I’m doing a build using the Uchigatana as my only weapon. Mostly 2 handing for more damage. Wondering if taking Dex to 99 could be worth it, or if points would better be spent on Vit and End. for context, i’m bandit class, default strength to wield uchigatana (14) and i’m only investing in Vit, End and Dex. 99 dex sounds awesome even just as a flex, but is the damage noticeable? or essentially wasted points? i try to cap out my characters at 125 in case of pvp
It's a waste of points if you're only concerned with weapon scaling. It does improve cast speed up to 45 but that's not very impactful for PvE.
The much better option for your build would be to level faith for Sunlight Blade. You could also level strength but you would need to get new weapons for it to be worthwhile.
The difference between 40 dex and 99 dex is 420 attack rating and 454 AR. Not nothing but not very relevant either. For context and to give a sense of scale, 30 dex has 368 AR. You are spending 59 levels for 34 more AR.
Going past 40 dex isn't useless but it is not worth it.
https://soulsplanner.com/darksouls/weaponatk
very helpful, and i appreciate you posting the source as well. thanks for the comment!
You're welcome :D
In a situation like this where you go to meet the requirements for weapons/equipment or soft caps .. do you basically just resort to putting the rest in HP & stamina ? Is there any viable situation where a stat is over 40/45?
No aside from like....
You wanna use Smoughs hammer + a shield LOL... That's about the only time it would "make sense"
At that point, yeah go into hp and stamina, or if your weapon is buffable get working on 25 int or faith for cmw/sunlight blade
Buffs are a good choice if you have everything you need for a weapon already.
past 40 dex is diminishing returns, not worth it at all, if anything you could go 45 to cap casting speedfor fast pyros like great combustion and black flame to true combo after a kick for pvp
You can put your stats into the Mugenmonkey character planner.
According to this a +15 Uchigatana has an attack rating of:
So is an ~8% increase worth 59 levels? I mean, it's probably slightly be more than 8% once you take defences into account, but likely not Much more than 8%.
The other questions is, what else could you do with those 59 levels? Let's just say a lot. Like, you couls get to 50 INT or 50 FAI and a few levels in ATT and have a fully-leveled spell-sword build (which are the highest damage output builds in the game). That would give you significantly more than 8% extra damage, as well as a whole lot of utility from other spells.
If you do go for a spellsword build, you actually DO get a slight increase to your casting speed by having a higyer DEX. Your casting speed increases between 35 and 45 DEX, so you could put 5 extra levels in and it would make a difference. If it's just for PvE I probably wouldn't worry too much about this, but for PvP it can make the difference.
From what I've gathered 50 is the hard cap you generally want to stop at for any build, so long as you're comfortable with other stats. So once you've gotten the stat requirements to wield the blade you want you put some in stamina and vitality to keep yourself alive and attack longer. Once you're comfortable after that you can increase dex up to 50 but after that there's no point. You're better off putting in strength for a little boost to damage, since most melee weapons benefit from strength as well even if they don't scale amazingly with it. If not that then more vitality or stamina doesn't hurt. You generally only want to 99 a stat after you've gotten everything else, except for resistance(or attunement, faith, and intelligence if you're going for a straight melee build). Once you've gotten vitality, endurance, strength, and dex to 50 then you can pump the rest of the way to 99, for a melee build anything else is a waste of points and even if you don't get amazing damage boosts after 50 it's not like every little bit doesn't help.
You should try making it a Chaos Uchigatana instead. Just get the bare requirements to wield it, upgrade it down the Raw path wild only leveling mostly HP and some Endurance. Once you beat Quelaag, go for ceaseless discharge then book it to the chaos ember.
Then give it to Vamos, downgrade the raw blade then into a flame one and then a chaos blade. Then just run around with 10 liquid humanity on you and have fun.
Haven’t checked but surely he’d get less damage this way not more?
Chaos is usually pretty good damage, but it's split damage so you'll end up doing less after accounting for defenses. It's best used when your build needs those levels in other stats. For example, the classic GiantDad build uses the chaos upgrade so it can pour more levels into health and carry capacity.
There never any reason to go down the raw upgrade path, though. Even with minimum stats you'll usually do more damage with the regular upgrade path.
Yeah I'm not 100% sure on the whole raw weapon tree but I've read in the past it's supposed to be okay up until you get access to +15 weapons. Meaning if you have the large shards and don't want to invest in str or dex you use raw for a little while. But again that's just what I've read. 🤷♂️
I think that’s about right. So a great option if you want to use those stats elsewhere, but won’t out damage the normal +15 weapon with the right build.
Pretty much! I was honestly surprised just how much you can tank with a ton of HP and heavy armor. I have a character with max giant armor and 40 levels in HP to help in the O&S fight and Ornstein can barely tickle me.
But also, putting Chaos on a bleed weapon goes extra hard on bosses that are weak to it.
Edit: But also yeah- I noticed the damage drop off on a raw weapon pretty much by the iron Golem. That was the best time to switch off of it.
Yeah I'm pretty sure you will get less damage but the trade-off is having more survivability. Good for a new playet who might want to invest in more HP but definitely not optimal for damage.
That being said, I've come across a few Invaders while helping others out and the extra HP and defenses from the humanity along with the extra damage with a chaos weapon has helped me power through them a lot.
You’ll get big attack boosts by investing in faith and getting sunlight blade and/or darkmoon blade. Power within also fantastic, and there’s the RTSR if you’re ballsy.
Particularly worth it if you’re going into NG+ (which you’d have to do anyway if you wanted to use both buffs).
Faith isn’t my vibe, I ended up grabbing Power Within and putting 2 points into attunement, will probably end up putting my leftover points into endurance :D
Honesty, keep it in mind for a future run, particularly if you ever thought about trying for the high NG+ cycles. You do insane damage and it remains a dex build at heart. You aren’t using offensive miracles, just buffs to boots your melee damage. It’s an absolute blast.
Anyway - power within is great. Gives a noticeable damage boost and the health drain is pretty minimal. Best of luck
You won't get big returns going past 40. Going to 50 might be okay. I found that leveling strength higher could be situationally worth it because some weapons require 50 STR to wield, and also 2-handing grants the STR bonus so you could get 99 virtual strength if you had 66 and two-handed. But it's still not a huge difference from 40 I don't think. Really depends on how high you are leveling your character.
It's also worth noting that 45 dex grants you the max spell casting speed, since Dex has a hidden bonus to cast speed. If you have plenty of HP, Endurance, and high Dex and wanted to spend more points, you could always put points into INT, even if it's not a lot, and use a spell like Great Magic weapon to buff your katana and add more meaningful damage that way, with only a handful of points in INT, rather than pumping a lot more DEX for a pittance in extra damage. If you have low INT (anywhere from 12-20 or so), the Oolacile Ivory Catalyst is a good choice. If your INT is higher, it's likely that another staff is a better choice than the Oolacile one.
going to 66 on a pure Strength build can be fun, cuz 2 handing gives you 33 virtual levels. definitely not OP, but feels like a chad move.
I do uchigatana on all my souls games and dex cap is 50 that's too OP even on dlc, I'd say start a secondary stat instead of wasting souls
According to ChatGPT the difference between 40 to 99 dex is 30 dmg in the uchigatana. Definitely doesn’t worth going above the soft cap, is way better to invest in vit and end.
I get that people are downvoting you because they hate AI. But to clarify, this is correct. 40 vs 99 Dex is 34 damage for a fully upgraded Uchigatana. Definitely not with it
Downvoting is justified, using AI for fact-finding is foolish, bad advice, and is tech illiteracy.
Is the AI giving you a correct fact or hallucinating? Who fucking knows. You have to fact-check what it says, at which point, why not just find a community resource where somebody put in the research, so you can be more confident in the answer.
Generative AI is fine if you're completely lost and you want a compass for doing your own research. Using it for fact-finding and then stopping there is misunderstanding of what generative AI is actually capable of. Yes, sometimes it's correct, but so is my broken clock.
don’t know why people are downvoting you: nothing you’ve written is an opinion, so do they disagree with objective facts? 🤷♀️
Its correct, but so is a broken clock twice a day. The problem with ai is a lot as while it can give correct answers sometimes, it has lead to more errors and mistakes when wanting to know something that a wiki, a simple google search by doing a simple scroll, old reddit threads or asking reddit, or just pulling the sources its finding to get the best accurate information possible. For example, asking the google ai if acid surge works on ds2 bosses says no, and chat gpt says yes but it applies poison to the bosses…but not only did meaty jesus’s video on his ds2 two shot video disprove it for a select number of bosses, but i also tested it to see if it was a lie and acid surge does affect bosses like mytha by applying a defense debuff that can be stacked, so its an unreliable source of information when asking for game information.
Didn’t knew about the AI hate hahaha no problem though