MatMan562 wrote:
Thanks for all the tips! I'm playing on PS3. Hadn't thought about getting help for the bosses, that could help a lot. So is it best to focus on one or two stats when levelling up rather than going for a bit of everything? I remember upgrading a sword before but I didn't know you could do elemental stuff with it, how do you do that?
I don't tend to hit a wall as such, I think the thought of dying repeatedly and not making any progress puts me off loading it back up.
You won't be able to do the elemental stuff until quite a bit later in the game, also Elemental weapons aren't usually as good as dedicated weapons, by that I mean weapons that scale S or A with your key damage stat.
They use to be but they got hit with quite a large nerf in one of the patches. Since my game is unpatched they still hit pretty damn hard but you'll run into bosses with different elemental resistances meaning a purely physical weapon will do you through every fight while you'll have to chop and changed between elemental weapons.
Once you reach the first blacksmith (which I'm assuming you've found), you can at first only upgrade weapons and shields to +5 and armour to +3. You need to find certain embers to upgrade past that but you'll come across the +10/+6 large ember not too much further into the game, it is also fairly hard to miss, unlike the other embers which you have to go out of your way to find.
For damage stats (Strength or Dexterity for melee builds, Intelligence or Faith for caster builds) it is better to at first focus on just one and your Endurance and Vitality.
The one stat pretty much everyone ignores is Resistance, I seriously wouldn't bother levelling that up, for the levels invested in it, it offers little return and you can find other things to boost your resistance to certain elements.
I would suggest spending an hour or two just farming the crap out of the undead knights in the area around the blacksmith, you'll make about 1500 souls per run and it takes 7200 souls to buy the small titanite shards from the blacksmith to fully upgrade a weapon/shield to +5, you need less for armour since that only goes up to +3.
An Easier build to start out with is definitely the strength build, high strength, endurance and vitality combined with a good shield and medium (Knight's set) or heavy (though you won't encounter your first piece of proper heavy armour until later in the game) armour basically makes you a lot more survivable and able to dish out a decent amount of damage as well.
Getting your Strength to 20, your Dex to about 16 or 18 (depending on what kind of weapon you want to wield) and bumping up your vitality and endurance occasionally along the way should sort you out.
I don't recommend starting the game as a caster type but, very much like Dungeons and Dragons, Caster start out weak and end up having the potential to do massive damage at higher levels.
Edited by Dr_Mech at 22:44:17 25-01-2013
Dark Souls 
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if anyone's on XBL wanting some duels or co-op funsies, I'll be using my DmB who's currently sat at 105. Hoping to level him to 125 tonight which will finish the build and set me up to grief the guilty... Who's with me 
