Seriously, up your VIg to 40. Damage in this game doesn't work like other Souls, it's way higher tuned.
Then you get to the last portion and everything two shots, three shots if you are luckySeriously, up your VIg to 40. Damage in this game doesn't work like other Souls, it's way higher tuned.
I don't co-op but don't you need to enable the summoning pool first? Those statues that are every where.
Unfortunately that's the last point the damage felt balanced enough around the soft cap, the next area after the capital the damage spikes up.Yeah. I have 45 vigor and am playing a pure melee str build. Been smooth sailing so far. Just got past the capital. I trade blows with bosses, its great. Ill probably go higher as well.
That weapon is indeed awesome!If anyone is doing an INT or a INT/DEX build I recommend the Sword of Night and Flame and Moonveil. Those two weapons have helped progress the game tremendously.
Radahn is the definition of anti-fun. Just run around for hours summoning stuff 'till I get one shotted by some random meteor. And I'm a pure STR build so I have to rely on the summons. I'm getting 0 enjoyment out of this. I'll keep trying, but at some point I might just shelf the game. -3 points to the game just because of this boss.
I'd say Midir is another one, the HP can get a bit... Let's say largeOh man, trying to help people beat Radahn in co-op is the real Dark Souls. That's where that boss's difficulty really comes through in a kind of ridiculous way.
Ponyboi gets a bigger HP bar which is rough enough, but the big thing is you don't have access to the horse. That alone makes the fight a million times harder and much more tedious than fighting him solo ("solo").
It's maybe the only fight I can think of in the entire Soulsborne series where summoning help makes the boss like an order of magnitude tougher.
Nope! I only tried it once, he's just very tanky then.Does it still one-shot you? If not then you should be able to see the second half of the fight in a reasonable amount of time and then decide from there if you want to keep going or look for more upgrades. It just has a ton of HP and takes a long time, so if you die it's very discouraging.
Yeah, this makes some bosses SO much harder. It doesn't feel like it's intended, considering you can't mount even in the open world during co-op. It'd be a damn chore to help people outside closed areas.Ponyboi gets a bigger HP bar which is rough enough, but the big thing is you don't have access to the horse.
I'm level 64 and maybe 70 hours in and I have no fucking clue what a Rune Arc is. Grants a blessing? Sure thing game.
I have used one spirit ash and can not figure our how the equipment stats page works. Why are there red numbers everywhere?
It took me a few dozen hours to figure out how to shoot a bow, but that was mostly because I didn't realize my greatbow wouldn't shoot normie arrows.
His first phase is really easy, but his second is relentless, even with damage reduction and just one damage taken increase talisman to dodge one of his attacks better he was oneshotting me even though the debuff of the other talisman was smaller than the damage reduction buff
Yeah I don't get it. There is one kinda boss that is overturned and she is completely optional. All the main story bosses were pretty reasonable on how to tackle them and didn't feel super bullshit.
Oh man, trying to help people beat Radahn in co-op is the real Dark Souls. That's where that boss's difficulty really comes through in a kind of ridiculous way.
Ponyboi gets a bigger HP bar which is rough enough, but the big thing is you don't have access to the horse. That alone makes the fight a million times harder and much more tedious than fighting him solo ("solo").
It's maybe the only fight I can think of in the entire Soulsborne series where summoning help makes the boss like an order of magnitude tougher.
The second phase of the last boss is infuriatingly boring for a melee user especially when you can die if you get bad RNG on the order of attacksBoss fights have never really been the draw to me for these games, but part of it for me is that it's a real big change of pace from the rest of the game. Prior to the last chunk of the game there aren't really a lot of mandatory bosses, you're kind of free to do things in whatever order you want, so the pace is a bit slower and there are generally larger gaps between the properly big fights. After the Fire Giant you get the Duo and Maliketh very close to one another, then straight after that you have Gideon, Godfrey, and the paired fight with Radagon and the Elden Beast with no normal enemies in between them. It's like they backloaded all the mandatory fights, and tbh it got kinda tiresome finishing one boss, walking up a flight of stairs to find another one, then going up yet another small set of stairs to find another boss. Feel like it really would have benefited from shifting some of them around and having more quiet time between them.
Personally they all kind of started to blend together by the end too, aside from Gideon. They're all fast moving, equally effective at long and close range, have huge AoE attacks, hit incredibly hard and generally have fairly small margins for error. I completely appreciate that the bosses have to be harder and more flexible in order to keep up with all the new tools you get given, but I don't particularly find fights like that fun, so it just felt like *a lot* to me. It's probably in part because I haven't played much of anything else since launch, but after pretty much all of those late game fights I was just glad it was over, which definitely wasn't the case with a lot of the earlier fights.
FWIW by this point in the game I was at like 45 VIG or so, which should surely be enough - although I did end up using Morgott's rune for extra health in the FINAL final boss
In a game where you're only invaded if you want to. If you're two manning invaders, you're pathetic. Which is everyone.
Looking at older boss designs from older soul games I can see they're much more slower and telegraphed along with in some cases easier to stagger or lower health bars. This is just a point of view from someone who hasn't played any other FromSoft game besides Elden ring but I don't know if that kind of design would last long as player skill goes up along with the tools available to the player also increases. I guess it's funny because I thought the Elden ring boss design was the norm for souls games but the bosses used to be much more lumbering and more telegraphed based on what I've watched.
Having had some time to stew my thoughts after finishing the game, I think there are fundamental issues with their design of the open world that really hamper the combat experience. The world is simply too large and too obscured to hide such critical gameplay items and resources behind them with no direction or guidance whatsoever. Rarely do you discover a path to something or a hint guiding you towards something, you literally have to stumble upon its exact location. In comparison to Ghosts of Tsushima, in which I barely ever used my map because the game had such a well-embedded visual language to communicate guidance towards sites of interest (even from long distances), I was constantly referencing my map in Elden Ring just to see if the particular graphics on the map implied that it *should* have something nearby.
This is most apparent with the weapon upgrade system, which is an already bad mechanic turned awful because it is completely dependent on whether you happen to explore specific hidden areas, which are very easily missable in of themselves but which have hidden areas/bodies inside them too. Hell, some areas are not even supposed to be hidden they're just so barely visible that you have to be coming from a specific angle/direction to even see it.
You can very easily get soft-locked out of upgrades because you just don't have enough of a particular number. Moreover, the very system itself is extraordinarily punishing because it forces you to commit to a select few weapons because the cost of trying to raise another to your level to experiment with it is far too high. So the game is constantly dumping all these new weapons on you and all you can think is:
"Gosh, it would be fun to try using that but I don't have the dozens of stones I need to make it remotely comparable to what I'm already using. And even if I did have the stones, it's not worth the risk of not liking the weapon. After all, I get new weapons so frequently that I should probably save them in case I get a really good weapon later on I want to use."
And it's not even a hard problem to address, your smith-forge NPC could very easily give generic hints about the rough locations of caves or mines that might be good sources of stones (e.g. "try looking around the north-east cliffs of X" or "south-west of castle Y"). Ideally you would replace the system entirely and just have boss-related forging tools to freely upgrade all weapons to a specific level. That way you can still gate access to the damage tiers by actual progression.
Along the same lines, the game world is just too large and too 'realistic' to make this kind of discovery reliable. You could safely cut the zone areas down by maybe 30% and still preserve all the sense of space and discovery. But things are so spread out and the assets so samey-looking that your eyes tend to gloss over as you're just riding Torrent back and forth along a cliff wall or ruins trying to find any carve-outs with a torch signaling a cave/tunnel/catacomb.
A good open world is not just about making a huge area and plopping things down in random locations and demanding the player thoroughly scour each and every inch in order to find things. You should be able to get a sense of where things might be just from a vista, and there should visual clues and tells to communicate both when something is far away, but also when something is nearby so you can shift from 'travel' mode into 'searching' mode.
Elden Ring does deliver on a majestic sense of scale and wonder (the entrance to the lakes probably being the biggest 'oh shit' moment) but the Dark Souls games have already been doing that from day one. I really didn't feel like the Open World itself added meaningful mechanical depth to the existing formula besides the novelty of being able to see the different zones in a non-linear fashion. Which is neat, but it also creates risk in that it allows players to access items/resources they normally shouldn't have until much later. In some zones, you can find trash mobs that pose little danger but give a huge amount of souls relative to the zone you're supposed to be in, increasing the risk of being over-levelled in a game that both over-levels you by default and where being over-leveled trivializes the entire middle third.
It doesn't totally address your point, because you still have to find the damn things, but you can find bell bearings that allow you to purchase unlimited amounts of every level of stone (both regular and somber). The only truly limited equipment upgrade resource is the Ancient Dragon stone (and somber version), which is required for final upgrades. If you have enough runes, you can +24 or +9 any weapon in the game, and then elevate the dozen or so that you like best.
I definitely noticed that mmo influence as wellYep, Elden Ring bosses also did something I'm sure a lot of people will hate but I personally loved. Namely, MMO-like attacks with areas of effect and tells that give you ample warning to run away or jump over. It's a really strange thing for Souls bosses but I thought the implementation was mostly great, bar a few exceptions.
I'm not mad at you specifically just the logic of this argument, just a warning because I feel it merits caps lock haha.
NOTHING IN THE GAME HINTS BALL BEARINGS EXIST OR THAT THEY CAN PROVIDE STONES. INTERNET SEARCHES ARE NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR IN-GAME MECHANICS.
*exhales*. Whew. Anyway, did you self-discover the game mechanic of *some* ball bearings providing stones by yourself? And if you did, did you find all the locations by yourself or did you consult the internet for the rest?
90h later and I've been able to jump everything except AOE, for some reason if I'm at the peak of my jump I get hit, I decided to just roll through explosions as usualYep, Elden Ring bosses also did something I'm sure a lot of people will hate but I personally loved. Namely, MMO-like attacks with areas of effect and tells that give you ample warning to run away or jump over. It's a really strange thing for Souls bosses but I thought the implementation was mostly great, bar a few exceptions.
90h later and I've been able to jump everything except AOE, for some reason if I'm at the peak of my jump I get hit, I decided to just roll through explosions as usual
If anyone is doing an INT or a INT/DEX build I recommend the Sword of Night and Flame and Moonveil. Those two weapons have helped progress the game tremendously.
There is no leaver penalty for quiting out when invaded right?
Its just frowned upon?
I'm playing an almost pure STR build as well and imo your problem comes from all the running around.
Get your summons going and then get in there. Most of his attacks can be dodged or at least most damage mitigated. Also as long as you stay pretty close to him he will never actually shoot the meteors I think. He only shot them at me when I rode away, trying to get some buffs or summons in.
Especially one of his gravity attacks takes several seconds and if you can dodge under him it will give you a window of I'd say 5 seconds every gime.
I just got my STR, DEX, and FTH to the required amount put this rest into mind and intelligence. Your normal r1 and r2 scale from all the stats. L2 and R2 scale using faith and the L2 and R1 scale using intelligence.I'm really digging moonveil but would you suggest pumping faith to use night and flame? i think it's like 24 FTH requirement if I'm not mistaken, my faith is at 10 at the mo lol
Those are actually quite lenient even for rolls, love that boss even if he two shot me hahaYeah not all of them allow you to jump over, but most of Radagan's for example do.
I'm not mad at you specifically just the logic of this argument, just a warning because I feel it merits caps lock haha.
NOTHING IN THE GAME HINTS BALL BEARINGS EXIST OR THAT THEY CAN PROVIDE STONES. INTERNET SEARCHES ARE NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR IN-GAME MECHANICS.
*exhales*. Whew. Anyway, did you self-discover the game mechanic of *some* ball bearings providing stones by yourself? And if you did, did you find all the locations by yourself or did you consult the internet for the rest?
At least one of the stone bell bearings is a boss drop in a relatively early mine dungeon, so it does stand to reason that there would be others.
I didn't understand it either, just assumed there was someone there needed to defeat lmaosome of you nerds give me a lore explanation for this late game thing:
what is the purpose of crumbling farum azula? why do you have to go there after the forge and not just straight for the erdtree?
Did you personally find or explore that location before you learned about it on the internet though? Not whether a player could theoretically do it, did you do it that way? And again, even if you did, did you find the other locations yourself or did you look it up?
I don't mean to be antagonistic but it's not an argument to say it 'could' happen that way. The nature of an open world means most players do not follow a set path so things being available 'early' has nothing to do with whether they are reliably discoverable or signified as critically important.
Saying you need to randomly discover something to learn a mechanic even exists in the game is not justifiable (let alone giving direction on finding the rest of the ball bearings to make the mechanic actually usable). So many players just google stuff or read the wiki and then act like it's obvious in retrospect when it's anything but.
some of you nerds give me a lore explanation for this late game thing:
what is the purpose of crumbling farum azula? why do you have to go there after the forge and not just straight for the erdtree?
Yeah I understand that it's frustrating. I did discover a bunch of the stone bell bearings during my playthrough. Not all of them, but I also wasn't super thorough. It was enough to fill in the gaps when I wanted to upgrade a new weapon, because I generally had a good amount of stones.I'm not mad at you specifically just the logic of this argument, just a warning because I feel it merits caps lock haha.
NOTHING IN THE GAME HINTS BALL BEARINGS EXIST OR THAT THEY CAN PROVIDE STONES. INTERNET SEARCHES ARE NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR IN-GAME MECHANICS.
*exhales*. Whew. Anyway, did you self-discover the game mechanic of *some* ball bearings providing stones by yourself? And if you did, did you find all the locations by yourself or did you consult the internet for the rest?
I just got my STR, DEX, and FTH to the required amount put this rest into mind and intelligence. Your normal r1 and r2 scale from all the stats. L2 and R2 scale using faith and the L2 and R1 scale using intelligence.