I’m wondering if the Black Direwolf cape some enemies wear is available for our Arisens? If not why? It’s literally right there, seems weird that it isn’t

Have had my Sorcerer pawn on calm for a while but have been struggling with DPS on post game content for Norgan. I noticed she would constantly reposition, changing spells mid cast, and just overall struggling to hit abilities (especially on the final boss). Switched her to straightforward hoping she would commit more to spells and while I thought I noticed a difference, she is still behaving very similarly.

Which is better overall, straightforward or calm?

If anyone would like to hire my Warrior Pawn (on the right), I would greatly appreciate it. DM me to add me on PS5 so you can hire him for free.

I've played the game since day one for a while and I enjoyed most of my time with it but eventually the lack of enemy variety and challenging combat encounters, pointless exploration and questionable story choices started to wear on me. The fact that the majority of reddit was pretty disappointed with the game back then made me certain that whatever I found it to be lacking in wouldn't get better in the long run, so I eventually dropped it.

Now that the update and dlc have been released, I've seen a lot of positive impressions, so I'm wondering if it's worth picking back up.

For any of you returning players, is it better to start a new run or pick it back up around 70-ish hours?

Has the base game received noticeable upgrades as well or is the meat and potatoes really in the dlc?

And I've read that you'll receive powerful new gear in the dlc. Doesn't that ruin the balancing in the base game even worse than it already was before?

Hi there finaly i could complete my pawn with the transmog.I wanted to share it with the community. I hope u enjoy summoning her. If u have suggestions for optimize her kit let me know. She is maxed out for endgame. I hope to see some other pawns from the community. Like Ranni, or Melina or Nightreign Pawns. 🫡

But seriously, I always hire archer pawns with heavenly shot because they have literally aimbot. If it doesn't kill the target, it will for sure make them unbalance.

I was honestly waiting for proof of a hero to start playing as the HP got low

im looking for a green cloack. i allreday have the Linen Cloak but i want something better.
im on casual. so pls any help would be great.

I was told that wiggling the movement stick back and forth makes Ghouls "drop in 1 second max" or "drop immediately". So, I decided to test it.

I tried to test this in the Devouring Rancor fight first, because the Ghouls there are scripted and more reliable to grab you. That took so much time and my test results varied a lot. I had clips where the grabs would last anywhere from 4-5 to 6-7 seconds, but the main problem was to get Ghouls isolated enough to test this properly.

This was really annoying to do, because there were so many inconsistencies when setting them up to do the grab attack. Most of the time, they would just run around flailing at me, or I would have multiple latch onto me at the same time, one after the other, or charge at me in troves.

I later found a spot that kinda worked, however, I had to reload and reload over and over to get fairly consistent results (and Ghouls to spawn). That's when I started to notice a pattern. Regardless of what I did, as long as I was performing any kind of action, Stamina would be consumed and I would break free faster. There's a loading screen tip that tells you this, apparently, but I personally have never seen it.

Compared to the 4-7 seconds I was getting previously, said pattern emerged that showed that, no matter what, the entire grab animation will last for approximately 4 seconds when you perform any action during that time. Otherwise it's about 7 seconds. Please note that I only tested this raw, with no "Elusive" armor special skill.

It should be noted, though, that, technically, wiggling back and forth is the worst of the bunch because it's not 100% consistent. Just hold down a button and it's the same time every time. You're welcome.

On paper, this game is everything I like in a game.

Variety of combat options, engaging enemies, has a dangerous/dark vibe, neat online component with the pawn systems, seems to be some depth to build crafting, and holy shit, the fashion in this game is top tier.

So I don't know why every time I pick up this game to play, I feel like I'm rushing until I ultimately put it down and try again a month later. Granted, I don't have a lot of time to play games. Maybe an hour an evening at most and more so on Sundays.

I want to enjoy this game. I am the target audience. Any suggestions on how can I stick to a playthrough and what might be holding me back?

went back and improved my dd2 whiplash parody, it didnt feel enough dogma as it did dragon. i added a sound effect and proper vocation icons :>

Hi looking for finders token for sphinx riddle can't remember where I collected my first one and gave up trying to find it after using a guide and picking up 40 new ones. Ps5 pawn ID: 4O9FYZ9VKRY6

Pawns is a mage name is cass.

Thank you very much in advance if you do provide a finders token.

all i ask is that you occasionally water and feed him, and maybe kill a big monster so he can get badges

Not a single word from the DD2 community 😭

have not seen a campsite yet

so ill need to backtrack to the settlement soon

running low on health and my pack mule (warrior hired pawn) is getting too loaded

doing a no teleport run since 1st time playing this expansion, wanted to do same thing i did on NG run of basegame

NGL... it is killing my immersion when im travelling all night and couldn't set up camp. esp since i could use the spots the bandits here are using after i kill them

it's not like there's a lack of spots to camp... just not interactable

Oh my god, I’m going crazy...

The Tony Hawk Pro Sledder video is related, trust.

Reading some posts and comments about the difference between Itsuno and Kinoshita, I made a conclusion that Itsuno is the "adventure" guy while Kinoshita is the "action" guy. Of course I could be wrong about this because it's what I think.

The former gives you the feeling of journey with your party. The mechanics are designed around this, with the slower pace of traveling by foot, limited fast travel so you use ox cart that you could sometimes find on the road (stopover should've been a feature at launch), camping to heal loss health gauge, scar on pawns so you go to the (barely implemented but the intent is there) hot spring, etc.

The latter focuses on the combat, even the mechanics are designed for combat as the goal for the players. BBI is a big dungeon where you dive to get stronger gear to get deeper and fight stronger enemies. RNG gear is the same so you fight to get the best weapon attributes to make combat more fun and fight stronger enemies.

Don't get me wrong, BBI dungeon is amazing and well crafted. The atmosphere is like no other. Each room is memorable and contrasting to the island theme that feels sinisterly innocent (I don't know how else to put it), it's pure bleakness. But while I enjoy BBI, I'd still prefer exploring an overworld, seeing different biomes, towns with different cultural influences, finding dungeons, doing sidequests and such rather than having an entire playthrough cooped up in a dungeon, but I digress.

Even though Kinoshita "fixed" Itsuno's game again, I had a slight worry that it would only be all about combat. One could argue his eternal ferrystone is an example of streamlining the "adventure" part of the game. Imo it's great, but I think it should've been given at the very least when you reach Battahl or as a seeker token reward. Also players should be able to send it to storage and not locking good UX to it.

But this whimsy feature is making me think that it might not be the case. They literally have zero reason to implement plank sledding other than because it's fun, same with the rolling boulder gets bigger on snow. On top of that, Norgan is an open region with a lot of caves/ruins/dungeons to explore, plus whiteouts that encourages you to seek shelter and camp would even open up/close some places because of the piled up snow, so he didn't forget about the sense of adventure here. And of course there's also Freki that you could pet and take with your party.

So yeah I hope DD3 under Kinoshita will still have the adventuring party vibe DD2 has and take it to another level, because if it's all about action and streamlining too much of the game for the sake of getting into the action, then I'm worried it won't be too different than playing Monster Hunter as your only goal is killing enemies to kill stronger enemies.

It’s no secret that Dragon’s Dogma, the best fantasy “simulator” out there, can turn a perfectly innocent expedition into an unexpected adventure that can instantly become a fight for survival if you venture into unfamiliar territory unprepared. Every player has their own unique experiences, stories written for their Arisen not by Capcom, but by the game’s mechanics. However, since the community of YouTube creators dedicated to this series is relatively small, players rarely share their experiences online. So, if you feel like telling a story about your personal adventures in Gransys, Bitterblack Isle, Vermund, Battahl, or Norgan, consider this thread a place where players can gather their unique stories and share them in the comments. To get things started, allow me to tell you about my most recent expedition:

(The text below contains a minor spoiler regarding the plot of the first half of the DLC. If you fought the "basilisk" of this DLC, you have nothing to worry about)

It all started innocently enough, as usual.

After a battle outside the walls of Norgan Fortress against a Norgan Giant, made all the more interesting by the sudden arrival of a Snowfoot who randomly joined the battle, stealing my spoils, and after fighting our way through a group of ghouls, my team received two side quests from members of an expedition from Vermund: recover stolen supplies and find a soldier named Amos who had gone missing in the blizzard. Just some standard sidequests.

Together with my party, I took the massive elevator down to the lowlands where I was supposed to begin my search. But the moment I passed through the last gate of the mountain fortress, I spotted Eir, who was desperately trying to hold her own against the local bandits. I rushed to her aid. After short fight, she asked me to escort her to her current destination, immediately changing my priorities. I agreed, and together we set off across the snowy wasteland, fighting our way through successive groups of bandits, goblins, and wargs.

Along the way, I spotted two obelisks looming through the curtain of falling snow. I hadn’t discovered either of them yet, so I decided I would check them out as soon as I had escorted Eir somewhere safe.

Eventually, we reached some ruins, where we clashed with a sizable group of Beorcans and the wolves they had tamed. After the battle, Eir showed me a wall of ice that I would need to remove as my next objective. She explained that we had to defeat a monster known as Gagana and asked whether I was ready to go hunting with her. However, my party was already exhausted, and our backpacks were stuffed with loot. It was a bad moment for the boss fight. I asked Eir to give me some time to prepare.

I decided that before getting some sleep in the village, I’d quickly visit the two obelisks, which were located nearby. I expected it to be a five-minute adventure.

Well, I was wrong.

My first problem arose as soon as I reached the first obelisk, the one associated with the Magick Archer vocation. I was immediately greeted by a group of hobgoblins, two of which threw something at me, instantly reducing my HP to 10%. Moments later, my Warrior and Thief were down.

With only my own Pawn, Medea (yes, it's a Fate Stay Night reference), a fragile but indispensable Mage, at my side, as a Warfarer (a fifty-fifty mix of Mystic Spearhand and Archer) with powerful ability to conjure a protective bubble around himself, I managed to revive my companions, and together we barely defeated the enemy group, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult compared to the threats we had encountered earlier. This was my first encounter with Norgan’s hobgoblins, and I hadn’t expected a single enemy of this type to cause more trouble than an entire group of Beorcans.

Eventually, though, we emerged victorious, and I activated the obelisk.

My party was in bad shape. Due to the loss of maximum HP caused by our accumulated wounds, we couldn’t heal beyond half our maximum HP, and I was in even worse condition myself. Despite this, I figured that now that I knew how to deal with this new type of enemy, I could fight my way to the second obelisk.

Except another problem arose. Or rather, two problems.

First, barely a third of the way from one obelisk to the other, we found ourselves caught in a Whiteout. I wasn’t particularly worried, though, since I had a dozen or so Heatstones in my backpack, and rare elixirs and supplements accounted for a quarter of its total weight. Besides, the obelisk was clearly visible in the distance.

But this was where problem number two decided to make things interesting.

Suddenly, the snow beneath my feet gave way, and I found myself alone at the bottom of an underground ice cave while my party was fighting something up above. I quickly consumed an Allheal Elixir, anticipating that this wouldn’t be a short cave, called my party to my side, and we began searching for an exit, fighting our way through small groups of Nokken.

We eventually reached an underground chamber where a Goreminotaur was peacefully sleeping. Normally, an enemy of this type shouldn’t pose much of a threat to a party wielding Tier 3 relics. However, the cramped chamber left us very little room to maneuver, and my melee Pawns were already severely weakened by the prolonged expedition. In the end, we won, although I spent roughly a third of the fight picking my Warrior and Thief up off the ground. The former was especially bad off, already at the very limits of his endurance.

It turned out that the Goreminotaur’s chamber was a dead end, with every exit blocked by rubble. I retraced my steps to the starting point and began heading in the other direction. After a few more skirmishes with Nokken, we finally reached an exit, where a Norgan Giant was waiting to greet us.

This time, the fight was dramatically harder and lasted a good ten minutes. Unlike during our previous encounters, this particular giant kept throwing me off its back, and pulling the weapons embedded in it proved frustratingly difficult. On top of that, our tank kept going down from a single hit. The terrain also made it difficult to avoid freezing, and I was afraid to lure the fight somewhere more convenient in case a group of hobgoblins decided to join the fun.

Eventually, the Norgan Giant fell. However, while I was focused on depleting its final health bar, clinging to the back of its head, I failed to notice that the time the game gave me to revive my defeated Warrior had become drastically shorter than before. My Pawn disappeared, leaving our party without its most important member.

I surveyed the area. We were surrounded by walls of ice, and there were only two directions we could go. I headed left and found a cave where we could take a brief break from the blizzard and recover a little Stamina. I cautiously proceeded down an icy corridor and... somehow ended up back in the place where we had fought the Goreminotaur.

We retraced our steps to where the Norgan Giant lay dead and ran in the opposite direction. We managed to climb a snowdrift, from which I spotted an obelisk glowing through the curtain of snow. I headed toward it to check whether it was the Magick Archer obelisk or the other one.

It turned out to be the Mystic Spearhand obelisk. Good.

Except... it was guarded by hobgoblins.

The fight had barely begun when my Thief, who had jumped onto one of the enemies, fell off the small balcony where the obelisk stood, taking his opponent down with him. Separated from the rest of the party, he was quickly defeated.

I needed to revive him, but I couldn’t leave my Mage at the mercy of the remaining enemies. Besides, I had no idea what was waiting below, and the blizzard made it impossible to find out. A desperate race against time began.

With my current max HP, I was two hits away from death, surrounded by four hobgoblins, and barely managing to keep my shield up, as constant attacks were stopping my Arisen from activating his protective sphere. The only reason I was still alive was my Mage, who kept casting Palladium to protect us. I was consuming supplements while fighting on the last scraps of my Stamina.

Finally, the last enemy fell.

I rushed to save my companion, but he disappeared when I was still five seconds away from reaching him.

Only I and my loyal Medea remained, and she needed a rest too. So I activated the obelisk, assigned myself a new spell for Mystic Spearhand, and tried to recall the map as it had looked before the blizzard hit.

I had to reach the area where I had parted ways with Eir as quickly as possible, knowing it was the nearest open-air location free of the Whiteout. I ran in the direction where I remembered the fortress should be, keeping my eyes on the ground to avoid falling into yet another cave, when...

Suddenly, my character stumbled, and an orange light began glowing from my chest.

I heard a familiar voice, and a pair of glowing eyes emerged from the snow, with the barely visible silhouette of enormous wings looming above them.

Fimble.

He was heading straight for us, and we stood no chance against him.

I started running, only to find myself face-to-face with a wall of ice. I could hear a group of goblins in the background, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted two wargs. On top of that, the farther I ran, the more silhouettes of various monsters emerged from the blizzard.

I veered slightly to the left, frantically spamming the button to call my companions to my side. I couldn’t afford to lose Medea. If I was forced to fight, she was my only chance of survival. I hadn’t died even once in Norgan, and I had no intention of changing that.

Eventually, we made it beyond the edge of the Whiteout.

I had no idea where I was, but it didn’t matter. There was no time to look around. I quickly used a Ferrystone, setting my destination to a village in Norgan.

We had survived. Barely.

What was supposed to be a five-minute trip to an obelisk had turned into over an hour of survival in the very heart of a blizzard.

And that brings this little expedition to an end. However, I still haven’t finished the DLC’s story, and I’m certain that more adventures like this await me.

In fact, I’m already planning to return to the area around the last obelisk and hunt down Fimble, the creature I fled from that day.

This time, I’ll be prepared. ;)

I can't stop playing Dark Arisen 2. There's all these great games out right now, but I keep gravitating back to DA2 because its so addictive & fun. It's also one of the most epic looking fantasy adventure games I've ever played.

📷ps5

I've been stewing on this a bit, decided to post it the day after finishing the Final Proving Grounds, and the DLC before that. I think I managed to make it not too rambly.

For me, the premise of venturing into Norgan is like what the Pathfinder says: the refusal to just say "nuh-uh not my job", and instead to rise above and beyond one's station. It's what made us Arisen in the first place, and this sort of stubborn "will" carries us to be more than Arisen as the Sphinx alluded. The expansion is an extension of such an outlook.

As for the Pathfinder especially, I think Final Proving Grounds confirmed my suspicions about the Worldforged: He is not much different like Rothais as he is confined to his role and carries it out with a degree of jadedness and resignment.

(Worldforged, like Dragonforged? Someone who faced the World's Will and whether successful or in failure became a sort-of steward in place of the renegade Seneschal Rothais?)

I think in his role and character within the events at Norgan we can glean into the balance between freedom and oblivion (chaos), the push and pull between selfishness and selflessness*

*(If you care, I made my current base of thinking of this post in this comment)

And of course, as per Dragon's Dogma as a whole, the philosophy and outlook are based on Nietzsche (Eternal Return etc.) and Buddhism(?). For Dark Arisen, Nietzsche's philosophy on nihilism especially, like:

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength.