So Dark Souls 3 has added a bunch of new refinements that are really good for the
game but of course they're also really hidden and you shouldn't have to puzzle
them out yourself like I did. Let me tell you about them
number one is that you can hold down on the D pad and you'll be brought to the
first item in your quick select bar. For most people this will be their healing
estus flask and I recommend you keep it that way because, man, once you discover this
mechanic you'll no longer be like "Ah where the fuck is my estus" and die while
you're toggling for it. It's great there's no longer a drawback to having
ten items in your quick select bar. For number two everyone knows that fashion
Souls is far more important than the worthless stats on your armor. For
example, these gloves have far better defense, poise and resistances but they
show my skinny hollow elbows and that just won't do so now the game helps you
curate the perfect fashion all with the press of the right analog stick at the
equipment screen. That's better. And at some point in your journey you gonna
take off that helmet and be like "holy shit I look like beef jerky". Well don't worry.
In Dark Souls 3 it's almost a good thing to go hollow, so let me explain.
When you rescued a character called Yoel on the Undead Settlement bridge, you
can bring him back to your shrine and when you talk to him there, you have the
option to "draw out your true strength". Selecting this option lets you level
up once for free, but there is a hidden catch. When you level up for free at Yoel,
you receive a Dark Sigil in the key slot of your inventory and every time you
die with a Dark Sigil in your inventory, you receive a point of hollowing in your
Stat screen, visible here. The more hollowing you get, the more you look like
beef jerky, the darker your covenant symbol becomes and the more excited
Yoel gets. Every few points of hollowing just check back at Yoel and he'll let
you level up again getting you another
Dark Sigil in your inventory, giving you more points of hollowing when you die and
again and again until you level up five times at Yoel and he dies of
excitement. In his place
Yuria appears and
the hollowing quest line continues. I highly highly recommend that you go down
this quest line because in my opinion it's one of the best ones in the game
however it is very very tricky to do right so check out my lore through series
if you're interested in doing the quest line we're gonna go through it there.
If you spent hours curating the perfect waifu -I wouldn't do that but some people like to
do it it's weird- anyway don't worry it's easy to reverse hollowing: just buy a
purging stone from Yuria and you can remove all the hollowing points and
furthermore if you give a fire keeper soul to the fire keeper then she'll heal the
dark sigils in your inventory so you won't hollow again. Good looks don't come
cheap though so remember that. Number four is that it's now way easier to play
with your mates: just set a password shared between you both and all of a
sudden you will be able to be summoned regardless of your soul level. To balance
this the game will scale down the Phantoms strength to match the hosts. Also you
can't drop a weapon for your friend that exceeds his or her maximum upgraded
weapon. How cool is this summoning system though. For so long we've been
leveling up characters alongside our friends and that gets so tricky and
complicated. This simplifies things so much. But I'll tell you what I like more
than friends:
invading people. Once you get the red eye orb from Ringfinger Leonhard, you can use
it to invade indefinitely. I'll
explain his quest line in another video, but did you know that the rewards you
get for killing a host now depend on which covenant you're in? For example if I
invade with the red eye orb and a sunbro medal equipped, then I'll get sun
light medals for killing. If you go in as a red phantom mound maker I'll get a
vertebra shackle for killing, and so on
if I invade as anything else I think though I get a pale tongue, which is a
reward for the fingers of Rosaria covenant, which is associated with the
red eye orb. So if you want to farm those three covenant rewards, then PvP with a
friend or invade others, it's really good for switching it up.
additionally the color of your red phantom now changes depending on your
equipped covenant as well.
You can see here I'm this sexy golden red phantom because I'm a sunbro invader
I love the way it looks. so yeah try some jolly murdering for once. Another related thing is to do
with invasion requirements: you can only invade people who match or are below
your maximum upgraded weapon leve,l in addition to the soul level system also
being in place. A user named Prinex on Reddit actually did a great write-up on
invasion requirements and you should go and check it out, it's really interesting.
I'll put it in the description below. Number six: one thing that I discovered from
watching PvP streamers was that you can now parry people even if they attack you
from behind.
Apparently a shield parry now affects phantoms in a 360 radius around you. But
is this a bug or feature? Time will tell. For number seven I've written down that
you can perform visceral attacks on a ton of enemies, some of whom don't even look
staggerable. The head is what you often want to aim for on many enemy creatures,
but the main thing I wanna talk about is that if you hit an enemy regularly
during this time, just with a light attack for example, you will now hear a different
sound which indicates that you're dealing more damage during their
vulnerable state.
You also hear this sound on counter hits and all the other vulnerable times, it's
a nice touch.
Number eight: when you run and press R2 now you do a jumping attack. These can also be
initiated by pressing forward and R2 of course. What's also new is that you
can do a rolling attack animation immediately after the jumping attack. I
found for most weapons this is really good for Crystal lizards because jumping
attacks often fling them onto their back and rolling attacks are often vertical
or pokes. Number nine: when you do a jump by pressing L3 when you're
running, you no longer have to do the mandatory roll at the end of it. If you
stop pressing forward on the left analog stick as soon as you initiate the jump,
then your character will come to a standstill, like this. This is
particularly good for tricky jumping puzzles like this one, but there really
aren't many uses for this right now at all, which is a shame. I never thought
Dark Souls needed jumping puzzles because the jumping mechanic has always been
trash, but the fact that this exists, that you don't have to roll is almost
like an Easter egg. It would be interesting if they put a puzzle where you have to
stop the jump, you can't do the roll in order to get the reward. I think that
would be neat. Alright number ten: using weapon arts with no focus still works for
a lot of weapons and while their effectiveness is often reduced, some
weapons are worth using simply for their weapon art. For example the sunlight
straight sword has a buff that you can apply even with tiny bit of focus and
daggers have a quick step that functions with no focus at all. This is
particularly handy when you're rolling through the swamp: just equip a dagger and fly
through the swamp with the weapon art instead. Look at how much faster this is.
It brought my swamp experience up to a almost bearable,
it's pretty good. The next five secrets are little quickfire secrets. First, you can
do a charge attack by holding R2 like in Bloodborne. You can also throw some
knives while running and some spells like Farron Dart while running as well
you get a heavy roll at above 70% equip burden so it's very beneficial
to stay below 70 percent. Power stance dual wielding no longer exists in Dark
Souls 3 which is sad, because I think that was one of the best things that
Dark Souls 2 brought to the table. You can now two-hand dual wieldable weapons
instead. And for number fifteen I want you to go and check out this video. It's
by a streamer named Scott Jund who did an awesome little write-up on how defense works
in Dark Souls 3. My favorite discovery in that video was that having an empty armor slot
is something you just never want to do, and that even wearing rags in that armor slot
can drastically increase your defense. So subscribe if you want to. This channel is
all about Dark Souls so we got stories and tips and guides, and if you have any
other tips, throw them in the comments section. It's really fun to be able to
unpack the game with you guys and I'm sure there's some stuff I've missed and
I hope there is, because I don't want this to end.
Also if you have another browser tab free, open up rbfrosty's
twitch stream and throw him a follow, because he helped a ton with all the
multiplayer testing, and he is another great streamer in the community that you
should support. Thanks for watching and supporting me and I'll see you in the next one
for more Dark Souls 3.