Many players struggle with their first playthrough of dark souls. I watched a streamer spend an entire hour in just the asylum, if you follow this guide, you'll never find yourself in situations like that again.

The truth is, dark souls is not a hard game, it is just punishing to reckless behavior. Playing the game in a coordinated and thoughtful way using all defensive and offensive resources you have is important. This guide is for all the lost, struggling undeads that can't find their way through Lordran.

Anyways, let's get on with it shall we?

In dark souls, there are eight different stats/attributes to level up, which can be done at bonfires at the expense of souls. Every level will begin to cost more and more souls until it soft-caps at really high levels. Soft-caps are limits set by your own abilities, so while technically you CAN keep leveling up, the amount it costs is almost impossible to reach without duping. (i'll teach you how to do that as well).


Leveling vitality increases your HP
Leveling attunement increases your spell slots
Leveling endurance increases your stamina and maximum equipment load
Leveling strength increases your attack damage (strength weapons)
Leveling dexterity increases your attack damage (dex weapons)
Leveling resistance increases your poison, lightning, and fire defense (by a very small amount)
Leveling intelligence increases your spell damage
Leveling faith increases your miracle effectiveness

Vitality and endurance are necessary. Prioritize them.

Also think about what kind of attack damage you want. Weapons with higher requirements in a certain stat will scale better with that stat (the gradual increase in it's damage via how much of that stat you have), indicated by a letter ranking "Param bonus" right next to it. Starting from worst to best rating: E, D, C, B, A, and S. A weapon's param bonus can be increased by upgrading the weapon.

Resistance is a mostly useless stat, it's better to ignore it and spend souls on others instead. I know it sounds useful at first but it really just isn't.

Intelligence and faith are for spells and miracles respectively. Spells are cast with catalysts and miracles are cast with talismans. Both are useful forms of magic depending on what you feel like using. I fancy myself a great lightning spear every once and a while. Hail sunbros! :praisesun:

Your equipment load is the amount of weight your character can carry and it affects your movement in a few ways. There are four levels of equipment load. Light, medium, heavy, and superheavy. Light load allows you to dodge roll, walk, and run at the highest speed possible. Medium load slows you down a bit but is still viable. Heavy load causes you to fat roll, slamming you into the ground and being a very impractical means of playing. And finally, superheavy load prevents you from rolling at all, and slows down your movement speed to a snails pace. Managing equip load is crucial to your success, so at the beginning of the game you might have to opt out of wearing any armor until you level your endurance high enough... or... there's another solution.

Rings! But specifically, one ring that I'll get to in a moment. First let's go over what rings are and what their purpose is.

Rings are equippable items that give you status effects and should not be overlooked. Be sure to inspect every ring you find and equip all necessary (there are two slots).

Here's a list of every ring in the game
https://darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com/Rings

And now I present to you, our solution to the equip load predicament...



HAVELS RING AND THE FAP RING!!!

Both of which you can get before the gargoyles fight (basically the first real boss)
For havels ring, you have to kill him to obtain it. He is located at the bottom of the tower you climb to reach the taurus demon, and the door can be opened with the master key. For the FAP ring, grab the mystery key in undead parish, and just before the gargoyles fight, in the room with the channeler and horde of hollows, go down the hall on the left side and bash open the wooden barricades. There should be a jail cell containing a golden man, his name is Lautrec, and he holds the ring. Shank that mf and put it on, it will be staying on for the rest of the game.
(Note: if you don't kill him, something bad will happen. You've been warned).

Stop neglecting your parry, it's extremely useful and stupid easy to do. Pick a starting class with a shield and start practicing, shouldn't take long at all to get the hang of it. To perform a parry, press L2 right as the enemy's weapon is about to hit you, near the end of its animation but also not too late, somewhere in the middle. You'll know when it works, and when it does, immediately attack and it will thrust you into a riposte, dealing massive damage to the enemy and giving you invincibility frames for a breather. Pretty much every common enemy that posed a threat to you before shouldn't be anything to be afraid of anymore. All of the enemies in the asylum and undead burg can be killed from one parry riposte / backstab. Backstabbing is just like a riposte except it's done by attacking an enemy where the sun don't shine (sorry solaire). I'm not gonna spoil anything about the final boss, except for the fact that he can be parried... do with that information what you will.

Newer players tend to panic roll during a boss and try to get away from it rather than getting closer, this is a fundamental mistake. Start rolling towards the enemy, INTO their attacks, close that distance and it turns a once rage inducing boss into a glorified common enemy with a big health bar. None of them are difficult to fight, just flashy. Also know when to use your opportunities to attack, heal, and dodge. Boss attacks are relatively easy to telegraph. You see, this was a point in fromsoftware's catalog that wasn't full of common enemies having godlike powers with delayed telegraphing and lightning fast flurry attacks that will have your p0rn tab switching speed put to shame.

There's a high chance you pick up tons of consumable items along the game and just let them sit there, never being used. You're missing out. Items like pine resins, green blossoms, homeward bones, firebombs, moss clumps. They're all extremely crucial to your success. Pine resins coat your weapon in different elements, boosting your damage by a ton, especially gold pine resin since it coats your weapon in lightning and the majority of all enemies in dark souls are weak to it. Green blossoms temporarily boost your stamina recharge and can be stacked with both the grass crest shield and chloranthy ring. I personally use one before every boss for lightning fast stamina recharge for the most DPS possible.

Titanite shards are items that can be used at blacksmiths to upgrade your weapon (The earliest one is blacksmith andre in the undead parish, he's hard to miss so you probably already know about him). There are 4 levels of normal titanite: Shards, large shards, chunks, and slabs. Upgrading past +5 begins to require embers, items that can be found around Lordran (the game's world) that you give to blacksmiths to continue upgrading even more. If you want to know where you can find every one, I'll link a video guide (not made by me) below.
Shards upgrades from +0 to +5 and requires 9 of them.
Ascension from +5 to +6 and requires the Large Ember.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGCbMX4kxWo

Aside from standard titanite, there are even more variants that upgrade different types of weapons. Which brings us to the topic of infusions. Infusing your weapon will alter its properties to better suit a different task. Wanna kill those pesky boneheads in the catacombs for good? Get a divine weapon and smite them with your handsome skill and pro gamer looks. Wanna deal more damage against an enemy that's weak to magic but aren't a sorcerer? Well too bad because magic/enchanted weapons are f*cking trash. But yeah you get the jist. Every infusion type requires it's own unique ember, which will be included in that video I mentioned).

So about the other shard types: Twinkling titanite, green titanite, red titanite, blue titanite, white titanite, demon titanite, and dragon scales.

Twinkling titanite, demon titanite, and dragon scales upgrade "unique" weapons to a maximum of +5. If you wanna know all the unique weapons, here:
https://darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com/Unique+Upgrades

The rest of the titanite types are for upgrading infused weapons
https://darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com/Upgrades

There are several areas in the game where you can farm different types of titanite, as well as a few vendors that sell an unlimited amount of them.

A few of the best classes to start with are Warrior, Pyromancer, and Thief.
By far the best starting gift is the master key, it allows you to access many locked off areas right from the get go. Whatever you do, do NOT pick the tiny beings ring. It's ♥♥♥♥. Also, do NOT pick the knight class, it's even more ♥♥♥♥. It starts you off fat rolling and the armor isn't even good enough to justify that bullsh*t. Just stick with warrior if you want something like that, it's the same thing but better.

1. Warrior
The warrior class is a very balanced melee class that starts with a shield for parrying and blocking and a sword for hacking and slashing. A really decent set of armor too. Not much else to say about it, it's just a viable pick overall.

2. Pyromancer
This is the go to if you wanna cheese the ♥♥♥♥ out of the game. I unknowingly did this my first playthrough. Maximizing your potential as a pyromancer can trivialize this game. If you're interested, look up pyromancer guides. You start with a hand axe, some busted up pot cover as a shield, shaggy robes, and best of all.. the pyromancy flame. It's harnessed fire that allows you to cast devastating spells with, although your starting spells aren't the best, through upgrading it and finding newer more powerful spells it slowly becomes more and more broken. It's insane that it's even in the game, the game that's supposedly "super hard" just has an easy mode right there in the starting menu.

3. Thief
This class is focused around high mobility. You get a fast knife that inflicts bleed damage, which when built up, releases massive damage chunks onto enemies and bosses. You also get a shield that's insanely easy to parry with, seriously it's broken. But the most important part is the fact that it's the only class that can have two starting gifts. The game does no effort in telling you this but the thief starts with the master key no matter what, which means you can have the key and any other gift as well.

I highly recommend, and I mean HIGHLY (I could not express this more) recommend you go to the catacombs as early as possible and pick up the Great Scythe. It is by far the best weapon in the game. Yes, better than black knight halberd. For 1, it's easier to get. 2, It can be upgraded to +15, can be infused with resins, has really low stat requirements to use, scales amazingly with dexterity at higher upgrades, and overall has a better and more efficient moveset. Now I know I know... the catacombs isn't exactly the nicest place to be, but trust me you won't regret getting your hands on this bad boy. Here's a video guide on how to get it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B8h5QzNbFc


And finally, create a beautiful character like ours (CRUCIAL).

There are methods to duplicate any item you want, including souls and humanity. While I know how to do it, it's really hard to explain in text without a visual representation, so I'll link two videos below covering the two different glitches. Have fun! Also I don't recommend you do these on your first playthrough, beat the game legit first and then mess with this stuff.
(Note: you will not get banned for this, these are undetectable. You will get banned from using things like cheat engine in online mode though, so if you're using programs like that, log out before doing it).

Item duplication
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV7N2fNxuTU&t=242s

Souls duplication
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc74UykH5zs

Used what you learned here and keep learning more naturally as you play. That's the beauty of Dark Souls after all. Now get to conquering lordran, lowly undead. And don't go hollow.