Destroying Dark Souls 3 as a Pyromancer

If there was one game that was gonna rip me away from Final Fantasy XIV it had to be Dark Souls 3. Me and a group of friends set out to do some Jolly Co-op last Friday and since then I've played close to 25 hours of Dark Souls 3. This game has got me hooked, again.

After our co-op session I made it a point this time around to play the game differently than I have before. In the last post I mentioned playing with the Great Machete which is an awesome and fun strength weapon. I might continue that character and change the Great Machete for Yhorm's Great Machete which is just a more basass version of that weapon. That however is a built I've played many times before. Time to change it up!

I made myself a Pyromancer. This will be the first time in the history of Dark Souls that I commit to playing a magic character. Dark Souls has always been about the awesome responsive sword combat for me. Magic has always seemed weak and tedious to me but my god was I wrong about this. The Pyromancer is the pure definition of destruction.

I destroyed the first boss Iudex Gundyr without taking a single hit. I ate up almost 10% of his HP bar with every hit of Fireball. Knowing almost all of his moves by heart I rolled and dodged as he went for me and just spammed him with fireballs during his downtime. Easy peasy.

The early game went by in a breeze although the mechanic of spells needed some getting used to. There's quite a long cast time on spells and even the smallest hit will stagger you and cancel the whole cast. This coupled with the fact that the Pyromancer starts with very little Vigor (HP stat) it's very easy to die if you get your timing wrong.

Because of this I started off by leveling my Vigor stat until I had a comfortable amount of HP. I then went for the Attunement stat to get more FP (mana) and attunement slots for spells. When I had three attunement slots I started leveling nothing but Faith and Intelligence. These last two is what increases my damage output. With every level I get more destructive.

During the early game I rushed straight for the Pyromancy vendor in the Undead Settlement. This lets me spend Titanite Shards to upgrade my casting catalyst and make my spells deal even more damage. I also got access to a bunch of new spells. This let me become even more of a powerhouse than I already was. I did however have one shortcoming and that was the fact that I was running out of FP really fast. This meant I needed to find a good weapon to have a secondary damage source.

I mostly ran with the Broadsword that you find early on in the High Wall of Lothric but since I wasn't leveling any Strength of Dexterity the damage was pretty bad. I then remembered there was a weapon called the Dark Fist that's available in the early game that scales with both Faith and Intelligence. Getting this weapon involves completing one of the easier quest lines in the game involving Yoel and Yuria of Londor.

Yuria sells the Dark Fist for 10000 souls which is quite a bit in the early game but easy enough to come by if you farm a little. My game completely changed when getting this weapon. A bit later I ended up checking out some Pyromancy build guides and turns out most builds recommend using the Dark Fist.

This thing destroys. This is a weapon that makes your fists glow red and deal dark damage. I am now literally fisting and burning my way through this game as it was nothing. Bosses that used to give me trouble as a melee character are now getting absolutely destroyed by my fire spells and fists. The Abyss Watchers took me two tries and I usually take a little while to kill them as melee. Pontiff Sulyvahn if usually a big hurdle for me but this guy got rekt in two attempts. I only really died in the first attempt because I was trying to take screenshots.

I'm having so much fun playing this game in a new way. As I go through the game I'm also trying to finish as many quest lines as possible which is something I've never done before. I'll be making a post about that eventually. Just need to finish them first.

I'm about to go up against Aldrich which is a boss that's never given me much trouble. I hope he'll be a breeze with this build as well. This it's time to get down to Yhorm in the Profaned Capital and eventually tackle the Dancer of the Boreal Valley. That's another boss that tends to be a big hurdle for me. I'm excited to see if I'll smash her up this time.

Also I'm a deacon now. Behold.