Enemies

## General Changes

Added Smithing Stones to all Catacombs/Cave/Tunnel boss drops.

**Detailed information on individual enemies can be found in the Basic Enemies and Bosses pages.**

Greatly improved enemy response to being injured. Enemies in groups will now react if you attack their allies, instead of blankly staring at them while the one you attacked slowly walks towards you. **This does not apply if you stealth backstab them or kill them in one hit.**

## Area and Enemy Scaling

* Rebalanced NG+ scaling so that every enemy is at equal strength.

* Enemy strength will still increase per NG+ cycle.
	+ *Previously, early game enemies were far weaker than enemies a player would have been fighting before starting NG+. This change puts all enemies in the world at an equal, endgame level strength.*

Area scaling has been adjusted to better match what people have reported as a natural path of progression through the game's content.

The scaling of an enemy's stats is represented by a tier number, ranging from 0-20. As scaling goes up, so does the max HP of enemies, alongside their status resistance (from 1x at Tier 0, to 1.5x at Tier 20).

### Area Tiers

```
0 - Stranded Graveyard
1 - Limgrave
2 - Weeping Peninsula
3 - Castle Morne
4 - Stormveil
5 - Siofra River
6 - Liurnia
7 - Raya Lucaria/Ainsel River/Caelid
8 - Redmane Castle/Caria Manor
9 - Wailing Dunes/Ruin-Strewn Precipice/Altus
10 - Mt. Gelmir/Shaded Castle/Nokron
11 - Capital Outskirts/Volcano Manor/Deeproot Depths
12 - Leyndell/Nokstella
13 - Mountaintops of the Giants/Leyndell Sewers/Lake of Rot
14 - Farum Azula/Castle Sol/Moonlight Altar
15 - Ashen Leyndell/Dragonbarrow
16 - Consecrated Snowfield
17 - Stone Platform
18 - Mohgwyn
19 - Haligtree
20 - Elphael
```
As a rough guide, players should aim to be around a level 8-10 times the tier of the area for a balanced experience, though this isn't 100% consistent. If you find the content too easy, consider turning up the difficulty, and the opposite if you find it too hard.

Enemies in lower-level areas will partially scale up to match your power level as you progress through the game. This is capped so that you still get that feeling of overpowering early areas. For example, if you're in Mountaintops of the Giants and go back to Limgrave enemies won't suddenly be Leyndell tier but they might be Caelid tier.

This makes it so earlier areas in the game aren't *completely* trivialized if you go back to them later (though they should still be very easy), and more importantly allows these enemies to still drop a meaningful amount of runes.

#### Aggressive Scaling

There is also an "aggressive scaling" option at a Site of Grace that removes the scaling cap from this system. This means that if you go back to Limgrave while you're leveled for Mountaintops, the enemies in Limgrave will be Mountaintops-tier. Use at your own risk.

*Exact numbers on these scaling caps and how scaling is determined currently unknown.*

## Rune Drops

The amount of runes enemies drop has generally been increased for regular enemies and mini-bosses, while major bosses give less.

Enemies now drop different amounts of Runes depending on their stat-scaling tier instead of a set value.

* *Enemies previously had a set amount of runes for each variation of the enemy/boss. Now each enemy has a base amount of runes that scales based on their strength.*
	+ *The intent of this change was to make it easier to edit the amount of runes enemies drop, and to make standard enemies drop more runes. Bosses will give less runes overall, so fighting enemies in the world is now actually worthwhile.*

Increased runes gained from gold-eyed enemies (x5). Gold-eyed enemies now also have a small max HP increase.

## Enemy Defense

Enemy defense now varies based on how armored the enemy is, instead of being a fixed value of 100 for all enemies, it now ranges from 10 to 50. This is a large reduction in enemy defense that greatly benefits weak weapons like daggers, split-damage weapons, and multi-hit attacks.

* *As an example, standard “soldier” type enemies have 15 defense while the heavily armored Dragonkin Soldiers have 45.*
	+ *Weak attacks with many hits are effective against low defense enemies, while singular strong attacks are more effective against high defense enemies.*

## Enemy Poise

Changed all enemies to use a poise recovery rate of 5 poise per second.

* *Enemies will begin to recover 5 poise per second after 6 seconds of not taking any damage. Previously this value was around 12 poise per second for all enemies. This change should make stance breaking enemies more consistent.*

## Enemy Types

Changed the types of enemies that take bonus damage from certain gear. The new enemy types are:

* **Void**
* **Undead**
* **Beast**
* **Dragon**
* **Stone**
* **God**
	+ *Previously there were Void, Undead, Ancient Dragon, and Dragon type enemies, with two unused categories. This change uses the unused categories and gets rid of the double Dragon categories.*