Board 8 > Elden Ring Discussion 3 Sword of Dark and Spark

(+) Yeah! (+)

VintageGin posted...

I'm still using the straight sword and finger seal that I started with as a confessor and it kinda feels like I should've changed weapons by now? The only thing that's changed is that I've upgraded them and changed the ash of war so that my sword scales with faith too.

I mean what's stopping you from changing weapons? There's tons of the things lying around, especially Faith ones in Limgrave. If you're doing Liurnia though you'll be finding a lot of sorcery stuff, that's why.

Sacred Seals are a lot rarer but there are a couple in Limgrave and the areas past Liurnia.

Also Barricade shield seems completely weak
what is even the point of it?

It got nerfed really hard. Before, it added 35 Guard Boost for 15 seconds, and if you have 100 Guard Boost, you lose 0 Stamina when shielding, so you can shield every physical attack easily. Even worked against Malenia's big combo attack.

I wish I had been fast enough to beat the game before the patch, but I like being slow with big open world games like this, otherwise I'll end up feeling like a drag at times.

HeroDelTiempo17 posted...

I mean what's stopping you from changing weapons? There's tons of the things lying around, especially Faith ones in Limgrave. If you're doing Liurnia though you'll be finding a lot of sorcery stuff, that's why.

Sacred Seals are a lot rarer but there are a couple in Limgrave and the areas past Liurnia.

I think I found like...four that scaled with faith? The Tree Sentinel's weapon requires 30 strength, the Erdsteel Dagger sucks, and the Winged Scythe seemed maybe okay, but I couldn't get used to it.

I think the other thing is that it's hard to compare how powerful a weapon is against my current sword when my sword is +7 and the other weapons aren't.

Guess I wont be getting that Fingerprint Grape for Hyetta, dude just wont spawn for me no matter what I try

The winged scythe is definitely good, consider putting some time into figuring it out. If you can get up to Caria Manor you can find a very good weapon that uses faith, but it also requires 24 int

There's some faith Fisticuffs you can pick up in that PVE zone at the Roundtable.

Once you get to the capital there's a Sword that IS EXCLUSIVELY Faith, no physical damage whatsoever. Holy Lightsaber.

The number of weapons that only scale off of one stat in this game are shockingly low.

VintageGin posted...

I think I found like...four that scaled with faith? The Tree Sentinel's weapon requires 30 strength, the Erdsteel Dagger sucks, and the Winged Scythe seemed maybe okay, but I couldn't get used to it.

I think the other thing is that it's hard to compare how powerful a weapon is against my current sword when my sword is +7 and the other weapons aren't.

Just find a weapon that you like the moveset of, any weapon because you can also customize normal ones with Ash, and upgrade it. If you legitimately just don't like anything you've found more than your starting sword that's one thing but yeah you have to just pick stuff you like and upgrade it.

When I saw thought Kenneth Haight was the Castle Morne guy, but I'm just now seeing there's some nerdnwhinstands akrind on the map screaming about how he's the great Kenneth Haight? I....somehow NEVER encountered this guy even though I scraped that part of the map.

game beated

UshiromiyaEva posted...

When I saw thought Kenneth Haight was the Castle Morne guy, but I'm just now seeing there's some nerdnwhinstands akrind on the map screaming about how he's the great Kenneth Haight? I....somehow NEVER encountered this guy even though I scraped that part of the map.

That dude is on ruins right above a main road so I guess you picked a pretty weird route!

(if you had bought the note from Kale that says to go to the church to get the Physik flask, and then followed the road it tells you to, he would have been impossible to miss)

I'm almost level 150 and still can barely damage this fucking boss

Malenia is going to take me weeks, isn't she

tbh i've found that the starting weapons aren't bad

they're more well rounded than most of the specialized weapons- the crazy ones usually have slow attack animations

WazzupGenius00 posted...

Guess I wont be getting that Fingerprint Grape for Hyetta, dude just wont spawn for me no matter what I try

I had the same problem with that guy not spawning so I ended up just using CheatEngine to generate a Fingerprint Grape lol.

I think it's really annoying that you can't help people out with bosses if you are too high leveled. (For random help I mean, not with friends)

Like, I get it would be too simple to just destroy a boss easily with the help of a super leveled person, but would it really be so hard to scale the level down or something, but let them keep their equipment load and maybe lower the level of their weapon a bit?

Like, because I'm level 160+ now I just never get to help anyone with anything, it's stupid.

"Just make a new character!"

No, I want to help people with a fun build I have, and I don't care if they tweek the damage on it to make it more appropriate to that person's level. I don't want to help people using a fking starting game sword and a panlid.

I think the thing I suffered from most with sidequests is that I tried to avoid resting at Sites of Grace when possible. Several of them require you to rest at certain sites, so that proved to be somewhat unfortunate...

Resting at graces resets the world, which is what allows quest phases to progress. That's how it's always been in Souls games.
I think the only things that require specific graces are the Melina conversations. That is a pretty bad piece of design IMO. They should have had some sort of indicator that a specific grace had a convo.

Finished clearing out some bosses I had passed by, got myself to a clean 160m

I'm satisfied until the DLC!

dang they really don't let you do multiple endings on one playthrough huh

Okay i broke something else

I went to Fia to do her thing and I got the dagger for D, but after I progressed it went straight to her opening the new room and I didn't get a map or whatever for this knifeprint

colliding posted...

dang they really don't let you do multiple endings on one playthrough huh

If you've done some necessary things along your one playthrough, you can as late as after the final boss upload your save file and get all the endings in one playthrough. It basically takes no additional time.

Fastbreak posted...

Okay i broke something else

I went to Fia to do her thing and I got the dagger for D, but after I progressed it went straight to her opening the new room and I didn't get a map or whatever for this knifeprint

It's just a map telling you where the Black Knife Catacombs are located. They're pretty obvious as a map location in NE Liurnia to begin with.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

It's just a map telling you where the Black Knife Catacombs are located. They're pretty obvious as a map location in NE Liurnia to begin with.

Yeah I checked and I do have the knifeprint, but I got it from beating the catacombs earlier. Oops!

There's honestly a TON of "steps" in quests in this game that are just them giving you an idea of where to go that can be completely skipped over.

DeepsPraw posted...

Resting at graces resets the world, which is what allows quest phases to progress. That's how it's always been in Souls games.
I think the only things that require specific graces are the Melina conversations. That is a pretty bad piece of design IMO. They should have had some sort of indicator that a specific grace had a convo.

You have to rest at certain Graces for Ranni's quest too.

For the main story, I kept jumping trying to jump down into the Forge of the Giants to figure out how to get down there. Eventually looked it up to see I just had to rest at the Grace...

ctesjbuvf posted...

If you've done some necessary things along your one playthrough, you can as late as after the final boss upload your save file and get all the endings in one playthrough. It basically takes no additional time.

what if I already visited a grace post-seeing an ending?

Beat Radahn tonight. Wasnt too bad, but I guess he was nerfed with this last patch. Im also super over leveled due to bird suicide.

Still kinda shocks me how hard some of the bosses hit in this game. Went to try and go mess with the guy in front of the Bestial Sanctum, and still get 2-3-shot at level 150 in Radahns armor.

https://streamable.com/3l0svr

This game is great sometimes. Please Enjoy.

I love how the only dialogue is han. All we get of ermine is the laugh

So I plat'd this game on the ps4 a couple days ago and honestly this felt like the most exhaustive game I've ever completed. The entire game felt like I've triggered some anti-piracy protection where all the enemies can 2 shot me and they have 5x the HP. My build was almost purely STR/VIT/END with some FTH sprinkled in to use some magic. Weapon was dragon halbred for the majority of the game, ending with the Ghinza wheel. With all that, I still felt like I barely did any damage to the majority of the enemies, even two-handing. Without summons that is. With Mimic Tear, all of sudden fights got 10x easier and it just didn't feel right. Like it took me 3 hours straight memorizing Hoarah Loux's attack patterns and barely getting the win by myself. While I killed Melenia in 6 tries by stun locking her with alternating R1 bonks with my mimic.
My route through the game was probably also non-ideal as I have this stubborn mindset of "If I can access this area, I must be able to beat it!". So I spent a fair bit of time killing bosses that I was woefully underleveled for including Tree Sentinel before being able to level, the rotten tree beast in the hero grave near the beginning of the game at lv. 25, Margit at lv 20, the Putrid Avatar in caelid at like lv 50 and the majority of Ranni's quest before Rennala.
Performance on my PS4 was also really terrible and didn't help.Some framedrops and low framerates in general in some areas. And not to sound like DSP, but I swear the game would sometimes just drop inputs. I sometimes found my self standing around even though I hit attack or heal or needing to click in left control stick twice to demount.
Or the one time I was fighting a boss on horseback and noticed I was about to go off a cliff and started mashing jump. Horse instead just ran off. It was all so frustrating.
It just seems like the entire game was tuned against builds that used summons/magic/bleed/rot/frost which made pure heavy melee builds pretty much impossible on a casual playthrough. It feels like pure heavy weapons should do more damage or hell more poise break with how slow they swing against these bloodborne speed enemies. ( I know about jump attacks doing more poise break but had very low luck landing them without retaliation on the faster bosses)
I just needed to vent. It's not a bad game in any sense but the balancing just feels bad and I didn't have much fun with it. I know it's mostly my own fault but these games taut how you can play how you like. I guess I unintentionally took the hard-mode route.
(There was also that part where I lost 12 hours of progress due to a brownout, which included having to do redo valiant gargoyles and the entirety of rot lake and deeproot depths)

having now finished it and enjoyed it immensely, I come back to the question of "should there be an easy mode" and my answer is still yes, coming from someone who never could get into From games.

the only way I was able to make any progress at the start of this game was looking up the ball trick and getting to level 40 as a base level. sure, ostensibly I could have explored some catacombs and maybe leveled up in a more natural way, but I cannot emphasize how much I hated dying and my slow-ass confessor at the beginning of this game. starting at 40 basically made limgrave into an actual "first level" that prepared this non-souls gamer for the rest of the experience.

at level 40, everything about the first half of this game is so much better than that initial first 20-30 levels. but I'm a bit disappointed in myself and the game really, that it made me chase a ball off a cliff for an hour to get there.

people might say "well if you stuck with it and triumphed, you would relish that feeling" or "if you don't use mimic tear or moonveil and beat the boss, you'll feel more accomplished" and I just don't think so. everyone has their own individual tolerance for challenge, and people feel satisfaction from surpassing their own individual challenges.

tl'dr, an easy mode would save me a lot of time and would still make me feel good about myself without bothering purists, so let's have them from now on

colliding posted...

at level 40, everything about the first half of this game is so much better than that initial first 20-30 levels. but I'm a bit disappointed in myself and the game really, that it made me chase a ball off a cliff for an hour to get there.

You could have killed the zombie dragon in 4 minutes and it would have instantly taken you to 50 lol.

Hindsight 20/20

Decided to speed run NG+ to get another ending.

Frenzied flame ending is neat.

Gonna take my time through NG++ and probably keep it on that file until if/any DLC comes out.

You inspired me to check, and it sounds like ng+ is rather kind in its scaling. Nice!

Still on my first playthrough. Remembered that offensive stats are important and suddenly my run feels way better. Just beat the rolly fire giant

colliding posted...

what if I already visited a grace post-seeing an ending?

Then no, it needs to be before you've watched an ending, unfortunately.

Btw Revenants are and will always be Utter Nonsense

Also the Fell King is felled

Fun character that guy, neat attacks too

colliding posted...

tl'dr, an easy mode would save me a lot of time and would still make me feel good about myself without bothering purists, so let's have them from now on

It would still bother purists. You have to consider that these games are made with a particular vision that stems from classic games. Which are tough as nails and don't offer an easy mode. You either have to get good or stop playing. Fromsoft makes modern versions of those games.

I mean, you can easily use mods on PC to add easy modes to all of From's games, so they might as well just do it themselves...

I'm definitely not a purist and roll my eyes at people who think something has to be hard to keep a "purity" to it, accessibility options should never really be seen as a bad thing, but I don't really think From has an obligation to put an easy mode in per se. If anything Elden Ring is by far their most accessible game yet, not to dismiss those that want a legit easy mode option. I dunno, I just don't really think that's on them to need to do necessarily

Got Melania to one hit from death and died. Got annoyed and did a human summon, human did worse than my summon

I also got through phase one with neither I or my summon taking a single hit. That was cool

Then immediately got blasted by angels of course

CassandraCain posted...

It would still bother purists. You have to consider that these games are made with a particular vision that stems from classic games. Which are tough as nails and don't offer an easy mode. You either have to get good or stop playing. Fromsoft makes modern versions of those games.

yeah, except elden ring already isn't that, because it's quite "easy" if not time consuming to cheese/exploit the game

so may as well just cut out the middle-man here and just make an actual easy mode

UshiromiyaEva posted...

You could have killed the zombie dragon in 4 minutes and it would have instantly taken you to 50 lol.

Hindsight 20/20

I don't quite get this, because you're going to get killed by the "baby dragons" if you try this at level 20 right? Am I thinking of something else?

You can sneak up there and not aggro the baby dragons.

Use a bleed weapon for percentage damage buildup on the tail after sitting at the Fort bonfire behind it.

Even a level 1 character can do it with 0 risk.

Combined with a gold foot item popped right before you finish killing it and it's nearly 100k runes.

Im loving powerstancing colossal weapons

UshiromiyaEva posted...

Use a bleed weapon for percentage damage buildup on the tail after sitting at the Fort bonfire behind it.

Even a level 1 character can do it with 0 risk.

Combined with a gold foot item popped right before you finish killing it and it's nearly 100k runes.

I never even thought of just attacking the tail, haha. makes sense.

but that just further makes my point, I think. I guess it just comes down to the souls purist about what they find more distasteful: rune farming/mimic tear/moonveil or an optional easy mode

colliding posted...

I never even thought of just attacking the tail, haha. makes sense.

but that just further makes my point, I think. I guess it just comes down to the souls purist about what they find more distasteful: rune farming/mimic tear/moonveil or an optional easy mode

I'd so much rather let individuals play how they want with their build AND give them accessibility options. Something like celeste where players can slow the game down slightly would not detract from the enjoyment of other players.

I beat the game yesterday, and while I loved it, I would've loved it more if it were a bit easier. The main two things I'd like would probably be that I felt like I took a bit too much damage, and that falls killed me too easily. I'm not sure how to solve the latter, other than adding an option like Breath of the Wild's glider, but you'd have to completely redesign the game around something like that. Part of the reason falls were frustrating is that spawn points are usually further back than they are with bosses.

I know this is actually a big problem (lol PC gaming) but this is still the funniest Souls PvP clip I've ever seen.

https://twitter.com/vlonechanclas/status/1505230513426022402

I won't pretend to understand what that even was.