156 is fine you just need to go to the right areas. Either go to the capital, farum azula, or the haligtree and you should be able to connect to people either invading or assissting

125 seems to be to be the pvp sweetspot for me at least

156 is a bit high

You have a general ‘goldilocks’ area in terms of levels ie not too much/little. The farther you get the higher that level will be with exceptions

Meta for most Soul’s games has been to stick around lvl 120 and I think that’s still standard. Once you pass that threshold you might as well power level to the top level cap because there’s not a way (as far as I know) to go back. You might still be able to do co-op

Also forgot to mention, you can only see other signs of players if they are within 20 levels or so of yourself.

If you use a password, you can summon anyone, but damage output will be scaled down to match the Host.

You’re going to die. A lot. Don’t get discouraged. Learn the bad guys’ move sets. Find your defense style (jumping, rolling, blocking, parrying) that works for you.

Sometimes the best move is to run past enemies, especially near the churches. Most the time there is a site of grace inside (like a checkpoint) - go inside and hit it before engaging enemies. Have fun & good luck!

Seconding this strategy. I put lots into dex/int at first, more than I needed for the weapons and spells I used, and really struggled. Then I read about vigor. At first it seems bad because from 10 to 20 it only increases hp by a few each point, but then it ramps up more hp per vigor peaking from 30 to 40.

I very highly suggest getting minimum stats for the weapon/abilities/armor load you want and everything into vigor ASAP. 40 vigor makes the game infinitely easier than 20.

Also be sure to keep your load at medium, heavy rolling is terrible.

Cheers. Happy to help.

Also someone below me mentioned the importance of strengthening weapons at the blacksmith. I agree completely.

Weapon enhancing is the single best way to get the most out of them.

Leveling Vigor is important, you should have around 40 when you reach the last part of the game.

Level Dex/Str/Fth/Int/Arc only for weapon requirements early, get your damage from weapon upgrades. You can find upgrade mats in dungeons / tunnels around the map, there are plenty of em. Dump your remaining points in Vigor and endurance.

BTW, a quality build is equal amounts strength and dexterity. Also have lots of vigor. Usually the tip is to level vigor first. If you need a few more levels of strength of dexterity to use a new weapon fine, but your damage increase come mostly from weapon upgrades (using smithing stones) not leveling up strength or dexterity (not really anyway). So focus on vigor and endurance at first.

Start leveling in a balanced method.

Get vigor, endurance, and mind up to about 20 early on, then slowly level them up to 30-40 in late game.

Besides that, go with whatever type of build you want to do.

As soon as you enter Limgrave (starting area after tutorial), there is a giant gold guy on a horse. Do not engage lol.

Come back later for him.

For real though, I didn't know what was going on for like the first 30 hours I played.

Now I spend my time cooping end game bosses.

This is the greatest game ever made.

You do you.

I suggested leveling vigor, mind, and endurance because it ensures that you can have a varied playstyle and you're not locked into a certain type of weapon/armor setup

A quality build for your first run, The reason you would do this is so that when you come across a new weapon, you can likely meet the requirements to use it, whatever it is. And if you find you like how the weapon feels to use (has a nice ash of war, feels intuitive to use, varying enough combos), then if you do another playthrough later (or respec later) you can make a build completely based on that weapon.

My Advice would be:

While there are certainly extra powerful weapons, its perfectly possible to beat the game naked with a club and not take a single hit, not something your gonna do obviously, but the idea is, "if someone else can pull it off, my random build probably wont do so bad."

Also Strengthening a weapon at a blacksmith is far more powerful than leveling yourself, don't expect a non-strengthened weapon to do well, even with 99 Strength/Dexterity

Under the 'multiplayer' section, you'll see a bunch of different items. If you use:

Furcalling Finger Remedy - You'll see signs of other real life players whom you can summon for help to bring into your world

Tarnished Furled Finger - You drop your sign and someone else can summon you into their world to help

Small golden effigy - Automatically places your summon sign at summoning pools (so anyone can approach a summoning pool and see your sign without you having to drop it manually)

Duelist Furled Finger - Drops your sign to fight someone else in PVP.

Bloody Finger/Rescusant Finger - Both are the same. You invade someone else's world who has cooperative help in their world. So you are jumping in to fight the Host, while dealing with other players trying to kill you. Regular enemies don't bother you, so you can lure the host into danger.

Blue cypher ring - You can be summoned as a hunter (to help a Host who is being invaded)

White cypher ring let's you automatically summon a hunter for help if you get invaded.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

I would love to play co-op, but I refuse to pay $80 for PS+.

Also, it would just be the summoned reading, "the host died" very shortly after being summoned, lol. I'm not good at the game. But I have fun.

I did about 300 hrs before I ever did co-op. Once I did it, I fell in love with it and i never play without having my sign up.

I found that it's really fun to help people who are struggling and test strategies.  I'm currently doing a run where I'm almost to Malenia and Romina in the DLC and I'm at lvl 90 so I still get summoned for stuff as early as Morgott or even the Draconic Tree Sentinel.  My goal is to get the Euporia at about this level to help people with that awesome weapon.

I don't know what passwords are for and at this point I'm afraid to ask

isnt the server password kindred?

https://preview.redd.it/dmgjhu0fbqef1.png?width=405&format=png&auto=webp&s=3df73a3fcf9ebe8a64cf818b23597ba05dd32067

What passwords are you using?

just wait for libra balls to put madness + chaos into our games

I need to try this. Have over 200 hours in the game and only about 45 wins playing exclusively with randoms the whole time

I usually get downvoted every time I say this, but:

Don't worry about starting "class" or even your "build" later on. The game is designed so you can mess around with all kinds of weapons, spells, etc. There's always an enemy you'll encounter that will be unimpressed by your fire/blood/poison abilities.

Know that you don't have to - and aren't even really supposed to - tackle every challenge when you come across it. The game is designed so if you hit a roadblock, there are several other places you can go.

Don't be afraid of dying. The game is designed to kill you a lot, but never put you toooo far back when it does.

-Do not sell any type of equipment, unless it’s a copy of items you have already,

-try not advanced the story without exploring the map first.

-don’t kill Npcs

Different types of enemies have high resistance to specific damage types and vice versa. A Katana for instance ( slash DMG type) is really effective against enemies exposing their skin where as on high armored knights not that effective . Also stone structured enemies are strong against all damage types execpt (strike type) u just gotta use common sense in that regard

-Level vigor

-if a boss or area is too hard, go somewhere else.

-go south before taking on stormveil castle

-try to avoid online guides and spoilers as much as possible

-Don’t worry about missing mini dungeons, just do the ones you find naturally

-starting class doesn’t really matter that much, but you may have a better experience avoiding the thief and wretch as a beginner

-use all the tools the game gives you and EXPERIMENT. Find out what playstyle works best for you. Don’t listen to guides on the “best builds”. Try out shields and different spirit ashes if you want.

Try finger, but hole

If you ever decide to replay, you can use the Elden Ring reforged mod in conjunction with seamless coop. ERR has custom difficulties including some that are tuned for coop… makes it a lot more challenging

To counter the difficulty we increased the boss health to around 5x in the config file. It made for a much more enjoyable experience, and it took a lot of work to take down some bosses.

The "no health bar, let's reset" was definitely annoying, but i appreciated the coop all the same. I played with a friend who said he has "no coordination with a controller" and ended up finishing the whole thing, so i'm grateful to the mod for that. He even played the dlc alone.

>The Ugly

>Because it is a hack there are some issues. Desyncing would force us to restart the game at least once a session. Whoever was last to use a site of grace was the only one able to talk to NPCs. Sometimes bosses wouldn't register for one of us forcing us to restart. A little anti-climatic to ride up on a dragon only to hear your partner go, "No health bar, let's reset."

you can fix this by standing up together, its not 100% time sensitive, but aslong as you stand up relativley close together when you both are in the transition animation, that is not a problem anymore.

There is no further goodbye. You're here with us forever...

Yup

You know what's crazy is I googled it twice first and somehow still got it wrong

No not really. You don't need to drop stuff, we get rune arcs and souls (and fun).

In general, it is kinda rude if the host doesn't "acknowledge" your presence. Gesture, prattling pate, spin, crouch, jump, whatever. Just something to say hi before you run off.

The main rewards for a co-oper are from killing the boss. I 100% do not mind helping with the map rather than rushing the boss BUT if you are going to run around in circles meticulously checking every corner multiple times it's better to do that without a random summon. If someone put their sign directly in front of the fog gate, not at the pool , they probably won't want to do the area with you and just want to fight the boss . Edit: sending someone who helped you reach the boss home so you can grab a fresh summon is a dick move.

Some people get angry at the hosts watching cutscenes. I say it's like a minute, go ahead. Unless you are going to repeatedly summon me, then die and watch it every time I don't care.

If I have a summon sign in front of a specific boss please don't drag me to a different one (that was more an issue in D3 with dancer though).

This isn't an etiquette thing but if I am kneeling casting a golden spell then I am trying to buff or heal you.

As a host, skip cutscenes where possible and let your partners draw aggro- personally speaking I find it frustrating af when the host is going all in and getting their asses handed to them and then die, desummoning us.

No not really, we’re there to farm rune arcs and runes and it’s fun to help someone out. Only thing I’ll say is if there’s a cutscene then skip it

Hosts should stay alive/not get one shot while also deal reasonable damage, that's about it really.

Off the top of my head. If you summon someone and your stuck on a boss.. please skip the cut scene. If someone gestures you generally should return a gesture (doesn't have to be the same one) if you do summon in help on a boss don't sit at the back not helping, some people leave if they see the host refusing to join in. It's rare but it happens. Dropping items for someone isn't something you need to worry about. If we're there to help we don't expect compensation from the host.

Remember that each player who joins you is an extra 50% HP to the boss, some folks prefer you just go with them and not stand around trying to get a second summons that would mean the boss gets 100% more HP. Other than that just enjoy it and if you do fail and see their summon sign again do summon them again. We put the signs down again because we do want to see you succeed.

If you invade you will probably fight 3 people who suck at the game but have numbers on you. If you go into the colosseum you will probably fight 1 person with a really cheesy build. If you use the taunter's tongue it is extremely random who you get.

Not sure which of these would be the best for learning. But regardless of which you choose the best piece of advice you can get is don't get mad. Learn from your mistakes, stay calm, stay collected. Pay attention to what you're doing and whenever you die think of what you did wrong to bring yourself to that unfortunate end. Unless the enemy is laggy as fuck. Then blame the lag and block them so you don't see them again.

But only if they're actually so laggy that it was impossible to fight them properly, I'm talking you swing at them then you finish your swing and dodge and while you're rolling is when they finally take damage. If that happens just block 'em. But if they're slightly laggy so it's harder to rollcatch them and it's really obtrusive to the fight but you can play around it, probably don't block 'em. Unless you want to. It's up to you.

Best way is to watch someone else play and see what they do. For this, I recommend ChasetheBro -- he has consistently put out invasion content for years, and he's a good teacher as he explains what he does and why, while playing everything from meta builds to goofy jank. Hundreds of videos, check one out.

Otherwise, PvP is a harsh mistress. Chase is a better teacher than me, but in general:

-Know what a Roll Catch is. Roll Catching is when you hit somebody right at the end of their roll, smacking them before they can roll again. Some weapons and moves can roll-catch reactively, while most tools like Piercing Fang are good if you can predict the roll before they do it.

-Chasedown and Turn'n'Burn. Turn and burn is when someone is fleeing, and using attacks that punish aggression, while chasedown is attacking someone who is fleeing. Some weapons (usually small ones like claws and thrusting swords) are good at chasing, some ashes of war (such as flaming strike) are good at punishing people who chase.

-Poise is way the hell more complicated in PvP, as it's not just based on the poise you show, but which attack an opponent is using, and if your own weapon has any hyper armor. In general, a colossal sword with 88+ poise can usually muscle through most things uninterrupted.

I just found out about it today, and I am enjoying reading it.

I am very surprised they recommend as “Advanced Tactics” to have each player solo a boss to be efficient. I can understand this with low-level bosses, but I am not sure how this could be implemented with randos and no voice chat.

Good stuff in the materials you reference.

I picked up a few new things. Which is surprising for what I expected to be a fluff article.

> Colors mainly affect which chalices can use them, although some colors seem to have a greater affinity for some types of stat bonuses than others.

This is the first confirmation I've seen that colors do in fact bias the resulting roll.

> Unfortunately, any items swallowed by the tide on Day Two are lost forever.

This is something I've suspected, but hadn't seen confirmed (or thought to test) before.

> ... chests that drop from bosses generally have higher quality items than chests found in the overworld

Are they referring to the boss "loot spheres" as chests? If so, I think that's the first official description given to those. Though I'll likely not adopt that term myself, as it'll create too much confusion with actual chests scattering the world.

There's a few errors. The ratio doesn't matter in Recluse's cocktail as claimed, only the constituent parts (ie. 2 fire/1 magic is no different than 1 fire/2 magic).

They also falsely claim that the Cursed Sword is the only character skill with no cooldown, apparently forgetting that both Revenant and Recluse's skills have no cooldowns (not the same as animation speed).

I guess I'm a little more dubious of some of the claims (like color bias in relics) as a result of these simpler errors towards the end.

"The Whirlwind character skill can be used against light projectiles like arrows or fire pots, but it can also be used to deflect even larger projectiles, like the huge Magic Pots thrown from the fort battlements when guarded by trolls."

 WUT. I don't play Guardian much (yet), as I'm usually the Recluse trying to evaluate a staff upgrade while burning blue...

"For example, were you aware that touching the phantoms of other players helps fill up your Ultimate Art gauge a little bit?" O.o

>Wylder

>Wylder’s Sixth Sense passive ability can be reset by touching a Site of Grace or being revived.

Bruh, this is just wrong. Being revived does not give you Sixth Sense back. It only gives it back if you're revived by the timer running out and spawning at grace, but that is obviously a really important distinction to make. They don't specify if you're being revived by your allies or the game.

All runes that come from killing enemies are automatically credited to all players and chests that drop from bosses generally have higher quality items than chests found in the overworld, therefore, having a team that can defeat multiple bosses simultaneously is incredibly advantageous in terms of leveling and power.

- I guess I've been gimping my teams by trying to stick together... damn