Dark Souls 3 update coming to adjust poise

From Software and Bandai Namco will release a patch for Dark Souls 3 later this week to prepare the game for its first expansion, Ashes of Ariandel. That patch will also come with myriad bug fixes and balance updates, plus a change to one of the game’s most notorious stats: poise.

According to Dark Souls 3’s most recent patch notes posted to the game’s Tumblr, From Software has “Adjusted poise values across the board. Poise is now more effective for heavier weapons and armor.”

Poise has been one of Dark Souls 3’s more confounding character attributes since the game launched earlier this year. Players initially thought the poise stat had been effectively “turned off” because the attribute didn’t behave as it did in previous Dark Souls games (in short, poise increased the player’s resistance to being staggered or stun-locked in the original Dark Souls, but weapons and armor with high poise stats didn’t provide the same benefit in Dark Souls 3). As it turned out, however, poise was working as intended by developer From Software, though the explanation for how it works in Dark Souls 3 is complicated.

Here’s more than 3,800 words detailing how Dark Souls 3’s take on poise works, if you’d like to know more.

It’s not immediately clear how big of an impact Dark Souls 3’s poise tweaks will have on the game’s combat, or how far From Software is willing to go. Some popular player theories speculate that the change will not be akin to From Software flipping the poise switch to “on,” and will instead be a subtle change that only players who wield heavy equipment might notice. But Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki didn’t sound particularly pleased with Dark Souls 3’s implementation of poise and said he was willing to adjust how it worked.

“This isn’t something we are particularly proud of,” Miyazaki told Kotaku in July. “With how things are handled now, it can be improved and this is an agenda item we’ll be working on in the future.”

For a look at what else is changing with the version 1.08 update for Dark Souls 3 — which drops Oct. 21 — check out the full patch notes.