier class
There’s nothing wrong with cleric but it’s a pretty hard class. The more luck to you. @“The Martian” hit all the basic tips you need for the class though
See, thats why i love pyromancer. You dont have to level it up to use the pyromancys. Just put the glove on, attune what you want, and get er done. With that said, you you spend souls to level up your glove, but i find you can balance out having a melee heavy character in pyromancy pretty easily. Maybe its equal to cleric. I havent done a cleric build yet. Probably still wont before ds3 drops. lol
But ignore me, back to your cleric help. lol. Just chiming in.
Im one of those people who like to know the shit going in, and i’ll still enjoy it. Like, if i wouldve blinded ds1 at first, it wouldve been exciting, but eh. Id rather know about the invisible walls, hidden shit, and other stuff. Even knowing all of that, you still wont likely get to all of it on a first playthrough anyways, and the game will still have a ton of replayability.
Like, id be super annoyed to blind go through ds1, only to find out i missed out on great hollow, ash lake, and painted world. Hell, even the dlc isnt exactly easy to get to. I wouldnt have figured to go back to where i saved oolacile, in order to enter the dlc world. lol.
But kudos to the people that do, do it blind. Its not my type of game to blind run. Maybe i will when it comes to bosses, but when it comes to areas and stash. I wanna know that shit. lol
Yeah, stuff like accessing the DLC in the first DS would’ve been near impossible without help.
I wouldn’t go too crazy with attunement, definitely focus on vitality and endurance first, with a little bit of faith, dex or str mixed in as you go (depending on what weapon you want to use). 20 attunement is a good number to stop at imo, and I absolutely wouldn’t go any higher than 23 attunement. I would say for the first half of the game you won’t need more than 16 though.
I agree with whomever said to go in blind though, the game will be a lot more memorable that way
Vitality ain’t gonna be much help because most bosses are gonna 2 or 3 shot you anyway as a Cleric. You won’t be wearing armor with a lot of poise and damage resistance, and your best defense is gonna be rolling, not Vitality. Placing points into Attunement early on is advisable because you’ll immediately feel the difference due to being able to level up more than once (usually) after killing a boss.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever done a pure magic build, but trying to put points into Attunement 1 point at a time towards the end of your playthrough? It blows. In every Souls game you get to that point where killing a boss maybe nets you enough Souls to level up once. That means you won’t even be getting one slot through Attunement until getting 3 bosses worth of souls or so.
The Cleric already starts with 11 Attunement, just put another measly 10 points into it and you can have a whole 5 whopping slots for spells. Add in rings and you can have 7 total without any other stat investment.
Endurance is a given, and should be given SOME amount of attention regardless of class because you’re gonna need to either roll, run or block A LOT. Vitality, in this case at least, is something you can focus on every now and then throughout the playthrough.
I mean, the dude can do it however he wants tho. But he asked specifically for advice on a Cleric-type build, just trying to make his life easier.
Yeah I can’t argue with that, but I’m still of the opinion that every build, even a cleric, should have at least 45 vitality and 40 endurance if at all possible
This is going to sound really arrogant, but I’ve always wished there was an achievement for going through the game completely solo with no help from summons
I generally find the bosses to be the easiest parts of Souls games, with some exceptions. Getting to them is the hard part IMO.
45 Vit and 40 End for a NG run is over kill imo.
Maybe for an experienced player; for someone just starting out vitality is literally your best friend