One of the things I absolutely love in these games is that you can pretty much guess what an enemy’s weaknesses are by looking at them. Dude made of fire? Use ice. Dude made of ice? Use fire. Dude made of flesh? Use bleed.
Most people seem to understand this, but there’s one other thing in these that I constantly see people having difficulty with and that is dudes made of rock or metal. Your swords, axes and spears won’t really do much to these guys. But they do have a weakness: blunt weapons (IE Strike damage). The only stone guys in the game that don’t really seem to follow this are the new Forge Golems, which have their own special weak point.
Things made of stone or metal include:
- Imps
- Gravebirds
- Radagon
- Every type of golem
- Iron Balls
- Every type of Marionette
- Divine Beasts (not easy to tell by visuals; but in the lore, the humans underneath are called “sculpted keepers” and if you look carefully, they have the same kind of stone-grey skin as other rock monsters)
- Crystellians (these guys are actually used as a tutorial for the advantages of Strike weaponry!)
- Iron Virgins (although their insides are still fleshy, so you can just bait them to open up and use slash or piercing weapons effectively too)
- Falling Star Beasts
- Graven Masses
And in addition to these: Skeletons or anything visibly showing bone (which is pretty much all undead/Those Who Live in Death as well as Astels). But they are also super weak to Holy damage.
So if you find yourself struggling against any of these types of enemies, just switch to a hammer of some kind for that encounter. Especially the grave birds in the Shadow Realm; strike damage makes these things not even a threat as even the smallest strike weapons keep them completely stun-locked.
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Strength build enjoyers have plenty of options for strike damage with clubs, fist weapons, hammers, great hammers and some colossal weapons, but if you’re a Dex build (and shame on you) you might have found that there aren’t a ton of non-bladed weapons to pick from and you struggle with the Smithstone Miner basic enemies.
Fear not, the flail weapon class primarily scales with dexterity and makes for a great secondary swap weapon for when you’re trudging through the various tunnel dungeons looking for those sweet sweet smithing stones. You can find the basic flail super early in a chest in Limgrave near where you get the map segment and Night’s Cavalry enemies that use it also drop a somber version that has higher base damage and better dexterity scaling. That should make those dungeons significantly easier to manage as long as you peel the enemies one at a time and manage your stamina properly.
Int builds are also not completely out of options. The stone enemies are very weak to magic. Carian Slicer or any gravity sorcery should make short work of them.
Not to mention Fist weapons like the caestus scale equally with str and dex so it’s good for either. And the DLC added a lot of new dex weapons, one of which is hella fun: the dry leaf arts. 😃
I never even thought about that, I usually stick to a single weapon per playthrough. I don’t think I’ve ever used a sword.
The only sword I have ever used through an entire playthrough in any of these has been the broken straight sword in DS3 just because it’s the weakest thing in the game besides your bare hands.
Swords are boring. lol
I found this out on my first unga run i was unga bunga-ing and i like three shot the crystalians triple boss. Made me laugh because i was expecting a super long fight.
