Dark Souls II: The Thread, AND the Game!

[Zevox]

It's part of the sadistic experience.

BS. It means that if I need to stop playing the game for a few minutes for something important - oven buzzes to tell me my food's done, phone call, someone else in the house needs my help with something, whatever - I can't do it if I'm in a fight. I need to either die or turn the game off. There's no excuse for that, it's just plain bad game design.

The lack of pause is part of the multiplayer aspect. You can, however, save and quit pretty much whenever you like and then resume playing exactly where you were when you left off. It's what I do if I need to pause.

Wait, what? I thought that the bonfires were save points. I see no save option anywhere in the menus. Where is this?

Magic use doesn't really tie in to your armour choice (beyond certain pieces of headgear). However mages are ranged combatants and thus generally prefer lighter armour for the mobility.

Speaking of, I'm running up against the weight of my stuff slowing me down, annoyingly apparently at the halfway point of my carry capacity rather than once I reach it. Should I perhaps be putting a point here or there into strength to raise my carry capacity?

As you've surmised, Intelligence followed by enough Attunement to give you a comfortable number of slots. Then you want Vitality and Endurance. Beyond that? You might want to meet the minimums for whatever melee weapon you favour. Dexterity has a (slight) effect on your casting speed.

Well, figuring out what weapon I favor is kind of the thing for now, since I've hardly gotten a chance to try them all. I've been using a Battleaxe a random enemy dropped, and it seems fine. I do want to try and Estoc I found, but need another point in dexterity first. In general, I'd say I'm looking for something with fairly quick attacks (at least as fast as the battleaxe), horizontal slashes (for striking multiple foes), and decent damage output per swing.

Dexterity helping casting time sounds quite nice actually, since those seem a bit longer than I'd like.

At the Firelink Shrine, if you go downstairs, then down the elevator, you'll see a sunken city. Follow the spiral stairs down, then you go to the right, toward the other tower. You should see a zombie lying down at the top of a staircase. Follow those stairs. They end in a death-fall, but before that there's a Mage Smith hiding in a little hole, who sells more of the basic spell.

Kind of poor directions, but eh.

Thank you so much . Went and grabbed the basic magic missile-esque spell from this guy, and it's already helping quite a lot. Not much damage, but 30 uses is so far better than the mere 8 fireballs I had before.

Kind of annoying that they have different casting "weapons" though, particularly since I can only set two items per hand. I'm stuck putting my pyromancy in my shield hand, which I'd really rather not do. I've got a shield that has 100% physical resistance now, so it's actually suddenly very useful, rather than the questionable one you start with that merely reduces damage.

Anyway, I've gone further, beating the next boss and ringing the first of those bells. The Gargoyle boss was actually not that hard. Probably largely because I'd gotten that magic missile spell, but even without it, his attacks seemed pretty easy to dodge. Things might've gotten hairy when the second one showed up if I didn't have that spell though.