Dark Souls III

- MP is back under the name FP. Spells no longer have a number of casts and instead use FP.

- Every weapon now has a skill that you activate by hitting L2. They differ from providing buffs to changing your fighting style.

- For gifts the Fire Gem is a pretty decent starting item. The life ring is the only non consumable gift you can get.

- Certain enemies are weak to fire and even the lightest tap with a fire weapon will cause them to writhe for a few seconds allowing you to get extra hits.

- There's knee deep water that slows you down. Bring a dagger and use it's quickstep weapon skill to get through quicker.

- Having trouble with a NPC fight? Use a rapier/estoc since they don't have poise and you can easily stunlock them.

- Do not worry about saving Titanite shards & Large Shards. At certain milestones in the game enemies start dropping them like candy.

- Bows like the past souls games can result in cheesing a ton of ambushes and encounters.

- Unless you're big on No Spoilers, spoil yourself on the whens, wheres and what-fores of NPC quest lines. They are beyond "save Solaire by joining Chaos covenant and killing the maggot" levels of convoluted. Some are mutually exclusive, some end in merchant deaths, some are relevant to the ending, some you need to be constantly embered to catch, one in particular involves killing or not killing an actively Chameleon'd NPC and a few others involve a good amount of backtracking. Particularly obtuse ones:

Anri and Horace, Yoel and Yuria, Siegward, Sirris of the Sunless Realms, Hawkwood the Deserter.

- Dark pyromancy tomes and Dark divine tomes should go to Karla, the merchant you'll pick up from Irithyll Dungeon. Cornyx simply won't take Dark pyromancy tomes, and giving Dark braille tomes to Irina and then buying the miracles they unlock will lead to Bad Stuff happening. Feel free to give all of the sorcery scrolls to Orbeck. Definitely give him at least one before

defeating Abyss Watchers.

- Boss souls get spent at Ludleth of Courland after giving him the item you get from killing Curse-Rotted Greatwood. Most boss weapons are free, but a handful of powerful ones will cost up to 10k souls. Boss armors, and armors of particularly tough enemies, can be bought from Shrine Handmaiden.

- Note that killing Curse-Rotted Greatwood before getting the Mound Makers covenant will break it for the first half to two-thirds of the game. You will need to proceed with Sirris's quest line or wait until NG+ to grab it.

- NPC invasions require you to be embered and to have not already killed the area boss. Since these usually provide great loot, you'll want to stay embered for good stretches of the game, or at least until you find and kill the area invader.

- Like the other two posters said: Poise is broken. Rolling and poking is the new meta, and is generally a good plan in PvE combined with bow and arrow cheese.

- Be cautious when using that cheese on big enemies. A lot of their attacks have great vertical reach and clip through the environment. The Pus of Man enemies (black snake guys) can hit you on ledges high enough to need a ladder.

- Multiplayer scales with soul level AND with the max level of reinforcement on any weapon you have. There is no reason to rush for chunks when all your potential co-op partners are at +3 or 4. At +7 you will start matching with players at maximum reinforcement, so you may as well go nuts.

- Setting a password to play with friends (or at least other jerkoffs who also have the password) removes restrictions on summoning.

- NPC summons hide some of the gestures, and at least one is needed to peacefully obtain a cool armor set:

Summon Great Swamp Cuculus for Old Demon King and make sure she survives. Afterward, the Spotted Whip and Cornyx's Set will be back at his cage in the Undead Settlement.