u/CrimsonTyphoon02

I got a little bit into Act II in my first Honour Mode playthrough--bumrushed to Minthara and Wulbren, basically--before I doubled back to do the Creche. Noticed Halsin wasn't in my camp, but didn't make anything of it.

When I get back to Act II, I notice that brother bear is still not in camp. Huh. Odd. Long rest, still not there. Fast travel around to a couple of other spots in the Shadow-Cursed lands, check camp, and sure enough, when I go to the Reithwin Town campsite, who do I find but Halsin. Neither revivify nor Withers are an option here, of course. Guess there'll be no shadow curse removal for me!

Bro's built like an ox but died like a dog left in a hot car :L

On Lae'Zel's first turn in the duel, she misty steps over to me, but instead of attacking, she uses a scroll of feign death on me and I'm incapacitated instantly with no save. The combat ends, but the duel doesn't, and I have to lie there for a minute while she slowly saunters back to her tent before I can wake up, sneak over there, and finish the fight.

I've seen some folks in the threads on here about Reggie's ongoing DS2: SotFS struggle sessions saying that Scholar made DS2 gankier/less fair/whatever, and that's never rung true to me. I think a few side-by-side comparisons will back up my point here.

Starting with a brief video on the group aggression point, you'll notice that significantly more of the enemies in the original DS2 hordes attack at once. This is a QoL improvement that I've almost never seen anyone point out, but it means that, in Scholar, even if you fuck up and get the entire constabulary on your ass, the situation is less dire than it would have been in the original.

As for enemy placement, despite its reputation, Scholar is actually generally less ganky than the original DS2. Here's a collection of a few examples to start us off, including highlights such as the bonfire where you just get shot as soon as you stand up in original DS2's Lost Bastille and Harvest Valley's gate just putting two giants like five feet apart from each other. Scholar is still full of enemies, of course, but they tend to be spaced a bit further apart, and they often have their aggro ranges reduced, such as in the infamous Shrine of Amana.

And while there absolutely are gank encounters like the Lost Bastille Clown Car in SotFS, they're generally placed in such a way that they can be mitigated or avoided if you pay attention and use the environment to your advantage. For instance, you can lure the soldiers in the Clown Car out onto a narrow bridge so you can hit multiple of them at once while only the ones in the front can hit you, or you can either blow up the gunpowder barrels scattered around the room yourself or trick the soldiers into whacking them to thin the herd.

On that note, let's talk ambushes and traps. Again, there absolutely are ambushes in SotFS, but a lot of the time, they're better signposted for observant players than they are in the original DS2 (the room where you just walk in and instantly start getting shot with poison arrows in OG DS2 being changed to a room where that only happens if you open the chest sitting in the middle of the room is a great example of this). I like this: the game rewards you for being observant, and, in a few cases, sort of subtly nudges you towards noticing the trick, like when it introduces you to the spiders in Brightstone Cove in a room that's dark enough that you might already have a torch out, in which case you'll instantly learn that, in this version of the game, they retreat in fear from fire.

My favorite example of one of these signposted ambushes is in one of the earliest rooms in the game. In Scholar of the First Sin, as you approach the Forest of the Fallen Giants, you have a couple of encounters with hollow soldiers. In each of these encounters, there's at least one hollow soldier lying on the ground as if dead that will get up and start attacking you once you get close. If you pay attention and spot the pattern, when you climb up a ladder and see a tree surrounded by "corpses" like the ones you've been getting surprise attacked by, you'll know to tread carefully, and you can pretty easily clear the room without trouble. If you didn't pay attention... you'll learn the lesson the hard way.

This is, incidentally, an encounter that some of SotFS's detractors frame as an instance of unfair enemy spam with no counterplay (generally in videos where they don't show the part where they ran around like a chicken with its head cut off aggroing every sleeping enemy in the room).