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Huh mimic uses exalted flesh if you have it on hot bar going mess around see what items it can use
The chariot designer must have been pissed off at life and that was his coping mechanism, only reason I can justify those dungeons
They do, but it seems fairly rare. Regular smithing stones are way too rare considering how many you need to upgrade weapons. I felt like I got somber stones at the same rate, which feels super unbalanced.
I would say incredibly rare to that point that it barely ever happens. Seems to be an odd decision
So this is the power... Of Weed Instinct
Actually might not be far-fetched, there was another person here today saying the same lmao
immediate youtube guide every time I go in one, ESPECIALLY now in the second playthrough.
they're fine that way lol :D
I still appreciate what they were going for with those btw.
Okay thanks. Thought there would maybe be a portal somewhere lol.
I liked the concept the first time, but it gets ridiculous in some of the later ones where one mistake means losing 10 minutes :/
I'm basically doing that using the tree crucible set and siluria's tree
The "solution" to that dungeon is pretty fun
The somber smithing stones are pretty common drop from the hands at least
so I skipped the incantation guy's quest on my first playthrough (I never found him and I kinda forgot about him tbh) and I've been doing it this time around and... it's pretty shit. Like, I know its not a 1 for 1 comparison, but if you compare the "sorcery" sidequest(s),
to this "faith" sidequest and, well, its lackluster.
the only noteworthy thing in it is when you
not even Ranni but just Sellen's
the only noteworthy thing in it is when you
use that incantation near the statue and it goes "Marika is Radagon" which is some nice foreshadowing (that you wouldn't understand at the time)
Pebble - Filler/Poke
Loretta's Greatbow - Group Pull usually/great for bosses
Night Maidens Mist - Great for kiting certain types of bosses and enemies
Rock Sling - For magic resist creatures or breaking bosses
Comet Azur - For when I want to roleplay Goku a bit
Adula's Moonblade - My favorite spell in the game and one of the best poke aoe spells. Does great dmg
Ranni's Dark Moon - Spell experimenting with this one but mostly using it versus over mage types for the spell absorb
Star of Ruin - Great dmg shredder.
Only thing that gets swapped out is Ranni's for Carian Slicer is I feel the need for it.
I knew it because it happened to me and I laughed my ass off.
As a general rule, if you're ever frustrated just drop a marker on your map and go back later. There's high-level content pretty much everywhere that you probably won't be able to finish when you first find it. I beat Tree Sentinal before I did Margit so it's not like it's an endgame boss or anything, but you're not supposed to fight it immediately.
Me too. I followed the trail of shining stones and then felt like a idiot lol
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if you did the
dungeon and killed Ryckard
Weird. I followed that trail and didn't see any thing so I just went on about my business. Patches knew what would happen to him if he tries to push ME.
Sorry I'm very new to this so apologies for the dumb question.
I have an Uchikatana (Samurai) and what seems like enough stones and runes to upgrade it. It says the weapon is D for nearly everything, so does that mean I shouldn't upgrade it and try and find a different weapon? If I get the katana to +3 for example, is it going to do the job for a while still?
I have an Uchikatana (Samurai) and what seems like enough stones and runes to upgrade it. It says the weapon is D for nearly everything, so does that mean I shouldn't upgrade it and try and find a different weapon? If I get the katana to +3 for example, is it going to do the job for a while still?
Malenia was tough. It took quite a bit of time to figure out her moveset, even if a good amount of that time was trying to solve her flurry attack. That being said, they actually did it. They manage to shore up Friede's weaknesses and, over three different tries, finally make one that feels complete.
To start, I feel the experience with this fight would vary wildly, even more so than any other, from build to build, so for context I did this fight with colossal GS as main weapon and decided to not parry at all for this particular instance.
Malenia's moveset was absolutely marvelous. While Maria and Friede had various issues, their biggest one to me has always been that they only move in a straight line offensively. Friede had a standalone side step but it doesn't translate into anything so it's just for flavor. In order to protect their weakness of being staggerable, they made sure to have as little gap as possible in their combo strings, resulting in combo sequence more similar to something you'd find in actual action games in that they would take their turn and then you would take yours. Additionally, they are provided hyper armor after taking a certain number of hits for their next attack, which works but felt like a band-aid solution. While the fight might feel fast, the decision making required is actually really slow, so it's easy to get comfortable, and in Friede's case, it turns more into just an endurance fight.
Malenia's is completely different. Her movement abilities are amazingly well thought out. She has the core left and ride step into sweeps (her left is faster than her right) that are great for her sequence change up and also makes it hard to keep her at ideal distance (they are super easy to parry however). She has the retreat for when she has been intercepted on too many moves in a row, instead of just applying hyper armor on her after recovery. She also has two variations of her standard double slash, one of which is a retreat that allows her to go into her three different long range options or just reset. She is also much much better equipped to defend herself, with a lot of her core attacks built to prevent easy roll-throughs. You cannot stick to her like glue if you mainly dodge for defense. She has moves that gives you opportunity to close in and moves that force you to go back out. Because of this, keeping proper positioning relative to her is a full time task and felt amazing in practice.
This kind of zoning is also only possible because, despite how long her sword looks, she has really modest range on her core attacks. You can simply outrun a lot of her attacks, which was necessary in the case of the colossal GS because rolling recovery is too long to secure decent damage. Colossal GS also suffers from the fact that jumping attacks and R2s simply have too much recovery and her standard double slash will clip, so unfortunately colossal GS users will primarily need to use R1s to dish out damage. I was using Godslayer's GS so my ash was also useless outside of one specific instance so I really had to rely almost entirely on R1s. That being said, it was really fun to optimize damage against her because of these limitations. Almost felt like an old souls game for a bit.
Unlike Maria and Friede, who get their hyper armor added on recovery to turn the tide, Malenia has hyper armor on specific moves, and some only during certain parts of it. Because the hyper armor active window is clearly defined, it's a lot easier to work out a plan against her since you know where you can stagger her and where you need to be cautious. The one that's the most notable is her right side step, which during the movement part has hyper armor but when she is getting ready to swing, does not. Adding on top that right step is the slower of the two that's a really good place to continue to pressure her if you are within range.
One thing I really liked about Malenia's moveset design is how the devs chose to show the two different versions of her triple slash into sweep attacks. The two versions have the same triple slash but the follow-up sweep has a fast and slow version. They decided to differentiate the versions by whether Malenia attached her sword to her arm or not, and that's shown by whether there are sparks right before the triple slash comes out. If sparks, attached and fast sweep is coming. If no sparks, not attached and slow sweep. I thought this was an amazingly cool way to show the tells of an attack. It's not major but it's one of my favorite things from the whole game.
I really liked how the flurry move is overall designed in that it has three parts and the best way to deal with each one individually is different. It is super fun to dodge once figured out. Part one requires running away to proper distancing and/or specific tools for countering. Part two require dodging into the boss with moderately strict timing, and part three can just be walked off. It took a while to figure this one out because for souls games I always operated under the impression that the basic dodge would be sufficient in solving everything in the game. That has been true all the way through DS3, but in ER I felt that there are two cases where that's not true.
-Godskin Noble's phase 2 belly bump, which is way too fast to react too and too fast for most weapon's recovery.
-First part of Malenia's Flurry which lasts too long (and she also readjust and move forward more during middle parts of it) for standard dodge in any direction to work unless you have significant distance.
The former can at least be reasonably contained by hard flank constantly so it never comes out. The latter cannot be prevented at all so you have to figure out ways to deal with it. Like I said at the beginning, this fight goes very very differently depending on how you approach it, so I still need to try this with other weapon classes to see how it feels. But with just colossal GS, I had to rethink my loadout and add a dagger with bloodhound step to properly counter the flurry. I am not sure how I feel about something more specific being required as a base line for fighting a boss in a souls game. On the other hand, I also thought that Sekiro's baseline not requiring any of the shinobi tools to clear any boss was kind of a waste for that part of the combat system. It does help show case more defensive ashes like bloodhound step and barricade shield, so right now I don't think it's an issue that one weapon class needs that tool to avoid the flurry.
I don't have as much to say about Malenia's second phase since they are all minor additions. She has a phase change explosion that is super easy to dodge (run away from) and leaves her extremely vulnerable. Some additional combo finishers were added, several new gap closers were added and another aerial attack was added, all of which are easy enough to counter. I think this will also be quite a bit different depending on loadout, but I wasn't going to say no if she gave me 15 seconds of free damage so phase 2 was comparatively simple for me.
As for parts to improve, one of the following would help make the boss more reasonable.
-No life steal on block with no damage. (I feel kind of strongly about this one. This punishes shield users way too much I think)
-Flurry prep is another second or so longer so it doesn't require as tight a timing on move recognition and reaction to start running away from her? Not sure if this is really an issue but I did feel that from when she goes airborne to when the move comes out it's pretty fast for how deadly the move is.
-Stance break last a little longer? Her stance break down time is like 1/4 of every other boss in the game. I think certain ranged play style simply will never get to critical since unless you are within several character models distance to her you will not reach her in time.
-Maybe I just missed it, but I didn't find any move that can be jumped over, so that part of the new mechanic was kind of left out. Can't have everything but it would have been nice if just one move had an optimal counter that required jumping.
Overall I think she is definitely one of the best bosses From has ever made and I would say they definitely solved the issue with humanoid staggerable bosses. Mechanically she is nearly perfect.
Wow, what a great post. Thanks for this.
Just reached the Haligtree.
Good luck. Make sure to upvote my "are you ready" message.
Scaling can change with upgrading, and also Arts of War can change it as well. If you enjoy the moveset, there is no reason not to upgrade it. A lot of the earlier weapons have similiar scaling, so I wouldn't worry about that. Also smithing stones are pretty common as long as you don't go buck wild and you get can respec later, so I wouldn't stress. I had a common long sword for the longest time until I stumbled across a unique weapon, and I was able to get through a lot of the game fine.
just comet azur him bro
that one was by far the hardest one on my first playthrough STR char :(
Just reached the Haligtree.
I really liked the item the devs put on the branch after all the red plants, and I highly recommend you detour to pick it up.
Also doot doot!
Got my plat after 87 hours.
I was really surprised with how satisfying my final boss run was. I had been relying on my mimic so much that beating a boss didn't feel as satisfying as before but I couldn't ditch it because the fights would be too stressful for me and I didn't want to spend 5 hours on the boss like before.
After a couple hours on the final boss, I gave up trying to do it myself and tried to summon others to help but got "unable to summon" for like an hour straight so I gave up on that too lol.
Went back to try it by myself and on my successful run, my mimic died half way into the second phase and I ran out of flask and FP. I somehow managed to clear it with a bit of health left and that felt sooo good. I don't think it'd be that satisfying if it was a smooth run and my mimic survived all the way.
The alternate endings were
I was really surprised with how satisfying my final boss run was. I had been relying on my mimic so much that beating a boss didn't feel as satisfying as before but I couldn't ditch it because the fights would be too stressful for me and I didn't want to spend 5 hours on the boss like before.
After a couple hours on the final boss, I gave up trying to do it myself and tried to summon others to help but got "unable to summon" for like an hour straight so I gave up on that too lol.
Went back to try it by myself and on my successful run, my mimic died half way into the second phase and I ran out of flask and FP. I somehow managed to clear it with a bit of health left and that felt sooo good. I don't think it'd be that satisfying if it was a smooth run and my mimic survived all the way.
The alternate endings were
pretty disappointing though. With just different color/effect and one or two different lines of narration. I'm glad I did Ranni's questline because her ending was the best and most different.
I feel like I am not supposed to be in this Nokron/Siofria place yet, these knights are brutal but I also feel like I would have to have 30 more levels to deal with them
I know exactly what you're talking about and I'm in that same spot. I'm level 109 and barely denting them with my Coded Sword.
If you haven't beaten the Volcano Manor boss, you go to Leyndell and beat the first main boss there and you'll get access.
That's pretty much what I do, but for bosses that aren't far enough away to start with Loretta's, I would drop that and Carian Piercer for Renna's Dark Moon. I don't really use it, but Mimic does and that helps us both.
With the Crucible incantations I presume?
Hows it working out so far?
I keep forgetting the moon, I have it too and enough int to use it now.
It's just annoying that so many enemies have unlimited stamina, if you are going to do that at least make them stagger when hit with a greatsword!
Yeah had to skip and come back to that guy. It's so tempting to try at a low level because of the Grace right next to him
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