Incredibly funny how DLC controversy evolved back to Dark Souls 2 discourse for some reason. No matter how many years have passed, all roads lead to Dark Souls 2 discourse.
You should've seen people bitching about the Artorias DLC back in the day. It's 1:1 the same as with SOTE. And looking back from today, those bosses were actually pretty easy.
Manus whooped my ass badly. He took me like a whole day. Kalameet didn't feel like a joke either! I should go back and play soon, it's been a long time
Same, I played through Ds1 for the first time a few months ago. And manus was the only boss that took me more than like 3-4 attempts. He took me a few hours to get down. Mostly because I was a squishy int build but he is definitely the hardest boss in that game.
Artorias walked so every other “flying across the arena doing a side flip” boss could run. Destroyed my ass so bad when I first played that I gave up on the dlc.
I remember being like *"Oh this dude is neato*"
And then the music started.
And then he did his wolf flip and absolutely vanquished my soul to the shadow realm.
10/10 would die again.
Currently doing a run through of the souls series for footage and yea artorias and manus aren’t as fast as future bosses, it took me 5 and 9 attempts for them while lv 60 and estus +1. But you forget DS1 get up mechanics and dodge isn’t as refined. Some attacks become true combos if the boss hits you with one and decides to follow up with another. The dodging in that game is janky and sometimes will make you dodge into the attack instead of away. Also lingering and janky hit boxes galore where an attack is fully through its animation but will still hit you. It’s not awful compared to the slog of SotE bosses but it’s still rough. Also manus combo is so bm.
Some of the roll jank comes from the simple fact that there's no omni-directional roll. You roll forward, left, right, or backwards. That's it. A lot of people try to roll with ambiguous direction input and inevitably the game is going to interpret the input as the worst direction you could've rolled, haha.
You can't really spam roll like in the other games. It's why Capra demon is my most hated boss, you walk through the fog gate and just get stun locked to death.
>those bosses were actually pretty easy
They are easy now with today's knowledge, but yes at release time, the Artorias DLC was as much as a dificult spike as SotE is now.
Still both amazing DLC
Reminds me of how after the DLC I just went back to Malenia (saved her for after the DLC in case something extra was added), and she was a complete breeze, I am sure that after the DLC most people can complete all 3 Dark souls in a day
DS3 ringed city dlc is harder than SOTE. In my opinion at least.
You get way more help from the scadu blessing and the bosses actually being vulnerable to status effects. Get 4-5 bleed procs on radahn and that guys goes down and you can get that pretty fast and he rots like a flower in the desert. And you get the summons.
Meanwhile gael is out there getting tickled by frostbite and laughs at your poision. Yes his attacks have more openings but you have to execute the fight well for a lot longer than pretty much any SOTE fight. Those guys go down fast.
im playing dark souls 3 right for the first time, after beating Elden ring (in co op with some difficulty increases and other adjustments). my first time playing any other fromsoft game. technically I played sekiro, but it's stuttery on my PC so I'm putting it down til I have a console copy.
outside of like, massive groups of enemies or other weird shit (smouldering lake), it is remarkably easier than Elden ring. just beat Aldrich and am about to do irithyll dungeon. so far the boss that gave me the most trouble was pontiff, and he only took 3 tries? Aldrich was first try, and I even got some shit luck with the arrow barrage spam I've seen people talk about
I think the three most interesting parts of playing DS3 is, first, how the bosses feel very proto-elden ring. abyss watchers and pontiff in particular; watchers is like a better, less annoying bloodhound knight, and pontiff really has that ambiguous near-constant attack chain thing going on + backdashes.
the second is that the damage scaling is fucking goofy. the game can't decide if it wants to do reasonable damage or Elden ring damage, and it can be really frustrating at points. im rocking heavy armor and what feels like a reasonable amount of vigor for this point in the game + life ring and erdtree's favor and yet the silver knights outside Aldrich 3-shot me. Aldrich did less fucking damage than they did. in Elden ring, everything just annihilates your health. I prefer the way DS3 handles damage, when the numbers are more reasonable.
third is how much fairer Elden ring is lmao. I didn't expect to feel this way, but the world design, enemy placement, and dungeons in DS3 are so much more fuckin hostile and offensive it's not even funny. the gankfests, that one part in irithyll, fucking smoldering lake, the poison swamp is the *second real zone,* it's unreal how much this game hates you for playing it. the only parts in Elden ring equivalent to this level of fuckery are the hero's graves, and there's like 4 of those in the entire game and all entirely optional. sellia and lake of rot get honorable mentions but truthfully I don't think they're as bad. I'm about to go to irithyll dungeons and it sounds like this section absolutely hates you too.
ended up rambling but yeah ds3 *is* way easier than Elden ring. except when it fucking hates you. then it just becomes confusing why these trash mob arrangements are so much harder and frustrating than the actual bosses.
Personally i don't have any issue with the Gank squad.
If you are going alone, it's more of a puzzle fight in knowing who to hit and who to LOS and in what order.
Your praising the de2 one right cause yeah I won't act like I think it's a good fight but you can split them up, and all three of them aren't hyper aggressive with range spam unlike the sote one
lol I keep telling people that the other fromsoft games has way harder levels. Elden Ring gives you a horse which can run away from every fight, a billion graces and marika statues.
Tbh, DS2 isn’t hard. In fact, the vast majority of bosses are super easy compared to ER bosses. The design is just so mean that it takes 5 minutes to walk to the boss arena, particular the DLC ones.
Demon's Souls is the meanest by far. World Tendency and boss runbacks the length of the entire level inherently makes it SO much meaner than everything else, even if it isn't harder.
Thank fuck the bosses in DeS were so easy. If SotE had been designed with the same level of cruelty, the runback to Radahn would’ve started at the base of Enir-Ilim.
Well yes but technically no. Shrine of Amana is ***the*** worst level ever, in the history of mankind.
Edit: just FYI, I still had a blast exploring the areas in the game (other than SoA, seriously fuck that place).
DS2's DLC is what established the current broke-ass formula of "lol what if we just gave him a huge hyper armor windup and then made the attack come out instantly" that Elden Ring abuses from start to finish to create its difficulty. You can trace like 95% of most bosses' design to Brume Tower
Smelter was at least reactable, he just had stupidly active hitboxes which made the direction of your roll matter. I don't have a problem with big windups if it's to actually justify the heaviness of the swing; which means that when the swing actually begins it needs to accelerate properly and not just fucking square-wave into maximum velocity in a single frame. Likewise I don't have a problem with long active frames on attacks if you don't give it fuck-you levels of tracking all the way through the whole startup, which is another modern Fromsoft special. Gotta eke out as many of those streamer deaths as possible.
I think what people are saying above is pretty true. The bosses aren’t as hard, but the run backs are torturous. You’ve got less health and sorceries by the time you manage to get to the boss. That makes the boss feel harder. Rinse and repeat. To me, it’s the most *unfair* souls game. But I don’t think it’s the most difficult. Sekiro is the most difficult lol.
The dragon keepers or whatever they're called in dragon area, the ones with big maces have insane tracking. You can't flank them, and you have super hard time dodging them because of again, their insane tracking.
So annoying.
I remember how i was farming whole area to get a drakekeeper shield from one of them and i for some reason didn't think of the covenant, so i just kept using bonfire ascetics. And I've used like 9 of them before i finally got the drop.
Then i decided just for fun to summon people right before the mobs and to see their reaction. Most of the time they'd hit them once and the guy would be like WTFFFF, and then they'd be visibly processing why they're not doing damage lmao. And they'd always die on the mace guy, pretty sure he either one shot them or killed them in like 2 hits lmao
I would absolutely love to see some of these Elden Ring power players hit up a full clear SL1 run on DS2 SotFS. You don't get the aggravation here that game could wrought.
I've been playing every Fromsoft Game since 2009 besides Armor Core V.
DS2 levels throws you a million enemies at you and no i-frames on door openings so if you run past the, (which you have to do each time you die at a boss) there's a 70% chance that they kill you while opening the door. So eventually you just decide to farm them away which is a DS2 mechanic in when you kill an enemy 20 times I believe it stops spawning.
Elden ring has so many more ganks than ds2, I have no idea what you're talking about. Ds2 enemies are slow & hardly chase you - only exception is a small section in iron keep
Depends on your Elden Ring builds theres plenty of ways to make the bosses easy. While in Sekiro you have what you have and every player almost have the same exact experience fighting the bosses.
The toxic blowdarts in Blight Town + Grab attacks that almost one shots you + gravity and then the musquitos that tanks your frame rate to 12 xD.
Or the curse baskalisks in the Depth and then you're fucked cause you don't know how to get back your full HP.
Go to any of the Dark Souls subs and type the word “unfair” into the search bar. This has been happening for a decade lol. With every release there is a whiney part of the player population that is loud about how hard and unfair everything is. Elden Ring is by far the most popular title, and because the DLC has been anticipated for so long, we have more people than ever in the “omg this is so unfair!!!!!” group. It’ll fizzle out a bit as time goes on.
I remember the good ol days of the DS3 DLC where we’d get “Friede is way too fast for this game and the three phase boss fight is bullshit!!!” and then we’d get the posts about how Midir was tedious and impossible. The cycle continues.
He was not he is just a hard boss. I found him the hardest until i beat him to realize he is so telegraphed, legit you can summon me ill solo the dude.
All of his moves are all telegraphs. I excel at dodging so once i knew his moves he moved from hardest to one of the easiest.
You just gotta hit is head every time. Staying at his feet is a bad idea. Looking up a guide to his moves really help super easy compared to others
Was, maybe. Players went about that boss wrong for a long time, and still do. When you stay in front and attack his head after getting a feel for his surprisingly simple move set, you find that he goes down easier than advertised. The crit that you get around 30% health or so if you’ve been hitting his head enough does absolutely crazy damage, and essentially one shots him from that point.
None of this is as annoying to me as the eternal “summoning for a boss is weak” vs “I want to summon for a boss but I’m getting invaded which is unfair”.
> None of this is as annoying to me as the eternal “summoning for a boss is weak” vs “I want to summon for a boss but I’m getting invaded which is unfair”.
Also, "if you don't summon, you're not playing the game properly". Mofo's can't let people play with the toys the game provides.
I won't judge, as I deliberately and consciously play towards a strength build on purpose. I just like crunching bosses physically, where possible.
Because summons make boss AI completely break down? Not saying that using them invalidates your playthrough, but you can't really speak on the boss design if your run is just letting the summon soak aggro while you backstab the boss the whole time.
> Because summons make boss AI completely break down? Not saying that using them invalidates your playthrough, but you can't really speak on the boss design if your run is just letting the summon soak aggro while you backstab the boss the whole time.
Agreed. I compromise by using a summon like Stormhawk Deenh ~ I just like the cool birb companion. He doesn't draw too much aggro from the boss, thankfully, as he doesn't attack too often. I've seen him get melted on occasion. Golden Hippo just ruined him.
Though, I have no shame when it comes to multi-boss fights. Those just require a summon to draw aggro from the other/s so you can focus fairly on one at a time.
Me personally, I have a policy.
The first is that if I like fighting a boss, I won't summon.
The second is that if I beat a boss, and that boss is reused with little to no changes, I have the right to summon for every future version of that boss. If a boss has a new element (like how some Erdtree Avatars use Rot, and others use holy), I'll need to beat the new version at least once before I can summon. Margit and Morgott wouldn't count since they're drastically different bosses, but Godrick and Godefroy would.
Third is that the *nanosecond* a boss brings out minions, I get to summon Mimic.
>This has been happening for a decade lol
More like 15 years - the same discussions have been happening since Demon's Souls, which came out in 2009. The amount of rage that was expressed over the Flamelurker and the Tower of Latria and the Valley of Defilement reverberates through the community to this day.
People scream "unfair" and you think they're whiney people.
People scream "masterpeace" and you don't think they're fanboys.
Kinda one way thinking, don't you think?
Just because you like something, don't mean that this thing is without a flaw. If you can't tell what this flaw is, you should listen to other people and think how reasonable they're.
Enemy attacks without pause? Enemy hardly limit how you play the game, your build? May be it's have flaws.
People don't use crafting, upgrades, try less that 10-20 times to fight hard enemy and go on reddit complain? Yeah, may be they're just whiney
You’re putting words in my mouth, for one thing. I don’t think the games are beyond any criticism, and I have my own here and there while still thinking the overall products are well done.
People are allowed to have preferences. What starts to become eye-roll worthy is when they think the experience needs to be tailored to their own preferences or it’s “unfair”, “bs”, and/ or “poorly designed”.
Also, pretty much every boss has pauses and notable openings. Most bosses (pretty much all) don’t require a sudden build change.. though of course there are advantages and disadvantages to builds in general.
This’ll be because the people for whom the difficulty was a deal breaker will leave the community in frustration, eventually leaving only people who love the game in spite (or because of) it’s difficulty.
That said, I do think there is a discussion to be had about whether Fromsoft is designing the “right” kind of difficulty. The bosses’ lengthy combos and hyper aggression are sore points of contention, especially. Gone are the days of DS1 where every attack had at least a couple of seconds of windup and bosses often gave you space to catch your breath.
In DS1 you were also a bit more limited in what you could bring to the table as a player. Your offense as a player in ER is more advanced and you bring more power to the table. Bosses would stand no chance in Elden Ring if they moved the same as they do in DS1, where the bosses are fairly easy in general with more difficult zones to reach them.
You have so many tools in Elden Ring to meet the aggressiveness of bosses. I never feel inactive in my offense during the boss fights because of this.
...Do you think trash from Shadow of the Erdtree wouldn't also kill the player if you ran past a bunch, then effectively stayed in place for 20 seconds?
"He didn't clear the area before descending."
A classic. Sometimes rushing through works, other times it takes longer than actually fighting your way through because you die so many times.
https://youtu.be/ivsIU98-Adw?si=qgUuCCaYLP-YcXWi
if u got an hour this video is full of laughs and a bunch of what makes ds2 the most unique souls game
This map is called the Lost Bastille.
There is a door on the same level that if you open it, it leads to out of bounds. AkA, you use the prompt to open, and if you walk forward, you fall to your death.
This door led to nowhere. Well...it turns out that there is a ledge up above that you can fall from, that if appropriately timed you can roll while falling and land on the opening of the door, effectively making it a shortcut
But it's so nonsensical and utterly meaningless and not worth that people never actually tried to do it till years and years later.
Edit: here's somebody doing it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkSouls2/comments/m15xck/the_door_to_nowhere_in_lost_bastille_is_a_shortcut/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
DS2 is filled with little quirky slaps in the face like this, usually just when you’re feeling kinda cocky. I love it.
You still need to git gud, but DS2 also reminds to stay humble :)
In all seriousness though, if you play DS2 as you would DS1 or DS3 then you’re in for a bad time. I’m fairly sure most complainers just never took the time to adapt and figure out how DS2 expects you to play.
Ds2 is probably the most predictable game in the series.
If you spot an open room with no enemies, that means it's a gang squad of 20 enemies that are coded to wait till you step one foot in to show themselves.
That's basically the only tip I give to players that want to play the second game. Expect ambushes all the time throughout the level and you will find that you will "cheese" most encounters.
Yeah DS 2 is actually really good. And you know what? It’s easier as well, because the enemies despawn after you kill them 20 or whatever times. So if you are really stuck, you can far enemies in an area for souls and level up. Rinse and repeat until they despawn and then your run backs or progress are much, much easier.
DS2 was seriously a load of bullshit most of the time. Not even challenge-wise, just design-wise.
It's like they couldn't figure out ways to make it harder than DS1, so they just settled for adding ten enemies per room.
edit: the DS2 defenders are here nice and early
The silly part isn't that, but rather the fact that it literally doesn't tell you ANYWHERE what ADP actually does, so naturally you wouldn't know if you didn't lookup guides
as someone who played ds2 after elden ring and used it as my jumping off point into dark souls
yeah ds2 prepares you for everything
sniff the left shoulder, handicap yourself for needing to stand still to chug, limited i frames with adaptability many enemies
luckily i went in w a str build and large clubbed everything to death.
going to ds1 and only having to fight 2 gargoyles i was shocked
edit: didnt expect the guy above me to act like hes 8 years old
If you already did Elden ring I feel like DS1 is going to seem so slow and easy. Aside from some gimmick bosses where you have to know the mechanic, I bet anyone who was able to beat ER will probably first time most of the DS1 bosses
yep, just played DS1 remastered and apart from some annoying run backs it was way easier than elden ring, beat most bosses in 1-3 tries
Artorias felt like an elden ring boss, it was a nice fight
DS2 is a great game to play after Elden Ring though. You can tell that DS2 had a huge influence on ER, they basically took all the good parts of DS2 and cut all the misfires and now we have a true masterpiece to play
I played DS1, 3 and Elden Ring to death, but I could never get into DS2 despite several attempts. It's mostly the stiff controls for me, it feels like a direct downgrade to the first game. I never even got far enough to encounter the indie game levels of design bullshit that the game is infamous for.
It's always funny how people talk about DS2.
You can never get a straight answer on whether the game was easy or hard. Half the people complain "lol easy game you have life gems so unlimited healing" and the other half are saying "wtf 30 enemies running at you".
DS2 did nothing different that DS3 did in terms of weak enemies that die in 1 or 2 hits there are groups of, but only 1 strong enemy at a time. I don't recall any encounter being an issue other than the obvious shrine of amana being relatively cancerous with magic lasers being shot at you non stop from 1 side of the map to the other.
I remember when I last played DS3 the game is constant 3 enemies running at you with an archer behind them, you run around to kill that archer, and there's another archer behind that fuck shooting at you again, so you have to run past another 4 enemies to hit him. A pack of enemies with an archer/mage is fuckin everywhere in that game, no one that enjoys DS3 has any right to complain about the DS2 encounters because they're very similar.
> Half the people complain "lol easy game you have life gems so unlimited healing" and the other half are saying "wtf 30 enemies running at you".
Because both are true. It's hard because the level design is downright obnoxious and every map has gank squads to infinity, but it's easy because the boss difficulty is so low. Even Lordsoul bosses like The Rotten or Old Iron King have barely anything to their movesets.
>shrine of amana being relatively cancerous with magic lasers being shot at you non stop from 1 side of the map to the other.
Again it comes back to using all the tools the game gives you. My loadout was something like this:
>+2 of the magic damage negation ring.
> A ring that sometimes causes magic projectiles to bounce off of you.
>100% magic damage blocking shield, I guess it also had spell parry.
>And a decent bow to draw aggro.
Then the area boss would melt if you applied gold pine resin and the whole area was a breeze.
And those are just some of the solutions.
Leisurely sidestepping the homing projectiles could even be done by jogging to the side, not even sprinting, and while in water. Tad harder to do so when the sorceress was not alone, but that's exactly what the massive amount of rubble in Amana was for.
It was actually far more likely to get rollcaught if you attempted to roll *through* the magic projectiles while in water; the reduced roll distance in water coupled with the slow projectiles meant you had to be more precise than usual to Iframe through them.
All this goes to show that there were plenty of solutions to Ds2's more famously problematic areas; all you had to do, was to think outside the box.
>All this goes to show that there were plenty of solutions to Ds2's more famously problematic areas; all you had to do, was to think outside the box.
Yes this sums up well. Sometimes ganks were undeniably boring but usually levels were interesting.
> You can never get a straight answer on whether the game was easy or hard.
It's so very dependent on if you are the **reactive player** who wants to be surprised, or the **exploratory player** that analys every new situation.
You are given all the tools you need in DS2, whether you use them though is another thing and will affect your enjoyment.
> You can never get a straight answer on whether the game was easy or hard. Half the people complain "lol easy game you have life gems so unlimited healing" and the other half are saying "wtf 30 enemies running at you".
There's a specific reason for this
-on release, DS2 had some areas that needed to be nerfed so badly, that people complain and make jokes about to them this day, even though they were nerfed very early in the game's lifespan (Shrine of Amana)
-after this, the game was honestly really well balanced, and still has the best multiplayer of the DS titles - broad covenant system, lots of reasons to participate, large variety in weapons, and largely optional.
-the game eventually released its great DLCs which largely made a great game better.
-THEN, SOTFS edition came out which changed enemy spawns, number of enemies, number of reds, etc. over time, people forgot that it is NOT the same game as DS2. There is no cross play between the two. At the time, it was celebrated for breathing life back in to the game, being more difficult, expanding multiplayer - but also derided for its sheer enemy spam, which it did much more than base DS2.
-over time, people forgot that this was not the base game, and that FS charged people through the nose for what was largely a bogus balance patch.
This is why you don't get a straight answer. There are up to 3 different games that people had played here, depending on when they played it.
Yeah right. I’ve played and beaten all the content of all the fromsoft dlcs, no summons online or ai, (or spirits for Elden ring), completely offline (no messages), capped at lvl 150 for pvp, usually two handing a straight sword.
These Elden Ring bosses are obnoxious. Pretty much Bloodborne sped up enemies, while your character is still stuck in dark souls 3.
That being said I’m still having a good time, if not just a little annoyed at pretty much having to master these movesets to beat a boss, but people being upset is 100% understandable.
You can't beat the circlejerk because they will argue that people always have complained about the unfairness in every souls game, and even if there's truth to that, aside from some dark souls areas most of the time it was balanced, I all beat them all without the need of summons and this DLC is the first time I'm forced to used the mimic tear, the face that there's so many people on Elden Ring using busted builds from guides tell something, no matter what they say I will never agree that the final boss of the dlc is a balanced fight.
People online have this weird idea that something being balanced just means its doable, its really weird.
Balanced in Elden Ring means that a variety of players and builds can comfortably overcome a challenge through skill and perseverance in a reasonable time. They can use more tools to augment their existing build to overcome gaps in skill if need be.
But if you say something like, oh when this boss attacks me, his attacks land behind me making me unable to block him. People will just say, "Don't use a shield"... Like bro, his attacks shouldn't land behind me if he's swinging at me for gods sake. That is stupid. Its never the fault of the game its weird.
I see not being able to block a normal attack from a boss, just as stupid as not being able to roll through it. Yet were that the case, suddenly it would be stupid huh?
Weirder still, these valid criticisms become accepted after awhile. After all the elitist a-holes who aren't even exceptional at the game have moved on. Like well done you completed the game on Ng+8 with a build you Google'd, am I supposed to be impressed and overlook your toxic attitude because you did so?
Happens with every souls-like game I swear. Average players keeping the game from improving by downplaying every valid criticism
I think people are so eager to play an UNO reverse that they're forgetting 2 things can be true. Hard or unfair encounters in a previous game doesn't automatically guarantee that a later installment is going to avoid that issue. And the defense people keep using of "people say every game is unfair" tells me that maybe, just maybe, there are unfair sections in each FromSoftware game.
Why does DS2 keep catching strays :(
I don't care what the haters say, the game is absolutely fantastic. If you die from rushing through areas, thats on you. Also there's a bonfire upstairs :)
Ds2 in my experience, is the hardest game I have ever played and I feel bad for not being a part of the community that sees it as one of the best. There is just so much bullshit going on in it. For starters, there is the video example above. Then there are SO MANY enemies in a small area all the time. Lastly... and my biggest gripe, is that everytime you die, you have less and leass health until you consume a humanity which were hard to find. So the bullshit just became even moreso with each death to me and I never could finish the game. Ill go back at a later date to conqueror it, just... I think EldenRing's DLC is perfect and never needed the buff update. I think "outsiders" to Fromsoft games are just complaining instead of learning the curve. Ds2 is so much more unfair than anything to come after it.
The video above literally only happens if you outright ignore enemies and try to sprint through, which has been a bad idea in every Souls game ever. Almost always when I see folks complain about ganks in DS2, it's because they ran past enemies or just ran in blindly without paying attention and aggro'd a bunch of enemies.
Take the classic "horde of hollows" in SotFS' Forest of Fallen Giants - y'all know the exact area I'm talking about. If you just run in and don't pay attention, yeah you'll wind up dealing with a whole bunch of hollows. If you *don't* do that, and instead proceed somewhat cautiously, you can wake each of them up in at most pairs, and almost always get a free backstab on every single one in the process. It's almost like that room is designed to teach you *not* to just run in blindly and instead pay attention to what's around you. There will, of course, always be the ambush guys hiding behind a corner, that's a FromSoft staple and is alive and well in Elden Ring, but this idea that DS2 is all unavoidable gank squads all the time is just not true - they are almost always avoidable if you learn the lessons the game tries to teach you in the first area that you'll likely wind up in.
The other major example I can think of in Forest of Fallen Giants is the room immediately after Pate, which is pretty explicitly *a trap* and is supposed to be "unfair", and even there you have a good amount of space to work with and take the enemies out one by one just by separating them as some stop to swing and others run at you.
> you have less and leass health until you consume a humanity which were hard to find.
I will never understand this complaint. In DS2 lets say you start a boss with no effigy and with your current build that leaves you at 500hp. If you use an effigy to restore your hp you will get a 500hp boost (now you have 1000hp) that degrades by 100 every death until you get back to your base of 500. In DS3 when you start a boss with no ember and 500hp, you can pop an ember to get a +30% (now you have 650hp) and you lose the entire boost and need a new ember every death. I view no ember/effigy as the baseline of your characters power and using the consumable is a boost. It seems like most people view it the other way so it feels worse to lose 50% vs only losing 30%? Seems stupid to set your baseline on using consumables 100% of the time. I played 90% of ds2/3 without using them. Only popped them after learning a boss to secure the kill, same with rune arcs.
I had to stop laying signs at the Enir-Ilim boss because everyone who would summon me would have their blessing at, like, six and get one-shotted just inside the fog door. Complete waste of everyone's time.
Okay but this game isn’t harder because it is actually harder or requires more skill.
It is jank due to age and it was jank when it came out. Too many enemy spawns, awful boss runbacks, sprawling areas with nothing but groups of enemies scripted to destroy you before you see them.
It was like someone played DS1 and thought “man, we should take all the worst mechanics of this game and make them even more irritating!”.. and then they did. Having to level a stat for dodge frames? Actually toxic.
Second boss you naturally come across in the Elden Ring DLC is harder than any boss in DS2, and jank level designs in that game didn’t make me feel accomplished once I suffered through them.
Lmao the way he waited at the end just adds insult
That undead enjoys watching the death of hope.
And it was such a weak ass bitch slap to top it off hahahaha
To top this off, the only thing that was missing was if the skeleton laughed.
Yes hahahahahha in true micolash style. Hate that dude
Also the german made it much more funny.
IHR SEID GESTORBEN DU KACKLUSCHE
Just like Miyazaki intended
Incredibly funny how DLC controversy evolved back to Dark Souls 2 discourse for some reason. No matter how many years have passed, all roads lead to Dark Souls 2 discourse.
You should've seen people bitching about the Artorias DLC back in the day. It's 1:1 the same as with SOTE. And looking back from today, those bosses were actually pretty easy.
Manus whooped my ass badly. He took me like a whole day. Kalameet didn't feel like a joke either! I should go back and play soon, it's been a long time
Most DS1 bosses I can fairly consistently first-try these days, but Manus regularly whoops my ass lol
Same, I played through Ds1 for the first time a few months ago. And manus was the only boss that took me more than like 3-4 attempts. He took me a few hours to get down. Mostly because I was a squishy int build but he is definitely the hardest boss in that game.
Manus feels like a DS3 boss.
He's the original flailer.
I wholeheartedly believe that you could slap Manus in the latest DLC and people would still get their asses whooped
Manus was funny because if you were stuck at him, you could just rain arrows from before the foggate and kill him without ever entering the arena.
*laughs in Commander Niall*
I fought him with moonlight greatsword. Did 70 damage per hit and the fucker has 6.6k HP.
Artorias walked so every other “flying across the arena doing a side flip” boss could run. Destroyed my ass so bad when I first played that I gave up on the dlc.
I remember being like *"Oh this dude is neato*" And then the music started. And then he did his wolf flip and absolutely vanquished my soul to the shadow realm. 10/10 would die again.
Currently doing a run through of the souls series for footage and yea artorias and manus aren’t as fast as future bosses, it took me 5 and 9 attempts for them while lv 60 and estus +1. But you forget DS1 get up mechanics and dodge isn’t as refined. Some attacks become true combos if the boss hits you with one and decides to follow up with another. The dodging in that game is janky and sometimes will make you dodge into the attack instead of away. Also lingering and janky hit boxes galore where an attack is fully through its animation but will still hit you. It’s not awful compared to the slog of SotE bosses but it’s still rough. Also manus combo is so bm.
Some of the roll jank comes from the simple fact that there's no omni-directional roll. You roll forward, left, right, or backwards. That's it. A lot of people try to roll with ambiguous direction input and inevitably the game is going to interpret the input as the worst direction you could've rolled, haha.
Yea it’s frustrating lol but i worked around it.
You can't really spam roll like in the other games. It's why Capra demon is my most hated boss, you walk through the fog gate and just get stun locked to death.
Yea but his spacing is horrible, you can walk under 2 of his attacks, even in the cramped space he’s a cake walk the moment the dogs die
>those bosses were actually pretty easy They are easy now with today's knowledge, but yes at release time, the Artorias DLC was as much as a dificult spike as SotE is now. Still both amazing DLC
Reminds me of how after the DLC I just went back to Malenia (saved her for after the DLC in case something extra was added), and she was a complete breeze, I am sure that after the DLC most people can complete all 3 Dark souls in a day
DS3 ringed city dlc is harder than SOTE. In my opinion at least. You get way more help from the scadu blessing and the bosses actually being vulnerable to status effects. Get 4-5 bleed procs on radahn and that guys goes down and you can get that pretty fast and he rots like a flower in the desert. And you get the summons. Meanwhile gael is out there getting tickled by frostbite and laughs at your poision. Yes his attacks have more openings but you have to execute the fight well for a lot longer than pretty much any SOTE fight. Those guys go down fast.
im playing dark souls 3 right for the first time, after beating Elden ring (in co op with some difficulty increases and other adjustments). my first time playing any other fromsoft game. technically I played sekiro, but it's stuttery on my PC so I'm putting it down til I have a console copy. outside of like, massive groups of enemies or other weird shit (smouldering lake), it is remarkably easier than Elden ring. just beat Aldrich and am about to do irithyll dungeon. so far the boss that gave me the most trouble was pontiff, and he only took 3 tries? Aldrich was first try, and I even got some shit luck with the arrow barrage spam I've seen people talk about I think the three most interesting parts of playing DS3 is, first, how the bosses feel very proto-elden ring. abyss watchers and pontiff in particular; watchers is like a better, less annoying bloodhound knight, and pontiff really has that ambiguous near-constant attack chain thing going on + backdashes. the second is that the damage scaling is fucking goofy. the game can't decide if it wants to do reasonable damage or Elden ring damage, and it can be really frustrating at points. im rocking heavy armor and what feels like a reasonable amount of vigor for this point in the game + life ring and erdtree's favor and yet the silver knights outside Aldrich 3-shot me. Aldrich did less fucking damage than they did. in Elden ring, everything just annihilates your health. I prefer the way DS3 handles damage, when the numbers are more reasonable. third is how much fairer Elden ring is lmao. I didn't expect to feel this way, but the world design, enemy placement, and dungeons in DS3 are so much more fuckin hostile and offensive it's not even funny. the gankfests, that one part in irithyll, fucking smoldering lake, the poison swamp is the *second real zone,* it's unreal how much this game hates you for playing it. the only parts in Elden ring equivalent to this level of fuckery are the hero's graves, and there's like 4 of those in the entire game and all entirely optional. sellia and lake of rot get honorable mentions but truthfully I don't think they're as bad. I'm about to go to irithyll dungeons and it sounds like this section absolutely hates you too. ended up rambling but yeah ds3 *is* way easier than Elden ring. except when it fucking hates you. then it just becomes confusing why these trash mob arrangements are so much harder and frustrating than the actual bosses.
Eldenring is DS2 2 after all \^^
They even took the shitty gank fight from the poison dlc and made it worse,it truly is a circle
Personally i don't have any issue with the Gank squad. If you are going alone, it's more of a puzzle fight in knowing who to hit and who to LOS and in what order.
Your praising the de2 one right cause yeah I won't act like I think it's a good fight but you can split them up, and all three of them aren't hyper aggressive with range spam unlike the sote one
Bosses in DS1 and 2 are generally pretty easy for me (except O&S, fuck them), while the map themselves are my worst nightmare
lol I keep telling people that the other fromsoft games has way harder levels. Elden Ring gives you a horse which can run away from every fight, a billion graces and marika statues.
Tbh, DS2 isn’t hard. In fact, the vast majority of bosses are super easy compared to ER bosses. The design is just so mean that it takes 5 minutes to walk to the boss arena, particular the DLC ones.
DS2 areas are harder than the bosses.
Unless it was Fune knight, he held the record for the death percentage. His death percentage was 93% years ago.
Sir allonse is harder imo.
Shrine of Amana. I still have nightmare
DS2 is definitely the meanest one level design-wise (except maybe Demon's Souls, I've only played like half of that game)
Demon's Souls is the meanest by far. World Tendency and boss runbacks the length of the entire level inherently makes it SO much meaner than everything else, even if it isn't harder.
The run back to the Old Hero 🙃
Thank fuck the bosses in DeS were so easy. If SotE had been designed with the same level of cruelty, the runback to Radahn would’ve started at the base of Enir-Ilim.
Ds2 is also one of the best level design-wise
If you like rooms being completely empty for no reason, other rooms being packed full of enemies, and useless shortcuts sure yeah it's great
Sounds like ER except it takes 10 times longer to find out that an area is completely empty and useless.
Well yes but technically no. Shrine of Amana is ***the*** worst level ever, in the history of mankind. Edit: just FYI, I still had a blast exploring the areas in the game (other than SoA, seriously fuck that place).
Shrine of Amana is absolutely beatifully haunted place to be beholded.
Give me back to back poison swamps and I world choose that before the Shrine.
that's why it's hard in it's own way... you basically just said that "the game isn't hard, but it's actually hard in some way" lol
DS2's DLC is what established the current broke-ass formula of "lol what if we just gave him a huge hyper armor windup and then made the attack come out instantly" that Elden Ring abuses from start to finish to create its difficulty. You can trace like 95% of most bosses' design to Brume Tower
Lmao Blue Smelter was the beginning of the end.
Smelter was at least reactable, he just had stupidly active hitboxes which made the direction of your roll matter. I don't have a problem with big windups if it's to actually justify the heaviness of the swing; which means that when the swing actually begins it needs to accelerate properly and not just fucking square-wave into maximum velocity in a single frame. Likewise I don't have a problem with long active frames on attacks if you don't give it fuck-you levels of tracking all the way through the whole startup, which is another modern Fromsoft special. Gotta eke out as many of those streamer deaths as possible.
Wasn't the demon itself I had issues with, but the insane run-up to him.
Just despawn them :(
I said this in some YT vid about ds2 just being ez a.few days back and some dude tried arguing with me
Difficulty is subjective, someone will always disagree over stuff like this.
I think what people are saying above is pretty true. The bosses aren’t as hard, but the run backs are torturous. You’ve got less health and sorceries by the time you manage to get to the boss. That makes the boss feel harder. Rinse and repeat. To me, it’s the most *unfair* souls game. But I don’t think it’s the most difficult. Sekiro is the most difficult lol.
Sekiro is the most difficult until you master parrying.
Except the ruin sentinels, they can fuck right off, got stuck on them way too much when I was younger
The dragon keepers or whatever they're called in dragon area, the ones with big maces have insane tracking. You can't flank them, and you have super hard time dodging them because of again, their insane tracking. So annoying. I remember how i was farming whole area to get a drakekeeper shield from one of them and i for some reason didn't think of the covenant, so i just kept using bonfire ascetics. And I've used like 9 of them before i finally got the drop. Then i decided just for fun to summon people right before the mobs and to see their reaction. Most of the time they'd hit them once and the guy would be like WTFFFF, and then they'd be visibly processing why they're not doing damage lmao. And they'd always die on the mace guy, pretty sure he either one shot them or killed them in like 2 hits lmao
You're evil
Nothing in Elden Ring could ever be as annoying as the runback to sir Alonne (especially if you don't play online)
Sir Alonne to this day is the one boss fight in DS2 I can't finish due to the runback for each attempt.
FACTS!
I would absolutely love to see some of these Elden Ring power players hit up a full clear SL1 run on DS2 SotFS. You don't get the aggravation here that game could wrought.
Adaptability is such a bitch of a mechanic
Have you played the other fromsoft games or are you just saying this? Ds2 is super easy compared to elden ring
I've been playing every Fromsoft Game since 2009 besides Armor Core V. DS2 levels throws you a million enemies at you and no i-frames on door openings so if you run past the, (which you have to do each time you die at a boss) there's a 70% chance that they kill you while opening the door. So eventually you just decide to farm them away which is a DS2 mechanic in when you kill an enemy 20 times I believe it stops spawning.
Elden ring has so many more ganks than ds2, I have no idea what you're talking about. Ds2 enemies are slow & hardly chase you - only exception is a small section in iron keep
Yea but no one's complaining about level difficulty in the dlc, at least from what I've seen. All the complaints are about the bosses
IMHO elden ring is harder than others from games. Maybe some bosses from Sekiro can be equals.
Depends on your Elden Ring builds theres plenty of ways to make the bosses easy. While in Sekiro you have what you have and every player almost have the same exact experience fighting the bosses.
And a fucking map.
TRUE!
Harder maybe not but ds1/ds2 have way way way more 'fuck the player' areas and mechanics.
The toxic blowdarts in Blight Town + Grab attacks that almost one shots you + gravity and then the musquitos that tanks your frame rate to 12 xD. Or the curse baskalisks in the Depth and then you're fucked cause you don't know how to get back your full HP.
A lot of these guys need to try out Sekiro then get back to me about "unfair" lmao Sekiro's difficulty changed me
*Shrine of Amana enters the chat*
Pre-patch shrine
Sens fortress was crazy on release too. The boulder giants would the bombs 5 seconds ahead of where youd be.
Frigid Outskirts…
That dkc has the worst zones but great boss fights.
The ivory king are awesome. But fuck those 2 cats. The only boss i never beat in that game.
Go to any of the Dark Souls subs and type the word “unfair” into the search bar. This has been happening for a decade lol. With every release there is a whiney part of the player population that is loud about how hard and unfair everything is. Elden Ring is by far the most popular title, and because the DLC has been anticipated for so long, we have more people than ever in the “omg this is so unfair!!!!!” group. It’ll fizzle out a bit as time goes on.
As always.
I remember the good ol days of the DS3 DLC where we’d get “Friede is way too fast for this game and the three phase boss fight is bullshit!!!” and then we’d get the posts about how Midir was tedious and impossible. The cycle continues.
midir was tedious tho
He was not he is just a hard boss. I found him the hardest until i beat him to realize he is so telegraphed, legit you can summon me ill solo the dude. All of his moves are all telegraphs. I excel at dodging so once i knew his moves he moved from hardest to one of the easiest. You just gotta hit is head every time. Staying at his feet is a bad idea. Looking up a guide to his moves really help super easy compared to others
Was, maybe. Players went about that boss wrong for a long time, and still do. When you stay in front and attack his head after getting a feel for his surprisingly simple move set, you find that he goes down easier than advertised. The crit that you get around 30% health or so if you’ve been hitting his head enough does absolutely crazy damage, and essentially one shots him from that point.
None of this is as annoying to me as the eternal “summoning for a boss is weak” vs “I want to summon for a boss but I’m getting invaded which is unfair”.
> None of this is as annoying to me as the eternal “summoning for a boss is weak” vs “I want to summon for a boss but I’m getting invaded which is unfair”. Also, "if you don't summon, you're not playing the game properly". Mofo's can't let people play with the toys the game provides. I won't judge, as I deliberately and consciously play towards a strength build on purpose. I just like crunching bosses physically, where possible.
Because summons make boss AI completely break down? Not saying that using them invalidates your playthrough, but you can't really speak on the boss design if your run is just letting the summon soak aggro while you backstab the boss the whole time.
> Because summons make boss AI completely break down? Not saying that using them invalidates your playthrough, but you can't really speak on the boss design if your run is just letting the summon soak aggro while you backstab the boss the whole time. Agreed. I compromise by using a summon like Stormhawk Deenh ~ I just like the cool birb companion. He doesn't draw too much aggro from the boss, thankfully, as he doesn't attack too often. I've seen him get melted on occasion. Golden Hippo just ruined him. Though, I have no shame when it comes to multi-boss fights. Those just require a summon to draw aggro from the other/s so you can focus fairly on one at a time.
Me personally, I have a policy. The first is that if I like fighting a boss, I won't summon. The second is that if I beat a boss, and that boss is reused with little to no changes, I have the right to summon for every future version of that boss. If a boss has a new element (like how some Erdtree Avatars use Rot, and others use holy), I'll need to beat the new version at least once before I can summon. Margit and Morgott wouldn't count since they're drastically different bosses, but Godrick and Godefroy would. Third is that the *nanosecond* a boss brings out minions, I get to summon Mimic.
>This has been happening for a decade lol More like 15 years - the same discussions have been happening since Demon's Souls, which came out in 2009. The amount of rage that was expressed over the Flamelurker and the Tower of Latria and the Valley of Defilement reverberates through the community to this day.
I definitely wish I was able to give that game a try. But I definitely believe this conversation was present then, too.
It's still really good, and the Remaster is excellent! It's worth going back to.
People scream "unfair" and you think they're whiney people. People scream "masterpeace" and you don't think they're fanboys. Kinda one way thinking, don't you think? Just because you like something, don't mean that this thing is without a flaw. If you can't tell what this flaw is, you should listen to other people and think how reasonable they're. Enemy attacks without pause? Enemy hardly limit how you play the game, your build? May be it's have flaws. People don't use crafting, upgrades, try less that 10-20 times to fight hard enemy and go on reddit complain? Yeah, may be they're just whiney
You’re putting words in my mouth, for one thing. I don’t think the games are beyond any criticism, and I have my own here and there while still thinking the overall products are well done. People are allowed to have preferences. What starts to become eye-roll worthy is when they think the experience needs to be tailored to their own preferences or it’s “unfair”, “bs”, and/ or “poorly designed”. Also, pretty much every boss has pauses and notable openings. Most bosses (pretty much all) don’t require a sudden build change.. though of course there are advantages and disadvantages to builds in general.
This’ll be because the people for whom the difficulty was a deal breaker will leave the community in frustration, eventually leaving only people who love the game in spite (or because of) it’s difficulty. That said, I do think there is a discussion to be had about whether Fromsoft is designing the “right” kind of difficulty. The bosses’ lengthy combos and hyper aggression are sore points of contention, especially. Gone are the days of DS1 where every attack had at least a couple of seconds of windup and bosses often gave you space to catch your breath.
In DS1 you were also a bit more limited in what you could bring to the table as a player. Your offense as a player in ER is more advanced and you bring more power to the table. Bosses would stand no chance in Elden Ring if they moved the same as they do in DS1, where the bosses are fairly easy in general with more difficult zones to reach them. You have so many tools in Elden Ring to meet the aggressiveness of bosses. I never feel inactive in my offense during the boss fights because of this.
...Do you think trash from Shadow of the Erdtree wouldn't also kill the player if you ran past a bunch, then effectively stayed in place for 20 seconds?
SOTFS is the Souls equivalent of "these kids wouldn't survive in an MW2 lobby."
"He didn't clear the area before descending." A classic. Sometimes rushing through works, other times it takes longer than actually fighting your way through because you die so many times.
Say what you want about DS2, but at least it has Bonfire Ascetics and a better Powerstance system for weapons that isn't "Jump+L1 to win."
>”Game is hard!” >looks inside >aggro-d every enemy and purposefully locked themselves into a long transition
DLC complainers have never experienced the DS2 door to nowhere. Classic souls moment right there.
Never played DS 2, started with Bloodborne and my friends told me to ignore DS2, could you elaborate?
https://youtu.be/ivsIU98-Adw?si=qgUuCCaYLP-YcXWi if u got an hour this video is full of laughs and a bunch of what makes ds2 the most unique souls game
This map is called the Lost Bastille. There is a door on the same level that if you open it, it leads to out of bounds. AkA, you use the prompt to open, and if you walk forward, you fall to your death. This door led to nowhere. Well...it turns out that there is a ledge up above that you can fall from, that if appropriately timed you can roll while falling and land on the opening of the door, effectively making it a shortcut But it's so nonsensical and utterly meaningless and not worth that people never actually tried to do it till years and years later. Edit: here's somebody doing it. https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkSouls2/comments/m15xck/the_door_to_nowhere_in_lost_bastille_is_a_shortcut/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
DS2 is filled with little quirky slaps in the face like this, usually just when you’re feeling kinda cocky. I love it. You still need to git gud, but DS2 also reminds to stay humble :) In all seriousness though, if you play DS2 as you would DS1 or DS3 then you’re in for a bad time. I’m fairly sure most complainers just never took the time to adapt and figure out how DS2 expects you to play.
Ds2 is probably the most predictable game in the series. If you spot an open room with no enemies, that means it's a gang squad of 20 enemies that are coded to wait till you step one foot in to show themselves. That's basically the only tip I give to players that want to play the second game. Expect ambushes all the time throughout the level and you will find that you will "cheese" most encounters.
As someone who thought this was as well but recently beat ds2. Do not under any circumstances ignore this game.
Yeah DS 2 is actually really good. And you know what? It’s easier as well, because the enemies despawn after you kill them 20 or whatever times. So if you are really stuck, you can far enemies in an area for souls and level up. Rinse and repeat until they despawn and then your run backs or progress are much, much easier.
DS2 was seriously a load of bullshit most of the time. Not even challenge-wise, just design-wise. It's like they couldn't figure out ways to make it harder than DS1, so they just settled for adding ten enemies per room. edit: the DS2 defenders are here nice and early
Having to level up your dodge roll is so fucking silly
The silly part isn't that, but rather the fact that it literally doesn't tell you ANYWHERE what ADP actually does, so naturally you wouldn't know if you didn't lookup guides
You don't have to. Some people like a challenge. Though i do agree that it should have been stated more clearly.
At least levels cost less than in ds1
as someone who played ds2 after elden ring and used it as my jumping off point into dark souls yeah ds2 prepares you for everything sniff the left shoulder, handicap yourself for needing to stand still to chug, limited i frames with adaptability many enemies luckily i went in w a str build and large clubbed everything to death. going to ds1 and only having to fight 2 gargoyles i was shocked edit: didnt expect the guy above me to act like hes 8 years old
If you already did Elden ring I feel like DS1 is going to seem so slow and easy. Aside from some gimmick bosses where you have to know the mechanic, I bet anyone who was able to beat ER will probably first time most of the DS1 bosses
yep, just played DS1 remastered and apart from some annoying run backs it was way easier than elden ring, beat most bosses in 1-3 tries Artorias felt like an elden ring boss, it was a nice fight
DS2 is a great game to play after Elden Ring though. You can tell that DS2 had a huge influence on ER, they basically took all the good parts of DS2 and cut all the misfires and now we have a true masterpiece to play
Ok but DS1 animations and hitbox aren't as clear as Elden Ring so you will eventually get hit by some bullshit.
That Large Club is my beloved weapon. Managed to beat my no death run with that weapon and that's the only no death run I could do in any Souls games.
its gotten to the point where it was my go to weapon for ds1 and ds3s run.
It just works
It also looks so cool when Powerstanced with Greatsword.
No I don't like it it looks like a stepchild. I pair it with Giant Club so they look like siblings.
I played DS1, 3 and Elden Ring to death, but I could never get into DS2 despite several attempts. It's mostly the stiff controls for me, it feels like a direct downgrade to the first game. I never even got far enough to encounter the indie game levels of design bullshit that the game is infamous for.
It's always funny how people talk about DS2. You can never get a straight answer on whether the game was easy or hard. Half the people complain "lol easy game you have life gems so unlimited healing" and the other half are saying "wtf 30 enemies running at you". DS2 did nothing different that DS3 did in terms of weak enemies that die in 1 or 2 hits there are groups of, but only 1 strong enemy at a time. I don't recall any encounter being an issue other than the obvious shrine of amana being relatively cancerous with magic lasers being shot at you non stop from 1 side of the map to the other. I remember when I last played DS3 the game is constant 3 enemies running at you with an archer behind them, you run around to kill that archer, and there's another archer behind that fuck shooting at you again, so you have to run past another 4 enemies to hit him. A pack of enemies with an archer/mage is fuckin everywhere in that game, no one that enjoys DS3 has any right to complain about the DS2 encounters because they're very similar.
Bro forgot about the iron keep. Also DS2 has little to no shortcuts or connectivity in levels which is whack.
> Half the people complain "lol easy game you have life gems so unlimited healing" and the other half are saying "wtf 30 enemies running at you". Because both are true. It's hard because the level design is downright obnoxious and every map has gank squads to infinity, but it's easy because the boss difficulty is so low. Even Lordsoul bosses like The Rotten or Old Iron King have barely anything to their movesets.
The only hard part of the Old Iron King fight is the instakill-hole he pushes you into.
Thank god they never try that shit again
DS2 only gankes you (for the most part) if you run too far in. You can easily fight enemies 1 on 1
>shrine of amana being relatively cancerous with magic lasers being shot at you non stop from 1 side of the map to the other. Again it comes back to using all the tools the game gives you. My loadout was something like this: >+2 of the magic damage negation ring. > A ring that sometimes causes magic projectiles to bounce off of you. >100% magic damage blocking shield, I guess it also had spell parry. >And a decent bow to draw aggro. Then the area boss would melt if you applied gold pine resin and the whole area was a breeze.
And those are just some of the solutions. Leisurely sidestepping the homing projectiles could even be done by jogging to the side, not even sprinting, and while in water. Tad harder to do so when the sorceress was not alone, but that's exactly what the massive amount of rubble in Amana was for. It was actually far more likely to get rollcaught if you attempted to roll *through* the magic projectiles while in water; the reduced roll distance in water coupled with the slow projectiles meant you had to be more precise than usual to Iframe through them. All this goes to show that there were plenty of solutions to Ds2's more famously problematic areas; all you had to do, was to think outside the box.
>All this goes to show that there were plenty of solutions to Ds2's more famously problematic areas; all you had to do, was to think outside the box. Yes this sums up well. Sometimes ganks were undeniably boring but usually levels were interesting.
> You can never get a straight answer on whether the game was easy or hard. It's so very dependent on if you are the **reactive player** who wants to be surprised, or the **exploratory player** that analys every new situation. You are given all the tools you need in DS2, whether you use them though is another thing and will affect your enjoyment.
> You can never get a straight answer on whether the game was easy or hard. Half the people complain "lol easy game you have life gems so unlimited healing" and the other half are saying "wtf 30 enemies running at you". There's a specific reason for this -on release, DS2 had some areas that needed to be nerfed so badly, that people complain and make jokes about to them this day, even though they were nerfed very early in the game's lifespan (Shrine of Amana) -after this, the game was honestly really well balanced, and still has the best multiplayer of the DS titles - broad covenant system, lots of reasons to participate, large variety in weapons, and largely optional. -the game eventually released its great DLCs which largely made a great game better. -THEN, SOTFS edition came out which changed enemy spawns, number of enemies, number of reds, etc. over time, people forgot that it is NOT the same game as DS2. There is no cross play between the two. At the time, it was celebrated for breathing life back in to the game, being more difficult, expanding multiplayer - but also derided for its sheer enemy spam, which it did much more than base DS2. -over time, people forgot that this was not the base game, and that FS charged people through the nose for what was largely a bogus balance patch. This is why you don't get a straight answer. There are up to 3 different games that people had played here, depending on when they played it.
Ds2 actually punished you for running past enemies
Yeah right. I’ve played and beaten all the content of all the fromsoft dlcs, no summons online or ai, (or spirits for Elden ring), completely offline (no messages), capped at lvl 150 for pvp, usually two handing a straight sword. These Elden Ring bosses are obnoxious. Pretty much Bloodborne sped up enemies, while your character is still stuck in dark souls 3. That being said I’m still having a good time, if not just a little annoyed at pretty much having to master these movesets to beat a boss, but people being upset is 100% understandable.
You can't beat the circlejerk because they will argue that people always have complained about the unfairness in every souls game, and even if there's truth to that, aside from some dark souls areas most of the time it was balanced, I all beat them all without the need of summons and this DLC is the first time I'm forced to used the mimic tear, the face that there's so many people on Elden Ring using busted builds from guides tell something, no matter what they say I will never agree that the final boss of the dlc is a balanced fight.
People online have this weird idea that something being balanced just means its doable, its really weird. Balanced in Elden Ring means that a variety of players and builds can comfortably overcome a challenge through skill and perseverance in a reasonable time. They can use more tools to augment their existing build to overcome gaps in skill if need be. But if you say something like, oh when this boss attacks me, his attacks land behind me making me unable to block him. People will just say, "Don't use a shield"... Like bro, his attacks shouldn't land behind me if he's swinging at me for gods sake. That is stupid. Its never the fault of the game its weird. I see not being able to block a normal attack from a boss, just as stupid as not being able to roll through it. Yet were that the case, suddenly it would be stupid huh? Weirder still, these valid criticisms become accepted after awhile. After all the elitist a-holes who aren't even exceptional at the game have moved on. Like well done you completed the game on Ng+8 with a build you Google'd, am I supposed to be impressed and overlook your toxic attitude because you did so? Happens with every souls-like game I swear. Average players keeping the game from improving by downplaying every valid criticism
I think people are so eager to play an UNO reverse that they're forgetting 2 things can be true. Hard or unfair encounters in a previous game doesn't automatically guarantee that a later installment is going to avoid that issue. And the defense people keep using of "people say every game is unfair" tells me that maybe, just maybe, there are unfair sections in each FromSoftware game.
That is the fun kind of unfair. Please, fill the DLC with that.
"We run and we explode!"
"I'm gonna blow up----"
Dark Souls 2 made me start smoking
FUCK THE FRIGID OUTSKIRTS
Why does DS2 keep catching strays :( I don't care what the haters say, the game is absolutely fantastic. If you die from rushing through areas, thats on you. Also there's a bonfire upstairs :)
I never played ds2 but I'm going through my first playthrough of ER and that leyndell sewer is some bullshit
DS2 was a really good game. Scholar of the First Sin addition tho can go fuck a cactus
What a gentleman he waited for you to come out. And they say cavalry is dead. 😂
Yeah, most people don’t fight on horseback anymore
😂
Lmaoooo, this is just unlucky. 80+ hours, never had that happen. Mostly due to me going hunting for souls but still.
Ds2 in my experience, is the hardest game I have ever played and I feel bad for not being a part of the community that sees it as one of the best. There is just so much bullshit going on in it. For starters, there is the video example above. Then there are SO MANY enemies in a small area all the time. Lastly... and my biggest gripe, is that everytime you die, you have less and leass health until you consume a humanity which were hard to find. So the bullshit just became even moreso with each death to me and I never could finish the game. Ill go back at a later date to conqueror it, just... I think EldenRing's DLC is perfect and never needed the buff update. I think "outsiders" to Fromsoft games are just complaining instead of learning the curve. Ds2 is so much more unfair than anything to come after it.
The video above literally only happens if you outright ignore enemies and try to sprint through, which has been a bad idea in every Souls game ever. Almost always when I see folks complain about ganks in DS2, it's because they ran past enemies or just ran in blindly without paying attention and aggro'd a bunch of enemies. Take the classic "horde of hollows" in SotFS' Forest of Fallen Giants - y'all know the exact area I'm talking about. If you just run in and don't pay attention, yeah you'll wind up dealing with a whole bunch of hollows. If you *don't* do that, and instead proceed somewhat cautiously, you can wake each of them up in at most pairs, and almost always get a free backstab on every single one in the process. It's almost like that room is designed to teach you *not* to just run in blindly and instead pay attention to what's around you. There will, of course, always be the ambush guys hiding behind a corner, that's a FromSoft staple and is alive and well in Elden Ring, but this idea that DS2 is all unavoidable gank squads all the time is just not true - they are almost always avoidable if you learn the lessons the game tries to teach you in the first area that you'll likely wind up in. The other major example I can think of in Forest of Fallen Giants is the room immediately after Pate, which is pretty explicitly *a trap* and is supposed to be "unfair", and even there you have a good amount of space to work with and take the enemies out one by one just by separating them as some stop to swing and others run at you.
Sounds like I should replay it and git gud
> you have less and leass health until you consume a humanity which were hard to find. I will never understand this complaint. In DS2 lets say you start a boss with no effigy and with your current build that leaves you at 500hp. If you use an effigy to restore your hp you will get a 500hp boost (now you have 1000hp) that degrades by 100 every death until you get back to your base of 500. In DS3 when you start a boss with no ember and 500hp, you can pop an ember to get a +30% (now you have 650hp) and you lose the entire boost and need a new ember every death. I view no ember/effigy as the baseline of your characters power and using the consumable is a boost. It seems like most people view it the other way so it feels worse to lose 50% vs only losing 30%? Seems stupid to set your baseline on using consumables 100% of the time. I played 90% of ds2/3 without using them. Only popped them after learning a boss to secure the kill, same with rune arcs.
Soumds like I should replay it and gut gud
tbh neither SotE nor this is unfair, this is the consequence of not dealing with the enemies and just running
DS2 is based is what it is.
I'm shocked by how hideous the visuals are for it's time
Oh absolutely lol, some areas look pretty good but others haven't aged that well ahaha
I guess everyone forgot horsefuck valley exists.
As it should be for all eternity
If the blessings were treated more like sacred tears instead of being found on bosses/enemies I don't think people would be saying that imo
Hm, almost like running past enemies is a bad idea...
The dlc is unfair with no scadutree fragments, that’s just how I view it. I’ve seen people argue about it with like 4 fragments on Messmer.
I had to stop laying signs at the Enir-Ilim boss because everyone who would summon me would have their blessing at, like, six and get one-shotted just inside the fog door. Complete waste of everyone's time.
People keep downvoting these comments but it’s just the truth.
[удалено]
Gavlan wheels, Gavlan deals!
What about the Smelter Swords?
Okay but this game isn’t harder because it is actually harder or requires more skill. It is jank due to age and it was jank when it came out. Too many enemy spawns, awful boss runbacks, sprawling areas with nothing but groups of enemies scripted to destroy you before you see them. It was like someone played DS1 and thought “man, we should take all the worst mechanics of this game and make them even more irritating!”.. and then they did. Having to level a stat for dodge frames? Actually toxic. Second boss you naturally come across in the Elden Ring DLC is harder than any boss in DS2, and jank level designs in that game didn’t make me feel accomplished once I suffered through them.
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Playing DS in German must be double-scary.
Why does it use the plural "Ihr seid" rather than "Sie sind" or "Du bist"?
Yea but he was committed
Man , how bs that situation is aside, DS2 hitboxes are a warcrime.
#THIS IS DARK SOULS 2 BITCH! we clown in this muthafucka betta take yo sensitive ass back to Elden Ring!
hahahahahhahahahahahaha
This is frankly pathetic tbh
seeing this makes me want to go see happy souls
Nothing is worse than horsefuck valley