I have spent a little bit of time leveling in my secret forest of killable things. At some point I was level 37 (still might be) and went through my first multi-level upgrade, which was kind of fun. Unfortunately I wasn't really improving any of my gear during this time, so I eventually got itchy to go see new things. Suspecting that crossing the bridge guarded by the Axe guy was going to lead to fighting the strange river octopus-thing I decided to go down a different path from the Darkroot Garden bonfire. Next to the door there is a downward path that I took. Aside from some tree guys (that are pretty easy to kill now, even in groups) there were some interesting enemies in this little open area.
Most interesting was the Stone Giant. While I lost the first two times to the stone giant, that is never going to happen again. I can easily get behind him and kill him that way, so the only thing I have to worry about is his spell that prevents me from running (and maybe rolling). That allows him to beat up my stamina and then slaughter me with his gigantic sword. But it turns out he has a long delivery on that move and I can just run away from him when this happens. So now I can kill them with no problem . . . shame they only get me 600 souls.
Down another path I saw a purple thing that I thought was the poisonous frog you (Dan) spoke about somewhere else. I decided not to interact with those. The other two, strange enemies I encountered were a lizard on a tree (which was easy to kill with arrows) and literally a slowly moving tree. I don't know what happened, but a tree started to slide my way while I was fighting a giant. I killed the giant and then shot an arrow at the tree. It took damage, and the tree was wiggling, but it never attacked me . . . so I killed it.
Anyway, I cleared that section, got some Great Knight armor that I assume I will never use. It seems like there are specific places where you get full sets of armor. That is how I got my Eastern Armor and my Great Knight Armor, at least. At the end of this little opening there were stairs that I took up and a white door. The last white door led me to the opening and not a boss fight, so I was unsure where this would go.
I walk through the door and immediately the boss life meter pops up and I am fighting the moonlit butterfly. I die twice on this boss, first because I walked in with no Estus and didn't know how to dodge all of his attacks, second because I got hit by a tree on the wrong side of the light door. Either way the boss was super easy to beat. Having arrows I shot the shit out of it and then beat it up when it landed on the bridge. The attacks were easy to dodge and when blocked didn't kill me in one hit.
This is the first boss that I killed without spamming it in some way, yet I found little joy in killing this butterfly. It made me wonder if there was a non-lethal approach . . . but the butterfly attacked me so what was I to do.
After killing the butterfly I thought that I might have opened up some great new location, but instead it was just a tower that led me to a petrified blacksmith. I took items from him (which was scary because I thought he was going to wake up) and got some humanity (I've got a good stash of unused humanity), a key, and something else. So now I'll have to press a little more in a different direction and see what is up there. I'm still curious about blighttown (now that I have run the first bell), but I might get the courage up to go to the Darkroot Basin or cross the bridge.
The first time I took on the Moonlight Butterfly, it trounced me as the only time it would seem to come into hand-to-hand range was before it released it's massively damaging area attack. The second time, I summoned Witch Beatrice at the bottom of the stairs, and she made the fight almost trivially easy--all I had to do was survive.
ReplyDeleteMy character has put very little into fighting at range. I'm starting to rethink this, and may end up reinforcing my longbow to start having some options in this direction. What I've seen so far of Sen's Fortress has me thinking this might be helpful.
Did you remove the magical, spinning trees to access the area with the Great Wolf ring? It raises your poise significantly and I've rarely removed it since I found it.
I do have the Wolf Ring, but haven't put it on (because I didn't know it raised poise). Both of my rings raise HP but I think I'll take the poise. I also fought a black knight (who eventually ran away and never came back?) and think I have found the back route in the catacombs.
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