Using that now, fully upgraded.
Dropped the Darkmoon Greatsword and gone Bloodhound’s Fang with 70 dex.
I was doing pretty decently at Malenia but my refusal to use Ashes is kinda fucking me up.
I am starting to think Ashes were what made the devs create bosses without “stamina”.
I was chasing her around all the time but she would simply not stop attacking no matter what. No rest periods and her attacks hardly have enough openings.
the balance between mandatory and optional content starts to oscillate pretty severely toward the end, especially considering how (as others have said) it does a relatively poor job of sustaining interest in its various mysteries and plot threads after liurnia.
like, up to the snowfield, the mandatory stuff is both pretty darn compelling and interwoven decently enough with the optional stuff, which is excessive at times but still very, very good at its best. from the snowfield onward, the optional stuff is still fantastic if you can avoid the impulse to mop up all of it, but the mandatory stuff becomes a pretty muddled drag.
it doesn’t necessarily help that the bosses that gate a lot of the most compelling optional stuff (radahn, niall) are questionable-brutal
something that I think is emblematic of this game’s ultimately not-great narrative design is how, by the very end of the game, gideon ofnir’s primary dialog option is still “find the albinauric woman”
like, I get that they wanted to try to funnel players toward the haligtree without making it mandatory, but that’s a sidequest that the average person would have half-resolved for probably half of their total playtime on average, and meanwhile the roundtable keep just sort of empties out?
anyway there is still nothing else like this game that really comes close to working at this scale so I think it’s still pretty well canonized but the back leg could use some work, no question
The Haligtree is a marvelous dungeon, and the midboss was one of the few that made me say “fuck yeah” when I defeated (booster Loreta version). Now at Crumbling Farum Azula is also pretty sweet. Both are aesthetic marvels and high on the level design as well.
It’s just the constant parading of boss level enemies that is really screwing it. It replaces smart enemy placement to many times.
I blame youtube and streamers. Everyone was always about the bosses? There you, non stop bosses all the time D= (just a bit frustrated, not seriously blaming people outside the dev team)
[edit]
Already had to kill 2 white 4 winged dragons without my horse… Paaaaaaain
[/edit]
After summoning helpers and as a helper into multiple, at times very close but, ultimately unsuccessful fights, me and my boy Nerfed? +10 Mimic Ash ended up taking down Bonglord Placidusax. I accidently triggered the teleport while trying to touch a summon, and we had to go it alone. He got in the last hit with a clutch Ancient Dragon Lightning Strike incant, how fitting, how devilish. That’s a cool fight, feels like a dangerous marathon with lots of visually exciting wild shit building up, but learnable. Lots of running, I think fights where you have to run are better. Running is the thinking man’s dodging.
I think my favorite thing in this game so far was the fulfillment of my wish for the return trick of the hub world being discoverable in the ‘regular’ world. I’ll hope for and love it when they do it again next time, too.
I think I might actually respec into a faith build at the end for kicks. not sure what genius made all the good incantations be rewards from the final bosses and a faith build require like 45+ in both faith and at least one physical stat to work at all, but there’s some fun stuff buried all the way back there for no reason
this isn’t that different from Ranni’s quest dumping all the good int items on you halfway through despite, as @HOBO said, almost no magic doing meaningful damage between like 30 and 50 int, but at least that’s the part of the game that feels well scoped?
The patch made Radahn a much, much easier fight. I’m not sure you can get one shot by the first arrow anymore unless you’ve got like 8 vigor? Makes me wonder how much they’re going to overhaul the game. Honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they tweak a ton of lategame shit.
I’ve been curious about how a dex/faith caster build shakes out but not so curious that I’d respec and test it myself.
that’s a bummer about radahn. the gravity orbs were kind of too much but I’d have left him alone otherwise
also everything having to do with dragons in this effectively winds up feeling like dark souls 3 is canon to elden ring because they are not really lampshaded at all here by comparison
dex/faith focused on frenzy/blood casts seems viable, esp since you can get frenzied burst pretty much right away and unlike most faith spells, it actually casts pretty quickly.
Would wait for a patch that buffs faith though, since its still hilariously lacking, so glad I switched to arcane late game.
So I was pretty much stuck.
I was ready to do 3 bosses, right outside their areas. These were:
So far I’ve been working myself through the game without Ashes. They feel to me like NPC summons and I prime myself of not using those on the other FromSoft games.
But I was sick and tired, and even videos with the bosses showed people using ashes.
By the same order or boss name as before:
The game, specially pos capital, is completely created with difficulty tuned for using Ashes,
Instead of making bosses tuned for going against one player and have ashes make it more accessible.
This explains why the bosses are always attacking when you are in their zone in case it is an Ashe, why they don’t have longer recovery times to do a couple of attacks because it is counting on you doing the attacks while the boss is distracted with the ash, and why there is no stamina for bosses cause they count on always be fighting against multiple “players”.
The simple decision to implement this mechanic single handedly derailed the game into having a mediocre quality of bosses imo (one theory is that they were mediocre so they included the ashes and ruined the good bosses).
finally finished this last night (chaos ending, which ruled)
maybe i’ll longpost after i read the threads but boy they sure just went ahead and made the best videogame again for like the fourth time in fifteen years huh
Have we already talked about how they tried to inject personality/motivation/ambition into these actively warring demigods and whatnot but they all still just hang out in their boss rooms like Wood Man from Mega Man 2?
Mechanics that work fine in Demon’s (very dreamlike) and Dark (seems like everything’s just now waking up to kill an intruder), feel discordant in Elden Ring.
You can ignore me if the lore addresses this. I came here to bleed not to read.
yeah this is another way that I kept being reminded of dark souls 3 here, which seemed at least more aware of that conceit, despite probably having thought about dark souls 3 all of once in the years since I played it
when I summoned against Godrick I immediately got the sense that they’d finally designed their bosses to fight against multiple players (in some cases; which ones is probably not something most people need to think that hard about) after years of your doing that feeling like a cheese. it’s inconsistent, but I still think it’s a much better concession here on average than it’s been in the past.
You can summon for a pretty big section of Malenia’s city and I enjoyed rolling through that with Black Knight Tiche like Batman and Robin (she’s Batman). I wish there was more of that instead of me forgetting these things existed until I passed through a fog gate.
It might be asking a lot, but I’d rather they tune bosses so that some of the 360 attacks and AOEs only appear when you’ve summoned another player or spirit. It would be very From to then include an invincible ash that does no damage, but increases experience gain, sort of like a temporary bonfire ascetic for people who want the hardest challenge possible.
something about Wood Man’s posture and appearance really makes me want to picture him, like, on the phone, going “yeah, I’ve got absolutely nothing going on, he’s not here yet, I’m just standing around.”
I didn’t care for the fight but this part from a cutscene during the the Godfrey fight was so cool:
That will be all.
Thou didst me good service… [cut to black]
…Serosh.
[pained beastial screaming, his hand, covered in blood, pulling Serosh’s head by the mouth in a separate direction from its body]
I picked Wood Man because he’s a big tree like in this game.
The Godfrey fight thing was sick as hell but I missed all the lore about it (it’s in some item descriptions and a couple NPCs I guess I didn’t talk to bring it up) so when he did the phase transition it was mostly just kind of surreal. Yeah, ok man, I guess?