Good weapons in Dark Souls 2: Dual Caestus

Dark Souls 2 is a game that prides itself on making you die over and over and takes no mercy whatsoever. Wielding Dual Caestus is a technique that makes you akin to a boxer. So in a world that wants you to die, why on earth would you want to fight monsters and sword-wielding enemies with your fists? It seems like madness, but as always, there is a method to it.


The first thing to know about Caesti are that they are, in effect, leather boxing gloves. Because of this, you won’t be taking long, drawn-out swings like you would with an Ultra Greatsword, but you’ll still be dealing pretty decent damage and knocking enemies’ health off in rather big chunks. Once you get used to it and your character grows, it can be a highly effective build to use.

If you are considering using Dual Caestus, when making your character and choosing what kind you would like, the main things you are looking for are strength, speed and agility. Mainly your damage output will come from the L1/LB (depending on console) power stance combo. To make this effective your timing has to be spot on and you have to be willing to get right in the enemy’s face. You’ll want to make sure that you can take damage and survive as its likely you won’t always manage to avoid being hit every time. At the same time you want your speed to be getting you out of the way of danger more often than not too, so when choosing gear and equipment trial and error your way against ‘lesser’ enemies to find a good balance for you.


Basically using your fists will mean that more or less every enemy will have a good reach advantage on you. Therefore it’s incredibly important to be light on your feet. A crucial part in using this technique is analysing your foe’s attacks. Study them without getting too close if you can at first, then when you are comfortable with the timing it takes for their swing and the different attacks they possess it’s time to go to work. Once an enemy has started his attacking movement, until it has recovered from the full animation of that attack, it is vulnerable to damage. Therefore what you want to be doing is suckering the enemy into an attack, reading what the attack is, getting out of the way and then laying into them using the combo (L1/LB) as much as possible before they are set for another attack. Another key here is looking into how long it takes them to ‘recover’ from their attack (i.e. a huge swing from an enemy will make them susceptible to damage longer than a small swipe at you).


Considering all of that, you have to understand your own ‘recover animation’ time too. Once you have committed to an attack you are bound to however long it takes for that animation to complete. The easier thing about getting to grips with this is that you can practice your attacks in an open area against nobody and just study the recover times of them.

When evading attacks if at all possible you want to be doing it with your basic foot movement, i.e., not rolling. If you can’t avoid rolling to evade that’s not a problem, you’ll just have a smaller time frame to get in close enough to do damage and get out before you get smacked. Rolling has its own animation timeframe and you can’t attack whilst in the middle of it. It’s all about maximising the time you have to deal damage quickly and effectively.

For a better idea of how this fundamentally works, take a look at this video of a Dual Caestus build in Dark Souls...