how's it going everybody welcome back to the channel where we are once again in Dark Souls a few weeks ago I put out a video titled optimize the damage and dark souls and there was some rightful criticisms about how maybe optimize wasn't the best word to use in that situation for example I didn't use the red tearstone ring no power within and a couple of other things that probably could have been improved which is the point of this video we're going to tackle Dark Souls once again this time with even more math and truly see what an optimized DPS build can do against some of the later game bosses so let's get into it the first step in our build of course is to pick a starting class and there's really only one starting class that we can use in this run and that is the pyromancer obviously we're going to need a pyromancy flame and we cannot obtain one without starting as the pyromancer without killing at least one boss because we are picking the pyromancer there's really not a whole lot that we can do in terms of optimization in the Undead Asylum so we just take our services on throughout the Asylum kill the Asylum Demon and head to Lord ran where we're going to start our early game farming the first step in our journey is to pick up some Humanity by the well and then head on to the undead Parish where I have to start farming for the Black Knight sword and when I say farming I mean if we don't get it first time we have to restart redo it all over again fortunately for me I do get a drop first try using our starting gift of the master key we make our way down to the Valley of the Drakes to pick up the red tearstone ring and over to Blight Town as well to pick up power within from the chaos demon because we are using a weapon that requires Twinkling Titanite I also went around and scoured the areas for various different Twinkling Titanite drops from Crystal lizards and I decided that we are going to go farm in the Ash Lake where the clams have a pretty good chance of dropping Twinkling Titanite upon death as we make our set back up the great hollow let's talk about what we're going to Define as optimized in this run the first Formula that we need to understand is how damage is calculated in the game I have on screen a couple of different equations that are based on the attack of your character versus the enemy or boss's defense these have been derived over the years these are the ones that are available on the Dark Souls Wiki and from what I can tell are the most accurate and generally result in correct damage within a couple of points we don't really need to get into too much detail on exactly what these are but just know that you can find these if you are curious about looking up in how much damage you'll do to an enemy based on a specific attack important to note as well that damage Buffs such as power within at 1.4 multiply the resulting damage after this calculation and do not multiply your attack directly which is what we'll talk about next so for attack there are three different kind of conditions that we can discuss uninfused weapons infused weapons and uninfused weapons that can receive a buff for this run there's really only going to be a couple of times that we're using uninfused weapons these are generally weapons that are upgraded using Twinkling Titanite or demon titanite there are a couple exceptions of weapons that can be buffed but the Black Knight sword which is what we picked up is an example of of these weapons infused weapons are anything in the game that has innate Elemental damage either magic fire or lightning or any weapon that you could Ascend with special Embers at various blacksmiths throughout the world and finally uninfused weapons that can receive Buffs are going to be the strongest of the bunch generally speaking I'll throw a couple of graphs up on screen here but before we do so the one item in the formula that is important an to note is the motion value these are sets of values that are hidden from the player in game that multiply the attack rting of your weapon by a certain value generally speaking a one-handed light attack has a motion value of 100 meaning that the attack rating will be equal to your attack in the damage formula as previously shown whereas a two-handed light attack R1 or right trigger whatever controller you're using have motion values of 120 meaning that your attack rating is multiplied by 1.2 before damage is calculated in addition to this the attack buff that I'm showing on screen is something along the lines of the red tearstone ring or the dragon torso stone that multiply your actual attack by a set value there is one thing to note as well for this run and that is I am not using the dragon torso Stone while it does provide an extra attack buff keeping the buff active throughout the entire length of the fight especially for some of the late game fights that are going to take me more than 5 to 10 seconds is effectively impossible given that it uses stamina and we're going to need to join another Covenant as well with more powerful effects in reality you could think about it like this if we do use the dragon torso Stone we are going to get a higher initial damage on our first hit but followup hits from our weapons are generally going to be lower than otherwise or they're going to be equal to if we did not use the dragon torso Stone in simpler terms to make sense of these values I'll throw a couple of graphs on screen as mentioned so we can explore exactly what this means and why infused weapons are generally worse than uninfused weapons plus weapon Buffs for attack speed thankfully there are more talented people than I that have developed a program called DS Animation studio if you're interested in doing anything similar to this I would be sure to check it out after you're done watching this video but what they have done is they have exported all of the animation files into a program that you can simulate at the touch of a button and what we can do is we can derive the total number of frames used for each attack based on the weapon type including any special weapons that have altered or unique move sets in order to determine the quickness of every attack I went ahead and calculated the total number of frames for four different types of attack combinations those being the one-handed and two-and light attack Combos and heavy attack combos I know there are altered combos that can chain but given the amount of data I was scraping through and the formulas that I was writing I figured that this was probably the best guess as to the ranking of all the weapons in terms of attack speed so where does that lead us well what we have to do is we have to explore the maximum weapon upgrade level based on every single available infusion type all of the available damage Buffs and the various different classifications of enemies such as chaos demons like quag or the camper demon which have special weapon modifiers on a couple that being the occult or Black Knight weapons that do a little bit of extra damage those type of enemies and then we compare the total possible DPS output of every single combination in the entire game based on the weapon that we are using and the boss that we are facing in essence the formula will look like this in order to determine DPS DPS equals damage of the first hit plus damage of the second hit if present plus damage of hits three four five and six if present divided by the total combo length there are a variety of weapons typically the heavier weapons that don't have a true combo in using certain type of attacks usually an one-handed R1 attack and then there are a variety of weapons that have multiple hits on the second follow-up attack the painting Guardian Sword for example the second R2 actually does three different hits if you can connect them all it's also important to note that in this formula we do have to take in enemy resistances between physical types of damage as not all weapons do the same you probably already know that but there are standard thrust strike and slash types of physical damage and then of course Elemental damage being magic fire and lightning and some weapons actually do different types of damage depending on if you are one-h handing two-handing using the light attack or the heavy attack so in essence we have to take a look at every single weapon available to us at the specific point in the game we have to calculate the attack rating of all of those weapons being infused or uninfused we have to take a look at the available weapon Buffs that we can use if we are using a weapon that can be buffed we have to take a look at any special damage modifiers such as Black Knight weapons versus demons or a couple of different enemies that are weak to Ault and then we have to compare all of those things divided by the total combo length of the attack chain that we're using and we look at that versus every single other possible weapon combination available to us at that stage in the game now obviously that seems like a lot of data and trust me it is a lot of data I spent a good amount of time writing a spreadsheet to determine the total possible DPS of every weapon but once you go through the process a couple times you'll notice that a couple of different weapons tend to stand out Above the Rest due to the relative quickness of their attacks especially when you are using a weapon buff which we will do for the majority of the playthrough for the camper demon you'll also notice that I am cursed and I'm just getting cursed in this run I will be cursed with most of the play through as this really helps you stay in hyper mode as power within drains a percentage of your total available Max HP and when you're cursed when it is at you have 50% of your total Max HP so power within actually drains you a little bit slower either way thanks to all the grinding that we did at the start of the game we are at 25 strength and 18 dexterity alongside 11 Faith as I know we're going to be building towards a run that's going to make heavy use of Dark Moon blade and for the CER demon I'll throw some numbers up on screen so you can kind of see what the calculation is in terms of how we're going to be calculating the total DPS of the weapon that we are using for said fight now obviously in this fight our total available DPS is roughly 937 obviously we do more damage than that in one swing but that is is mostly owing to the fact that the Black Knight sword does not swing in under a second so the total actual damage output is going to be a little bit higher than the total available DPS this is one of the few fights where that matters as the remainder of the fights outside of the Bell Gargoyles are going to follow a very different path being that we're going to be able to use our weapon more than one time as this is one of our two available one shots in the entire game now they we're able to take down the camper demon this opens up the depths for us so we go ahead and get the Large Ember make our way all the way over to New Londo kill ingward and pick up the very large Ember as well and our next step is we're going to go head up and face off against the Bell Gargoyles I almost forgot that we also picked up the Dark Moon Seance ring from the catacombs before facing off against the camper demon actually but I figured I'd throw it in right now and for the Gargoyles it's a very similar fight to the camper demon where we're able to One-Shot them with a Black Knight sword again we don't actually have any levels in either strength or dexterity so the raw damage output of our Black Knight sword stays the same and I should mention this is the only fight in the game outside of the Asylum Demon which of course in the Asylum we're not really able to take on any differing types of optimization for DPS that we are not using the actual highest theoretical DPS weapon for this fight specifically reason being is that I knew with a plus five Black Knight sword and Hyper mode that we're going to be able to onshot the Gargoyles either way so I figured there really was no point in doing a whole blot of running around picking up upgrade materials and what have you why not just go ahead and oneshot them because I think in terms of optimization that is the most sensible choice for this fight once the Bell Gargoyles are down our next stop is to go back down to Bight town and face off against quac just a brief interstitial here this is actually fight I had to redo because I had a number wrong for the Black Knight sword in terms of how quickly it attacked I was for whatever reason using the regular long sword move set as opposed to the great sword because I totally forgot that the Black Knight sword was actually a great sword and not just a regular straight sword just pointing this out because I I am touting this as an optimized DPS route but thanks to the very large quantity of numbers various calculations that we have to do that it is certainly possible that there is going to be a mistake or two in terms of Maximum possible DPS but I'm pretty sure that this is relatively close to the tippy top of the mountain in terms of DPS output against every enemy based on our stat spread but if you disagree feel free to leave a comment below because comments are of course good for the YouTube algorithm and engagement boosting is always a fun little thing to to do with quog down our next step is to go through S Fortress and face off against the Iron Golem before doing so however we got to figure out which weapon we're going to use against the big old hunka armor I was thinking that it was probably going to be a quick strike weapon such as a hammer but in a rather ironic twist of fate it's actually the starting weapon for the pyromancy class that has our weapon of choice yes indeed the hand ax is the weapon that is going to be able to produce the highest total DPS against the Iron Golem for this stage in the game the reason for this is it is one a very quick weapon it is by far the quickest weapon in the axe subass of weapon category and it does regular standard damage as opposed to having an alternate damage type such as strike slash or thrust so not that the Iron Golem is a relatively difficult fight to begin with but thanks to the gold Pine resin that we were able to pick up earlier in Undead ber the hand ax and and Hyper mode we're able to make quick work of the Iron Golem rocking a DPS just shy of 750 which is pretty impressive for this stage in the game so if you know what's coming next you know what's coming next and the Iron Golem was one of the biggest Gatekeepers in this run beating him allows us to go to an Orlando and go to the painted world where we can finally start farming our Souvenirs of we need 80 of these bad boys to max out our covenant rank we also are able to pick up a sweet Talisman the best Talisman in the game in terms of total magic adjust and thanks to all the levels we're able to get from grinding those crows we're also able to really juice our stats up for our next fight our next boss is orstein and Smo and they are another gatekeeper which will allow us to ultimately get the crystal Ember from the archives but before we do so if you had to pick a weapon before coming into this video as to what will have the highest total DPS potential output in the game what would you pick coming into it I thought it was going to be the painting Guardian Sword obviously this is a very strong weapon and is often touted as one of the highest DPS weapons in the entire game not untrue looking at the numbers but actually it's a weapon that I intentionally opusc picking up back in s for Fortress and this is ricard's Rapier this Rapier is incredibly strong for one big reason in the R2 R2 combo or the heavy attack heavy attack combo in two-handed it does a total of six hits of damage and they all come out in very quick succession this is one of two weapons in the entire game that does a total of six hits on a combo attack the other being the jagged ghost blade but the rap here itself self is able to be buffed with various weapon Buffs it can also be infused but again we talked about why that's a bad choice and with our stat spread at this stage in the game against orn scen andm our DPS climbs to incredible levels we weren't even over a th000 versus the Iron Golem and while obviously now I have one of if not the entire strongest weapon Buffs in the entire game with dark moon blade we're able to easily Crest just below 1,500 against orstein and with SM having much less defense than orstein even in his second phase or able to almost hit 1,900 at this stage in the game which is honestly incredible now that we take down or andm we get the Lord vessel we're able to place it at the altar and go to the Duke's archives where we pick up one of the last remaining upgrades that we can get in terms of increase in our DPS s and that is the crystal ember in the Duke's archives we go over take it to the giant blacksmith and upgrade both our hand ax and our ricard's Rapier to plus4 and a bit of another ironic twist we go on and face SE and the reason I say it's ironic is because despite me touting ricard's rap here as one of the best weapons we actually switch back to the hand X for this fight SE has colossal magic defense and due to the six- hit combo that ricard's Rapier does it has quite a bit lower physical damage output when compared to the hand axe and the Hand ax again is a very quick weapon so while we still go ahead and use dark moon blade it is the physical damage component of the weapon that is really the controlling factor in terms of calculating DPS for this fight we're still over a th000 with the hand ax which is still really good and this was one of the two fights in the game that I actually died at the same time as the boss I thought that se had a longer death animation than was going to allow me to get the victory achieve screen but we're able to get it just in time and that is our first of the four Lord Souls acquired next we're going to go head down to the catacombs or at least that was my original plan until I thought about it and I said you know what there is a tight night slam that we can get for the DLC and owing to the fact that Crystal weapons are rather frail but their durability can be restored if you upgrade them a level which is why I'm at plus4 right now I figured let's go ahead and stop off at the stray demon back at the Undead Asylum unfortunately while I do get the kill and rather easily I am unable to get my drink of Estus before I also die and thanks to the slab itself spawning as a drop instead of going directly into your inventory we're unable to come back here and pick it up so that is one of the two guaranteed Titanite slabs in the game that we missed but we continue on our original intent and we head down to the catacombs to go ahead and face off against pin wheel pin wheel obviously a bit of a joke of a boss super easy he actually goes down to the first R2 of our combo but I like to also use that followup just to see what the number can climb to against pin wheel it's just a little ahead of 4,000 which more or less coincides with the DPS of ricar Rapier having a DPS of just a little bit over 2,000 I haven't really pointed it before but if you do notice that in this fight it is very easy to see the total DPS is roughly half of pin wheel or the damage that we do to pin wheel rather which if nothing else tells me that my numbers are generally correct and again I kind of mentioned it towards the beginning of this video but the damage calculation formulas are not 100% accurate but they do give a pretty good idea as you can definitely see from this fight and the real reason that we're actually coming down this way is we want to pick up the Sanctus from Leroy in the Tomb of the Giants this is is one of the last available upgrades that we can get for our run and if we hold this in our off hand and are using the curse status as well as the ring that you get from dusk which haves your HP and gives you extra magic castings this will actually out heal the total we'll call it damage penalty from Power Within at this low level of vigor I also went ahead and picked up the fog ring for the Neato fight in order to avoid AG grewing some of the skeletons and for needo we're sticking with ricard's Rapier which has a DPS output of a little bit less than 1600 Neo is a relatively easy boss but again the fog ring really helps to cut down on some of the skeletons that tried to attack you tried this a few times without it and it was getting really frustrated so I went back traded one of the skull lanterns I had and got that from the Asylum which made this fight a whole lot easier neita goes down relatively quickly and now let's go on and start a Boss Rush fig our next step was to go and face Sith so that we could do the Four Kings right after and I haven't really mentioned it before but even though this weapon is very good in terms of total DPS that being the ricard's Rapier it has a real glaring issue that is highlighted in the sift fight and then is the hitbox you know thrusting swords are not a personal favor to mine I don't really like using them unless they are heavy thrusting swords or colossal thrusting swords or whatever the weapon class is called in Elden ring because they have relatively poor hit boxes it seems SI for example you really want to use some overhead attacks or you want to use some sweeping attacks to hit the legs of C uh but if we're using the thrusting attacks we have a tendency to miss even when we're right underneath as the hit box does not extend down outside of cif's legs either way we get some pretty decent RNG in terms of the attacks that I find difficult to dodge and when we're rocking a DPS still very high up above 1,800 for this fight it is a relatively quick fight even despite the numerous times that we ended up whiffing on our attacks with the Covenant of artorius in a hand we go down to take on the Four Kings this fight is pretty RNG and we have to make sure that at least for one of the Kings we actually hit a R2 by itself without the followup this will allow us to get the second which is lightning quick and does four total hits of damage and again thanks to the magic buff that we use just really crime climbs into the crazy total damage output we don't actually hit that on the first king we actually whiff our first R2 kill him with the second and then for the second of the four king Rays we are able to indeed land that final crushing blow with the four hit combo while he's still in his death animation and we get the Four Kings down while only seeing two of them appear in the abyss as the rape here that we're using for a lot of these fights was getting pretty low on durability I figured it was high time that we book it over to the DLC to unlock the other guaranteed slab in camitz Arena so we're here to face off against the sanctuary Guardian it is actually back to the hand ax however I got a similar situation with SE where the sanctuary Guardian has really high magic defense so the actual reduced damage from the Raper itself compared to the hand ax makes it a worse option in this case we're able to make some tight Dodges and the sanctuary Guardian goes down we even got to stagger towards the end and it's just kind of funny just looking back at some of these these numbers in these fights exactly how much damage we're able to do with with a starting class weapon with the slab open to us we could go and get it ever I decided to go back down to the demon runes to make use of our plus4 Crystal rap here instead I wanted to use all the durability just in case there were any other situations where we could not further upgrade to restore the durability so ceaseless discharge it was we have a DPS just under 1700 and again this really shows how strong this weapon can be in optimal situations dealing his entire health bar in Just Two attacks the R2 and then the follow-up R2 with seeless out of our way we go and face off against the demon fire Sage who Gates another of the Lord's Soul locations being the beted of chaos and my concerns about weapon durability were founded in this fight as our rape here we actually got the weapon at risk warning about halfway through the fight while I could restart I actually just went ahead and soldiered on and it's kind of funny I looked back at the footage we actually only do about 300 less damage in total on our second followup that eventually kills the demon fire Sage which I think really speaks to just how powerful both Dark Moon blade is and how powerful weapons with multiple hit combos that can be buffed are it's time for everybody's favorite night in the series night or torus and we're actually back to the handex again once again this is going to be a consistent theme for all the bosses in the DLC where their magic defense is just way higher than any of the base game enemies outside of a very select few so again back to the hand ax it is still rocking a DPS over a th000 and with some good RNG and some cooperation from artorius this turns it into a very quick fight I wanted to save the big three bosses for last being cam Manis and Gwyn so instead we go ahead and grab the titanite slab from calam Arena upgrade our ricar Rapier to plus five Crystal and head back down to the demon ruines to face off against the ctip demon you the first time I fought this guy was very difficult he tended to do that lunge attack with his arm over and over and over again and he still does that nowadays however I find that attack to be very easy to die and we're able to get the ctiy demon first time with rocking a DPS of just under 2,000 which is near the top of what we've seen so far in this [Applause] run after the centipede demon the BET of chaos is the BET of chaos there's really no point in optimizing it so I figured I'll just kill it with the shield and then there were three calam I decided to take on first as I like to leave Manis and Gwyn for our last two fights of the game we got some good RNG with calamy he did both the Calamity ring effect debuff as well as the standing twoin leg fire breath attack which if you dodge those you basically get a good four or five seconds to really whale on his hind legs and thanks to that good RNG we really kill calamate quickly I want to say this is probably my f fastest Maybe maybe second fastest overall calam fight across every single time that I fought him which I again there's really owes to to show just how good this build actually can be under the ideal circumstances you know in hindsight I probably should have gone to plus five on the hand X but I was really focused on the next boss being the centipede demon as the hand ax is once again our weapon of choice against Manis and I got to say this is probably the cleanest Manis fight I've ever had in my entire life of playing Dark Souls 1 I got some relatively easy attacks to dodge we're able to really stick around his legs for a long period of time without taking damage allowing us to get damage and in total this fight only took me about 30 seconds from whenever I got popped down onto the Arena which is very quick if you ask me against Manis our final boss is Gwyn and I did think about avoiding parries and reposts for the first portion of this fight but ultimately decided to stick with kind of the same formula that I've been using that being the highest DPS weapon and we did get in some regular R1 combo hits at the end after we after he stood up from the their post ultimately this was a very interesting and fun run to Route really it took me quite a bit to go through and compile everything in terms of raw numbers that being both the ARs of the weapon motion values of the weapon and attack speeds of the weapon in terms of combos to derive DPS but once I did you can really see that these fights especially in comparison to my last video lasted a far far shorter amount the time especially some of the late game bosses like calam me and Manis my big takeaway from this run I think is that whenever I am going to be doing a run focused on weapon Buffs in the future I'm definitely going to take a good hard look at card's rape here I've really underestimated this weapon in the past but the fact that it does six hits on your R2 R2 two-handed combo and it can receive weapon Buffs honestly make it one of the strongest weapons in the entire game if you ask me so that's it I hope you enjoyed enjoyed watching let me know if you'd like to see me tackle this in some different fromsoft games I'd like to try this in Dark Souls 3 as I think there might be a little bit more variance thanks to how damage is calculated in that game but until then thank you so much for watching thanks for all the support recently and I'll see you in the next video
