God honestly I feel like this game is absolutely the worst for “this boss is impossible; I am going to live the rest of my life and die fighting this boss” posts being met with “oh he was easy for me” responses haha
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Speaking of Commander Niall I have run him probably more than 50 times in the last week to both help a friend of mine clear him and to farm runes for item upgrades and level ups. My tried and true co-op Commander Niall tips are as follows:
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One person should tank or kite both adds if possible; if not, each person should take one enemy in the first stage of this fight.
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The people fighting the adds should not prioritize killing them. Rather, they should prioritize moving them physically away from Niall and the player fighting him.
- Put your highest DPS on Niall himself, and if more than one person can bring a high damage DOT to the fight, make sure everyone gets Niall ticking during the first 10 seconds of the fight, while he’s summoning the knights.
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Niall despawns his adds at 50% health when he transitions to stage 2 of the fight. If you kill the adds before Niall transitions to stage 2, he just stays in stage 2 for longer and the fight is harder for some builds that way, as he’s much more mobile.
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Get Niall down to 50% as fast as possible. Ignore the adds. Almost every failed run I see is down to people not focusing Niall and either getting stunlocked by the adds or killing the adds too soon and then finding themselves unprepared for stage 2 Niall.
- Niall stage 1 has a movement pattern in the early part of the fight where he will target a player and keep a distance from them, carefully moving right and left as if looking for an opening. This means that he can be induced to stand for a long time within the damage radius of DOT grenades like the volcano pot.
- If you can pull off phase 1 flawlessly you can probably pull of phase 2-- and if you have rot breath or other DOT effects on him, it will be easier. The main hazard in this phase is that Niall will get aggro on a player who’s not prepared to dodge or deal with him. He is so mobile that he can pursue one player much faster than the others can follow. Careful aggro management by the more resilient players makes this phase much easier.
Having this much experience with a boss is stupid but this is the guy I was farming while trying to level up enough that I could properly summon for the Godskin Duo.
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IMO that was launch-day Bloodborne with the “boss AI forgets all but one attack if the PS4 was in rest mode” glitch
I beat Vicar Amelia on the second day after launch on the second try, and couldn’t really understand the discourse around that boss for a while. I mean Amelia just kinda swipes at you repeatedly, what’s the hangup
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Yeah, I mean it’s really hard to answer the question “how hard should FromSoft games be?” or “what builds should be viable?” when I’ve worked on old-school feeling roguelike games and such for work I’ve always proceeded with the ethos that it’s a good thing to make builds a bit of a hidden difficulty slider and just let some things be obviously broken. Instead of a difficulty option you just take the moon laser that melts everything and that’s your easy mode. It usually feels like From is trying to manage difficulty, balance and their own flavour and it’s a bit murky what the experience ought to feel like or if something is broken or just bad by design.
Their move early on here to patch out basically everything that made the game any easier feels… I dunno, like a bad one, honestly. From games seem to trade on the fact that there’s a kind of organic looseness to their design—things are, if anything, kind of underdesigned, with a lot of latitude that can make the game unfair, but just as often unfair in your favour. Patching out anything that works in favour of the player is what a lot of From-inspired games (you know, Hollow Knight) have gone for and the end result is just an experience that’s as overdesigned as the AAA and III nightmares that drove people towards the Souls series except they’re designed to be bad and hard to play.
Edit: you know what it is? It’s like the difference between tripping on a tall step that’s there because the ground around it was worn down by foot traffic over a hundred years. Who are you going to be mad at? God? Nature? It’s that vs. FromSoft sending over the step guy to pour some extra concrete on after the fact to make the step a bit extra tall so more people trip over it. Older FromSoft games always had the feel that things were the way they were because they were just like that. Once they start patching out everything people like it starts to feel a lot more like the latter
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I kind of get it though, some of this was so ridiculous that it was like a challenge run to use anything else. Hoarfrost Stomp’s inexplicable damage level was arguably a glitch, and it risked reducing the enormous variety of choices to near-meaninglessness.
Ideally it would’ve been fixed before the game was released, since suddenly pulling the rug under PvE players is a real bad vibe certainly
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I think it is simpler than that.
The patch they did was probably more over the PVP than actual PVE. They did the same with bleed damage in DS3. Also, having one solution to every problem never was what they intended to do in any game. That’s what these things they patched were becoming really fast.
As for the rest they try to get the maths… On even ground.
I.E. in DS1 Syth the maximum magic boss. You could beat it with magic even in run 1. I beated it with the Moonlight Greatsword in NG+3 and +4.
Actually… Now that I remember it, since I did a new character for streaming which was obsessed with the Moonlight I actually cut his tail to get the Moonlight Greatsword, and beat his ass with it with a half asses dex/int build.
What they try to do is exactly NOT to favor any build. Some builds will do more damage than other to certain bosses and areas, but this is not Pokemon and you won’t find an enemy absorbing all your fire attacks. Having well defined parameters of what is the minimum damage any build can do at an acceptable level, actually gives more freedom to the dev imo to focus on the actual action of the boss, on it’s patterns, on it’s affinities and for whatever lore reasons the dev might want. Because every build, at any given time, with more or less patience… Could “solve the puzzle”.
That why Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne didn’t need any respec functionality. It focused the player on “every problem can be solved, every challenge surpassed”.
DS2 was actually the black sheep. Or should I say the pokemon of the bunch. There was some bosses that were pure elemental, and the player could actually nullify the damage from that boss with the right equipment (less than 1% the intended damage). That sucked.
This was part of the reason i quit playing sekiro and muted the thread
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Didn’t they nerf like half a dozen things and buff way more.
I don’t see how that makes From the new Blizzard, this patch sure seemed to be filled with good changes and there are still many ways to break the game and I’m sure many more will be discovered before long.
Signed,
Guy Who Spent Hours Spamming Hoarfrost Stomp Yet Is Glad It’s gone
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They should make every invisible door require 100 hits
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you’re just in the tank for Jar Bairn
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They should make some illusory walls break only by rolling, and others only by attacking
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Idk, they sure seem to favor int in this game. Sorceries are strictly way more damage than incantations, and were buffed across the board. The real main quest (ranni) only rewards int items. There are way more int or int/dex weapons than anything else, and the bosses just attack too much for colossal weapons to not suck. then they nerfed the heavy infusion for some inexplicable reason
Meele doesn’t need to raise Mind (usually).
That means that at least a portion of the points going to vig and end are going to mind. Even having low armor and fast roll… Well ashes kinda broke most of it really. And the investment in int in every game is always a very heavy one. The great spells have very high int requirements, unlike weapons, which are mostly soft capped around str or dex 40 anyway. Spells go higher than that. In boss fights the range can very easily mean nothing.
Faith builds have (usually again) a bunch of buffs.
And dex… I always go dex and I use bows heavily in every game. No decent dex scaling bow in this game. I even wikied it. Best dex scaling bow has split damage with int. So i wasn’t being able to pull any decent damage with bows, unless I went quality build. There’s even a very nice str bow.
But even so these games seem to always be bit biased toward int casters, I think I mentioned this before. Probably the high risk vs return, but personally I think it is because at some point in every game the damage output is not so hot and makes things harder for pure casters.
are you for real
There was a long, long stretch where sorcery was doing jack shit damage for me. It wasn’t until I could use Comet – which requires 52 int – and respecced so I had more FP that I was able to consistently nuke shit. This seems roughly in line with a few other folks I know who went int/dex and didn’t use Moonveil. So I’m pretty glad they buffed all those spells. I couldn’t find a use for many of them.
Every build (and player) is going to have wildly different peaks and valleys so I am consistently baffled when people gripe about how other folks have it easier than they do.
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I think it’s the time investment it takes to do something differently, I know you’re talking about respeccing but I still don’t have any of those items to do that. Maybe I have one. I can’t remember. I’m not going to spend ten minutes launching the game to find out.
And yeah, I could look it up and go get one or two OR I could do what I know and continue bashing my head against this particular wall I’ve encountered and then complain about it and then have someone tell me “oh that’s trivial”
I dunno, I think the midgame in this is really weird because there are lots of meatwalls and I feel so invested in my particular build, both emotionally and time-wise that I’m not that interested in changing all of that now just for one boss, especially considering that it’s possible that this change will make a different boss into a nightmare for me and I’ll have to re-do it all over again.
Mind I’m not complaining about balance changes in the patch or anything, I’m essentially justifying my own feeling of “either this game is imbalanced towards specific builds OR i’m a huge idiot who can’t play it” based on the evidence of “this boss seems to have been absolutely trivial for everyone but me”.
Honestly though, I’m still having a blast summoning two randos and just wailing on bosses until they die, it’s deeply satisfying.
I dunno, I think I’d be much, much more positive on this game if it was much, much shorter. I feel like I’m less than halfway through at 55 hours and it’s starting to feel like I’m being punished for my choices? I just want this game to end already, and I don’t want to have to find out how to play a completely different game to get there. I don’t want to learn how sorcery works. I want my moderately sized hammer to work plz.
Anyway I have super mixed feelings about this game, but I also don’t want anyone to think I’m shitting on their experiences here. I’ve gotten more out of this game than almost any open world game I’ve played. It’s certainly on par with BotW, and I appreciate it as much as I appreciate No Man’s Sky which is saying a lot.
It’s also been nice to be contemporary with people on a Soulsborne game for once.
But god it’s fucking long. I’m so tired but…still compelled to play…
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there are a million good int weapons that will scale before your sorceries do, though. faith is basically this, only the whole game, and with far fewer weapons for some reason. it’s a weapon stat, because none of the damage sorceries are worth casting and none of the support sorceries scale with your faith. but it does work as a weapon stat, the good faith weapons are good. a bit boring to use until you actually get some of those weapons, though, because otherwise you’re just stuck using sacred blade on whatever basic weapon you choose, so you’re locked out of all the ash of war variety.
Yeah when I respecced int/faith I was like “oh hell yeah I get to use all these incredibly cool spells; I mean sorcery has magic damage but faith has versatility—attack, defence, debuffs, utility—how great is that?” but actually damage is better than everything else and versatility only helps if you like navigating TWO MENUS AT ONCE while a guy is relentlessly and mercilessly attempting to kill you. It’s like a martial arts demo where the guy is like “I will show you how to stop an attacker with a gun; ok, not if you take a step back obviously. Ok, not if you move too fast. Listen just hold your arm there so I can grab it”
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Yeah its just that faith really feels underwhelming the whole game because simply doing damage is always better than running around doing a bunch of prep just to do less damage per second of anyone I coop with.
What faith is really missing is range. The only offensive incantation that has a useful range is stone of gurranq and that’s a late game incant
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