Best Class to use in Dark Souls 2

Dark Souls 2 is insidiously lurking just around the corner, so what better way to prepare than to give you all an overview of how best to embark upon your quest?

For those who have never played Demon's Souls or Dark Souls, the first thing to be aware of is the difficulty level. You will die, and die an awful lot. Don’t be discouraged by this because it happens to everyone. Instead of getting discouraged or frustrated, pay close attention to how and why you died and the mistakes that led up to your death. Most importantly, when in combat, you should be watching the enemy’s movements and looking for patterns in the animations and their attack patterns. The idea is that you learn from your failures and thereby convert death into wisdom.

Let’s delve into the starting classes and the character builds that you can strive towards throughout the game. The starting classes are as follows:


 Character stats in Dark Souls 2 and what they do

Vigour
Increases your maximum Health.

Endurance
Increases your maximum Stamina.

Vitality
Increases your maximium Equip Load.

Attunement
Increases your number of Attunement Slots and also improves Casting Speed.

Strength
Imparts a scaled increase in weapon damage and increases the Guardbreak Damage of Strength-based weapons.

Dexterity
Adds scaled damage increase to weapons and increases the effectiveness of Poison and Bleed effects.

Adaptability
Grants bonuses to defence and multiple aspects of your character’s mobility.

Intelligence
Provides a scaled increase to weapon damage and boosts Magic and Fire damage and defence for both spells and weapons.

Faith
Adds scaled damage increase to weapons and increases Lightning and Dark damage and defence for both weapons and spells.

General Tips

The first thing to keep in mind is that there is no standardised method for getting through this game easily. In that respect, you are relatively free to choose your own path through the game, though some particular early game choices may benefit you in the opening stages.

Generally in the early game it can be a good idea to focus on Dexterity rather than Strength, which is more of a late game consideration. The reasoning behind this is that if you go for Strength in the early portion of the game, you will inevitably be carrying around heavier weapons, making your movement – and by extension your rolls – significantly slower.

Concordantly, another good skill to increase early in Dark Souls was Endurance, as it increases your Stamina, which is extremely important in tough battles. Your Stamina depletes when you roll, backstep, run, block, and attack. As such it can be extremely damaging if you find yourself devoid of Stamina in a close-combat situation.

The Resistance stat from Dark Souls has been replaced by the Adaptability skill in Dark Souls 2. Adaptability gives you a bonus to all types of movement (which includes everything from rolling to raising your shield), as well as a bonus to your defence. Combined with Endurance, this skill has the potential to be very useful indeed in making a quick, evasive character.

Although how to increase your stats in Dark Souls 2 is entirely up to you (and depends greatly on your particular class and personal strengths/weaknesses), a good rule of thumb to follow is:

Melee-based characters
Increase Dexterity and Strength, depending on your personal style.

Magic-based characters
Increase Faith and Attunement.

Hybrid characters
A spread of Vigour, Vitality, Dexterity, Faith, Endurance and Adaptability. Again, base this on your personal play style and assign importance to your weakest skill areas.

Adaptability will be a good stat to consider raising with any character type, being that it increases both speed and defence, so if you find that you are really struggling through the game, it may be prudent to give a boost to your Adaptability stat.

You can continue on to find all of the starting stats for each of the classes right here...

Dark Souls 2 will be released on the 14th March 2014 in the UK for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Do you have any hints or tips for Dark Souls 2 classes? Let us know in the comments section!