

If you want a harder game, you can make an area harder, and you get rewarded with more soul drops from dead enemies and a chance to reloot all items. There also is an item called Bonfire Ascetic that can be used to revitalize a bonfire: it respawns all item orbs on corpses, refills all enemies' lives (including reviving bosses), but also increases the area's difficulty one NG+ cycle. If you're really struggling at getting past some area, but keep fighting the enemies there, eventually you'll be able to proceed safely. (Some enemies have more, some have less, but 12 seems to be the standard). This area mostly is there to teach you how to block and circle around enemies, I'd say :PĪs for the dynamic difficulty: enemies have a limited number of lives, kill them 12 times and they're permanently gone.

Heide's Tower gets much easier with a shield and blunt weapon - the rusty knights' attacks chip away incredibly little stamina when blocked, and blunt attacks easily do twice as much damage to them, at least with unupgraded weapons.
