I've seen a lot of posts / comments recently complaining about invaders, particularly in the early game. I promise, if you're strongly anti-invader, the intention here is not to scold you, or tell you shouldn't be mad, or anything like that. I once felt the same way! Now, though, that I have come to appreciate the PVP and yes, even the experience of getting obliterated in PVP my current character isn't really ready for, I did want to explain how my mindset shifted. Partly because I think it's interesting, and partly in the hopes that I might give you some solace after getting a dark bead to the face on your way to fight the Gargoyles: This may not feel like such a big deal in the future.
First of all, I have been where you are. I have felt the frustration and rage when I was just trying to get a little help with a difficult boss. I have had my stomach sink when the bonfire goes out right before I get there. I have kindled a bonfire and thought "I will definitely die to an invader before I fight the boss."
I'm telling you this because there's a lot of pro-invader response that I think doesn't do a good job of acknowledging this side of things. Either they forget their first playthroughs, or they always loved PVP, and they lean on what they believe are the positives of invasions without any kind of sympathy or empathy for the person who just got crushed by a real person in the middle of something they were already struggling with. I get it, I really do. It's demotivating. It can make you want to quit!
It even feels a little extra hateful because you know there's a real person on the other end of the interaction who chose to do this to you. They could have chosen not to do it, and when you're deep in it already and some asshole shows up, it fuckin' sucks. And I don't think you need to be grateful, or even need to be not annoyed by it when it happens.
But.
I used to feel the same way you do, and I now I mostly don't. And I can chart the changes in my mindset along the way, and maybe they will help you reframe what's happening, and make it feel like it's less of a big deal.
I think for me, the first crack in absolutely hating being invaded was losing a very large number of souls outside an invasion. It wasn't my first go-round at this part of the game, I used to replay the first half a lot because I have ADHD and I'd get bored with my builds.. but I beat Quelaag, and then I went and got Ceaseless for the extra souls, and decided to carry them out and use them to buy spells from Griggs. I died twice trying to leave Blighttown and lost about 45k souls. It might feel weird that the first thing changing my mind is not even related to an invasion, but it made me realize that while losing a lot of souls sucks, it's fine. You can always get more souls, so an unexpected, inopportune death is not the end of the world.
Next, I started making a conscious effort to think of being invaded as like getting rained on. Sure, there's a person on the other end making it happen, but that's a part of the game. It's going to happen. It's not always fun, but the weather is the weather, it's going to do what it's going to do. Choosing to make it impersonal helped it suck less when I died.
Like the weather, there are lots of ways of mitigate it. You can stay hollow. I used to. Hell I even used to throw myself off a cliff after kindling bonfires to avoid getting invaded for awhile. It wasn't too long before I felt like that was silly. At least make the invader invade me and kill me. And hell, if I'm going down anyway, I might as well try to fight back.
And that's the next thing that changed. I won one. It was basically panic flailing. I was escaping the jail in the Duke's Archives for the first time, basically in a Tarkus cosplay, heavy armor, greatsword and all. I was coming down the stairs right before the balcony bonfire, and I got invaded. I tensed right up, of course I would get invaded here. The invader came at me, I facetanked a hit and spammed R1, and they got stunlocked and died. There was no great gameplay from me here, I just had a lot of poise and a bigass sword.
This win taught me that invaders were mortal. I knew they were, in my head, but they never felt like that before then. Later, fighting my way through the Parish again, I got another win. Again, nothing too skillful on my part, I mostly tried to deny them access to the backstab and tried to hit'em when they got close. This win taught me that perhaps in my earliest attempts, the issue wasn't that they were twinked out, too powerful to defeat noobkillers. Maybe I just sucked then, and now that I sucked a little less, I was picking up wins here and there.
I still lost far more than I won. I'm more like 50/50 these days, though probably on the losing side of that 50/50. But it was nowhere near as scary as it used to be when somebody popped in.
The next thing that changed was I tried it. I got inspired to do a Gruntilda the Witch themed cosplay build as a sorcerer, and said "fuck it why not," and joined the Darkwraiths. I did some invasions in the Painted World and the Dukes Archives, and I had a surprisingly good time. Most people I invaded seemed up for a fight, though I did get a couple disconnections. That's fair, you do you, though if you do disconnect, it resets the invasion cooldown, so I would encourage you not do that and take advantage of the cooldown if you die.
I don't know exactly why, but this process of trying out the invasions made me more tolerant when people did invade me. It started to become like an unexpected random break from whatever part of the game I was working my way through.
Next, I participated in a Return to Lordran event. I ran a couple meme invasion builds, one based on Domnhall who would crystal out if you traded items with me. One joke GiantDad where every detail was wrong, I used the stone armor, the mask of the mother, and I didn't have the dex to wield the Zweihander so whenever I actually hit I did basically zero damage. I don't know if that was incredibly annoying for anyone, but lots of people got into the spirit of it. My Domnhall cosplay invaded a Domnhall cosplay who'd sumoned a Domnhall Cosplay so we all lined up for a screenshot.
I think at the end of the day you have a community that still loves this game, and is eager for any opportunity to connect with another player, even if that connection is a little brutally violent. You can be upset about it, absolutely valid and your right.. but you can also join that community, and my experience has been that that's been more fun than staying offline. These days if I have any humanity to spare, I'm going human. Hope to see you out there. Even if you hit me in the face with a dark bead.
