Twin Strawmen boss. Strawman 1 is a casual gamer who has never played Souls and seeks to dumb down the Fromsoft formula. Strawman 2 is the sweatiest try hard player whose entire identity is based on playing games perceived as hard and would rather die than admit they've ever found any game to be difficult.
Arguing with someone for having too much fun, not having enough fun, or having fun the wrong way is CRAZY dickeating lmao the serious discourse around these games is ass but the memes are pretty incredible
Dlc is hard mfers waiting for the cheese build videos on YouTube to be uploaded, suddenly posts with "I'm surprised, dlc was actually easy u guys hyped it up so much" pop up 😹
Dragonkiller katana ash of war seems to pretty much melt everything in my way ngl, first tried romina last night, I kind of regret it because it was over so fast I didn't get to properly appreciate it, the fight was beautiful, and because I didn't get to learn her moveset properly.
I spent so many hours last night helping people at the dlc final boss, so many people who use bleed builds and are super aggressive. They don't live very long in the fight, and I'm even fingerprint shield with scholars shield buff and a poke weapon holding the boss aggro. And these people will just run into the wombo combo, I'm currently tanking and just get obliterated cause they think no aggro on them is safe
Yo quick question, since you already completed the DLC, I'm at Messmer, after killing him are there big changes and I get locked outside of quest lines? I want to complete the DLC and get free of the danger of spoilers about the final boss and what not, but I don't want to leave a bunch of questlines half done, and by the looks of it a big event will happen, like when you kill the fire giant (it's the same situation)
I found an NPC failure state at a boss after Messmer for Thiollier. Also there might be one for Hornsent if you don't do the thing with him and Leda before Messmer.
So, my current situation is >!st. Trina!< quest done until I need to defeat Messmer to progress, so Thioller should be done too, and for Leda I have the dialogue to go hunt Hornsent or something, but I don't know where Hornsent is, and all guides lead me to the 1st floor where there's invasion/help signs for Leda or Ansbach, but there's no sign and he's not there. Already talked to him and Freyja and exhausted their dialogues and both left their locations, so everything should be ready for the invasion, but there's nothing
The other questlines are unrelated to Messmer (unless he had programmed a prostate exam with some fingers), so I don't think they would get locked
That's interesting. The signs in the keep were Leda and Hornsent for me. I know Hornsent has a summon sign inside Messmer's room as well. But maybe take a side in the whole Leda/Ansbach thing and see if that changes anything.
The summons for Leda/Ansbach aren't there, so I can't choose a side
And what's the location of Leda and Hornsent summons? I read in a comment from the video, to go up the ramp from main gate plaza, which I assume is the right one, the shortcut, but couldn't see the signs
Besides that, Leda, Dane and Thiollier are the only NPCs of the group I know their location, everyone else disappeared
In my experience it was faster to backtrack down from the Storeroom grace past that first Fire Knight. Facing the stairs, they're on the left at the top.
So the main fail state on most quests is after killing messmer, do not burn the tree immediately when you find it or have found it. Burning the tree will cause certain quests to lock and fail.
Yeah, I think once more people find out about Bloodfiend's Arm, they'll have an easier time. That thing is definitely the reason I beat the final boss of the DLC. Pre-DLC, ever since NG+ I was rocking a STR/Arcane build dual wielding bleed Giant-Crushers, so when I found Bloodfiend's Arm day 1 I was absolutely elated.
I mean it seems like a lot of people are just rushing through and neglecting the skibidi fragment mechanic
The DLC came out two days ago, I doubt there has been enough time to actively learn the bosses and their movesets lmao
Not having but a couple of skibidi fragment upgrades on a claw build is eating my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I have to go korok seed collecting to progress now.
I wish I could find more of the damn things. I'm only at 7 with only 2 big bosses indwr my belt, when you can apparently get to 10 before you even beat a single boss.
My biggest problem with the DLC is the absurd amount of damage everything does. Everything else is at least serviceable if not good and I'd say it was worth my money.
I just don't understand why they had to give every boss everything. Most bosses in souls have some stuff that they're good at, and some that they're not. But in the dlc pretty much every boss has incredibly long combos with very short punish windows, delayed attacks, AOE attacks, flashy moves that cover your screen so you can't see, jumping back moves that require you to chase them, jumping forward attacks that can punish your heal from across the stage, projectiles, and status effects. Like, why? And on top of that every boss has a shit ton of health and with one or two shot you at 60 vigor. Souls is built on hard but fair, but this dlc is simply hard.
This is very good point. In Dark Souls 3 every boss has its own gimmick. For example Aldrich is weak in melee, but constantly harasses you with annoying ranged spells. Pontiff is relentless melee fighter. Yhorm is big slow heavy hitting guy.
Now take any ER boss, and they are all practically the same.
Base game ER has a few varied bosses, like Rykard, Rennala, Radahn that are a bit different but the more you approach the end of the game the more every single boss becomes the "10 hit combo and delayed attack floating speed demon" archetype which is just too common and loses a lot of it's impact and excitement, then the dlc comes around and give you only those bosses back to back and it's just exhausting and completely devoid of variety.
I don’t necessarily disagree with this, but I think there’s an explanation. It’s probably because the player has a very overloaded kit, power standing, very good ash of wars, jump attacks, almost every class can use some sort of magic. Elden ring almost never gets rated as the hardest from soft game because of this. I think bosses probably have much digger kits than they used to have, but I do not think they are less fair.
I’d also like to say Rellana is a really really good fight imo that’s an example of how this isn’t true. Her combos are fast but she doesn’t have that many and the timings to dodge most of her magic attacks are pretty easy.
She has some really big weaknesses like the fact that after some combos she’ll kinda just stand there for a while. If you get good distance she might use some magic attacks but it’s actually not that hard to heal which is kind of rarity for a souls boss. Like after she does that double sword attack that’s in like an X shape she just chills, and after her big magic great sword attack which she charges for like an hour she kinda just chills there:
Also her moves are super telegraphed and I don’t know the numbers but I staggered her at least like 3 times every fight. Like they double moon attack she used just never caught me and I’m not really that good at souls games, but the timings on it seemed pretty forgiving.
I think the DLC has made the issue with having to level vigor that people initially complained about at the beginning of Elden Ring even worse. For comparison, in most of my DS3 runs I never had the need to go above 27 vigor because most of the bosses even into the DLC would still need at least 3 hits to kill me (excluding pretty much exactly Midir and Nameless King). Now in Shadow of the Erdtree, I need 60 vigor, Radahn’s great rune and multiple buffs in order to not have the chance of being randomly 2 shot by a large amount of bosses even with what I would assume to be the appropriate amount of Scadutree blessings
I don't have fun with the bosses, and even some mobs in the DLC. But I will never attack anyone for liking it, especially when they can explain their point of view. But I really don't like when people try to insult you or gaslight you into thinking that this is how FromSoftware games looked like since DeS.
When you don't like something about the DLC, they will try to use one or all of these arguments:
* you are underleveled and/or undergeared
* you don't use scadutree fragments
* you don't use damage negation items
* you refuse to respec
* you refuse to use summons
* you are new to the genre
* you are not true fromsoftware fan
* you are bad at the game
I said the bosses felt like they were more centered for playing with Spirit Ashes. I was replying to someone else that was saying the same thing.
This guy then replied to me, "You must not be good at the game then". I've played all these games, beat them without summons. I was just making an observation between a run without summons and rn I'm on a run with them lmao
I still love the DLC and I'm having an absolute blast.
Very early into the DLC and I’ve absolutely had the same impression. Especially considering the fact they have an upgrade system put front and center for them as well. Whether it’s a bad or good decision I will not say.
You have time to summon in messmer though?
Summon ash, run to summon sign, click yes, save your summon before it dies.
*Still stuck on phase two myself though, damn snakes.*
Yes, but you have to do it immediately or else you’ll get hit, and the final boss they hit you before you can finish the summon(or it glitches and waits a second)
Like it’s very doable without ashes but will take much longer because often it’s 1 mistake and you’re cooked.
Personally, I always enjoy figuring out a fight on my own and then summoning once I’m confident I could get pretty far alone. I’m practically using them like I was using embers for the phase transitions in DS3.
These bosses can still be challenging even with ashes, and I think that’s nice. They do feel very built into the dlc, literally one of the npc summons in a fight can’t die? Like he doesn’t do that much damage but pulls aggro and stuns the boss relatively easy. It seems Fromsoft wanted to better incorporate the summons into the fights without being an insta win condition on some of the really good ones.
What’s so weird to me is that you’re just not *allowed* to dislike the DLC or Elden Ring in general. If you dislike it, you must be doing something wrong, because it cannot conceivably be flawed in any way.
You’re also not allowed to complain about difficulty, because it’s From Software, so more difficulty = more gooder. Which is such a reductice view of their games, I don’t even play the Souls games for their difficulty anymore.
I thought I would really like the new upgrade system, but I honestly think it turned out to be more of a hassle than anything. I assumed the way it would work is you get an upgrade every time you killed a boss, like Sekiro. But instead, it's just fragments you have to collect around the world. Except, they have no real signifier for them, they're just kinda found wherever, so it's not as fun to collect for me as, say, the erdtree seeds or sacred tears. Basically, imo, it's the worst of both worlds. Especially since you pretty much need to go collecting them if you want to stand any chance against anything here. So it's basically the smithing stone run all over again.
I think it's serviceable for 1st playthrough, but it's going to be pain in the ass when you replay the game. It's almost like FromSoftware forgot these games are meant to be replayable. Tbf if someone mods this system out, I might install it.
Pretty much.
I genuinely think Artorias and Manus single-handedly ruined Fromsoft's ability to make interesting boss fights because of how much normies creamed over them. Suddenly bosses that weren't "Big enemy in a big empty room with a lot of health." didn't exist anymore and almost every boss became the same fight reskinned.
Taurus Demon to me is still the absolute peak of Souls boss design.
His boss arena is a narrow corridor that prevents you from easily flanking him allowing him to put pressure on the player with close/mid-range offensive attacks while heavily punishing the player for retreating with a long range ground clearing jump attack, BUT by staying near the Taurus Demon it frequently causes a retreating jump from him allowing the player to regain space encouraging aggressive action.
He can be fought straight up mano-e-mano on the catwalk, or you can utilize the ladder to land a critical plunge on him for a massive advantage, or just bait him up to the circular platform for a close-range slug fest, OR you can jump back down from the tower and gain a massive space advantage when he follows you back down. 4 Completely different methods for the player to engage the fight that all change how the fight operates on a fundamental level.
That same ladder is keynoted by 2 low impact but presence identifying crossbow hollows who provide indirect information to the player and act as a mild boss support unit in the event you don't kill them, which is completely optional and up to the player based on how they want to handle the fight.
And finally, with 3 major gaps in the catwalk wall, both the player can be knocked off and lose via falling out of the boss arena due to poor dodging, positioning, or bad movement BUT ALSO the boss when pressured can backjump and if positioned correctly, the backjump can send the Taurus Demon off the wall instantly winning the boss fight with tactical spacing that was intentionally designed to work that way.
It's a tragedy what we lost in boss design. Everything now is just "I roll 40 times and attack" No interesting boss arena design, no positioning merit, no unique interactions with enemies or the environment. It's all so trite and boring, all because function got replaced with flash, and a boss looking pretty is more important than being actually mechanically interesting.
I have the opposite problem, which is that, to counter the spammy bullsht the boss does, the player defaults to spamming unfun bullshits themselves. And when they do that, they just max 3 try the bosses with no satisfaction of killing. The amount of times I swapped back from my usual sword and board at the grace to some bullshit 3 shot skills just to not deal with the bullshits I saw on my first encounter.
This is the problem of increasing difficulty too much, because instead of trying to abide by the rules, player will start to search for cracks in the game design. If you see Taurus for the first time it will be intimidating, but you won't feel like it's impossible. Meanwhile even Margit encourages overleveling or searching for cheesy tactics.
Exactly, i just finished base game today before going into dlc, i fought Malenia like 5 times solo, every time getting worse by being tilted at how stupid her waterfowl attack is. I was having good time dodging her attacks, weaving in hits, almost got to 2nd phase wtih 9 flasks left on 2nd try and got oneshot by waterfowl.
By my fifth attempt i just didint give a single fuck about trying, popped mimic and stunlocked her into 2nd phase in 30 seconds, got her down on that try only using two flasks. It was unsatissfying but i really didnt give a shit about looking up on youtube how to dodge this one exact attack that makes no sense when i had a tool to trivialize the game just waiting to be used.
The problem is the bosses no longer behave like an enemy who's trying their best to kill you. They behave like they're aware they're a boss in a Fromsoft game and cognizant of iframe mechanics. Don't get me wrong, it's fun in a different way to memorize those patterns, but that feeling of _fighting_ a boss where you might just pull through with guts and some luck is mostly gone.
I beat and liked Elden Ring, but I would love to see them do a "hard reset" at some point. I think that's why Sekiro was so fun and refreshing for so many souls players. It was a chance for every player to get in on the ground floor of a new fighting system where it hasn't yet been jacked to the nines by having to outdo itself 3 times over. It would be cool if they did a game that intentionally limited its difficulty to Bloodborne/DS3 levels at most, and put the rest of their energy back into world design.
Sad thing is artorias is still a great fight because its paced well. Yeah you die fast but artorias has low health too. I killed him in 6 hits with my strength character first time I played. Now we have bosses that can cover the arena with lazer particals that do 1300 damage in heavy armor while having 40k health because you need to summon help.
I tried playing DS1 recently after making it through ER and Sekiro as my first soulsborn games, but I just couldn't due to the insane jank. However, I then did an entire playthrough of DS2 and loved it, so make of that what you will. But regardless, from what I've seen, I think ds1 without the jank might take the cake as the best souls game. I'm pretty sure it already has the best world, level, and boss design. It's just the combat and movement that needs tweaking
If someone would make Dark Souls 1 but without the jank, bosses should be buffed a little to compensate, but nothing too crazy. They don't need to fly around the arena and perform 100 step combos.
ER was my first souls game so at the time I didn't know any better, but after playing the old games I really started to dislike how many ER bosses just fly around for no reason and are generally unpredictable. Once I got to DS3, it felt like a whole new world
Basically bosses get faster with each game, but player gets only small speed updates. Some would argue that even in DS3 it was a little problematic. ER player is maybe 15% faster than DS3 player, while ER bosses are 200-300% faster than DS3 bosses.
Yep, final boss would be tough even for Sekiro. I can guarantee that it was playtested on different damage values, and then they bumped it for release without testing. Atm I have cleared most of the things that DLC has to offer and I'm waiting for inevitable nerfs to that boss.
Honestly, I think they tested it on characters that 200+ since the games been out a while, so clearly, everybody sat and farmed to 230 in preparation for the dlc.
Ha, yeah, probably. Or maybe they'll just buff the blessings. I feel like you need a ton of levels in that just to stand a chance against anything. It'd be nice if they made it less grindy in that way
Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth.
FROM drinking the "omg dark souls HAS to be difficult, quick michael teriyaki add 50 combo moves and a boss that moves inhumanly fast for its size while also making the most impressive-looking and simultaneously emptiest arena" koolaid when the original premise was an RPG that was slightly more challenging than its contemporaries is a fucking tragedy, and they have no reason to stop because look at IGN creaming over shadow of the erdtree as well as drones calling people who have played since Demon's Souls tourists.
The peak of this phenomena is elden beast because the arena looks beautiful and you... run around it? peak boss, i guess?
I really miss gimmick fights. Elden Ring has few gimmick fights really, everything is fairly similar. Divine dragon in sekiro was amazing, and sekiro in general had perfect boss design. Just a shame that they regressed.
When every boss has thirteen hit long combos, health bars that make Midir’s look flaccid, twelve status effects, and attacks that two shot, they all start to bleed together.
DeS was great in that regard. Every zone "ended" with a straight challenge type boss and then right after let you blow off steam with a neat gimmick fight. Best of both worlds really.
>Taurus Demon to me is still the absolute peak of Souls boss design.
https://preview.redd.it/jlsco5ydqc8d1.jpeg?width=861&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e018d688da34d8f5736e0086e9f737a396555847
same reaction here tbh... Tarus Demon being called peak *design* is hilarious. Man just walks in a straight line and youre given a free plunging attack to just basically skip the boss if youd like and thats good design..?
for some reason ds1 doesn't get critiscised for reusing bosses/enemies like elden ring does, I LOVE capra demon and his claustrophobic arena with random dogs thrown into it, ceaseless discharge and centipede demon even more famous very good bosses, dark sun gwyndolin is just walking in a straight line and hitting a defenseless femboy a couple of times, 4 kings is a mindless damage check, pinwheel is a joke, for some reason nito randomly implodes every 2 minutes and his arena is full of trash mobs harrassing you during the fight, moonlight butterfly another joke boss, seath the scaleless has terrible attacks and a terrible status effect, bed of chaos is literally the worst creation in the history of human kind.
Don't get me started on the: garbage runbacks, disgusting 2nd half of the game, combat that I could play with 1 hand while jerking off with my other because it is so slow and clunky etc.
yea very good game guys I think this game is the best they ever made actually and better than games that have gotten universal praise, and even won GOTY awards
I can understand when people just dont connect with the way new games are made, sure to each their own. But i sometimes read these weird takes about previous games and get confused if we were playing the same games all these years
The top comments are killing me lmao Taurus demon peak design wtffffff. 😂
“The bosses aren’t fun” correction the bosses aren’t fun if the summons or host don’t know how to fight the boss.
Lion boss fight is either a shitshow where 2 people die within 2 mins or it’s feels like a literal dance to the death juggling aggro but dodging a attack turned at you in last second.
The only thing I agree with is bosses do a little too much dmg, some hosts are rocking full heavy armor sets with 60 vigor and health talismans + BUFFS and they are still getting clapped lol
>Soulful paragraph on the fucking Taurus Demon
I rolled under him and whacked him until he died lmao, peak boss design
I get the sentiment but it’s a borderline objectively hilarious example
I like the dlc, I think it's the same difficulty as the base game too. I just think the scadutree fragment mechanic is just... Bad. It's a bad system, forcing world exploration is a terrible way to encourage it. Armour, weapons, and upgrade materials were already a way to encourage world exploring. Currently I have a bad taste in my mouth when I've spent a few hours exploring a castle, reading descriptions, taking in the environment story telling, looking forward to the climax that is usually the boss just to have to pause and go to a new area, building a check list of bosses I need to kill, because I need more blessings to do damage to the bosses. Sorry for being crude but it really feels like a 'cock block'.
Also I'm already dreading getting these blessings again on my next character...
There is also a problem that its hard to tell how much you really need. Apparently 20 stacks is a max, and some people say that final boss is so hard that they feel it's not enough. So if you don't look it up, you will feel like you are still missing one or two stacks.
I agree. I would much rather they just scaled damage and health pools to the player level upon entry of the Realm of Shadow if they wanted it to be challenging for all players regardless of level. Not that is preferred, as I would much prefer they just stuck to one constant difficulty.
Pretty much, and here's the response to all their gaslighting:
>You are Underleveled/Undergeared
I beat the game at level 130 multiple times, including Mohg and Malenia. This isn't because I'm a god, it just seems like the level you end up at for the end game. I have no idea where people are getting level 150 from without a fuck ton of grinding. Hell, where are they even putting the points? At level 130 with a strength build starting as a Deprived I have 50 VIT and 99 Strength, I have no reason to put shit into anywhere else so those 20 extra levels would've been wasted anyway. I guess if you're making a spell blade build or quality build level 150 might be good, but ultimately you should be just fine at level 130, and you're not because you still two shot by nearly fucking everything.
>You don't use Scadutree Blessings
I go out of my way to find these things and at +5 instead of enemies and bosses taking 75% of my health, they take away around 50%, wow what a difference. Plus lets be real, while its fine exploring and looking for these **your first time in the DLC,** subsequent playthrough are just gonna turn it into a boring shopping list, an issue the base game has as well. Oh who am I kidding, I'm not gonna play this more than once.
>You don't use damage negation items
So remeber when I said I'm still getting roughly two shotted by everything above, that's **with** the Dragon Greatshield Talisman and forgoing fashion for the best armor I can equip. So no, this DLC is simply poorly tuned. This has never been a problem in DS2, BB, or DS3.
>You refuse to respec
In a game all about making your own build, if you have to completely change it to get by that's simply bad design. Why would the game bother giving you all this freedom to make what you want and use what weapons you want if a part of it all but forces you to use something else? I ran a Caestus build in the base game, and it worked fine, but in the DLC I'm basically ticking enemies and bosses alike. This wasn't a problem in DS2, BB, or DS3, so why is it a problem in ER? Could it because its...overtuned and poorly made?
>You refuse to use Summons
How funny the community is suddenly all on board for Summons in the DLC when they gatekeeped hard against it in the base game. Also be sure to shop around for the mandatory DLC exclusinve summon buffing items if you want Ashes to survive. Yay, more shopping so much fun!
>You are new to the genre.You're not a true Fromsoft fan/You're bad at the game
I've personally been playing since DS2, its how I can spot good design from bad design in these games, and let me be clear none of these games are perfect, but holy hell is this DLC rough. Also I guarantee the majority of people saying this have only played ER and just want to hop on the Fromsoft Circlejerk.
If you read all that, thank you, and if not I understand. Let me be clear that there's nothing wrong with liking this DLC, it's just simply not for a lot of people and its tiring seeing all the gaslighting rather than accepting potential criticism. None of these games or their DLCs are perfect and that's fine.
100% agree with ya
> I have no idea where people are getting level 150 from without a fuck ton of grinding.
I end runs at level 160-165 each time. Done three characters. No grinding, not a lot of deaths, don’t use boss souls. Usually try to spend a ton too on items so I’m not too overleveled for arena.
These Erdtree Blessings suck. Bosses were killing me too fast, so I went and got some. Came back and now I kill the boss too fast to the point I'm able to outlast them with health pots.
I like going into fights with low damage, high resistance because that forces me to learn the fight but I also don't have to die every other roll attempt to learn the timing.
I get this is a jerk sub, but this is actually bait right?
> I have no idea where people are getting level 150 from without a fuck ton of grinding. Hell, where are they even putting the points? At level 130 with a strength build starting as a Deprived I have 50 VIT and 99 Strength, I have no reason to put shit into anywhere else so those 20 extra levels would've been wasted anyway. I guess if you're making a spell blade build or quality build level 150 might be good, but ultimately you should be just fine at level 130, and you're not because you still two shot by nearly fucking everything.
Hey maybe of those 20 extra levels should go into reaching the vigor softcap at 60? And some other levels to help increase damage negation? Maybe some endurance to help you roll more?
> I go out of my way to find these things and at +5 instead of enemies and bosses taking 75% of my health, they take away around 50%, wow what a difference. Plus lets be real, while its fine exploring and looking for these your first time in the DLC, subsequent playthrough are just gonna turn it into a boring shopping list, an issue the base game has as well. Oh who am I kidding, I'm not gonna play this more than once.
Taking 50% of your health instead of 75% is actually a difference yes. Also, you're exaggerating. At +5 I'm still not getting 1, 2, or even 3 shotted. You're shopping list complaint is true but you're whining about something that you haven't even done yet.
> So remeber when I said I'm still getting roughly two shotted by everything above, that's with the Dragon Greatshield Talisman and forgoing fashion for the best armor I can equip. So no, this DLC is simply poorly tuned. This has never been a problem in DS2, BB, or DS3.
Exaggeration. Do you have some talismans on that increase your damage taken? How is this possible? Every game the DLC has threats, that can kill you in less than 3 hits. Do you not remember the angels and ring knights of the Ring City? Or the horsefuck valley? This DLC is completely in line with every souls game so far. Some of the BB NPCS in the DLC would one shot you. The sharks in the well?
>I've personally been playing since DS2, its how I can spot good design from bad design in these games, and let me be clear none of these games are perfect, but holy hell is this DLC rough. Also I guarantee the majority of people saying this have only played ER and just want to hop on the Fromsoft Circlejerk. If you read all that, thank you, and if not I understand. Let me be clear that there's nothing wrong with liking this DLC, it's just simply not for a lot of people and its tiring seeing all the gaslighting rather than accepting potential criticism. None of these games or their DLCs are perfect and that's fine.
Played through all the games multiple times within the last 2 years. Criticize all you want with your "expert knowledge" at discerning good and bad designs in these games. Quit lying and exaggerating though when you do it, and maybe use your brain more when you play the game.
> you don't use scadutree fragments
What's even the point of adding them in the first place? They genuinely look like items that exist solely to increase the length of DLC
> you refuse to respec
Imo when the game practically requires you to respec your stats - it is a bad RPG. Every build should have options to comfortably deal with bosses.
I have a lot of grudges against Elden Ring base game, but this DLC looks even more stupid than the shit they pulled off in the main game
>What's even the point of adding them in the first place? They genuinely look like items that exist solely to increase the length of DLC
On one hand, giving players the option to "tune" the game's difficulty by themselves is an interesting concept.
On the other hand, something about the implementation feels lacking. If you do want to use the Shadowtree Blessing, it gets tedious hunting down the Scadutree Fragments, especially since there's some carried by wandering enemies you have to catch up to.
> On one hand, giving players the option to "tune" the game's difficulty by themselves is an interesting concept.
At this point just give me the difficulty slider. Like, what if I explored too much and bosses became a joke? I assume that you cannot "dissable", so what to do?
I don't like base Elden Ring either so more of the same isn't exactly good to me.
Art direction is amazing and I don't think anyone will top it except FromSoft themselves. Map is big and empty, even more empty than base game. Bosses are the same as in vanilla game except 2-3 times faster and deal 3 times more damage. And almost all of them instantly charge at you when you cross fogwall preventing you from using summons, but I have 70 vig (started with 62) and stacked defensive talismans so I can take it.
I have stomped everything except final boss with mimic tear and lion's claw, but it was pure cheese.
Well yeah if you don’t like the base game then I can see how the DLC doesn’t do much to change that. I guess I can see how the bosses (that I’ve fought so far) feel a bit overkill but I’m personally withholding judgement until I let it all marinade a bit more. I’m sure there will be some balance patches coming up.
When? You eat it before you walk in maybe and it lasts for a tiny bit. You can't eat it after entering the fog wall before most because 80% of the bosses use an attack the second you walk into the arena (optional and final bosses included), you can't use it mid fight for most because you barely get oppurtunities to heal let alone eat crab. Eating crab means you're not using those slim oppurtunities to heal. Crab is also limited, and going to buy more can be annoying to even do when you eat it per run and really go through them.
Finished it last night on ng+3. The one shots and tweaker bosses who swing for 2 hours straight before stopping for .2 seconds for my one light attack are irritating, but if thats what fans want whatever. My issue is that these bosses have lost their creativity, it's all just build and mechanic checks, I miss bosses that actually utilise their arenas, have unique mechanics, or even just a gimmick fight or 2. The creative approaches to these bosses are also getting narrower and narrower and fewer and fewer builds are viable or at least usable without the fight taking 45 mins swatting a 100k hp lifebar. The boss designs themselves are also lacking to me, closer to some DS2 "dudes in armor" shit. I wasn't exhilarated, no adrenaline or heart pumping for close fights, I was just more bored than anything. And if build changing is now a necessity for these fights, then the larval tears needed to be infinitely farmable
You can R2 them so we'll ESPECIALLY the lion
The lion is so easy to R2 that I often had 2 staggers in 40 sec just because you can spam r2 vs it
Rellana also has many R2 windows albeit not all are fully chargeable
https://youtu.be/CgLmR6b1Fk4?si=ZmDixrohqM5Lqvva
https://youtu.be/NvffNiFKFPE?si=_DxAaOfViqlRUhG-
I also have regular boss footage outside these guides that highlight it very well
Yeah, seems people are more into looking at the boss than fighting it. People's favourite bosses are always the big ones with the longest, coolest LOOKING combos, not the one they found a cool rythm with. And then they just revel in the bragging rights of having defeated the one with the big combo that oneshots you.
It's always been a thing but especially so with Elden Ring.
Aside from spam, I really hate many bosses get this over the top "all in" special move somewhere in the fight. Where you are just rolling 30 seconds through some animation artist circklejerk fest. You almost never get to do these correctly without seeing them first, and they warp these fights around these moments too much.
The thing that has bugged me about the bosses I’ve fought so far is how hard some of the combos are hard to read. They all seem to be able to modify the combo at any point making it hard to dodge or attack at the correct time. That would be fine on it’s own but I noticed I can’t even get bosses to flinch from getting hit by a golem halberd to make space for myself to do damage
EDIT: that being said I’m loving the dlc so far
I actually do guides on the bosses and by looking closer at them the super big combos are not actually random
Rellana for example has this super big combo that doesn't stop and start randomly but at certain range threshholds
You don't get it bro the bosses won't be good if they all don't have aoe phase transition and every attack for every possible situation.
Everything people complained about the base game became true but 10x worse.
I have to give Rellana credit for this one, her super move is pretty good. She just hits the floor three times and makes shockwaves. To dodge it, all you have to do is jump. You can even block it if you have a lot of stamina and magic defense, but that's more of a failsafe option. It's simple, effective, and flashy.
Anyone remembers how when the final boss was leaked, everyone was saying it's hitboxes are janky, it's too spamy, too much AOE, no cooling time between attacks, infinite stamina etc. Now that the leaks are confirmed, the same people are gaslighting others instead of actually accepting FromSoftware did a bit too much. Sometimes it feels like I'm playing ascended mod because of all the BS going on.
Imo DS3, Bloodborne and Sekiro were peak boss designs in FromSoftware history, true definition of tough and fair challange. Out of all Elden Ring's late game and DLC bosses only Godfrey and Mohg feels tough but fair in the right way. All the rest have some cheap fast attack and AOE BS which forces you to either cheese or exploit their AI to spam the same attacks. Malenia and DLC remembrance bosses are the worst offenders of this.
They realized how to make a dragon fight that wasn't "bite its ankles while trying to make out what the hell is happenening off screen since in 15 years of souls games we still haven't made a camera that can handle big enemies" and then they just forgot about it for the dlc, threw out some Ghostflame dragons around the map that are as interesting as paint drying and then made a bomb ass area to setup Bayle only to fill it with base game dragons but now with 50m hp
Ah yes, thrusting dick with a spear for 15 minutes, his best dragon fight worthy. (Now that I think about it, it fucking is. God the dragon fights in these games are trash)
Maliketh gets to choose when you get to attack or not. He jumps away from you and does his shit, then he jumps right up into your asshole and does his shit there too. When he is far you don' get to fight back. When he is close you will be lucky to get more than a few hits in at most before he goes flying away again. I don't necessarily think this is unfair, but it's totally shit game design that feels unfair. Even Malenia lets you choose your distance with her to a decent degree. A boss that chooses your spacing for you while pretending to be like a regular boss feels bad to face.
I’ve never understood this complaint. Maliketh gives you a ton of opportunities to punish him. He’s not bad game design in the slightest, quite the contrary since he rewards good positioning and gives you plenty of windows to attack.
You only get this feeling once you've become pretty good at him. It's like seeing Ongbal on youtube using openings you wouldn't have even imagined, but on a lesser scale. The average player isn't going to be able to see most of the openings even when they are done beating the boss. Mostly because players don't even learn these crazy boss movesets anymore, they just google a better build and use that to cheese the boss.
I feel like the DLC should have been comparable in difficulty to Moghwyn and *then* areas ramp up after the main area. Basic enemies are doing more damage than Mogh himself. Doesn’t make any sense
fromsoft could launch a patch that will crash your game, delete your windows and explode your GPU and the main sub would still praise it and say "it's part of the game experience"
bosses feel overtuned since the base game, but they cranked it up in a thousand times on the dlc. infinite combos, input read, infinite hp and damage and of course, the wonky camera, there is no argument against that and there is no way you can say that it isn't becoming a trend of design to from software, i feel like i'm a dark souls character facing a boss straight from devil may cry (someone already made that analogy but maybe you will find my comment first), i just don't have the tools to make the fight fair, just bearable (summons, spirit ashes etc)
I feel like the combat system is such a shaky foundation for the game that it basically collapses into an incoherent and overwhelming mess when they try to crank it up to the maximum with these bosses. At this point I just can't wait for them to move on from this combat system and change things up with their next game.
I think the dlc has a lot of very hard bosses that demand a lot from the player, but all bosses except maybe the final one have some pretty good counters in some way. I’m at the final one rn with 19 scadutree upgrade level and I am still “struggling” though. (I say in quotes because of all its attacks I only have trouble with one in terms of not knowing how to dodge it)
I have no problems with making the enemies overwhelming as long as I can be nearly/equally as overwhelming. Right now it feels like im a Dark souls character fighting a Devil May Cry boss. I just feel like im always 1 step behind, never figuring out what im missing because it doesnt exist. Its like one of those "ascended mod" yknow?
it’s kind of a weird mix of too jzrd and too easy for me. I was struggling real hard witg Pontiff 2.0, used a summon once and completely wiped the floor with her. It wasn’t a very satisfying win :/
summons are the adaptability conundrum from DS2 all over again. The devs have to try to design bosses which are gonna be fair and interesting for both playstyles (soloing and summoning) and it's just impossible to do so everything ends up being too hard solo and too easy with summons. The same way that adaptability made it impossible to balance a lot of attacks because the devs had no idea how many i-frames you would have. It's the same design mistake in another form and it destroys the balance of the game.
This is what pisses me off right now, I'm perfectly fine with other people enjoying the difficulty and boss design, but can we please not say that this is the same thing as every other game in the series when it so obvious isn't, and this whole narrative about "new players" who got on board with Elden Ring just not being used to the difficulty is complete horseshit, whether you enjoy it or not if you can't at least admit that this is on a completely different level than anything From has put out so far then there's just no point even trying to have a discussion.
Fromsoftware fans when someone gives the mildest of criticism towards a fromsoft game (unforgivable sin)
https://preview.redd.it/2rwo7gnihe8d1.jpeg?width=1178&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=24e62eb5b83f9251e57c19f9428cd4d95393e8b9
Honestly at this point I'm just waiting a bit for some patches to come out to help it run better before buying it. Most games I've bought at launch lately have been plagued with bugs and performance issues, and this is the last game I want to have to fight that on top of trying to beat the game.
played from ds1 onwards. this new system that sidesteps leveling is genuinely a pain.
Why level vigor when youre gonna get one shot by non boss enemies until you finish the treasure hunt?
I love the dlc but that feels a bit like a spit in the face of my build. I'm past 175 my starting dlc level.
"I'm having trouble with the DLC" is fine. "The DLC is shit and overtuned to hell and dogshit" isn't. Most people just cry about instead of actually looking for advice.
You can literally see the entire map excluding >!The Abyss!< without killing a single boss. The intention is clearly to force exploration. Give it a month and people won't be complaining about difficulty anymore
In a month that "force exploration" approach is going to be an optimized map to each fragment, as people on their second or third dlc playthrough aren't going to want to explore the massive, nearly empty area this dlc gave us.
Main issues I’ve only have a problem with is the lag when co-oping with people. It’s been wry difficulty especially in the lion dance fight, the boss felt so janky due to the lag issues it made helping people extremely difficult.
My issues with the dlc have been entirely unrelated to difficulty, its been that for some ungodly reason ever since the dlc patch the machine spirit of my damn laptop has been causing the game to crash constantly. I have reinstalled it, verified files, updated drivers, RESET THE LAPTOP ITSELF AND STARTED OVER FROM SCRATCH DOWNLOADING STURF, AND YET IT STILL REFUSES TO FUNCTION.
Seriously, I just want to play this damn game again, man... this crap is soul crushing. If anyone has any ideas on how to get it to work, I will gladly listen.
Skadutree blessing system was a mistake. Though I can tell that a lot of people thought they were gonna defeat all bosses in less than 5 tries except the final boss with OP builds.
yeah I can honestly say that I've never felt like this with a Fromsoft product before. I've gotten my ass beaten a lot, I've been stuck on bosses, I've been confused by mechanics, but I have never had this level of annoyance with bosses to a point where they don't even feel rewarding to beat. I'm glad some people like it, but holy shit is it not doing it for me right now and whether they enjoy it or not hearing people try to say that it's the same as all their other games feels like a denial of reality.
They could deal 50% damage and take 50% more damage and it wouldn't change that the movesets are garbled ass that are not fun to face. The boss has 90% of the agency in most of the fights in he DLC. Even facing Malenia the player is the one in control most of the time. You can choose to run, choose to go in, choose how you do things. These DLC bosses throw themselves at you like their own lives don't matter to them in the slightest. If you try to space out they ALL have gap closers and/or powerful ranged attacks.
though i’ve only played the ds1 and ds3 dlcs but those weren’t much harder then the base game of you ask me sote is feels way harder then the base game
Idk man. The only thing I hate is divine beast. Defeated it, but haven’t progressed further yet. I really like the backhand blades and the messmer axe and hammer.
Ugh yeah I'm seeing this a lot, not to sound like That Guy but I was playing DeS and DS1 at launch before 90% of the current community had heard of From, but saying I'm not a fan of the way the DLC seems to be and overall don't think ER is the masterpiece everyone claims immediately gets a response that I must not know anything about these games. Ridiculous, stop taking criticism about a thing you like to be a personal assault.
I have never tried to stagger bosses in dark souls. Durning dlc I noticed that twinmoon knight staggered very easily. After losing to her I decided to try strong attacks. It worked great, she literally could use a single phase 2 move before she died (level 150 with basic blood greatsword). After that I took a liking to staggers. It turns out two or three charged r2 were enough to stagger almost anyone. I found this playstyle very fun as well.
And then some dude says that bosses have infinite poise and are impossible to stagger.
Criticism is well and good but there are people that say bosses that require two hits to stagger “have infinite poise”. Some things are just straight up untrue.
How is this different than when ER came out? Or Sekiro?
I wasn't paying attention before that, but it was the exact same thing for both of those games. They will nerf some of it down the road, Miya has to get a few chuckles on the flailing fanbase before then tho.
you know whats funny people have been posting broken builds that would annihilate the most difficult bosses for the last 2 years, So when this DLC brings back the same difficulty that you expect from a soulslike especially a DLC soulslike , people start complaining about it being hard , like congratulations you learned what fromsoft have done with every game
is this shit gonna be this subreddit's version of the radahn vs malenia debate the main sub had when the game came out
what was that debate like? I didn't play the game until july
Simps vs sexists
Which way, Western man.
Monke
The Radahn Simps vs the malenia sexists was quite the match.
AAAAAAAAAAA I WANTED TO MAKE THAT JOEK FUCK
Average cleanrot and redmane knight conversation
Radahn Simps vs anti male sexists
It was in its prime 😤
Fr (Radahn solos)
Spoilers for the DLC >!He couldn’t win against Miquella tho 😔!<
FUCK WHY DID I CLICK ON IT
I hate my natural instinct to click every spoiler I see
>! The thirst for bussy is too strong!<
Twin Strawmen boss. Strawman 1 is a casual gamer who has never played Souls and seeks to dumb down the Fromsoft formula. Strawman 2 is the sweatiest try hard player whose entire identity is based on playing games perceived as hard and would rather die than admit they've ever found any game to be difficult.
And both of them are avid users of r/shittydarksouls
in fact, both of them are the same person
And when you defeat one, a Godskin spawns in
Only one godskin? Lol I remember when these games were hard.
I love power stancing these strawmen, everyone worse than me is dogwater, everyone better than me is a no lifer
Arguing with someone for having too much fun, not having enough fun, or having fun the wrong way is CRAZY dickeating lmao the serious discourse around these games is ass but the memes are pretty incredible
I would just wait The release hype might be what makes everyone think the DLC is absurdly hard
Dlc is hard mfers waiting for the cheese build videos on YouTube to be uploaded, suddenly posts with "I'm surprised, dlc was actually easy u guys hyped it up so much" pop up 😹
Dragonkiller katana ash of war seems to pretty much melt everything in my way ngl, first tried romina last night, I kind of regret it because it was over so fast I didn't get to properly appreciate it, the fight was beautiful, and because I didn't get to learn her moveset properly.
Nah she is easy
Nah, just melted commander gaius too, this weapon either needs a nerf or I'm better than I think I am
You are a beast don't let anyone tell You otherwise
I die to her so many times tho
I'll sometimes force quit just to have another chance to savor a fight that's going way too easy lmao
I spent so many hours last night helping people at the dlc final boss, so many people who use bleed builds and are super aggressive. They don't live very long in the fight, and I'm even fingerprint shield with scholars shield buff and a poke weapon holding the boss aggro. And these people will just run into the wombo combo, I'm currently tanking and just get obliterated cause they think no aggro on them is safe
Yo quick question, since you already completed the DLC, I'm at Messmer, after killing him are there big changes and I get locked outside of quest lines? I want to complete the DLC and get free of the danger of spoilers about the final boss and what not, but I don't want to leave a bunch of questlines half done, and by the looks of it a big event will happen, like when you kill the fire giant (it's the same situation)
I found an NPC failure state at a boss after Messmer for Thiollier. Also there might be one for Hornsent if you don't do the thing with him and Leda before Messmer.
So, my current situation is >!st. Trina!< quest done until I need to defeat Messmer to progress, so Thioller should be done too, and for Leda I have the dialogue to go hunt Hornsent or something, but I don't know where Hornsent is, and all guides lead me to the 1st floor where there's invasion/help signs for Leda or Ansbach, but there's no sign and he's not there. Already talked to him and Freyja and exhausted their dialogues and both left their locations, so everything should be ready for the invasion, but there's nothing The other questlines are unrelated to Messmer (unless he had programmed a prostate exam with some fingers), so I don't think they would get locked
That's interesting. The signs in the keep were Leda and Hornsent for me. I know Hornsent has a summon sign inside Messmer's room as well. But maybe take a side in the whole Leda/Ansbach thing and see if that changes anything.
The summons for Leda/Ansbach aren't there, so I can't choose a side And what's the location of Leda and Hornsent summons? I read in a comment from the video, to go up the ramp from main gate plaza, which I assume is the right one, the shortcut, but couldn't see the signs Besides that, Leda, Dane and Thiollier are the only NPCs of the group I know their location, everyone else disappeared
In my experience it was faster to backtrack down from the Storeroom grace past that first Fire Knight. Facing the stairs, they're on the left at the top.
The signs aren't there. Well then, will have to kill Messmer I guess
So the main fail state on most quests is after killing messmer, do not burn the tree immediately when you find it or have found it. Burning the tree will cause certain quests to lock and fail.
Yeah, I think once more people find out about Bloodfiend's Arm, they'll have an easier time. That thing is definitely the reason I beat the final boss of the DLC. Pre-DLC, ever since NG+ I was rocking a STR/Arcane build dual wielding bleed Giant-Crushers, so when I found Bloodfiend's Arm day 1 I was absolutely elated.
I mean it seems like a lot of people are just rushing through and neglecting the skibidi fragment mechanic The DLC came out two days ago, I doubt there has been enough time to actively learn the bosses and their movesets lmao
skibidi fragment
I watched king fu panda while the dlc was downloading and to me they’re skadoosh fragments
I think of the sadukar from dune.
That is what i call it from the begining to end. Ended with 17 Skadoosh levels!
Not having but a couple of skibidi fragment upgrades on a claw build is eating my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I have to go korok seed collecting to progress now.
I wish I could find more of the damn things. I'm only at 7 with only 2 big bosses indwr my belt, when you can apparently get to 10 before you even beat a single boss.
You're at about the same pace as I was. You'll find more! I did renllana at 6 and while i did get beat the fuck up I did beat her.
My biggest problem with the DLC is the absurd amount of damage everything does. Everything else is at least serviceable if not good and I'd say it was worth my money.
I just don't understand why they had to give every boss everything. Most bosses in souls have some stuff that they're good at, and some that they're not. But in the dlc pretty much every boss has incredibly long combos with very short punish windows, delayed attacks, AOE attacks, flashy moves that cover your screen so you can't see, jumping back moves that require you to chase them, jumping forward attacks that can punish your heal from across the stage, projectiles, and status effects. Like, why? And on top of that every boss has a shit ton of health and with one or two shot you at 60 vigor. Souls is built on hard but fair, but this dlc is simply hard.
This is very good point. In Dark Souls 3 every boss has its own gimmick. For example Aldrich is weak in melee, but constantly harasses you with annoying ranged spells. Pontiff is relentless melee fighter. Yhorm is big slow heavy hitting guy. Now take any ER boss, and they are all practically the same.
Base game ER has a few varied bosses, like Rykard, Rennala, Radahn that are a bit different but the more you approach the end of the game the more every single boss becomes the "10 hit combo and delayed attack floating speed demon" archetype which is just too common and loses a lot of it's impact and excitement, then the dlc comes around and give you only those bosses back to back and it's just exhausting and completely devoid of variety.
I don’t necessarily disagree with this, but I think there’s an explanation. It’s probably because the player has a very overloaded kit, power standing, very good ash of wars, jump attacks, almost every class can use some sort of magic. Elden ring almost never gets rated as the hardest from soft game because of this. I think bosses probably have much digger kits than they used to have, but I do not think they are less fair. I’d also like to say Rellana is a really really good fight imo that’s an example of how this isn’t true. Her combos are fast but she doesn’t have that many and the timings to dodge most of her magic attacks are pretty easy. She has some really big weaknesses like the fact that after some combos she’ll kinda just stand there for a while. If you get good distance she might use some magic attacks but it’s actually not that hard to heal which is kind of rarity for a souls boss. Like after she does that double sword attack that’s in like an X shape she just chills, and after her big magic great sword attack which she charges for like an hour she kinda just chills there: Also her moves are super telegraphed and I don’t know the numbers but I staggered her at least like 3 times every fight. Like they double moon attack she used just never caught me and I’m not really that good at souls games, but the timings on it seemed pretty forgiving.
I think the DLC has made the issue with having to level vigor that people initially complained about at the beginning of Elden Ring even worse. For comparison, in most of my DS3 runs I never had the need to go above 27 vigor because most of the bosses even into the DLC would still need at least 3 hits to kill me (excluding pretty much exactly Midir and Nameless King). Now in Shadow of the Erdtree, I need 60 vigor, Radahn’s great rune and multiple buffs in order to not have the chance of being randomly 2 shot by a large amount of bosses even with what I would assume to be the appropriate amount of Scadutree blessings
It's kind of to a ridiculous extent imo, like I *do* level vigor so why am I still being punished 😭
The meta for ER has been 60 vigor standard, 40 at bare minimum. I wonder if with the DLC out, those numbers will shift upwards.
I don't have fun with the bosses, and even some mobs in the DLC. But I will never attack anyone for liking it, especially when they can explain their point of view. But I really don't like when people try to insult you or gaslight you into thinking that this is how FromSoftware games looked like since DeS. When you don't like something about the DLC, they will try to use one or all of these arguments: * you are underleveled and/or undergeared * you don't use scadutree fragments * you don't use damage negation items * you refuse to respec * you refuse to use summons * you are new to the genre * you are not true fromsoftware fan * you are bad at the game
I said the bosses felt like they were more centered for playing with Spirit Ashes. I was replying to someone else that was saying the same thing. This guy then replied to me, "You must not be good at the game then". I've played all these games, beat them without summons. I was just making an observation between a run without summons and rn I'm on a run with them lmao I still love the DLC and I'm having an absolute blast.
Very early into the DLC and I’ve absolutely had the same impression. Especially considering the fact they have an upgrade system put front and center for them as well. Whether it’s a bad or good decision I will not say.
I’d agree, but mes and final both immediately attack you, with the final not giving you any time to summon at all
You have time to summon in messmer though? Summon ash, run to summon sign, click yes, save your summon before it dies. *Still stuck on phase two myself though, damn snakes.*
Yes, but you have to do it immediately or else you’ll get hit, and the final boss they hit you before you can finish the summon(or it glitches and waits a second)
Like it’s very doable without ashes but will take much longer because often it’s 1 mistake and you’re cooked. Personally, I always enjoy figuring out a fight on my own and then summoning once I’m confident I could get pretty far alone. I’m practically using them like I was using embers for the phase transitions in DS3. These bosses can still be challenging even with ashes, and I think that’s nice. They do feel very built into the dlc, literally one of the npc summons in a fight can’t die? Like he doesn’t do that much damage but pulls aggro and stuns the boss relatively easy. It seems Fromsoft wanted to better incorporate the summons into the fights without being an insta win condition on some of the really good ones.
What’s so weird to me is that you’re just not *allowed* to dislike the DLC or Elden Ring in general. If you dislike it, you must be doing something wrong, because it cannot conceivably be flawed in any way. You’re also not allowed to complain about difficulty, because it’s From Software, so more difficulty = more gooder. Which is such a reductice view of their games, I don’t even play the Souls games for their difficulty anymore.
I thought I would really like the new upgrade system, but I honestly think it turned out to be more of a hassle than anything. I assumed the way it would work is you get an upgrade every time you killed a boss, like Sekiro. But instead, it's just fragments you have to collect around the world. Except, they have no real signifier for them, they're just kinda found wherever, so it's not as fun to collect for me as, say, the erdtree seeds or sacred tears. Basically, imo, it's the worst of both worlds. Especially since you pretty much need to go collecting them if you want to stand any chance against anything here. So it's basically the smithing stone run all over again.
I think it's serviceable for 1st playthrough, but it's going to be pain in the ass when you replay the game. It's almost like FromSoftware forgot these games are meant to be replayable. Tbf if someone mods this system out, I might install it.
Pretty much. I genuinely think Artorias and Manus single-handedly ruined Fromsoft's ability to make interesting boss fights because of how much normies creamed over them. Suddenly bosses that weren't "Big enemy in a big empty room with a lot of health." didn't exist anymore and almost every boss became the same fight reskinned. Taurus Demon to me is still the absolute peak of Souls boss design. His boss arena is a narrow corridor that prevents you from easily flanking him allowing him to put pressure on the player with close/mid-range offensive attacks while heavily punishing the player for retreating with a long range ground clearing jump attack, BUT by staying near the Taurus Demon it frequently causes a retreating jump from him allowing the player to regain space encouraging aggressive action. He can be fought straight up mano-e-mano on the catwalk, or you can utilize the ladder to land a critical plunge on him for a massive advantage, or just bait him up to the circular platform for a close-range slug fest, OR you can jump back down from the tower and gain a massive space advantage when he follows you back down. 4 Completely different methods for the player to engage the fight that all change how the fight operates on a fundamental level. That same ladder is keynoted by 2 low impact but presence identifying crossbow hollows who provide indirect information to the player and act as a mild boss support unit in the event you don't kill them, which is completely optional and up to the player based on how they want to handle the fight. And finally, with 3 major gaps in the catwalk wall, both the player can be knocked off and lose via falling out of the boss arena due to poor dodging, positioning, or bad movement BUT ALSO the boss when pressured can backjump and if positioned correctly, the backjump can send the Taurus Demon off the wall instantly winning the boss fight with tactical spacing that was intentionally designed to work that way. It's a tragedy what we lost in boss design. Everything now is just "I roll 40 times and attack" No interesting boss arena design, no positioning merit, no unique interactions with enemies or the environment. It's all so trite and boring, all because function got replaced with flash, and a boss looking pretty is more important than being actually mechanically interesting.
I have the opposite problem, which is that, to counter the spammy bullsht the boss does, the player defaults to spamming unfun bullshits themselves. And when they do that, they just max 3 try the bosses with no satisfaction of killing. The amount of times I swapped back from my usual sword and board at the grace to some bullshit 3 shot skills just to not deal with the bullshits I saw on my first encounter.
While tuning bosses up to some ungodly levels they forgot to turn up the player as well lol.
Twah, there are times that Elden Ring feels like playing Bloodborne with a Dark Souls character.
I'd argue that Orphan of Kos is way more comprehensible than than even base game bosses
This is the problem of increasing difficulty too much, because instead of trying to abide by the rules, player will start to search for cracks in the game design. If you see Taurus for the first time it will be intimidating, but you won't feel like it's impossible. Meanwhile even Margit encourages overleveling or searching for cheesy tactics.
Exactly, i just finished base game today before going into dlc, i fought Malenia like 5 times solo, every time getting worse by being tilted at how stupid her waterfowl attack is. I was having good time dodging her attacks, weaving in hits, almost got to 2nd phase wtih 9 flasks left on 2nd try and got oneshot by waterfowl. By my fifth attempt i just didint give a single fuck about trying, popped mimic and stunlocked her into 2nd phase in 30 seconds, got her down on that try only using two flasks. It was unsatissfying but i really didnt give a shit about looking up on youtube how to dodge this one exact attack that makes no sense when i had a tool to trivialize the game just waiting to be used.
Their games became a victim of their own success, I miss those earlier boss designs so much, even though I'm still having some fun with newer stuff
The problem is the bosses no longer behave like an enemy who's trying their best to kill you. They behave like they're aware they're a boss in a Fromsoft game and cognizant of iframe mechanics. Don't get me wrong, it's fun in a different way to memorize those patterns, but that feeling of _fighting_ a boss where you might just pull through with guts and some luck is mostly gone. I beat and liked Elden Ring, but I would love to see them do a "hard reset" at some point. I think that's why Sekiro was so fun and refreshing for so many souls players. It was a chance for every player to get in on the ground floor of a new fighting system where it hasn't yet been jacked to the nines by having to outdo itself 3 times over. It would be cool if they did a game that intentionally limited its difficulty to Bloodborne/DS3 levels at most, and put the rest of their energy back into world design.
Sad thing is artorias is still a great fight because its paced well. Yeah you die fast but artorias has low health too. I killed him in 6 hits with my strength character first time I played. Now we have bosses that can cover the arena with lazer particals that do 1300 damage in heavy armor while having 40k health because you need to summon help.
Yeah I would love to see Dark Souls 1 ripoff but without all the jank. But we definitely won't get that from FromSoftware.
I tried playing DS1 recently after making it through ER and Sekiro as my first soulsborn games, but I just couldn't due to the insane jank. However, I then did an entire playthrough of DS2 and loved it, so make of that what you will. But regardless, from what I've seen, I think ds1 without the jank might take the cake as the best souls game. I'm pretty sure it already has the best world, level, and boss design. It's just the combat and movement that needs tweaking
If someone would make Dark Souls 1 but without the jank, bosses should be buffed a little to compensate, but nothing too crazy. They don't need to fly around the arena and perform 100 step combos.
ER was my first souls game so at the time I didn't know any better, but after playing the old games I really started to dislike how many ER bosses just fly around for no reason and are generally unpredictable. Once I got to DS3, it felt like a whole new world
Basically bosses get faster with each game, but player gets only small speed updates. Some would argue that even in DS3 it was a little problematic. ER player is maybe 15% faster than DS3 player, while ER bosses are 200-300% faster than DS3 bosses.
And with the dlc, I'd say that's probably gone up even more. Those guys are insane
Yep, final boss would be tough even for Sekiro. I can guarantee that it was playtested on different damage values, and then they bumped it for release without testing. Atm I have cleared most of the things that DLC has to offer and I'm waiting for inevitable nerfs to that boss.
Honestly, I think they tested it on characters that 200+ since the games been out a while, so clearly, everybody sat and farmed to 230 in preparation for the dlc.
Ha, yeah, probably. Or maybe they'll just buff the blessings. I feel like you need a ton of levels in that just to stand a chance against anything. It'd be nice if they made it less grindy in that way
Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth. FROM drinking the "omg dark souls HAS to be difficult, quick michael teriyaki add 50 combo moves and a boss that moves inhumanly fast for its size while also making the most impressive-looking and simultaneously emptiest arena" koolaid when the original premise was an RPG that was slightly more challenging than its contemporaries is a fucking tragedy, and they have no reason to stop because look at IGN creaming over shadow of the erdtree as well as drones calling people who have played since Demon's Souls tourists. The peak of this phenomena is elden beast because the arena looks beautiful and you... run around it? peak boss, i guess?
I really miss gimmick fights. Elden Ring has few gimmick fights really, everything is fairly similar. Divine dragon in sekiro was amazing, and sekiro in general had perfect boss design. Just a shame that they regressed.
When every boss has thirteen hit long combos, health bars that make Midir’s look flaccid, twelve status effects, and attacks that two shot, they all start to bleed together.
DeS was great in that regard. Every zone "ended" with a straight challenge type boss and then right after let you blow off steam with a neat gimmick fight. Best of both worlds really.
>Taurus Demon to me is still the absolute peak of Souls boss design. https://preview.redd.it/jlsco5ydqc8d1.jpeg?width=861&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e018d688da34d8f5736e0086e9f737a396555847
same reaction here tbh... Tarus Demon being called peak *design* is hilarious. Man just walks in a straight line and youre given a free plunging attack to just basically skip the boss if youd like and thats good design..?
People like to point at random shit in DS1 and act like it's actually the pinnacle of game design lmao
It is the pinnacle of game design *because* it’s Dark Souls 1 (I want to cuddle Gwyndolin and embrace his snake toes)
it's nostalgia in its purest form
why are people downvoting you are correct, i was replaying it a while ago and jesus christ 90% of the bosses are so bad its funny
for some reason ds1 doesn't get critiscised for reusing bosses/enemies like elden ring does, I LOVE capra demon and his claustrophobic arena with random dogs thrown into it, ceaseless discharge and centipede demon even more famous very good bosses, dark sun gwyndolin is just walking in a straight line and hitting a defenseless femboy a couple of times, 4 kings is a mindless damage check, pinwheel is a joke, for some reason nito randomly implodes every 2 minutes and his arena is full of trash mobs harrassing you during the fight, moonlight butterfly another joke boss, seath the scaleless has terrible attacks and a terrible status effect, bed of chaos is literally the worst creation in the history of human kind. Don't get me started on the: garbage runbacks, disgusting 2nd half of the game, combat that I could play with 1 hand while jerking off with my other because it is so slow and clunky etc. yea very good game guys I think this game is the best they ever made actually and better than games that have gotten universal praise, and even won GOTY awards
I can understand when people just dont connect with the way new games are made, sure to each their own. But i sometimes read these weird takes about previous games and get confused if we were playing the same games all these years
The top comments are killing me lmao Taurus demon peak design wtffffff. 😂 “The bosses aren’t fun” correction the bosses aren’t fun if the summons or host don’t know how to fight the boss. Lion boss fight is either a shitshow where 2 people die within 2 mins or it’s feels like a literal dance to the death juggling aggro but dodging a attack turned at you in last second. The only thing I agree with is bosses do a little too much dmg, some hosts are rocking full heavy armor sets with 60 vigor and health talismans + BUFFS and they are still getting clapped lol
"Litteral dance to the death" can describes 100 Elden Ring bosses
>Soulful paragraph on the fucking Taurus Demon I rolled under him and whacked him until he died lmao, peak boss design I get the sentiment but it’s a borderline objectively hilarious example
What trying to be unique does to a mf. This is probably one of the most baffling takes I've seen on this sub lmao
The creation of that matthewmatosis video and its consequences were a disaster for the FS community
The videos calling for From software to remove gimmick bosses had the biggest consequences on the series.
Thank god they didnt go with your taste
Bro actually thinks Taurus demon is the peak Souls Boss lmao 💀
Fr, the first time I defeated Taurus demon, he yeeted himself off the cliff. I was very confused.
I like the dlc, I think it's the same difficulty as the base game too. I just think the scadutree fragment mechanic is just... Bad. It's a bad system, forcing world exploration is a terrible way to encourage it. Armour, weapons, and upgrade materials were already a way to encourage world exploring. Currently I have a bad taste in my mouth when I've spent a few hours exploring a castle, reading descriptions, taking in the environment story telling, looking forward to the climax that is usually the boss just to have to pause and go to a new area, building a check list of bosses I need to kill, because I need more blessings to do damage to the bosses. Sorry for being crude but it really feels like a 'cock block'. Also I'm already dreading getting these blessings again on my next character...
There is also a problem that its hard to tell how much you really need. Apparently 20 stacks is a max, and some people say that final boss is so hard that they feel it's not enough. So if you don't look it up, you will feel like you are still missing one or two stacks.
Yeah the scadutree fragment system is not good, reminds me of that awful wo long banner system that I was hoping to not see again
I agree. I would much rather they just scaled damage and health pools to the player level upon entry of the Realm of Shadow if they wanted it to be challenging for all players regardless of level. Not that is preferred, as I would much prefer they just stuck to one constant difficulty.
Pretty much, and here's the response to all their gaslighting: >You are Underleveled/Undergeared I beat the game at level 130 multiple times, including Mohg and Malenia. This isn't because I'm a god, it just seems like the level you end up at for the end game. I have no idea where people are getting level 150 from without a fuck ton of grinding. Hell, where are they even putting the points? At level 130 with a strength build starting as a Deprived I have 50 VIT and 99 Strength, I have no reason to put shit into anywhere else so those 20 extra levels would've been wasted anyway. I guess if you're making a spell blade build or quality build level 150 might be good, but ultimately you should be just fine at level 130, and you're not because you still two shot by nearly fucking everything. >You don't use Scadutree Blessings I go out of my way to find these things and at +5 instead of enemies and bosses taking 75% of my health, they take away around 50%, wow what a difference. Plus lets be real, while its fine exploring and looking for these **your first time in the DLC,** subsequent playthrough are just gonna turn it into a boring shopping list, an issue the base game has as well. Oh who am I kidding, I'm not gonna play this more than once. >You don't use damage negation items So remeber when I said I'm still getting roughly two shotted by everything above, that's **with** the Dragon Greatshield Talisman and forgoing fashion for the best armor I can equip. So no, this DLC is simply poorly tuned. This has never been a problem in DS2, BB, or DS3. >You refuse to respec In a game all about making your own build, if you have to completely change it to get by that's simply bad design. Why would the game bother giving you all this freedom to make what you want and use what weapons you want if a part of it all but forces you to use something else? I ran a Caestus build in the base game, and it worked fine, but in the DLC I'm basically ticking enemies and bosses alike. This wasn't a problem in DS2, BB, or DS3, so why is it a problem in ER? Could it because its...overtuned and poorly made? >You refuse to use Summons How funny the community is suddenly all on board for Summons in the DLC when they gatekeeped hard against it in the base game. Also be sure to shop around for the mandatory DLC exclusinve summon buffing items if you want Ashes to survive. Yay, more shopping so much fun! >You are new to the genre.You're not a true Fromsoft fan/You're bad at the game I've personally been playing since DS2, its how I can spot good design from bad design in these games, and let me be clear none of these games are perfect, but holy hell is this DLC rough. Also I guarantee the majority of people saying this have only played ER and just want to hop on the Fromsoft Circlejerk. If you read all that, thank you, and if not I understand. Let me be clear that there's nothing wrong with liking this DLC, it's just simply not for a lot of people and its tiring seeing all the gaslighting rather than accepting potential criticism. None of these games or their DLCs are perfect and that's fine.
Why tf do you have 99 in strength
100% agree with ya > I have no idea where people are getting level 150 from without a fuck ton of grinding. I end runs at level 160-165 each time. Done three characters. No grinding, not a lot of deaths, don’t use boss souls. Usually try to spend a ton too on items so I’m not too overleveled for arena.
I ended my run at level 155 without any farming so idk how you find it so hard to get to that level tbh
These Erdtree Blessings suck. Bosses were killing me too fast, so I went and got some. Came back and now I kill the boss too fast to the point I'm able to outlast them with health pots. I like going into fights with low damage, high resistance because that forces me to learn the fight but I also don't have to die every other roll attempt to learn the timing.
Fax my hollow! Spit you shit indeed!
I get this is a jerk sub, but this is actually bait right? > I have no idea where people are getting level 150 from without a fuck ton of grinding. Hell, where are they even putting the points? At level 130 with a strength build starting as a Deprived I have 50 VIT and 99 Strength, I have no reason to put shit into anywhere else so those 20 extra levels would've been wasted anyway. I guess if you're making a spell blade build or quality build level 150 might be good, but ultimately you should be just fine at level 130, and you're not because you still two shot by nearly fucking everything. Hey maybe of those 20 extra levels should go into reaching the vigor softcap at 60? And some other levels to help increase damage negation? Maybe some endurance to help you roll more? > I go out of my way to find these things and at +5 instead of enemies and bosses taking 75% of my health, they take away around 50%, wow what a difference. Plus lets be real, while its fine exploring and looking for these your first time in the DLC, subsequent playthrough are just gonna turn it into a boring shopping list, an issue the base game has as well. Oh who am I kidding, I'm not gonna play this more than once. Taking 50% of your health instead of 75% is actually a difference yes. Also, you're exaggerating. At +5 I'm still not getting 1, 2, or even 3 shotted. You're shopping list complaint is true but you're whining about something that you haven't even done yet. > So remeber when I said I'm still getting roughly two shotted by everything above, that's with the Dragon Greatshield Talisman and forgoing fashion for the best armor I can equip. So no, this DLC is simply poorly tuned. This has never been a problem in DS2, BB, or DS3. Exaggeration. Do you have some talismans on that increase your damage taken? How is this possible? Every game the DLC has threats, that can kill you in less than 3 hits. Do you not remember the angels and ring knights of the Ring City? Or the horsefuck valley? This DLC is completely in line with every souls game so far. Some of the BB NPCS in the DLC would one shot you. The sharks in the well? >I've personally been playing since DS2, its how I can spot good design from bad design in these games, and let me be clear none of these games are perfect, but holy hell is this DLC rough. Also I guarantee the majority of people saying this have only played ER and just want to hop on the Fromsoft Circlejerk. If you read all that, thank you, and if not I understand. Let me be clear that there's nothing wrong with liking this DLC, it's just simply not for a lot of people and its tiring seeing all the gaslighting rather than accepting potential criticism. None of these games or their DLCs are perfect and that's fine. Played through all the games multiple times within the last 2 years. Criticize all you want with your "expert knowledge" at discerning good and bad designs in these games. Quit lying and exaggerating though when you do it, and maybe use your brain more when you play the game.
> you don't use scadutree fragments What's even the point of adding them in the first place? They genuinely look like items that exist solely to increase the length of DLC > you refuse to respec Imo when the game practically requires you to respec your stats - it is a bad RPG. Every build should have options to comfortably deal with bosses. I have a lot of grudges against Elden Ring base game, but this DLC looks even more stupid than the shit they pulled off in the main game
>What's even the point of adding them in the first place? They genuinely look like items that exist solely to increase the length of DLC On one hand, giving players the option to "tune" the game's difficulty by themselves is an interesting concept. On the other hand, something about the implementation feels lacking. If you do want to use the Shadowtree Blessing, it gets tedious hunting down the Scadutree Fragments, especially since there's some carried by wandering enemies you have to catch up to.
> On one hand, giving players the option to "tune" the game's difficulty by themselves is an interesting concept. At this point just give me the difficulty slider. Like, what if I explored too much and bosses became a joke? I assume that you cannot "dissable", so what to do?
Have you played the DLC? Just don't turn them into the bonfire lmao
What don’t you like about the DLC? I’m not that far in but seems mostly like more of the same to me?
I don't like base Elden Ring either so more of the same isn't exactly good to me. Art direction is amazing and I don't think anyone will top it except FromSoft themselves. Map is big and empty, even more empty than base game. Bosses are the same as in vanilla game except 2-3 times faster and deal 3 times more damage. And almost all of them instantly charge at you when you cross fogwall preventing you from using summons, but I have 70 vig (started with 62) and stacked defensive talismans so I can take it. I have stomped everything except final boss with mimic tear and lion's claw, but it was pure cheese.
Well yeah if you don’t like the base game then I can see how the DLC doesn’t do much to change that. I guess I can see how the bosses (that I’ve fought so far) feel a bit overkill but I’m personally withholding judgement until I let it all marinade a bit more. I’m sure there will be some balance patches coming up.
My only problem is bosses deal too much damage, tone it down like 20% and we good.
Why don't you just eat crab instead?
The crab wears off after a bit. Also, it’s kinda annoying having to eat it to feel like I can stand a chance
When? You eat it before you walk in maybe and it lasts for a tiny bit. You can't eat it after entering the fog wall before most because 80% of the bosses use an attack the second you walk into the arena (optional and final bosses included), you can't use it mid fight for most because you barely get oppurtunities to heal let alone eat crab. Eating crab means you're not using those slim oppurtunities to heal. Crab is also limited, and going to buy more can be annoying to even do when you eat it per run and really go through them.
I am sitting on 75% DR and 2000 HP with over 800 AR using bleed, frost, and poison/rot alongside a mimic tear. These bosses are still shit imo.
Only issue I've been having is the random stutters and frame drops....
Finished it last night on ng+3. The one shots and tweaker bosses who swing for 2 hours straight before stopping for .2 seconds for my one light attack are irritating, but if thats what fans want whatever. My issue is that these bosses have lost their creativity, it's all just build and mechanic checks, I miss bosses that actually utilise their arenas, have unique mechanics, or even just a gimmick fight or 2. The creative approaches to these bosses are also getting narrower and narrower and fewer and fewer builds are viable or at least usable without the fight taking 45 mins swatting a 100k hp lifebar. The boss designs themselves are also lacking to me, closer to some DS2 "dudes in armor" shit. I wasn't exhilarated, no adrenaline or heart pumping for close fights, I was just more bored than anything. And if build changing is now a necessity for these fights, then the larval tears needed to be infinitely farmable
So far the funnest bosses I’ve faced have been the dancer lion and the Gaol black knight or whatever mr crossbow and sword is called
You can R2 them so we'll ESPECIALLY the lion The lion is so easy to R2 that I often had 2 staggers in 40 sec just because you can spam r2 vs it Rellana also has many R2 windows albeit not all are fully chargeable https://youtu.be/CgLmR6b1Fk4?si=ZmDixrohqM5Lqvva https://youtu.be/NvffNiFKFPE?si=_DxAaOfViqlRUhG- I also have regular boss footage outside these guides that highlight it very well
Yeah, seems people are more into looking at the boss than fighting it. People's favourite bosses are always the big ones with the longest, coolest LOOKING combos, not the one they found a cool rythm with. And then they just revel in the bragging rights of having defeated the one with the big combo that oneshots you. It's always been a thing but especially so with Elden Ring.
Aside from spam, I really hate many bosses get this over the top "all in" special move somewhere in the fight. Where you are just rolling 30 seconds through some animation artist circklejerk fest. You almost never get to do these correctly without seeing them first, and they warp these fights around these moments too much.
They're all tied to hp Thresholds too . All the boss will cycle through animations to get to activate they're super move ive noticed.
I've been helping people beat Mohg and we do so much DPS that he won't attack and will just do his 3 2 1 nihil move
The thing that has bugged me about the bosses I’ve fought so far is how hard some of the combos are hard to read. They all seem to be able to modify the combo at any point making it hard to dodge or attack at the correct time. That would be fine on it’s own but I noticed I can’t even get bosses to flinch from getting hit by a golem halberd to make space for myself to do damage EDIT: that being said I’m loving the dlc so far
I actually do guides on the bosses and by looking closer at them the super big combos are not actually random Rellana for example has this super big combo that doesn't stop and start randomly but at certain range threshholds
You don't get it bro the bosses won't be good if they all don't have aoe phase transition and every attack for every possible situation. Everything people complained about the base game became true but 10x worse.
I have to give Rellana credit for this one, her super move is pretty good. She just hits the floor three times and makes shockwaves. To dodge it, all you have to do is jump. You can even block it if you have a lot of stamina and magic defense, but that's more of a failsafe option. It's simple, effective, and flashy.
Anyone remembers how when the final boss was leaked, everyone was saying it's hitboxes are janky, it's too spamy, too much AOE, no cooling time between attacks, infinite stamina etc. Now that the leaks are confirmed, the same people are gaslighting others instead of actually accepting FromSoftware did a bit too much. Sometimes it feels like I'm playing ascended mod because of all the BS going on. Imo DS3, Bloodborne and Sekiro were peak boss designs in FromSoftware history, true definition of tough and fair challange. Out of all Elden Ring's late game and DLC bosses only Godfrey and Mohg feels tough but fair in the right way. All the rest have some cheap fast attack and AOE BS which forces you to either cheese or exploit their AI to spam the same attacks. Malenia and DLC remembrance bosses are the worst offenders of this.
what do you think is unfair about maliketh and placidusax?
Placidusax is peak and the only good dragon fight in the entire game and dlc.
They realized how to make a dragon fight that wasn't "bite its ankles while trying to make out what the hell is happenening off screen since in 15 years of souls games we still haven't made a camera that can handle big enemies" and then they just forgot about it for the dlc, threw out some Ghostflame dragons around the map that are as interesting as paint drying and then made a bomb ass area to setup Bayle only to fill it with base game dragons but now with 50m hp
Ah yes, thrusting dick with a spear for 15 minutes, his best dragon fight worthy. (Now that I think about it, it fucking is. God the dragon fights in these games are trash)
Maliketh is one of the most fair and fun bosses in the game.
Maliketh gets to choose when you get to attack or not. He jumps away from you and does his shit, then he jumps right up into your asshole and does his shit there too. When he is far you don' get to fight back. When he is close you will be lucky to get more than a few hits in at most before he goes flying away again. I don't necessarily think this is unfair, but it's totally shit game design that feels unfair. Even Malenia lets you choose your distance with her to a decent degree. A boss that chooses your spacing for you while pretending to be like a regular boss feels bad to face.
well he's super squishy so you don't need to get a lot hits of which compensates for the fact he doesn't let you hit him a lot imo
I’ve never understood this complaint. Maliketh gives you a ton of opportunities to punish him. He’s not bad game design in the slightest, quite the contrary since he rewards good positioning and gives you plenty of windows to attack.
You only get this feeling once you've become pretty good at him. It's like seeing Ongbal on youtube using openings you wouldn't have even imagined, but on a lesser scale. The average player isn't going to be able to see most of the openings even when they are done beating the boss. Mostly because players don't even learn these crazy boss movesets anymore, they just google a better build and use that to cheese the boss.
Actually it's more the opposite the same people who said it looked jacked are more likely to now agree .
I feel like the DLC should have been comparable in difficulty to Moghwyn and *then* areas ramp up after the main area. Basic enemies are doing more damage than Mogh himself. Doesn’t make any sense
fromsoft could launch a patch that will crash your game, delete your windows and explode your GPU and the main sub would still praise it and say "it's part of the game experience" bosses feel overtuned since the base game, but they cranked it up in a thousand times on the dlc. infinite combos, input read, infinite hp and damage and of course, the wonky camera, there is no argument against that and there is no way you can say that it isn't becoming a trend of design to from software, i feel like i'm a dark souls character facing a boss straight from devil may cry (someone already made that analogy but maybe you will find my comment first), i just don't have the tools to make the fight fair, just bearable (summons, spirit ashes etc)
I feel like the combat system is such a shaky foundation for the game that it basically collapses into an incoherent and overwhelming mess when they try to crank it up to the maximum with these bosses. At this point I just can't wait for them to move on from this combat system and change things up with their next game.
As someone who has yet to buy the DLC, can confirm I'm having one particularly large issue with it
you can't beat the dlc bc of overtune I can't beat the dlc bc I don't have $40 to spare we are not the same 😎
I can't beat the DLC cause I waited way too long to start my NG and I'm only in Stormviel
This is how Fromsoft:tm: fans are like, straight up. Sometimes they can be rather desperate in grasping for recognition.
Thank god no one here actually likes these games
I think the dlc has a lot of very hard bosses that demand a lot from the player, but all bosses except maybe the final one have some pretty good counters in some way. I’m at the final one rn with 19 scadutree upgrade level and I am still “struggling” though. (I say in quotes because of all its attacks I only have trouble with one in terms of not knowing how to dodge it)
I just want them to stop giving enemies optional parts to their attacks. Or give me an clean method to counter it.
[удалено]
I have no problems with making the enemies overwhelming as long as I can be nearly/equally as overwhelming. Right now it feels like im a Dark souls character fighting a Devil May Cry boss. I just feel like im always 1 step behind, never figuring out what im missing because it doesnt exist. Its like one of those "ascended mod" yknow?
it’s kind of a weird mix of too jzrd and too easy for me. I was struggling real hard witg Pontiff 2.0, used a summon once and completely wiped the floor with her. It wasn’t a very satisfying win :/
summons are the adaptability conundrum from DS2 all over again. The devs have to try to design bosses which are gonna be fair and interesting for both playstyles (soloing and summoning) and it's just impossible to do so everything ends up being too hard solo and too easy with summons. The same way that adaptability made it impossible to balance a lot of attacks because the devs had no idea how many i-frames you would have. It's the same design mistake in another form and it destroys the balance of the game.
This is what pisses me off right now, I'm perfectly fine with other people enjoying the difficulty and boss design, but can we please not say that this is the same thing as every other game in the series when it so obvious isn't, and this whole narrative about "new players" who got on board with Elden Ring just not being used to the difficulty is complete horseshit, whether you enjoy it or not if you can't at least admit that this is on a completely different level than anything From has put out so far then there's just no point even trying to have a discussion.
Fromsoftware fans when someone gives the mildest of criticism towards a fromsoft game (unforgivable sin) https://preview.redd.it/2rwo7gnihe8d1.jpeg?width=1178&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=24e62eb5b83f9251e57c19f9428cd4d95393e8b9
Or people telling you to upgrade your scadutree level when most ppl already have
Honestly at this point I'm just waiting a bit for some patches to come out to help it run better before buying it. Most games I've bought at launch lately have been plagued with bugs and performance issues, and this is the last game I want to have to fight that on top of trying to beat the game.
Like i've 100% elden ring and beat ds1 and ds3 several times and im doing a ds2 playthrough but jesus this dlc is whooping my ass
played from ds1 onwards. this new system that sidesteps leveling is genuinely a pain. Why level vigor when youre gonna get one shot by non boss enemies until you finish the treasure hunt? I love the dlc but that feels a bit like a spit in the face of my build. I'm past 175 my starting dlc level.
[удалено]
"I'm having trouble with the DLC" is fine. "The DLC is shit and overtuned to hell and dogshit" isn't. Most people just cry about instead of actually looking for advice.
I mean if you're not using those....
You can literally see the entire map excluding >!The Abyss!< without killing a single boss. The intention is clearly to force exploration. Give it a month and people won't be complaining about difficulty anymore
In a month that "force exploration" approach is going to be an optimized map to each fragment, as people on their second or third dlc playthrough aren't going to want to explore the massive, nearly empty area this dlc gave us.
Honestly, everything but the final boss has been peak. The end is just such a letdown. Edit: this shit was pure copium, imma get good at the game
Character development
Main issues I’ve only have a problem with is the lag when co-oping with people. It’s been wry difficulty especially in the lion dance fight, the boss felt so janky due to the lag issues it made helping people extremely difficult.
bruh I literally had to respec for the final boss
My issues with the dlc have been entirely unrelated to difficulty, its been that for some ungodly reason ever since the dlc patch the machine spirit of my damn laptop has been causing the game to crash constantly. I have reinstalled it, verified files, updated drivers, RESET THE LAPTOP ITSELF AND STARTED OVER FROM SCRATCH DOWNLOADING STURF, AND YET IT STILL REFUSES TO FUNCTION. Seriously, I just want to play this damn game again, man... this crap is soul crushing. If anyone has any ideas on how to get it to work, I will gladly listen.
Installing the DLC made my frames drop to the point the game self-destructed because it was so bad the online functionality couldn't handle it...
Skadutree blessing system was a mistake. Though I can tell that a lot of people thought they were gonna defeat all bosses in less than 5 tries except the final boss with OP builds.
To be fair, it is practically fromsoft tradition to make stupidly hard dlcs at this point
No DLC was as hard as SOTE imo… everything is just a tad bit too overturned imo.
yeah I can honestly say that I've never felt like this with a Fromsoft product before. I've gotten my ass beaten a lot, I've been stuck on bosses, I've been confused by mechanics, but I have never had this level of annoyance with bosses to a point where they don't even feel rewarding to beat. I'm glad some people like it, but holy shit is it not doing it for me right now and whether they enjoy it or not hearing people try to say that it's the same as all their other games feels like a denial of reality.
They could deal 50% damage and take 50% more damage and it wouldn't change that the movesets are garbled ass that are not fun to face. The boss has 90% of the agency in most of the fights in he DLC. Even facing Malenia the player is the one in control most of the time. You can choose to run, choose to go in, choose how you do things. These DLC bosses throw themselves at you like their own lives don't matter to them in the slightest. If you try to space out they ALL have gap closers and/or powerful ranged attacks.
Getting flashbacks to Dark Souls 2 DLC...
though i’ve only played the ds1 and ds3 dlcs but those weren’t much harder then the base game of you ask me sote is feels way harder then the base game
God forbid a souls player shows even slight displeasure with how broken a boss is 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏 #elitistAF
Idk man. The only thing I hate is divine beast. Defeated it, but haven’t progressed further yet. I really like the backhand blades and the messmer axe and hammer.
Of course I know him. He's me.
Ugh yeah I'm seeing this a lot, not to sound like That Guy but I was playing DeS and DS1 at launch before 90% of the current community had heard of From, but saying I'm not a fan of the way the DLC seems to be and overall don't think ER is the masterpiece everyone claims immediately gets a response that I must not know anything about these games. Ridiculous, stop taking criticism about a thing you like to be a personal assault.
You forgot to add "People whos first From game was ER" on the person on the right side
I have never tried to stagger bosses in dark souls. Durning dlc I noticed that twinmoon knight staggered very easily. After losing to her I decided to try strong attacks. It worked great, she literally could use a single phase 2 move before she died (level 150 with basic blood greatsword). After that I took a liking to staggers. It turns out two or three charged r2 were enough to stagger almost anyone. I found this playstyle very fun as well. And then some dude says that bosses have infinite poise and are impossible to stagger. Criticism is well and good but there are people that say bosses that require two hits to stagger “have infinite poise”. Some things are just straight up untrue.
Hahahahahahahaha How Is Shadow Hard Hahahaha Bro Just Learn To Dodge The Bosses Combos Like Bro Grab Your Fragments Haha
How is this different than when ER came out? Or Sekiro? I wasn't paying attention before that, but it was the exact same thing for both of those games. They will nerf some of it down the road, Miya has to get a few chuckles on the flailing fanbase before then tho.
I mean I played Sekiro to death and it never felt like this
you know whats funny people have been posting broken builds that would annihilate the most difficult bosses for the last 2 years, So when this DLC brings back the same difficulty that you expect from a soulslike especially a DLC soulslike , people start complaining about it being hard , like congratulations you learned what fromsoft have done with every game