Liraxus wrote:
people keep saying it's terrible but I'm killing stuff in 1 to 3 hits with it that isn't a miniboss.
because for when you get it, it's the best option easily
however, as the game progresses, enemies get more and more health and higher and higher defense.
the drake sword has no scaling. it does the same damage regardless of how much strength or dex you have. meaning your stats don't matter. and very quickly stats start mattering a lot on other weapons.
like i said, it's a waste of time. it has a lot of damage when you're just looking at it, but most other weapons quickly surpass it thanks to scaling, which adds to their damage. kind of a good on paper, bad in practice type deal. you can upgrade a lot of the earlier weapons, even one you can get at the exact same time, the claymore, and they do way more damage and don't stop being useful. the claymore specifically can be used the whole game and never get bad, where as after quelagg the drake sword almost immediately starts being as effective as a piece of wet paper.
scaling is a big, big deal. weapons that don't scale aren't worth your time as a general rule, because any weapon with scaling can pretty quickly outclass it.
to put it into SPECIFICS
the drake sword, fully upgraded, only does 300 damage.
it will always do 300 damage once you hit that.
it will never do any more. ever. because it has no scaling.
and right now the one you're using is probably not even +1, and is just doing the base damage of 200. however, to make it as fair as possible, lets say you've upgraded it as much as you could by the time you reached quelagg. which i believe is +2. so you're doing 240 damage. whoopee.
however, lets look at just the basic longsword.
at it's base, it's doing 80 damage, with C scaling in both strength and dex. lets assume by quelagg you have 20 strength and 20 dex, which is even kind of low but bear with me. which means it's not doing 80 damage, it's doing 80 damage + 32.64 from the scaling. meaning it's already doing 112 damage the second you pick it up.
however, in blighttown, you can easily farm large titanite shards, and regular shards are cheap and easy to purchase, and you should have gotten the large ember. which means the maximum rating the longsword can have is +10. the longsword at +10 does 160 damage base.
so that 160 damage changes the scaling as well, directly doubling it to 65.28. which means the longsword is doing 225 damage. so by quelagg, the drake sword is already losing it's edge as a "good" weapon, and once again, that is assuming low stats. it is not hard, in fact i'd say it's even a bad idea, to not have at least 40 in either strength or dex by quelagg. and it's with a weapon that uses C scaling.
To compare with a weapon from the next area, Sen's Fortress, lets go with the Man Serpent Greatsword at +10. It will already be doing 220 damage, and has a B in scaling for strength and none for dex. lets say for accuracy with the longsword, that since it has no dex scaling, you've put everything into strength and so you have 40 strength.
lets actually lay out the math here
damage bonus = weapon strength * scaling * level
the weapon's strength is 220, the scaling is B*** at 88%, and your level is 40 which is 85%.
so we have 220 * .88, which is 193.6.
193.6 * .85 = 164.56 + 220 = 384
so the serpent greatsword at +10 is beating out the drake sword at it's maximum by a whopping 84 damage, which is actually a ludicrously large amount. mind you, they're two different weapon classes, but you can get the serpent greatsword within the first seconds of sen's fortress. and it's not even upgraded to +15 yet, where it's damage with scaling would become
536 because it boosts up to A scaling.
the drake sword is okay at the start if you're not upgrading anything at all whatsoever, but it's mediocre at best in mid-game, and in late game it's so laughably trash.
all it really does is waste your time when you could be hunting for new weapons. it's the easy way out for the first several parts of the game, and ultimately it just makes you worse than if you'd just picked up a slightly less strong weapon that would actually last way longer and learned how scaling and everything works.
***
Scaling uses S, A, B, C, D, E in descending order, however the actual % that a weapon scales by is way more nuanced. some weapons have higher C scaling than others, some weapons have lower S scaling than others. it's weird. the lowest a weapon ranked B can scale is 75%, and the highest is 99%. the maximum any weapon can scale is 200% on S rank. if you're looking at scaling between weapons, and they have the same rank but one is blue and the other is red, the blue one has better scaling. the MSGS specifically has a starting scaling of 88% as it starts in B, but i'm honestly not super sure if that increases at all before A scaling or what it's scaling is like afterwards, so ultimately i could be wrong and it could be doing even MORE damage at +10.