Bountiful Sunlight | Dark Souls Wiki

This spell is even more fake than princess making it available to use.

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god this spell sucks

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Okay I am going to rip into this miracle. The requirements for this miracle are ridiculous, and the pay is really bad.

I love the idea of this miracle. I love being able to help teammates, even if it's a little bit and I'm not a dedicated support. But the implementation is just plain bad.

First, you need 36 faith. A lot of melee/miracle hybrid builds stop near 30, or maybe if their build has good faith scaling weapons, they may consider going up to 40 or so. You only would ever consider using this if your faith is already high enough to use it, it's never something you'd logically want to strive for, especially if you know what it does. If you go to 36 faith not to scale anything or because you want to reach 50 for sunlight spear, you are essentially wasting points. (It's not a total loss, it will still help with some scaling if you build your build correctly and use the right equipment.) But this makes this miracle incredibly niche.

On top of all this, it cancels self-buffs. I don't really understand why this is a thing in the first place, kind of makes paladin or battle mage builds less viable. Maybe according to their research this was because it made things too overpowered, but personally to me it comes across as if they did it as an arbitrary restriction.

But at least with self-buffs, you can control that. You can make the informed decision "okay, I'm going to self buff, that will cancel my current one." But teammate's cannot make that decision. Teammates cannot control or communicate to you when to pop this miracle. That means you are trying to help, but you very well could make things worse. For the stat investment required, and it being a 2 slotted higher faith stat-identical clone of replenishment, that's BS. You have to go out of your way (or have a high faith casting build) in order to make use of this, and it can make things worse? In a game without a text chat where you can plan or communicate? What were the devs thinking?

For new players/people who don't want to refer to the wiki (Which no game should require you to look at a wiki for basic in-game stats,) this is a trap. It's not the greatest thing ever that Dark Souls doesn't display values for miracles or spells, so if you don't look it up on a wiki, you are purely at the game's mercy to tell you what you need to know about something, and for miracles and spells, Dark Souls does a really horrible job at this. Makes you wonder why they didn't fix this in the supposed "remaster?"

Anyways, this is literally a higher costing replenishment. And if you look at it purely in-game, you'd see that it serves a similar function. But surely it's a better form of replenishment right? There's no way they would make it cost so much more faith, and take TWO slots to be functionally identical to replenishment except for affecting nearby allies as well right? You even need to be in a covenant to use it! (and not just to get it.)

Nope, it literally just applies to teammates too. (I am not speaking from experience here, I looked at the wiki first lol. It'd be nice if I could have found out all this information in-game though.)

Now in a game where you are overwhelmingly going to play it solo, why would you balance an ability purely around teamplay, and make the faith requirements really high, meaning you have to specifically build towards it (unless you can already use it just because you strived for Sunlight Spear.) Co-op isn't big enough in Dark souls to warrant the increased stat cost and covenant requirement (especially since covenants penalize you for switching) to use this ability. It isn't useful enough on its own, and its requirements are high and potentially out of the way of your build. They should have made this have the same stat requirement as replenishment, but take 2 slots. If the ability cannot stand out on its own from the original except in very niche cases (co-op,) there's no reason to make it so hard to get. Let the player experiment with their build and decide for themselves when to use it. How it currently exists is a trap to new players, and useless to experienced players (unless again, they just happen to be able to use it as a side effect of their build.)

Especially with how summoning range works, in order to get consistent co-op/pvp matches, you have to stop leveling at some point. Which makes this miracle all the worse. If summoning ranges were like, how they are normally calculated and then it went like, level 100-infinite, but it used the in-game scaling system it already uses to scale down the power of joining players to match their host, then the requirements may not be so horrid. But going under the assumption you need to stop somewhere for co-op and especially PVP... Many people will just say goodbye to this miracle because it's not worth the extra investment. Maybe it's busted in PVP and co-op, but from what I have gathered online, no one seems to make this argument. And I'm not so sure how smart it is to make Co-op and PVP spells that are entirely reliant on having to be in co-op or PVP in order to be useful in any sense, rather than being balanced for normal play in a mostly PVE game and then the community picking up spells that happen to slap in co-op and PVP in addition to their already solo benefits.

Soothing light has its own issues, being a WORSE form of great heal, and having a whopping 48 FAITH REQUIREMENT. At least it doesn't remove self-buffs.

In DS2, it largely remains the same with some tweaks. Bountiful Sunlight requires 3 SLOTS, but at least you don't have to be part of a covenant. But it still replicates replenishment exactly, just with higher faith cost and more slots cost. Still cancels buffs...

Now it's worth noting, that in Dark Souls 3, they tried to fix this. They actually made it better than replenishment AND bountiful light, in terms of overall healing. Well, kind of. The HP to FP conversion downscales with the better regen spells you get, so it's not an absolute upgrade in every sense (other than higher faith requirement and FP cost.) I'd need to do more research to display an opinion on this though.

You could argue about how regen spells suck in DS3 because FS wanted to discourage passive play, and how HP value per FP point decreases with each iteration of regenerative spells, and whether or not you think that's a good decision... But that's an entirely different discussion. As I said I'd need to do more research in order to formulate an opinion.

Point is, at least they improved their design philosophy and recognized how situational and stupid the spells were in the previous games. Now they at least vary somewhat, and at least have some single-player niche by actually making the most expensive, team-healing miracles actually have greater stats overall as well. Whether the cost is worth it and if it still is situational to actually be useful is up for debate, but at least the design philosophy improved, even if the balancing potentially didn't improve enough.

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It goes without saying, you grab this and the other miracle from a pair o non hostile, frightened, crying pisacas, which implies Seath took Gwynevere's maidens and twisted them into those humanity farms.

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