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I'm a Pyromancer and I have Vigor 18, Attunement 13, Endurance 10, Vitality 9, Strength 18, Dexterity 14, Intelligence 14, Faith 14, and Luck 7.

The farthest I've gotten is Vordt of Boreal Valley and I haven't even gotten close to killing him.

I also have Hand Axe +2, 5 Estus, East-West Shield +1, a full set of Lothric Knight Armor (Red), a Great Swamp Ring, and of course, the Pyromancy Flame.

I'm sorry if I needed more details or if I had too many, but can anyone tell me what Attributes I should focus on? I suck at this game and I've been farming souls for 36 hours straight. If anyone has a suggestion, it would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Your attributes seem balanced to me, Ben's answer covers this part. If I may, some advice: You might be "fat rolling" (if your equip load is => 70% to your maximum load, your rolls get very slow), always avoid fat rolling; its better to roll into an attack (there are invulnerability frames, go through it) than blocking it. Don't bother upgrading your shield btw. Take a look at a video of someone beating Vordt to see what to do, then try to survive against him without attacking, then add attacks. Consider focusing on physical (vig, end, str & vit), its easier to start imo.
    – Pierre
    Jul 22, 2019 at 8:57

2 Answers 2

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In Dark Souls, Pyromancers are generally seen as one of the "DPS" classes.

In the original Dark Souls games, Pyromancy worked purely off the item called "Pyromancy Flame" which worked very similarly to many other weapons. The power of your Pyromancy depended purely on your Pyromancy Flame level.

In Dark Souls 3, however, they changed the Pyromancy Flame so that it worked more off your stats, like most other caster builds. However, because this works off both your Int and Faith, it does make reaching the full potential of your spell casting harder (soft levels of 40, to a maximum of 80 over two stats instead of one), but with the payoff of a higher overall potential.

Additionally, it is important to note that while most enemies don't sport resistance to fire, most of the more unique enemies do, and only a handful of them (like the Pus of Man enemy) have a weakness to fire. In these instances, it is important to have a backup option to be able to deal with these particular enemies.

In regards to damage dealing, while Intelligence and Faith contribute directly to your Pyromancy, Strength and Dexterity contribute to your ability to deal physical damage.

The starting equipment for the pyromancer includes the handaxe, which is a versatile tool, scaling off both Strength and Dexterity. It boasts a decent damage return, and can be two-handed, to increase the damage by 1.5 x your Strength modifier, and also has the "Warcry" ability, that can deal an additional 10% damage for 30 seconds. And an added bonus is that your Strength stat also adds to your fire resistance as well, which can come in handy.

Dexterity on the other hand is a more well-rounded stat, that contributes to all defenses and resistances (though at a much smaller return per level), but can also decrease your spell casting time (which stops at level 50). Unfortunately, however, this does interfere with the damage output of your handaxe (the 1.5x multiplier for two-handing and the Warcry ability work purely of your Strength stat), but if you use a Sharp Gem you can increase the bonus you get from Dex scaling, if you wish.

Ultimately, how you wish to play is completely up to you.

Dark Souls is a versatile game, and you can either play to your own strengths, or build a character that is specialised in a particular area. For a new player, Vigor and Endurance are important, as they contribute to your HP and Endurance bars respectively, but ultimately, with time and experience, they actually can become less important, as with timing and patience, players can often play the game effectively with minimal scaling in these stats.

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  • So basically the Attributes basically depend on how strong I want my attacks, how quickly I can move, and how I want my attacks to hit? (Sorry I'm a huge Dark Souls noob and it takes me longer to catch on to this that most games. Might just be because the gameplay is so different.) Jul 22, 2019 at 5:16
  • It does take some getting used to. I suggest spending some time on the wiki, it is really informative :)
    – Ben
    Jul 22, 2019 at 13:00
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If you have no idea how to play any class, I suggest you selecting any build available online and trying to follow it. For example, these are top results for "ds3 pyromancer build" from google - 1 , 2.

If you want to create some build yourself, just chose whatever weapons and pyromancies you like and invest in attributes until you are able to equip it.

Then if you want to burn everything with pyromancies, invest everything into intelligence and faith, until hitting soft cap 40. Because pyromancies damage scales with these.

If you want to focus on buffs, then I suggest using Power Within and Carthus Flame Arc. As soon as you can use them, you can switch to any other attribute - either those you weapon scales with, or general survivability/ utility attributes.

If you want to mostly use your melee weapons, just focus on attributes that benefit your weapon most. Right now you are using Hand Axe which has base D scaling with Strength and Dexterity so either of them will have the same effect on your damage. You can check how scaling can change with different upgrade paths here - Hand Axe wiki. If you have any problems with health or weight limit or stamina, you can throw some points into Vigor, Vitality, Endurance. Personally, I think huge HP pool doesn't matter much in Dark Souls - you cannot face tank every enemy, so it's better to just learn to avoid damage at all by rolling or blocking or parrying.

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  • I don't only use pyromancies. Usually I only use pyromancies when there's a tough monster that I want to get their health down before attacking to make it go by faster. I mainly use light attacks with no buffs. I just time my attacks and then just go ham when there's a chance. Jul 22, 2019 at 5:20
  • @KerikoKraft I've updated my answer with some tips about attributes for weapons.
    – arghtype
    Jul 22, 2019 at 17:15

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