I just recently got into dark souls, and I did something I like to think was decently impressive. I was looking to get the grass crest shield (stamina fo dayz), and saw a vid in which a guy got it really early by going through the valley of drakes. I did the same thing, but when I came up on the undead dragon, my dumb ass grabbed the sword by his head and woke him up. He then promptly killed me. So I tried again, and managed to make it past him, despite the fact that he was aggro'd, and managed to grab the shield (I probably should have gotten the red tearstone ring, too, but it didn't occur to me at the time and I'd rather not make that run again unless necessary). A question regarding this. If you quit out of the game and reload, does he go back to sleep, or once you wake him up, does he stay aggro'd until he's killed?
I also just started a sorcerer and managed to memorize the way to the Tin Banishment Catalyst(and consequently the crimson robe set), and made it past all those lava spitting spider things to get to it.
No, that asshole is always active once you piss him off once. You only agro him once you are in pickup range of the shield itself. He really doesn't care about the rest though his hitbox is touchy and might need experimentation.
Glad you are into the game... if you wanna try something fun but really hard, try to run through the catacombs till you get to a dark room with lots of sarcophagi. There is a giant demon there, if you run past him there is a side quest item. "Eye of death" if you lay in the open sarcophogus with it in your inventory you can enter a very powerful covenant that gets you a sword that can carry you through the game. Its fun.
However getting there is a frustrating chore till you have it down to a science so only do it when you have a large amount of time to waste on possibly dying a lot to get it.
oh yeah, the grave sword I think it was called? isn't the guy that drops all those masks down that way as well? The first build I mentioned is a bit of a take on the Giantdad PVP build, except I plan on using different armour that doesn't impede stamina recov, like Black Iron or Havel's
Its called the Gravelord Sword, Numerically speaking the build you speak of is a minmax and also you are supposed to use more than just the shield to combat the stamina loss. But Giants +5 is probably a little bit stronger than Havel's.
But that is reasonable, Also back to one of your earlier questions, yes Pinwheel(The Masked Family) is down there. Honestly if you want to really have fun with PVP experiment, make 4 characters with 4 focuses and then just fiddle with builds on them that can work with them. Once you find one you like play around with it, that just personal opinion, but I never liked messing with copy paste builds. Most of mine were just roleplayish and focused around the Moonlight greatsword. Its a fun toy and I love it so.
Also a lot of the PVP scene is used to copy paste builds where some of them don't work anymore, but you will meet your fair share of idiots who are trying to do some crazy stupid build like claw-parry-only-builds where they don't even upgrade them and only try to build up bleed. Some people just hate themselves.