i took a break for a while and i’m back at it now. i can get her down to near death consistently by leaning on bleed but she shreds my summons too fast in phase 2 and i haven’t figured out how to react to the arena-wide true combo 3(+?) hit juggle spell
i’m also doing this with 3 tree fragment upgrades
going to upgrade tiche to +10 and replace the dung eater summon with her, %hp damage seems like a good move
you just jump
got it after sleeping on it! i used the free npc summon and dung eater puppet. phase 1, i used rotten breath to apply scarlet rot, then went in with a greatshield and the star fists with bloodflame blade on them. dung and i were both applying bleed so it went off like 3 times. phase 2, i switched to the black knife and spammed the %hp damage weapon art while the summons tanked. dung eater fell pretty early on but leda lasted the entire fight this time. what really made the difference this time was wearing the heaviest armor i could and using the mixed physick that negates all elemental damage for 15 seconds.
per felix’s advice, i jumped to avoid the triple moon attack this time (previously i had been in the ramp up phase of the black knife weapon art whenever rellana started it, so i could only watch helplessly as i was juggled to death from full hp) and managed the last sliver of damage while i was still comfortably immune to magic and fire
this win was about as far as you could get from mastering a boss fight in sekrio, i tried leaning on carian retaliation for a few of the attempts last night but in the end it was more my speed to bring in a magic the gathering deck of metagamey bullshit and win by pressing the same button repeatedly
what a great boss, unironically
Actually noticing and enjoying the music in one of these things for once instead of it going in one ear and out the other, in a few places anyway
Scorpion River Catacombs might be the funniest filler dungeon in the game, recommend
At least if you enjoy giant googly eyes that give you deathblight
I’m in the abyss with the madness inducing enemies you can’t hurt and everything looks the same and there’s like a completely different reshade filter looking lighting and weather state everytime I die and respawn that makes it impossible to get any kind of sense of direction
this was happening to me when I first started playing before rebooting and it was pretty bad, luckily the stuttering was worse and fixing that seemed to have fixed this too
Neat
I forgot you can counter with R2 after blocking.
I liked the Rellana fight a lot. It felt like Malenia but without waterfowl and a less annoying second phase
The map in the DLC is confusing me so far. It feels like it’s trying to do the DS1 thing where areas are interconnected and loop around to meet each other in unexpected ways, but the open world makes finding those single connective points really hard? It’s sort of like the NPC quest problem where the old Souls style of doing things becomes much harder once it collides against an open world
I’m at the last boss but I don’t even have the north and south map unlocked?
youve entered your speedrunner era
fog rift catacombs best catacombs. so many slapstick moments with the falling spiked ceilings. at one point i briefly switched to keyboard and mouse controls to beat an annoyingly placed enemy in a sniper duel. now i’m camping out right outside the boss fog putting getting summoned repeatedly and out-bullying the initially overwhelming boss by whacking him with heavy attacks from the guts sword.
yeah it encourages running around hugging cliff faces and ledges like you’re looking for secret walls in wolfenstein. i’m still not sure if there’s another way out of that valley that the rift fog catacombs are in
got into the DLC. man, its so so cool. the red-ish browns with black fabrics, the rollings fields and rivers and ruins. everything looks so luxurious! im still underleveled (115) but im managing ok. i can do good damage to normal enemies and alright damage against most bosses with a +22 weapon. if i let them touch me im dead, though.
have been using a lot of the craftable items and spirit summons, way more than i ever did in the base game. its awesome
i spoiled myself to the new weapons and have decided i want to center my build around that golden greataxe dropped by the death knight. the ash of war is dashing forward like a lighting bolt then doing a crazy helm-splitter from the air. i know the general direction of where to get it, but not exactly where. will go on exploring till i bump into it
i have died to the golden hippopotamus more than to any other enemy in the entirety of elden ring, typically within the first 5 seconds of the fight
edit 15 minutes later:
then i summoned someone in heavy armor and they tanked it while i stood back spamming the black knife weapon art and it went down in under a minute. the end! no moral
must start work now
in terms of bullshit that kills you in these games, i much prefer bottomless pits to roll-catches
I’m glad the expansion didn’t add any trophies. I don’t know whether that was intentional or whether they just ran out of time, but it makes the world feel more like a world and not just a checklist. (I wish trophies didn’t exist in video games.)
Shortly before I quit for the night yesterday, I found Bonny Village. While fighting a crowd of shadow people there, I was surprised and amused to suddenly encounter someone else amid the crowd. And then I found an evocative weapon in a hut as I was leaving the area.
At first it felt a little odd to have enemies and landmarks spaced out as much as they are here, maybe even more so than in the base game. Like they’d made the world a certain size and then tried to fill it in as much as possible while reaching a reasonable release date.
But although I can’t help seeing the contrast with the way every corridor is a puzzle or challenge in their other games–especially when an area reminds me a lot of their other games–I like the Shadow of the Colossus-type approach they took this time.
Was excited to get into the DLC after putting the game down for a year or something. But nope! Lost my save to the PlayStation gods. Stormveil suuuucks to do again
