Dark Souls Polearm Thief Guide Introduction Through Moonlight Butterfly. Guide by bijalba [@] gmail.com
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Guide Introduction
If you try and play the thief as a high dexterity, small weapon assassin, the beginning of the game can be downright painful, and you might relish the challenge but you can pick up bad habits. The purpose of this introduction guide is how to set your thief up so that you are a farming machine and can hold your own in any situation, not just those that the thief typically excels at. Why polearms? Because they force you to learn how to play properly based on how they function inherently. ...but for a thief? Yes, for a thief. Especially for a thief! The DEX balances out the inherently poor qualities that the two starting polearms have, and the nature of spears allows you to learn the value of shielding and not giving up openings.Series Introduction
Those new to the series experience a rude awakening: it is a 3D RPG / platformer except you are not supposed to just kill everything once. The souls series (demon's souls and dark souls) recall a difficulty dating back to NES era games where you might have to grind experience repeatedly in order to pass a point. This, coupled with a harsh penalty system of potentially losing everything you've earned has given mixed reviews to the souls series: you either hate the games because they are pure punishment and unintuitively difficult, or you cope with the systems in place and they are a refreshing exercise of risk and reward.Thief Introduction
The thief is considered one of the hardest, if not the hardest, playstyle to master in the souls series. Essentially what it boils down to is your maneuverability and speed doesn't make up for the lack of damage you put out and the difficulty to successfully backstab/crit something, especially those things which are impossible to position properly. As such, the thief starts out very slow because in order to become an assassinating killing machine you hope to you need to balance out other stats and that means farming.Statistics
The important stats to balance will be strength, dexterity and endurance. The thief starts with 9 str and 15 dexterity. It is currently unconfirmed that STR also alters your swing speed at various high levels. This guide will not get that far for it to matter, the main reason we will put points into STR is to be able to equip various weapons. Endurance is extremely important early on as well, it might be the difference between 2 and 3 swings when presented with an opening. Your initial goal is to get strength to 16.General Tactics
I. Get used to locking onto a target. This is extremely important for polearms as their radius sucks. With swords, even your daggers, you swing at a pretty wide open arc. This seems better for now, but eventually you *want* your attacks to be in a straight forward, controlled motion, especially when hitting the wall reduces your attack. II. Hold + Release the shield. Learn your enemies attack patterns, only hold shields down when you have to, the goal is to regenerate the most stamina possible to block / attack again. Even having a sliver could mean the difference between a block and a death. Even if that block means you stagger or take some damage, it is better than dying. III. Wait for the enemy to attack. If you're getting impatient and want to hack and slash, first of all you shouldn't be a thief. Secondly, maybe take a break. This game is not like Demon's Souls, it doesn't get harder as you die. So any perceived "increased difficulty" is because you're going on tilt and losing patience, especially if you just lost a lot of souls. IV. Don't bother parry + riposte or trying to get behind enemies for a backstab. The first dozen or so levels you want to get the hang of countering everything. Sure, practice getting good with the timing and it is useful on some bosses, but a better habit to learn is playing defensively and only counterattacking when an opening is presented. V. Spears + Shields don't give the same type of opening as 2h, swords + shields, etc. Spearmen with shields, when they attack, is not when you are to counterattack. It is when they hit your shield and stagger. Sometimes they will stagger you or not give an opening, just wait it out.Item List
Starter items: use these until you have enough STR for winged spear Winged spear: 13 STR 15 DEX, hold shield in while attacking with 1H mode. Hollow Soldier shield: this is the shield you want to use, it deflects all physical and has nice non-interrupt stats, even over later shields. Halberd: the goal of this guide, 16STR 12DEXInitial Playthrough
I am not going to go into details of precisely what do to, just give a roadmap for how you can go from dying repeatedly to clearing everything through the bell gargoyles without dying at all. I put dozens of hours into learning this, only to start over and be able to kill everything without dying once at 10+ humanity. I. Intro. Nothing special here, clear it like you normally would. Apparently if you want even more challenge you can kill the boss the first time you beat him (with your broken item, without the plunging advantage) and get a pretty nice intro weapon... for STR classes. II. Your first (and only, for a while) thief-like action: grave robbing! When you make it to the shrine, move to the graveyard area and hug the right wall, running past any skeleton spawns. You should find a corpse with a winged spear (and a huge skeleton spawn). Run in, run back to the bonfire, laugh maniacally as you have your first real loot. Unfortunately, it requires 13 STR to effectively 1hand it, so you'll have to grind a bunch of levels, dumping points into strength. III. Grind time. OK, now you're going to follow the path up and into undead burg. You've got a bunch of grinding to do, but with all of your souls found as treasure/items you should be able to get 4 levels very quickly to use the winged spear. Follow the general tactics: hold shield down when an attack is coming, thrust after they've staggered. Your immediate goal is to get 16STR for the halberd, then start putting points into endurance. IV. Levelling pattern: ok, so you will clear undead burg up to the spot where the fire barrel is dropped a bunch of times until you have 16STR. You will go to the merchant downstairs from where the two spear+shield skeletons near the bonfire are and purchase about 1k-1500 souls worth of firebombs, a couple dozen. You will also farm until you at least have the hollow soldier shield as well, or some other 100% physical resist shield. With firebombs and that shield, the first boss is completely trivial. Go through the white light, go on top of the tower and kill the two skeletons, then run across the bridge to trigger the boss. Now run back to the white door where you came in and hold down shield, locking on to the boss. Throw a firebomb whenever he's far, let go of shield to charge up but never let him hit you without shield up. Easy kill. Before the next bridge you'll see a knight. it's not an enemy: talk to him and he'll give you the coop tool. if you're human you can summon ghosts to help you, he will apparently help you with the bell gargoyles but i didn't talk to him because i thought it was an enemy and soloed the gargs. The next part can instagib you if you're not careful, just stutter step out on to the next bridge with skeletons until you hear/see the dragon coming then sprint back. They'll all die to the breath. You have two options here, one is to sprint for the stairs on the right, go kick the ladder down to rest and open up the path from the bonfire, and two is to wait around in the stairs for the dragon to fly down, then you can run past him and there's a bonfire in there and he'll take off. I think this is a bit of a meaningless bonfire, as it is literally 5 enemies away from another one. Also there is a secret that if you are underneath and shoot the dragon's tail 30-40 times you'll get a drake sword. haven't done it, though i did shoot the tail a few times to see what would happen. Underneath there is a room of 3 rats, they actually drop humanity at a very high rate so keep a note that they're an easy farm. So now you've opened up a whole new area, which is still fairly trivial if you're holding down shield and using your spear during openings. So very much easier than the low damage dagger! Clear those areas a bunch of times and it's time to exploit / use strategy on the bull boss. Basically you clear all the skeletons then drop down behind the boss to the stairs down, you'll notice that it charges but gets stuck in that doorway. Firebomb / melee him when its walking away and its very, very easy. Clear all of the mobs and the next "challenge" arrives and you start seeing the power of a polearm rogue, the knights with the red capes are ridiculously easy (in fact the polearm skeletons are harder). hold down shield, wait for them to attack and stagger, then counterattack. If you thought it was easy with the spear, just wait until you get the halberd because you're right there. Return to the other side of the gate where you killed the boar boss and the halberd is on one of the corpses. Success! V. Now what? Well you should immediately notice the pros and cons of the halberd. If you don't connect your attack you stagger forward giving your pretty undead face away to whatever's attacking you. This *forces* you to make sure you're locked on and connecting. Next, you'll notice it doesn't give the same "shield is still up" benefit of a spear when attacking, again it requires you to block then counter. But look at the crazy damage it does? You should now be 2-3 hitting things that you were previously 4-6 hitting. You have insane reach where, once you learn its limit you can hit things hard from far away. Also it is still straight forward attacks but it has a much better arc than the spear, so you can clear groups much easier. Once I got this combo, farming was so easy i farmed up the 20,000 souls to unlock the forest door. I wouldn't recommend it, everything in there destroys me but it's cool to run through and see a pretty epic boss at the end of it. VI. Gargoyle time. You've muddle with farming and have everything memorized and could do it in your sleep. You've upgraded your flasks by taking the fire keeper's soul back to her (don't do what i did and use it on yourself...) One of the things that makes this really, really easy is magic weapon. In order to get this you'll have to go into lower burg and free the sorceror. There is a ton of souls down there and nothing should give you problems with your new halberd! You can also start upgrading your halberd, its very cheap to upgrade any normal weapon to +5, and you should have some materials besides. There are a bunch of rarities with the gargoyles. i got the gargoyle helmet which is an amazing helmet but plate, and if you chop off the tail you can get a nice weapon. Really I just magic weaponed and the rest was fairly obvious. No real strategy. I accomplished all of this without dying at level 20, with an even spread of STR/DEX and endurance. VII. Post blacksmith boss. Another exploit/strategy, is circle behind it to those steps. Most all of its attacks will go over your head, allowing you to slam it from below. He does one plunging attack that will hit, so avoid that. To fully realize the power of this, try attacking the stone giants in the back of the forest near the locked door. You can easily outreach them, and when they cast their slow you still move fast enough to range them and have time for potions. Any heavier armor and you'll crawl, any shorter range and you won't be able to hit them enough between their attacks. This is an ideal setup. VIII. The butterfly is very simple. I would switch to as much magic defense as possible as all of the damage done is magic, roll away from any attacks and when she moves in get magic weapon up and clobber it.Conclusion
So you should be able to have killed: the Moonlight Butterfly, Bell Gargoyles, two minibosses Using: your initial items, one shield upgrade, winged spear and halberd, a handful of firebombs, magic weapon and the halberd upgraded as much as you care to (I did it with 0 upgrades). In approximately: 2 hours of farming / playing. If you do it without dying and only increasing two bonfires to max, you should end up with your humanity around 8 (~150 item find) based on how lucky you are with drops. This is a pretty good start to now continue grinding your dex or switch back to pure dagger / "real thief" mode while mitigating the harsh learning curve of this game and training you as to how you should play even though it feels more fun to hack and slash!