Very late here, but Dark Souls II has two different stagger mechanic, and something like... 5 different "Hyper Armor" events.
Dark Souls II was the first game to introduce the posture system, later featured in Sekiro. There is an hidden meter that, when depleted, puts the character in the guard broken state, where a critical attack can be performed. Most enemies have absurd values of Posture, Hollow Infranty (the first enemy you see in the Forest of Fallen Giant) has 4400 Posture and regens 2,2 posture per second. Plus, your attacks deal an average of 5 posture damage per hit. Basically unusuable against normal enemies.
Bosses however use Posture as their default stagger mechanic, while having persistent Super Armor (which prevents Poise stagger OR poise damage, depending on the Super Armor event type).

As for Armor events, they are all triggered by TimeAct, FromSoftware's proprietary animation metadata format (what is usually referred to as "frame data"). There is event 110500, "Super Armor", which disables Poise stagger, 110210 which disables Poise damage (and as a result, Poise stagger lol), 110600, "Ultra Armor" (shitty name I came up with in my Discord for the memes but was accepted by the PvP community, what to say) which disables Posture stagger and 111900, "Hyper Armor", which changes the poise damage multiplier from 1 to a value that depends on the specific weapon that enabled this event. Hyper Armor basically reduces poise damage by a certain percentage.


Some attacks can have a property, commonly referred to as "Hyper Stagger" which will always stagger regardless of poise. Does not get through armor events as far as I am aware though, but I haven't run extensive tests on this.

12:57 "We couldn't see her, because she was invisible"

That made me think of something I would hear in a Nintendo direct. (:

Wearing more pieces of poise-granting armor reducing your regen timer is such a mindblow for me.

I like how the 3 spells that deal 130 poise are Sunlight Spear, Chaos Storm, and Great Gravelord Sword Dance. It’s like they chose attacks representing Gwyn, Witch of Izalith, and Nito on purpose.

Whoever the developer is that wanted to make the 4 kings staggerable, you deserve the world ♥️

Wow, it's thematically so appropriate that the three creatures with the highest poise are all made of stone.

The balder knights are actually geniuses because they take advantage of their lack of poise to parry you. Because you know they will stagger at every hit, some players would resort to spam, and that's a free riposte there.

Illusory wall: Interesting and useful.
LimitBreakers: Interesting and useless.
With their powers combined, all data will be covered!

The tankiest enemy award was such a fun way to present that data. Great video! It helps that it sounds like the commentary was done with a smile.

There is something so funny seeing all these buffed characters and creatures and even lord Gwynd himself competing for a spot in the poise category and then there's Gwyndolin next to them, just existing

So my takeaway from this video is that I should find Iron Flesh before going up the stairs in the Undead Asylum in order to mitigate against the rolling boulder.

Definitely noticing some sense of humor beginning to seep its way into this series. Can’t say I would have missed it if it weren’t there, but I kind of like the levity. Makes it easier to digest all this  juicy, juicy knowledge.

Crazy how after all these years im still learning new useful stuff about this game, gotta remember the poise regen cooldown decrease from armor.

what about headshots with arrows?

I love how andre is as tanky as the literal lord of light

I learned a staggering amount of info from this video.

Mention of DkS1's intuitive poise reminds me that the Zwei carried me through PvE hard because everything was split between "staggers for followup kill" or "I'm going to die if I miss" lol

Wow, I didn’t realize there was such consistency in DS1 poise. PvP and PvE.

I love how poise in DS1 works, never touched PvP but it felt the most natural.

For any who might be wondering about the weirdness with poise damage multipliers (mentioned at 34:58), this bug most likely stems from the way decimal numbers are stored in binary. Without getting into the specifics too much, most modern programs store decimal numbers in a format called floating point, which, instead of storing the numbers like a normal integer, stores whether the number is positive or negative, a fraction, and an exponent to raise that fraction to. This format gives floating point numbers a wide range of possible values, but can, in some cases, introduce very tiny inaccuracies. For example, when adding 0.1 + 1.1, instead of getting 1.2 like expected, I got 1.2000000000000002, which is technically incorrect, but in most applications, an error small enough to ignore. However, in the case of Dark Souls testing if the running attack's poise damage meets or exceeds 32, because the number needs to be exactly enough and no less, the minuscule inaccuracy is enough to make the poise damage come up short.