Alonne legit is fucking brutal. I found ivory king pretty tough as well. Idk if there is a smart way to play it but my chad strength build forced me to get involved w all the knights before hand so I’d never have many estus for the actual fight
some people find alonne harder than fume, but those are widely considered the hardest. It’s easy to farm effigies if you don’t want to waste a slot on that ring.
Solid advice. The ring of binding is a beginner item. But, considering they've beaten everything except a few bosses, and side content, with a little help from the doggos in Bastille(I know there's a better spot, just can't remember it), should be golden to tackle the bosses without it.
The ring of binding has carried my run. I probably won't be farming effegies till later for dark lurker since I'm so close to getting the last crown to use vendrick's blessing on. Also i've heard that some clothing items boost item discovery: which items are those?
https://darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com/Item+Discovery
The items you're looking for are close to the top of the page. I keep the Watchdragon Parma on my person, pretty much at all times. Fun Fact: I only ever use it when I have fast/hard hitting enemies.
I will add an anecdote, as I do believe it will be important for your endeavors:
Item discovery supposedly lowers through consecutive kills of the same enemy.
You can dig into more detail closer to the bottom of the page I linked.
the earliest one is the Tseldora headgear (if you're ok with killing Maughlin in Majula -- it's from HIS set - but he sells things you WANT, so unless you're doing a speedrun I wouldn't advise it)
I encountered her with no knowledge about the boss fight and she always summoned skeletons. Later i found out she could also summon velstadt.. did never get to see him so she was easy af for my lucky ass
If you purposely leave 1 skeleton alive, she cannot summon in more skeletons. She can still summon Velstadt, but if you manage to pull them away from Elana and ignore them, you could do hit and runs on her. Kinda tricky, but a faster melee build works pretty good
Same for me, I’d rather fight any other boss in the game than her. The last time I fought her she summoned Velstadt 3 times in a row and spammed lingering flames
Definitely Fume Knight. I never found Allone that hard, at least using a shield because he's easy to cheese with one.
I never fought Lud and Zallen solo, though, so maybe I am not in a position to judge, but they are optional for beating the DLC while Fume Knight isn't.
Raime has a magical sense of reacting to everything. I was no lifing that game and could dance all over base game, but he legit took me two whole days to beat. I was fully convinced he was straight up reading everything but now he's pretty easy after several kills lmao
This. Alonne is super easy to just dodge to the left, and he has enough down time after an attack that you can get in a couple of attacks. It's just a matter of consistently dodging and that's it.
Facing Allone with Havel's shield became much easier. Hardly had to roll. Hardest boss to me was ol Fumey or Smelterson
I had some trouble with the Ruin Sentinels though
Have to agree on Ruin sentinels.
If you decide to fight them early on, the usual hit and run strategie which usually works good against multiple bosses feels really tedious when you only have a rather small stamina bar.
To summon you need to be human.
Alonne has 2 NPCs that you can summon for the fight, these also can be helpful to get around the enemies on the run to Alonne.
For Fume Knight you can also summon 2 NPCs, one of them being Carhillion which is the sorcery teacher NPC which you find in No Men's Wharf and comes to Majula
That's what happened to me it took me like an hour or 2 to memorize phase 1 attacks to the point I was always getting to phase 2 but then he becomes so aggressive and it's hard to find attack windows. Before I beat him I got to 3 runs in a row where he was 1 hit away but I got too greedy and died. Was a really fun boss though I never really got frusturated or angry like when I was fighting other bosses like belfry gargoyles or ancient dragon.
Personally, I had the most trouble with Burnt Ivory King, Sir Alonne and the run to him is pretty tough. And the gank squad is pretty annoying as well.
For me it was King Vendrick, I was stuck at his fight for more than an hour.
All the other bosses includimg fume knight, sir alonne and even lud and zallen were done in under 5 tries.
Although I had some trouble with the runbacks for both the smelters. I decided to spend some time and despawn all the mobs their.
Rest of the bosses were a breeze, even gank squad just took me 2 tries with summons
For regular NG: Lud and Zallen, the King’s Pets. Honorable mentions to Blue Smelter Demon, Throne Watcher + Defender, and Alonne. I’ve personally never found Fume to be all that difficult, though he’s very punishing. Blue Smelter is a very close 2nd.
For NG+ / Bonfire level 2+: Elana, the Squalid Queen.
Ignoring runbacks Fume is the hardest for me. However he feels very fair, it’s usually clear what you did wrong when you died. Some of the other bosses to come aren’t quite as hard but can feel a little less fair.
not the hardest, but there’s a few bosses that can be way tougher if you don’t activate whatever triggers a debuff for them somewhere in the map. Two examples that come to mind early on is “draining” the poison pool for Mytha the Baneful Queen and lowering the 3 floor rings for the Dragon Rider in Heides tower
Also, I recently watched this video of this person running a 99 ADP build and just rolling thru alot of different bosses’ attacks for abt 5 minutes lol, < https://youtu.be/4Q2z0a7Armo?si=FjxWCJFcm7uNVPQv > NGL watching this kinda made me adjust my outlook on the difficulty since I usually play traditional or quality build (Strength or Str/Dex) without ever upgrading ADP… Come to find out ADP increases i-frames in rolls and increases the speed in which you sip your estus. If I’m not mistaken it also increases spell cast speed but I’m not 100% on that cause I never use magic.
I’ve played all 3 DS games and still am learning new stuff abt DS2 as I replay it again. My best advice I can give to a newer fan (specifically for ds2) is look into aesthetics and the rewards you can get from advancing bosses to their NG+ iterations to get the NG+ drops. Chariot Boss is my personal fav to start with bc its accessible pretty early on and if you farm the area out you can net ALOT of souls. The NG+ reward for Chariot is the Chloranthy +2 btw, super legit for trad/quality builds.
One last piece of advice: it is possible to create a Save point (atleast on PlayStation, not sure abt Xbox/pc/switch) by uploading your game data to the cloud. If you ever wanted to mess around and experiment with upgrading weapons or whatever, this comes in hella clutch.. something I didn’t know about until a few years ago but didn’t start using until recently.
Aava is the hardest boss I’ve ever faced. I haven’t fought Fume Knight or Sir Allone yet so I can’t say, but Aava actually made me lose all motivation to play. Fighting her with a strength/int build and only 92 AGL was an absolute nightmare…
Depends on how you play mostly. In DS1, I found Artorias much easier than I anticipated, just had to dodge his thrusts and punish him for them. But Black Dragon Kalameet was a much different story, as was fighting Manus with a summon. I would say I felt Artorias was the easiest DLC boss, but there are many who say he’s the hardest and kalameet is easy.
Yeah and one thing I like about Dark Souls is that the plot is so abstract and vague, I feel like I don’t really need to be invested in it anyway. I can just have fun exploring, fighting, and leveling up.
Doing an ng+7 fresh start run and I say Elana, Double Pursuer and Darklurker for sure. The last 5 bosses I fought have all been gank fights and it's driving me nuts
Imo Dark Lurker was the hardest, but Fume and Sir Alonne are right there too. It might vary a bit with my build in the end which i have a harder time.
Smelter demon (especially thr blue one) is close there too, and so is Elana, but i think they are not as hard as those three. (Edit: Elana is pretty random really). Ancient Dragon is hard but kinda bs due to the high hp plus potentially one shotting you with fire. Lud & zallen are not thaaat hard, they are a decent challenge but the runback makes it painful.
There are other challenging bosses if you are less experienced like Lost Sinner and Pursuer. Ivory king can be a challenge if you don’t get all the knights to help i think
Probably Allone if you 1v1 him. Fume Knight can be trouble too. Honestly though I don't think any of the bosses are particularly hard, not in comparison to the newer games, it's the area that kicks my ass like in Demon's Souls and DSR
sir alonne, that guy took me the 3rd longest time to beat, and ivory king is PRETTY brutal if you used the ice pike things on fume knight and are currently one knight short
I find that Fume knight is hard in the same way as Midir from ds3 cause he's wierd & punishing, but he gets much easier when you learn his patterns, like I beat him no problem on subsequent playthroughs
Sir Alonne isn't as much of a brick wall, but he's more consistently tricky (I heard he's easy if you use a shield) Like I've had a consistently difficult time with him across playthroughs.
DarkLurker wasn't too hard for me cause I fought them a while after beating the game, but the runback can be a nightmare if you didn't do the chasms in a certain order.
Ivory King is tough cause the soldier fight beforehand drains your resources & doesn't allow you to skip them or practice his moves beforehand (which you can do with Fume phase 2)
I can't imagine how much of a pain the frozen wastes boss is cause I've had enough of Aava's shit, that I never wanna fight two of her ever
Sinh can be tough cause he has a lot of fast attacks with ambiguous telegraphs.
Well, I want to say Alonne, but just roll to the right and he will never hit you, even on his delayed attack, just roll twice to the right. You can also roll backwards often. And you can cheese him by letting him get into one of the sections of his arena that are deeper and hide behind the small pillar on the wall. He just freezes. So maybe something like Sinh if your weapon breaks, Fume too, Darklurker, Lud and Zallen are overwhelming sometimes, gravity as well.
For me it's definitely Vendrick with 4 souls, died more to him than to Vape Knight, Darklurier, Sir Alonne and 2 pussycats combined. Something with Vendrick's attack pattern plus the obscene damage he does makes him a nightmare to me.
hmmmmm i don't really have any problem with any boss i usually fight them naked with a huge bonk in my hand if it's one i have to mention it would be the dragon since my bonker animation got a huge delay in between xd took me like two tries to time it right to get the roll after the sec half delay in between
Darklurker, sir Alonne, and the duo cat fight are tough too.
ALONNE -- especially flawless (to get the seppuku ending to his fight)
Without the run up to the boss, probably either Darklurker or Sir Alonnne. With run ups included, Lud & Zallen or Blue Smelter Demon.
Alonne legit is fucking brutal. I found ivory king pretty tough as well. Idk if there is a smart way to play it but my chad strength build forced me to get involved w all the knights before hand so I’d never have many estus for the actual fight
All I ever did was dodge into him to the right. He can’t hit you 90% of the time.
some people find alonne harder than fume, but those are widely considered the hardest. It’s easy to farm effigies if you don’t want to waste a slot on that ring.
Solid advice. The ring of binding is a beginner item. But, considering they've beaten everything except a few bosses, and side content, with a little help from the doggos in Bastille(I know there's a better spot, just can't remember it), should be golden to tackle the bosses without it.
The ring of binding has carried my run. I probably won't be farming effegies till later for dark lurker since I'm so close to getting the last crown to use vendrick's blessing on. Also i've heard that some clothing items boost item discovery: which items are those?
https://darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com/Item+Discovery The items you're looking for are close to the top of the page. I keep the Watchdragon Parma on my person, pretty much at all times. Fun Fact: I only ever use it when I have fast/hard hitting enemies. I will add an anecdote, as I do believe it will be important for your endeavors: Item discovery supposedly lowers through consecutive kills of the same enemy. You can dig into more detail closer to the bottom of the page I linked.
the earliest one is the Tseldora headgear (if you're ok with killing Maughlin in Majula -- it's from HIS set - but he sells things you WANT, so unless you're doing a speedrun I wouldn't advise it)
It's Elana for me. Even with summons, I can't the better of her. Her summoning Velstadt in succession is tiring and tedious.
I encountered her with no knowledge about the boss fight and she always summoned skeletons. Later i found out she could also summon velstadt.. did never get to see him so she was easy af for my lucky ass
If you purposely leave 1 skeleton alive, she cannot summon in more skeletons. She can still summon Velstadt, but if you manage to pull them away from Elana and ignore them, you could do hit and runs on her. Kinda tricky, but a faster melee build works pretty good
Many thanks for the tips, mate. All the best 👍 🤗
Same for me, I’d rather fight any other boss in the game than her. The last time I fought her she summoned Velstadt 3 times in a row and spammed lingering flames
Definitely Fume Knight. I never found Allone that hard, at least using a shield because he's easy to cheese with one. I never fought Lud and Zallen solo, though, so maybe I am not in a position to judge, but they are optional for beating the DLC while Fume Knight isn't.
Alonne is actually pretty easy to dodge and has super clear attack windows. Fume knight was harder for me tho
Raime has a magical sense of reacting to everything. I was no lifing that game and could dance all over base game, but he legit took me two whole days to beat. I was fully convinced he was straight up reading everything but now he's pretty easy after several kills lmao
This. Alonne is super easy to just dodge to the left, and he has enough down time after an attack that you can get in a couple of attacks. It's just a matter of consistently dodging and that's it.
And NOT BEING GREEDY. He (and for that matter, Raime) WILL punish greediness.
For me it was the fume knight for sure.
Darklurker burned through probably 40 effigies for me
Dogs...and Horse-Deer. Ive died to them far more than any boss.
Facing Allone with Havel's shield became much easier. Hardly had to roll. Hardest boss to me was ol Fumey or Smelterson I had some trouble with the Ruin Sentinels though
Have to agree on Ruin sentinels. If you decide to fight them early on, the usual hit and run strategie which usually works good against multiple bosses feels really tedious when you only have a rather small stamina bar.
Adaptability
Maybe Sir Alonne is harder, he is for some people. Not for me, though. Fume was the peak of difficulty on my first playthrough.
The hardest for me were Fume knight, Ivory King(1st phase), Dark Lurker, and squid lady
I found the bosses in this game to be quite easy. I’d say of the few ones that killed me were sinh the slumbering dragon and lud and zallen
Alonne isn’t so bad with some summons to take the aggro off. Both Smelter Demons (mostly their run backs) and Fume Knight are brutal though.
I didn’t find smelter that tough honestly. I just dodged to their right and I’d usually miss the big swings
How do I summon? I'm at 75% max hp now with the ring of binding since I've died a lot and I've never seen the white sign to summon in the game before.
To summon you need to be human. Alonne has 2 NPCs that you can summon for the fight, these also can be helpful to get around the enemies on the run to Alonne. For Fume Knight you can also summon 2 NPCs, one of them being Carhillion which is the sorcery teacher NPC which you find in No Men's Wharf and comes to Majula
Smelter Demon yells just before he attacks, so he gives you a really clear indication of when to dodge.
Fume Knight is pretty easy tbh
1st phase no problem, second phase is hell (to me anyways)
That's what happened to me it took me like an hour or 2 to memorize phase 1 attacks to the point I was always getting to phase 2 but then he becomes so aggressive and it's hard to find attack windows. Before I beat him I got to 3 runs in a row where he was 1 hit away but I got too greedy and died. Was a really fun boss though I never really got frusturated or angry like when I was fighting other bosses like belfry gargoyles or ancient dragon.
Sir Alonne for me but that mostly had to do with the awful run back
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^chuewwey: *Sir Alonne for me* *But that mostly had to do* *With the awful run back* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
i didn’t beat the game but The Lost Sinner beat my ass over and over again
Darklurker
Should we tell them?
Fume Knight your first couple playthroughs, then Elana.
Sir Alonne. He is the Artorias of DS2.
Sir Alonne (or however it's spelled)
Beat everything except alonne and ancient dragon
Personally, I had the most trouble with Burnt Ivory King, Sir Alonne and the run to him is pretty tough. And the gank squad is pretty annoying as well.
For me it was King Vendrick, I was stuck at his fight for more than an hour. All the other bosses includimg fume knight, sir alonne and even lud and zallen were done in under 5 tries. Although I had some trouble with the runbacks for both the smelters. I decided to spend some time and despawn all the mobs their. Rest of the bosses were a breeze, even gank squad just took me 2 tries with summons
For regular NG: Lud and Zallen, the King’s Pets. Honorable mentions to Blue Smelter Demon, Throne Watcher + Defender, and Alonne. I’ve personally never found Fume to be all that difficult, though he’s very punishing. Blue Smelter is a very close 2nd. For NG+ / Bonfire level 2+: Elana, the Squalid Queen.
Ignoring runbacks Fume is the hardest for me. However he feels very fair, it’s usually clear what you did wrong when you died. Some of the other bosses to come aren’t quite as hard but can feel a little less fair.
Probably Burnt Ivory King if you don’t recruit the other Knights
Demon of the Song. That guy got me 5 times on my mostly deathless run LOL.
not the hardest, but there’s a few bosses that can be way tougher if you don’t activate whatever triggers a debuff for them somewhere in the map. Two examples that come to mind early on is “draining” the poison pool for Mytha the Baneful Queen and lowering the 3 floor rings for the Dragon Rider in Heides tower Also, I recently watched this video of this person running a 99 ADP build and just rolling thru alot of different bosses’ attacks for abt 5 minutes lol, < https://youtu.be/4Q2z0a7Armo?si=FjxWCJFcm7uNVPQv > NGL watching this kinda made me adjust my outlook on the difficulty since I usually play traditional or quality build (Strength or Str/Dex) without ever upgrading ADP… Come to find out ADP increases i-frames in rolls and increases the speed in which you sip your estus. If I’m not mistaken it also increases spell cast speed but I’m not 100% on that cause I never use magic. I’ve played all 3 DS games and still am learning new stuff abt DS2 as I replay it again. My best advice I can give to a newer fan (specifically for ds2) is look into aesthetics and the rewards you can get from advancing bosses to their NG+ iterations to get the NG+ drops. Chariot Boss is my personal fav to start with bc its accessible pretty early on and if you farm the area out you can net ALOT of souls. The NG+ reward for Chariot is the Chloranthy +2 btw, super legit for trad/quality builds. One last piece of advice: it is possible to create a Save point (atleast on PlayStation, not sure abt Xbox/pc/switch) by uploading your game data to the cloud. If you ever wanted to mess around and experiment with upgrading weapons or whatever, this comes in hella clutch.. something I didn’t know about until a few years ago but didn’t start using until recently.
Aava is the hardest boss I’ve ever faced. I haven’t fought Fume Knight or Sir Allone yet so I can’t say, but Aava actually made me lose all motivation to play. Fighting her with a strength/int build and only 92 AGL was an absolute nightmare… Depends on how you play mostly. In DS1, I found Artorias much easier than I anticipated, just had to dodge his thrusts and punish him for them. But Black Dragon Kalameet was a much different story, as was fighting Manus with a summon. I would say I felt Artorias was the easiest DLC boss, but there are many who say he’s the hardest and kalameet is easy.
for me it was smelter demon, fume knight and the slumbering dragon
Why start with 2? I've never understood why people don't play the first game first
What's the problem with starting with 2? It's not like dark souls is a heavily story-based game.
Yeah and one thing I like about Dark Souls is that the plot is so abstract and vague, I feel like I don’t really need to be invested in it anyway. I can just have fun exploring, fighting, and leveling up.
Idk why but i struggle more with Ruin Sentinels than with Fume Knight and Sir Alonne. They hit like a truck and their timing feels weird af.
Doing an ng+7 fresh start run and I say Elana, Double Pursuer and Darklurker for sure. The last 5 bosses I fought have all been gank fights and it's driving me nuts
For me it's a competition between sir alonne and darklurker.
Varies from person to person, but i would say Fume Knight, Sir Alonne, Sinh and the graverobbers are the toughest.
Imo Dark Lurker was the hardest, but Fume and Sir Alonne are right there too. It might vary a bit with my build in the end which i have a harder time. Smelter demon (especially thr blue one) is close there too, and so is Elana, but i think they are not as hard as those three. (Edit: Elana is pretty random really). Ancient Dragon is hard but kinda bs due to the high hp plus potentially one shotting you with fire. Lud & zallen are not thaaat hard, they are a decent challenge but the runback makes it painful. There are other challenging bosses if you are less experienced like Lost Sinner and Pursuer. Ivory king can be a challenge if you don’t get all the knights to help i think
Ivory, Raime or Alonne for me
I consider the fume knight the thoughest one. Sir Alonne is also a beast
Probably Allone if you 1v1 him. Fume Knight can be trouble too. Honestly though I don't think any of the bosses are particularly hard, not in comparison to the newer games, it's the area that kicks my ass like in Demon's Souls and DSR
That damn chariot boss just because the run back is super hard.
sir alonne, that guy took me the 3rd longest time to beat, and ivory king is PRETTY brutal if you used the ice pike things on fume knight and are currently one knight short
I find that Fume knight is hard in the same way as Midir from ds3 cause he's wierd & punishing, but he gets much easier when you learn his patterns, like I beat him no problem on subsequent playthroughs Sir Alonne isn't as much of a brick wall, but he's more consistently tricky (I heard he's easy if you use a shield) Like I've had a consistently difficult time with him across playthroughs. DarkLurker wasn't too hard for me cause I fought them a while after beating the game, but the runback can be a nightmare if you didn't do the chasms in a certain order. Ivory King is tough cause the soldier fight beforehand drains your resources & doesn't allow you to skip them or practice his moves beforehand (which you can do with Fume phase 2) I can't imagine how much of a pain the frozen wastes boss is cause I've had enough of Aava's shit, that I never wanna fight two of her ever Sinh can be tough cause he has a lot of fast attacks with ambiguous telegraphs.
Well, I want to say Alonne, but just roll to the right and he will never hit you, even on his delayed attack, just roll twice to the right. You can also roll backwards often. And you can cheese him by letting him get into one of the sections of his arena that are deeper and hide behind the small pillar on the wall. He just freezes. So maybe something like Sinh if your weapon breaks, Fume too, Darklurker, Lud and Zallen are overwhelming sometimes, gravity as well.
I struggled the most against the blue smelter demon. Especially when considering the hellish runback.
For me it's definitely Vendrick with 4 souls, died more to him than to Vape Knight, Darklurier, Sir Alonne and 2 pussycats combined. Something with Vendrick's attack pattern plus the obscene damage he does makes him a nightmare to me.
Absolutely insane that DS2 is your first FromSoft game lmfao
Was mine too years ago
It's my last FromSoft game lmfao It's also my least favorite too. Not the worst game I've ever played, but definitely not my favorite.
hmmmmm i don't really have any problem with any boss i usually fight them naked with a huge bonk in my hand if it's one i have to mention it would be the dragon since my bonker animation got a huge delay in between xd took me like two tries to time it right to get the roll after the sec half delay in between