>playing dark souls 2 for the first time without ADP
>absolute kino, coolest fights of the trilogy, have to actually dodge out of the trajectory of the attacks
>every boss holds up dodging through their combos, great parries but mostly trying to not use shields
>unironically most exciting defense of the whole series
>sometimes a little annoying in PVP but still more than doable, won most of the time

>arrive at frigid outskirts
>ice stallion forward charge is literally undodgeable without ADP, you need to pray for it to miss itself
>if you dont have ADP its also practically luck-based whether or not you can land more than a single hit in with melee
>the kings' pet is specifically the one boss that is a little aids to dodge without ADP and now theres two of them which means either you win the DPS race or you die
thank you for listening to my blog post

>>713851171 (OP)
Based and ADP-pilled. DS2 without pumping ADP is like trying to roll through molasses-you need to nail spacing and invincibility windows like you're playing Dark Souls: Turbo Edition. But yeah, Frigid Outskirts was FROM slapping together their "What if hell just sucked?" folder. Not even mechanic difficulty, just “walk through white death for 10 minutes to maybe fight horses.” And then get ganked by two teleporting saber cats that tag-team your iFrames out of existence. Pure Miyazaki mischief. Still, props for doing it the hard way. Peak suffering = peak soul.

>>713851171 (OP)
DS2 invokes the hyperborean spirit

>>713851171 (OP)
I always picked that traveler or whatever class that starts out with ADP leveled and never had to deal with it ever again. It's not even that horrible. The less ADP you have the later you want to time your dodge that's it.

>>713851307
>eed to nail spacing and invincibility windows like you're playing Dark Souls: Turbo Edition
I actually didnt feel like that at all. All i really had to do was dodge in the correct direction
Like you pick some boss like Smelter Demon or Alonne, either you gotta roll to the left or to the right, sometimes you need to go backwards depending on your spot, its pretty intuitive. It was far, far more forgiving than i expected and i usually didnt actually rely on the invincibility frames of the roll, just the movement
i dont feel like it was suffering either, felt like the game was practically made for that, most bosses took 1-3 tries. Fume Knight was 4 tries for instance despite missing his bonfire and only taking out two of the healers

>frigid outskirts
I assume it gets a lot more tolerable if you can just i-frame dodge the horse charge
But i think the area would be infinitely better like this
>make it longer, more of an endurance test
>perhaps tone down the possibility of getting 2-3 enemies on your ass at once
>add a bonfire at the end before the boss
Now all you have to do is come up with a boss as cool as Sir Alonne again instead of the sheer laziness of the kings pets

>>713851171 (OP)
>>713851307
>>713851423
>>713851514
dark souls 3 is better sorry

>>713851514
>he less ADP you have the later you want to time your dodge that's it.
You could either bother with tight timing and dodge later (meaning you have less time)..
Or just stop thinking like a DS3 zoomer, and actually roll out of the attacks' trajectory. Now you can roll early, you can roll much more safely, and you look cool as hell

Dark souls 2 is better then dark souls if your playing the original one.

Unironcally the only game that would benefit from a patch.

>>713851580
The King's Pets are a good fight though, one of the very few times where a boss is actually designed as duo boss instead of just leaving two slightly different speed mooks in a room and having random chance be the deciding factor like Ornstein and Smough.

>>713851732
whats worse about SOTFS?
i havent played the original fully, just a little bit in a friends' console. All i really noticed was that the early game encounters were staler, not necessarily harder/easier but blander (Like that one tree in the forest where theres a lot of sleeping hollows in SOTFS being replaced with just a bunch of random enemies and a heide knight sitting on his ass)

>>713851816
>where a boss is actually designed as duo boss
does their AI actually prevent them from ramming themselves into your face too hard so it stays fair?
in all honesty i have little experience with two being alive at once, because i was just in a frantic DPS race to kill the first in fear of getting raped by two at once

>>713851974
It has been a while, but basically one is a ranged foe and the other focuses on rushing you down. They can both do the ranged attack iirc, but Lud can only do the jumping bite thing when Zallen is dead and Lud gains the rage mode. They don't just both rush you forever, similar to those invaders in the same dlc that have the predator dreadlocks where they won't ever actually gangrape you.

>>713851896
Sorfs random enemy placement is the main problem. They thought the original was too easy so they just tripled the enemies instead of actually changing the difficulty in a meaningful way.

I think it's playable but only online.

>>713853265
This isn't accurate. In some areas they did increase the enemy count a little, but they also changed the aggro ranges, behaviour and placements so that you're no longer getting swarmed. In the original you'd walk into a room and basically the entire group will aggro, that doesn't happen in Scholar outside of puzzle rooms like in Brume Tower and the shoulder exploding guys. The simplest example of this that everyone should recognize is already posted by the anon asking. In base DS2 there is just a crowd of hollows that attack you immediately after you climb the ladder, in Scholar they're all sleeping until you approach and you only engage with the ones you choose while dodging the firebomb guy.
I have no idea when or how people get this backwards in their heads but the original game is the unbalanced piece of shit filled with gank squads, Scholar is the game that fixed that.