I've started a brand new build with a brand new strategy, and I learned something new. So far I've used pretty much exclusively fire or lightning weapons, or elemental weapons if you will. I decided that I wanted to make a character with a more classically medieval knight feel to it, so one that uses strictly physical damage based weapons. Hence I started a strength build.
Most weapons in the game, aside from elemental weapons, have some kind of stat scaling. They either scale off strength, dexterity, faith or intelligence. Weapons that stat scale have a letter ranking system for the stat a weapon scales off, where S is the best, A is second best, B is third best etc...For example, the weapon I'm using has a B rank for strength scaling, and an E rank for dexterity. All that means is that I'll get a bigger damage bonus for leveling up my character's strength, and a slightly smaller bonus for leveling up dexterity.
NOW, here's what I learned. I'd noticed before that some people had mentioned diminishing returns where weapon scaling is involved. I'd never put much thought into what this meant, as I'd never made a character that used stat scaling for weapon damage before. However, after having sunk 80 levels into strength for my latest character, and noticing that the damage for my weapon didn't increase at all after 50 levels, it hit me. Damage bonuses almost cease to exist after your stat reaches 50. So in other words I pretty much threw away 30 levels I could have put towards dexterity, or vitality (which would have been good seeing as I was dying a lot more with a lower vitality character xP).
Anyways, after pulling my hair out for a short time from realizing my blunder, I've box glitched this character (started a new game while keeping the old inventory) and am now armed with my new knowledge about how stat scaling actually works in this game. I don't think I'll be taking any stats past 50 this time, except maybe vitality or endurance...
Oh right, I forgot to mention how awesome sheer physical damage is. I think most enemies in the game have higher resistances to fire or lightning, and I'd never noticed before doing this strength build how much damage from my elemental weapons wasn't getting through. For example, the damage on a maxed out fire greatsword is over 600, but that's because it has a base damage (physical damage) of around 300, and then fire damage of around 300. The strength scaling weapon I'm currently using has a comparable total damage to that of the fire sword when you include the stat bonus from a decent amount of strength (40 or above), but it's all physical so the enemies are absorbing more damage per hit. I've been noticing things like one hit kills on enemies that used to take me 2 or 3 hits with maxed out elemental swords. All things considered, I would say that physical damage stat scaling weapons kick the crap out of anything elemental.
Oh and just for the record I am using a maxed out black knight greataxe. Of all the strength scaling weapons it won't deal the highest damage, but I'm pretty sure it has the best damage/speed ratio. For one of the bigger weapons this thing is insanely fast (not including the power attacks, which are actually some of the slowest in the game and are only really effective against very large, slow enemies). No sense in using a weapon that does like 800 damage when each swing is so slow you get torn to shreds before you can get one hit in edgewise.
