Into the Woods - Farron Woods, That Is

 I don't know, I guess I wanted to make a reference to Stephen Sondheim, the absolute legend of musical theater. I don't know exactly how the Venn diagram of theater nerds and video games lines up (though TTRPGs most certainly draw theater nerds). Anyway, weird forum for it, but there you have it. RIP Sondheim.

So, my DS3 Sorcerer has finally broken through to make a bit of progress. I took down the Curse-Rotted Greatwood and the Crystal Sage in short succession, actually using the ember from the former to summon help for the latter, which honestly made Crystal Sage a cakewalk.

I think when I first played the game it didn't even occur to me that there was a branching path here. You can go past the Sage to the Cathedral of the Deep, or you can go the passage to the right of the keep that leads to the Sage and instead go into the Farron Swamp, toward the Abyss Watchers. While I think it's definitely easier to start with the Cathedral (you'll need the doll from the Deacons to get into Irithyl anyway) I did benefit a bit from sneaking into the Keep and grabbing the Sage's Coal, which allowed me to turn my spare Mail Breaker into a Crystal Mail Breaker, which means it now does magic damage and scales with Intellignece. Getting it just to +1 was enough to make it nearly as good as my Fire Mail Breaker +2, and I think I actually got it to +2, so I now have a decent weapon that scales with my primary stat.

While I want to focus more on actual sorceries if I can, having something that doesn't run out of juice is definitely nice.

One thing I've found is that the Sorcery build is really fantastic for dealing with those heavily-armored foes that hit very hard. The two player-like NPCs that guard the entrance to Ferron Swamp went down relatively easily (one kept dodging my spells, but I could catch him if I baited him into an attack) and the Black Knight you can fight in the kind of right-hand section of Farron Woods was a cakewalk.

I'm pushing to get my Intelligence to 40, and then I'm going to start bumping up some of my other stats to qualify me for some weapons and, importantly, get some Attunement so that I have more FP to spend and more spell options at a time.

I also discovered the wonder that is Spook, which now seems like the logical way to rescue Irina of Carim, rather than what I've done on previous playthroughs, which has been to just try to find the one spot I can drop into that chasm and have a tiny sliver of health left. Spook prevents all falling damage, which is amazing (and I think also reduces the radius by which enemies detect you, which is nice.)

Anyway, I've made it to the second Cathedral shortcut, so progress is coming along there.