Highlights
- Sinh’s corrosive scales in Dark Souls 2 force players to manage weapon durability in a unique and challenging way.
- Preparing for Sinh’s encounter requires players to bring repair powders or utilize a flexible build with multiple weapons.
- Weapon durability in Dark Souls 2, specifically against Sinh, highlights the mechanic as a critical part of combat strategy, even if it is annoying elsewhere.
Equipment durability is a divisive topic for action games like Dark Souls 2, as the mechanic can often conflict with a cohesive gameplay feel as weapons and armor breaking at key moments rarely appears to be a planned challenge. However, in the case of Sinh, the Slumbering Dragon, the durability in Dark Souls 2 makes mastering a single weapon only part of the puzzle for defeating the boss.
Locked behind the Crown of the Sunken King DLC for Dark Souls 2, Sinh is a unique encounter, due to the way that players will need to be prepared in order to survive the encounter. While preparation is already an important part of success in the Soulsborne series, the extra strain that Sinh imparts changes the minor benefits of keeping a collection of consumable items or a robust build into a necessity.
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Sinh, the Slumbering Dragon Gives as Good as He Gets
The Decay Hiding Under Sinh’s Surface
The mechanic that makes Sinh unique is the fact that his scales are corrosive, and will quickly drain the durability from any weapons that strike him. In most of FromSoftware’s catalog, this would be a minor annoyance, possibly requiring the player to repair their weapons between attempts. However, even Dark Souls 2‘s best weapons have the least durability of any equipment throughout the Soulsborne series, with weapons readily breaking from one boss encounter to the next without Sinh’s corrosive scales.
As a result, most weapons brought into the fight against Sinh won’t last long enough against the dragon’s corrosive scales to kill the boss without either dropping in damage output or breaking outright. This doubles the war of attrition between the player and Sinh, where the player isn’t only managing their healing items against the boss’ health bar, but also the durability of their weapons. For players wandering into this encounter unprepared, Sinh can then become one of the toughest fights in the Dark Souls series because of this steady loss of damage output.
Preparing for Sinh’s Corrosive Backlash
One way to prepare for Sinh’s corrosive scales is to bring a hefty amount of repair powders, a rather pricey consumable item that can be purchased from Chancellor Wellager in Drangleic Castle. Other than the costly repair powders, there is also the Repair sorcery that replenishes its casting limits from one encounter to the next. Of course, for players diving into the powerful magic builds of Dark Souls 2, casting spells from a distance might be a better course of action than relying on the Repair sorcery.
Another possibility for making it through the Sinh encounter is to utilize a more flexible build, one that doesn’t hinge on a single weapon at a time. This would then give the player multiple weapons to burn through before reaching the end of the fight, bypassing the need to pull back in the middle of the fight and repair. Considering how long the repair animation can take, the powder can make any of Dark Souls 2‘s weapons impractical against Sinh if players need to duck away and heal their gear along with themselves.
Sinh Makes the Most out of Durability in Dark Souls 2
Considering that weapon durability has been almost completely phased out by the time of Elden Ring‘s release, the brittle weapons of Dark Souls 2 are a quickly divisive design decision for what is already a controversial entry in the Soulsborne series. However, by building in a near certainty for weapons to break against Sinh, it forces the mechanic to become a critical part of combat in a way that it rarely does anywhere else. The result is a unique way to highlight weapon durability, taking the mechanic from a minor annoyance to an actual concern that dictates how players prepare.