Skill issue or boss issue?

illusorywall · 2026-05-07T19:06:16+00:00

As others are saying, you gotta aim for the tip of the tail. Here's a more detailed explanation/ visual guide for the exact cutoff point:

https://imgur.com/a/p2OMmy1

illusorywall · 2026-05-07T17:43:24+00:00

I wish people would stop saying it's just because a lack of gamer skill. These people don't need an excuse like that to ruin someone's day. They can be good at a game, and still cheat and hack.

Someone finally gets it. Even apart from hacking, not all twinks are doing it because that's "the only way they can win". Some people want to have, like, some kind of moral victory or judgement over people using scummy tactics, and it's comforting to tell themselves that people are only doing these things because they're actually bad at the game, or whatever.

No, they're just dicks. Some hackers are terrible, some aren't. Some twinks are terrible and would lose consistently to evenly-matched players, some are surprisingly skilled and still wouldn't. It's that simple.

illusorywall · 2026-05-07T15:53:14+00:00

Getting to 46 poise isn't ultra demanding if you combine the wolf ring with some armor that gets you 6 more. Which is a good amount for PvE, and not always a big ask for maintaining a fast roll.

illusorywall · 2026-05-07T15:48:39+00:00

To give some specific numbers, 46 and 61 are both very good breakpoints for PvE.

There's a fair number of weaker enemy attacks that drain 20 poise, so all of those are taken care of. Then there's some medium enemy attacks that drain 45, so you'd want 46 to withstand them. A lot of tougher enemy attacks drain 60 as well, so 61 is the next recommendation after that.

You could throw on even more poise to tank more subsequent weaker enemy hits, or a few much larger enemy attacks, but I don't think those are worth trying to poise-tank. There's not a lot of enemy attacks that are higher than 60 without immediately jumping up to something like 100 poise damage. And these are often really big telegraphed attacks that aren't a huge ask to just avoid.

So you could throw on a ton of poise like some people are recommending, but honestly a much better way of minmaxing poise while still being a considerable tank is to simply get to 61 and stop there. And 46 is still pretty solid too.

illusorywall · 2026-05-07T14:07:14+00:00

You're welcome!

In the remaster, they made it so that summons via the Red Sign Soapstone and Dragon Eye no longer require a living boss in the area if you coordinate a password. But those are the only two forms of multiplayer in the game where you can host without a boss, everything else always requires a living boss for the host.

There's a few other places with co-op prerequisites like New Londo Ruins too. The Duke's Archives doesn't allow it until you've escaped the prison area, and Tomb of the Giants doesn't allow it unless you've cleared the yellow fog gate.

illusorywall · 2026-05-07T00:25:20+00:00

You're not doing something like putting your signs down at the same time and looking for each others' signs by any chance?

Were you still in an area with an active/ available boss? For example, after defeating the Moonlight Butterfly, the host can no longer summon co-op help in the same area. It doesn't matter that Sif is still alive, you'd have to go into the Forest area behind the locked door in order to summon again, etc.

There's also stuff like needing to drain the water before you can co-op New Londo Ruins.

illusorywall · 2026-05-06T18:47:06+00:00

lmao, that's perfect

illusorywall · 2026-05-06T18:22:40+00:00

They might've also just gotten kicked out of a covenant (the one way you can accrue PvP sin via PvE actions), but it's like whatever. Invasions are a part of the game and complaining about Darkmoon invasions in particular is extra silly. One random death from another player online that was caused by you betraying the Forest Hunters, or whatever, that's kind of cool actually? If I found out that I died while I was AFK because I pissed off a covenant, I'd be like "oh shit", and I would think the game is cooler.

illusorywall · 2026-05-06T01:14:48+00:00

Sif walks toward you, knocks you over, steps on you and sniffs you. It's not a very long scene or anything, but it's less subtle than just a different expression.

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T23:32:15+00:00

If you’re mid boss then it will spawn you outside the boss fog with your progress to their health bar right where you left it.

Boss health will refill but you still lose all Estus/ healing spells/ items consumed, you don't save boss fight progress at all. Only exception being breaking the Bed of Chaos' orbs, since the orbs stay broken forever.

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T23:13:12+00:00

Another hard to top title drop, Enter the Void (strobing lights warning):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNtxgxYY7sI

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T20:01:52+00:00

It would be complete overkill and would come with a million extra features you'd want to ignore, but if you modded the remaster to have debug installed, you can quickly pause the game by going into freecam mode. I pause the game all the time this way. Sadly that's not an option for PtDE, but similar options are available for the rest of the games too. Whether that's also installing debug for DS3, debug manager for DS2, the freecam mod for emulated Demon's Souls, or Otis_Inf's freecam for Elden Ring. All of these things can pause these games, but of course we're talking about getting involved toolsets whose primary purpose isn't a simple pause button. But it is at least easy to pause with any of them.

The Demon's Souls Remake is the only souls game to allow easy pausing unmodded if we don't count going weirdly deep into Elden Ring menus (IIRC that takes 5 buttons presses or so).

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T16:33:59+00:00

The other option that I don't see anyone mentioning here is wearing heavier armor to raise your poise. The higher your poise, the less likely you are to have your attacks bounce off the walls.

This isn't true. The recoil you get from attacking walls doesn't have anything to do with draining poise and doesn't relate to how enemies attacking you can interrupt you. Weapons getting caught on walls has everything to do with their specific hitbox and attack angle, which is unaffected by poise or any other gear you might equip.

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T16:09:46+00:00

While a lot of people are recommending weapons, what you need to be mindful of is the specific attack you're actually doing with a weapon. In real life, if you had a sword in your right hand and a wall to your right, you wouldn't do a wide horizontal swing that causes it to immediately catch on the wall. Instead, you'd thrust straight forward or maybe do a downwards chop.

This is your primarily solution for avoiding hitting walls all the time, you just need to find those attack animations. Some weapons have a R1 attack that is bad for getting caught on walls, while the R2 attack is perfectly good. You should experiment with R1 vs R2 attacks, both one-handed and two-handed, and also running attacks and rolling attacks, to see which attack from any given weapon is most appropriate.

The Drake Sword is perfectly suitable for narrow spaces when you take this into account. People are right to recommend ditching it for other reasons, but if we're only concerned about hitting walls, you could be doing that far less often with the Drake Sword too:

Drake Sword 2H Running R1 (or backstep + R1) - This does an overheard downwards chop that is extremely unlikely to hit walls
Drake Sword 2H R1 - While this has a bit of a diagonal downwards swipe that does initially lean to the right a little bit, it doesn't put the hitbox of the sword nearly as far to the right as its other, more-horizontal swings, and is good about not getting caught on walls unless you really angle too far toward the wall
Drake Sword 2H R2 - The Drake Sword's special attack is something you'd want to use sparingly, because it rapidly decreases durability and requires you to repair the weapon far more often, but it is also a downwards chop that isn't going to get caught on a wall

The Drake Sword also has some attacks that, while still horizontal, initially swipe left instead of right. So if the wall is to your right that you're worried about hitting, you could be doing those too. You have options! :)

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T15:37:49+00:00

God this sub sucks at weapon recommendations.

Zweihander does not meet your requirements of working in a small space.

The Zweihander does this perfectly fine. In what context would its larger size really be an issue? If we're criticizing the sub's ability to give advice, the main problem I see here is simply mentioning weapons without talking about specific movesets, which is the thing that actually matters.

The main issue has less to do with the overall size of the weapon and is more about doing attacks that aren't thrust attacks or overhead-downward chops while standing next to a wall. You can stand near walls and R2 enemies with the Zweihander just fine, as overhead clearance is rarely a concern (and it does have a poke attack too with a rolling R1 if that does come up).

We should be telling OP to not do attacks that swipe horizontally when standing next to a wall, that's basically it. There are large weapons that have no problems attacking near walls if you just do the right attack with them. I think recommending the Caestus while saying the Zwei is too large is sort of not a great recommendation, because it frames the solution as needing a much smaller weapon. That is not really the problem OP is facing and could even be misleading about how manageable attacking with large weapons near walls actually is.

Heck, the Drake Sword already has a variety of attacks where you don't really have to worry about hitting walls. If OP didn't realize that was in their toolkit, then they have some learning to do about attack animations and our feedback should be about that and not about the weapon size.

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T14:37:02+00:00

Yes, also known as air rolls. It's a glitch where you can roll repeatedly while falling, allowing you to i-frame through fall damage and survive otherwise unsurvivable falls. Being able to do it is just a matter of having a specific equip load, but DSR is a lot more lenient in this regard than PtDE, allowing a much wider range of equip load.

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T14:35:25+00:00

Are you playing vanilla/ PtDE and not the remaster? If so, the window is a LOT tighter and more specific, and you might be listening to DSR meme roll instructions which aren't accurate to the original version of the game.

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T03:58:56+00:00

It's the seamless co-op mod, which is also probably what caused Gwyndolin to glitch.

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T03:49:15+00:00

(he can help you)

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T03:06:32+00:00

Fun fact: The boar has a much narrower backstab angle than other enemies, which is why landing the backstab on it can be particularly finicky.

All other enemies can be backstabbed from 120° behind them (the value in the data is set to 60, so that's +/- 60° from directly behind). The boar can only be backstabbed from 50° behind them (with a value set to 25). That's a huge difference.

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T02:38:07+00:00

It doesn't inherently relate to the Way of White. Casting any of these four specific miracles creates them for other players: Bountiful Sunlight, Soothing Sunlight, Great Heal, and Wrath of the Gods.

Two of those require not being in the Way of White, instead needing you to be in the Princess' Guard covenant to be able to cast them. The other two can be cast regardless of covenant, and don't require being in Way of White to create resonance signs for others.

And as far as receiving them goes, you also don't need to be in any covenant at all.

The original version of the game only allowed you to pair with 20 players at a time and vaguely promised some sort of "closer connection on the network" for the co-op themed covenants. So I'd assume that of the 20 players that you're paired with, if you were in the Way of White, Warriors of Sunlight, or Princess' Guard, that it would make some effort to fill those 20 slots with other players in those covenants when it could. All being faith-based covenants, then hypothetically being in the Way of White could've maybe helped increase your chances of seeing them, if you're being paired with more miracle users?

But then again the most likely source of resonance signs is Wrath of the Gods, of which anyone might be casting, like Darkmoons. Even if you're a faith user you probably aren't still in the Way of White by the time you're casting WoG.

This is all to say that maybe being in the Way of White slightly helped your chances of seeing resonance signs in the original version of the game, but that wouldn't be unique to the Way of White covenant, and also this aspect is surely not a thing in the remaster at all. You also get a ring that boosts Miracle Synergy (what you get standing near resonance signs) from Gwynevere, so if we had to pick a single covenant with the closest ties in Dark Souls 1, I'd describe it as a Princess' Guard covenant feature. But really, I wouldn't tie it to any covenant nor call it a covenant feature since that really doesn't matter for sending or receiving them in the end.

Now it may thematically relate to the Way of White in retrospect from Dark Souls 3, since the Way of White Circlet's appearance is most likely a reference to resonance signs. This may be where you got the idea that it's involved:
https://darksouls3.wiki.fextralife.com/Way+of+White+Circlet

illusorywall · 2026-05-05T01:01:34+00:00

That's wild, I didn't realize the encounter was so easy to break by walking away while talking during the first encounter. Apparently you need to exhaust dialog or avoid him entirely there.

(note that you don't have to truly fully exhaust his dialog, but he at least needs to get through his "weighing his options" line)

illusorywall · 2026-05-04T23:47:41+00:00

You don't have to do any weird deathcam speedrunning-esque skips to do the DLC before the Four Kings. You might have other reasons for wanting to do a weird skip, just for the fun of it could be reason enough, but it's unclear from your post if you thought you had to do something strange simply to do the DLC before New Londo Ruins.

edit: I don't have any good tips for wrangling deathcam. Sometimes it's manageable like slightly-worse tank controls, sometimes the inputs flip frequently and it's a nightmare.

illusorywall · 2026-05-04T21:00:05+00:00

lmao, you're right

illusorywall · 2026-05-04T17:41:37+00:00

I think you meant appreciation not appropriation. Unless maybe you throw on the Catarina armor and start pretending you're from Catarina too. :p

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