In Dark Souls 2 there is a 'Shrine of Winter' near Sinners Rise. When you approach the shrine it will not let you open the door and a message pops up that says
Seek Mightier Souls
What does this mean and how do you open this shrine?
Dark Souls 2 – How to Access the Shrine of Winter
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Related Solutions
Human Effigies can be found from Starting Gift, Static Locations (corpses), Merchants (All merchants have limited supply), and NPC's (both given and dropped when killed).
The term 'farm' usually implies an unlimited resource, as you pointed out. As of the latest patch, the Company of Champions covenant allows infinite respawn.
These are enemies that drop Effigies:
- Attack Dogs.
- Skeletons [not in Undead Purgatory]
- Turtle Knights.
- Sentinel (Sword/Shield) and Sentinel (Great Sword)
Always remember you can farm 6 effigies off of the Old Firekeepers and 3 alone off Housekeeper Milibeth in Things Betwixt.
After unlocking the Shrine of Winter, it is possible to farm Smooth and Silky Stones. While not directly farming Effigies, these have a high conversion rate to Effigies at Dyna & Tillo (Drop trade crow), although this is random.
There is however a way to restore humanity consistently.
In the Shrine of Amana, above the last bonfire, there is a Shrine with a praying Milfinito. After you have 'rescued' the two stray maidens (one outside the Demon of Song room, another behind the Embedded Door in Drangleic Castle) you can pray at this Shrine at any time to regain humanity. This is free of cost and can be done a limitless amount of times.
There is an easier way, although it seems so easy that it will be patched.
This requires the Ring of Life Protection, which can be found at the No Man's Wharf. This ring prevents loss of your Humanity and souls on death, but breaks afterwards. This ring can be repaired for 3000 at the blacksmith giving a constant 3000 Souls per Human transfer rate. A +1 Ring of Life Protection (Also prevents petrification) can be purchased from Vengarl in the Shaded Woods.
Update
Since Patch 1.03 the bug of randomly getting human form back after multiplayer sessions has been fixed. According to the patch notes, you now get some humanity back for helping others as a white phantom, meaning your health penalty will decrease. When all your health is back, you will regain your human form (I have just tested this). This means you are no longer dependent on human effigies to get your humanity back in online mode.
Patch note excerpt:
Players now receive a small portion of Humanity after successfully assisting in a Multiplayer session instead of regaining full Humanity.
Before Patch 1.03:
Before Patch 1.03, you got revived by playing co-op at random. It does not matter whether you defeat the boss or die, sometimes you will return to your world revived, although you placed your summon sign hollowed.
There are several rumours on the internet, that it gets less likely to revive the more often you fight the boss, or that the amount of human effigies you have has an influence on your chances to revive, but they are wrong.
I once got revived although the summoner died in a boss fight, and once it took six times killing a boss and then only one time killing the same boss to revive, although the circumstances had not changed.
This random procedure indicates, that you are not actually meant to revive. In From Software's twitter post, that has been partially translated at reddit, it has been confirmed, that phantoms reviving is a bug and not actually supposed to happen:
Somebody asked the official Japanese FromSoftware twitter if it was a bug that sometimes you didn't revive to human after helping somebody else play coop.
The answer? "Actually you're not supposed to revive to human, we'll investigate why that happens".
Human effigies are limited in Dark Souls 2, as long as you don't use Bonfire Ascetics, which practically turn areas into New Game + difficulty, but as long as you use them rarely and with care, you shouldn't run out of them. You can find a lot of them as treasure and they also drop from (limited) enemies. For more information on that, see How do I farm Human Effigies?.
Should you find yourself running out of effigies anyway, you can either try to find the Ring of Life Protection, which makes you practically immortal as it can be repaired, or you could try to get summoned and ask other players through private messages to give you an effigy.
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Best Answer
The 4 greater bosses you have to beat to enter the Shrine of Winter are the following:
1
Name:
Location:
2
Name:
Location:
3
Name:
Location:
4
Name:
Location:
(Is this formatting bad? I wanted both the names and locations to be independently spoiler tagged so people have the option to peek at the location without seeing the name of each boss.)