And we're all very upset. The important stuff from the past week or so:

• Poise (i.e. resistance to flinching/staggering when hit) does not exist for players. You can, however, just change a boolean in the game files to turn it on. Don't, mind you. You'll get banned.
• Poise is fully functional for enemies and possibly NPCs.
• The "weapon skill" of talismans - Unfaltering Prayer - gives you temporary poise for the duration of casting a spell (hyperarmour). The exception is the Saint's Talisman, whose version of the skill is bugged and gives you nothing.
• Large weapons (Ultra Greatswords, Greathammers, etc.) also give you hyperarmour. Poise has no effect on how effective this is.
• The Wolf Ring has no effect whatsoever. The secondary effects from Yhorm's Greatshield and the Lothric Knight Spear also don't work.
• The weapon skill Perseverance still works.
• Poise has no effect on how stable you are when rolling. Equip load % does - the higher the better.

So for the time being, don't expect heavy armour to be as much of a lifesaver as it used to be. If you're using weapons that fall into the middle of the weight spectrum like greatswords, be aware that they are in a rough spot, balance-wise.

I'm not sure how much it effected my first playthrough but it's funny that I decided this game would be the first time I'd try a heavy weapon/armour build after playing mostly dex in the previous ones.

So basically, your weapon determines your poise, and even then, it's only the super-big ones?

Dark Souls 3 definitely seems to be a case of wear what looks coolest, use what feels best; there doesn't seem to be very much of a reliance on armour for much of anything.

I disagree wholeheartedly with this last part. Use whatever weapons you want. Min/maxing in Dark Souls is not something you need to worry about unless you're doing PVP or are on the later NG+ runs. It's much more important for regular PVE play to use a weapon you're comfortable with. I used regular Greatswords my entire run and very much enjoyed it. If I had chosen to use something I didn't like as much because of practically meaningless stat reasons I would have enjoyed the game less.

The funniest/saddest part of this is some dude literally changed a number from 0 to 1 in a field to enable poise. I'm guessing it was in the game for a long time, but From decided to disable it in the last few months of development for whatever reason. Perhaps the game simply plays too fast for poise, maybe it was too easy? I mean, the roll is almost Bloodborne levels of spammable. Either way, it's crazy that there are multiple items, armor, weapons and a section of the character menu devoted to a stat that might as well not exist.

This seems like a pretty big oversight.

I wonder if such a little thing could be the reason why this game feels so much easier than the previous entries.

@ll_exile_ll: It does sound powergamer-y. I've tweaked it.

Greatswords still S-rank in my heart though

This is lame. I mean, if they got rid of it they should at least wipe the poise stat from the menu and stop misleading people.

Yup, armour is hugely de-emphasised in this game. Not only do heavier armours generally not actually net many benefits but, as you note, poise does nothing aside from specific weapons which give you hyper armour (note: curved greatswords give you it too from memory, as do great axes I think edit: Oh, and greatclubs).

IMO it's a carry-over from Bloodbourne, as now all armour does is make up a spectrum on the cost-benefit curve of resistances vs weaknesses vs weight, noting that weight is a 3rd pillar which wasn't in BB, but is in Souls games.

Essentially, if you make sure you;

A) have SOMETHING in all armour slots (this insures you get the static level/stat based Resistance bonus from having something equipped), and

B) hit the breakpoint of 20% DR (the 2nd column of numbers next to armour on your stats) against the damage types you care about

you're good to go.

At end game I had 21-27% resist against every damage type and 100+ resist against every status effect. That's about as good as you can expect, and you can use multiple different combinations of armour to achieve this assuming you've got like 15-20 vit and Havel's Ring.

Miyazaki has said in a past interview that the game was balanced so that early / mid game difficulty was lowered compared to previous entries.

I haven't gotten the game yet but Boo! The balance of poise was just about my number one complaint about DS2.

You see zweihander is best girl. But in DS2 where poise was like 1/4 as effective for players and was like twice as effective for enemies compared to Dark Souls. So you would run into the situation plenty of times where enemies could take a two handed swing from my zweihander and not even flinch. While an attack with a straight sword would stagger you even in full Havel's and specced in poise.

Sure fine I'll allow something to take a hit from my sword that is twice the size of me without flinching. But at least allow me same option so we can go blow for blow. Or unless they are like a 15 foot giant they should should be staggered by my attack if not completely knocked on their asses. Otherwise you are completely removing the reward or the risk versus reward for using a slower weapon.

Hopefully that hyper armor is actually useful or at least makes it better than DS2 in that regard.

@ryuku_ryosake: hyper armour is clutch given how fast enemies can be in this game.

That said, considering I was stun locking some bossess with a normal one handed Brigand Axe, I think the favour remains strongly on the side of fast-ish small weapons. EDIT: For PvE.

@ryuku_ryosake Don't worry, big weapons give you plenty of poise in DS3. Strait swords pretty much out dps anything in the game, but you'll be staggered by everything. I used a curved greatsword and could pretty much trade blows with most things except some ultra greatswords in pvp. I actually like the change to poise being decided by what weapon you are using.

Well this is very lame to read. Going out of my way to use heavy armor in this game, in part for that reason. I had been noticing it some but was hoping there was something I was missing I was gaining.

I still wear heavy armour just cuz it looks sweet as (Faraam!)... but yeah, it's pretty blatantly obvious that poise is broken given that you can be decked out in full havel's gear yet still stagger against the rat brigades.

Eh, I wouldn't say we're all very upset cause I personally don't really care. I do, however, enjoy the multitude of people going around evangelizing this poise thing as a make or break for Dark Souls 3. I love seeing people in chats and message boards be like "Wake up people! Poise is turned off! What are we going to do about it? Complain on the internet!"

I don't get what's going on with poise in this game. I don't know why rats can stunlock me while I'm wearing the heaviest armor. It would be nice if From or Namco or the Great Lord Miyazaki himself would tell everyone if this is intentional or some kind of error. But until then I'm left deciding if I'd rather deal with Estocs and Dark Swords, or everyone in full Havel's with Estocs and Dark Swords.

Since this has been confirmed, I guess it's time to start playing Fashion Souls III with my armor situation.

Poise works just fine if two hand a great shield.

I was greatshielding in the back third. Pity I didn't give vitality a proper look.

From what i read poise has a different function this game, it affects your ability to dodge out of the second hit but first hit always goes through. I forget the term but some weapons have an ability to not get interupted during certain parts of animation which is an effect the poise stat also had in earlier games. Im a dex medium armor character so i can only say what ive read about it as I've gotten stun locked to death more than ever before lol.

@dudeglove: Pro tip: you can't parry this shit.

@oursin_360: Both of those were tested by Juutas in this video. He released a correction saying no, those are actually tied to equip load %.

I put on my Black Iron set, and I went from staggering at one hit, to staggering after three or four. I think people are mixing up flinching and staggering. I've watched dozens of GIFs and videos, and it looks like Poise is working as intended.

I had a shit time fighting the Nameless King until I put on armor with more poise. I noticed that when I got hit, I recovered faster, fast enough to dodge his next attack that was constantly killing me. Once I changed armor I beat him within two tries.

Also, as a proud unashamed estoc spammer in many of my pvp fights, I've noticed that those wearing heavy armor are less susceptible to estoc spam than those wearing lighter armor.

In short, everything's business as usual. Some people will complain about poise because they prefer it work a certain way, but that's nothing new.

It does have an effect: it's there to confuse the player and specifically push them down the path of pointless stats...

...And isn't that what Dark Souls is all about?

This sucks for me cause I played fast roll dex in first Souls and wanted to give the medium two handing strength build a shot. I'm still going to go through with it but I can definitely see myself respecing to another fast dex build now. Seems that there are a lot more cool dex weapons in this one too.

Well that sucks, because honestly a lot about this combat just feels bad to me and it looks like it's because a lot of it is just flat out broken.

I noticed this after getting that wolf ring +1. I was getting staggered out of attacks by daggers still. This is kinda lame since I was hoping to make a pure melee heavy armor dude for my next character, but I guess that will have to wait until (if) they fix it. Has From acknowledged it? I mean if you can just replace false with true in the game files it can't be that hard to fix if they've been made aware of it.

I'm rolling a new character and restarting for the upcoming DLC.

Does anyone know if they ever "fixed" this? I know that From came out in May and claimed that poise was working as intended but that's clearly bullshit because of the number of items that reference poise.

I looked at the Steam community forums a couple of weeks ago and people were still complaining about it/defending it. So no?

@kasaioni: ugh, gross. Okay, thanks I guess I'll stick with light armor this time. Perhaps I'll try dual wielding this playthrough.

Aha! http://www.vg247.com/2016/10/17/dark-souls-3-getting-big-patch-this-week-will-make-poise-more-effective-more/amp/

Poise in this game works differently from how it worked in previous games. It's "hyper armor" that works in conjunction with big, heavy weapons. Basically, having a lot of poise in Dark Souls 3 allows you to attack with greatswords, great axes, etc. without getting interrupted, but only at certain points of the wind-up animation. It's the most noticeable in PVP where if you have a UGS and you're fighting someone with a straight sword. When both of you attack at roughly the same time, you won't get knocked out of your animation and have your swing cancelled even if your enemy lands on you before you finish attacking. There's an invisible meter that drains from getting attacked mid-swing, and if that's all used up, your strikes will get interrupted. The more poise you have, the longer this meter is.

So yeah, it is working as intended. Just not like it used to in DS1 and 2 which basically negates any sort of stagger even when you're just standing still.

Wow after all this time. I have been thinking about jumping into my abandoned game and this might be a good reason to. I had spent quite a bit in poise and was really bummed to realize it wasn't doing jack (or at least, compared to previous games. People can argue what it is doing but I think it's hardly useful based on what they say it's doing).

I purposefully didn't want to spoil the game for myself and so I avoided any talk about it online and that's what I got for my trouble.