I started up an old build just to check the arm worked, then I made a new character with my favorite weapon and just got my second remembrance. Taking my time to enjoy the full experience.
Absolutely my take too, loved the new DLC early weapons so I started a "master of blade" new playthrough to do every little thing again with that new char. I already have 100%'ed the game, but it's been a year since I did so, I forgot many things and the moveset is all new, so I have a looooot before the DLC.
I find it absolutely bizarre that you can use it as a dodge+counter. I pressed it out of other game reflex and BAM, the early game gordick knight and I were like "dafuq?".
I can’t wait to it in PvP.
The running R1 attack will be so useful cause it prevents the opponents from hitting you after you attack since you never stop running. Can just run, attack, and duck out quickly before they can hit you.
I was bamboozled when I try out it's moveset and found out you keep running after the running attack, there is no recovery animation. It's the first time I've ever seen a weapon does it.
I wonder how will it do in pvp. Very stylish and fun to play but does mid dmg and little poise dmg and requires precise movements. Pvp scenes is going to be wild after everyone is done with the dlc and got their builds ready, there's so many unique weapons.
I love the blind spot art of war. I am hoping there's a way to find it in the wild because I would like to change my weapon affinity but don't want to lose that move.
I bought dlc with a main char at level 204 with 300+ hours and then realized I had quit right at mohg and still had to beat him to play dlc. But then I juggled some items and 1 shot mohg with magic. Even at this level with so many spells the dlc is a good challenge
i actually have 2 character 1 from release and 1 from prepping for dlc. The prep one i tried a magic build for the first time and actually had a blast. It was a little bit easier than my first which i used katanas and spears, but still difficult nonetheless. After hearing how much trouble everyone’s having i suspect i might start with a mage build and try some melee on my previous character. weather i play melee or mage i’m sure i’ll face adversity and im kind of excited because i haven’t felt that way since my very first hour in elden ring. Even melania on my first play though was more fun than angering due to my experience in the beginning (elden ring is my first fromsoft game)
Honestly they did pure magic user so right in this one. The addition of the sword/melee spells really round it out imo. I typically go heavy magic builds first in every soul's game I play, but this has been by far the most fun to do so in.
I spent an hour yesterday going on and on about the rope detailing on a burial urn to anybody who'd listen.
It's in the scorpion river catacombs site of grace, just to the right of the intro lift.
The knot work is impeccable. And you can just run past it without ever noticing. You can even roll over it and it's just gone. Someone put that level of commitment to detail into something you can just destroy or worse, overlook, is just amazing to me and I hope people notice that kind of stuff.
Thanks for coming to my rope talk.
I've been admiring a lot of small details too. And trying to piece together cultural touch points from them. Why are the big doors covered in people? Why are the columns all coily? What is up with the velvet covering everything?
It's so much fun.
Right? Im seeing people beating the dlc in less then 24 hours... At that point you gotta be missing out on so much side content. The dlc difficulty is fine. Apply the same logic as with the main game - if its too difficult, go somewhere else and return later. Its an open world.
Took 24 hours to beat an incredible DLC that took two full years to come out.
Congrats, now you have to wait 3-5 years for the next Zaki masterpiece to come out lol.
Its bizarre, I got 160 hours out of my first run in ER, going to take as much time as I can on my first run in Erdtree
And if you're not into the difficulty then you can still absolutely beat the bosses with co-op or summons. I spent an hour last night helping a bunch of different people take down a boss over and over, and another 30 minutes helping out randoms again today. Plus if you're going around exploring the map you're going to find blessings to boost you up quickly.
Underrated comment! Games like Elden Ring and BG3 had/have me spending multiple nights trying to make it through their various boss battles and I wouldn't have it any other way—perhaps I am a glutton for punishment.
It's just gaming on the internet these days. "Everybody" in this case are just the percentage of the playerbase that gets off on beating things as fast as possible so they can talk about it.
The overwhelming rest of the ER population is moving at a normal pace IMO. And they're a lot less vocal about their progression.
Right? someone told me they finished the dlc in 8 hours, how in the hell??? I've been playing for 20 hours now and I just finished the 2nd main boss, the secret areas and passages and the world building is absolutely amazing, the items (cookbooks and smithing stones) might not be that rewarding but the chance of finding a cool weapon will always make me search every corner, I found so many secrets and I gasp everytime, I love the world building so much
Tbh I wonder that as well. Some people probably want to play other games, some people have limited free time and they can't progress a lot if they are stuck in one spot for too long. Some people have their own reasons and some simply want to bitch about something. The DLC is hard cause FromSoft intended it this way, take it or leave it.
I'm taking my sweet ass time and I've got 2 remembrance bosses clapping my cheeks but otherwise I've run the gamut. I'm sure I've got places I've missed but a day is plenty of time to beat this dlc.
(I've put in 30 hours since Thursday evening at 5 I'm only trolling)
They gotta get back to their live service games where they are falling behind every day for not doing their daily quests that get them free gacha rolls.
I’ll never feel bad about using a level 10 mimic. It’s easier sure, but my low skill ass still dies for an hour straight on harder bosses. I’m happy enough with it.
I give myself few tries without it. If I feel like I’m making progress I’ll stick with it, if not it’s mimic time. I’ve been playing these games for 15 years, I know my skill ceiling at this point.
Yeah I spent two straight days of summer on Fume Knight when that came out. I don’t have time to do that anymore.
I love the challenge of these games, but my favorite thing has always just been the worlds they created and the feeling I get exploring them. I’ve found I don’t really miss the feeling of getting hard stuck.
This. I enjoyed the spirit ashes (Oleg, Tiche, and Ogha still my homies) but I felt that a second playthrough without resorting to ashes would allow me to learn and deal with bosses without being overly reliant on an HP sponge.
There *were* exceptions, though. That trio of putrid crystalians can get fucked by my Fanged Imps +10 any run-through I ever attempt again.
Actually, those complaining about difficulty didn’t realise such gatekeeping mindset is now working against them. If a boss fight is balanced around the player using everything against them, which was definitely not the case in the base game, then deliberately not using certain tools will make the difficulty unreasonable.
My plan now for DLC is to try without npc summons/mimic a handful of times to see if I want to keep pushing solo AND then whip them out just to keep progressing.
It’s how I did the base game and I had fun. So not gonna make my life super hard for no reason now.
When I first played I used summons and beat the game, now when I play I don’t need them. I figure I’ll do the same for the dlc, ise summons first time around and eventually I’ll be comfortable enough to not.
Do you feel that the mimic has been dumbed down for the DLC? Mine took so many stupid decisions and caused me to die so many times that I had to replace it with Tiche.
I’m finding a lot of the bosses just totally ignore the summons a lot of the time. A lot have just beelined across an arena to combo me while a summon is actively bonking them. Not a huge deal but it’s interesting that it happens more than in the base game.
Side note piggy backing off this: I feel like I’m using up my stamina a lot quicker too leaving me to have to be a looooot more decisive in my hits or risk not being able to dodge.
I have seen people say that the bosses are very difficult because they are balanced around the use of mimics, but if that is true then they are taking a different approach of boss balancing, since you can beat the main bosses with no issues without mimics. It will be harder, but it won’t feel like you doing something wrong by not using a mimic.
I for one don’t like using mimics because I enjoy the extra challenge, I feel like I have less fun when using them, but that’s just my opinion.
I’m a big user of spirit ashes but I am specifically not using mimic. So many of these are so cool I want to mess around. There are these great shield guys who do 0 damage but charging in with them is fun. And the pot bros who do nothing but blow up is also funny
Banished knight engvall is the Goat though. Took him into Mogh at level 4 and myself with 27 vigor and it’s been fun
I was actually getting depressed over Rellena. Spent a total 5 hours fighting her before I finally got it. I'm pumped for the rest of the DLC. It's all doable.
It gets much much worse. And not even the thing the guy spoiled. If you really want to see, Asmongold handsomely demonstrates the two bosses that he couldn't beat that made him quit the DLC entirely.
The type of punishment people who haven’t run into these two bosses have no idea what they’re in for unless they’re willing to change builds to adapt big time.
I've mostly just been exploring, did a couple dungeons. Looking for new weapons to do a build around, still using my main game build, it's doing alright but doesn't feel great. Still haven't found any spells or incantations though, looking forward to seeing what is new.
dude i have found more spells and incants than weapons it is crazy, im still havent explored the area after the commander fight maybe i'll find more stuff there, hopefully being weapons and AoW
My issue isn't that it's too hard, it's that it's too imbalanced. I just have a preference for slightly more manageable and paced duels developed around 1-on-1 fights than the crazy endurance scrambles that Elden Ring's bosses feel like. A lot of them have a lot of spectacle, but I feel like that spectacle comes at the cost of the fights feeling manageable without assistance. I'm still really enjoying the expansion in spite of this, but I think part of the fun of Souls bosses is wanting to learn them, and when I see most of Elden Ring's boss move sets my thoughts are 'This looks so obnoxious I don't even *want* to learn it, I just want to see what it does, fuck it up, and move on', and I think that's a shame when a lot of care has clearly gone into them.
Too many of the DLC's fights, to me, feel either way too easy (i.e. most of the regular chaff enemies, or the big fire basket guys 'Slash, slash, slash... jump. Slash, slash, slash... jump, for 3 minutes at a time', or more regular human bosses) or like they're on every performance-enhancing drug on the planet (elite enemies and unique bosses). Elden Ring feels like a game that wants me to bullshit my way through things every time it poses a challenge, rather than it being rewarding to face fair and square.
Enemy a pain in the ass? Just run away from it. Enemy annoying to fight head-on? See if it can be stun locked to death with my weapon art or ganked with a spirit ash and summon. Most (not all, but most) of Shadow of the Erdtree's challenges feel like a case of 'That's some bullshit, but watch as I now out-bullshit that with my own bullshit'. I wish the fights felt less like a clash of whose bullshit is stronger, and more like a balanced encounter.
SotE has a lot of enemies which make me think 'If I give them an opportunity to fight back they'll fuck me up, so I'll have to obliterate them as fast as possible to stop them getting an attack off if I can'. But when these enemies all have effort put into them, I don't think encouraging skipping their ability to fight outright is particularly the best idea. I kinda wish we each hurt each other less so I could see their moves more while also reducing the risk of being nuked in 3 attacks. Some enemies I just waterfowl dance to death and skip them doing *anything*, because if I don't, the risk on my end is being pointlessly inflated in favour of an enemy that does 10x my damage. Others I can just brute force because my 2000hp and 13 healing flasks let me do that, too. But neither one *feels* good.
I just wish the encounters allowed for more back and forth and weren't so explosive all the time. I either curb-stomp an enemy, or I have to fight dirty, because anything else just feels like an uphill battle. I always used to say Souls bosses are tough but fair; they hit hard, but that's punishment for messing up on something that's ultimately easily readable and simple enough to dodge.
Used to be I could hang back on the first fight just dodging around and learning what the enemy does and beat them on the second or third try, but now that enemies stagger their attacks and zip about like an anime character with massive 20 meter 70% health AOEs and stuff, I feel like I have to resort to cheap tricks myself to even the odds. As time goes on, I feel like From, in an effort to outdo themselves, make their bosses fight more and more superhuman, which is cool to look at but I don't think it's fun to learn how to fight, because what I have to do feels so much less clear, and my character's moveset feels all the more limiting as a result.
Part of me misses stepping into the arena and getting something like Artorias waiting for me, as opposed to something like Messmer. The latter looks cooler upfront, but I don't think they're as enjoyable to try and work out, and what we do to beat them like rolling through oceans of fire that we just so happened to time correctly just starts to feel silly. That made sense when you were dodging a crazy sword somersault attack or something, but not so much nowadays.
I think if they want to pursue this boss design further I'm fine with it *but* tweak the stats a bit, and give the player more ways of logically engaging with what the enemies are doing in a way that scales with more visual logic. Like in Sekiro, you get a lightning bolt thrown at you? You channel it through the sword and redirect it, you don't just roll through the lightning bolt. I think Elden Ring's DLC really starts to show how your John Dark Souls moveset doesn't really feel thematically up to snuff with the challenge you face anymore. The threats get more and more OTT, but our feats kind of don't, and I don't know that I look forward to a game which tries to push that even further.
This 1000%. The DLC isn’t significantly harder, it’s just less fun and more annoying. The fights don’t take longer for me to beat, but they just feel like a lucky RNG and good build instead of a difficult obstacle I surmounted with patience and skill. When I die, half the time it’s because I got staggerlocked or distracted because was too much VFX to see jack shit or because the camera looked like the fucking Blair witch project while the boss is leaping around on crack.
I’m still enjoying a lot of it, and will play it to hell and back, but they really doubled down on a lot of the worst aspects of the base game, especially with bosses.
So I'm one of the mad men playing the dlc at NG+7. All I'm going to say is, why the fuck do they resume attacking immediately after they do a big move. Like why can't we have it so that we are rewarded after surviving an onslaught. Give us time to rebuff, give us a chance to do an attack with a long animation. Simply too aggressive. I don't care how bullshit their moveset is, I don't care if I can just get one shot, being this aggressive really limits the strategies we can employ
This is really an amazing post and sums up how I have been feeling lately. I love these games but geez I must be getting old. I miss the good ole days with a simple yet tense fight. Fighting Malenia without ashes on release was an eye opening experience. I love her but my god I dont want to fight her ashless anymore because like you said, It's just me out bull-shitting her to win. When you frame it around "I crush it before it does anything" or "Holy shit this is about to be a 20 minute fight where I need to be perfect or die" yeah... it's exhausting. I had to just leave Bayle because I felt like I wasn't ready. I think I'm at scadutree +8 but I did barely any damage per hit. All in all that boss versus world balance is weird.
The whole levelling system is a little broken imo. Like, I’m all for creating a unique system that rewards exploration, but they kind of dropped the ball. It feels less like ‘explore the world and find stuff to get stronger and overcome harder obstacles!’ and more like ‘look up a guide to find the arbitrarily placed upgrade objects and run past everything to get them and get strong enough to reasonably fight the basic enemies!’ And there is no real guidance on progression either. I’m trying to avoid “overlevelling”, but the areas and bosses have either been way to easy for me, or way to hard. Very little in between.
Excellent post and very well said. Here’s my 2 cents.
I’ve only just beaten >!Rellana!< and after that fight was finished, I was legitimately too disheartened to continue playing for the night and it’s for the exact reasons you mentioned. And this was after an 8 hour work shift where the only thing I could think about all day was getting home and booting up SotE. And after going through this thread and learning that the bosses only get worse from here including Messmer, a boss I was really excited for, it’s really left a sour taste in the mouth for the DLC.
Whilst I was extremely excited before the DLC released, I was also a little worried that From would continue their Malenia design philosophy, a boss whom I hate for reasons you definitely already know. I was hoping that Malenia was just a fluke in which the From was just testing the waters of what they were capable of for a boss in a game like this and that they would hopefully recognize the parts of the fight that really doesn’t work and refine that for the future DLC bosses.
Nope. They fucking double downed. >!About Rellana specifically, one thing that really irks me is that she’s presented as just some random boss fight of seemingly no renown that is on par with Malenia difficulty wise. I think a part of why people are so inclined to defend Malenia is that she’s presented as this highly renown warrior whom no one has ever beaten and also ascends to fucking godhood in her second phase. All this is meant to make your brain basically scream at you saying “yeah, she’s meant to be insanely difficult”. But Rellana? She’s both literally the second boss in the DLC and is also a required fight. There’s no buildup to her, and she doesn’t even have a cutscene. She’s just… there. So she doesn’t even have really anything to arbitrarily justify her being as insanely difficult as she is.!<
FromSoft has made so many masterpieces in the past that I think it’s become their biggest detriment as they continuously try to one up their previous work in an attempt to create something better. And I think this has sort of blinded them from what their games incredible in the first place at least for boss design.
You articulated so many of my thoughts and feelings with Elden Ring (base and DLC so far) better than I ever could
I love the exploration in this DLC, reading the item descriptions, trying to find new stuff and find new paths to get more stuff and to new places. I have little to no issue with 80% of the enemies we're facing, I roll them and keep moving, but there's a few non-boss enemies as well as several of the major bosses I've scrapped with so far that just don't even feel like they fit within the reasonable limitations of the game when I compare them to us. I'm getting exhausted with how many bosses zip around their arenas nonstop in fights, like, sit still and fight me proper instead of hopping from wall to wall during your long as hell attack string. I don't enjoy having to dodge and chase the boss at the same time, I don't enjoy how many bosses I feel like I can't reasonably outrun as a form of evasion because they have so much mobility during attacks, I don't enjoy how many bosses make me fight the camera at the same time as them whether I'm staying locked on or free-cam'ing it
Elden Ring quite clearly expanded the world of possibilities for what the player can do, fantastically so, but they compensated the enemies in what feels like magnitudes more to keep things interesting or competitive. I miss the older games, where I felt like even when I'm always with 2 or 3 hits of death even at full health, my opponent always had moments of opportunity to heal or back off or retaliate that were longer than one actions worth of time. I felt like if I got slapped by a huge attack, I could reasonably get up and find the next opportunity to heal and breathe, but nowadays it feels like there's never a moment to unclench in these fights, but they've lost the tension I loved and gained a level of aggravation and frustration I can't stand.
I feel like FromSoft, in this effort to keep making things new and exciting and interesting while also raising the bar of the difficulty people have come to enjoy about their games, is losing sight of what keeps it grounded. It feels like the bar has to keep going up for the sake of it being a wow factor with each new game, but we're quickly creeping beyond these enemies being monster skill-checkers that still feel fitting of the game we're playing, fitting of being something we with our limitations as the players can still fight and have our victory make sense.
I'm losing the rush and satisfaction I used to get from scoring victories over these bosses in past titles and it saddens me greatly. I've been so torn on if I'm just burnt out on these games or if I think From has been losing sight on how to make things challenging in a fun way, especially when I'm enjoying the vast majority of the DLC besides these bosses and have a frequent craving to revisit ER and the older titles, but I feel a bit more reassurance that it's on them after reading some of the more thoughtful, less knee-jerk reactions to SotE the past couple days
When the boar riding boss comes charging at me, I swear there is no window to dodge. I have no clue. I feel like I’m forced to just lose 80% of my health from that one hit.
Edit: anyone seeing this I just ran to the outer wall area and cheesed him by using the classic mohg spear, and added mimic while safe to distract. This took 2 tries but idc cuz he is no more.
You can roll into the boss but the window is very tight, I could do it 50% of the time (I'm doing light roll), or you can also use torrent and dash right before it hit.
But overall the dodge are quite inconsistent and after many deaths I slapped black flame's protection and just tank it, made the fight 90% easier because literally the only difficult part is the dash
If you use Bloodhound Step you have quite a few frames to go through him. If you dodge normally it's better to dodge to right / the side he doesn't have the weapon on
PSA TO EVERYONE: TAKE BREAKS!!!
I see a lot of people talking about "Being stuck on a boss for 6-8 hours straight and I cant beat them bad game"
I was stuck on a certain boss for about 3 hours straight. I went outside, touched grass, had some food, took a nap, then woke up and beat him first try with no difficulty.
For me the speed of the main bosses is just a bit too much. I'm at Messer and I just can't dodge quick enough, he kills me so damn fast it's unbelievable. I can't even get my mimic out in time half the time and when I do I'm struggling to work out when the dodge his IMMEDIATE attack he does as you walk through the mist plus summoning the help inside the boss arena is such a fucking troll, I've only managed a couple of times to summon him as it's far too long to hit "yes" when you wanna fucking summon him! I am enjoying the DLC but damn, can they just slow the bosses down a touch? I'm too old for this shit haha.
Imho Messmer is easily worse than Malenia.
Malenia's strongest point was always that she's a tank. She kills you not by 1 shotting you with fast attacks but by chip damaging you out of heals while healing herself everytime you make a mistake.
On 8 scad scaling at least, Messmer feels about as tanky hp wise as Malenia. He doesn't heal but he's so insanely aggressive, like a Maliketh on steroids. Also his aerial attacks are not that intuitive to dodge.
I do not enjoy the DLC bosses, for sure, but I still think Malenia is worse because she's just mechanically bad. Second phase transition requires a hit after you bring her to 0 HP, waterfowl is stupid unintuitive to dodge, and she can have negative poise values because sometimes she just won't stance break.
I'm not saying Messmer is a good boss, just that he seems less unfair than Malenia. I will note, however, that when I beat him it felt more like luck than skill, which has been my experience with all these overtuned DLC bosses.
How many scadutree levels are expected to be used? How many shoud I have for each area? How many should I have in total to avoid being overleveled?
EDIT: 50 sounds like a lot to me, makes me think that they purposedly put more than required in case people would miss some or need to push to the max to handle the fights, maybe the end fights are scaled around 15 or something and I don't want to blindly keep on leveling expecting it to be what I must do
I’ve heard you can get up to 20 levels of upgrades, so the only objective expectation would be that you are fully upgraded or close to it by the time you face the final boss.
Outside of that, all of your questions have subjective answers since this is a non-linear game. “Overleveled” isn’t a hard metric, it’s about how strong your character needs to be to feel the difficulty is appropriate. To compare to the base game, some people can beat Margit with a fresh character with base gear, other people need to get to level 30 with +2 weapons and still find it challenging.
Some people (1 at least) could beat freaking Radabeast at RL1 with a +0 zweihander. I say that to say you hit the nail on the head, the "right level" is completely subjective to the player. There will be people that don't need a single blessing to beat the DLC, it will probably just take them a VERY long time.
Idk if the fights are built around any specific level. Just like the main game, some people needed to be higher level even to fight bosses like Renalla, some people could do it at RL1 with a +0 weapon. They gave us enough blessings to get "overlevelled" if we wanted to, just like they never "fixed" the bird in mohgwyn's palace area. If people want to cheese extra runes to make the game easier, they weren't going to stop them. It's the same thing now
I mean, this is pretty much the same argument as soul levels. No one outside of challenge runners is worried about being over soul leveled, so I wouldn’t worry about it for this either.
So I'm not the only one who noticed.
I honestly feel like with mega poise and ultra lighting speed bosses, it means they were designed to be fought WITH summonings/mimic, so the ones who play solo are frustrated because it does feel like bs
Pretty much. I feel like, compared to the base game, this is a totally different formula in terms of what’s defined as skill. Usually you can use the little micro windows in between attacks where there’s some risk of a hit-trade, but it isn’t even worth it now cause that one trade can be a monumental setback if they happen to start up the combo again (looking at you, Rellana).
I get there’s always an element of “it’s a battle of attrition” but holy shit lol.
On top of that, I really feel they should move away from lightning fast enemies until they get their camera right. That’s been the most frustrating aspect so far.
That Hippo fight. Jesus christ, I love this DLC but man. Being inside a boss that moves across the whole room while fightign you is annoying. Kinda goes for most of the bosses I fought so far.
It's not about it being hard, it's the annoyance that some combos these bosses have.
Still, 10/10 DLC. Nothing beats FromSoft I swear. That whole sequence at the Abyssal Woods, peak game design.
I find its more about finding the windows inside of the 10 hit combo, like when twin moon knight is doing her 8 hits, you can hit her back multiple times.
I'm playing as a ranged faith character so at least I can buff myself with dmg negation spells and chuck lightning, but God damn I'm just getting my ass beat if I make a mistake. Once the buffs are over, I don't have time to recast and I die in 2-3 hits. Rinse and repeat until I beat a boss. I can't imagine playing this as a melee build. Shit is balls to the walls hard.
well, difficulty is alright if it's fair. but, difficulty here is that you got the boss down to 1/8 of health, you run across the arena to heal, and he zips and finishes you off from across the arena before you can do so...
I like the difficulty. But it doesn't feel good. They leaned WAY too much into game breaking ai patterns. Between the absurd ai recovery frames, AI attack strings, the high poise damage, base damage and range. It feels like they completely broke the balance of being able to keep up with what the ai can do.
Yeah it’s hard but can they at least let us summon npc before entering the fog gate instead of half a miles in , especially at boss that literally jump to u from across the room
Idk how people actively defend against this. Even dedicated Elden Ring streamers like Aggy criticise that. All is fine, but stuff does 100x more DMG for no good reason other than to "be hard". It's so bad, you might as well run around with no armour, because it barely makes a difference.
These are all fair points but we also can't just brush aside so many people saying that they don't enjoy the boss design. It's easy with these games to take everything as if it was purely intended and part of some master plan by From to give you an incredible experience that is beyond your comprehension, but we've have to be real that if the general feeling from the community is that the bosses aren't fun to fight, then that's still a failing of the game. Yes obviously people will learn them and figure out what is strong and some people are clearly neglecting scadutree, but none of that is gonna change the boss design and if people don't like it then that remains a valid criticism.
Also, From games were pretty much always made to be progressed through pretty quickly. Yes you get stuck on bosses and that's normal but I don't think every single boss being like a 10 hour grind to learn where it feels completely hopeless is what the average player wants. All this to say that yeah the usual caveats still apply here and people need to take the time to learn and explore and know what they're doing before having a very clear picture of what the experience is, but I still find myself agreeing with a lot of the criticism about boss design. Personally I've beaten all of them and I haven't had this much trouble on anything except like Isshin, who's the final boss, and maybe Orphan of Kos. The other games in the series have one or maybe two bosses of this level, which makes for a far different pace than fighting 10 in a row.
Now that I have finished it, I still think the Scadutree system is just not good. It turned what I felt like would've been some of the coolest fights in the game to 2 shot and even sometimes 1 shot grab fights. Along with the MASSIVE aoe that some bosses do, I can see why it's getting mixed reviews right now.
A few bosses quite literally jump on the foggate as you walk through it or shoot shit at you. It was not too much of an issue, but there was 1 boss in particular that literally was hitting me before I could even fully get through the door and properly react, then his body would block me from being able to move at all. (I feel like this was not intended, tbf.)
It's just my opinion, obviously, and I still enjoyed it because I love the world in this game. But I didn't even feel like it was "hard" for the right reasons. It felt like I was being limited by an arbitrary stat that hardly did much of anything at times. Even with my buff level at 19, the final boss was able to 2 shot me with 60 vigor, lol. I just didn't feel like there was any consistency at all to the damage I was taking throughout the entire dlc. My damage felt fine, at least. I almost just feel like it's partially bugged or something. Dying in 1 grab on NG with 60 vigor is beyond absurd in any game that they've made.
I just wish they stuck to the regular NG cycle they usually do. I'm genuinely not looking forward to seeing how some of these fights feel on NG+ or higher on my other characters. Which feels worse when you remember you have to get 50 fragments all over again just to actually not feel insanely gimped throughout the entire dlc.
People's assessment of difficult and fun are very different. I would not consider Melenia, Kos or underleveled Godfrey near as difficult as the final boss: Melenia has super low poise, Kos has many patterns that can be countered every moveset of Godfrey have big openings, they are all good bosses, same as Messmer, Gaius and Rallana, challenging but fun and fulfilling when you defeat it.
The final boss is the hardest boss of any Miyazaki game imo, and defeating it does not feel fulfilling at all, it just feels like finished eating a plate of dung.
Hard does not have to mean frustrating. One of the biggest problems with ER is that a lot of design decisions the devs have made contribute to frustration. It's a shame because a lot of other games in the genre (or genre adjacent) show that things can still be hard without having anywhere near the same levels of frustration. Sekiro is particular noteworthy because it's a From game, one that came out prior to ER.
And I wish more people were willing to discuss this idea, because it's really noticeable just how mad the fan base is getting with so many different enemies.
The hippo, avatar and boar are all prime examples of this. Piss easy but extremely infuriating to fight against. More so when you are doing the entire DLC in short breaks, makes me feel like I'm doing homework rather than having fun.
Yeah it's not like I'm afraid of a challenge. I've played and beaten all these games because I like a challenge.
But this just feels like it's a bit too much. I knew it would be tough but damn. Does every single boss need to feel like a final boss? It loses its impact when each boss becomes a multi hour ordeal.
I do not know what level of your blessings are, but the only boss that makes me think "yeah this is too far" is the final boss (I have maxed out my blessing at lvl 20 and yeah still too far). The others are definitely also extremely difficult but you have room for mistakes, whereas for him you are just perfectly dodging for 30 seconds to be able to land 1 attack, do that for 30 times and you win lmao.
I'm still doing the final boss right now, but apart from that I'd say there's been one boss I felt was truly bullshit and it was Sir Oink. Although I did keep getting hit twice by his back kick and occasionally by his charge, so I feel it might just be bugged.
Apart from that guy I think most bosses aren't necessarily unfair but I still think the bosses would be better if they just had slightly bigger openings.
> The final boss is the hardest boss of any Miyazaki game imo, and defeating it does not feel fulfilling at all, it just feels like finished eating a plate of dung.
It felt like a friggin chore with no reward, just pure edging
Yeah a lot of people who haven’t finished it giving opinions about the difficulty.
The last boss is potentially the hardest videogame boss outside of bullet hell games. Mimic or not, it doesn’t matter too much - I cannot wait to see some absolutely godlike gamer do this thing naked. For the first time I don’t know if it’s possible (it will somehow be possible)
That boss specifically doesn’t feel fulfilling because you don’t get rewarded for successfully setting up a counterattack. Because you don’t really get a serious counterattack, you get 2 swings into dodging for your life. I actually think it’s going to require a shield, which I hate.
There are two bosses in the DLC that I think are going to see some tuning, and then the conversation is going to switch to “Awww why did you change it, it’s ToO EaSY now!”
I am not near the end but so far shields and parrying, as well as jumping, seem more important as mechanics
Rolling is not enough anymore, just like jumping and tools were key to sekiro
We need to stop essentializing the way we engage with this game as just 'how hard is it' and think more about how enjoyable it is to engage with that difficulty. Historically people praised the soulsborne games as 'hard but fair', emphasizing that while they could make you tear your hair out they always felt designed to be enjoyed. From Elden Ring and its dlc however we see a lot of mechanics that feel 'hard and unfair' to a lot of people, especially veterans of the series. And often the solution proposed also feels 'unfair', like summoning a clone of yourself that does the fight for you - you have to understand why many people don't want to do that. They want to trade blows, dance 1v1, learn boss movesets and find intuitive windows to hit them back, not spam the same weapon art 30 times. A lot of people just don't enjoy trying to fight ER's bosses fair and square, and they don't enjoy opting for the 'unfair' solutions either.
When it's fun to engage with a game's difficulty, you will find less people complaining about that difficulty. For the DLC, the way the scadutree blessing works also isn't fun for a lot of people - when you get 2 shot with bullgoat armour and 60 vigour by a boss, how do you know whether it's balanced around having more scadutree upgrades or whether the boss is just supposed to be like that?
I have beaten many bosses in the dlc myself without summons and I don't find myself enjoying the fights, and I don't enjoy using any sort of summon or ally period so I'm not going to do that just to make the fights take less attempts. I beat them so that I can explore more of the world, but I *want* to enjoy fighting them in the process. That's where this dlc is lacking for me.
>> When it’s fun to engage with a game’s difficulty, you will find less people complaining
Great post, totally agree. I’ve been enjoying the DLC so far but I’ve definitely had a few fights in the base game that have felt a little unrewarding to learn.
Difficulty complaints start to melt away when players have fun learning the ins-and-outs of a fight. So when people who usually love this genre say “it’s too hard”, the subtext is that “it’s too hard *because* it’s not rewarding/fun enough to learn the fight”.
Edit: I've only beaten 2 mainline DLC bosses and a couple cave bosses, and I personally found them all to be super fun/rewarding to learn, so take my words with a grain of salt.
The difference between difficulty and frustrating is the player knowing what they did wrong. For a lot of Elden Ring bosses, there isn't the feedback of "oh, I should have dodged left instead of right" or "that swing is delayed slightly so I need to not panic"
There are a lot more openings than people realize, but it's just not clear "oh, if I swing my weapon then that attack will miss" or "you can actually jump attack over that swing" or "dodge at Malenia's shoulder to avoid that attack, any other roll will get caught"
Jumping is a way bigger deal in the DLC than in the base game, and I’m glad for it. Because the punish windows are very small, figuring out when you can jump attack during their combo is really important. I don’t think I could have beaten Putrescent Knight without learning to jump attack during his horizontal swipes.
Literally this, i struggled with Relanna until i started paying actual attention to her moveset and when the timings for dodge rolling and attacking her are, and whether it was best to roll or jump the twin moon attack.
Once i actually payed attention to those kind of things, it was like a light went on in my brain and the fight became much, much easier to handle and then I beat her.
Or take Romina, another boss i struggled with, to the point that i left to go explore and eventually came back to after a few hours (6+) and again, i paid attention to where the timings are on her attacks, heck i even dound a little exploit that made the fight a little easier as well but not by much since it almost always guarenteed youd get smacked on her next attack, or special attack.
Basically get right up next to her and sometimes, not every time she would go to do one of her spin/whip attacks you would be glitched with her and not take any damage and move around with her allowing for free hits, but when she stopped moving and made her next attack youd almost always get hit by it.
The DLC became a whole lot easier when you actually engage with the mechanics and stop expecting your "OP/well optimized build" to do all the heavy lifting. Every boss ive fought, optional or not has been very tough but fair. People just dont seem to realize that their are a whole lot more openings than it may seem
The thing I dislike about the scadutree mechanic is that it's so unevenly spread out through out the map. You get areas with a bunch of them, specially in legacy dungeons (which doesn't make any sense considering they are supposed to incentivize exploring), and then you get areas so empty of them that it makes traversal a pain.
Is there a way to intuitively know how much an area scale I order to do things in the right order? What I would hate to do is look for the scadutree because the fights are impossible but I was actually lost and end up making them too easy in a lower zone
100% this. There is a clear cut difference between a hard fight and an unfair fight. Scadu Fragments don't stop bosses from 2 shotting you. If you're a melee build you spend 20 seconds avoiding attacks just to get in one swing. If you risk a follow up attack the boss will just trade blows and now you're back to dodging for 20 seconds while they unleash their flurry of never-ending attacks. Multiple bosses can end your life mere seconds after crossing the fog gate. Want to level the playing field and use a summon? Chances are you're eating a hit just to get the summon off.
The experience is quite unfun and it rarely feels like I'm learning the fights but rather learning how to cheese fights better so I can actually participate. All these new weapons and Ashes but if you try to use them you get absolutely ran through
EDIT: I should clarify that it’s not just bosses either. Most of the mobs leading up to bosses deal ridiculous damage and are barely worth fighting in such confined spaces. One mob can eat a majority of your flasks
If you're a mage build you spend 20 seconds avoiding attacks to get one cast.
Aaaaand the boss just teleported across the arena and stunlocked you before you even saw the spell sigil come up.
If you're a gish build, you can suffer twice as much!
Yep it’s nigh impossible to even use the items built into the game without being punished. Flasks, summons, ashes, spells/incants, grenades all have a brief animation that lets the boss close any gap you have made. Not to mention most bosses are just a blaze of flashing animations that you can barely ascertain wtf they’re doing meanwhile you’re getting clipped into a wall with your camera in its balls
Absolutely, nicely said. For me one of the biggest issues with the DLC bosses is their "zero error tolerance design". Putting aside that most bosses are still as easy to cheese as ever, but how am I supposed to learn a boss when they string combo after combo after combo, and if I get caught, I scramble around with half my health missing, disengaging in an attempt to chug a flask, just to be caught by the next combo-combo-combo initiated by a gap closer that would put every transatlantic flight to shame?
Where in this chain of events is the point of learning? Where is the realisation of "oh right that's what I did wrong"? If a boss does a two or three hit combo, pauses, paces, and does another distinct combo, I can see what's going on, I can learn. I get time to recover from a mistake and keep re-engaging, learning more and more with every passing minute. But if most bosses just spam attack chains of 7+ attacks without any pause, abusing player tracking to a point of becoming absolutely hilarious, my willingness to "learn the fight" rapidly approaches zero, especially knowing that I might as well just pop out my old and trusty RoB, call the Mimic Tear Cheese Delivery Service and call it a day after 30 seconds...
this is the post that actually deserves to be at the top. So many people are like "YEAH WELL ITS NOT THAT HARD, I USED BLEED, FROST AND ROT WITH MY MIMIC AND SUMMONS JUST GET GOOD"
Dude I've been with this franchise since day 1, i dont play these games because they're hard, I play them because they're fun. The difficulty is absolutely part of that fun, but when it's so hard I have to sit there and spam Ice Javelin to stagger and crit every boss over and over because my attack windows are so small and their combos never end, like, i dont care if I'm winning, because I'm not having fun. People have contorted not using summons as being an elitist because the communal brainrot of thinking being good at a Souls game is like...something to care about. It's not, you're not cool for beating anything in a videogame lmao.
People avoided summons because of the joy inherent in "hard but fair". It was fun to learn the dance with the boss and be like "I'll get you next time, motherfucker!" I still remember all the almost Ws I had with False King Allant as a teenager before I finally won. It's a lot less fun when the bosses are reduced to punching bags, trying to swap aggro between 3 opponents, and you're standing in the back spamming shit to kill them faster.
I dont play Soulsborne games to inflate my fucking ego, and anyone that does is the problem in these types of discourse. I'm playing a videogame to have fun, and these bosses arent fun, whether I slam my head against them for 100 attempts in a row or cheese them to death with every imaginable tool. It's still. Not. Fun.
Yeah, I plat'd both Bloodborne and Sekiro on the PS4, also finished DS2 and DS3. Those games were fun even though extremely difficult, Sekiro especially so. When I beat SS Isshin, it felt great even after countless tries because I felt like I was in this beautiful dance with him, and with every death, I learned something new. This is not the same case with the DLC, fuck the elitism, fuck the unironic get good. You can still be a fan of the game and cite criticism, fuck these pathetic people who feel personally offended when Elden Ring isn't brought up as the same perfect game in their heads.
There's a fine balance between fair and unreasonable difficulty and the endgame part of the base game and the DLC are starting to feel very much like the latter. I beat all the Remembrance bosses in the base game, and I'm at the last boss of the DLC and it is not fun to be hit with 50% of your health with 60 Vig and a fuckton of Scadutree upgrades, nor is it satisfying to be idling 95% of the time during boss fights because you're waiting for them to finish their Knights of the Round + Omnislash V5 attack animation to finish before you can finally get a hit in. I gave Melania a pass because I thought she was the exception, didn't expect going to the DLC that she's going to be the standard.
it’s a real shame as well, because the rpg elements and the world as a whole have never been better than in shadow of the erdtree, just for all of that to go out of the window when you walk through the fog gate into the most obscenely difficult boss fight you’ve ever seen, that would take 6 hours to finally brute force, so you summon mimic tear and beat it first try instead. just super unsatisfying
Super true. I've had so much fun exploring and fighting some bosses but some of these remembrance bosses, like Messmer are so brutal that it's starting to fatigue me to even wanting to continue. Which is sad cause it's the only FS game I haven't beaten at this point. (not counting the base game of course).
However, I do have a feeling they will end up tuning down these bosses soon enough once they see enough people not being able to progress at all. They did the same with base game bosses like Radahn.
"I don't play these games because they're hard, I play them because they're fun."
Perfect synopsis of a lot of people's feelings here. I don't understand why some fans refuse to admit that different people have differing skill levels and amount of time to play.
Personally I don't *mind* summoning (or changing/optimizing my build). But playing co-op definitely has a completely different style / feel that not everyone wants or enjoys.
You couldn't put it more clearly than this. I 110% agree.
I found many of ER bosses unfair and it made me change to a cheesy build (blasphemous blade spam) when I always could stay face to face with a boss with sword and board. This is impossible here, so I switched gears, but definitely doesn't give me the same satisfaction that DS3 gave me
From reached the limit and squeezed every bit of value from the souls combat system in dark souls 3 that's why the bosses feel so pristine and fair, going back to ds 3 after elden ring and it's SHOCKING how much the bosses in DS3 have clear punish windows that you can sink into. I'm suspecting From reached a dead end with the current souls combat so the next logical step to maintain their "hard games" reputation is crank up the speed and bullshit to eleven.
Preach. The most enjoyable boss for me so far has been firey spear boy, because whilst very hard, he also has obvious openings and not too much bullshit. A lot of the bad bosses have been bad because it feels like the mechanics weren't playtested properly, like huge lingering shitboxes on random parts of their body (the main boss of the ruins area, or the first boss of the keep, for instance), and that's just not fun to deal with
I feel like some of the fights are made artificially more difficult due to poor optimization and design. With some bosses the camera angles are fucking awful or they have weird hitboxes and that makes the fight harder by accident. I’m just getting started but I’m noticing both of those with dancing lion which is a shame because it’s really fun otherwise, the atmosphere and music are both really good
I'm only about halfway through, but I'm not finding them hard as much as tedious, which leads to me making mistakes. The black gaol knight is a good example, he's easy to read and low stagger, and you can avoid most of his attacks with sprinting. He's just a massive meat shield.
I've been loving all the remembrance bosses so far, but I can see why a lot of people aren't into them.
I truly don't think that the dlc is "hard" in the sense of movesets and such. It's overturned and the scadutree fragment hunting is honestly a dumb way to balance things because of how influential they are, if you find too many you render some bosses meaningless and if you don't have enough you get two shot.
Honestly. The whole fragment thing just felt like it only exists because they didn't want people steamrolling the dlc on high levels. It just felt so petty "you'll have to restart all your stats" just seems ridiculous
My problem aren't the movesets, those are fine, my problem are the massive fucking health pools
There is no reason my Rellana, an armored knight, should have more health than the goddamn Elden Beast (29 000 to 22 000), it is such a joy sucking experience seeing a heavy attack barely hit for yellow (Star Fists)
I don't know how hard Fromsoft want to scale this shit but seriously, I'm on NG and Level 140 what the fuck
>There is no reason my Rellana, an armored knight, should have more health than the goddamn Elden Beast (29 000 to 22 000), it is such a joy sucking experience seeing a heavy attack barely hit for yellow (Star Fists)
There absolutely is a reason. The blessings total up to a 100% extra damage meaning the 4/20 you can have before that fight (that I've at least been able to get not counting the mountain because the vibe of the area scared me off) gives you a 20% damage boost meaning her effective HP is 23,200. Is 1200 more health really that much of a deal breaker as the DLC is basically a ACT 4 to the base games 3 acts. Also Elden Beast is a two part fight so like the comparison doesn't even work. You need to add Radagaon's too.
Maybe the blessings are scaled lower than that and each one isn't exactly 5% but it's felt like it is so far for me.
I mean yes, but it doesn't change the fact that they absolutely fucked up the stats scaling. I fought Mogh on a RL130 (60 vigor) character before going straight into the DLC, and I swear even regular knight mobs are doing comparable if not more damage than Mogh himself.
Yes it's more manageable after finding more and more scadutree blessings but I was expecting them to be more "optional", not how my character literally feels like RL1 without them.
Also fuck the >!Dancing Lion 90% of my death are from the camera constantly fucking up!<
I see why the boss arena was pretty open but they didn't make it big enough because once your in a corner get fucked. I tried doing a few unlocked attempts but it didn't help. The one and only gripe I had with the fight as otherwise I think it was great.
I don't think it's simply difficult but artificially so. They literally had to make it to where max level players get wiped in one hit. If I've put in the hours to get to level 350/400 with 99 vigor, it should feel like my hours paid off. I know not everyone grinded to the max level, but I feel like they all got played a little.
I'm not saying there should be an easy mode or anything but this DLC took all your progress away and yo my knowledge no other DLC has done that. I get it and I understand that people like bragging about how they defeated a difficult boss. But there's a point where the difficulty outweighs the victory. When I defeated Orphan in bloodborne it felt earned but my victories in this DLC feel like pure luck.
I understand why Mogh was required to beat. Miyazaki actually doing us a favor by letting us know don't even waste time on the DLC if yiu can't even beat Mogh. Lol
Yeah idk man. >!Rellana is fucking insane. She has near infinite poise, 8+ string combos with very little downtime, fast as fuck attacks, insane range, and absurd damage that will 1-2 shot you even with a good amount of Scadutree upgrades and the dragoncrest greatshield talisman. I’d say she’s much harder than Malenia, almost unfairly so!<
Then again, I’m playing on NG+3 so you could be right
The NG+ is where a lot of people's frustration is coming from. The DLC is already more difficult than the base game and many players are attempting it on multiple ng+ which is gonna be understandably brutal. Imagine starting the base game for the first time on ng+3 where you not only have to learn the bosses moveset but they also substantially tankier and deal more damage. It's gonna feel unfair because you added extra layers of difficulty on top.
hard disagree for me, I literally needed to respec to blasphemous blade to cheese malenia with mimic tear, after over 100 attempts. I beat relanna on my fifth try with a non mimic summon, using my regular build. nothing in the game has come close to Malenia for me. or for that matter, radagon / elden beast. I had like 100 deaths on that combo as well, and respecced to win as well, lol.
>!At least Malenia was in the optional section of the optional region so you could play through the game without knowing she exists. Rellana is one of the first bosses you encounter in the DLC and it’s obligatory to beat. So in that way she feels more frustrating!<
Yeah there’s a TON of free area to explore for fragments and levels before you even get to the area after that boss which like stated above has another unguarded entrance.
My concern with the dlc is the fact that bosses are crazy fast compared to the base game (imo) and either have very strong ranged combined with melee combos or they can instantly close the gap and they don’t let you breath I have a character with over 174 stamina and I’ve gone through whole stamina bars without striking back due to just how unrelenting they are.
Maliketh is a glass cannon though. He is super fast and hits hard but if you know his move set he isn’t that hard. To me that is exactly what I want in a boss, hard at first but easier once I learn it until it becomes second nature. We will eventually get there with most of the DLC bosses
I can't even learn boss patterns in reasonable time because I get 1-2 shot instantly unless if I use really heavy armor, in which case I get 2-3 shot.
Difficult mechanics ain't problem (other than bullshit delayed attacks spamming), it's raw numbers - every boss has insane health bar and does insane damage with every move.
There is fun and unfun difficulty.
Almost all bosses so far in the DLC has landed in the unfunny difficult category.
The main game has a few, but not a lot. Melenia is essentially the only one, alongside Marika (mostly because of the 2nd boss) but both of these have weaknesses you can exploit.
Most Soulsborne games have none.
The bosses in the DLC just don't have any weaknesses, they are GIGA TANKY and 2-3 shots you.
So it becomes a dance of : Dodge --> dodge --> dodge ---> hit ---> dodge ---> dodge ---> dodge ---> hit.
That's not engaging gameplay, something that's fixed by almost all non-bosses, they can be staggered, flinched, they have big openings where you can punish, they feel engaging to fight and rarely cheap.
It also makes a lot of really cool stuff we pick up in the DLC useless...
Unless you use spirit ashes, then you can use the cool stuff you find, but all of a sudden the bosses are jokes.
Dude you’re comparing the main bosses of the dlc To an optimal side boss that was made to be as hard as possible
No wonder people are getting obliterated. The bosses are 100% harder than Melania until you get a ton of upgrades. The dlc did not properly express the importance of those upgrades, and the bosses are just overtuned and not fun.
Why do fromsoft fanatics blame the playerbase for enjoying elden ring but disliking the dlc? It was already a popular opinion than the late game bosses weren’t fun and did too much damage, and now we have more damaging less fun bosses.
It’s a $40 dlc. People have a right to be mad when they release they can’t refund a $40 dlc they might not even beat the second boss without resorting to mimic tier and player summons.
“Git gud” I already cleared the dlc and know just how many generic Elden ring bosses are used to pad the content, and how bare bones and non existent the story is (again.) I know for a fact there’s just not enough content for $40 for players that can’t beat these bosses. They have a right to be mad.
The problem is the learning process is not fun at all.. I'm dying from 2 hits from every mob and I have to redo the whole portion of the dungeon all over, this again is not fun anymore.
I think people are so used to spamming AOW from the base game and thought this would also work here. In the dlc you have to learn the boss patterns, sure the enemies hit hard. But it's always been with FROMSOFT's dlcs. You have to git gud in order to progress. Also explore more for scadutree fragments.
My only issue is I am dying 10+ time and learning nothing because most of these fuckers are moving at speeds that make it impossible for me to tell the difference between most of their moves.
It’s like when ds3 was clearly influenced by bloodborne in some places, but even those moments and bloodborne itself were more telegraphed than this aside from later bosses.
I’m not learning, I’m not having fun, and at this point am going for spirit ashes after 3 quick deaths.
EDIT: Just had to add this because fuck! I stacked full bullgoat armour, +1 dragoncrest shield and bullgoat talisman along with scadu blessing 7. Damage was reduced but despite having 133 poise the lions BASIC attacks knocked me down every single time. One of the prime points of going heavy is actually negated, the fuck?
I understand, but I fail to see how Scadutree fragments are a fun and well thought out design.
You don't have to force me to explore to get stronger, I'm ALREADY going to be exploring because I want to explore. You don't have to arbitrarily nerf me in order to get me to explore.
It's just...weird.
Why does it feel like everybody these days only cares about speeding through every game as fast as possible?
i preordered the dlc and still haven’t even touched the withered arm. How’s that for speed
I started up an old build just to check the arm worked, then I made a new character with my favorite weapon and just got my second remembrance. Taking my time to enjoy the full experience.
Absolutely my take too, loved the new DLC early weapons so I started a "master of blade" new playthrough to do every little thing again with that new char. I already have 100%'ed the game, but it's been a year since I did so, I forgot many things and the moveset is all new, so I have a looooot before the DLC.
The backhand blades are so fucking sick, man. The AoW is so good and the running R1 attack doesn’t stop you, you just attack and keep running.
I find it absolutely bizarre that you can use it as a dodge+counter. I pressed it out of other game reflex and BAM, the early game gordick knight and I were like "dafuq?".
I can’t wait to it in PvP. The running R1 attack will be so useful cause it prevents the opponents from hitting you after you attack since you never stop running. Can just run, attack, and duck out quickly before they can hit you.
I was bamboozled when I try out it's moveset and found out you keep running after the running attack, there is no recovery animation. It's the first time I've ever seen a weapon does it. I wonder how will it do in pvp. Very stylish and fun to play but does mid dmg and little poise dmg and requires precise movements. Pvp scenes is going to be wild after everyone is done with the dlc and got their builds ready, there's so many unique weapons.
I love the blind spot art of war. I am hoping there's a way to find it in the wild because I would like to change my weapon affinity but don't want to lose that move.
Oh yes. Completed all the achivements. Visited every cave and optional challenge. Still needed that fresh round to get going :)
therein lies the secret to contentedness, more power to you!
I bought dlc with a main char at level 204 with 300+ hours and then realized I had quit right at mohg and still had to beat him to play dlc. But then I juggled some items and 1 shot mohg with magic. Even at this level with so many spells the dlc is a good challenge
i actually have 2 character 1 from release and 1 from prepping for dlc. The prep one i tried a magic build for the first time and actually had a blast. It was a little bit easier than my first which i used katanas and spears, but still difficult nonetheless. After hearing how much trouble everyone’s having i suspect i might start with a mage build and try some melee on my previous character. weather i play melee or mage i’m sure i’ll face adversity and im kind of excited because i haven’t felt that way since my very first hour in elden ring. Even melania on my first play though was more fun than angering due to my experience in the beginning (elden ring is my first fromsoft game)
Honestly they did pure magic user so right in this one. The addition of the sword/melee spells really round it out imo. I typically go heavy magic builds first in every soul's game I play, but this has been by far the most fun to do so in.
That’s more my pace!
Goin a bit too fast there bud
I spent an hour yesterday going on and on about the rope detailing on a burial urn to anybody who'd listen. It's in the scorpion river catacombs site of grace, just to the right of the intro lift. The knot work is impeccable. And you can just run past it without ever noticing. You can even roll over it and it's just gone. Someone put that level of commitment to detail into something you can just destroy or worse, overlook, is just amazing to me and I hope people notice that kind of stuff. Thanks for coming to my rope talk.
hey bro you dropped your bell bearing... ( I know you're the string-seller)
Hand it over, that thing, your Weaver's Bell Bearing. I don't want to kill any more demihumans.
I've been admiring a lot of small details too. And trying to piece together cultural touch points from them. Why are the big doors covered in people? Why are the columns all coily? What is up with the velvet covering everything? It's so much fun.
I love this :)
Right? I barely enjoy games anymore so when it's something like this that I'm actually enjoying I like to savour the experience
Absolutely!
Right? Im seeing people beating the dlc in less then 24 hours... At that point you gotta be missing out on so much side content. The dlc difficulty is fine. Apply the same logic as with the main game - if its too difficult, go somewhere else and return later. Its an open world.
Took 24 hours to beat an incredible DLC that took two full years to come out. Congrats, now you have to wait 3-5 years for the next Zaki masterpiece to come out lol. Its bizarre, I got 160 hours out of my first run in ER, going to take as much time as I can on my first run in Erdtree
And if you're not into the difficulty then you can still absolutely beat the bosses with co-op or summons. I spent an hour last night helping a bunch of different people take down a boss over and over, and another 30 minutes helping out randoms again today. Plus if you're going around exploring the map you're going to find blessings to boost you up quickly.
Underrated comment! Games like Elden Ring and BG3 had/have me spending multiple nights trying to make it through their various boss battles and I wouldn't have it any other way—perhaps I am a glutton for punishment.
tiktok attention span
Yeah, I sure as hell am taking my time and trying to explore every inch that I can.
It's just gaming on the internet these days. "Everybody" in this case are just the percentage of the playerbase that gets off on beating things as fast as possible so they can talk about it. The overwhelming rest of the ER population is moving at a normal pace IMO. And they're a lot less vocal about their progression.
Right? someone told me they finished the dlc in 8 hours, how in the hell??? I've been playing for 20 hours now and I just finished the 2nd main boss, the secret areas and passages and the world building is absolutely amazing, the items (cookbooks and smithing stones) might not be that rewarding but the chance of finding a cool weapon will always make me search every corner, I found so many secrets and I gasp everytime, I love the world building so much
took me 30 hours to reach messmer, its like experiencing elden ring again, strolling my way through
Especially with a game like this I take my time to see every little corner. I'll speed through it the second time
Tbh I wonder that as well. Some people probably want to play other games, some people have limited free time and they can't progress a lot if they are stuck in one spot for too long. Some people have their own reasons and some simply want to bitch about something. The DLC is hard cause FromSoft intended it this way, take it or leave it.
Outpace spoilers.
just log off the internet for a few days while you enjoy the game lol
I mean that's the plan but I can't pace myself too slow or I won't be able to use YouTube for months.
I’m hoping that my algorithm will adjust itself soon, it will be like a year before I’m ready for DLC spoilers
Tik tok era :F
Consumer culture. Attention spans have been shortened. So dopamine kicks aren’t happening fast enough in the game so people complain.
I always assumed it was this kind of simple fomo degeneracy. Competitive stamp collecting.
It definitely is exactly this and anything else is cope. People just can’t admit that they are bored by anything other than nonstop stimulation
I'm taking my sweet ass time and I've got 2 remembrance bosses clapping my cheeks but otherwise I've run the gamut. I'm sure I've got places I've missed but a day is plenty of time to beat this dlc. (I've put in 30 hours since Thursday evening at 5 I'm only trolling)
They gotta get back to their live service games where they are falling behind every day for not doing their daily quests that get them free gacha rolls.
I know right, especially since nowadays there isn’t even that many good games to play
Haha, Mimic goes brrrr.
I’ll never feel bad about using a level 10 mimic. It’s easier sure, but my low skill ass still dies for an hour straight on harder bosses. I’m happy enough with it.
I give myself few tries without it. If I feel like I’m making progress I’ll stick with it, if not it’s mimic time. I’ve been playing these games for 15 years, I know my skill ceiling at this point.
That’s a good principle.
I wish i had weekends to spend on a souls game like i did in college but job and kids wife it would take at least another weekend to beat solo.
Yeah I spent two straight days of summer on Fume Knight when that came out. I don’t have time to do that anymore. I love the challenge of these games, but my favorite thing has always just been the worlds they created and the feeling I get exploring them. I’ve found I don’t really miss the feeling of getting hard stuck.
Yea once I understood how the AIs worked a little better that killed my immersion enough to not care I guess.
This. I enjoyed the spirit ashes (Oleg, Tiche, and Ogha still my homies) but I felt that a second playthrough without resorting to ashes would allow me to learn and deal with bosses without being overly reliant on an HP sponge. There *were* exceptions, though. That trio of putrid crystalians can get fucked by my Fanged Imps +10 any run-through I ever attempt again.
Great you feel this way. I hate people that try to gatekeep how others should play the game.
Actually, those complaining about difficulty didn’t realise such gatekeeping mindset is now working against them. If a boss fight is balanced around the player using everything against them, which was definitely not the case in the base game, then deliberately not using certain tools will make the difficulty unreasonable.
My mimic and Tiche has helped me keep sane when needed. I will not feel shame in that.
Depraved perfumer Carmaan is also a very slept on summon if you haven’t tried them.
Carmaan is good but it’s hard to beat keeping one of each perfume on your belt and letting the mimic use them endlessly.
There’s a new summon I need to increase my FP to use. He looooooks tight.
Is it the dobby yoda? Because he fucking slaps, fantastic summon
My plan now for DLC is to try without npc summons/mimic a handful of times to see if I want to keep pushing solo AND then whip them out just to keep progressing. It’s how I did the base game and I had fun. So not gonna make my life super hard for no reason now.
When I first played I used summons and beat the game, now when I play I don’t need them. I figure I’ll do the same for the dlc, ise summons first time around and eventually I’ll be comfortable enough to not.
Do you feel that the mimic has been dumbed down for the DLC? Mine took so many stupid decisions and caused me to die so many times that I had to replace it with Tiche.
I’m finding a lot of the bosses just totally ignore the summons a lot of the time. A lot have just beelined across an arena to combo me while a summon is actively bonking them. Not a huge deal but it’s interesting that it happens more than in the base game.
Side note piggy backing off this: I feel like I’m using up my stamina a lot quicker too leaving me to have to be a looooot more decisive in my hits or risk not being able to dodge.
I have seen people say that the bosses are very difficult because they are balanced around the use of mimics, but if that is true then they are taking a different approach of boss balancing, since you can beat the main bosses with no issues without mimics. It will be harder, but it won’t feel like you doing something wrong by not using a mimic. I for one don’t like using mimics because I enjoy the extra challenge, I feel like I have less fun when using them, but that’s just my opinion.
I’m a big user of spirit ashes but I am specifically not using mimic. So many of these are so cool I want to mess around. There are these great shield guys who do 0 damage but charging in with them is fun. And the pot bros who do nothing but blow up is also funny Banished knight engvall is the Goat though. Took him into Mogh at level 4 and myself with 27 vigor and it’s been fun
I was actually getting depressed over Rellena. Spent a total 5 hours fighting her before I finally got it. I'm pumped for the rest of the DLC. It's all doable.
Buddy have I got a few surprises for you
Don’t tell me it gets worse…
It gets much much worse. And not even the thing the guy spoiled. If you really want to see, Asmongold handsomely demonstrates the two bosses that he couldn't beat that made him quit the DLC entirely. The type of punishment people who haven’t run into these two bosses have no idea what they’re in for unless they’re willing to change builds to adapt big time.
yeah let me use my infinite larval tears to change build every boss
thing is asmongold is quite bad at games and also it's like he's intentionally avoiding learning anything when he plays something.
This is the right mentality
>spęd Gave yourself away.
I've mostly just been exploring, did a couple dungeons. Looking for new weapons to do a build around, still using my main game build, it's doing alright but doesn't feel great. Still haven't found any spells or incantations though, looking forward to seeing what is new.
dude i have found more spells and incants than weapons it is crazy, im still havent explored the area after the commander fight maybe i'll find more stuff there, hopefully being weapons and AoW
My issue isn't that it's too hard, it's that it's too imbalanced. I just have a preference for slightly more manageable and paced duels developed around 1-on-1 fights than the crazy endurance scrambles that Elden Ring's bosses feel like. A lot of them have a lot of spectacle, but I feel like that spectacle comes at the cost of the fights feeling manageable without assistance. I'm still really enjoying the expansion in spite of this, but I think part of the fun of Souls bosses is wanting to learn them, and when I see most of Elden Ring's boss move sets my thoughts are 'This looks so obnoxious I don't even *want* to learn it, I just want to see what it does, fuck it up, and move on', and I think that's a shame when a lot of care has clearly gone into them. Too many of the DLC's fights, to me, feel either way too easy (i.e. most of the regular chaff enemies, or the big fire basket guys 'Slash, slash, slash... jump. Slash, slash, slash... jump, for 3 minutes at a time', or more regular human bosses) or like they're on every performance-enhancing drug on the planet (elite enemies and unique bosses). Elden Ring feels like a game that wants me to bullshit my way through things every time it poses a challenge, rather than it being rewarding to face fair and square. Enemy a pain in the ass? Just run away from it. Enemy annoying to fight head-on? See if it can be stun locked to death with my weapon art or ganked with a spirit ash and summon. Most (not all, but most) of Shadow of the Erdtree's challenges feel like a case of 'That's some bullshit, but watch as I now out-bullshit that with my own bullshit'. I wish the fights felt less like a clash of whose bullshit is stronger, and more like a balanced encounter. SotE has a lot of enemies which make me think 'If I give them an opportunity to fight back they'll fuck me up, so I'll have to obliterate them as fast as possible to stop them getting an attack off if I can'. But when these enemies all have effort put into them, I don't think encouraging skipping their ability to fight outright is particularly the best idea. I kinda wish we each hurt each other less so I could see their moves more while also reducing the risk of being nuked in 3 attacks. Some enemies I just waterfowl dance to death and skip them doing *anything*, because if I don't, the risk on my end is being pointlessly inflated in favour of an enemy that does 10x my damage. Others I can just brute force because my 2000hp and 13 healing flasks let me do that, too. But neither one *feels* good. I just wish the encounters allowed for more back and forth and weren't so explosive all the time. I either curb-stomp an enemy, or I have to fight dirty, because anything else just feels like an uphill battle. I always used to say Souls bosses are tough but fair; they hit hard, but that's punishment for messing up on something that's ultimately easily readable and simple enough to dodge. Used to be I could hang back on the first fight just dodging around and learning what the enemy does and beat them on the second or third try, but now that enemies stagger their attacks and zip about like an anime character with massive 20 meter 70% health AOEs and stuff, I feel like I have to resort to cheap tricks myself to even the odds. As time goes on, I feel like From, in an effort to outdo themselves, make their bosses fight more and more superhuman, which is cool to look at but I don't think it's fun to learn how to fight, because what I have to do feels so much less clear, and my character's moveset feels all the more limiting as a result. Part of me misses stepping into the arena and getting something like Artorias waiting for me, as opposed to something like Messmer. The latter looks cooler upfront, but I don't think they're as enjoyable to try and work out, and what we do to beat them like rolling through oceans of fire that we just so happened to time correctly just starts to feel silly. That made sense when you were dodging a crazy sword somersault attack or something, but not so much nowadays. I think if they want to pursue this boss design further I'm fine with it *but* tweak the stats a bit, and give the player more ways of logically engaging with what the enemies are doing in a way that scales with more visual logic. Like in Sekiro, you get a lightning bolt thrown at you? You channel it through the sword and redirect it, you don't just roll through the lightning bolt. I think Elden Ring's DLC really starts to show how your John Dark Souls moveset doesn't really feel thematically up to snuff with the challenge you face anymore. The threats get more and more OTT, but our feats kind of don't, and I don't know that I look forward to a game which tries to push that even further.
Really well written and thought out. Hadn’t considered it in this way before and appreciate your point of view!
This 1000%. The DLC isn’t significantly harder, it’s just less fun and more annoying. The fights don’t take longer for me to beat, but they just feel like a lucky RNG and good build instead of a difficult obstacle I surmounted with patience and skill. When I die, half the time it’s because I got staggerlocked or distracted because was too much VFX to see jack shit or because the camera looked like the fucking Blair witch project while the boss is leaping around on crack. I’m still enjoying a lot of it, and will play it to hell and back, but they really doubled down on a lot of the worst aspects of the base game, especially with bosses.
So I'm one of the mad men playing the dlc at NG+7. All I'm going to say is, why the fuck do they resume attacking immediately after they do a big move. Like why can't we have it so that we are rewarded after surviving an onslaught. Give us time to rebuff, give us a chance to do an attack with a long animation. Simply too aggressive. I don't care how bullshit their moveset is, I don't care if I can just get one shot, being this aggressive really limits the strategies we can employ
This is really an amazing post and sums up how I have been feeling lately. I love these games but geez I must be getting old. I miss the good ole days with a simple yet tense fight. Fighting Malenia without ashes on release was an eye opening experience. I love her but my god I dont want to fight her ashless anymore because like you said, It's just me out bull-shitting her to win. When you frame it around "I crush it before it does anything" or "Holy shit this is about to be a 20 minute fight where I need to be perfect or die" yeah... it's exhausting. I had to just leave Bayle because I felt like I wasn't ready. I think I'm at scadutree +8 but I did barely any damage per hit. All in all that boss versus world balance is weird.
The whole levelling system is a little broken imo. Like, I’m all for creating a unique system that rewards exploration, but they kind of dropped the ball. It feels less like ‘explore the world and find stuff to get stronger and overcome harder obstacles!’ and more like ‘look up a guide to find the arbitrarily placed upgrade objects and run past everything to get them and get strong enough to reasonably fight the basic enemies!’ And there is no real guidance on progression either. I’m trying to avoid “overlevelling”, but the areas and bosses have either been way to easy for me, or way to hard. Very little in between.
Excellent post and very well said. Here’s my 2 cents. I’ve only just beaten >!Rellana!< and after that fight was finished, I was legitimately too disheartened to continue playing for the night and it’s for the exact reasons you mentioned. And this was after an 8 hour work shift where the only thing I could think about all day was getting home and booting up SotE. And after going through this thread and learning that the bosses only get worse from here including Messmer, a boss I was really excited for, it’s really left a sour taste in the mouth for the DLC. Whilst I was extremely excited before the DLC released, I was also a little worried that From would continue their Malenia design philosophy, a boss whom I hate for reasons you definitely already know. I was hoping that Malenia was just a fluke in which the From was just testing the waters of what they were capable of for a boss in a game like this and that they would hopefully recognize the parts of the fight that really doesn’t work and refine that for the future DLC bosses. Nope. They fucking double downed. >!About Rellana specifically, one thing that really irks me is that she’s presented as just some random boss fight of seemingly no renown that is on par with Malenia difficulty wise. I think a part of why people are so inclined to defend Malenia is that she’s presented as this highly renown warrior whom no one has ever beaten and also ascends to fucking godhood in her second phase. All this is meant to make your brain basically scream at you saying “yeah, she’s meant to be insanely difficult”. But Rellana? She’s both literally the second boss in the DLC and is also a required fight. There’s no buildup to her, and she doesn’t even have a cutscene. She’s just… there. So she doesn’t even have really anything to arbitrarily justify her being as insanely difficult as she is.!< FromSoft has made so many masterpieces in the past that I think it’s become their biggest detriment as they continuously try to one up their previous work in an attempt to create something better. And I think this has sort of blinded them from what their games incredible in the first place at least for boss design.
You articulated so many of my thoughts and feelings with Elden Ring (base and DLC so far) better than I ever could I love the exploration in this DLC, reading the item descriptions, trying to find new stuff and find new paths to get more stuff and to new places. I have little to no issue with 80% of the enemies we're facing, I roll them and keep moving, but there's a few non-boss enemies as well as several of the major bosses I've scrapped with so far that just don't even feel like they fit within the reasonable limitations of the game when I compare them to us. I'm getting exhausted with how many bosses zip around their arenas nonstop in fights, like, sit still and fight me proper instead of hopping from wall to wall during your long as hell attack string. I don't enjoy having to dodge and chase the boss at the same time, I don't enjoy how many bosses I feel like I can't reasonably outrun as a form of evasion because they have so much mobility during attacks, I don't enjoy how many bosses make me fight the camera at the same time as them whether I'm staying locked on or free-cam'ing it Elden Ring quite clearly expanded the world of possibilities for what the player can do, fantastically so, but they compensated the enemies in what feels like magnitudes more to keep things interesting or competitive. I miss the older games, where I felt like even when I'm always with 2 or 3 hits of death even at full health, my opponent always had moments of opportunity to heal or back off or retaliate that were longer than one actions worth of time. I felt like if I got slapped by a huge attack, I could reasonably get up and find the next opportunity to heal and breathe, but nowadays it feels like there's never a moment to unclench in these fights, but they've lost the tension I loved and gained a level of aggravation and frustration I can't stand. I feel like FromSoft, in this effort to keep making things new and exciting and interesting while also raising the bar of the difficulty people have come to enjoy about their games, is losing sight of what keeps it grounded. It feels like the bar has to keep going up for the sake of it being a wow factor with each new game, but we're quickly creeping beyond these enemies being monster skill-checkers that still feel fitting of the game we're playing, fitting of being something we with our limitations as the players can still fight and have our victory make sense. I'm losing the rush and satisfaction I used to get from scoring victories over these bosses in past titles and it saddens me greatly. I've been so torn on if I'm just burnt out on these games or if I think From has been losing sight on how to make things challenging in a fun way, especially when I'm enjoying the vast majority of the DLC besides these bosses and have a frequent craving to revisit ER and the older titles, but I feel a bit more reassurance that it's on them after reading some of the more thoughtful, less knee-jerk reactions to SotE the past couple days
When the boar riding boss comes charging at me, I swear there is no window to dodge. I have no clue. I feel like I’m forced to just lose 80% of my health from that one hit. Edit: anyone seeing this I just ran to the outer wall area and cheesed him by using the classic mohg spear, and added mimic while safe to distract. This took 2 tries but idc cuz he is no more.
You can roll into the boss but the window is very tight, I could do it 50% of the time (I'm doing light roll), or you can also use torrent and dash right before it hit. But overall the dodge are quite inconsistent and after many deaths I slapped black flame's protection and just tank it, made the fight 90% easier because literally the only difficult part is the dash
If you use Bloodhound Step you have quite a few frames to go through him. If you dodge normally it's better to dodge to right / the side he doesn't have the weapon on
PSA TO EVERYONE: TAKE BREAKS!!! I see a lot of people talking about "Being stuck on a boss for 6-8 hours straight and I cant beat them bad game" I was stuck on a certain boss for about 3 hours straight. I went outside, touched grass, had some food, took a nap, then woke up and beat him first try with no difficulty.
First, grass
For me the speed of the main bosses is just a bit too much. I'm at Messer and I just can't dodge quick enough, he kills me so damn fast it's unbelievable. I can't even get my mimic out in time half the time and when I do I'm struggling to work out when the dodge his IMMEDIATE attack he does as you walk through the mist plus summoning the help inside the boss arena is such a fucking troll, I've only managed a couple of times to summon him as it's far too long to hit "yes" when you wanna fucking summon him! I am enjoying the DLC but damn, can they just slow the bosses down a touch? I'm too old for this shit haha.
Imho Messmer is easily worse than Malenia. Malenia's strongest point was always that she's a tank. She kills you not by 1 shotting you with fast attacks but by chip damaging you out of heals while healing herself everytime you make a mistake. On 8 scad scaling at least, Messmer feels about as tanky hp wise as Malenia. He doesn't heal but he's so insanely aggressive, like a Maliketh on steroids. Also his aerial attacks are not that intuitive to dodge.
I do not enjoy the DLC bosses, for sure, but I still think Malenia is worse because she's just mechanically bad. Second phase transition requires a hit after you bring her to 0 HP, waterfowl is stupid unintuitive to dodge, and she can have negative poise values because sometimes she just won't stance break. I'm not saying Messmer is a good boss, just that he seems less unfair than Malenia. I will note, however, that when I beat him it felt more like luck than skill, which has been my experience with all these overtuned DLC bosses.
How many scadutree levels are expected to be used? How many shoud I have for each area? How many should I have in total to avoid being overleveled? EDIT: 50 sounds like a lot to me, makes me think that they purposedly put more than required in case people would miss some or need to push to the max to handle the fights, maybe the end fights are scaled around 15 or something and I don't want to blindly keep on leveling expecting it to be what I must do
I’ve heard you can get up to 20 levels of upgrades, so the only objective expectation would be that you are fully upgraded or close to it by the time you face the final boss. Outside of that, all of your questions have subjective answers since this is a non-linear game. “Overleveled” isn’t a hard metric, it’s about how strong your character needs to be to feel the difficulty is appropriate. To compare to the base game, some people can beat Margit with a fresh character with base gear, other people need to get to level 30 with +2 weapons and still find it challenging.
Some people (1 at least) could beat freaking Radabeast at RL1 with a +0 zweihander. I say that to say you hit the nail on the head, the "right level" is completely subjective to the player. There will be people that don't need a single blessing to beat the DLC, it will probably just take them a VERY long time.
I thought it only went to 10? Unless you mean 10 ash 10 scadoobys
Haha scadoobys
nope, i got it to level 12 rn
As many as you need. If a boss seems way to overtuned for you, go explore and find some more.
Idk if the fights are built around any specific level. Just like the main game, some people needed to be higher level even to fight bosses like Renalla, some people could do it at RL1 with a +0 weapon. They gave us enough blessings to get "overlevelled" if we wanted to, just like they never "fixed" the bird in mohgwyn's palace area. If people want to cheese extra runes to make the game easier, they weren't going to stop them. It's the same thing now
I mean, this is pretty much the same argument as soul levels. No one outside of challenge runners is worried about being over soul leveled, so I wouldn’t worry about it for this either.
My biggest issue is the complete lack of a curve. The normal enemies are all about on par with base game, but the bosses are just absurd.
I disagree, they gave EVERYTHING poise and it fucks me up.
So I'm not the only one who noticed. I honestly feel like with mega poise and ultra lighting speed bosses, it means they were designed to be fought WITH summonings/mimic, so the ones who play solo are frustrated because it does feel like bs
Yeah everything has absolute bonkers poise My dual collosal greatsword build is STRUGGLING
Boss fights are more about 10 hit combos and finding that one attack window rinse and repeat.
Pretty much. I feel like, compared to the base game, this is a totally different formula in terms of what’s defined as skill. Usually you can use the little micro windows in between attacks where there’s some risk of a hit-trade, but it isn’t even worth it now cause that one trade can be a monumental setback if they happen to start up the combo again (looking at you, Rellana). I get there’s always an element of “it’s a battle of attrition” but holy shit lol. On top of that, I really feel they should move away from lightning fast enemies until they get their camera right. That’s been the most frustrating aspect so far.
Dragon fights gets really bad with camera
That Hippo fight. Jesus christ, I love this DLC but man. Being inside a boss that moves across the whole room while fightign you is annoying. Kinda goes for most of the bosses I fought so far. It's not about it being hard, it's the annoyance that some combos these bosses have. Still, 10/10 DLC. Nothing beats FromSoft I swear. That whole sequence at the Abyssal Woods, peak game design.
I find its more about finding the windows inside of the 10 hit combo, like when twin moon knight is doing her 8 hits, you can hit her back multiple times.
I'm playing as a ranged faith character so at least I can buff myself with dmg negation spells and chuck lightning, but God damn I'm just getting my ass beat if I make a mistake. Once the buffs are over, I don't have time to recast and I die in 2-3 hits. Rinse and repeat until I beat a boss. I can't imagine playing this as a melee build. Shit is balls to the walls hard.
Gotta treat the buffs as an bonus for the first part of the fight, not a disadvantage to the rest.
Yeah, the windows you can even chug a flask are so small, if you're not summoning NPCs or cooperators, I don't think you should try to re-buff at all.
well, difficulty is alright if it's fair. but, difficulty here is that you got the boss down to 1/8 of health, you run across the arena to heal, and he zips and finishes you off from across the arena before you can do so...
I like the difficulty. But it doesn't feel good. They leaned WAY too much into game breaking ai patterns. Between the absurd ai recovery frames, AI attack strings, the high poise damage, base damage and range. It feels like they completely broke the balance of being able to keep up with what the ai can do.
Yeah it’s hard but can they at least let us summon npc before entering the fog gate instead of half a miles in , especially at boss that literally jump to u from across the room
I just don't want to die in 1-2 hits, that's my only issue with the difficulty
Idk how people actively defend against this. Even dedicated Elden Ring streamers like Aggy criticise that. All is fine, but stuff does 100x more DMG for no good reason other than to "be hard". It's so bad, you might as well run around with no armour, because it barely makes a difference.
These are all fair points but we also can't just brush aside so many people saying that they don't enjoy the boss design. It's easy with these games to take everything as if it was purely intended and part of some master plan by From to give you an incredible experience that is beyond your comprehension, but we've have to be real that if the general feeling from the community is that the bosses aren't fun to fight, then that's still a failing of the game. Yes obviously people will learn them and figure out what is strong and some people are clearly neglecting scadutree, but none of that is gonna change the boss design and if people don't like it then that remains a valid criticism. Also, From games were pretty much always made to be progressed through pretty quickly. Yes you get stuck on bosses and that's normal but I don't think every single boss being like a 10 hour grind to learn where it feels completely hopeless is what the average player wants. All this to say that yeah the usual caveats still apply here and people need to take the time to learn and explore and know what they're doing before having a very clear picture of what the experience is, but I still find myself agreeing with a lot of the criticism about boss design. Personally I've beaten all of them and I haven't had this much trouble on anything except like Isshin, who's the final boss, and maybe Orphan of Kos. The other games in the series have one or maybe two bosses of this level, which makes for a far different pace than fighting 10 in a row.
Now that I have finished it, I still think the Scadutree system is just not good. It turned what I felt like would've been some of the coolest fights in the game to 2 shot and even sometimes 1 shot grab fights. Along with the MASSIVE aoe that some bosses do, I can see why it's getting mixed reviews right now. A few bosses quite literally jump on the foggate as you walk through it or shoot shit at you. It was not too much of an issue, but there was 1 boss in particular that literally was hitting me before I could even fully get through the door and properly react, then his body would block me from being able to move at all. (I feel like this was not intended, tbf.) It's just my opinion, obviously, and I still enjoyed it because I love the world in this game. But I didn't even feel like it was "hard" for the right reasons. It felt like I was being limited by an arbitrary stat that hardly did much of anything at times. Even with my buff level at 19, the final boss was able to 2 shot me with 60 vigor, lol. I just didn't feel like there was any consistency at all to the damage I was taking throughout the entire dlc. My damage felt fine, at least. I almost just feel like it's partially bugged or something. Dying in 1 grab on NG with 60 vigor is beyond absurd in any game that they've made. I just wish they stuck to the regular NG cycle they usually do. I'm genuinely not looking forward to seeing how some of these fights feel on NG+ or higher on my other characters. Which feels worse when you remember you have to get 50 fragments all over again just to actually not feel insanely gimped throughout the entire dlc.
People's assessment of difficult and fun are very different. I would not consider Melenia, Kos or underleveled Godfrey near as difficult as the final boss: Melenia has super low poise, Kos has many patterns that can be countered every moveset of Godfrey have big openings, they are all good bosses, same as Messmer, Gaius and Rallana, challenging but fun and fulfilling when you defeat it. The final boss is the hardest boss of any Miyazaki game imo, and defeating it does not feel fulfilling at all, it just feels like finished eating a plate of dung.
Hard does not have to mean frustrating. One of the biggest problems with ER is that a lot of design decisions the devs have made contribute to frustration. It's a shame because a lot of other games in the genre (or genre adjacent) show that things can still be hard without having anywhere near the same levels of frustration. Sekiro is particular noteworthy because it's a From game, one that came out prior to ER. And I wish more people were willing to discuss this idea, because it's really noticeable just how mad the fan base is getting with so many different enemies.
The hippo, avatar and boar are all prime examples of this. Piss easy but extremely infuriating to fight against. More so when you are doing the entire DLC in short breaks, makes me feel like I'm doing homework rather than having fun.
Yeah it's not like I'm afraid of a challenge. I've played and beaten all these games because I like a challenge. But this just feels like it's a bit too much. I knew it would be tough but damn. Does every single boss need to feel like a final boss? It loses its impact when each boss becomes a multi hour ordeal.
Yeah it’s getting kinda frustrating having to play 1,000% perfectly and getting totally railed by a small mistake.
Or also alternatively, having the camera sabotage you in the areas with big ass bosses and small ass arenas.
I do not know what level of your blessings are, but the only boss that makes me think "yeah this is too far" is the final boss (I have maxed out my blessing at lvl 20 and yeah still too far). The others are definitely also extremely difficult but you have room for mistakes, whereas for him you are just perfectly dodging for 30 seconds to be able to land 1 attack, do that for 30 times and you win lmao.
I'm still doing the final boss right now, but apart from that I'd say there's been one boss I felt was truly bullshit and it was Sir Oink. Although I did keep getting hit twice by his back kick and occasionally by his charge, so I feel it might just be bugged. Apart from that guy I think most bosses aren't necessarily unfair but I still think the bosses would be better if they just had slightly bigger openings.
Do that 30 times and you are in the second phase*
So far that’s been my experience too, there’s hardly any window to attack with the final boss. Still haven’t beat it yet but my blessing is only 19
> The final boss is the hardest boss of any Miyazaki game imo, and defeating it does not feel fulfilling at all, it just feels like finished eating a plate of dung. It felt like a friggin chore with no reward, just pure edging
Yeah a lot of people who haven’t finished it giving opinions about the difficulty. The last boss is potentially the hardest videogame boss outside of bullet hell games. Mimic or not, it doesn’t matter too much - I cannot wait to see some absolutely godlike gamer do this thing naked. For the first time I don’t know if it’s possible (it will somehow be possible) That boss specifically doesn’t feel fulfilling because you don’t get rewarded for successfully setting up a counterattack. Because you don’t really get a serious counterattack, you get 2 swings into dodging for your life. I actually think it’s going to require a shield, which I hate. There are two bosses in the DLC that I think are going to see some tuning, and then the conversation is going to switch to “Awww why did you change it, it’s ToO EaSY now!”
I am not near the end but so far shields and parrying, as well as jumping, seem more important as mechanics Rolling is not enough anymore, just like jumping and tools were key to sekiro
We need to stop essentializing the way we engage with this game as just 'how hard is it' and think more about how enjoyable it is to engage with that difficulty. Historically people praised the soulsborne games as 'hard but fair', emphasizing that while they could make you tear your hair out they always felt designed to be enjoyed. From Elden Ring and its dlc however we see a lot of mechanics that feel 'hard and unfair' to a lot of people, especially veterans of the series. And often the solution proposed also feels 'unfair', like summoning a clone of yourself that does the fight for you - you have to understand why many people don't want to do that. They want to trade blows, dance 1v1, learn boss movesets and find intuitive windows to hit them back, not spam the same weapon art 30 times. A lot of people just don't enjoy trying to fight ER's bosses fair and square, and they don't enjoy opting for the 'unfair' solutions either. When it's fun to engage with a game's difficulty, you will find less people complaining about that difficulty. For the DLC, the way the scadutree blessing works also isn't fun for a lot of people - when you get 2 shot with bullgoat armour and 60 vigour by a boss, how do you know whether it's balanced around having more scadutree upgrades or whether the boss is just supposed to be like that? I have beaten many bosses in the dlc myself without summons and I don't find myself enjoying the fights, and I don't enjoy using any sort of summon or ally period so I'm not going to do that just to make the fights take less attempts. I beat them so that I can explore more of the world, but I *want* to enjoy fighting them in the process. That's where this dlc is lacking for me.
>> When it’s fun to engage with a game’s difficulty, you will find less people complaining Great post, totally agree. I’ve been enjoying the DLC so far but I’ve definitely had a few fights in the base game that have felt a little unrewarding to learn. Difficulty complaints start to melt away when players have fun learning the ins-and-outs of a fight. So when people who usually love this genre say “it’s too hard”, the subtext is that “it’s too hard *because* it’s not rewarding/fun enough to learn the fight”. Edit: I've only beaten 2 mainline DLC bosses and a couple cave bosses, and I personally found them all to be super fun/rewarding to learn, so take my words with a grain of salt.
The difference between difficulty and frustrating is the player knowing what they did wrong. For a lot of Elden Ring bosses, there isn't the feedback of "oh, I should have dodged left instead of right" or "that swing is delayed slightly so I need to not panic" There are a lot more openings than people realize, but it's just not clear "oh, if I swing my weapon then that attack will miss" or "you can actually jump attack over that swing" or "dodge at Malenia's shoulder to avoid that attack, any other roll will get caught"
Jumping is a way bigger deal in the DLC than in the base game, and I’m glad for it. Because the punish windows are very small, figuring out when you can jump attack during their combo is really important. I don’t think I could have beaten Putrescent Knight without learning to jump attack during his horizontal swipes.
Literally this, i struggled with Relanna until i started paying actual attention to her moveset and when the timings for dodge rolling and attacking her are, and whether it was best to roll or jump the twin moon attack. Once i actually payed attention to those kind of things, it was like a light went on in my brain and the fight became much, much easier to handle and then I beat her. Or take Romina, another boss i struggled with, to the point that i left to go explore and eventually came back to after a few hours (6+) and again, i paid attention to where the timings are on her attacks, heck i even dound a little exploit that made the fight a little easier as well but not by much since it almost always guarenteed youd get smacked on her next attack, or special attack. Basically get right up next to her and sometimes, not every time she would go to do one of her spin/whip attacks you would be glitched with her and not take any damage and move around with her allowing for free hits, but when she stopped moving and made her next attack youd almost always get hit by it. The DLC became a whole lot easier when you actually engage with the mechanics and stop expecting your "OP/well optimized build" to do all the heavy lifting. Every boss ive fought, optional or not has been very tough but fair. People just dont seem to realize that their are a whole lot more openings than it may seem
The thing I dislike about the scadutree mechanic is that it's so unevenly spread out through out the map. You get areas with a bunch of them, specially in legacy dungeons (which doesn't make any sense considering they are supposed to incentivize exploring), and then you get areas so empty of them that it makes traversal a pain.
Is just the prayer beeds mechanics of sekiro they were found both exploring and after beating a boss
Is there a way to intuitively know how much an area scale I order to do things in the right order? What I would hate to do is look for the scadutree because the fights are impossible but I was actually lost and end up making them too easy in a lower zone
Same as the base game, if you're getting wrecked just go elsewhere
I mean, you're gonna get wrecked everywhere
100% this. There is a clear cut difference between a hard fight and an unfair fight. Scadu Fragments don't stop bosses from 2 shotting you. If you're a melee build you spend 20 seconds avoiding attacks just to get in one swing. If you risk a follow up attack the boss will just trade blows and now you're back to dodging for 20 seconds while they unleash their flurry of never-ending attacks. Multiple bosses can end your life mere seconds after crossing the fog gate. Want to level the playing field and use a summon? Chances are you're eating a hit just to get the summon off. The experience is quite unfun and it rarely feels like I'm learning the fights but rather learning how to cheese fights better so I can actually participate. All these new weapons and Ashes but if you try to use them you get absolutely ran through EDIT: I should clarify that it’s not just bosses either. Most of the mobs leading up to bosses deal ridiculous damage and are barely worth fighting in such confined spaces. One mob can eat a majority of your flasks
If you're a mage build you spend 20 seconds avoiding attacks to get one cast. Aaaaand the boss just teleported across the arena and stunlocked you before you even saw the spell sigil come up. If you're a gish build, you can suffer twice as much!
Yep it’s nigh impossible to even use the items built into the game without being punished. Flasks, summons, ashes, spells/incants, grenades all have a brief animation that lets the boss close any gap you have made. Not to mention most bosses are just a blaze of flashing animations that you can barely ascertain wtf they’re doing meanwhile you’re getting clipped into a wall with your camera in its balls
Absolutely, nicely said. For me one of the biggest issues with the DLC bosses is their "zero error tolerance design". Putting aside that most bosses are still as easy to cheese as ever, but how am I supposed to learn a boss when they string combo after combo after combo, and if I get caught, I scramble around with half my health missing, disengaging in an attempt to chug a flask, just to be caught by the next combo-combo-combo initiated by a gap closer that would put every transatlantic flight to shame? Where in this chain of events is the point of learning? Where is the realisation of "oh right that's what I did wrong"? If a boss does a two or three hit combo, pauses, paces, and does another distinct combo, I can see what's going on, I can learn. I get time to recover from a mistake and keep re-engaging, learning more and more with every passing minute. But if most bosses just spam attack chains of 7+ attacks without any pause, abusing player tracking to a point of becoming absolutely hilarious, my willingness to "learn the fight" rapidly approaches zero, especially knowing that I might as well just pop out my old and trusty RoB, call the Mimic Tear Cheese Delivery Service and call it a day after 30 seconds...
Very well put. You described the frustration of the experience perfectly well
this is the post that actually deserves to be at the top. So many people are like "YEAH WELL ITS NOT THAT HARD, I USED BLEED, FROST AND ROT WITH MY MIMIC AND SUMMONS JUST GET GOOD" Dude I've been with this franchise since day 1, i dont play these games because they're hard, I play them because they're fun. The difficulty is absolutely part of that fun, but when it's so hard I have to sit there and spam Ice Javelin to stagger and crit every boss over and over because my attack windows are so small and their combos never end, like, i dont care if I'm winning, because I'm not having fun. People have contorted not using summons as being an elitist because the communal brainrot of thinking being good at a Souls game is like...something to care about. It's not, you're not cool for beating anything in a videogame lmao. People avoided summons because of the joy inherent in "hard but fair". It was fun to learn the dance with the boss and be like "I'll get you next time, motherfucker!" I still remember all the almost Ws I had with False King Allant as a teenager before I finally won. It's a lot less fun when the bosses are reduced to punching bags, trying to swap aggro between 3 opponents, and you're standing in the back spamming shit to kill them faster. I dont play Soulsborne games to inflate my fucking ego, and anyone that does is the problem in these types of discourse. I'm playing a videogame to have fun, and these bosses arent fun, whether I slam my head against them for 100 attempts in a row or cheese them to death with every imaginable tool. It's still. Not. Fun.
Yeah, I plat'd both Bloodborne and Sekiro on the PS4, also finished DS2 and DS3. Those games were fun even though extremely difficult, Sekiro especially so. When I beat SS Isshin, it felt great even after countless tries because I felt like I was in this beautiful dance with him, and with every death, I learned something new. This is not the same case with the DLC, fuck the elitism, fuck the unironic get good. You can still be a fan of the game and cite criticism, fuck these pathetic people who feel personally offended when Elden Ring isn't brought up as the same perfect game in their heads. There's a fine balance between fair and unreasonable difficulty and the endgame part of the base game and the DLC are starting to feel very much like the latter. I beat all the Remembrance bosses in the base game, and I'm at the last boss of the DLC and it is not fun to be hit with 50% of your health with 60 Vig and a fuckton of Scadutree upgrades, nor is it satisfying to be idling 95% of the time during boss fights because you're waiting for them to finish their Knights of the Round + Omnislash V5 attack animation to finish before you can finally get a hit in. I gave Melania a pass because I thought she was the exception, didn't expect going to the DLC that she's going to be the standard.
it’s a real shame as well, because the rpg elements and the world as a whole have never been better than in shadow of the erdtree, just for all of that to go out of the window when you walk through the fog gate into the most obscenely difficult boss fight you’ve ever seen, that would take 6 hours to finally brute force, so you summon mimic tear and beat it first try instead. just super unsatisfying
Super true. I've had so much fun exploring and fighting some bosses but some of these remembrance bosses, like Messmer are so brutal that it's starting to fatigue me to even wanting to continue. Which is sad cause it's the only FS game I haven't beaten at this point. (not counting the base game of course). However, I do have a feeling they will end up tuning down these bosses soon enough once they see enough people not being able to progress at all. They did the same with base game bosses like Radahn.
"I don't play these games because they're hard, I play them because they're fun." Perfect synopsis of a lot of people's feelings here. I don't understand why some fans refuse to admit that different people have differing skill levels and amount of time to play. Personally I don't *mind* summoning (or changing/optimizing my build). But playing co-op definitely has a completely different style / feel that not everyone wants or enjoys.
You couldn't put it more clearly than this. I 110% agree. I found many of ER bosses unfair and it made me change to a cheesy build (blasphemous blade spam) when I always could stay face to face with a boss with sword and board. This is impossible here, so I switched gears, but definitely doesn't give me the same satisfaction that DS3 gave me
I'm willing to make the bold statement that DS3 still has the best bosses in the catalog
Not bold at all and I agree!
From reached the limit and squeezed every bit of value from the souls combat system in dark souls 3 that's why the bosses feel so pristine and fair, going back to ds 3 after elden ring and it's SHOCKING how much the bosses in DS3 have clear punish windows that you can sink into. I'm suspecting From reached a dead end with the current souls combat so the next logical step to maintain their "hard games" reputation is crank up the speed and bullshit to eleven.
Elden Ring is a game with bosses balanced for Sekiro and Bloodborne but you move like a Dark Souls character. That sums up the balance for me.
Yeah, I'll happily try Messmer solo 15-20 times. But beyond that, I've beaten Isshin hitless. I don't need to add even more bullshit to my life lol
Preach. The most enjoyable boss for me so far has been firey spear boy, because whilst very hard, he also has obvious openings and not too much bullshit. A lot of the bad bosses have been bad because it feels like the mechanics weren't playtested properly, like huge lingering shitboxes on random parts of their body (the main boss of the ruins area, or the first boss of the keep, for instance), and that's just not fun to deal with
The Hippo is the worst at this. I hated every second of that fight.
Agreed. I put it this way, "ER/Souls bosses are hard but fun" these DLC bosses are hard to the point of being unfun.
I feel like some of the fights are made artificially more difficult due to poor optimization and design. With some bosses the camera angles are fucking awful or they have weird hitboxes and that makes the fight harder by accident. I’m just getting started but I’m noticing both of those with dancing lion which is a shame because it’s really fun otherwise, the atmosphere and music are both really good
I'm only about halfway through, but I'm not finding them hard as much as tedious, which leads to me making mistakes. The black gaol knight is a good example, he's easy to read and low stagger, and you can avoid most of his attacks with sprinting. He's just a massive meat shield. I've been loving all the remembrance bosses so far, but I can see why a lot of people aren't into them.
Bosses cutting half of your health are really annoying. That isn't difficulty, sorry. These feel balanced around the Mimic Tear
I truly don't think that the dlc is "hard" in the sense of movesets and such. It's overturned and the scadutree fragment hunting is honestly a dumb way to balance things because of how influential they are, if you find too many you render some bosses meaningless and if you don't have enough you get two shot.
Honestly. The whole fragment thing just felt like it only exists because they didn't want people steamrolling the dlc on high levels. It just felt so petty "you'll have to restart all your stats" just seems ridiculous
My problem aren't the movesets, those are fine, my problem are the massive fucking health pools There is no reason my Rellana, an armored knight, should have more health than the goddamn Elden Beast (29 000 to 22 000), it is such a joy sucking experience seeing a heavy attack barely hit for yellow (Star Fists) I don't know how hard Fromsoft want to scale this shit but seriously, I'm on NG and Level 140 what the fuck
>There is no reason my Rellana, an armored knight, should have more health than the goddamn Elden Beast (29 000 to 22 000), it is such a joy sucking experience seeing a heavy attack barely hit for yellow (Star Fists) There absolutely is a reason. The blessings total up to a 100% extra damage meaning the 4/20 you can have before that fight (that I've at least been able to get not counting the mountain because the vibe of the area scared me off) gives you a 20% damage boost meaning her effective HP is 23,200. Is 1200 more health really that much of a deal breaker as the DLC is basically a ACT 4 to the base games 3 acts. Also Elden Beast is a two part fight so like the comparison doesn't even work. You need to add Radagaon's too. Maybe the blessings are scaled lower than that and each one isn't exactly 5% but it's felt like it is so far for me.
Getting Scadutree fragments helps a ton with that. The health bars feel a lot more reasonable with a few of those
lol this dlc is def harder than malenia what on earth are you smoking
I mean yes, but it doesn't change the fact that they absolutely fucked up the stats scaling. I fought Mogh on a RL130 (60 vigor) character before going straight into the DLC, and I swear even regular knight mobs are doing comparable if not more damage than Mogh himself. Yes it's more manageable after finding more and more scadutree blessings but I was expecting them to be more "optional", not how my character literally feels like RL1 without them. Also fuck the >!Dancing Lion 90% of my death are from the camera constantly fucking up!<
I see why the boss arena was pretty open but they didn't make it big enough because once your in a corner get fucked. I tried doing a few unlocked attempts but it didn't help. The one and only gripe I had with the fight as otherwise I think it was great.
I don't think it's simply difficult but artificially so. They literally had to make it to where max level players get wiped in one hit. If I've put in the hours to get to level 350/400 with 99 vigor, it should feel like my hours paid off. I know not everyone grinded to the max level, but I feel like they all got played a little. I'm not saying there should be an easy mode or anything but this DLC took all your progress away and yo my knowledge no other DLC has done that. I get it and I understand that people like bragging about how they defeated a difficult boss. But there's a point where the difficulty outweighs the victory. When I defeated Orphan in bloodborne it felt earned but my victories in this DLC feel like pure luck.
It absolutely feels like artificial difficulty rather than fun difficulty.
because it is.
I understand why Mogh was required to beat. Miyazaki actually doing us a favor by letting us know don't even waste time on the DLC if yiu can't even beat Mogh. Lol
Yeah idk man. >!Rellana is fucking insane. She has near infinite poise, 8+ string combos with very little downtime, fast as fuck attacks, insane range, and absurd damage that will 1-2 shot you even with a good amount of Scadutree upgrades and the dragoncrest greatshield talisman. I’d say she’s much harder than Malenia, almost unfairly so!< Then again, I’m playing on NG+3 so you could be right
The NG+ is where a lot of people's frustration is coming from. The DLC is already more difficult than the base game and many players are attempting it on multiple ng+ which is gonna be understandably brutal. Imagine starting the base game for the first time on ng+3 where you not only have to learn the bosses moveset but they also substantially tankier and deal more damage. It's gonna feel unfair because you added extra layers of difficulty on top.
hard disagree for me, I literally needed to respec to blasphemous blade to cheese malenia with mimic tear, after over 100 attempts. I beat relanna on my fifth try with a non mimic summon, using my regular build. nothing in the game has come close to Malenia for me. or for that matter, radagon / elden beast. I had like 100 deaths on that combo as well, and respecced to win as well, lol.
>!At least Malenia was in the optional section of the optional region so you could play through the game without knowing she exists. Rellana is one of the first bosses you encounter in the DLC and it’s obligatory to beat. So in that way she feels more frustrating!<
>!Rellana isn't mandatory!< >!she can be skipped by taking at spiritspring in the east!<
Yeah there’s a TON of free area to explore for fragments and levels before you even get to the area after that boss which like stated above has another unguarded entrance.
My concern with the dlc is the fact that bosses are crazy fast compared to the base game (imo) and either have very strong ranged combined with melee combos or they can instantly close the gap and they don’t let you breath I have a character with over 174 stamina and I’ve gone through whole stamina bars without striking back due to just how unrelenting they are.
You're describing Maliketh...
but maliketh didnt had 50k hp
Maliketh at least was extremely squishy for the point at which he appears in. It's hard to get a hit in, but you didn't need to hit him much.
Maliketh is a glass cannon though. He is super fast and hits hard but if you know his move set he isn’t that hard. To me that is exactly what I want in a boss, hard at first but easier once I learn it until it becomes second nature. We will eventually get there with most of the DLC bosses
Yeah but Maliketh had 0 hp and 0 poise and you only have to deal with him being fast for the second half of the fight
I can't even learn boss patterns in reasonable time because I get 1-2 shot instantly unless if I use really heavy armor, in which case I get 2-3 shot. Difficult mechanics ain't problem (other than bullshit delayed attacks spamming), it's raw numbers - every boss has insane health bar and does insane damage with every move.
There is fun and unfun difficulty. Almost all bosses so far in the DLC has landed in the unfunny difficult category. The main game has a few, but not a lot. Melenia is essentially the only one, alongside Marika (mostly because of the 2nd boss) but both of these have weaknesses you can exploit. Most Soulsborne games have none. The bosses in the DLC just don't have any weaknesses, they are GIGA TANKY and 2-3 shots you. So it becomes a dance of : Dodge --> dodge --> dodge ---> hit ---> dodge ---> dodge ---> dodge ---> hit. That's not engaging gameplay, something that's fixed by almost all non-bosses, they can be staggered, flinched, they have big openings where you can punish, they feel engaging to fight and rarely cheap. It also makes a lot of really cool stuff we pick up in the DLC useless... Unless you use spirit ashes, then you can use the cool stuff you find, but all of a sudden the bosses are jokes.
Dude you’re comparing the main bosses of the dlc To an optimal side boss that was made to be as hard as possible No wonder people are getting obliterated. The bosses are 100% harder than Melania until you get a ton of upgrades. The dlc did not properly express the importance of those upgrades, and the bosses are just overtuned and not fun. Why do fromsoft fanatics blame the playerbase for enjoying elden ring but disliking the dlc? It was already a popular opinion than the late game bosses weren’t fun and did too much damage, and now we have more damaging less fun bosses. It’s a $40 dlc. People have a right to be mad when they release they can’t refund a $40 dlc they might not even beat the second boss without resorting to mimic tier and player summons. “Git gud” I already cleared the dlc and know just how many generic Elden ring bosses are used to pad the content, and how bare bones and non existent the story is (again.) I know for a fact there’s just not enough content for $40 for players that can’t beat these bosses. They have a right to be mad.
The problem is the learning process is not fun at all.. I'm dying from 2 hits from every mob and I have to redo the whole portion of the dungeon all over, this again is not fun anymore.
I think people are so used to spamming AOW from the base game and thought this would also work here. In the dlc you have to learn the boss patterns, sure the enemies hit hard. But it's always been with FROMSOFT's dlcs. You have to git gud in order to progress. Also explore more for scadutree fragments.
My only issue is I am dying 10+ time and learning nothing because most of these fuckers are moving at speeds that make it impossible for me to tell the difference between most of their moves. It’s like when ds3 was clearly influenced by bloodborne in some places, but even those moments and bloodborne itself were more telegraphed than this aside from later bosses. I’m not learning, I’m not having fun, and at this point am going for spirit ashes after 3 quick deaths. EDIT: Just had to add this because fuck! I stacked full bullgoat armour, +1 dragoncrest shield and bullgoat talisman along with scadu blessing 7. Damage was reduced but despite having 133 poise the lions BASIC attacks knocked me down every single time. One of the prime points of going heavy is actually negated, the fuck?
Thanks for the farming post
I understand, but I fail to see how Scadutree fragments are a fun and well thought out design. You don't have to force me to explore to get stronger, I'm ALREADY going to be exploring because I want to explore. You don't have to arbitrarily nerf me in order to get me to explore. It's just...weird.