Every button and pillar has some sort of purpose. Unusually for Dark Souls 2, none of them are evil traps that you’ll regret activating. If you see a rune-pillar thingie or a button, try shooting at it. Shulva and the accompanying Dragon Sanctuary are full of pillars and buttons (those flower-type symbols inside squares) that can be used to activate bits of the environment or open doors to hidden places. But that obviously requires you to have a bow (or some other projectile) to begin with. Instead of riding the pagoda down, you can also peer off the edge and shoot a pillar to just raise the platform with the long bow on it. You’ll need the usual 10 Strength and 16 Dex to do anything with it, but hey, free bow.

When you reach the early area with a bunch of Shulva hollows and the first rune-pillars you can attack to raise and lower a pair of tower-like pagoda platforms, ride the second one down to get a +7 long bow. If you already entered the DLC and don’t want to bother warping out to fetch a bow for some reason, FromSoft actually included one to pick up in the DLC. I mean, it’s a Souls game so your character probably has some sort of back-up bow no matter what, right? You’ll definitely want to have a bow for parts of Sunken King. I used a character who’d just finished the Dragon Aerie with a 10+ mace (boring, but effective). Post Drangleic castle, or a character from anywhere near the end game sequences, should be fine. Sunken King’s bosses have pretty hefty health bars. Realistically though, unless you want a major challenge you should leave it until you have a fully upgraded (or near enough) weapon of some sort. The Rotten has spruced the place up a bit.

Dark souls 2 dlc locations