Dark Souls III

About Dark Souls 3 Challenge Runs
Dark Souls 3 is the most popular Souls game for Challenge Runs due to its user-friendly mechanics - which make the fights feel fluid and dependent on you, not the mechanics, (mostly) interesting bosses with a lot of depth to them, rather balanced NG+ scaling and extremely large variety of usable (and viable) equipment at SL1 - Largest weapon variety in the series.

All these allow for a very fun experience when doing challenge runs. The game allows you to feel like every death is your own fault, not due to the game's limiting mechanics or unavoidable attacks. Thanks to the weapon variety, there are a lot of weapons a player can use to keep them interested in their SL1 runs.

Dark Souls 3 allows for many different challenges that are fun, consistently challenging and make you change your play style.

No-Hit Runs
No-Hit runs are a type off challenge that involves completing the game without getting hit by any enemy. There are several different kinds of No-Hit runs with various additional conditions:
 * Traditional No-Hit
 * SL1 No-Hit
 * Pyromancy Only No-Hit
 * Sorcery Only No-Hit
 * Miracle Only No-Hit

Soul level 1
Most common one is restricting your soul level (also known as SL) to 1. This likely should be the first challenge of a player who is thinking of getting into challenge runs. Limited gear (compared to a leveled character), limited health and limited damage will make the player approach the encounters strategically, and will require a certain degree of knowledge of every fight in order to come out victorious.

Interesting bonus restrictions to add, on top of SL1, however, you can also do these separately, on a leveled character if you wish to take smaller steps.

Not using Rings,buffs and/or infusions
- Not using rings is the restriction with the biggest impact on the player. The inability to use rings to increase Defense and offence, as well as the lack of attribute rings in order to use different gear will for sure make the SL1 run harder.

- Not using buffs is mainly restricts your damage, however since most damage boost comes from your rings, and not buffs, this isn't as big of a deal. Not using buffs mainly hinders the use of elemental weapons such as Dragonslayer's Axe or Firelink Greatsword.

- Not infusing your weapon means a rather significant amount of damage is lost. Not infusing a Broadsword to Raw costs you 58 Base damage for example. This also means you cannot experiment with elemental infusions as well as you cannot infuse some weapons with Blood.

Specific weapon only
- Be it a fun weapon, or a horrible weapon, you can set your run to be weapon specific.

For example, you can use a Broken Straightsword or Torch to vastly limit your damage and make your fights much more difficult. Different movesets, swing speeds, split damage, Ranges and Damage values are bound to make some of the bosses extremely challenging.

Some horrible weapons you can use: (Easiest to hardest)

Broken Straight sword

Wooden Great Hammer

Crescent Moon sword

Soldering Iron

Crystal Sages Rapier

Cleric's Candlestick

Whip

Torch

Or you can pick a weapon that isn't very conventional, however still usable. This is done more for fun, just to increase the variety of your play through's. For example, you can complete an SL1 run only using Harald Curved Greatsword, Gael's Greatsword etc. Which are all usable at SL1, and are viable, however, there is always something better to use instead.

If you wish to go for a more endurance run based challenge run, restricting your weapon upgrade level and infusion is the best bet. Since weapon upgrades make up for the most damage increase for you, not upgrading your weapon will make fights last much longer. If you wish to add extra challenge to this, consider not using status effects, such as Bleed, Poison or Frost. This is recommended because they don't scale with anything, meaning that you can still do a lot of damage without weapon upgrades, which removes the whole purpose of the run.

New Game +
You can also simply raise your New Game+ cycle. NG+ scaling isn't very punishing, however by the time you reach NG+7, the bosses are significantly more tanky and damaging. Fights last longer, allow for fewer mistakes, which means the amount of skill and knowledge needed to come out victorious is significantly higher than on NG.

No Roll/Block/Parry
Lastly, you can limit yourself from basic game mechanics, such as Rolling/Blocking/Parrying. This is without a doubt, the hardest single challenge you can add on top of SL1, and it's still very difficult on a leveled character.

The no roll run makes you learn the boss fights much better than other runs. You need to know the attack patterns, AI, boss attack blind-spots, how to move around quickly, how to manage your camera (unlocked play is often recommended but not required)

This run will force you to look at the game from a totally different perspective. It will teach you better positioning, camera control, sharpen your reaction times, and most importantly, will teach you ins and outs of boss fights, as well as teach you that the rolling is much less necessary than one may think. Learning how to strafe attacks instead of having to roll through them will save you the time it takes to roll, meaning you can either land one more hit or be safer when making the distance from the boss.

However, a few of the fights are RNG (create unwinnable scenarios when you are not rolling).

The two main ones are: The Twin Princes, the big teleport slam is almost unavoidable and it is definitely not avoidable consistently.

Nameless King: If he decides to do his Charge when you're close to him it's very difficult and inconsistent to avoid it. If you are too far away he can do his shock-wave ranged attacks, which are very inconsistent in the means of avoiding them.