2/12/14: Progress and the First Bell!

I've been playing most evenings for a while, but I haven't posted since progress hasn't really been happening.  That changed a few nights ago when I figured something out.  See, no one had explained the difference between being hollow and not-hollow.  I think I understood that being non-hollow meant that you were human again and that people could then invade you game and kill you.  What no one had told me was that if I was human I could summon people into my game (in particular the Knight Solaire).  I heard something about this on a podcast so I decided to give it a try.  I became human and then wandered up the church tower to where the gargoyle lives (at this point I only thought there was one).  I was able to summon Solaire and we went onto the roof together and started killing the gargoyle.  Things were going well as the gargoyle was distracted by Solaire and I was able to sneak behind him and attack.  Then I got lit on fire and died because the other gargoyle showed up.

Still, that felt like a success.  I decided to try it again and started grinding kills in order to get enough souls to get humanity (I'm still not sure the mechanics of that).  Eventually I get enough to do it and so I become human again.  This time, when I enter the church I notice all of the doors go white and a prompt tells me that someone had invaded my game.  Some magic caster showed up and wrecked my shit pretty good.  I was under the impression that I would lose everything if this happened, so I was panicked trying to get away from him.  I was revived and relieved to see that I didn't lose all of my gear or anything else.  But it dissuaded me from trying that route again.

If I was going to beat those gargoyles without help I knew I was going to need to be tougher, so I started grinding and was trying to figure out where the best place to do so was.  I had left a lot of souls on the roof, so I wanted to make sure that I didn't die and lose those souls.  I ended up wondering if I should be going somewhere else first and started to explore my surroundings.  I found the forest out the bottom of the castle, and killed some tree things.  I found a door with a seal on it, and wandered into a region called darkroot basin. I didn't go very far in that direction because I felt like I found a boss door and didn't want to die.

I also went the other direction, starting to wander down to Blighttown.  I didn't make it the whole way, but realized that I could manage the skeletons as long as they were coming one at a time.  I even figured out how to beat the large skeleton, but it involved running away to trigger his return animation.  While I was wandering around the graveyard I found lots of nice things that don't fit my character.  I did eventually wander into the catacombs where I dodge some floating head that blew up and figured out that skeletons there don't fully die.  I barely made it out of there with my life and decided not to do it again.

Eventually I had leveled up a few times and decided to try my hands at the gargoyles again.  I went up there three times, each time being sure to grab my souls in case I died.  Once I managed to run to a distant corner where the gargoyles couldn't physically reach me.  Unfortunately the fire breath could and while I could head to counter balance, I was doomed and died.  It became increasingly clear that I couldn't deal enough damage or manage both of them, so I decided to try my luck with Solaire again.  This time we were able to get it to work and I got some sort of Sun Medallion, all of my souls back and went up the tower to right the first bell.

At this point I was sitting on 15,000 souls and then I remembered that the blacksmith had a key to the door in the forest that cost 20,000 souls.  I had a pretty good route for grinding ~4,000 souls per bonfire by running through the Undead Keep so I decided to grind until I was able to get the key.  I got the key, wandered through the forest to the door and walked in.  The description of the key was pretty ominous and suggested that there was some bad shit in there.  I entered slowly and eventually was set upon by a semi-transparent knight.  I ran from him, luring him to a different location, where despite my blocking he still was able to kill me pretty easily.  I went back to get my souls and tried again.  I fought him in the room he started this time and focused on keeping my range.  This seemed to work until I got hit by some magic attack and ran out of the room.  The knight followed, just like last time, and has become my M.O. I found his range.  At this point he started returning to his location and I shot him full of arrows.  I did the same trigger-run trick that I had done before and killed him for 3,000 souls.  If he returned after a bonfire I was certainly going to use him to grind.  I went back into the room and killed the magic guy.  He had a sword and wasn't taking much damage from mine, but I was able to dispatch him pretty easily.  I read some glyphs and figured out that the knight (Darkwraith?) was attached to the guy (Master?).  I wandered around some more until multiple trees started attacking me so I ran all the way back to the bonfire (being out of Estus).  Having reset the world I was worried that the Knight would be back.  Turns out he wasn't, but the Master was.  The Master was worth 2,000 souls so that was fine by me.  I wandered through the forest where I found what turned out to be another Master.  I wasn't able to kill him because he brought his own Knight with him (and this one healed himself).  I'm thinking that if I can kill the Master it will destroy the wraith, but I honestly think I have a better chance against the wraith one-on-one than I do the Master two-on-one.  So I'll go back in tonight (or today) and try to see if I can kill both of them and explore the forest some more.

I now feel like there is some room for movement in the game.  It is still an exercise of grow until you die, but I have a basis for how I can move through the game and make more consistent progress (at least for a little bit).