They only give shards the first time you kill them iirc.
I used deep axe in the beginning. Was quite good without upgrades, so I had time to try out all weapons!
Nope, they have a random chance to drop titanite shards when killed. It's a fairly decent chance as well. I think I averaged somewhere around a 15-20% drop rate when I was farming them.
Found the Deep Axe as well as the claymore.....but now I am stuck with weight issues
! I have lothric knight armour and Helm, coupled with claymore, with no shields, no other weapon, weight goes about 78% !!!
Switched to Deep Axe, but it's damage doesn't scale, and I can't tell where the "Dark" damage comes into play. My starting axe as a pyromancer does more basic damage and due to scaling.
The dark damage is just non-physical damage. So if the weapon had 100 physical damage and 100 dark damage it would do 200 total damage. It's decent against average mobs. Really good against mobs weak to dark damage and not so good against mobs strong against dark damage. Also not good against mobs strong versus slashing damage, but conversely it's good versus mobs that are weak to slashing damage.
It doesn't scale with stats, but it has very high base damage and scales strongly with each level of reinforcement. Basically it's just a Dark infused weapon (you'll eventually be able to infuse any element you want onto a weapon if you desire). But when infusing an element to a weapon you lose stat scaling in favor of flat damage scaling when reinforcing weapons (+1 to +10). In some cases damage may scale better this way than with stat scaling. Raw infusion does something similar except it's all physical and not split between physical and elemental.
It's especially great early game if you don't want to put too many points into strength, dexterity, intelligence, or faith. And instead want to pump up Vigor (HP is always good), Vitality (so you can use heavier weapons and armor), and Endurance (so you can attack/dodge more before running out of stamina). So for instance a RAW, and to a slightly lesser extent elemental infusion build that focused on Vigor, Vitality, and Endurance would be an early game PVP monster as damage comes purely from reinforcing weapons. Also makes it very strong in PVE early game.
As for weapon load. If you are good at dodging or have a really good shield (100% block and high stability) you can skimp on armor to lower weight. Just make sure you have a piece of armor in every slot no matter how bad it is. If you leave one slot with no armor, you drastically reduce your damage mitigation.
I usually just wear whatever armor I think looks cool and that I have enough Vitality to wear without going over 30% or 60% weight. Depends on how far and how quickly I want to be able to dodge. 70+ I think puts you into heavy rolls for dodging which is bad. Unless you can mitigate a LOT of damage.
TL: DR - Weapons without stat scaling instead have greater scaling when reinforcing (+1 to +10 or +1 to +5)
Regards,
SB
