Dark Souls but it's with Mathematically Optimized Damage

how's it going everybody welcome back to the channel where today we return to Dark Souls to do something a little bit different on the channel a couple of weeks ago I posted a comment about some ideas for what would make an interesting run through a dark souls or Souls born game and I got a comment from Sam the Pigman 4069 that said he was interested in looking at what a mathematically correct route for every boss would be uh he he said taken into out DPS for this video I have not done that because that is a much more complex formula to derive I may do something like that in the future a little bit of a spoiler I guess for what I'm working on next which would might be my most ambitious project ever so be on a lookout for that but for this one I went through and I looked at all the bosses looked at the damage formula that was in the game and took out what would be the highest overall damage weapon in the game versus every boss in the entire game so without further Ado let's dive into some of the backbone and get this run started so let's talk about what we mean by optimized for the purposes of this video I am going to be using an R1 attack to determine damage and the maximum damage output is what I'm going to say is the optimized attack it's also going to be based on physical attacks only as ranged and Magic attacks are generally stronger in Dark Souls but I wanted to avoid doing just a full-on sorcery build we're going to follow a normal game route that means avoiding killing NPCs such as ingward to get to the Four Kings early and avoiding the master key as a starting gift because it's a little bit overpowered as you can just pick up a bunch of different upgrade materials super quickly if you do that and we're going to avoid percent chance or tail cut weapons as these are not guaranteed and I want to make sure that every weapon that I use you can either purchase or find in the open world and as mentioned I've been learning a lot more about the damage calculation formula and I'm just going to throw this up on screen here the damage formula is not super complicated at least not as complex as I thought it was going into this video but it is still a bit of an interesting thing in the game's files because it's a nonlinear continuous function meaning that no matter what as long as you increase your damage the as long as you increase your attack damage goes up which obviously makes sense but there are certain thresholds that you want to meet if you're going to end up doing a lot more damage um everything that I'm putting up on here is you know you can find that in various locations uh the the general threshold that you're going to be at is those third and fourth where your attack is less than 2 and 1 half times the enemy's defense or less than eight times the enemy's defense there are a couple of Fringe situations especially early game and late game where you might fall into one of those first two or last categories but those are pretty rare and again it's pretty linear even if it's not an exact linear function we start the game make our character top heavy because of course he is very smart being that he's running a mathematically optimized build and we start off with the burial gift of the black firebombs and believe it or not you probably believe it but these are the best damage dealing source that we can get here in a fresh new game start what I'm going to have shown in the corner for the majority of the the of these bosses is our attack rating the boss's defense rating and the resulting damage output I will say that in the early stages of the game this seems to be spot-on accurate however some of the late game bosses it seems to be off by a couple of points here and there I think there's probably some rounding going on in the background that doesn't give you an exact value for damage dealt to an enemy but what that is I can't say for sure either way black firebombs do 250 fire damage the Asylum Demon has 66 fire defense resulting in a damage output of 1955. 7 and as you can see it is rounded off so the next step in our journey is to find our early weapon of choice and that is going to be this viander from the graveyard just outside Firelink Shrine for the first couple of bosses in this run we are rocking a plus zero because of course we can't reliably get to Andre without having the master key which again we did not choose as our gift so we are stuck with a plus zero damage weapon we also make sure to pick up the residence key so that we can go down later in the depths and get ourselves a catalyst although when I was doing this I thought the sorcerer Catalyst was going to be my Catalyst of choice turns out that that's actually not going to be the case due to how some of the routing and defenses work for some of the bosses prior to getting to an Orlando we also stop by and pick ourselves up some lightning Pine resin which of course is the best resin in the game it adds a flat 150 lightning damage to your weapon and it's very interesting some of the lightning calculations as we'll get into some of these bosses first boss of course is the Taurus demon and in addition to what I showed on the Asylum Demon fight in this fight I'm also showing a line item for MV which stands for motion value this is not quite as complicated as it might seem if you are just learning some of the damage calculation formulas in the game essentially what it is is it takes your damage output in this case your attack which we have 177 with a plus Z Zander and our appropriate stats I don't remember exactly what I had for this fight but it's pretty low and it multiplies the attack rating shown by the motion value divided by 100 so for the plunging attack it's just a straight up four times multiplier for a two-handed R1 attack it's 1.2 damage multiplier and that 120 motion value applies to basically every single weapon in the game for a two-handed R1 attack which is why even if you're using a primarily deck Focus weapon that if you two hand you will probably do more damage than if you use a one one-handed attack there's a couple of exceptions in the game but that's not really important for this video and again just alluding to a future upcoming project where I think I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into what some of these numbers actually mean either way the plunging attack I think it gives the Taurus demon a defense value of 100 because using the 103 gives me an incorrect damage number but for the rest of the attacks it used see he has 103 standard defense so our damage is 246.at even goes down very quickly now that we have taken down the tourist demon we're able to get to Andre and being that he has titanite shards for sale we're able to get our weapon up to plus five no problem we also do a bit of a grinding to unlock the crest of artorius and go into the forest and join the forest Hunter Covenant it's going to be important for us later when we head down to blight Town it'll open up Shiva as a vendor which that's going to be the weapon of choice the Demon's great Axe because we did not get the drop from the tus demon B gorgo is up next and even without the lightning Pine resin using a plus five weapon against the guys makes this fight very quick but the pine resin does add quite a bit of damage to them as you can see we clock in at around 325 damage and again you know if you're looking for an early game weapon even if you can just get it to plus one or plus two the Vander is a fantastic choice while we're in the area figured I'd go take on the Moonlight Butterfly now next as does open up an ember for us but we're not going to be using anything but the standard and later Crystal infusions as if I've heard it once I've heard it a thousand times split damage on a weapon in this case infusions are a terrible idea and you can kind of just derive that from the early damage calculation formulas but again we're not going to get too much into that just know that using a standard or Crystal weapon and either a spell miracle or resin will always result in a higher damage output in this case 2 94.1 against the Moonlight Butterfly [Music] took a bit of a different route than I usually do and went down to fight pin wheel next as I think this is kind of the logical or intended route you know cuz pin wheel obviously does not have very high defenses most people including myself tend to fight him after getting the Lord vessel because traversing the catacombs without having the ability to warp between bonfires is a little bit annoying if you just take the shortcut however and just go down and one shot pin wheel or excuse me one cycle pin wheel then you can just hward bone back up to the top which is what I did here you see our damage on screen 33.8 and again if we came back here with much greater damage potential thanks to having like greater magic weapon crystal magic weapon what have you or a plus 10 even plus 15 weapon we'd be able to maybe even one shot him without any additional Buffs either way he goes down very quickly and we get the giant dad helmet took a quick track back to the Asylum Demon we're not fighting the stray demon quite yet but I wanted to get myself a ring so that traversing Blight Town is a little bit easier for me and the fact that uh you can get the doll here early is another positive although we are not going to be fighting Priscilla on our first go around we'll save her for after we get a max out weapon either way we also go down to the Hydra take care of him rescue Dusk and get ourselves a catalyst which is the ulil Ivory Catalyst it's a very interesting Catalyst as it doesn't actually scale once you meet the weapons requirements it always has a 180 spell buff which is the best that we can get up until around I think 27 intelligence when we have to switch out but that's going to be for much later after those errands we continue our track through the game heading down and facing off against that kapper demon again the Capper demon has pretty low defenses and he actually staggers quite easily I think two hits with his Vander is all it takes and again the lightning Pine resin still coming in clutch that's going to be what we're going to be using for the next couple of fights but don't worry we're going to be getting an upgrade soon once we can get to the rafters and get greater magic weapon first off though 343.50 damage is what our output is I know we can do a little bit more damage if we were to do a plunging attack off the stairs but again I'm trying to keep this fight uh I'm trying to keep these fights rather as a two-handed R1 attack only just so that the numbers on the screen match the numbers in the game with the kapper demon dead now that allows us to pick up ourselves A Large Ember from the depths and fun fact the slimes out side of the chamber bonfire in the depths allow you to farm large titanite shards I didn't actually know that they drop them it's a long and painful grind however it is a 2% chance I do have some Humanity I did have some Humanity on me when I was doing this grind so it wasn't quite as bad either way once we get enough we can upgrade our weapon all the way up to plus 10 which really juices our damage to very high levels and we can go fight off against the gaping dragon gaping dragon as you know has a weak spot on the head which I think takes double damage and there was a couple of instances in a few fights where I was doing the calculated damage but I was doing a little bit more I think that's due to instability damage or weak spots didn't really tend to focus on that too much either way a damage output of 475.894 and we can finally make our trik down to BL town while we're in BL town we have a number of errands to run and remember that Forest Hunters Covenant that's going to come in key here as we pick up a couple of Demon's great axes although you'll see as we go on that we only actually need one I picked up two because I knew I was going to send my weapons to the crystal upgrade path and I thought that the durability was going to become an issue I also picked up the large club which does strike damage which will come in play on a few of the upcoming bosses and actually a very late game Boss that have relatively higher weakness to strike damage but the Demon's great a is going to be our weapon of choice for the most part going forward with our newly acquired grade X our standard damage output jumps up from 429 to an absurd 500 and that's with just a plus 10 weapon and no Crystal infusion which is very high for this stage in the game again we're still rocking the lightning Pine resin and with our new Goods Quay lag becomes a pretty easy fight although the first couple of tries it took me a few times to get into Rhythm and she actually killed me a couple times either way de dealing nearly 455 damage at this stage of the game is no joke and makes these boss fights rather [Music] easy ring our second Bell and now s Fortress is available make our run through there's not actually anything in s Fortress that we are interested in I know there are some Demon Titanite in the basement but we are not going to be using any boss weapons as they are great but they get outclassed pretty easily by some of the regular weapons either the way the Iron Golem up next being a big hunk of armor we bust out the large club for the first time in this run it is a few points shy in terms of total AR behind the Demon's great Axe but being that enemies like the Iron Golem anything clad in large pieces of armor has a larger weakness to strike damage that's what we're using here and we don't really have any other options as far as weapon Buffs outside of lightning Pine and resin still which you can farm from some of the big mushrooms down in the Dark Root Garden and the Iron Golem is a very easy boss fight this one was a first try and I think was the quickest boss fight in this entire run if I remember correctly once we make our way up to anando we can knock down the chandelier go down and pick up great magic weapon which is going to be our primary buff until we can get the crystal magic weapon spell in a little bit on are next and I was debating on who to fight first as orstein actually has quite a bit more defense in both phase one and phase two as opposed to Smo but sm's defense don't actually get increased outside of his lightning defense in phase two whereas orstein all of his defense gets Juiced up when he goes into phase two so I decided to take down orstein first which this is going to be one of the very few fights that I have a differential damage output on the screen here you can see 436 with great magic weapon which is a pretty high output it's not crazy higher it's actually lower than when we fought a couple of bosses such as the gaping dragon and quag but a lot of the late game bosses have much higher defenses and for SM in phase two again I mentioned he has quite a bit lower defenses so our damage takes up over 100 points out to 555 and again a very quick on fight is had this one took me two tries because I got some really weird RNG where they both really pin me in a corner all by the way that's neither here nor there another quick boss fight and now we can really open up the game and we can start maxing out some of our weapons before we take on our next boss we have quite a bit of backend stuff to do our first track is down into the New Londo Ruins to get the key to the seal from ingward and drain the valley this opens up a farming spot as dark RS have very high drops of titanite chunks they can also occasionally drop Titanite slabs however I didn't really want to farm those so we're going to avoid those for now you also head up to the Duke's archives and while we're here we got to stop off die to se once actually did get cursed this time but that neither here nor there I suppose pick up the crystal Ember and then do some Big Hat Logan stuff making sure to free him from his cells and open him up as a vendor so that we can purchase our crystal magic weapon which is the best spell buff in the entire game from my understanding thanks to having the crystal Ember now we can go to the giant blacksmith and an Orlando give him that which opens up ourselves for cryst CST Ascension uh if youve never used a crystal weapon before they have very low durability in comparison to some of the weapons in the game but they get a ton of extra raw and scaling damage and Crystal weapons are basically all we're going to be using from here on out for my next boss I went to go fight cth and hindsight I probably should have fought the stray demon as he drops a titanite slab but it's not really much of a difference as we can still do nearly 700 damage to SI with a plus Crystal weapon and there you see on the screen what our damage does when we are facing off against SM we were at 51 standard damage with a plus4 crystal it's up to 684 so that's a 183 damage increase in terms of what we're using for our primary weapon Si's rather easy although the first time I fought her she jumped around just about every single frame that I was in the fight so I had to attempt her twice as well but 600 192 damage on the output and a very easy fight as well and now we go face the stray demon which has remarkably similar defenses to CIF and the damage is actually only a couple of points of difference for CF is 6 91.8 for the stray demon 6 93.1 their magic defense is the exact same and the Stray demons standard defense is only 2 points less which is where that difference comes from thanks to knocking down the stray demon we get our guaranteed titanite slab and now we can plus five a weapon and it is going to be the crystal demon great Axe there really one final upgrade that we can make to this run but we need some levels in intelligence first so we're going to take down a slew of bosses here to make sure that we can use the spell in question and the Catalyst which will be the tin catalyzation Catalyst first though we Face Off against Priscilla in the painted world she's a very easy fight this go around as we're able to get a free hit thanks to her dialogue and there you can see where our damage jumps up we are using 684 with a plus4 crystal up to 710 with a plus five so that's roughly 30 point increase and uh it's not insignificant I will have to say it's not a ton but when you're multiplying that by 1.2 it exacerbates the difference even further and let's continue on to gelin for gindin I thought that he actually had a lot higher magic defense than he does it's actually quite a bit lower than I was expecting you know you see a lot of late game bosses and even some base game bosses like se but thinking particularly of some of the DLC bosses with magic defense lightning defense and fire defense up in the 5 six 700s but for gindin it's only at 251 which matches his standard defense and I don't know it's just kind of interesting I thought that being a magic user these guys usually have a lot higher magic defense I'm not going to complain either way and gindin is a pretty easy fight although if we're not doing a running attack sometimes getting in a standard R1 can prove to be a little bit difficult we have to wait to get a good phase but again a very very easy fight aselin typically istic SED in dark an eternal curse upon thee still a few levels away from being able to use the tin crystallization catalyst so I figured this was a good time to start our Trek through the demon ruins and our first boss is ceaseless discharge I didn't actually do the cheese here because I wanted to fight him normally and uh to be honest this was the first time I fought him like this I think since my first maybe second playr I pretty much always do the cheese but uh he's a lot easier than I I recall maybe that's just some of my experience playing through Dark Souls over the last couple of years now but he just bait out his slam attack get a couple of hits in on his hand and he goes down very very quickly continuing on we go face off against the demon fire Sage who again has a very easy move set we've already seen it a couple of times he's also got a lot of HP but his defenses don't nearly stack up to some of the bosses at this stage in the game as we're pulling in nearly 800 damage here on the demon fire stage and as I'm recording this it appears that I actually deleted the footage for the stibe demon who is next and he was actually the first boss in the run that we crushed at over 800 damage I'll show his stats on screen during this fight but again I don't exactly know what happened but I again I I must have apparently deleted the footage either way he was a rather easy fight plus you know you could always just go and join the daughters of chaos Covenant skip the C to be demon and go face off against the better chaos that way bet of chaos as far as I can tell doesn't actually have a set amount of Defense if it does it might have one defense and all defense stats outside of fire uh to which it is immune to fire so you know there's not really any optimal way to fight the B of chaos suppose you could do the cheese but any attack from any weapon will work to one shot him now surely with SE being a Magic based enemy you would expect that using the lightning Pine resin is going to far outclass the crystal magic weapon even though we don't have the tin calization Catalyst right well the answer is actually no with the build I'm using it is actually basically even the crystal magic weapon gives us three excuse me 280 magic attack and with SE having 690 magic defense our total damage output is 6372 with the lightning Pine resin and see having a lightning defense of 207 the damage calculation actually comes out to 636.3 five less than the great or excuse me the crystal magic weapon with the the Catalyst that we are using I was very surprised when doing this because I thought for sure that using the lightning Pine resin was going to be what we were going to have to do on this fight but it turns out that the answer was continue using the same build that we've been using for the last I don't know five six seven bosses at this point either way see very easy enemy he just kind of stood around this fight didn't really do a whole lot and now this opens up us to go and require the last upgrade that we can get in this run from Logan in the duk's archives speaking of we go up and take care of Big Hat Logan in the duk's archives get ourselves the tin crystallization Catalyst and our magic adjust jumps way up and now when using crystal magic weapon it goes from 280 in the SE fight all the way up to 356 in the sanctuary Guardian fight as I figured fig I'd start the DLC uh in this fight I also am at half HP because I thought that this was going to be a more drawn out fight so I was Rock in the ring that gives you additional castings but Hales your HP didn't actually end up mattering as we were able to lock the shank Guardian kind of in the edge of the map and take him down with ease as we are doing just about 674 damage uh with each swing in this fight it's Boss Rush time at this point I figured let's go take care of the remaining Lords of Cinder first off we're going to go down and face off against Neato very easy boss fight a lot lower defenses than some of the upcoming fights although not the lowest of the remaining fights that actually is going to be the Four Kings which will come next but but uh again another fight where we're able to do more than 800 damage per swing and I think this this fight really highlights just how crazy some of the defenses in the DLC are Neato actually has more standard defense than the sanctuary Guardian but Sanctuary Guardians magic defense is 768 compared to Neo's 238 and there you can see it's more than a 100 Point increase in total damage dealt per swing as I mentioned for Kings next and this is actually the most damage that we do in any single hit outside of Gwyn of course because you know we got a Perry Gwyn but 846 point2 is the highest number that we're able to get and I think it just kind of speaks to how ridiculous some of the crystal weapons are and crystal magic weapon in this game where we're able to do nearly 850 damage without any further aument M ation you just imagine rocking the red tearstone ringing power within with this build you could be doing easily 1500 1600 maybe even 2,000 damage with a single swing and without a special weapon art or anything like that I think that's kind of truly ridiculous and just goes to show how good the Demon's great a is in this game just a few more bosses to go next up is one of everybody's favorite Knights Knight artor and when doing this back I think I made a slight mistake here in routing as I kind of forgot that you could pick up the slab in calams Arena before you go off and face artorius I don't know why I thought that was gated or maybe I just forgot about it either way the crystal Demon's great ax is still our weapon of choice but if we were able to ascend our Crystal great Club to a plus5 it would actually Edge out the damage just a little bit it's not crazy amounts but it is a slight mistake in the routing either way still 651 damage and there you can again just see kind of the difference between resistances and some of the DLC whereas we're doing 846 damage to the Four Kings we're only doing 651 damage to artorius and I don't know lorewise I think it makes a little bit more sense that the Four Kings would probably take less damage but that's just uh that's just how they decided to work out the game here and just the big three are left cam Manis and Gwyn the black dragon is next and surprisingly for whatever reason he actually has quite a bit lower defense against strike damage that opposed to physical or rather standard slash or thrust all of his other defenses sit at 468 but his strike defense is only 374 not uh not exactly sure why that is is the case but just for comparison sake the crystal demon great ax would do 6 27.3 whereas the club is up at 6405 again we're also able to pick up another of the guaranteed slabs in this game to ascend our weapon to the plus five and hey at least we get a little bit of variability here at the end game and we've been using the the demon grade ax for 90% of these fights following its pickup but we get to see the great Club in action at least one more time while the Manis fight plays in the background I just want to take a moment to say thanks for all the support on some of my last videos it's been fun making some Souls content as a relatively newer Souls content creator here on YouTube again I really only started playing these games back in 2023 and so I've I've only been playing these for a little over a year and uh it's it's definitely opened my eyes to the wonders of the from catalog really enjoyed playing these enjoyed some of the challenge runs which have m mostly been you know new game plus 7even plus 6 whatever the max level is one shots still have some upcoming plans you know I do want to do bloodborne and uh you know speaking of the Dark Souls video here you know I've kind of alluded to it but I think I am going to go through and rank every single weapon in terms of total DPS output against late game bosses and maybe turn that into a video so be on the lookout for that I also do want to try this in some of the other games I think this would be a very interesting way to do things in Dark Souls 3 as it's quite a bit more linear and some of the damage calculations with absorptions and flat defenses area defense multipliers which don't exist in this game I think might make for a more interesting video as it turns out that in dark Souls one at least when you're using the optimization route that I am it tend to use a lot of the same stuff the crystal magic weapon with the crystal demon great Axe I also want to say that Crystal weapons uh you know very underrated I kind of thought going into this one that the durability was going to be a much bigger headache than it was which was the reason I bought two Demon's great axes but if you pick yourself up a boss killing weapon like this or you can pick up a another really good weapon that you can purchase from vendors even even one-off weapons I mean you know as long as you're using something else to clear out areas if you use a crystal weapon as your boss killer durability is not really much of an issue I don't think I dropped below 50 during all my boss fights and that's 50 out of 60 so I used about 10 durability points so I could have done these bosses two three maybe even four times over before having to worry about that either way Manis goes down and we've got one final boss fight to go for GNN of course you know I got to hit him with the Parry strats and what's very interesting here is that some of the motion values that I was able to find for the great Axe don't seem to give me the correct damage output so I back calculated given what the emotion values are with the Hornet ring and the formula that I found is on screen everything that I could find says the Hornet ring adds a 30% damage boost I don't know why it's quite a bit different between those first two hits either way uh a cool thing to note is that the first hit and second hit both do equal amounts of magic damage so that's like a flat damage for every hit on hit for every weapon which could severely increase or decrease your total damage output depending on what type of weapon you are using which again I think I might look at in my next project either way a quick kill on Gwyn twoot which was where this build was kind of secretly going towards all along I wanted to be able to twoot GN without using power within or the red tearstone ring and we do so successfully and close out this video was pretty interesting to make you know again I was hoping that it was going to be a lot more varied turns out it's very syy when a lot of Defense by enemy are the exact same which is the case for at least half of them where your standard strike slash and thrust defense basically are the exact same number across the board so I'm hoping that uh we can get some more variability if I were to do this in some other Souls gam such as Dark Souls 3 which I think I might tackle in this fashion as well by the way thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this feel free to leave a like a comment or subscription if you have any other Dark Souls Challenge videos that you would like to see be sure to leave them in the comments below and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: TrevTheDev

Views: 102,578

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Id: TjfIzQi_P_Y

Length: 43min 27sec (2607 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2024