Last time Fault the thief forged herself a +1 fire rapier and then died repeatedly to the game’s first non-tutorial boss: Vordt of the Boreal valley.
The basic problem is that Fault doesn’t have enough armor or HP to survive more than one attack in a row, which is unfortunate because Vordt’s fighting style involves a lot of combos where he uses one attack to knock you over and then hits you a second time while you’re standing up. All the estus in the world won’t do you any good if you go straight from full health to dead without a chance to drink it.
The obvious solution here is to just avoid getting hit in the first place but my fire rapier only does 40 points of damage per poke, dragging the fight out and giving Voldt lots and lots of time to pull off a two-hit combo. I manage to work myself up to something like a 90% successful dodge rate but that’s just not enough when the other 10% is lethal.
I finally burn one of my precious early game embers which gives me just enough bonus health to survive the occasional two-hit combo. Fault can now survive long enough to fire poke Voldt to death.
This victory gives Fault a ton of XP souls which, according to my build rules, I have to use to level up luck. Bummer. But at least my luck is finally high enough I can start boosting my vitality for some extra HP!
This was much funnier in my head.