There are no "battle arts" in this game

The weapon was in the original game so it's not a newly added weapon. By the way, no one gives a sh*t that it came from your home country.

Wow look at the replies. Typical demon souls players. After grinding so many hours they still in their soul form.. Pitty of them.

Go f*ck yourself.

???

I want you to use all your powers and all your skills, I don't want his mother to see him this way.

Get down on your knees and start sucking as if your life is at stake.

Who's sucking whos ****? OP doesn't want one drop of cum wasted!

Go design your own version of the kris blade instead of whining like a little b*tch.

You have bad taste, clearly

Bruh how are there 18 people out there who think this weapon looks good

Nah, it's not ugly at all you dumb f***.

Clearly you haven't seen a real life version of the historic kris blade. You do know that there's a search engine called Google?

That's just your opinion and it's worthy to be defecated on. You catch my drift?

As an additional note, if you're already using the Fragrant Ring, upgrading the Pole pretty much eliminates the need for it, which means that ring slot is now freed up for another ring...such as the Ring of Magical Sharpness or Ring of Magical Nature.

Wow this is terrible advice

It's not terrible advice. At the end of the day, all that matters concerning damage is the number of hits or castings required to down a target. For normal enemies, Kris won't make a meaningful difference in terms of hits-to-kill. It's mainly useful for fighting targets with greater HP pool, such as bosses. The advice here is that overall you will feel a greater benefit to +5ing the pole first, but still using both. Of course, if you're the type to go out of your way to farm souls to amass spice rather than gain levels (less likely on your first playthrough), then the point is moot.

The point about attrition in PvP is also a valid one. The last thing you want in PvP is to leave yourself unnecessarily vulnerable, which should be obvious.

To put numbers to it, let's say you do 300 damage with Soul Ray without the usage of the Kris Blade. Fairly reasonable starting point. A base Kris will change that to 314.4, meanwhile a +5 will change it to 390. An extra 90 damage is definitely nice, but only actually has any real impact if your target was one that it took you ~4 castings of Soul Ray to kill before, which will then bring it down to ~3. However, at around that damage-per-cast, most standard enemies can be taken down in 3 or less castings anyway, so there is little to no tangible benefit gained apart from feeling better about yourself. Further, it's slightly less impressive than that because even with no colorless soul investment, there is still a small added benefit for damage, so the actual damage improvement from +5ing is only 76, not 90.

Let's take this a little further. Obviously if you were to collect every single colorless demon soul in the first playthrough, then you can +5 both. This case clearly doesn't matter for the purposes of comparison. However, it's not uncommon for players to not want to do the assassination questline, in which case the best you can bring a second weapon to is +3 assuming you aren't picking up Resurrection. For the Kris blade, that means +22% damage, which translates to a total of 366 damage per singular cast of Soul Ray, leaving the actual damage you missed out on at a mere 24, which is obviously largely insignificant. The damage difference between a +3 and a +5 would require 15.25 castings to equate to a single extra casting at +3 level.

Meanwhile, the regen rate for the pole more than doubles from +3 to +5, becoming actually large enough passive regen to be felt within a single combat encounter, more than making up for the occasional extra cast that the Kris Blade would have saved you assuming the enemy was a sack of meat with infinite HP, which can go towards anything including and especially turning yourself into a tank with free Warding fuel.

In summary, if you blindly try to get the highest damage number possible without considering how much actual, real benefit it would provide vs other options, you're shooting yourself and your build in the foot.

Base Kris is around +5%, maxed it's +30%. 6x higher boost in percentage is not insignificant. 300 damage spell would do an extra 75 damage on a maxed kris compared to base (390 vs 315). Obviously there is more to it, but I'd say that's a substantial difference.

It very much does stack with them

Most likely your damage is over the hp of the enemy in which case only the enemy 's hp is shown.

Actually it does. You just have to pull your head out of your *** to realize it.

That's the "overkill" mechanic, if you do 150% of an enemies' max health in one attack, you get 20% more souls.

No