The Dark Souls 3 poise mystery may have been solved

Poise! It's real, and it has an effect. Why didn't anyone just say?

The Dark Souls 3 poise mystery may have been solved

Dark Souls 3 players may have cracked the mystery of poise.

To quickly recap: poise doesn't work in Dark Souls 3 the way it did in the first Dark Souls. In fact, for a long time it seemed like it didn't do anything - and when data miners found inactive code that could be used to "switch it on" so it functioned the way fans expected, players speculated that it might be bugged.

From Software chimed in, eventually, to say that poise was working as intended - which didn't help us much, beyond letting us know it wasn't going to be what we'd expected.

Now Redditor Back_like_Flint has put together a very plausible theory, and it goes something like this:

• When you roll, the animation takes a certain number of frames to complete. Some of these frames are "vFrames", during which you are vulnerable to damage, and some are iFrames, during which you are invulnerable.
• Whenever you take damage, including during the vFrames of rolls, the number of iFrames available during subsequent rolls is reduced. Your available iFrames gradually recover over time if you don't take damage.
• The higher your poise stat, the lower the number of iFrames you lose after taking damage.
• The higher your poise stat, the faster you will recover your lost iFrames.

That's very different from the old poise system, where a higher poise stat meant your attacks couldn't be interrupted as easily, essentially avoiding stagger. It has more in common with Dark Souls 2's agility stat.

What do you think? The linked post includes plenty of numbers for you data-loving types, as well as deeper discussion of the system and various bits of evidence. It's a compelling theory and seems to be going down well with hardcore fans - although nobody's exactly happy about it.