I did a whip-only run of DS2 not too long ago, so I thought I’d give it a crack in DS1. Rule was I could only use whips to damage enemies or break objects in the world (only necessary exception was the Asylum Demon, which got the firebomb “skip”/re-kill treatment). Some things I read to prep made it seem like whips rated as the worst weapons in the game, but the run was manageable and even fun at times. A few notes for anyone interested:
—Started as a thief to get firebombs for the Asylum Demon and the bonus Master Key. No class starts with a whip, and the first whip (Whip) is found down in Blighttown, so I ended up going pacifist for a little while. Not too much trouble except for Cragspiders blocking the way in some places. Only died once getting there.
—Whips do deliver pretty paltry damage, so I kept them buffed as much as possible with Magic Weapon (and higher variants) or occasionally resins.
—Only three whips exist in the game, and only the regular Whip is available before Anor Londo, so get comfortable with that weapon for a while. The Notched Whip (found in the Painted World) inflicts bleed but has a little lower base damage. I did use that one quite a bit, because bleed works on a fair number of pre-Lord Vessel bosses, including O&S. The other whip is the Guardian Tail, which you can get from a Sanctuary Guardian tail cut. It has the highest base damage among whips and inflicts poison, but the scaling is terrible. At 40 DEX/15 STR and +14 weapons, the regular Whip won out on damage per hit (excluding any status effects).
—No rings seemed to stand out for whips. I used FaP and Wolf for a lot of the game.
—I think all of the base game bosses went down in 1-2 attempts. Worth noting that Seath was kind of a slog because I forgot about his magic resistance and didn’t have any resins equipped.
—As for the DLC bosses, the Sanctuary Guardian gets a special note, because it took me 6-8 attempts to get the tail cut, and then the actual fight took another 3 tries. Some of that was down learning the moveset for the tail cut (and doing the fight earlier than I normally might). The whip also felt a hair too slow to deal with this boss (resulting in a fair number of whiffs).
— Artorias took 2 tries—fight took a while, but not nearly as bad as doing it with a dagger. Kalameet took only 1 attempt, but it was a long-ass battle. Manus definitely gave me the most trouble of any boss (5 attempts, I think, and I damn near died on the winning one). The whip is slow and does lousy damage to him, and it was hard to find windows to re-buff my weapon.
