Elden Ring

[Gondolindrim]

Nah, From making the enemies move at the speed of light while also making the player slow as shit is the problem, bloodborne and sekiro had the decent idea that if you want to have gay ass anime combos the player also needs the speed to avoid them
But i guess From is allergic to continue using good ideas

I want to preface this next thought by saying that I love these games but Fromsoft is a shit fucking developer when it comes to listening to valid criticism. There are so many enemies in the DLC that continue this trend of moving lightning fast and being able to spam AOE attacks, meanwhile the play gets locked into animations that they can't cancel out of to avoid damage. It's not a skill thing because I can't tell you how many times I've seen an attack coming but the buttons are on delay because I'm drinking or having my shield slapped away somehow lasts long enough for me to get oneshot.

Those Divine Warrior enemies are a perfect illustration of the issue. They have huge 6-hit combos, they can close the distance in about a second and they have massive AOE attacks that do disgusting damage. The only way I can reliably kill them is with spells and incantations because going sword to sword is a death wish.

A Bloodborne dodge would trivialize a lot of these enemies and my fear is that they know that so the "only option" is to keep us weak and slow like it's DS1.

 

[Tablet County]

Messmer came way later to the Lands of Shadow as he was close to Rykard, his army makes use of Rykard's abductor Virgins which were made by Rykard, and Omen Killers are in his army as well. So it's likely he was sent out in response to the Omen curse or the Gloam-eyed queen's attack making Marika more paranoid of him.

So why did the hornsent curse them to begin with? Are there lore pieces I'm missing?

But on the subject of the Shadowlands, it was always part of the Landsbetween before Marika removed the rune of Destined Death as indicated by the tower of sealing which says. "The very center of the Lands Between. All manners of death wash up here, only to be suppressed."

So they took the shadow realm and pushed it somewhere else?

 

[Lizard Machine Bugs]

So why did the hornsent curse them to begin with? Are there lore pieces I'm missing?

Well Marika fucked them over and left them in the Lands of Shadow, she was probably the one to convince them to create the Gate of Divinity, probably in the promise that they'd be able to master the crucible and that their Empyrean could also become a god, but instead she took everything for herself.
But instead she betrayed them and turned the crucible into the Erdtree, and stuck the Hornsent in the Lands of Shadow.

 

[LoTex]

So why did the hornsent curse them to begin with? Are there lore pieces I'm missing?

The problem with Fromsoft is that they purposefully obscure the lore to the players during the game developer to have that brand of "environment storytelling" they are now know for. The problem is that this ends up leaving the lore nonsensical in a few places. We know this for sure because the version of Elden Ring 1.0 that you can play on consoles has much more clear lore in items descriptions and what not that was later either removed, reduced or changed in the 1.1 patch. There are few YouTube videos that got over all this changes.

 

[Coldgrip]

So, if Marika is from the Shaman Village, is the Land of Shadow the Land of the Numen?

Those Divine Warrior enemies are a perfect illustration of the issue. They have huge 6-hit combos, they can close the distance in about a second and they have massive AOE attacks that do disgusting damage. The only way I can reliably kill them is with spells and incantations because going sword to sword is a death wish.

And they don't stagger or stun for anything.

So why did the hornsent curse them to begin with? Are there lore pieces I'm missing?

I'm assuming that Marika extracted revenge on the Hornsent, and to them it appeared as her being a psychotic cunt. It should be noted that the Hornsent had no problems with their grisly rituals and looked upon them as normal. To them Marika is some upstart that upended their entire way of life, not only by refusing to undergo their rituals, but genociding them as well.

 

[Mega Black]

The problem with Fromsoft is that they purposefully obscure the lore to the players during the game developer to have that brand of "environment storytelling" they are now know for. The problem is that this ends up leaving the lore nonsensical in a few places. We know this for sure because the version of Elden Ring 1.0 that you can play on consoles has much more clear lore in items descriptions and what not that was later either removed, reduced or changed in the 1.1 patch. There are few YouTube videos that got over all this changes.

A lot of the 1.0 lore is just incorrect, to be fair. It makes sense that a lot of it was changed with that in mind. What From decides to cut is a mystery though. It's like Radahn's cat. Why is him having a cat something they felt the need to delete from canon?

Anyway, I beat the final boss. I give it to the complainers that was genuinely horseshit. I have no idea how you're supposed to fight that fucker legitimately. The only strategy that seems somewhat viable is to shield and poke which is a tactic I'm sure they'll nerf into the ground.

Phase 1 was kind of fun at least.

Very underwhelming conclusion, however. It reminds me of Dark Souls 3 where the content just sort of ends and that's it, despite supposedly being the capstone stuff for the entire series. I was mostly satisfied with how the DLC handled its story content, but the last minute Redditdahn inclusion and the lack of any meaningful ties into the base game or a decent cutscene or alternative ending leaves the DLC feeling underwhelming.

 

[Scarthew]

Look man I'm just saying trying to role-play as a monk and utilize holy damage is going to be much worse than running the usual bleed oriented builds that defined the game's release. There are clearly developer-favored builds and that's why they let you respec to begin with- because they knew you'd try to have fun in your own way instead of the correct way.

There's a noticeable lack of alternative damage types per stat in elden ring. In Dks1 Str and Dex have always had standard, slash, thrust and strike. Int had magic and physical via the enchanted enhancement tree. Fth had lightning and physical via divine enhancement. INT and FTH hybrid thus has 4 types if you include dark damage and 5 if you include fire which was available to all. Lightning and Fire infusions were also generic in DkS1 rather than being stat scaling they were to exploit the much more meaningful weaknesses of that game.

If you're a fth build in elden ring, first off you've lost lightning for the most part since the weapon attunement is now DEX for some reason despite it having 4 damage types already. Holy only works against undead which is primarily mobs and undead mariners (one of the easiest bosses). And sacred flame.

FTH used to be THE way of killing dragons the fastest now its not even good against them. Its a stat that really only helps you against the easiest trash enemies in the game now, its a joke. Most of the best miracles are really arcane spells and if you just want the buffs (the best thing faith has to offer) you can easily access them with just talismans, armor swaps or flask since most don't require a high FTH investment. To make it even worse you still can't buff infused weapons like you could in DkS2 to get a multiplicative dmg boost. Not only is nothing weak to FTH damage, there's no physical infusion for it and the majority of lategame bosses are resistant to it, and many are also resistant to its only alternative, fire. There's no status effect tied to FTH, unlike INT which at least has frostbite, especially weird since ER has more status effects than ever before but decided they all go to Arcane.

And just to rub salt in the wound Arcane still has item drop buff from 3's luck even though its a fully fleshed out damage stat now. That was a problem in 3 as well because it made all the item drops from enemies absurdly low and they've retained this, for any weapon that drops from enemies it almost always has a 1% chance of dropping in ER. Again this is a joke in a game with more content than rewards. The amount of dungeons you clear only to get a spirit ash is absurd. A sizeable, maybe even majority of players will never use a spirit ash. On top of that you can only use one. So the idea that they're valuable enough to be the ONLY reward for clearing a dungeon is laughable.

FromSoft have a really bad habbit of not fixing issues between entries but also introducing new problems. They've made way too many of these now not to have a document for sorting this stuff out.

 

[Strangolapreti]

If you're a fth build in elden ring, first off you've lost lightning for the most part since the weapon attunement is now DEX for some reason despite....

Fire damge.
You still have faith based fire damage.
Elden ring is far more wide in term of variety than prevous souls
Strenght gives you mainly Standard and most forms of blunt damage, but now also also a whole STR scaling fire.
Dex has Standard too, but also most of slash weapons and lightning with dex scalings.
Int gives you mainly magic damage and some physical (gravity) songside access to magma sorcecries if you level some faith, easily the one with least variety from the game, despite being the game's easy mode.
Fth is mainly for incantations, and while there's holy damage, you also get access the best physical damage nd fire in cantations in the form of black flame incantations, frenzied flame, giantsflane and pest threads, a good few lighting incantations too, and you must level it anyway to gain access to the best stuff you want for an Arcane build, such as dragon communion and bleed spells.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

There comes a point with these kinds of games where it's not about skill anymore, it's pure luck. There's only so much you can do to beef up the difficulty before it becomes artificial.


Sometimes an enemy will spam the same 10 hit combo over and over again, and sometimes the AI just shuts the fuck down and lets you get some free hits in. People who think it's easy deal with the latter more than the former.

People have been making the same complaints since demon souls, and the response has always been "skill issue/git gud" I don't see why its any different this time.

If you design combat around small windows of opportunity and heavy punishment for mistakes its only natural that escelation will lead to higher punishments and smaller windows.

This is the natural progression of the system that has been getting nonstop praise for the past 20 years, unless you want them to just re-release dark souls 1 over and over again I fail to see how you are expecting them to evolve the formula short of completely scrapping it and starting all over again like they did with sekiro.

At that point it seems like you don't even want to play dark souls anymore (since you dislike the core defining aspect of its gameplay loop, small opportunity windows and big punishments) and want to play something else.

 

[ShitLurker]

Still operating on blackout, so still won't read the thread proper, but more highlights of my adventures.

So after killing Rellana basically did what I always do, ignored the obvious path and went to the sides. Managed to end up in the creepy church and got something to do with the finger ruins! Yay! So I go there expecting some insane shit, play a whistle and get a fucking talisman... yaaay.... so I try to head to the other finger ruins to see if I get some cool shit going and enter Shadow Keep through the side door. Kind of waddle about through the place and come out the other side into the floating gardens zone. Very pretty but my god do I hate the spin to win faggots. Since I still have 0 idea how to reach the lower river part, I have no proper map, so I just go through the motions and find centipede rot lady. Takes me a few tries, but nothing too insane, though I did default to 2 colossal swords again. After that! a dead end.... ok game, ok.... Some shit about mesmers flames...

So then I just talk to the NPCs and they say some shit about Miquella's seal breaking and I remember "hey, what if I go back to the hole in the blue flower gardens?" Lo and behold a new path of adventure is open! HUZZAH! But before that, I creep around a bit more in the Shadow keep, notice some invasion options to take out the creepy chick obsessed with Miquelly or half naked horn guy, I did sort of convince the lady to kill the horn guy but ended up siding with horn guy. Anyway, while I was still debating that I find some crap in some sewers and find one of my favorite gimmicks, the casket that takes you on adventures! And I arrive into a lower area. Initially I was disappointment thinking it was just another arena for a fucking wicker man (did kill my first one in the starting area) but saw you could go down and down we went...

After multiple steps down, avoiding a couple of hippos, killing Rakhasha and stealing her set and so on, I arrive to a copy paste dungeon, kind of whince at this being my reward for going of the beaten paht but wait, the boss arena is elaborate?! I face off against inquisitor... something, was a cool fight and liked all of his little trickery, though the standard Guts smash manouver ended doing the fucker in. And to my greater glee, there is something beyond him.

A creepy area that reeks of the 3 fingers where torrent just declares he will not collaborate. So I get a Bloodborne dejavu with the fucking bulbous head things and proceed to try and stealth through and run like a madman when it fails. Finally manage to not fuck it up and find a manor with the lovely decapitated head display. Go in, do the little dungeon and my prize is Midra. Midra proceeds to kick my shit in multiple times with his "Sorry borblorglop" narrative prowess before I tap out and head back to the fissure, I'm assuming he's the "Laurence" of the DLC unless somebody corrects me on this (and if you quote me, please keep it spoiler free).

In the fissure, I do the area and do one of those leaps of faith that Fromsoft loves and find the Putrescent Knight. Honestly, it really reminds me of that art contest Vaati did to the winner, so part of me wonders if there was some inspiration there. Anyway, I don't know if I was just being a little bitch, but I was getting very frustrated with the damn thing. I did read some messages saying "go with holy" and with holy I went in, but the thing felt spastic and I was fucking up my attacks a ton. I was also going with greatshield strats which kind of worked and kind of didn't. Thanks to Rellana I already learned that jumping is huge for dodging some shit, so the ghost flame wasn't too bad, but the things tempo was still messing with me. Finally calmed down, dropped the shield for 2 great hammers and went in with the Holy Land ash to have some pew pew and we did a double KO, but it still fucking counted. Once I get my runes, find the flower lady, drink her juice... and die. did this a couple of more times since messages seemed to insist on it, then I thought "well, I got a cookbook, maybe I have to sleep in front of her or something" and it seemed to work (though not really since I went wiki hunting and you just have to drink 4 times...) and got the usual souls abstract lore "poor kind Miquella can't be a god!", which hope opens some sort of alternative ending.

So the DLC improved a lot for me once I bumped into the optional areas, the part that I always enjoy most in these games is the discovery and the weird shit I can bump into. Also, less recycled stuff, I haven't bumped into another dragon since I found 3 relatively early. The bosses I think are fine for the most part, I was being a bit of a bitch with the Putrescent Knight since it wasn't that hard to dodge once I stopped panic rolling and focused on his tempo and the horse leap double rush wombocombo which gave me fits at the start turned into a free heal and a hit at the end. Midra is still giving me shit but I'm assuming he's the hardass of the DLC and he at least doesn't heal. Also, using the flame protection miracle, plus golden vow and flame talisman does mean that I barely take damage from the fire itself, but I'm still getting used to Midra's tempo and his very quick flame bursts.Though nothing is really hitting the high of Friede, Ludwig or Gail, though I want to believe Mesmer will be it. I did really enjoy there being some St Trina and flames of madness content. Just missing a proper Godwyn... anything, have killed some dedicated knights, but I want something more imposing.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

Reminds me of Destiny. Bungie is constantly upping the "difficulty" because the streamers (who are the only people they listen too now) are convinced they're playing a Souls game and everything needs to be hard. But they're idiots, so all they can do is make beefier enemies and more add in more convoluted raid mechanics.

That is a hillariously apt comparison. Bungie like from soft is designing content around streamers to the point where it reaches absurdity.

Vow of the disciple having 27 callsigns you need to memorize clearly wasn't made with the philosophy "how can we make a fun and engaging encounter?" it was made with the philosophy "how can we punish those streamer fucks that called last wish easy?".

Sound familiar? Better yet, despite having 27 callsigns, they can't actually do anything with them more complicated than you already could with 5-7 because no shit, non mentally insane human beings won't be able to handle that much bullshit, so they make everything more frustrating without significantly enchancing the experience.

Its like when half of elden ring bosses have 27 second long multihit frenzy supercombos. It doesn't really enchance the experience any more than a 3 second long combo would, only makes it more frustrating because you spend less time playing the game and more time watching the developers jerk themselves off.

What's funny is that unlike bungie, from soft already solved this problem with sekiro managing to make 27 second long multihit frenzy supercombos engaging, but for some reason they like to pretend sekiro doesn't exist despite it being probably the best game they've ever put out from a gameplay standpoint.

 

[Scarthew]

Fire damge.
You still have faith based fire damage.

?

And sacred flame.

the majority of lategame bosses are resistant to it, and many are also resistant to its only alternative, fire

 

[Strangolapreti]

?

Faith gives you access to multiple categories of fire incantations and the flame art affinity for weapons, it's not just for holy damage and healing miracles.

 

[Lizard Machine Bugs]

There's a noticeable lack of alternative damage types per stat in elden ring. In Dks1 Str and Dex have always had standard, slash, thrust and strike. Int had magic and physical via the enchanted enhancement tree. Fth had lightning and physical via divine enhancement. INT and FTH hybrid thus has 4 types if you include dark damage and 5 if you include fire which was available to all. Lightning and Fire infusions were also generic in DkS1 rather than being stat scaling they were to exploit the much more meaningful weaknesses of that game.

No idea why ER has lightning weapons as dex based either, it's pretty silly especially when the Ancient Dragon are the most renown for using lightning. But Faith still has lightning incarnations from the Dragon Cult, percentage based damage incantations from the Goskins. Magic, Fire, Rot, and Cold damage from Dragon Communion, physical damage through bestial incantations, bleed, the most effective way of kill big bosses in the form of Pest Threads and Pest threads-Spears.
At the very least it has more options than Int with it's magic and cold.

 

[Lurkerish Kandor]

So the ultimate scholar of the Golden Order, who provides you the means to save it, has determined that the Gods are the problems and that an independent golden order free of the Gods' interventions is the path to a brighter future

Even when I was about 18 playing GFWL DS1 for the first time, I had a distinct feeling that the Age of Fire was actually some utter bullshit, and Humanity were being subjugated by shitty asshole Gods who don't care about us. So, I'm totally unsurprised to hear this is the culmination of the "faith questline" in Elden Ring as I guess you could call it.

I like Age of Dark in 1, I like Abandon The Throne in 2 (and, honestly, felt a bit vindicated when Aldia explained the "First Sin"), and I like the Return ending of Sekiro. Endings where the shackles of the Gods are overthrown and Humanity gets to look after itself. Although I do feel a bit like in DS 1 & 3 Age of Dark is portrayed a bit supervillain-esque, as if you're basically Palpatine now.

Then Elden Ring takes that up to 11 with the Frenzy ending being an exterminatus. Frenzy's cool, but I wish 2/3rds of ER's endings weren't lazy palette swaps, and I especially wish Turtle Pope got an ending where he tells everyone to stop being retarded and conjoin all heresies for the sake of mortal wellbeing, or some other kind of 'independence' ending.

 

[Sun Sucker]

If you do, you have to tell me how the fight goes (or cap it).

Will try and get back to you for this. I also wonder how the Fire Giant will go. I don't have too much time on my hands as is, working on a thesis, do not recommend academia to anyone who values their mental health but I'd rather play a challenging ER run rather than sink another 100 hours in Rogue Trader for my spare time activities.

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

So, to take a break from the story and combat complaints, I have a question:

How are the dragon forms that were released in the DLC? I was a pretty big fan of the Dragon Covenants back in the Dark Souls games, so I admit that I'm interested in seeing how these forms play in ER; anyone test them out yet? From the looks of them, it looks like they're the classic "no armor" kind of form, but has anyone managed to make a solid build with them, as of yet?

 

[BlerdBjern]

Never before Am I so glad to that a videogame enemy committed genocide.

GO MESSMER, BURN THEM HORNSENT JAR FUCKING NIGGERS TO THE GROUND, AGAIN AND AGAIN!

 

[Raging Capybara]

This should be the camera during the pedophile's battle

This should be the camera in 70% of the fights thinking about that.

At 5:16 there's a glitched hitbox, lmao.

But nobody is going to talk about that. The useless japs at fromslop had 15 years to learn and are still incapable of designing hitboxes.

 

[LoTex]

FTH used to be THE way of killing dragons the fastest now its not even good against them. Its a stat that really only helps you against the easiest trash enemies in the game now, its a joke. Most of the best miracles are really arcane spells and if you just want the buffs (the best thing faith has to offer) you can easily access them with just talismans, armor swaps or flask since most don't require a high FTH investment. To make it even worse you still can't buff infused weapons like you could in DkS2 to get a multiplicative dmg boost. Not only is nothing weak to FTH damage, there's no physical infusion for it and the majority of lategame bosses are resistant to it, and many are also resistant to its only alternative, fire. There's no status effect tied to FTH, unlike INT which at least has frostbite, especially weird since ER has more status effects than ever before but decided they all go to Arcane.

Bestial incantations does physical damage, black flame beyond doing fire damage does PV damage over time, frenzy flame does fire and great poise damage, dragon cult incantations and lightning spear still do lighting damage based on faith scaling. If anything FTH now has a lot more damage options than it had on previous games

So, to take a break from the story and combat complaints, I have a question:

How are the dragon forms that were released in the DLC? I was a pretty big fan of the Dragon Covenants back in the Dark Souls games, so I admit that I'm interested in seeing how these forms play in ER; anyone test them out yet? From the looks of them, it looks like they're the classic "no armor" kind of form, but has anyone managed to make a solid build with them, as of yet?

It is decent but you get too late into the game to truly mater during the playthrough unlike DS1, it is more of a NG+ thing. Although it can further improve your roleplay if you are doing a Dragon communion playthrough/Dragon Worshipper, as in the end you finally achieve dragon form after partaking in Dragon communion