LogFAQs > #954330725

ctesjbuvf posted...

Thinking about how the hub is a weird area I wander around a bit exploring. This ends up getting me back to the tutorial area. Theres a new boss here and its without a doubt the least fun boss in the game so far. It just seems cheap. I mightve gone here early, but due to the stun and damage from the fall it seems like theres a small chance that I just dont get to try for real depending on what attack it chooses to use first, which just sucks.

Yeah, I'd say you went there a little early - the item you get for taking down that boss doesn't come in handy until almost the end of the game - but either way I agree it's a poorly-designed boss anyway, and it doesn't really help that it reuses the model of an earlier boss.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Also, this was my first time using an Eastern European civ and the building art is magnificent! I'll have Exdeath know that according to a leak, Age of Empires IV has the Rus as one of the eight playable factions instead of grouping a bunch of Eastern Europeans together as "Slavs".

Cool, I'll have my main. One of the only campaigns I started in Crusader Kings II was as the Kievan Rus'. Actually I did finally get around to playing a couple games in AoEII the other day. I didn't have the DLC that unlocks the Slavs (since it turns out their units do at least speak Russian,) so I settled on the Teutons. I found out that the AI will never really seriously attack your base on the lowest two difficulties so you can just do whatever you want, whether it's spamming villagers early on and not bothering to build army or defenses or just playing really lazily like I did by getting to the castle age, putting out a huge army of Teutonic Knights, and then just selecting them all at once and right-clicking in the direction of the enemy base. I was trying to get to grips with what all the different buildings do and what the general build path should be, so I needed a really simple undemanding strategy. Whenever I play next I'll do a few more games like that for practice and then bump up the difficulty.

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I played so late last night that I wound up passing out without being able to do a write-up, though I made comparatively little progress in all that time. When I started I was about to head into Blighttown, which both for the characters in this game and the players is one of the most dreaded areas in the game. In lore even the people who live in The Depths, which again is basically a sewer, built a massive gate to avoid any contact with Blighttown. The place a dark poison chasm that leads down for miles. You have to deal with giant mutants, rickety architecture where it's easy to slip off and fall to your death, low visibility, and blowgun-wielding little men who stick you with the toxic status from long range, which is an extremely fast-acting poison that you need a rare/expensive type of purple moss to cure, though thankfully those guys don't respawn. It's also one of the most confusingly laid out areas in the game where it's hard to get your bearings, and waiting at the bottom of it is a massive open bog that you can only trudge through very slowly and that poisons you if you stay inside for more than a few seconds. The bonfire here can be almost impossible to find unless you know exactly where to look, since it's hidden in a little corner of a huge area with no real landmarks, and I died a few times by running lost through the swamp slowly dying of poison until some enemy or other finished me off.

I managed to get myself in a really rough situation because I had neglected to buy the weapon repairbox that lets you restore weapon durability at bonfires. Normally weapon durability is an almost irrelevant mechanic that only really serves as an ammo system for a few unique weapons that have magic attacks, but the Uchigatana also has really low durability and was running low by the time I got into blighttown. I didn't want to walk all the way back through the depths to repair it, so I picked up the unupgraded Iaito that you can find by doing a slightly-tricky jump near the start of the area and used that for the whole of blighttown. The Iaito is identical to the Uchigatana in stats and scaling, but since it was brand new while my Uchi was +5 that meant taking a big hit to my damage output already. The difference between the two swords is entirely down to their R2 attacks. The Uchi has a slow stab while the Iaito has a slow charge. I almost never used the stab but found a few times where the charge was handy, so I'll be favouring the Iaito from now on. Either way, by the time I reached the bottom of blighttown, with a good few deaths under my belt, the Iaito was almost worn down too and I had to switch to the Falchion, which was the weapon I used in endgame in my very first playthrough. I had been saving my Uchigatana durability for the boss, Quelaag (a half-human, half-spider woman) - but when I reached her I found out that even that weapon took away 49 of her 3000+ HP per swing. Meanwhile she could practically blow me up with one shot, and I would always start the fight poisoned to boot because of the aforementioned swamp which I had used up all my purple moss wandering through looking for the bonfire. I used to know how to locate it relative to the Boss' Domain, but I can't remember any more. It's to the immediate right when you come off the scaffold structure of blighttown and into the bog.

So that was all pretty disheartening. Blighttown is designed to be a tough area to get out of, so I didn't want to go back to fix my weapons or level, or buy new moss, but the stat disparity made the boss seem way too daunting. I even thought about restarting a completely new character to come back to blighttown better prepared, but in the end I persevered and managed to slowly chip Quelaag down in a Monster Hunter-length boss encounter. My one saving grace is that overall Quelaag's attacks aren't too hard to dodge. If you're standing in front of her, her human half will use some slow sword moves on you, and her spider half will often sit still to bellow magma around the area, which gives you a long opportunity to attack, though it leaves the magma on the ground for a long time. The main thing you have to watch out for is her AOE magic burst attack, which does a ton of damage - if you're backed up against a wall or trapped by the lava it can be tough to get away in time. It was this attack that caused most of my deaths since it could usually finish me off after a small amount of poison damage.

But I did finally win in the end, and I rang the second Bell of Awakening, which in the far distance opened up the gate past Undead Parish. I went down further into Quelaag's Domain and took down an illusory wall, where one of the spider-egg covered mutants that lie around the demon's nest was guarding a hall. I talked to him and told him I was the new servant and he let me pass and speak to "The Fair Lady," a pale-haired spider-girl like Quelaag, but too sick to move. Since I was still wearing the Old Witch's Ring, I could speak to the Fair Lady, who, blind and delirious from illness, assumed my character was her sister.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls