I've never played a magic build in a souls game before.

The concept of attunement slots is too complex for my smooth brain. And besides ranged is for cowards. Give me a two handed great sword any day of the week.

It feels like it can either be super cheese or super shit in most action games/action RPGs. In Souls case, I always assumed it has casting time of sorts, and staing still in that game for even a second spells death.

The vibe I've always gotten is that if you build and use magic correctly, you end up being ludicrously powerful and utterly obliterating bosses, but if you build and use it wrong, you end up running out of spell charges and are left impotently poking things with a stick for 3 damage. There's no real middle ground, which isn't ideal for giving a sense of progression and feels excessively punishing if you don't know exactly what you're doing (particularly, you need to skip most trash enemies instead of using spell charges on them, which relies on knowing where you're going instead of exploring). 3 may have improved this with the switch to using FP to cast spells instead of spell charges, but I haven't dug deep enough into 3 yet to have really explored build options (I got filtered by Darkflame Friede a few years ago and kind of drifted away from the game before getting through Lothric Castle; I need to go back to it one of these days).

Attunement slots are simple enough, though. Each one lets you equip a different spell, which you can change at a bonfire equivalent. Some spells occupy multiple slots, but otherwise behave the same way. There's nothing really complicated about that except trying to figure out the appropriate point in your build to invest in attunement.

They're fine. Having spells gives you more variety in how you approach fights, but there are enough tradeoffs involved that you have to pick the right tool for the situation to be comparable to a straightforward melee build. I will say that having access to ranged spells is one of the most overrated things in souls games. The harder enemies and bosses tend to be aggressive enough that having some distance isn't enough to make you safe, so it's mostly just a way to dispatch enemies that were pretty easy to begin with.

I've never played any build in a souls game before. Whee!

But when you talk about magic builds in soulslike-type games, the main thing I think of is this:

https://youtu.be/GwBc0ixfbzI?t=1282

It's usually very boring but extremely effective, having a way to deal very high amounts of damage from a distance and eventually access to crazy OP spells that trivialize the game, especially in earlier Souls games.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

It feels like it can either be super cheese or super shit in most action games/action RPGs. In Souls case, I always assumed it has casting time of sorts, and staing still in that game for even a second spells death.

I think you overestimate how fast Souls games play, it's not Ninja Gaiden, you can absolutely kite many bosses and enemies and cheese from a distance, doubly so if you bring a melee summon.

Cruddy_horse posted...

I think you overestimate how fast Souls games play, it's not Ninja Gaiden, you can absolutely kite many bosses and enemies and cheese from a distance, doubly so if you bring a melee summon.

And even if you aren't kiting, cast times aren't so long that you can't ever find openings to use spells. There are fewer openings that are large enough for spells than there are that are large enough for melee attacks, certainly, but considering that most openings for melee attacks also offer you enough time to run up to the boss before attacking, there are more than you might think.

I've never played a Souls game.

I like meathead mode more probably

But magic can be fun

And miracles

Elden Ring magic is pretty fantastic because there are so many spells to work with, and almost all of them are at least situationally useful. Spell slots are even more plentiful than other games so you can run pretty much everything you like.

Sitting back and sniping from a distance is usually not even worth it. Set up a phalanx and frame trap them with carian greatsword, use poorly tracking but FP efficient spells like gravity spells in cramped quarters, push them off a cliff with knockback. There's a lot of really cool weapons that scale with int or faith, use them in conjunction.

It's been awhile since I played, but I tried and couldn't beat Castlevania Rondo of Blood with the standard Trevor Belmont. I could beat it with the magic user Maria