Daus, you should try and upgrade weapons based on the class you intended to be.
Drake sword, although good at the very beginning of the game, is only hurting you now because the stats for that sword does not scale.
Lightning Spear is actually one of the best weapons you could have at that stage of the game.
Say you wanted to make... a Samurai.
Iaito +10 |
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Physical Damage | 176 |
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Parameter Bonus | B | (0.84 mod) |
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Other | Critical: 100
Bleeding: 300 |
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Normal +10 weapons, say the Iaito from Blighttown which has 176 DMG and a B Dex parameter bonus, are about as high as you would have at Blighttown. Let's say you picked the Hunter class and are level 40 (20 VIT, 20 END, 8 STR, 32 DEX), with that weapon you would be doing 235 DMG per hit after the mod calculation (but before calculating the defense of your target).
That isn't that great, but it sets you up for greater things in the future. Now, look at your Drake Sword. At it's normal base level it will have 200 physical damage, if you used the scales you've found you might have... 5-8 so far, you could increase the damage up to 300 but I will tell you why you shouldn't. Drake sword does not have a Parameter Bonus, this means it can not scale, this means it will always do 200 damage (before calculating the defense of your target). This means that a Drake Sword... is weaker than a regular common +10 weapon you could have already.
Now, let's look at the lightning spear people have told you about.
Lightning weapons, like the Drake Sword, have no Parameter bonus either. However, they overcome this by copying the physical damage to lightning damage.
Spear with a normal lightning modifier has 160 Physical Damage, and 160 Lightning Damage. This gives it basically 320 Damage before resistances. If your target is strong against lightning it will lower the lightning dmg a bit, but the same can be said with targets strong to physical damage as well so it shouldn't come as a surprise. Still, with this weapon alone you jump to 320 damage, and you don't need to put points into STR or DEX (just enough to use the weapon) so you're free to put points into other stats.
You can make your own lightning weapons when you reach Anor Londo. You'll need a regular +10 weapon, so if you were the Samurai I gave an example of before, you could take your +10 regular Iaito blade that you would have by Blighttown and make it into a Lightning Iaito once you reach Anor Londo. It actually has the same stats as lightning spear as well, so you would go from 235 damage after calculating the mod to 320 damage from a single enchantment.
Hope this helps a bit, the system was so confusing for me until late into my first playthrough and it is very important that you understand the system and how it works. You don't need to know the Parameter modifier, that is something people figure out through testing or something and you can just look it up online, like at
DarkSoulsStats.