Dark Souls 3 Die Already

I remember that I felt I had trivialized the fight by basically suffering through phase 1 to get rid of Smough first. Not so much a trick as it was a huge test of patience and figuring out when the appropriate time to attack was while leading them around the huge room (and hopefully not getting stuck on pillars or forgetting how long I had until I reached the wall).

I felt weird when Flamelurker wasn’t much of a challenge in spite of having heard about how difficult the fight was. If there’s one thing Demon’s Souls did that was interesting (and I personally enjoyed), it was making levels feel like they mattered a lot more than they seem to post-Demon’s Souls. Granted, Dark Souls 1 basically introduced weapon leveling as the new form of “real” leveling, but since it was static you knew that past a point you couldn’t really overlevel encounters and trivialize them in the more typically RPG fashion that Demon’s Souls allowed.

Yeah but like 8 of those 9 failures were the host dying, not me. I mean, sure, with her high damage combos and near-one-shots she’s still capable of taking out a first-attempt host who just wants to roll white phantoms until one of them carries rather than learn the boss at all.

I beat her today after an hour and a half or so of attempts. Felt a lot less hard than Orphan, although I think some of that was good weapon fit (Exile Greatsword) and some of it was sheer luck (I won by the skin of my teeth with zero Estus left) – if the fight had gone slightly worse there I would still be attempting it probably (I had a lot of those barely off attempts against Orphan).

One thing that feels really fresh and evolutionary about this boss is how much it’s about macro learning and tactics as opposed to pure skill. Learning what to do with the various invisibilities and how to zone the second phase properly is one thing, and another thing is there’s a lot of breathing room to apply buffs and even respec your equipment between phases. And yet the breathing room which can also be applied to Estus doesn’t trivialize the boss because the main lose condition is running out of Estus. Then in the third phase you get a traditional really fast Souls boss, but just a tad more fair and predictable to compensate for the gauntlet you had to do to get to it.

What I’m saying is From has not stopped getting better at boss design. Mundanely punishing turds like Camera King are not the limit of their ideas about how to make a hard boss, it turns out.

man sotfs is infinitely better than i thought it was having played through 20-30 hours of dks2 prior to rolling a new pc in sotfs. part of it is sotfs is way less stingy about effigies than vanilla, which means until you get the ring of binding you’re not just shit out of luck if you eat a bunch of deaths in a row with no effigy to restore your health. melentia only selling a limited number of lifegems in the early game is also… game can be rather cruel early, but it levels off meaningfully by midgame and becomes much more geographically interesting around that time as well. loving the game now

it baffles me how ridiculously easy pursuer is to me now, considering i nearly just quit dks2 vanilla after wasting all of my effigies on that dude and being hopelessly unable to solo him either. the ruin sentinels also drove me batty and wasted all my effigies again.

i must be better or sotfs must be easier

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One of my favourite things to do in a souls game is to stand on high vantage points and just look at the view, looking for all the paths that you can traverse later in the game.

The bridge before Gascoigne in Bloodborne is good for that too, you can see all of old Yharnam

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images 2 3 4 and that last one all look fine to me

Agreed, just posting some screens I took last night and liked and wanted to share

oh, for some reason I thought you were highlighting texture tiling issues in the game

oop

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That makes me curious about whether or not DS3 had any issues with hardware. I sincerely wish we could do this with Bloodborne.

Surprising number of people that are playing this now have the umadbro/getgudscrub naming schemes on if you try to invade or get invaded.

Meanwhile I am rocking Dr Pepper ICED and SSJTabFan6969

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I finally bought this game.

Should I buy the DLC before my first playthrough or nah?

You might as well get it now if you’re interested.

Thanks for reminding me that I need to make a post some time detailing stuff about the DLC too

this is weird to me because you’d think people who play souls games obsessively enough to do pvp would be pretty immune to lame trash talk. like, if you don’t have iron clad self confidence and a steely resolve you probably won’t make it that far in the game to begin with

I get a lot of hate mail even when I win! I’ve had to block at least 3 teens that would not stop hassling me for…winning against them.

I need to get motivated on playing through Ashes of Ariandel. Accessed it but then went back to other games, and peak time for possible multiplayer might fade out before long…

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I enjoyed the DLC. Felt too short. Still going to buy the next DLC because even as short as it is, it’s still something I want more of.

As for PvP - I still beat people most consistently with the Farron Greatsword (70-80%) and secondarily with my Sorcerer and the Moonlight UGS (60%). It’s always cool to find the occasional person who knows when to parry the Farron Greatsword (because it’s super easy to parry). Pretty much always lose to those players but I find the parry window so goofy that I’m usually just amused more than anything else.

Friede is definitely the hardest Dark Souls / Bloodborne boss I’ve ever faced. I have never been able to solo the fight so far and thus far it’s the only boss where I’ve had this occur. I can’t remember if it’s the only boss with that many forms but the forms are definitely a huge part of the difficulty. The constant transfer between fast and slow fight pacing also contributes.

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Hmm, if you’re finding Friede harder than Orphan, you’re likely missing something. As I said earlier, Friede is refreshingly mostly about developing the right tactics and it doesn’t require quite so much twitch skills once you’re approaching it the right way. Hopefully you’ve realized there’s a tell to the invisibility in the first phase (if not, look harder). For the second phase, Friede’s melee seems especially punishing, so what I found worked well is to only attack the big guy when Friede is at a safe distance and there’s space to dodge, and use throwing knives to knock Friede out of her heals. I also liked to use the breaks between phases to my advantage: embering at the start of the second phase (to avoid wasting any estus from incidental hits in the first phase), and swapping in a dark stoneplate ring at the beginning of the third. Once you can consistently get through the first two phases while only wasting 2-3 estus, then the third is a quite difficult but not abusive standard Souls boss.

Friede might be a well designed boss on her own, like the Nameless King, but I’m just not interested in yet another bald-roomed fight where I’m micro-managing my stamina bar against a flurry of guard-breaking/shield-ignoring attacks and dealing with the millionth micro-variation of ‘Dodge-Roll Now; but Don’t Dodge-Roll Now.’ It is, like Orphan, at the limit of, or past, what the mechanics can handle as far as explicitly challenge-oriented iteration goes. I don’t know if this means that responsible criticism of the series now has been passed over to a different sort of person than myself, but I do know that it didn’t interest me enough to keep at it on my own once I got past the first two phases (the second of which does feel a bit novel) solo. Have to say, seeing a boss die twice and rebirth twice within the same fight is stupid as hell in action and robbed the encounter of any emotional weight it might have otherwise had (I even committed to watching the cutscene every single time I reattempted (it owned)).

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