I (personally) would still use them to level up, because of the DLCs „separate“ leveling system and sheer difficulty. Leveling also allows for more build variety which is always fun, and trust me, you wont feel „overleveled“, 1 million runes is less than you think!

The classic way to use them when not blowing them on levels is to buy smithing stones and level up new weapons. By the time you've beaten Godskin Duo, you have the ability to acquire every smithing stone bell bearing in the game, so you might as well take advantage.

One build is not constrained to one weapon. Off one set of stats, you could easily have two dozen weapons at your disposal, and leveling up multiple weapons to +24 or +9 Somber ain't cheap -- you'll blow through that million and more in a flash.

Buy some stones and level up a bunch of weapons. You’re going to need it.

Buy crab

Invest in a time share

Basically what the other comment has said. imo it's harder than Old Hunters on base ng, assuming you're going in solo melee. Roughly the same in difficulty on max ng+ cycle.

Get the best spirit summons (look these up) and level them up. There are more than a few dragons and deathrite birds that you're better off just summoning and getting it over with.

Unless you're checking a guide you're bound to miss a lot of stuff, especially the character quests. Don't fret too much over them.

1+2: Beat the base game for the best start in it. Around 120-150 would be pretty good.

3: Whatever you like, bring in whatever. You can go back to the base game at any time.

4: Probably.

5: Collect Scadutree Fragments to increase your damage and defenses. This is how you actually get strong enough to take on the DLC. If you do not, no matter what level you are, you're gonna get ground to dust.

I went into the DLC at like 150ish. I think I beat Messmer at around level 190.

By the time I defeated the DLC final boss, I was level 200. Honestly, levels don't nearly matter as much. You can beat the DLC at your current level but you need to level up your Scadutree blessing.

My first time doing the DLC I was 138 in NG+ or maybe NG++. You do not get massive increases in power for continuing past 150, you mostly just remove the concept of builds because you have everything. A level 800 is probably like 20% stronger than a level 138.

My first completion, my dude was at 150.

My third full completion was at 118.

I have done partial completions on various characters, but I never finished it on anyone lower than that. I suppose the furthest I went on the lowest character might have been my level 70 who got to Enir Ilim to pick up Euporia, or my level 30 who knocked out Rakshasa (I really wanted her katana). However, both those completions came long after my third completion.

...Oh my gosh, I should go pick up the Falx on my level 30, those are perfect weapons for her. But now I can't remember my quest progress on her.

If you just explore the world you should never have yo worry about being under leveled. The most important thing is to upgrade your weapons

If you are farming the same enemies over and over it gets tiring really fast. Just exploring all areas, caves and dungeons and doing all optional bosses will give you more than enough levels

Quite the opposite for me- leveling up is pretty consistent and fast in this game- I was often over leveled most of the game just for fully exploring- towards lategame it evens out pretty good. Extraordinarily I feel like they got the leveling pace perfect in this game.

If you’ve beaten Godrick you can do Varres quest line to access the best tune farming spot in the game

literally explore everything - every nook & cranny, every cave, tunnel, dungeon, etc. activate all of the summoning pools and throw out the effigy to be summoned to help people. activate the hunter ring to be summoned as a hunter. if you do these things you will level up quickly and never need to farm for runes.

The entirety of Limgrave is pretty starter-friendly, with the exception of some of the big field bosses who look like they're going to be too much for you.

My advice would be to explore, explore, explore. Fight what you can, and learn from the things that kill you.

Run around, get runes, die a lot, retrieve your runes before you die again, and level up at a grace site as soon as you have enough runes to do so. This will make you stronger, you can explore more, and explore making your character how you see fit. Don’t worry about min/maxing, just play however you want :)

Also, I still die frequently, and sometimes many times in a row so that will likely not change :P

There's an area near the "impassable bridge", where giant dogs and soldiers are fighting each other. You get all the runes when they kill each other. There will be some survivors still left, just kill them, and you can get thousands of runes in 10 minutes without fighting too much. There's also 2 giant birds near by worth thousands of runes. A site of grace is nearby, and you can keep reloading it and farming if you want.

When you level up enough, and can kill giants fast, there's 8 giants close to each other in stormhill that are worth a thousand runes each, and it's about 10,000 runes in 10 minutes. Just go to nearby site of grace and reload it, and farm it.

Eventually, you'll get to the bird farm, where you can get 13,000 runes a minute if you're good enough....and that's what helped me max out.

Also, get the golden scarab from abandoned cave in Caelida, it's a talisman that helps you collect more runes.

Around the world you can find these cemeteries with runes in them and they scale from rune[1] to rune[13] unless you find an orange one. If you use these tunes you will get a specific amount of money e.g rune[1] gives 200. Hope you can understand this and good luck

You dont need levels you need to git gud

There are some areas that are accessible really early that you'll definitely be underleveled for. They kinda want to softly funnel you into areas that are appropriate for your level with that. It could also be that you're not doing a lot of side dungeons to level up and could just be underleveled in general.

as with most games the further away from the starter area you get the stronger the enemies. when ppl say "it's sn open world, so just go somewhere else" they forget to mention that most the time.

the fact that you csn just stumble straight into Calid doesn't help either. that's more of a early midgame area.

If you stick in the starter areas limgrave, east-limgrave and weeping peninsula you should be fine even at low leveld

Yeah pretty normal if you just explore randomly and end up at like Caelid too early.

You can always explore somewhere else and come back, that's the thing with this game.

Yeah this is just traditional rpg stuff. If you seem underleveled you should see if there’s another path or area you haven’t explored.

Tbh souls are pretty light in the actual stat leveling. Pick the weapon you want and level to the requirements. Then all you have to do is keep leveling health/stamina until you decide to change things up.

Upgrading your weapons at a blacksmith will always be way more useful than leveling the scaling stat. Scaling is so random I’ve played ds 1 & 3 bloodborne and ER yet I still doesn’t seem like I can get significant results lol

From level 1 to 25:

https://youtu.be/3djplST4o6g?si=_HqneXunAq1btdxs

From level 25 to 45:

https://youtu.be/eW1t470WD54?si=ZJ0A8MmqDu2TbYfR

From level 45 to 65:

https://youtu.be/XKkIed_jnnU?si=-PvVvMmstZHEKMMx

From level 65 to 85:

https://youtu.be/Fp8PoPHz6zM?si=9JcjNiELIUbbgHnc

From level 85 to 99 (XP and Luminas):

https://youtu.be/rl8IlHicRzM?si=-1JOqAqPKD_Rdasd

Good game to you

I would personally recommend going to Frozen Hearts, and farming weapon upgrade materials.

There is an ice golem, a bit deeper into the map , near one of the expedition flags. You can repeatedly beat it up and it will always drop high tier weapon upgrade material.

Once you have level 28-32 weapons, you can start exploring higher level zones , and beat up some tougher bosses, which will then get you better Pictos and then you will be pretty much set.

Dark Shores. Set Lune up as a nuker. Cheater + Elemental trick + elemental genesis should do it. Just slap on all the damage boosting pictos you have. You could also put first strike on Sciel and have her boost the damage of lune.

or go and do all the other side stuff. Collect pictos. you'll gain levels and lumina and weapons doing this.

frozen hearts

Dark shores - it may say danger but it has one type of enemies, easy to parry ~800k per fight, ~1kk if you don't take damage. I leveled around 20 levels there probably.

After that - Renoir's drafts is the place to go.

All stats have diminishing returns except Defense. All stats eventually get eclipsed by the bonuses from Pictos, but they are still helpful in the early game and for attack power scaling in the late gate.

Me? I dumped everything into Defense until it was 99 at the start. I wish I had done a 1:2 split with Vitality instead, but it was fine when I threw some Health Pictos on people. I did have some funny moments with major bosses only doing 50 damage to me per hit, but eventually your Defense stops rising and you stop easily finding Defense pictos, so you hit a sort of soft cap while the enemies keep hitting harder.

As an interesting note, if you hyper focus your attributes and DO NOT use a Picto to support your weaknesses, you can end up with something funny like 5,000+ Speed but base Health, or 11,000 Health but base Speed. :P

You’ll likely end up maxing the 2 stats for whichever weapon you take to lvl 33 for each character, then whatever you need into luck to get to 100% crit with your endgame picto setup, and the rest into might.

Anything else is just handicapping the character’s potential. Build however you want of course. I haven’t encountered a fight where extra vitality or defense would have been beneficial since first run Act 2.

Before Act 3, stat-scaling for weapons is not very good, and you are damage capped anyway. Better to guarantee 100% crit or max out Agility (Or Health, if you get hit a lot).

In act 3, dump 99 on both weapon stats, fill with whatever you want, more agility, more crit, more HP, whichever.

Let's go over this :
- You can recoat a fairly high number of time, I think I did it about 10 times per character over the course of one playthrough.

- The more you approach the endgame, the more the luminas/pictos are indeed gonna be more important (up until a certain point) than the weapons.
Weapons unique effects are really useful to set up specific builds (especially on more complex characters like Sciel, Lune or Monoco) but some Luminas are simply must have.

- Regarding stats, I came from a Souls background as well and did a similar approach to yours. However, this game usually prioritizes min maxing, especially since there is a cap to the number of levels you might get.
Thus it is more often than not preferable to min max your stats to go in accordance to your wepaon. I know I maxed the main stat of my equipped weapons, then used the remaining points between the secondary stat and the "Strength" stat.

EDIT : Also the pictos equipped gives some raw stats, a lot of stats actually the higher their level are, so for instance on a character with a Defense / Agility scaling weapon you can still get a looooot of crits out of the equipped pictos :)

Try the wikis. But you may need to check each of your current quests.

22 and above for the Mundane Ring to drop on Raven Camoran which is probably the ring you’re referring to. If I remember correctly it’s 25 and up for quests to give their highest stat versions of rewards.

That being said there are more rewards than you’ll be able to use practically in one play through so unless you have a specific reward in mind speed leveling isn’t really necessary. Being a below a certain level to make a quest easier or keep npc’s alive is still a useful tactic.