I beat the final boss. My mimic was absolutely beautiful. You don’t bench your best player just because she’s nearing retirement.
No respec, dumb dumb magic longsword, different pair of actual glasses with a stronger prescription.
It still took several more tries, but here’s how I did it:
Minor adjustments win championships. I found a talisman that negates Holy and looked up the location for the entry-level incantation that does the same. The holy buffs allowed me to take a couple of big hits and they kept my mimic alive until nearly the end.
As I mentioned before, Glintblade Phalanx can break Radagon’s poise. My damage output sucks so my critical hits suck, meaning it was actually better to just wail on Radagon without triggering the animation. Sometimes my mimc would go for the highlight reel instead, but whatever, that’s fine. She deserved it.
Elden Beast has the same weakness. Glintblade Phalanx can break its poise too. And I guess From so badly wants you to have that feel good moment of landing the critical that they made the poise break last a really long time. Positioning myself just to the side of its King Hippo weak point allowed me to slash away for a good chunk of its health.
Radagan’s invincible during his grab. Unless I’m really tired, Elden Beast is not. My mimc took this one for the team, allowing me to stack all kinds of normal slashes and Phalanx swords to get damage and a poise break immediately after.
Elden Beast taking flight means circles in the sky and circles on the ground (can be one or more). You’ve got to position the camera so you can see these. Then you have to jump over the moving inward circles while running to get clear of the outer one in time. Then you’ve got to reset the camera and scan around to get the boss back into view so you know what the next attack is.
Elden Beast starts stacking attacks: little homing stars will overlap with holy swings or bursts. I assume there’s a way to dodge all of these or position yourself such that they don’t overlap, but I got lucky here. My mimc’s last act on this Earth was to draw the first couple of rune arcs in a series while I dodged a separate homing attack. I dodged the final arc and just let the smaller attacks land because I wasn’t sure I could dodge both.
I don’t like that this is a back-to-back fight. The phase 1 music sucks and it takes a lot of concentration to know when you can roll through or have to roll out of different attacks. Phase 2’s got a lot to learn and some of that is camera management. I found that combination exhausting, but ultimately felt like either fight could have been fun for me if they were spaced apart.
Still, when the second phase rolled the dice with zero health left and decided to come at me with three unenchanted melee swipes, it felt like such a victory lap to roll through those and get one last stab.
Thanks to the NPCs getting noted on the maps and the better drop rate/merchant availability of smithing stones, I made some decent progress last night.
In just one evening I got my halberd from +1 to +4, found the path to the northern area, and beat that big dude with the two giant morning stars and the Undertaker chokeslam attack in one of the crypts.
I think I have to go back and catcall some wolfman out east now. According to that official Namco starter guide I probably need to get back to sniffing around that river near the artist shack for a second cave.
So yeah, I’m the guy that needed that starter guide and the early game rebalancing.
I thought the last line Maliketh says after you kill him was one of those great lines which make a reader realize the stakes of a world or action in a way that you just hadn’t before.
Why covet Destined Death? To kill what? *disintegrates*
If you ever need to grind for a few levels, there is an extremely easy way to do it. So easy that it kind of feels like cheating.
If you completed Varré’s quest (the guy by the Rose Church in the Lakes area, who you also talk to very early in the game), he gave you an item that teleports you to the Mohgwyn Palace area (which is right next to Siofra River but not connected as far as I can tell). If you ride your horse through some dangerous things and up a path, you get to the Palace Approach Ledge-Road bonfire.
Once there, walk a few steps away from the bonfire (right next to the enemies that don’t seem to care about your presence) and shoot an arrow down at the big bird below. It runs right at you and falls off the cliff. Sit at the bonfire and repeat. This is even more efficient if you wear the gold bug talisman from the Abandoned Cave in Caelid.
This didn’t work for me the first try but you have to wait until the bird is a bit further away from you before you hit it with the arrow. I used the intervening tree branches to gauge whether the distance was appropriate. I think the issue relates to the AI steering algorithm which due to the shape of the nav graph fails to slow the enemy down enough before hitting the target causing it to fall off the cliff, which is why it only works if it’s far enough away to hit full speed before it hits the cliff edge (I got 20 or so levels this way when everything was kicking my ass so I had a lot of time to think about it)
Finished all of the volcano manor stuff. After completing all the hit contracts, killing Rykard, exhausting dialog, you can find Patches at the Shaded Castle bossroom. He’ll give you an item, which seems like you can only show to Tanith as she’s eating Rykard’s corpse in his bossroom. It doesn’t seem to do anything, though, she just shrugs and keeps chomping and says she needs more time. You can choose to kill her, which causes her Crucible Knight to invade, apparently, after which you get an incantation and her armor. Seems like there’s a missing/unsolved/unfinished step there though.
I have converted over from my +23 Flame-Art/Sacred Cross-Naginata to a +23 Flame-Art/Sacred Godskin Stitcher after not being able to resist the siren call of a Heavy Thrusting Sword. The Stitcher has a sweet lunging run+r2 attack, and you can cancel the windup of standing-r2’s with circle to get a kinda feint-slash back-dash that can be combo’d into the backdash R1. The Cross-Naginata is cool, it’s probably better? it has native bleed buildup, but tbh I never got along with the initial katana-like first R1 slash. The Bloody Helice, also a Heavy Thrusting Sword also seems cool; it has what seems like a very useful unique iframe-dodge weapon art combo, and native bleed - but I cannot commit to a life of arcane scaling, sinful blood worship, etc.
Also I got blue-ring called into an invasion while alt-tabbed typing up all this gamer diary bullshit and only noticed when my controller started vibrating. I got back in and the invader had almost killed my unresponsive body before the host showed up. Then another invader appeared and the host got tied up, the initial guy and me both got down to the wire, emptied our soda pop bottles, he was throwing all his warming stones out. My new best friend running-R2 clutched it for team host.
While they’re patching this game for “balance” they should break this out into four inputs: backstep, dodge roll, toggle dash, hold dash. As it stands it’s miserable.
You also can’t map the same action to more than one key so I can’t even redundantly map it to my pinky and thumb – it’s mandatorily one key and/or mouse button for each item on the menu.
I’m experimenting with keyboard firmware that does something like if X is tapped macro hold Y until Z is released but it’s clearly not going to be consistent enough. So I’m just going to watch others play this.
Remapping each action is table stakes for accessibility. Neglecting it is more hateful than any boss pattern.
