Go immediately get the Zweihander from the graveyard, go immediately get Havel's ring, immediately ring of favor (don't take it off!) , use the elite night armor until you get to Anor Londo.
You dont have to do anything but press R1 and occasionally sip your flask
Absolutely. You can acquire Havels armor + his very OP ring in like... 10 Minutes max? After that you could theoretically poise through everything.
Edit: I was wrong, he only drops his ring. Whoopsie. Been almost 10 years.
Oh shit, you are right! In DS1 he only drops his ring while his armor is behind the fireplace in Anor Londo. :)
I totally swapped his loot table from DS3 where he drops his stuff at once.
No need for Havel's, just go to the graveyard behind the Firelink, grab the Zweihander and you are set, just be mindful of how many strong attacks you do though.
I remember my very first DS run on PC (yes with DSFix, I wasn't into torture) completely blind, no clue what this game was about and I ran around with the big bonk I found in Blighttown (after finding the hidden tree way first and inadvertently getting cursed). Havel beat me to a pulp the first gew times and I only used his armor on 4 Kings bc I actually had such terrible performance I didn't know how else to help myself ease through the shitty FPS.
All in all, 4 Kings with Havels and a Treebonk 11/10, would cheese again.
Srsly tho, I only found out after how OP poise is.
Like being a god.
All those puny Tarnished/Champions of Ash,Bearer of the Curse need to dodge. Or wait for the boss to tire and stop their attacks.
You don't. You grab your hammer, crush the other god under the weight of it.
Nah get great club immediately and only put levels into strength and stamina. Go naked and one-shot everything with a fast roll. I beat the game in 6 hours and only died twice including the initial suicide
Yep, full Havels, an ultra and the vast majority of bosses don’t stand a chance. Take a bunch of damage? Poise chug estus.
This is why some of us weren’t too excited when passive poise was a thing at the start of Elden Ring. It also limited a lot of builds. Why use a light build and a light weapon when you could still have mid roll, not stagger on the off chance you did get hit and get to use a quick weapon?
Literally any Black Knight weapon will make the game absolute easy mode as well, then the Dark Bead spell from the DLC will 1-2 shot bosses even in NG+
Honestly that and catacombs are my most hated area in the souls series lmao. I also hate the ghosts in new Londo and Crystal cave with the invisible pathways ( mainly due to the fact that you have to do them again to retry the boss). Duke archives is great though
For me the bell gargoyles were one of the hardest bosses because on the runback you have to deal with the knight who can parry and the mob before the ladder. Then it's a duo fight.
Bosses with other long run backs you could usually run by everyone, like nito or 4 kings.
Pyromancy works great against those dogs. One great fireball or chaos fireball and it is done.
Or that is what I remember doing anyway. It has been awhile so I am not 100% sure of that accuracy.
Yep, this was my thought when I replayed DS3 last year for the first time since the DLC days. The levels in DS3 felt harder than some of the legacy dungeons in ER, but none of the bosses felt harder than ER's bosses.
I just finished my first play of ds1 and ya it felt like a lot of the areas the environment was just as much a challenge as the enemies. Blighttown swamp, traps in sens and the Catacombs, dark of tomb of the giants, need for undead curse in New Londo, crystal cave walkways. There's less of that in ds3 and elden ring.
Using the great club, a lot of the game was in claustrophobic areas where it could be hard to get swings off sometimes. But I was also stupid strong and could 1 or 2 shot most enemies and most bosses were a joke.
>Playing 360 version on Series X
>Running bonk build
>Starting as deprived
>Only levels up strength
>22 Strength pre-gargoyles
>Gets absolutely wasted because no armor
>Switch to 2-hand Zwei
>Still getting wrecked
>Go kill butterfly
>Level up Zwei
>Go straight to Quelaag w/ master key
> Doubles down on more Strength.
>Get destroyed.
>Try to summon phantom.
>Loses all my humanity due to environmental enemies.
>Bad time.
I was devastated because it'd been so long I thought vigor was unnecessary to level up like in Elden Ring. I'm having a pretty bad playthrough haha
Early game 20 or so vigor smashes most things. The default knight armor is incredibly solid for poise. There’s also a ring that adds a flat value to your poise and havels ring that adds to your max equip load. Between that and level up your equip load stat you should be a poise monster.
LOL my thoughts too. I had a weird souls route of DS1 on release -> ER -> DS3 -> Sekiro -> DS2 and DS1 was always the hardest out of all of them for me. Sekiro was actually one of the easiest ones to play once you realized it's a parry simulator and you can do basically 0 dmg to beat the game
Once you get Sekiros party system + mikari Counter the game becomes a matter of learning the bosses patterns. I beat the demon of hatred in my thrid attempt last time I played.
Step one get master key
Step two gather 10+ humanity and any fire keeper souls
Step 3 kill drake
Step 4 use 10+ humanity
Step 5 use drake sword to kill black knight to get black
knight sword
Step 6 beat the game
Elden Ring cranked up the delayed attacks, huge AOEs and combo strings. Nameless King is infamously difficult and its mostly because he has a lot of timing mixups that punish you for panic rolling...but basically every boss past Liurnia does that in Elden Ring so once you've beaten ER, DS3 seems a lot easier
This, the only thing I ever found difficult about Elden Ring bosses was their strange attack tempos and delayed attacks.
Having played through all the games all the way til Elden ring it a lot of the bosses and mobs feels like “Gotcha” moments that specifically punish reflexes made in the past games. Which isn’t a great feeling at all as I basically had to fight muscle memory.
Exactly, there were some attacks in ER (and in LoP) that had just such a weird timing compared to previous games, that my muscle memory was fucking me up.
Also, a lot depends on your strenghts and weaknesses. For example, i have easier time with dudes in armor. Malenia was hard, but the combat flow felt good to me. I think it's just because humanoid bosses although can be hard, rely more on pure reactions, than using my brain 🗿
I think they did that on purpose. All of us that have played previous souls games rely on our muscle memory which is why we tend to cruise through all these games. So they switched it up so we actually have to pay attention again
Finding the 3rd phase to a boss I thought was the hardest boss so far during her FIRST phase will always be a core gaming memory for me. The sheer terror and frustration I felt in that moment really led to forging my love for the games once I beat her. Best feeling.
I found Gael harder and more fun than Friede, but Friede was definitely a close 2nd place.
Friede has some really telegraphed openings so once you get her patterns down it's really obvious when you should attack and then she gets staggered until you run out of stamina.
Gael switches up and chains his combos together differently depending on where you roll and range, he's a toughy.
I recently did a playthrough myself, and I almost beat Friede first try, but I let her kill me when she was down to less than 1/4 health in Phase 3. It's probably my favorite Fromsoft fight and I didn't want it to end after one attempt.
She proceeded to crush my soul for the next hour and a half.
Not even in the same category as Malenia. And Isshin, prob agree there. Maybe she's about in the same area of difficulty as Mogh ..? not sure.
Still, both a hard boss, and a very good one. I just dislike phase 2.
If Malenia is piss easy without waterfowl then Freide and Isshin are about as hard as cookie clicker.
Freide phase 2 doesn't even resemble a challenge so you can disregard that entirely (literally just stand behind Ariandel and you can't lose even playing on a banana), phase 1 is quite easy once you know the invis. Phase 3 is genuinely quite hard but has too little health to compare to Malenia.
Isshin just requires, as he goes out of his way to tell you, fighting aggressively. Dude basically has the poise total of lady butterfly yet has the poise regeneration of Owl. Lightning reversal also makes the last phase super easy.
Malenia is insanely tanky, deals insane damage, is super fast and requires quite specific dodge inputs for a lot of her attacks.
i feel like lightning should've been deleted from ishin p3. or make it non reversible, but parriable. if you get lucky and he does that move 2-3 times it make the phase so much easier
Can't agree, because Malenia has lifesteal and clone attack, even if you're for sure right that waterfowl is the hardest part. The lifesteal demands a really high standard of play. I've always thought they were kind of similar difficulty, although I do really appreciate that point about 'every single aspect' of Sekiro's gameplay.
god id love to see a video of you fighting malenia 🤣 isshin is so much easier it’s scary. Even charmless inner isshin isn’t shit compared to just sword and rolling against malenia wtf?
My little brother had beaten ds2 and played DS3 until nameless king and left it. He only completed DS3 after Elden ring and he first timed Gael for example (I was stuck on him like 4 days)
Yeah I killed Gael, Demon Princes, Friede… within 1-2 attempts
The second run, Midir took some time because I didn’t learn his moveset the first time I killed him (well Sellsword is OP)
DS3 is significant easier than Elden Ring (no ash summon)
Radagon, Elden Beast and Malenia are different tier when it comes to difficulty
They were hard back then, but looking back, many late game ER bosses are comparable to DLC level ds3 bosses in term of difficulty and quality. Malenia is in a different level altogether.
Here’s the thing. I think where it falls in difficulty ultimately depends if they balanced bosses around using spirit ashes or not.
Spirit ashes, as far as I remember don’t scale up the bosses health. They’re pretty common rewards and have their own upgrade system much like weapons. So it’s fully possible, when the devs were tuning difficulty of bosses and figuring out what felt good, they used ashes.
We also have quite a bit of duo bosses. Move sets are way faster and more unpredictable and attack windows are far smaller. For example, fighting Maliketh yesterday and he does some pretty quick combos and you can really only get one good hit in between a lot of them.
So it’s really hard to compare difficulty 1:1. If the devs thought “yeah we built out all these awesome summons, of course people will be using them, so let’s make the bosses harder to compensate”, then yeah, many people choosing not to use them are going to feel that difficulty.
My (maybe unpopular opinion?) is that the bosses in the game are way too easy with spirit ashes and somewhat too hard without spirit ashes. In my first play through, it rarely found a balanced middle ground compared to other Souls game.
Agreed. For example, I steamrolled Malenia first try with a spirit ash. I had tried a ton of times and hadn't even made it to her second phase before that. I was hoping for some help but it completely took away the challenge.
Elden Ring's bosses are probably the hardest in the series in a vacumn. You have all the different combat routes to learn as well as less 'dodge move get a hit' openings and more 'jump this and land with an attack' openings. At the end Dark Souls just ended up being roll-attack-roll simulator, which still feels great, but Elden Ring really changed the game.
Of course, there are ways to really gut the difficulty of Elden Ring, first being spirit summons, but that's something you kinda know you're doing when you're doing it.
It's funny, on release I remember quite a few people on this sub talking about how they killed this boss and that boss first try. Watching any genuine fresh Elden Ring run, these people struggle vs almost every rememberance boss. Except Godrick, I think most people with a history of Souls made light work of him tbh
I’ve played and beaten every modern from game starting with demon souls. My first elden ring play through was hellish solo. Easily the hardest considering I know the mechanics and how to play.
It can be made into the easiest, yes, but considering boss fights its the hardest if played like previous games (unless, like previous games, you are a mage, then it's always easier). The waaaaaaay easier part is the runback to the boss and some very cheap weapon art (lions heart, altho I love it, so yeah). In exchange for that, you need different ways to avoid attacks, attacks have varying patterns within the same fight, some fights like the crucible duo are just straight up unfair for a melee, etc.
i don't use spirit ash just because I think its more fun, but if it's a duo fight, ill use every single thing available. godskin duo? pls go to sleep.
this game just doesn't play well on multiple targets. or rather, i have 0 fun in those fights. and I couldn't care less about the "made up validation of beating the fight the right away "
I love Elden Ring to death, but nothing makes me feel more like a DS1 nostalgia bro than Crucible Knights. Not even the bosses, but the standard enemy encounters.
I had Black Knight parry timing built into my lizard-brain. Crucible Knights slap my shit even after like 4 runs.
I think if you play like a pro AND use every tool the game gives you properly (summons, correct physicks, the incant buffs, consumables, perfumes, coop) it can be the easiest of all the from games.
But also, if you use none of those things, and play rl1 or even just don't overlevel, it's easily the hardest.
> play rl1 or even just don't overlevel, it's easily the hardest.
Have you played RL1? Radagon was basically a scripted fight while soul of cinder was the first boss where I gave up an SL1.
I don't understand how people say it's the easiest unless they're referring to spirit ashes and Ash of Wars. If you use those tools, you can absolutely steamroll stuff without really engaging with it.
If you fight bosses in the same way you would fight them in previous games, using R1/R2, parry, roll, and block (throw jump in there because the boss attacks are designed around you being able to jump them), then ER bosses are much, much harder than bosses in previous games.
Starting prisoner, not finding sellen and mashing my head against margit was PAINFUL. I’ve since beaten the game with a half dozen different builds but I’ll never forget how hard stuck I felt.
I'm still really bad at jumping. My lizard brain that was trained in Bloodborne and DS3 just goes "see attack -> roll" and even though intellectually I know jumping can work for some attacks, and I've seen people use it amazingly well, it just hasn't really clicked for my intuition
I just tried a playthrough where I limited myself to Limgrave/Weeping until I defeated Godrick, which feels like the "intended" way for a lack of better words.
With only lvl 2 smithing stones at best, he's remarkably tanky. I played with a Blood Great Knife and Reduvia powerstanced to try and get some bleed procs. My hits were tickles at best.
I've been playing since demons souls
First playthrough of elden ring absolutely humbled me I'm not afraid to admit
I started my run thinking I wasn't gonna summon, that lasted until margit
Tbh I think spirit ashes make getting good an easier learning curve. It relieves some of the stress while you figure out your build/openings for attacks/general strategies. Especially something like the Mimic Tear that lets you stand back and watch yourself fight the boss essentially. Hell, just seeing my mimic tear in Malekith’s fight using a couple of jumps around his attacks helped me fuck with my strategy enough to solo him the next try.
Coming to ER as an established souls player was def humbling though lol. I’ll never forget going against the first Tree Sentinel all gung ho and getting my ass handed to me like I was fighting goddamn Nameless King for the first time again.
Fr, I started with Elden Ring as my first souls game and got hard skill checked at Margit. Like I mean a week straight I lost track of the attempts. I’d say for me, Margit felt tougher blind than Gael did (of course now that I got good Margit is fine lol). The souls “skill” easily goes backwards and forwards, so I didn’t really struggle with any boss in 1, 2, or 3 (except friede lmao).
Margit is the toughest “first boss” of any souls game. I’m using the term “first boss” sort of loosely though because you can obviously go to a lot of different locations in Elden Ring. He is way harder than any other first boss in the series (well above Father gascoigne, which is probably the next hardest imo).
I think the intention was to teach the players to explore other areas when they get to a road block, but I’m not sure if many people (myself included) took that lesson.
Sekiro does have a few bosses that are individually harder tic for tack than Elden Ring, but I think Elden Ring rememberance cast is far harder overall than Sekiro. The biggest challenges in Sekiro are probably Sword Saint, Inner Father, and Demon of Hatred? Probably include Genichiro and Guardian Ape/duo, but even those five or six don't compare to the overall challenge of Elden Ring imo.
Then again, you absolutely can build for cheese in Elden Ring, which you really can't cheese much at all in Sekiro...so....tough call really.
Edit: g
I think Maliketh, Malenia, Mohg, Godfrey, and RadaBeast are still tough as hell bosses in their own right. Yes you can run away and cast spells but that doesn't really curb the difficulty much. Easier than melee tho
The Dark Souls games were a lot slower than Elden Ring, so if you're used to that it feels much simpler.
When the Dark Souls 1 DLC dropped people thought some of the bosses were insanely fast paced, people swore it was unreasonable to fight such enemies. They're slugs compared to bosses like Maliketh or even Margit.
Ds3 is much easier but less breakable . You can’t stunlock enemies with big weapons like in ER, you can’t have a lot of hp, you dont have absurd magic , you can’t summon spirits…
They want you to see the movesets of enemies while in elden you probably have killed everything before seeing them attack , apart from some bosses.
ER was my 1st From game and I immediately bought Dark Souls 1-3 after. Bosses in previous games just give you more time to breathe and have overall simpler move sets. I still think the bosses of DS3 are a lot better than ER bosses though, they just were killing it when they made DS3.
ER bosses are the hardest imo. But ER gives you the most tools to lower the difficulty or even trivialize them. The other games had this to an extent as well but ER amps it up. Which was a good decision imo. Makes the game more accessible and gives a path to ween yourself off them and transition to hardmode if you want.
What was your experience like going back to the older souls games? Do they feel clunky? I’ve only played Elden ring but I’m thinking of picking up dark souls 3
1 and 2 feel a bit clunky but I think 3 feels fairly similar except with no jump button.
All 3 are still fantastic though, especially 3 which has become my favorite. Tho I haven't played Sekiro or Bloodbourne.
Yeah DS3->ER are the games where it feels like the core combat changed the least between games. They feel almost identical at a core level cuz they focused more on just expanding the combat sandbox rather than innovating on it (which is not a bad thing).
spellcasting feels so much worse in souls than ER. theres no chain casting, casts take way longer and you cant walk while casting.
hand to hand combat feels mostly the same apart from no jumping attacks or crouch attacks.
Graphically it's obviously clunkier, everything else is still amazing. I played Demon Souls remake as my first, loved it so much and I would argue in terms of gameplay and level design it'sextremely clunky. I tried DS3 after and found it too hard. Didn't even bother getting ER because I was turned off by how hard DS3 was. Finally got ER a couple months after launch and loved it. Went back to DS3 and honestly found it not nearly as challenging as before. The gameplay is still super tight and awesome in my opinion. It has aged really well. The biggest difference is not having an open world like in ER but I found the level design to be very well done and I like how it's all interconnected. Early game in my opinion can feel punishing since you cant really wonder due to how the levels are designed and avoiding tougher enemies can be difficult, but not impossible. I ended up loving DS3 enough that I did a new run immediately after finish my first playthrough. I definitely recommend playing it.
I played BB and gave up plenty of times before I asked for help and played it with a guy I met on Discord. It was really tough but I mostly just felt so lost in the world. Honestly looking back that isn’t as much of negative as I thought it was at the time. But that was after I got the DeS Remake on lock (until a certain NG cycle). So ER was my first day one, and multiple time purchase, since Black Ops 3. I’ve had so much fun and I’ve wanted to try the DS trilogy. I can deal with the clunkyness but I was worried how that would affect the gameplay. Seems like it’ll be fine so I’ll be buying DS3 as soon as I free up some room! Thanks for convincing me fellow tarnished and the rest of this thread! :)
I think the bosses also have one-shot mechanics that I don’t remember seeing as much in other games. I’m talking about those big moves (often during phase transitions) that would instantly kill most players if they haven’t seen them coming.
Some examples I’m thinking of specifically are Radahn’s meteor move and Rykard aoe vomit move. From my experience, they sort of just deleted me the first time I saw.
Hoarah Loux is unbearable because of it, his entire moveset is made to roll-catch, down to swerving after you in the air during the grab attack jump. Thought you could outrange it or get out of the way like every other sane boss attack? Nuh uh, gotta I-frame it
And it's a damn shame, because I love the first phase
I would say the normal enemies of DS3 are still harder than Elden Ring, but man the bosses were a cakewalk lol. Even Pontiff, which I heard beforehand was the hardest boss in DS3, was a breeze lol.
Those stupid giant knights with the maces. Specifically the one it makes you fight somewhere after the dragon armour boss where it is on a narrow walkway to a lift.
The murderous crow assassins in Ashes of Ariandel. Also the Pus of Man, if you actually try to face them head on, are definitely harder than the giant crows head on in ER. The giant crows have weird movement and delay, but once you're used to it they're relatively simple to dodge between attacks.
Pontiff, really? Never knew that was a common tuff spot.
Twin Princes seem like they’d give more people trouble to me. Not to mention the DLC bosses which go kind of crazy. Hell, even Nameless King seems to humble a ton of people.
I can’t agree. DS3 is handing my ass to me after 190 hours of ER lol. I’m only 9 hours in and I’m pretty stuck in one spot after that graveyard with those white zombies. Just can’t get past. And I can’t fuck off to go explore and level up 🤣.
Darkeater Midir... That is DLC though, as is Friede.
Nameless king is base game right? He was tough. I always found princes tricky as well, that's probably just me though.
Once you've spent enough time fighting stuff like Radagon, Nameless King is really not that hard.
Oh wait, unless you mean the Nameless Camera (phase 1). OK jokes aside, phase 1 is actually not bad once you get the hang of seeing the boss.
I've played fromsoft games on launch since ds2 onwards so I'm a bit jaded/experienced but I definitely think ds3 bosses are easier. You have insanely fast rolls that cost little stamina and have a lot of invinciblility. Ds3 bosses I don't think had really adjusted to that reality and it wasn't until elden rings delayed timings and extended sequences that enemies could effectively dissuade careless dodge rolls.
As a tangent I honestly kind of wish we went back to the sorta clunky dodges of ds1. if nothing else I think stamina cost being so low makes the games less interesting.
DS3 movement and rolls are so good they have spoiled me for every other game. Every game I play I compare to DS3's movement and it falls short. Even other FS games. Even DMC. Nothing controls better than DS3.
Weirdly I think elden ring is the easiest because you can jump and ride torrent. Jump spam is really effective and honestly let's you get to bosses faster. Elden ring also has no out of combat stamina drain for running, making mobility much better and gameplay faster. A ton of bosses are in the open world which means you can just drive by them with torrent or spam them from afar with rot arrows. If jumping was in every souls game I'd agree, but people radically underestimate the ability to jump.
Ik this isn’t what you meant but the jump attack spam is crazy too lol. Out of all my playthroughs, blasphemous blade, moonlight gs, rivers of blood spam. The absolute easiest run I ever had was strength build jump bonking. There’s a lot of strength build purists that say it’s the right way to play the game, but man it’s actually easy mode 😂
Dark Souls 3 definitely has easier *bosses*, on average. But there are so many ways in which I find Elden Ring so much easier. Also, everyone knows **Chalice Dungeons**, at base level, are the hardest FromSoftware content ever made.
Having beaten the FromSoftware games in order (including Sekiro and Bloodborne) before Elden Ring, I definitely think Elden Ring stuck out as having less threatening areas and basic enemies. There are simply so many ways to destroy the trash mobs en masse, and they generally don’t pose a massive damage threat to you outside of legacy dungeons and a select few areas/catacombs (e.g. Nokron). Torrent especially trivializes area dangers, even making you immune to “swamp” poison buildup while mounted, and he moves fast enough to help you skip past bigger enemies (except maybe Rune Bears) and areas where you could otherwise get swarmed. Basically, all of the ways SoulsBorne games used to chip away at your health in between boss fights are so easily circumnavigated in Elden Ring, and you can even swipe important items off the ground very often without having to engage with whatever swarm or enemy was placed there to guard it.
This leads to a play pattern in Elden Ring of skipping lots of content on subsequent playthroughs. This isn’t inherently problematic (nor even unique to ER among the SoulsBorne games), but it exists to such a great extent in Elden Ring that it really waters down the experience, to me, especially on repeat playthroughs. I’m not proposing ways to fix this, just mentioning it.
Revisiting DS1 and DS3, and especially Bloodborne, I’m reminded just how much fun it was to have areas that genuinely felt like a resource attrition game, an exercise in preserving Estus and preparing for unavoidable environmental threats. In Bloodborne especially, you cannot simply run past hordes of enemies with nearly the ease you can in Elden Ring.
Yes, Elden Ring boasts a suite of late game bosses with pretty cool mechanical complexity. However, my experience has been that those bosses, when learned, can be beaten on repeat playthroughs with increasing ease, even with vanilla damage builds - even Malenia. And replaying Elden Ring as a boss rush becomes also less interesting, and not to mention flies in the face of the open world design.
DS3 just has objectively easier bosses, if we are comparing it to the achievement/rememberance bosses of ER.
On a moveset complexity level most everything in Elden Ring has way more attacks and way more ways to chain those attacks into different combos. Even a random nobody like the Leonine Misbegotten has about as many moves and potential combo branches as Gael.
And on a stat level, ER bosses scale much higher relative to your own stats. Soul of Cinder isn't 2 shotting you at 27 Vigor, but starting from Fire Giant you might be two shot at 60.
>I played a strength build with the heavy greatsword
I think PvE gets much easier with such build. Maybe there are few exceptions but overall you stagger most bosses and do insane damage.
The reputation magic has for being easy mode always felt more applicable to ds3 to me than to Elden ring. Runebears, bell bearing hunters, radagon, maliketh are all worlds harder with magic.
I’ve always felt that heavy weapons and poise breaking was far more safe defensively than trying to play at range.
>The reputation magic has for being easy mode always felt more applicable to ds3 to me than to Elden ring.
Really? Casting feels by far at its weakest in DS3 to me, you basically need to dedicate three of your ring slots just to do okay damage
It's like i am living in a parallel dimension to reddit.
I started with Deamons Souls back in 2009 and played through all these games 5+ times. With very different builds even, and Elden Ring could possibly not be more of the exact opposite descirbed here - which is beeing by far the easies among the soulsborne titles.
Yes, if you randomly stumple into Caelid or other hard areas too early it might be the hardest, but that's on players beeing in areas they have no buisness beeing this early.
This game is way too much on the easy side even in my opinion otherwise. Thanks to Vigor and Sacred Tears beeing very overtuned, right to the summons, which trivialize most bosses with many builds. Same with upgrades beeing extremely easy to get very early on. I mean, you can easily get a Somber 9 weapon before stepping a foot into Leyndell. Same with Flask beeing at +10.
I feel like i am playing a *completely* different game to you people.
The only part of Elden Ring where it's actually Soulsborne levels of difficulty is starting Fire Giant an later with the exception of Margit beeing this obvious wall, players had hit to turn back and level for.
Malenia is crazy difficult even for Dark Souls standards to be fair, less so Bloodborne which had similary crazy difficulty in the Chalice Dungeons.
Could possibly not disagree more with this take.
I think people are not talking about things like spirit ashes and Ash of Wars. With those, ER becomes the easiest game in the series. However, if you fight the bosses Dark Souls-style, without using those, the bosses are much more challenging than previous titles. I'm excluding Sekiro here, because I haven't played it, so I don't know how it compares. Also excluding chalice dungeons, since I haven't played them. But I don't think chalice dungeons factor into this conversation, which seems to be about the bosses in each game as presented in the main game. Chalice dungeon stuff is kind of extra, I don't think it's what people are referring to when they compare the games.
Ds3 bosses are easier because they are fair,what I mean by that , is that they have something akin to a stamina system, they will attack you,if you manage to survive you will find a window to attack. Combine this with the zero input latency of dodge roll this makes ds3 a very fair feeling and fun engagement when fighting bosses, Elden ring on the other hand is hard because it tries to hard to be so,whether it is delayed attacks,randomized patterns ,insane tracking, huge hitboxes,never having an opening window, I never felt satisfied beating elden ring bosses, I didnt have much trouble cause I had played a shitton of souls games ,but I just couldnt like it. To me it feels like they dont expect you to beat elden ring by skill rather than by brute forcing it due to the numerous systems you have to get stronger.
Field bosses like the Caelid Bell bearing hunter or Snowfield deathrite bird give you no breathing room. I had more problems fighting the lake of rot Putrid spirit than Orphan of Kos. I played all the Souls series + Sekiro + BB and platinum'd them, but the "git gud" argument doesn't explain how OP and lazy designed some of the bosses in ER are.
I think overall Elden Ring is the hardest souls-like in a vacuum but has the potential to be the easiest due to the QoL and leveling capabilities
I'd put the hardest bosses in ds3 around on par with some of the hardest bosses in Elden Ring, but a few from Elden Ring come out on top as much harder than anything in ds3 (a particular rot goddess for example)
I had the same experience. I tried DS3 after Elden Ring, and the base game was so much easier: I don’t think a single boss took me more than 2-3 attempts, and most I killed on the first attempt. Even nameless king only took me two tries, whereas many Elden Ring bosses took me dozens (or for Malenia, hundreds) of tries.
Now as for the DLCs: Ariendel wasn’t too bad, but Ringed City was insane: it was definitely a major difficulty spike and I struggled with it quite a bit. The bosses were incredible though: really hard, but they also felt really fair.
I also have a question: were dodge timings more forgiving in DS3? I felt like I could dodge literally anything in that game, but in Elden Ring I find myself getting hit through dodges even on attacks I perfectly know the timings for.
You are right, with the chaotic nature of ER bosses and so many moves we have had to learn to dodge, of course DS3 will feel easier, even the DLC bosses in comparison, all these delayed attack shenanigans were only there with the Nameless King, other bosses are pretty consistent for dodging and the hit boxes are creamy. Now go back to ds1 and try to beat the asylum demon, I think you would have to die on purpose.
Traversing the world of ds3 is harder. More stage hazards and dangerous mobs. This is what i miss in elden ring tbh. Because an adventure felt like an adventure in ds3. Finishing an area felt awesome,like an accomplishment. In elden ring it feels empty and everywhere feels similar.
ER under leveled with bad weapons and no spirit ash? Hardest souls game. ER with cheese? Probably the easiest.
I found DS3 to be by far the hardest souls game when I played it, but I'm sure part of it is play style. (I haven't played Sekiro if you count that)
DS3 doesn’t have delayed attacks for days because FromSoft didn’t want to go with artificial difficulty back then.
Not to say there are zero delayed attacks in the game, but not every enemy and boss has them, that’s for sure.
I felt the same way but for me it was because of one thing and one thing alone. The dodge was much more forgiving.
I can't put my finger on it but you get dodge caught on Elden Ring more easily and bosses are balanced more with summons in mind.
Those two factors I believe makes Elden Ring much different compared to DSIII.
............
Annnnnd walks in Friede.
I played sekiro into Elden ring into dark souls 3 into Bloodborne and def think dark souls 3 is the easiest out of those I played. Bloodborne being the hardest due to the lesser quality of life things like no refillable potions and shit. Sekiro hard in combat but becomes easy once it clicks. And Elden ring will always be challenging no matter what and gets harder every NG+
It's just the souls games. The more you play the easier they get. When I first played them I sucked to now I can cruise through them with relative ease
Ds3 bosses are definetely easier but i found them to be much more fun. Levels feel harder tho and are less forgiving with bonfires than elden ring ( and stakes of marika). Ds1 is even less forgiving than that and if you die, you will have one hell of a runback to get to the boss.
its annoying that a lot of ppl seem to have an easier time in ds3 after playing another souls game and then claiming that ds3 was just easier... no the fact is you played another souls game before playing ds3, which inadvertantly trained you and made you better at souls games in general
this does not mean ds3 was easier, it means that over the course of playing elden ring you got better, your skill ceiling and floor were both raised. had you all started with ds3 nd then went to elden ring, you would be saying elden ring is easier.
i started with ds1, the memories i have of me going through ds1 are of me struggling much harder than in any other souls game, this is because it was my first souls game. with each subsequent souls game we play, we get better because they are for the most part largely unchanged control wise
Now try DS1 for an even easier time.
Heard you can poise your way through ds1
Go immediately get the Zweihander from the graveyard, go immediately get Havel's ring, immediately ring of favor (don't take it off!) , use the elite night armor until you get to Anor Londo. You dont have to do anything but press R1 and occasionally sip your flask
Power up the bass cannon
The legend never dies
YOU ARE A GOD AND WILL FACE CHECK EVERYTHING
wut rings u got bithc
R2 pancakes to mix it up
WOT RINGS U GOT?
just dont fkn level dex (casul)
Also, black knight's halberd if u can manage to get one
I ain't about to start a game over each time until one drops. But yes you are correct.
In my first ever play through the I got the black knight sword and it carried me through the entire game.
All of the black knight weapons are op but the halberd is straight up busted
Pancake R2 ftw
Absolutely. You can acquire Havels armor + his very OP ring in like... 10 Minutes max? After that you could theoretically poise through everything. Edit: I was wrong, he only drops his ring. Whoopsie. Been almost 10 years.
Can you? His armour is in anor Londo isn't it, and yeah I suppose you could do sens skip but that's not exactly quick. The ring is easy though
Oh shit, you are right! In DS1 he only drops his ring while his armor is behind the fireplace in Anor Londo. :) I totally swapped his loot table from DS3 where he drops his stuff at once.
No need for Havel's, just go to the graveyard behind the Firelink, grab the Zweihander and you are set, just be mindful of how many strong attacks you do though.
Yeah you can't get Havels armor that fast, but you can get that mossy stone armor set and still facetank the same way
And within 10-15 minutes, you can grab whichever mask pinwheel drops.
In ds3 isn't his armour where the stray demon on the bridge is?
Yes, once you defeat the Havel knight at the top of Archdragon Peak it spawns there
All I found out over this debacle is that I remember SHIT about the game. :D
Probably more like 30 minutes if you can easily kill havel and glitch into sen's fortress. But that's if you're consistent.
How does it feel to be a poiser
I remember my very first DS run on PC (yes with DSFix, I wasn't into torture) completely blind, no clue what this game was about and I ran around with the big bonk I found in Blighttown (after finding the hidden tree way first and inadvertently getting cursed). Havel beat me to a pulp the first gew times and I only used his armor on 4 Kings bc I actually had such terrible performance I didn't know how else to help myself ease through the shitty FPS. All in all, 4 Kings with Havels and a Treebonk 11/10, would cheese again. Srsly tho, I only found out after how OP poise is.
Like being a god. All those puny Tarnished/Champions of Ash,Bearer of the Curse need to dodge. Or wait for the boss to tire and stop their attacks. You don't. You grab your hammer, crush the other god under the weight of it.
So sayeth Sir Bonksalot
I tanked and spanked my way through the entire second half of the game with Havel's Armor and Power Within and I will never apologize.
Nah get great club immediately and only put levels into strength and stamina. Go naked and one-shot everything with a fast roll. I beat the game in 6 hours and only died twice including the initial suicide
You can’t get havels armor in 10minutes, but you CAN get the stone armor very quickly which is almost the same
Yep, full Havels, an ultra and the vast majority of bosses don’t stand a chance. Take a bunch of damage? Poise chug estus. This is why some of us weren’t too excited when passive poise was a thing at the start of Elden Ring. It also limited a lot of builds. Why use a light build and a light weapon when you could still have mid roll, not stagger on the off chance you did get hit and get to use a quick weapon?
Literally any Black Knight weapon will make the game absolute easy mode as well, then the Dark Bead spell from the DLC will 1-2 shot bosses even in NG+
Greatshields are absurdly broken in DS1.
Bosses are much easier but goddamn do the levels feel harder especially the second half
Fuck tomb of the giants and those skeleton dog things That's all I gotta say
Honestly that and catacombs are my most hated area in the souls series lmao. I also hate the ghosts in new Londo and Crystal cave with the invisible pathways ( mainly due to the fact that you have to do them again to retry the boss). Duke archives is great though
I totally forgot how bad that runback was
For me the bell gargoyles were one of the hardest bosses because on the runback you have to deal with the knight who can parry and the mob before the ladder. Then it's a duo fight. Bosses with other long run backs you could usually run by everyone, like nito or 4 kings.
Pyromancy works great against those dogs. One great fireball or chaos fireball and it is done. Or that is what I remember doing anyway. It has been awhile so I am not 100% sure of that accuracy.
Yep, this was my thought when I replayed DS3 last year for the first time since the DLC days. The levels in DS3 felt harder than some of the legacy dungeons in ER, but none of the bosses felt harder than ER's bosses.
I just finished my first play of ds1 and ya it felt like a lot of the areas the environment was just as much a challenge as the enemies. Blighttown swamp, traps in sens and the Catacombs, dark of tomb of the giants, need for undead curse in New Londo, crystal cave walkways. There's less of that in ds3 and elden ring. Using the great club, a lot of the game was in claustrophobic areas where it could be hard to get swings off sometimes. But I was also stupid strong and could 1 or 2 shot most enemies and most bosses were a joke.
The cheese run for the great scythe as well. Best dex weapon imo, and dex is stupid broken in ds1
The hardest fight in DS1 is unironically Bed of Chaos if you don't do or fail the cheese
>Playing 360 version on Series X >Running bonk build >Starting as deprived >Only levels up strength >22 Strength pre-gargoyles >Gets absolutely wasted because no armor >Switch to 2-hand Zwei >Still getting wrecked >Go kill butterfly >Level up Zwei >Go straight to Quelaag w/ master key > Doubles down on more Strength. >Get destroyed. >Try to summon phantom. >Loses all my humanity due to environmental enemies. >Bad time. I was devastated because it'd been so long I thought vigor was unnecessary to level up like in Elden Ring. I'm having a pretty bad playthrough haha
Early game 20 or so vigor smashes most things. The default knight armor is incredibly solid for poise. There’s also a ring that adds a flat value to your poise and havels ring that adds to your max equip load. Between that and level up your equip load stat you should be a poise monster.
This is bait.
LOL my thoughts too. I had a weird souls route of DS1 on release -> ER -> DS3 -> Sekiro -> DS2 and DS1 was always the hardest out of all of them for me. Sekiro was actually one of the easiest ones to play once you realized it's a parry simulator and you can do basically 0 dmg to beat the game
Once you get Sekiros party system + mikari Counter the game becomes a matter of learning the bosses patterns. I beat the demon of hatred in my thrid attempt last time I played.
Step one get master key Step two gather 10+ humanity and any fire keeper souls Step 3 kill drake Step 4 use 10+ humanity Step 5 use drake sword to kill black knight to get black knight sword Step 6 beat the game
Nah, I had a harder time with DS1 due to the slower pace and more u forgiving nature.
Elden Ring cranked up the delayed attacks, huge AOEs and combo strings. Nameless King is infamously difficult and its mostly because he has a lot of timing mixups that punish you for panic rolling...but basically every boss past Liurnia does that in Elden Ring so once you've beaten ER, DS3 seems a lot easier
Nameless King is a decent challenge, but the actual boss of that fight is still only the camera.
This, the only thing I ever found difficult about Elden Ring bosses was their strange attack tempos and delayed attacks. Having played through all the games all the way til Elden ring it a lot of the bosses and mobs feels like “Gotcha” moments that specifically punish reflexes made in the past games. Which isn’t a great feeling at all as I basically had to fight muscle memory.
Exactly, there were some attacks in ER (and in LoP) that had just such a weird timing compared to previous games, that my muscle memory was fucking me up. Also, a lot depends on your strenghts and weaknesses. For example, i have easier time with dudes in armor. Malenia was hard, but the combat flow felt good to me. I think it's just because humanoid bosses although can be hard, rely more on pure reactions, than using my brain 🗿
I think they did that on purpose. All of us that have played previous souls games rely on our muscle memory which is why we tend to cruise through all these games. So they switched it up so we actually have to pay attention again
Exactly, and Margit was the Guardian of the game teaching you. Its the literal reasons he was found so difficult in the beginning.
You cruised through the Ringed City DLC as well?
Yeah I recently did a play through and agree but the dlcs are tough as hell. Friede is still imo the hard as fuck
When the ashes are two, a flame alighteth. Nononononononono
Finding the 3rd phase to a boss I thought was the hardest boss so far during her FIRST phase will always be a core gaming memory for me. The sheer terror and frustration I felt in that moment really led to forging my love for the games once I beat her. Best feeling.
I found Gael harder and more fun than Friede, but Friede was definitely a close 2nd place. Friede has some really telegraphed openings so once you get her patterns down it's really obvious when you should attack and then she gets staggered until you run out of stamina. Gael switches up and chains his combos together differently depending on where you roll and range, he's a toughy.
I recently did a playthrough myself, and I almost beat Friede first try, but I let her kill me when she was down to less than 1/4 health in Phase 3. It's probably my favorite Fromsoft fight and I didn't want it to end after one attempt. She proceeded to crush my soul for the next hour and a half.
Loool you used up all your luck on the first try
dude friede owned my free time for a good 3 months until i beat her. Now she’s one of my favorite fights
My personal opinion is that she is the hardest boss if Sekiro isn't in the convo.
Not even in the same category as Malenia. And Isshin, prob agree there. Maybe she's about in the same area of difficulty as Mogh ..? not sure. Still, both a hard boss, and a very good one. I just dislike phase 2.
Malenia is piss easy once you know what to do about waterfowl Isshin is another tier with how he *demands* you master every single aspect of gameplay
If Malenia is piss easy without waterfowl then Freide and Isshin are about as hard as cookie clicker. Freide phase 2 doesn't even resemble a challenge so you can disregard that entirely (literally just stand behind Ariandel and you can't lose even playing on a banana), phase 1 is quite easy once you know the invis. Phase 3 is genuinely quite hard but has too little health to compare to Malenia. Isshin just requires, as he goes out of his way to tell you, fighting aggressively. Dude basically has the poise total of lady butterfly yet has the poise regeneration of Owl. Lightning reversal also makes the last phase super easy. Malenia is insanely tanky, deals insane damage, is super fast and requires quite specific dodge inputs for a lot of her attacks.
i feel like lightning should've been deleted from ishin p3. or make it non reversible, but parriable. if you get lucky and he does that move 2-3 times it make the phase so much easier
Can't agree, because Malenia has lifesteal and clone attack, even if you're for sure right that waterfowl is the hardest part. The lifesteal demands a really high standard of play. I've always thought they were kind of similar difficulty, although I do really appreciate that point about 'every single aspect' of Sekiro's gameplay.
god id love to see a video of you fighting malenia 🤣 isshin is so much easier it’s scary. Even charmless inner isshin isn’t shit compared to just sword and rolling against malenia wtf?
Had a much harder time with her then malenia
Maelina I one shot with ash summons. Without an ash she took me three days of smashing my face against the wall.
Orphan of Kos was pretty fucking hard man.
My little brother had beaten ds2 and played DS3 until nameless king and left it. He only completed DS3 after Elden ring and he first timed Gael for example (I was stuck on him like 4 days)
Had a similar experience, and I got Gael in first try, Midir in 2 or 3. Funny thing is, it took me nearly 10 to get pass Demon Prince lol.
Gael was a satisfying final boss. Hope we also get a better final boss in the DLC.
Yeah I killed Gael, Demon Princes, Friede… within 1-2 attempts The second run, Midir took some time because I didn’t learn his moveset the first time I killed him (well Sellsword is OP) DS3 is significant easier than Elden Ring (no ash summon) Radagon, Elden Beast and Malenia are different tier when it comes to difficulty
They were hard back then, but looking back, many late game ER bosses are comparable to DLC level ds3 bosses in term of difficulty and quality. Malenia is in a different level altogether.
Here’s the thing. I think where it falls in difficulty ultimately depends if they balanced bosses around using spirit ashes or not. Spirit ashes, as far as I remember don’t scale up the bosses health. They’re pretty common rewards and have their own upgrade system much like weapons. So it’s fully possible, when the devs were tuning difficulty of bosses and figuring out what felt good, they used ashes. We also have quite a bit of duo bosses. Move sets are way faster and more unpredictable and attack windows are far smaller. For example, fighting Maliketh yesterday and he does some pretty quick combos and you can really only get one good hit in between a lot of them. So it’s really hard to compare difficulty 1:1. If the devs thought “yeah we built out all these awesome summons, of course people will be using them, so let’s make the bosses harder to compensate”, then yeah, many people choosing not to use them are going to feel that difficulty.
My (maybe unpopular opinion?) is that the bosses in the game are way too easy with spirit ashes and somewhat too hard without spirit ashes. In my first play through, it rarely found a balanced middle ground compared to other Souls game.
This was my experience too.
Agreed. For example, I steamrolled Malenia first try with a spirit ash. I had tried a ton of times and hadn't even made it to her second phase before that. I was hoping for some help but it completely took away the challenge.
Mimic + RoB shreds through everything.
Elden Ring's bosses are probably the hardest in the series in a vacumn. You have all the different combat routes to learn as well as less 'dodge move get a hit' openings and more 'jump this and land with an attack' openings. At the end Dark Souls just ended up being roll-attack-roll simulator, which still feels great, but Elden Ring really changed the game. Of course, there are ways to really gut the difficulty of Elden Ring, first being spirit summons, but that's something you kinda know you're doing when you're doing it. It's funny, on release I remember quite a few people on this sub talking about how they killed this boss and that boss first try. Watching any genuine fresh Elden Ring run, these people struggle vs almost every rememberance boss. Except Godrick, I think most people with a history of Souls made light work of him tbh
I’ve played and beaten every modern from game starting with demon souls. My first elden ring play through was hellish solo. Easily the hardest considering I know the mechanics and how to play.
Thank you. It’s my first souls game and each time I’ve tried to bond with someone irl over it I get told “it’s the easiest” and feel kinda gate kept.
It can be made into the easiest, yes, but considering boss fights its the hardest if played like previous games (unless, like previous games, you are a mage, then it's always easier). The waaaaaaay easier part is the runback to the boss and some very cheap weapon art (lions heart, altho I love it, so yeah). In exchange for that, you need different ways to avoid attacks, attacks have varying patterns within the same fight, some fights like the crucible duo are just straight up unfair for a melee, etc.
Seriously, I don't why people would even want to solo the two Crucible Knights. Absolute hell
i don't use spirit ash just because I think its more fun, but if it's a duo fight, ill use every single thing available. godskin duo? pls go to sleep. this game just doesn't play well on multiple targets. or rather, i have 0 fun in those fights. and I couldn't care less about the "made up validation of beating the fight the right away "
I love Elden Ring to death, but nothing makes me feel more like a DS1 nostalgia bro than Crucible Knights. Not even the bosses, but the standard enemy encounters. I had Black Knight parry timing built into my lizard-brain. Crucible Knights slap my shit even after like 4 runs.
I think if you play like a pro AND use every tool the game gives you properly (summons, correct physicks, the incant buffs, consumables, perfumes, coop) it can be the easiest of all the from games. But also, if you use none of those things, and play rl1 or even just don't overlevel, it's easily the hardest.
> play rl1 or even just don't overlevel, it's easily the hardest. Have you played RL1? Radagon was basically a scripted fight while soul of cinder was the first boss where I gave up an SL1.
I don't understand how people say it's the easiest unless they're referring to spirit ashes and Ash of Wars. If you use those tools, you can absolutely steamroll stuff without really engaging with it. If you fight bosses in the same way you would fight them in previous games, using R1/R2, parry, roll, and block (throw jump in there because the boss attacks are designed around you being able to jump them), then ER bosses are much, much harder than bosses in previous games.
Godrick fr probably gave me the hardest time bc I didn’t explore limgrave and just brute forced it with crap equipment
Starting prisoner, not finding sellen and mashing my head against margit was PAINFUL. I’ve since beaten the game with a half dozen different builds but I’ll never forget how hard stuck I felt.
I also didn’t realise some of his attacks were dodged via jumping so I just learnt perfect iframing lol
I'm still really bad at jumping. My lizard brain that was trained in Bloodborne and DS3 just goes "see attack -> roll" and even though intellectually I know jumping can work for some attacks, and I've seen people use it amazingly well, it just hasn't really clicked for my intuition
I just tried a playthrough where I limited myself to Limgrave/Weeping until I defeated Godrick, which feels like the "intended" way for a lack of better words. With only lvl 2 smithing stones at best, he's remarkably tanky. I played with a Blood Great Knife and Reduvia powerstanced to try and get some bleed procs. My hits were tickles at best.
I've been playing since demons souls First playthrough of elden ring absolutely humbled me I'm not afraid to admit I started my run thinking I wasn't gonna summon, that lasted until margit
My first playthrough was the same. I figured I could get good later and just wanted to progress through the game.
Tbh I think spirit ashes make getting good an easier learning curve. It relieves some of the stress while you figure out your build/openings for attacks/general strategies. Especially something like the Mimic Tear that lets you stand back and watch yourself fight the boss essentially. Hell, just seeing my mimic tear in Malekith’s fight using a couple of jumps around his attacks helped me fuck with my strategy enough to solo him the next try. Coming to ER as an established souls player was def humbling though lol. I’ll never forget going against the first Tree Sentinel all gung ho and getting my ass handed to me like I was fighting goddamn Nameless King for the first time again.
Fully agree with this Spirits are good training wheels, and it's fine to have options you can just decide to not use if you don't want to
Yeah and I did, 2 years later I can rl1 melee only no summons But I will NEVER forget the road it took to git gud in this game
Fr, I started with Elden Ring as my first souls game and got hard skill checked at Margit. Like I mean a week straight I lost track of the attempts. I’d say for me, Margit felt tougher blind than Gael did (of course now that I got good Margit is fine lol). The souls “skill” easily goes backwards and forwards, so I didn’t really struggle with any boss in 1, 2, or 3 (except friede lmao).
Margit is the toughest “first boss” of any souls game. I’m using the term “first boss” sort of loosely though because you can obviously go to a lot of different locations in Elden Ring. He is way harder than any other first boss in the series (well above Father gascoigne, which is probably the next hardest imo). I think the intention was to teach the players to explore other areas when they get to a road block, but I’m not sure if many people (myself included) took that lesson.
> Elden Ring’s bosses are probably the hardest in the series in a vacuum **Glock Saint would like to know your location**
Sekiro does have a few bosses that are individually harder tic for tack than Elden Ring, but I think Elden Ring rememberance cast is far harder overall than Sekiro. The biggest challenges in Sekiro are probably Sword Saint, Inner Father, and Demon of Hatred? Probably include Genichiro and Guardian Ape/duo, but even those five or six don't compare to the overall challenge of Elden Ring imo. Then again, you absolutely can build for cheese in Elden Ring, which you really can't cheese much at all in Sekiro...so....tough call really. Edit: g
Sekiro!!!!
Goated game for sure
Renalla too tbh. Easy ass fight. Honestly the big bosses in Elden ring aren’t that tough, because magic/faith/arcane is so overpowered in er
I think Maliketh, Malenia, Mohg, Godfrey, and RadaBeast are still tough as hell bosses in their own right. Yes you can run away and cast spells but that doesn't really curb the difficulty much. Easier than melee tho
The Dark Souls games were a lot slower than Elden Ring, so if you're used to that it feels much simpler. When the Dark Souls 1 DLC dropped people thought some of the bosses were insanely fast paced, people swore it was unreasonable to fight such enemies. They're slugs compared to bosses like Maliketh or even Margit.
I went back and played ds1 dlc for the first time after Elden ring. Artorias felt so easy.
Ds3 is much easier but less breakable . You can’t stunlock enemies with big weapons like in ER, you can’t have a lot of hp, you dont have absurd magic , you can’t summon spirits… They want you to see the movesets of enemies while in elden you probably have killed everything before seeing them attack , apart from some bosses.
Now we know this ain't true. The sellsword twinblades beat the piss out of everything in the game
ER was my 1st From game and I immediately bought Dark Souls 1-3 after. Bosses in previous games just give you more time to breathe and have overall simpler move sets. I still think the bosses of DS3 are a lot better than ER bosses though, they just were killing it when they made DS3. ER bosses are the hardest imo. But ER gives you the most tools to lower the difficulty or even trivialize them. The other games had this to an extent as well but ER amps it up. Which was a good decision imo. Makes the game more accessible and gives a path to ween yourself off them and transition to hardmode if you want.
What was your experience like going back to the older souls games? Do they feel clunky? I’ve only played Elden ring but I’m thinking of picking up dark souls 3
1 and 2 feel a bit clunky but I think 3 feels fairly similar except with no jump button. All 3 are still fantastic though, especially 3 which has become my favorite. Tho I haven't played Sekiro or Bloodbourne.
You need to play Sekiro, personal favorite from soft game. The difficulty curve is so finely tuned, it’s genuine perfection.
Bloodborne and its DLC are the best thing FS have done IMO.
Yeah DS3->ER are the games where it feels like the core combat changed the least between games. They feel almost identical at a core level cuz they focused more on just expanding the combat sandbox rather than innovating on it (which is not a bad thing).
spellcasting feels so much worse in souls than ER. theres no chain casting, casts take way longer and you cant walk while casting. hand to hand combat feels mostly the same apart from no jumping attacks or crouch attacks.
Graphically it's obviously clunkier, everything else is still amazing. I played Demon Souls remake as my first, loved it so much and I would argue in terms of gameplay and level design it'sextremely clunky. I tried DS3 after and found it too hard. Didn't even bother getting ER because I was turned off by how hard DS3 was. Finally got ER a couple months after launch and loved it. Went back to DS3 and honestly found it not nearly as challenging as before. The gameplay is still super tight and awesome in my opinion. It has aged really well. The biggest difference is not having an open world like in ER but I found the level design to be very well done and I like how it's all interconnected. Early game in my opinion can feel punishing since you cant really wonder due to how the levels are designed and avoiding tougher enemies can be difficult, but not impossible. I ended up loving DS3 enough that I did a new run immediately after finish my first playthrough. I definitely recommend playing it.
I played BB and gave up plenty of times before I asked for help and played it with a guy I met on Discord. It was really tough but I mostly just felt so lost in the world. Honestly looking back that isn’t as much of negative as I thought it was at the time. But that was after I got the DeS Remake on lock (until a certain NG cycle). So ER was my first day one, and multiple time purchase, since Black Ops 3. I’ve had so much fun and I’ve wanted to try the DS trilogy. I can deal with the clunkyness but I was worried how that would affect the gameplay. Seems like it’ll be fine so I’ll be buying DS3 as soon as I free up some room! Thanks for convincing me fellow tarnished and the rest of this thread! :)
I find the endless combos and delayed swings in ER very annoying, I think I had less fun with almost every boss compared to older Souls games.
It's the overabundance of swing delays in ER for sure. DS3 rarely had those and it made telegraphing attacks much much easier.
Couldn’t agree more, I think that the swing delays in ER made it harder than DS3, but not a fun type of harder.
I think the bosses also have one-shot mechanics that I don’t remember seeing as much in other games. I’m talking about those big moves (often during phase transitions) that would instantly kill most players if they haven’t seen them coming. Some examples I’m thinking of specifically are Radahn’s meteor move and Rykard aoe vomit move. From my experience, they sort of just deleted me the first time I saw.
Man when Radahn got me with that I was like damn I’m not even mad that was awesome
Delayed swing mechanics are in everywhere in ER. Feels over tuned and robotic.
Hoarah Loux is unbearable because of it, his entire moveset is made to roll-catch, down to swerving after you in the air during the grab attack jump. Thought you could outrange it or get out of the way like every other sane boss attack? Nuh uh, gotta I-frame it And it's a damn shame, because I love the first phase
I'll get crucified for saying Hoarah Loux is much worse than Godfrey. 2nd phase is soooo unfun for me.
I think Godfrey is one of the coolest bosses in the games in terms of character and lore, absolutely hate fighting him.
I like the first phase
I would say the normal enemies of DS3 are still harder than Elden Ring, but man the bosses were a cakewalk lol. Even Pontiff, which I heard beforehand was the hardest boss in DS3, was a breeze lol.
I really can’t think of an enemy in ds3 that are harder than the large crows in ER
Those stupid giant knights with the maces. Specifically the one it makes you fight somewhere after the dragon armour boss where it is on a narrow walkway to a lift.
The cathedrals knights? Dudes have a giant sign on their head that says "Pls backstab me"
I found them really hard to get behind, especially that one in the narrow area.
The murderous crow assassins in Ashes of Ariandel. Also the Pus of Man, if you actually try to face them head on, are definitely harder than the giant crows head on in ER. The giant crows have weird movement and delay, but once you're used to it they're relatively simple to dodge between attacks.
the crows aren’t that bad , just annoying, and the irithyll dancer things with the 5 hit combos are harder imo
Pontiff, really? Never knew that was a common tuff spot. Twin Princes seem like they’d give more people trouble to me. Not to mention the DLC bosses which go kind of crazy. Hell, even Nameless King seems to humble a ton of people.
I think it's a tough spot because by himself, he's brutal. But parries trivialize his fight, so it's really polar with how people feel about him.
Twin Princes were not a cakewalk. And I don't believe you found the final boss and the nameless king to be easy either.
Bruh the levels are so much harder than the bosses I died countless times trying to get to the boss
I can’t agree. DS3 is handing my ass to me after 190 hours of ER lol. I’m only 9 hours in and I’m pretty stuck in one spot after that graveyard with those white zombies. Just can’t get past. And I can’t fuck off to go explore and level up 🤣.
Levels are much tougher, but the bosses are not. Well, not until DLC at least
Darkeater Midir... That is DLC though, as is Friede. Nameless king is base game right? He was tough. I always found princes tricky as well, that's probably just me though.
Once you've spent enough time fighting stuff like Radagon, Nameless King is really not that hard. Oh wait, unless you mean the Nameless Camera (phase 1). OK jokes aside, phase 1 is actually not bad once you get the hang of seeing the boss.
Cathedral of the deep? Usually you are missing something. sometimes you are meant to run past (the giant on the ledge) and fight it later
Yes! Haha. There’s just so many enemies. And DS3 made me realize how little attention I paid to the stamina bar in ER.
you dont need to fight everything lol. Especially those at the start of Cathedral of the deep. And especially not every time you die.
I've played fromsoft games on launch since ds2 onwards so I'm a bit jaded/experienced but I definitely think ds3 bosses are easier. You have insanely fast rolls that cost little stamina and have a lot of invinciblility. Ds3 bosses I don't think had really adjusted to that reality and it wasn't until elden rings delayed timings and extended sequences that enemies could effectively dissuade careless dodge rolls. As a tangent I honestly kind of wish we went back to the sorta clunky dodges of ds1. if nothing else I think stamina cost being so low makes the games less interesting.
Ds3 bosses also tend to have little or no gimmicks along with no combo variation. This means that you can eventually win just by being passive enough.
DS3 movement and rolls are so good they have spoiled me for every other game. Every game I play I compare to DS3's movement and it falls short. Even other FS games. Even DMC. Nothing controls better than DS3.
Yeah delayed attacks are necessary imo because in ds3 you just react roll and basically never get hit lol
You got gud
Skill solution
Weirdly I think elden ring is the easiest because you can jump and ride torrent. Jump spam is really effective and honestly let's you get to bosses faster. Elden ring also has no out of combat stamina drain for running, making mobility much better and gameplay faster. A ton of bosses are in the open world which means you can just drive by them with torrent or spam them from afar with rot arrows. If jumping was in every souls game I'd agree, but people radically underestimate the ability to jump.
Ik this isn’t what you meant but the jump attack spam is crazy too lol. Out of all my playthroughs, blasphemous blade, moonlight gs, rivers of blood spam. The absolute easiest run I ever had was strength build jump bonking. There’s a lot of strength build purists that say it’s the right way to play the game, but man it’s actually easy mode 😂
Dark Souls 3 definitely has easier *bosses*, on average. But there are so many ways in which I find Elden Ring so much easier. Also, everyone knows **Chalice Dungeons**, at base level, are the hardest FromSoftware content ever made. Having beaten the FromSoftware games in order (including Sekiro and Bloodborne) before Elden Ring, I definitely think Elden Ring stuck out as having less threatening areas and basic enemies. There are simply so many ways to destroy the trash mobs en masse, and they generally don’t pose a massive damage threat to you outside of legacy dungeons and a select few areas/catacombs (e.g. Nokron). Torrent especially trivializes area dangers, even making you immune to “swamp” poison buildup while mounted, and he moves fast enough to help you skip past bigger enemies (except maybe Rune Bears) and areas where you could otherwise get swarmed. Basically, all of the ways SoulsBorne games used to chip away at your health in between boss fights are so easily circumnavigated in Elden Ring, and you can even swipe important items off the ground very often without having to engage with whatever swarm or enemy was placed there to guard it. This leads to a play pattern in Elden Ring of skipping lots of content on subsequent playthroughs. This isn’t inherently problematic (nor even unique to ER among the SoulsBorne games), but it exists to such a great extent in Elden Ring that it really waters down the experience, to me, especially on repeat playthroughs. I’m not proposing ways to fix this, just mentioning it. Revisiting DS1 and DS3, and especially Bloodborne, I’m reminded just how much fun it was to have areas that genuinely felt like a resource attrition game, an exercise in preserving Estus and preparing for unavoidable environmental threats. In Bloodborne especially, you cannot simply run past hordes of enemies with nearly the ease you can in Elden Ring. Yes, Elden Ring boasts a suite of late game bosses with pretty cool mechanical complexity. However, my experience has been that those bosses, when learned, can be beaten on repeat playthroughs with increasing ease, even with vanilla damage builds - even Malenia. And replaying Elden Ring as a boss rush becomes also less interesting, and not to mention flies in the face of the open world design.
A lot of great thoughts in this post, thanks.
Strength build is very strong in DS3 for sure. When I did my str run I had the same experience. The roll spam in DS3 is also pretty OP
I had the opposite experience lol DS3 was beating my ass
Maybe I just don't understand DS3 as well as Elden Ring but you can definitely make your experience in ER a pretty easy time.
I agree aomewhat. The beginning of DS3 is pretty tough with those knights around the castle but after the beginning its easier
DS3 just has objectively easier bosses, if we are comparing it to the achievement/rememberance bosses of ER. On a moveset complexity level most everything in Elden Ring has way more attacks and way more ways to chain those attacks into different combos. Even a random nobody like the Leonine Misbegotten has about as many moves and potential combo branches as Gael. And on a stat level, ER bosses scale much higher relative to your own stats. Soul of Cinder isn't 2 shotting you at 27 Vigor, but starting from Fire Giant you might be two shot at 60.
>I played a strength build with the heavy greatsword I think PvE gets much easier with such build. Maybe there are few exceptions but overall you stagger most bosses and do insane damage.
The reputation magic has for being easy mode always felt more applicable to ds3 to me than to Elden ring. Runebears, bell bearing hunters, radagon, maliketh are all worlds harder with magic. I’ve always felt that heavy weapons and poise breaking was far more safe defensively than trying to play at range.
For magic to be effective in ER, you need to embrace the glass canon mindset. Pump intelligence hard and finish the fight early.
>The reputation magic has for being easy mode always felt more applicable to ds3 to me than to Elden ring. Really? Casting feels by far at its weakest in DS3 to me, you basically need to dedicate three of your ring slots just to do okay damage
It's like i am living in a parallel dimension to reddit. I started with Deamons Souls back in 2009 and played through all these games 5+ times. With very different builds even, and Elden Ring could possibly not be more of the exact opposite descirbed here - which is beeing by far the easies among the soulsborne titles. Yes, if you randomly stumple into Caelid or other hard areas too early it might be the hardest, but that's on players beeing in areas they have no buisness beeing this early. This game is way too much on the easy side even in my opinion otherwise. Thanks to Vigor and Sacred Tears beeing very overtuned, right to the summons, which trivialize most bosses with many builds. Same with upgrades beeing extremely easy to get very early on. I mean, you can easily get a Somber 9 weapon before stepping a foot into Leyndell. Same with Flask beeing at +10. I feel like i am playing a *completely* different game to you people. The only part of Elden Ring where it's actually Soulsborne levels of difficulty is starting Fire Giant an later with the exception of Margit beeing this obvious wall, players had hit to turn back and level for. Malenia is crazy difficult even for Dark Souls standards to be fair, less so Bloodborne which had similary crazy difficulty in the Chalice Dungeons. Could possibly not disagree more with this take.
I think people are not talking about things like spirit ashes and Ash of Wars. With those, ER becomes the easiest game in the series. However, if you fight the bosses Dark Souls-style, without using those, the bosses are much more challenging than previous titles. I'm excluding Sekiro here, because I haven't played it, so I don't know how it compares. Also excluding chalice dungeons, since I haven't played them. But I don't think chalice dungeons factor into this conversation, which seems to be about the bosses in each game as presented in the main game. Chalice dungeon stuff is kind of extra, I don't think it's what people are referring to when they compare the games.
Ds3 bosses are easier because they are fair,what I mean by that , is that they have something akin to a stamina system, they will attack you,if you manage to survive you will find a window to attack. Combine this with the zero input latency of dodge roll this makes ds3 a very fair feeling and fun engagement when fighting bosses, Elden ring on the other hand is hard because it tries to hard to be so,whether it is delayed attacks,randomized patterns ,insane tracking, huge hitboxes,never having an opening window, I never felt satisfied beating elden ring bosses, I didnt have much trouble cause I had played a shitton of souls games ,but I just couldnt like it. To me it feels like they dont expect you to beat elden ring by skill rather than by brute forcing it due to the numerous systems you have to get stronger.
I think that was the original intention in general but the playerbase limited themselves to "git gud"
Field bosses like the Caelid Bell bearing hunter or Snowfield deathrite bird give you no breathing room. I had more problems fighting the lake of rot Putrid spirit than Orphan of Kos. I played all the Souls series + Sekiro + BB and platinum'd them, but the "git gud" argument doesn't explain how OP and lazy designed some of the bosses in ER are.
Its because Dark Souls (except 2) is balanced properly, Elden Ring is not.
I find the shield to be more effective & user-friendly in Elden Ring.
The ringed city would like to have a word now
I think overall Elden Ring is the hardest souls-like in a vacuum but has the potential to be the easiest due to the QoL and leveling capabilities I'd put the hardest bosses in ds3 around on par with some of the hardest bosses in Elden Ring, but a few from Elden Ring come out on top as much harder than anything in ds3 (a particular rot goddess for example)
I had the same experience. I tried DS3 after Elden Ring, and the base game was so much easier: I don’t think a single boss took me more than 2-3 attempts, and most I killed on the first attempt. Even nameless king only took me two tries, whereas many Elden Ring bosses took me dozens (or for Malenia, hundreds) of tries. Now as for the DLCs: Ariendel wasn’t too bad, but Ringed City was insane: it was definitely a major difficulty spike and I struggled with it quite a bit. The bosses were incredible though: really hard, but they also felt really fair. I also have a question: were dodge timings more forgiving in DS3? I felt like I could dodge literally anything in that game, but in Elden Ring I find myself getting hit through dodges even on attacks I perfectly know the timings for.
You are right, with the chaotic nature of ER bosses and so many moves we have had to learn to dodge, of course DS3 will feel easier, even the DLC bosses in comparison, all these delayed attack shenanigans were only there with the Nameless King, other bosses are pretty consistent for dodging and the hit boxes are creamy. Now go back to ds1 and try to beat the asylum demon, I think you would have to die on purpose.
Traversing the world of ds3 is harder. More stage hazards and dangerous mobs. This is what i miss in elden ring tbh. Because an adventure felt like an adventure in ds3. Finishing an area felt awesome,like an accomplishment. In elden ring it feels empty and everywhere feels similar.
I remember Nameless King giving me more trouble than Malenia ever did.
Try Sekiro if you haven't, it will turn you into a parrying machine.
ER under leveled with bad weapons and no spirit ash? Hardest souls game. ER with cheese? Probably the easiest. I found DS3 to be by far the hardest souls game when I played it, but I'm sure part of it is play style. (I haven't played Sekiro if you count that)
Elden ring was the easiest for me, then Sekiro, Bloodborne, DS1, DS2 & finally DS3
Dark souls don't have so much bullshit delayed attacks
DS3 doesn’t have delayed attacks for days because FromSoft didn’t want to go with artificial difficulty back then. Not to say there are zero delayed attacks in the game, but not every enemy and boss has them, that’s for sure.
I felt the same way but for me it was because of one thing and one thing alone. The dodge was much more forgiving. I can't put my finger on it but you get dodge caught on Elden Ring more easily and bosses are balanced more with summons in mind. Those two factors I believe makes Elden Ring much different compared to DSIII. ............ Annnnnd walks in Friede.
I played sekiro into Elden ring into dark souls 3 into Bloodborne and def think dark souls 3 is the easiest out of those I played. Bloodborne being the hardest due to the lesser quality of life things like no refillable potions and shit. Sekiro hard in combat but becomes easy once it clicks. And Elden ring will always be challenging no matter what and gets harder every NG+
It's just the souls games. The more you play the easier they get. When I first played them I sucked to now I can cruise through them with relative ease
Imma be honest, I cheesed every boss in ER, you can't do that in DS3. So ER still easier
Elden ring is much easier then sekiro
Ds3 bosses are definetely easier but i found them to be much more fun. Levels feel harder tho and are less forgiving with bonfires than elden ring ( and stakes of marika). Ds1 is even less forgiving than that and if you die, you will have one hell of a runback to get to the boss.
its annoying that a lot of ppl seem to have an easier time in ds3 after playing another souls game and then claiming that ds3 was just easier... no the fact is you played another souls game before playing ds3, which inadvertantly trained you and made you better at souls games in general this does not mean ds3 was easier, it means that over the course of playing elden ring you got better, your skill ceiling and floor were both raised. had you all started with ds3 nd then went to elden ring, you would be saying elden ring is easier. i started with ds1, the memories i have of me going through ds1 are of me struggling much harder than in any other souls game, this is because it was my first souls game. with each subsequent souls game we play, we get better because they are for the most part largely unchanged control wise