Dark Souls was lightning in a bottle, and created the groundwork for an entire style of gaming that, prior to that point, just didn't exist.

Dark Souls II tried to change things.

While many people hate Dark Souls II for the changes, at the end of the day, DS2 is still a good Dark Souls game. You can see where FromSoftware tried to change things up from the DS1 formula to fix some issues, and you'll see some of the same issues that did not get fixed until even later.

The purpose of this guide is to help with the transition from Dark Souls to Dark Souls II. A lot of the changes are not intuitive, and frustrating to someone who, by the end of Dark Souls, was only dying occasionally to boss monsters. This guide will cover the most glaring changes that need to be explained or prepared for, and how to change your mindset accordingly to enjoy the game to its fullest.

Character Creation is largely the same, but be prepared for much lower stats overall. If you want to cast spells, you need to either start with a caster class, or be prepared to invest several levels into reaching the minimum requirements to cast spells.

The only attribute check in the game is an intelligence of 8 needed to talk to a certain NPC. Everything else is purely related to equipment and spell usage.

There are some new attributes that are worth mentioning:
Vitality - This affects equipment load by itself, with Endurance only affecting your stamina bar now.
Adaptability - Replacing Resistance, Adaptability improves all your resistances, but also affects your natural poise and, importantly, influences a new sub-attribute called Agility.

Agility is influenced by Adaptability and Attunement, and affects the number of i-frames you have during a roll, speed of item consumption, speed of raising your shield, parry windows, and a few other things. You can, in fact, improve your rolling in Dark Souls II. This will be referenced again in the Early Challenges section, but when you notice your perfected timing from Dark Souls is now different in Dark Souls II, this is why.

There is no starting gift that is not found elsewhere. The Petrified Something can be traded with this game's Snuggly for a random selection of rare weapons and rare upgrade materials, and is the best option.

Starting Equipment: You will have to keep your lousy starting equipment for a little ways into the game's first dungeon before finding better gear. This is especially challenging for those classes that start with broken swords. Be prepared to have a difficult time initially. About halfway into the first dungeon is a merchant that sells better weapons, and you will find a few basic weapons as item pickups as well.

Estus Flasks and Estus Shards: When you reach Majula, the first town outside of the tutorial area, you will meet a woman in a robe who is responsible for letting you level up. She gives you your first estus flask. Estus flask shards are found throughout the world, and each one can be brought to her to give you an additional flask.

You read that right. You start with ONE estus flask outside the tutorial, and have to find items to gain more uses. You can have up to 5 before finishing the first dungeon, however, so it isn't all bad, but again - be prepared. This isn't the first Dark Souls.

Sublime Bone Dust: This is the Fire Keeper's Soul of Dark Souls II. These increase the healing given by your estus flasks, up to +5 total. There are more than 5 of these in the game, and once you've gotten +5 on your flasks, they're a useless item.

Healing Stones: These are slightly uncommon drops from many common mobs. At the start of the game, they heal about half your health bar, but they are consumables and do not regenerate when you rest like estus flasks do. It's ok to use them, just ration them and use your flasks first. Again - it's OK TO USE THEM. They become much less relevant once you get your estus flasks up to a comfortable amount. Don't suffer needlessly early on.

Human Effigies: These replace Humanity from Dark Souls. You can use one anywhere at any time to restore your humanity, with everything that entails. You are freed from having to go to a bonfire to restore your humanity. They do not restore health. They are, like Humanity, rare-ish but farmable and ultimately unlimited in supply if you really need them, so don't be shy about using them.

You can also burn a Human Effigy at a bonfire. This DOES NOT restore your humanity, but instead gives you 30 minutes of disabled PvP and Co-op play, including NPC invaders. NPC co-op signs remain.

Durability: This is the biggest change in equipment to beware of in Dark Souls II. In Dark Souls, you likely never had equipment break on you until you faced a certain worm monster. In Dark Souls II, equipment will break regularly if you aren't careful.

Many early items have low durability. You can see an item's remaining durability if you look at the item on your equip screen, and it also has a little red bar under the item on the HUD indicating the percentage of durability remaining, like a health bar for the item.

When you rest at a bonfire, your durability resets to full. When an item breaks, it remains broken, doing negligible damage and handling differently. When this happens, it has to be taken to a blacksmith to be repaired. Repairing weapons is expensive, so be sure to change out what weapon you have equipped before it breaks. The same holds true for shields, armor and rings, though rings rarely take direct damage and likely will never break outside of special circumstances.

For this reason, it's good to have at least one backup armor set you can shift to if your primary set loses a piece or two, and several backup weapons. I had three broken straight swords for use in killing early game mooks so that my one good weapon was in good shape when I reached a serious challenge.

Rings: You can equip 4 of them now! It's great. Easily the best improvement choice of the game coming from Dark Souls.

Early Blacksmithing: The game's first blacksmith is locked out of his shop at the start of the game. You find the key to his shop partway into the first dungeon. Once you have unlocked his services, he has 10 titanite shards for sale, and some other basic equipment. Upgrade your weapon of choice, as this gives the best and most immediate boost to your damage output in the game.

Regular weapons upgrade to +10, not +15, in this game. You need 6 shards, 6 large shards, 6 chunks and a slab to upgrade a weapon fully. Unique weapons still only go to +5.

Notably, there is only one ember in the game, used to add elemental properties to normal weapons apart from the normal upgrade path (meaning you can have a +10 longsword that you then infuse to create a +10 fire longsword - no more elemental upgrade paths). This is not available until later in the game.

Other Important Early-Game Items:
-Silvercat Ring: sold by Sweet Shalquior in Majula, this item reduces fall damage, and allows access to some otherwise unreachable areas.
-Lenigrast's Key: key to the blacksmith's shop, sold for 1000 souls by the merchant Melentia halfway into the first dungeon.
-Pharros' Lockstone: There are 12 lockstones and 12 locks across the entire world. Each one allows access to unique loot. There is a lockstone available for purchase, also from Melentia, that allows access to a room in the very first dungeon.
-Frangrant Branch of Yore: There are 17 branches, and 17 petrified humanoids that either block access to an area of the map or give out unique loot. Notably, the pyromancy merchant begins the game petrified near Majula, and the final region of the tutorial area is blocked by a petrified zombie. One of these branches is for sale by Melentia.
-Covetous Silver Serpent Ring: Given by Melentia after you spent 10,000 souls at her store. Yes, the +20% Souls ring is available halfway through the first dungeon.

Combat Timing: As I mentioned earlier, the timing is different from Dark Souls. Dark Souls II introduced a mechanic known as Agility, governed by the Adaptability and Attunement attributes, that speeds up things like casting times, rolling i-frames, parrying effectiveness, shield block speed, item consumption times, and a lot of other speed-related things.

In theory, this means that you can focus on raising your agility and becoming nearly untouchable. In practice it means that you will spend the first several hours of the game unlearning the timing you mastered in Dark Souls and adjusting to the initial timing of Dark Souls II. If it feels like Dark Souls II has clunkier combat, it was by design. You can get the extremely tight controls and reactivity of Dark Souls back, but it takes some investment in some unusual attributes. Until then, just accept that you will have to master new timing for things.

Stamina: You start with low stamina, and it runs out frequently, and you get punished harder in Dark Souls II for running out of stamina at the wrong time. Especially in the very early game, when you have no good equipment, sparse healing and large mobs of small enemies to contend with, you will have to be very patient. This DOES GET BETTER as you get more healing items, better equipment, and more levels, but it makes for a really frustrating early game experience. Be prepared to die frequently in ways that seem unfair.

Mobs: As mentioned, there are a ton of low-level enemies early on. Think the Undead Burg, except you only have the broken straight sword up until the Taurus Demon, you can only swing it three times before getting exhausted, and there are twice as many undead running around. This leads to the biggest early game frustration - poor equipment, poor stamina, and lots of low level enemies all at once. Sometimes pulling them one at a time is impossible. Frequently you will have archers sniping while you try to manage two or three melee guys at once. Coupled with having to adjust to new timing in combat, and you may spend the first couple hours frustrated at what seems like unfair deaths. Again, this does get better almost immediately after unlocking the blacksmith, but until then, it's just not a fun time.

In Dark Souls, whenever you rest at a bonfire, all normal enemies respawn, with a select few special enemies remaining dead. This mechanic remains in Dark Souls II, but with a slight twist.

After defeating the same enemy 15 times, they no longer respawn. You can, eventually, clear the entire map of enemies. This has several implications:

1. If you're having trouble clearing an early game area, you can eventually kill everything permanently. That ambush with five undead mooks will eventually stop respawning if you manage to kill one or two each time you run there. Runbacks are less of a problem once the map is empty, but it can get very grindy and annoying if you have one area giving you trouble. Still, it means that there's some leeway in the other direction, given that you have to figure out how to do combat all over again in Dark Souls II if you were a master at it in Dark Souls.

2. You cannot infinitely farm. Eventually, you will kill everything enough times that you cannot go back to farm that one area or that one enemy over and over again.

This can be bypassed in one of two ways. Bonfire Ascetics are a new item that can be burned at bonfires to resurrect all enemies in an area, but at NG+ difficulty (or NG++ difficulty during NG+, and so on). This allows them to be farmed in the same way, only they are much stronger and drop more souls. And the Covenant of Champions - immediately available in Majula - permanently increases the difficulty of enemies and keeps them respawning forever as the key feature of the covenant.

3. Don't stress about losing your souls. Yes, farming is a little more complicated in Dark Souls II, but the requirements for leveling up in Dark Souls II are also much lower. You don't need a fraction of the souls at higher levels that you needed in Dark Souls to increase your attributes. So even if you find yourself regularly losing large quantities of souls due to one specific section, it's ok. Most people reach level 150-160 in their first game without the need for any of the farming solutions mentioned in #2.

4. For the very early game, this tendency to lose souls frequently can be frustrating. Get comfortable with saving up just enough souls to purchase the gear you really want, and immediately going to buy that gear. Remember that you can also pop those low level undead soul items for a small boost as well in order to purchase more expensive items that you want in order to reduce that initial stress of gathering sufficient souls before permanently killing convenient farming areas.

As a final note on new features in Dark Souls II, I want to touch on covenants. There are nine total covenants, and the mechanics are a little different. Notably, there are no penalties for leaving and rejoining covenants in Dark Souls II.

You can leave and rejoin a covenant endlessly, with no loss of covenant devotion level, contribution to the next level, and no barriers to reentry except leaving your current covenant. Furthermore, Sweet Shalquior in Majula will help you leave your covenant without needing to join another. Covenants are much more forgiving in Dark Souls II.

Each covenant's rewards can be obtained offline in a normal New Game file except for the two PvP focused covenants (Brotherhood of Blood and Blue Sentinels). Those capstone items are only available for sale in NG++. Everything else can be farmed or obtained without the use of PvP using only what is available in the game itself.

So if you need to leave your current covenant to join the Covenant of Champions to farm an area for souls, go for it. You can rejoin the other covenant at any time with no penalty. Want to try the arena feature? No problem. Want to do a long side quest in a PvE area? Go join Pilgrims of Dark. You can come back to your invasions after, no worries.

So there you have it - the biggest differences I found in my own playthrough going from Dark Souls to Dark Souls II. I hope you find this guide helpful in adjusting from one game to the next, as the differences are very notable early in the game and very frustrating for the uninitiated.

Remember - Dark Souls II is a really fantastic souls game, but there's also many reasons people never gave the game a chance. My hope is that, by giving you this guide, you might be a little more prepared for the most glaring changes and can push past that early game hump to get back to feeling like the king of the world.

I personally love the worldbuilding of Dark Souls II. Majula is the coolest area, and I love how FromSoftware created a hub town that can grow and improve based on choices made in the game. I love the NPCs in the game and how much depth they have compared to DS1. For all its flaws, Dark Souls II has a lot going for it, if you can just get into the game.

Thanks for reading my little guide, and I hope to find you sometime in game for a fun little duel or a quick boss stomp just for fun!

-Kenny