lol O&S? yeah those guys are the bouncers at the souls club, first time’s the hardest but it gets easier

expect the ornstien rush at the start.

you mission is to manage distance, your back should always be face at the angle firthest from both.

now you have a choice to make, depending on what reward you want.

A. the better over all reward requires you kill Smogh (large lad) first, which is trickier, because he is slow, and ornstien will be attempting to rush you down. you objective is to orbit Smogh, you MUST maintain facing with both. but do not attempt to try to get kite distance away from orstein, just use smoghs lard size to body block ornstein by a close orbit. dont mind ornstein if he is behind smogh so much, focus on smough. keep close to him so you can orbit with less work, but watch for his telegraphed attacks. you can punish him more consistently then you can ornstein because his attacks have slow wind up and recovery.

B. If you just want this fight done, kill ornstein first. its easier. you can kite smough entierly when fighting ornstein, but just watch for his rushes as he likes to reach around ornstein. ornstein is very fast on recovery, so only hit him a coulle of times when the opportunity arises, do not over comit your stamina. if you are low on stamina focus on positioning both enemies and getting distance from smogh. ornstein has less hp so you get more work done for less.

after the first is dead the other will switch up, but the fight is your standard boss deul. just testing your composure and remaining allowance for mistakes/healing.

generaly, abusing the pillars in the duo phase can give you a moments breath, but its mostly a trap and may seperate the two. also you have been hording those resins, because you have the gamer disease. after the first fight or two when you manage to get one of them to less then half start useing them, and dont look back. THIS is THE fight. you will have better options in later fights.

all else fails, summon. as much as elitests will argue, it more important you get hours in and see the game. it will get you to improve. and you will learn to love this fight. you can always return for your annualy mandatory playthrugh.

praise the sun \[T]/

It’s my opinion that O&S are the hardest boss fight in all the souls games. They probably aren’t actually the hardest, but for the position they’re at in the game I think they are. At that point you’re into the game, but you haven’t mastered it. It’s also hard to travel around to get upgrades, because they’re the thing gating teleportation.

All the other games that may have bosses that are more challenging, they’re later in the game and/or optional. You’ll also have more options available.

I think DS1 is one of their best games, but O&S are a bit of a mistake I think.

Hit anyone here up and I bet they’d love to sun-bro you through. I’d suck at it, but I love the games enough to replay them with anyone who wants to try them.

STR build 101:

Find the heaviest weapon you can. Bonk.

Find the heaviest armor you can. Anti-bonk.

Ugga ugga big bonk is not something you build for.

You can, but such planning is clearly indicative of DEX thinking. All Bonk requires is the bravery to face your foes, and bonk them.

You simply start, grab the biggest, heaviest, most bonky bonk stick you are blessed with within 15 minutes of playing.

It will be there. The bonk is always there, waiting to be recognized.

You grab it and you pump your numbers into enough str to bonk really fucking hard with it.

You then go and bonk.

In the course of bonking, you learn you need to sustain a minimum amount of bonking yourself, in order to bonk the best you can bonk.

You then hold up three fingers, that is all you need. That is more syllables than ‘bonk’ has, so for every time you say bonk, you put a point in STR and another in VIT.

This continues until you feel you are no longer being bonked before your own bonking takes place.

Depending on how many syllables you think ‘bonk’ has as you were chanting it earlier, you will end up with roughly 1 VIT for every 3-4 STR.

That is all the thinking you need. Even other bonk sticks, while plentiful, are optional.

The two builds I played were an int caster and a str big bonk. The caster had a much easier time with bosses but open world was more dangerous. The opposite for the str build, had to learn more timing and patterns for bosses but open world was a smash fest. Great sword in caelid is easy to get early and is pretty great, just pumping up str and hp/end and a little dex just to meet weapon requirements.

To build a proper STR character, the first thing you must do is level vigor to 60.

The great sword is a great early game weapon, you can also get the bell bearing hunters sword early on, although it is behind a boss fight. I also enjoyed ordovis’s greatsword

Try a lot of different weapons. Greatswords are fun, but big hammers are awesome too. I think the great club is easy to get early hammer

In my opinion, a true strength build uses clubs. Maaaaybe a mace if you want to be creative, but in DS3, for instance, the big wood club was the most fun. If in elden ring, go for funsies and start as a wretch to get the club, then eventually switch to the grafted greatsword (or whatever it’s called) at the weeping peninsula castle that you can get.

As you get to ranni or radahn, just use whatever makes the most satisfying ‘WHACK!’ sound.