kirkhammer besthammer
also: old hunterâs bone is amazing. it probably took the first dlc boss to get me to realize this but itâs wow absolutely one of the best items in the game. itâd be really easy to miss that item too if youâre not like âhey how do i get to that really obnoxiously placed doorâ in one particular spot. which i died like six times getting to. dark souls 2 experience made me double-check that entire area though.
given it makes learning the timing of patterns a lot more lenient itâs extremely handy for first attempts, even if you have to waste a bunch of bullets to do it.
I got E on the first try with the saw cleaver but I probably had a lot more levels under my belt as I never really managed to parry anything correctly in that game (except that pointy hat hunter in the chalices) so I had to compensate.
i went and looked up invasion videos on nico and now iâm dying laughing (endgame spoilers probably)
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holy shit maria
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reached the final boss of the dlc, orphan of kos
after about five tries i got to the second phase, but the cumulative burn of vials finally caught up to me so i probably need to go grind for a little while. maybe do the chalice dungeons for a bit instead and stockpile reources.
rather than doing that, i spent another ten tries trying to get past the first phase without using vials. i did it once! for some reason, if i do a charge r2 backstab and follow up with the visceral hit, it heals me like 70%, and iâm not entirely sure why. it feels doable but i was getting tired by the end of the session so my reactions were dulling.
though, really, i am honestly feeling like the true final boss are those two giant fishmen in the well.
getting to the end soon. maybe iâll push through to it this weekend.
then iâm going to talk a lot about lore and setting and structure and how it all intertwines with the mechanics and urgh this game is so good
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FYI the sewer sharks are a very very good use of the dagger that confuses enemies
In case youâre interested, one nonobvious mechanical tip about Orphan: he is somehow not a Kin, so that super-anti-Kin gem you just found does absolutely nothing. Just raising that because I got him within 10% of death so many times before I beat him and it made me extremely salty to find that out later.
oh donât worry, iâm only using phys up and atk up gems.
my character knows only muscles
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I did that the whole game and only stopped doing that to optimize my build for Orphan!!!
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THESE FUCKIN GUYS
theyre the hardest fight in the DLC, and either the 3 hunters in Yaharâgul or the room full of spiders in Mergoâs Loft are the hardest fight in vanilla
Just in general i found the mobs in this game wayyy tougher than the bosses (who were, donât get me wrong, still pretty tough). Fuck OFF winter lanterns
honestly iâm just using moonlight blade in un-transformed mode and picking my opportunities for r2/charged r2. about 440 damage uncharged is pretty good, and it flinches every other hit with this, so i know i can get away with a charged r2 without being punished every other time.
it feels like the sort of boss where you need to learn where its stops are and just donât do anything until they happen, tbh.
those three hunters were a roadblock for me for awhile! the spiders didnât seem too bad? i lured them out of the room and just did poleaxe r1/l2 spam until they died from it.
Maximum adrenaline and aggression works also. It just punishes pacing your play in between those extremes.
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I only got heavy-ish weapons so there wonât be any of that for me!
could definitely see just rushing in with cleaver and hacking away at it being a viable strat if i had one
I really didnât have any trouble with the three hunters. Maybe I got lucky, but I was able to kite them down the staircase and get them separated while taking swipes. As for the spiders, I never tried to kill them at all (I was primed to run-past mode because thatâs how I handled the outdoor frenzy, and the #1 rule of running past things is that you do not ever stop running past).
The well fishmen are in an enclosed space, so theyâre different. After having enough, I resorted to the very specific cheese that Felix mentioned above after looking them up on the wiki. I donât know of any other reasonably feasible way to handle them.
Haha funny enough i actually kicked 2 of those 3 huntersâ asses on the first try! but it took as much luck as skill and i still got killed by the 3rd one and it was after like 20 minutes of running all around the broken lantern room and running out of blood vials. And my controller was all covered in palm sweat afterwards. So it was a tough-as-nails fight but a really good one!! (i definitely got killed more often by a few bosses, but that was more a matter of âoops got to remember to avoid that attack next timeâ than the sheer grueling mechanical balancing act of that hunter fight; i really think i only completed it as quick as i did because i was In The Zone at the time)
Meanwhile the spiders killed me over and over and over again, until i just gave up and ran by. Thus it stuck out to me as a memorably hard fight. This series finds your weak points in that way, sometimes!
Appropriately, Rom was one of the hardest vanilla campaign bosses and the spider room is basically a Rom redux
All that said, i had forgot about the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst obnoxious bastard you fight to complete Eileenâs quest, and would put that one above the spiders, though he is entirely optional and easily missed
three hunters were totally trivial for me, I grinded them dozens of times while failing to beat orphan
probably a dex thing
You smug scimitar slinger, you
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I did contextualize it with my failure!!!
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didnât play yesterday, ended up babysitting a dog today so i played through chalice dungeons until i had 100 vials stored up
and then i beat orphan of kos on my third try.
charged r2 untransformed moonlight sword is insane, tbh. it was basically my only attack and it hit for 850+ every time, and it turns out once i was rested enough that i could actually react to the attack cues i could just get behind him and get a visceral.
so, yeah, whoops.
still need to figure out the sewer mutants, and apparently go beat up laurence, then probably finishing NG, finally.