As any Dark Souls player will tell you, one of the of the most important stats in the game is poise. It’s the stat that helps you withstand hits, saving you from a frustrating, stun-locked death. In previous games, players could increase the stat in one of four ways: adding points into adaptability, wearing certain rings, casting pyromancies like Iron Flesh, or wearing heavy armor. However, in the latest game the poise stat doesn’t work the way it did in the past.
All of the ways described above are still in the game and still increase the player’s poise, but it doesn’t seem to do anything as this video shared by Kotaku will show you.
In the video, the player is wearing Havel’s set, one of the heaviest sets in the game, and in the starting area these low-level enemies are sending his character recoiling back with each hit. That shouldn’t happen. It doesn’t mean that the stat isn’t present in the game, as Kotaku explains, the stat is there, it’s just turned off. Many have wondered why the stat works the way it does; some have theorized that it has something to do with the new weapon arts that were added to the game, some of which could temporarily increase your poise, or, in this case, turn it on.
From Software has been notoriously quiet about it, even saying to Kotaku that the stat is working “as intended” and leaving it at that. But Kotaku’s Patrick Klepek had a chance to talk to series director Hidetaka Miyazaki and while he didn’t actually give a reason or explain why the stat works the way it does he did at least confirm that it wasn’t working properly.
When asked the question Miyazaki said that the current condition of the stat isn’t something that he and his team are proud of and that they will be addressing the issue at some point.
This isn’t something we are particularly proud of. With how things are handled now, it can be improved and this is an agenda item we’ll be working on in the future.
Kinda vague, but at least he acknowledges that there is something wrong.
From has a habit of being vague about what its updates do to the game, with most of the patch notes saying that something has been tweaked in some wholly unspecific way. So expect to see poise quietly fixed when the DLC comes out later this year.