Shit, shit!

I accidentally attacked the giant blacksmith whilst getting up for a beer. Is there any way to stop him attacking me?

Ah, I didn't know absolving sorted that sort of thing. Awesome.

Well, that info was a load of shit. It was 24k in the end so I now have 125k free. Woop.

I was going off some duff info. It turned out to be 24k so I had tons left to Pimp my Iaito to +13 and a good few SL's.

In darkmoon now so going to try and score some ears tomorrow. What's the best way to do this?

I'm stomping around in Havel's, child mask, grass crest and 2 handing. It's great fun!

Things are going alright on my playthrough. Just beat Quelaag. Have some general questions/comments the wiki isn't helping me put to rest:

I am a hoarder. In every game I play, it's the same. This is why I can't play Fallout/Skyrim. I can never make the judgement over which items are worthless and which are valuable. I just assume it's all going to be needed at somepoint so I try to keep it all until I 100% definitely need it.

So, I have 20 of the humanity item and about 5 twin humainty in my chest. What should I do with these? I usually just keep them until I need to reverse hollowing and kindle bonfires.

Same goes for the various shapes and sizes of souls. Loads of them. at least 30 in total I'm just keeping them for emergencies, when I need a quick influx of souls for a few levels or emergency supplies.

I'm still on the Wanderer starting equipment. Raw Scimitar +2, Wanderer set is all +4 now, except I have the Armour of the Glorious (or whatever it's called) because it's stats are decent, it has good poise but doesn't weigh much. I can't help but feel I'm missing something, but nothing I find seems worth getting rid of the stuff I've already invested in.

Is it worth upgrading shields?

I'd say you're using the humanity and spare souls like you should be. It's what I did on my first play with the second being of more pressing need so I chugged them asap.

Armour is a bit of a personal thing really. Certain sets are boss at certain things, gold hemmed is top for fire defence and Havel's is probably the best physical defence, Giant's might edge it out but I'm not sure. Essentially, you could pick and choose depending on what you need at any given time. Don't worry about 'wasting' souls on upgrading them. There'll be plenty of time later on to get the pittance used back in return.

My 3rd Darkmoon fight ended in a TKO. I still got an ear though so I'm just going to spam abother 8 and then start getting my Faith through to 50.

True about Havel's. It looks awesome though. I've stolen the helm for many a different getup.

Trying to prise a tite slab from the freaking darkwraith's is the proverbial blood/stone endurance test.

I need two!

I reckon I'll probably just completed this first run and start on NG+ to finish off this faithsword. I can't seem to get any slabs so the gear'll have to stay at +9 for now.

Yeah, fents, you're doing it right. As jon says, the souls are worth holding on to, bar the early ones.

(And he's doubly right about not using the boss souls.)

With humanity, it's always worth saving the item ones as best you can. Dudes who've been playing heaps and do lots of pvp/co-op have buckets and will use them willy nilly, but on a first playthrough, it's worth treating them as semi-rare.

(There's only one covie that I reckon it's worth burning 30 hume on and that's the chaos covie, it allows for a pretty sweet short cut and an alt story line for one of the NPCs and if you're using pyro, access to a pretty cool AOE spell. But I'd defo suggest that for a second playthrough, it's not something I'd be doing on first run necessarily.)

Looking at what you're currently holding, you could defo make life easier for yourself though, as far as armor and weapons go. As has been said, armor, apart from the odd specific situation, is pretty much down to how you want to play. If you're being a tank, wear heavy armor and protect yourself. If you're being dexy and want to move, mix up a bit of light gear.

If you've done q, you probably have the ninja hear (Shadow Garb), it's protection stats are pretty low, except it's great for a. poison resist and b. being super light. Sometimes it's worth rocking, for instance, the shadow legs and gloves and a heavier chest piece. A good way to keep you under weight. (I always rock full ninja gear when I'm roaming the bottom of blighty, you'll notice a massive difference with how big your poison bar is.)

Are you pumping lots of points into dex? If you are, I'd be getting that scim up to +5 ASAP. (To save you coming back, I'd also suggest farming the slugs at the bottom of blighty a couple of times to get a bunch of green tite shards (they drop 5 green shards at a time and single large tites). The green shards are how you level up fire weapons, divine weapons and magic weapons to +5.)

I reckon it's absolutely worth pumping points into shields, especailly if you're wearing lighter gear. If you've done qs, the shields you may have: Crest, Dragon Crest, Eagle, Spider and balder are all worth thinking about upgrading. In particular the spider and Eagle, I reckon. (If you have a balder this early, you're lucky. Level the shit out of it if you have it.) basically, they're all the lighter shields, but they have different strengths. (Spider is best for poison, so awesome in blighty; eagle has high stability and behaves like a heavy sheild and also has high lightning resistance, VERY handy for the next two sections you'll do; Crest has high magic resist; and balder, while only weighing 4.0, has stability out the wazoo and seems awesome for parrying.)

Ok, further to humanity, various perks to having a bunch in the top left:

- improved resistance. So the little bar that appears on screen when you're being poisoned, bleeding, cursed etc will be much longer the more humanity you have. If you're rocking 5-10 humanity then you'd actually have to be really fucking up to get any status effect.

- Increased chance of item drops from enemies. All the enemies in the game have set items they drop, so if you need more humanity, for instance, you'd go to the depths, pop 4-5 hume in the top left and farm those rats near the bonfire. You'd average 1-2 items per run, I reckon. I had to do that for the chaos covie on one of my builds. Took about 30 minutes to get 10 (item) humanity.

- Eventually you'll get access to chaos weapons and, if you're using pyro hand, chaos pyro. all of these things will do more damage the more hume you have on (maxes out at 10, I believe). And it's not a little difference, it's quite large. like an extra 70-80hp per hit for even 5 humanity.

Good work.

it's worth doing a big farm/grind for chunks and such and upgrading all the weapons you want now. You should also be able to go back and do some of the NPC stories at this point if you want to pick up all the miracles/spells etc. Some you might have missed the chance for, but if you can get a bunch of them, it'll be handy for NG+, means you can just spend cash on levelling in NG+ and then start using stuff you may not have had access to.

damn. Yeah, the slab drop from the dwraiths is uber rare. I only got one because of trying about 40+ times to do 4k with my sl10. Gold covetous ring, some humanity, and a lot of patience.

My latest build is slowly taking shape.

Nito down first time. And Found an excellent way to farm for white chunks:

Yeah, did them solo a couple of days ago. You really just have to be very patient. If you're not happy you know where they both are, don't swing. It helps when skinny does his uber slidey lunge attack, as that gives you time to hit him while fat boy lumbers.

As long as you're slow and steady and don't burn your big hits in the first part, the second part is easy. I used power within and just slashed the shite out of fatty with my +8 divine liato. He didn't like it.

The general consensus is that having skinny in the second half is much harder. Apart from anything else, he has a REALLY nasty grab attack. fatty basically has all the same attacks, it's just that the drop one is powerful. But then skinny has that too. Much easier to do fatty solo.

Also, +5 occult flamberge is a very sexy pvp weapon. Got me a couple more ears of reprisal today. Excellent.

With that and the +5 lightning washing pole, plus ricards rapier at +15 with darkmoon (and another couple of big swipe weapons for pvp) this build is going to be pretty boss. sl70 for the moment, and don't see the need to do much more for a while.

Figure I'll get me darkmoon and then see how I go just pouring damage on the rest of the bosses.

Mainly eastern on top, mask of child, shadow leggings and whatever uber light nothing gloves I felt like. Early on, I did a bit of switching with the crimson gear and/or all shadow gear, but other than that, i just kept my weight as low as possible, and spent a lot of time dodging and using shields. Kept all my shields at +5 and beyond. (Plus I was switching defensive rings for each occasion, fire thunderplate, magic, etc.)

Mask of the child saved me a lot of grief, given how low my END was.

Really though, as long as it's light, it doesn't matter that much.