General Gaming Elden Ring - Information Thread, update (02/21): Shadow of the Erdtree DLC "Collector's Edition Messmer the Impaler Statue" trailer

[BloodyHell]

6 minutes ago, Mercury33 said:

Huh, where do you find it? I beat the Mimic Boss which I thought was gonna give it me but it didn’t. 

In the Eternal City, in a chest. Across the long bridge after you beat the mimic. I kinda forget exactly where, but it wasn't hard to find. 

 

I informed my wife tonight that she can officially put "Here lay the Elden Lord" on my gravestone when I die. She was not impressed.

[Slug]

1 hour ago, BloodyHell said:

Oh, and I got a dagger that applies scarlet rot. It's light, so I can usually carry it on me as a spare weapon, and it melts humanoid health bars. It's the only weapon ive found in 100 hours that applies Scarlet Rot, and it works well. I upgraded it to level 8, and and it's been handy. 

I found a rapier that does it, but haven't found the dagger yet.

[Zaku3]

Damn the area for that option boss is hard. I want to beat her though because i want to get some more upgrade material. Wanna have dual katanas or/and this combo I saw of a sword that deals scarlet rot and another that deals frostbite. And I am conflicted on leveling up I think im at level 152 or somethign and I don't want to get so high I cant play coop or pvp.

[Bloodporne]

Dung Eater can eat shit but alas, he'd enjoy that 😑

[Mercury33]

Wooo lets go! Down go those stupid Gargoyles. Switching to the Moonveil Katana did the trick with Mimic +5

[stepee]

man I’m l went up like 15 levels today beating so many bosses.

 

The balance seems weird with bosses vs regular enemy’s sometimes. Like Morgot was crazy easy for me but then the area after

 

as soon as you hit the snow in the land of giants

got a lot harder at least for my build.

 

Like even the enemy’s at the fort you reach first were about  as hard as Morgot for me and they wanted me to kill like fucking 7 of them and you have to fight 3 at once. It knows they are hard too since it gives 5k per kill. Eventually I just snuck around and got the treasure and bailed.

 

And then a little later there were these huge skeleton ghost things and I thought it was a boss and eventually beat it, but then another spawns, I kept trying and kept realizing more and more of them existed until it was like 7 of those too it wanted me to kill so I bailed on trying to see if that did anything. Just a damn time sink that took so many hits each.

 

But then yeah I beat the

 

fog dragon [/spoiler] and

 

black bird of death

 

no problem. I wonder if some of these enemy’s in the open world here I’m just supposed to ride by. Went back to my greatsword for most of today, the “stamp” ash it has is crazy powerful now. I beat the evergoal in the area last thing I did and died a couple times then cheesed him bad with that move, literally just hitting lt, don’t even need to wait for him to get up.

[Moa]

 

I think he's close but not quite there on his criticisms of the difficulty. I suspect that the vast majority of players use mimic tears as a crutch in the end-game, and at least for me it's the only way most bosses feel remotely manageable. The problem is that doing this is not the most engaging way to play the game. I think the summons, and specifically mimic tear, are a net negative to the gameplay and the game would have been better without them and with balance changes to reflect this.

 

I do think there's a ton of room to explore different builds and style of gameplay, and from the SOULS VETERANS I've talked to, they seem to think the game is much more flexible than previous From games. You can get OP in a lot of different ways, they just all probably involve mimic tear.

[Bacon]

As a "souls veteran" the damage is total BS. You totally don't need mimic or other summons, but sure make the game easier than an actual easy mode ever could. Mimic isn't even the best summon. Was it before the patch? Maybe, but the patch came out too soon for actual testing, but there are some fucking killer summons. The issue is just the FP required to summon them vs the Mimic Tear's taking away a bit of HP. Change that HP to FP and you'd quickly see the mimic fall out of favor. 

 

And flexible? Maybe, but Strength is the weakest it has ever been with big weapons, at least from what I can tell, moving slower than their DS3 counterparts  which makes no sense with how fast this game is. It is Bloodborne levels of speed. There is a reason why people who use big weapons often use jump attacks almost exclusively and use Bloodhound's Step when they can.

 

I don't think it is flexible. I think the ol' tried and true methods are weak and so people look for tools that trivialize hard content and they consider stagger locking bosses or lowering a bosses HP to zero before the boss even puts up a fight as flexible. Just look at my two lord of blood fights or even my radahn fights. I don't see flexibility. I see trivialization. 

 

Like, if anyone here has never played a Dark Souls game before, go play DS1 or Demon's Souls. Those are baby games. The only From game out there that will give you issues is Sekiro. If you can beat Elden Ring you can beat their other titles with a kind of ease. 

[Slug]

5 hours ago, stepee said:

And then a little later there were these huge skeleton ghost things and I thought it was a boss and eventually beat it, but then another spawns, I kept trying and kept realizing more and more of them existed until it was like 7 of those too it wanted me to kill so I bailed on trying to see if that did anything. Just a damn time sink that took so many hits each.

Whenever I've run into those I've found that they were being summoned by a nearby enemy and killing it insta-gibs the giant ghost skele.  If the one's you're fighting are not summoned, that that's gonna be a huge pain in the ass because those things are sponges.

 

9 hours ago, Zaku3 said:

... this combo I saw of a sword that deals scarlet rot and another that deals frostbite. And I am conflicted on leveling up I think im at level 152 or somethign and I don't want to get so high I cant play coop or pvp.

My son is running frost claws and a bleed katana and it's pretty sick.  He goes in with the claws to proc the frost debuff and as soon as it lands he switches to the katana and enemies just melt.

 

As for PVP I think the dueling sweet spot right now is somewhere 125-150?  I'm not sure the community has quite settled on it yet.

[TheLeon]

10 hours ago, BloodyHell said:

Oh, and I got a dagger that applies scarlet rot. It's light, so I can usually carry it on me as a spare weapon, and it melts humanoid health bars. It's the only weapon ive found in 100 hours that applies Scarlet Rot, and it works well. I upgraded it to level 8, and and it's been handy. 

I just used this to make the Margott fight really simple. Went aggressive with my sword and spirit summon at the start, switched to the dagger and applied the rot just before he hit his second phase, that took his health down to just a sliver, so I only needed to him once with my sword to finish it. 

[Mercury33]

I would agree. Almost every boss I’ve fought my reaction to my first hit has been “oh nice I hit him pretty hard” whereas in other souls games usually your default weapon would only do a smidge of damage. Which honestly to me is fine. Elden Ring has been more about the sense of exploration and awe than accomplishment for me. There have obviously been a few bosses that have tested me. And that’s really welcome to get a boss “puzzle” but I’m really glad they’re not all that way. That would be too exhausting. 

[Slug]

So far my biggest boss accomplishment feeling has been Mohg as a slow, STR build greatsword user.  Just an intense fight.  Felt really good dropping him.

[Bloodporne]

My issue with From's approach here in late areas is that I often feel like they load up enemies with irritatingly long combo chains with next to zero openings, AoE spam or something else in that vein. It's weird because I kept thinking of it as difficulty but it really isn't even that because I beat things seemingly quicker than past Souls games ultimately. It's more that their particular approach here of mixing-and-matching seemingly Souls combat with Sekiro and Bloodborne-ish enemy movesets and speed often breeds these frustrating and exhausting feeling encounters. At least that's my experience. 

 

I'm currently exploring the sewers under the Capital and it reminded me of that the Giant Spider Hand enemy for example. It's obviously not the worst example but still. It's fast as fuck and it legitimately will do three to four hits in a row that are timed precisely to be JUST a tad faster than your weapon swing animation (and that's with my using a fast Curved Sword). It's not that I can't kill it but it consistently feels like a cheap way to exploit the combat system's limitations. Again, Bloodborne/Sekiro-ish enemies vs. Souls combat. There's nothing wrong at all with either speeds but I just think them seemingly randomly mixing and matching those approaches throughout the world sometimes creates this really unpleasant "okay whatever" frustration in me because I see what they're doing. 

 

Also if you look at the past Souls titles, the enemies' movesets kind of had an internal logic you could follow. If they were huge damage sponges that couldn't be staggered, they'd be slow. If they were fast and nimble, they wouldn't be able to tank massive damage and not flinch and so on. I think with Elden Ring being "everything we've ever done", and in many ways that works in a fantastic way, this can create enemies like the fat boys in the Capital sewers. I counted last night, they have one seven-hit combo chain with an approximately one second cooldown afterwards, they're somehow quick as fuck, they have two jump attacks, they have AoE, they have magic projectiles, they can quickstep out of the way of arrows/spells like Bloodborne enemies AND they have a grab attack. The reason I bring this enemy up is that most normal strikes, unless you probably have a massively heavy blade, will not stagger them out of any of this. Even if you do stagger them, their stagger animation is from Bloodborne, I know that shit well. It doesn't even provide an opening time enough to get out another hit animation. 

 

Anyway, it's gladly been somewhat rare that it bothers me much again lately but running through the sewers last night felt like it compounded every issue I have with their approach. That being said, the things the game does really fucking well and above and beyond the other Souls games far outweigh any of that in my opinion. I also think they're going to keep balancing and tweaking this game for quite some time. If anyone remembers, Dark Souls 1 got major balance changes up until like 8 months later. Doesn't help people buying it Day 1, or early in general, but I guess that's how it goes now unfortunately. 

 

Edit: Also have to add that I think the emphasis on 100 different summon types is...bizarre. It's a really unengaging way to provide an easier mode and some of these bosses are clearly overtuned around the idea that people will use the shit out of these. This ends up just feeling like "summon distraction while I whack at its ass and feel annoyed that this is what I had to resort to" to me so I never use them. Yet I pick up a new one as a reward seemingly every twenty minutes. I think it's fun to a certain extent for areas with large mobs but against 1v1 bosses it feels like a weird crutch and excuse to be able to ratcheting the movesets and HP to high heavens. 

 

And I agree with @Bacon, if you can make good progress in this game, I think Dark Souls' bosses would feel simple and easy afterwards. 

[XxEvil AshxX]

Anybody know a where I can get a guaranteed tower shield in Limgrave? My first character got two of them off of the soldiers right at the beginning and it made a huge difference when fighting some of the bosses. 

 

I started over with a new character to spec him better but I cannot get a tower shield to drop for nuthin. Is that one of the things they patched? Some of the bosses I beat before are giving me headaches now cuz I can't block their attacks.

[Slug]

1 hour ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

Anybody know a where I can get a guaranteed tower shield in Limgrave? My first character got two of them off of the soldiers right at the beginning and it made a huge difference when fighting some of the bosses.

 

I know the knight with the greatshield in that big group of soldiers leading up to Gatefront Ruins can drop his, but that's not guaranteed (easy farm though since the bonfire is right there).  I don't remember any specific guaranteed ones in Limgrave.  I know in Liurnia if you make your way up to the area near Four Belfries, there's the jellyfish greatshield on a body or something by a busted up cart surrounded by like 4 jellyfish.  But that's not Limgrave.

[BloodyHell]

1 hour ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

Anybody know a where I can get a guaranteed tower shield in Limgrave? My first character got two of them off of the soldiers right at the beginning and it made a huge difference when fighting some of the bosses. 

 

I started over with a new character to spec him better but I cannot get a tower shield to drop for nuthin. Is that one of the things they patched? Some of the bosses I beat before are giving me headaches now cuz I can't block their attacks.

Should still be a tower shield on the "captain" of that area. Use Silver Toed Fowl Feet if you have any, they work well.

 

My wife is still pretending she's not extremely turned on by my new role as Elden Lord of the Lands Between. Wait till I tell her about my new waifu consort.

 

Edit: I just learned that an adventurers guide came with the game. Some separate download I found in my library when I was looking for Habroxia 2 (which is a trult great pixel shmup). I downloaded it, checking it out now, and it seems to be a book of lore.

 

I can't play anymore on PS5 until my new controller arrives monday. No way I can beat Malenia with this crazy drift. I got the new Galactic Purple because of the upgraded springs in the triggers and thumb sticks. It finally shipped this morning and will arrive probably Monday. I really wanted the black, but im not buying OG controllers. Only the three new colors got the springs, collars, and thumbstick scrapers. I think purple looks the best of the three.

 

That was a lot of typing to say I can't play Elden Ring on PS5 until my controller comes in. My migration to Steamdeck and PC has begun, where I'll probably play str/faith.

[Kal-El814]

45 hours or so in, so I’m not in the end areas that @Bacon and @Bloodporne are referencing, but it’s clear to me that some bosses I’ve run into are meant to be fought with co-op allies or summons. A couple of them I’ve run into have gone from, “i have no fucking idea how you’re supposed to kill this thing,” to, “oh clearly the boss is supposed to be fought with a red herring.” And in those instances it’s not a difficulty curve, it’s a cliff. No summon / ally? Need to be perfect. Summon / ally? Derp away. Also I’ve never spent a ton of time co-oping in the other From games I’ve played (DeS, DS, and DS2), but I seem to remember those bosses handling more than one PC / target better than the bosses in this game so far.

 

Also the progression and guidance in this game remains bad. It’s wild that the directions from the sites of grace are permanent and in no way reflect your progression. It’s how I ended up clearing out most of Caelid before going to Stormveil in earnest; I didn’t pull up the map for a while and just followed the sites of grace.

[Bloodporne]

8 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

45 hours or so in, so I’m not in the end areas that @Bacon and @Bloodporne are referencing, but it’s clear to me that some bosses I’ve run into are meant to be fought with co-op allies or summons. A couple of them I’ve run into have gone from, “i have no fucking idea how you’re supposed to kill this thing,” to, “oh clearly the boss is supposed to be fought with a red herring.” And in those instances it’s not a difficulty curve, it’s a cliff. No summon / ally? Need to be perfect. Summon / ally? Derp away. Also I’ve never spent a ton of time co-oping in the other From games I’ve played (DeS, DS, and DS2), but I seem to remember those bosses handling more than one PC / target better than the bosses in this game so far.

 

Also the progression and guidance in this game remains bad. It’s wild that the directions from the sites of grace are permanent and in no way reflect your progression. It’s how I ended up clearing out most of Caelid before going to Stormveil in earnest; I didn’t pull up the map for a while and just followed the sites of grace.

They're permanent because they're just supposed to show you that this is the "story" path to become Elden Bro but do whatever you want outside of that. I don't think it's an issue and I think a lot of people go to Caelid early on for some sweet farming. They definitely designed it to be that adjacent to the early area on purpose.

[TheLeon]

The paths from the Sites of Grace are also kind of confusing because sometimes they're clearly pointing you towards the critical path (Stormveil, Lucaria, etc.), but other times it seems to be the optional stuff that they just really want you to see. Like Morne Castle on the Weeping Peninsula is optional, but a good place to focus on in the early game. Or in Caelid, they pointed me to/through Selia, which was cool, but also optional. 

[Keyser_Soze]

55 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

Also the progression and guidance in this game remains bad. It’s wild that the directions from the sites of grace are permanent and in no way reflect your progression. It’s how I ended up clearing out most of Caelid before going to Stormveil in earnest; I didn’t pull up the map for a while and just followed the sites of grace.

 

The guidance isn't unlike other souls games except this one has more of an emphasis on exploration. Caelid was a gentle nudge to go in a different direction not man up and beat everything. But if you can pull it off the game gives you that freedom to do so.

[Kal-El814]

31 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

The guidance isn't unlike other souls games except this one has more of an emphasis on exploration. Caelid was a gentle nudge to go in a different direction not man up and beat everything. But if you can pull it off the game gives you that freedom to do so.

 

I don’t know that the game teleporting me to Caelid and having the sites of grace give me directions to go deeper into the area after telling me I should follow them counts as a “gentle nudge,” it’s as close to explicit instructions as this game gives.

[Kal-El814]

23 minutes ago, Dimden said:

I mean, you chose to interact with the portal when you could have just marked it on your map and came back to it later. That's the thing with freedom, careless exploration can lead to positive or negative consequences, and you just need to decide if you can live with your own decisions.

 

I don’t particularly care, I’m having fun and managed to get through Caelid without getting too sweaty. But it’s not “careless exploration,” an NPC I met early on put a marker on my map and I went to it. Again, nothing else I’ve seen in the game has been even remotely that explicit and I had absolutely no reason to believe the game wanted me to go anywhere other than there. If I cliffhorse’d my way into and endgame area, fine, but I went to the only spot on the map that the game gave me aside from sites of grace directions.

[Zaku3]

27 minutes ago, Dimden said:

  Hide contents

I will say that the one thing this game does extremely poorly regarding the final boss encounter... If you spec'd into pure holy/sacred, you're going to have a really fucking rough time with the final boss as you'll do next to no damage outside of physical. If you decided to be a pure faith caster, phew lad, I'm sorry for you.

 

 

Halberd build stay winning.

 

Ok got that frost needle and antspur rapier maxed out. Added seppuku to the antspur for bleed and made it a poison rapier.

 

 

[Bloodporne]

I've been really digging this Wing Of Astel sword. Huge damage with "Raise INT" talisman and the Winged Sword Insignia talisman combined. If you have a quick weapon, don't sleep on that Winged talisman, if you can manage to really lay into an enemy, the damage ramps up a lot.

[stepee]

7 hours ago, Slug said:

Whenever I've run into those I've found that they were being summoned by a nearby enemy and killing it insta-gibs the giant ghost skele.  If the one's you're fighting are not summoned, that that's gonna be a huge pain in the ass because those things are sponges.

 

My son is running frost claws and a bleed katana and it's pretty sick.  He goes in with the claws to proc the frost debuff and as soon as it lands he switches to the katana and enemies just melt.

 

As for PVP I think the dueling sweet spot right now is somewhere 125-150?  I'm not sure the community has quite settled on it yet.

 

lol ok yeah there was one of those boat ghosts on a cliff below that was summoning them. Drove me nuts because I got the notice that a beast was nearby and I hadn’t seen the skeletons before that I recall so I thought that’s what it was and kept trying. Guess it was never going to end!

[stepee]

Welp I’ll try this spirit cave later on, not going to do a freakin stealth section every time before getting an attempt. Checkpoints are still what annoys me the most, I hate when the punishment is boredom. Luckily a lot of times you do get one that lets you quickly try again and I do realize I’m doing a lot of optional stuff.

[skillzdadirecta]

17 minutes ago, stepee said:

Checkpoints are still what annoys me the most, I hate when the punishment is boredom.

This game is EXTREMLY generous with the checkpoints. Much more so than any other From Souls game. 

[stepee]

47 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

This game is EXTREMLY generous with the checkpoints. Much more so than any other From Souls game. 

 

Yeah actually that’s fair for the most part, it’s probably more often than not that they are fair, it’s just a couple times they are a little annoying and it pisses me off. :P 

 

One of the main reason I could never really get into the others. But yeah, actually my main complaint is still just the overall difficulty and screen filling combo waves of destruction spam shit lol.

[Moa]

The reason Elden Ring is a bad game is that it is actually too easy for us veterans. 

[Zaku3]

4 minutes ago, Moa said:

The reason Elden Ring is a bad game is that it is actually too easy for us veterans. 

 

I need to do a playthrough without using my Mimic ash. Still unsure if I should do NG+ or start a new character. 

[stepee]

I hear both that after ER playing the Souls games would be easy and also that ER is too easy for Souls fans, so idk which it is. I will say from my experience I did try to spend a couple hours on Dead Souls Remastered figuring I knew some of the basics and still couldn’t even make it through a two minute stretch at what is apparently considered 2-1 in the game. It was still a pretty painful experience that seemed like it wanted me to slowly inch through and lure out enemy’s one by one and slowly get hits in one at a time. That was like 40 hours or so ago in ER I tried it though, Ill try it again when I beat ER.

[BloodyHell]

20 minutes ago, Zaku3 said:

 

I need to do a playthrough without using my Mimic ash. Still unsure if I should do NG+ or start a new character. 

Im doing the opposite, I beat it without, now im going full god mode. After Malenia, anyway. I want to beat her without mimic too.

[skillzdadirecta]

2 minutes ago, stepee said:

I hear both that after ER playing the Souls games would be easy and also that ER is too easy for Souls fans, so idk which it is. I will say from my experience I did try to spend a couple hours on Dead Souls Remastered figuring I knew some of the basics and still couldn’t even make it through a two minute stretch at what is apparently considered 2-1 in the game. It was still a pretty painful experience that seemed like it wanted me to slowly inch through and lure out enemy’s one by one and slowly get hits in one at a time. That was like 40 hours or so ago in ER I tried it though, Ill try it again when I beat ER.

I think after playing Elden Ring, you'll get used to the basic gameplay of the other Souls games especially anything Post Bloodborne where the games play much faster than pre- Bloodborne. Bosses won't seem as intimidating because you'll have fought more of them in Elden Ring than in any two or three Souls games combined. Where it will be tougher is not as many checkpoints... you die at a boss, you'll have to fight your way back to them or get good at running past mobs in order to retry difficult boss fights.

 

Another area where the other games are tougher is that you can't just escape a difficult fight or go around tough minibosses like you can in Elden Ring. Elden Ring rarely forces you to stay fighting an enemy you're not ready for unless it's a boss in an enclosed area. Most of the time you can get a couple of licks in, see you're not ready fro that particular challenge, and then back off and try again later. You can't really do that in most of the other From Games. Once you're engaged in a mini-boss battle, you're stuck until you win or die.

[stepee]

oh man the

 

fire giant

can FUCK off. I might have to turn back from here for now which sucks as I wanted to clear this out after making it up here but fuck. I’m level 85 strength and I barely hurt him fucking sponge.

 

edit: Yeah, I’ll come back later and hope I can hack my way through at level 140 or something. Just an absolute fun sucker.

[Keyser_Soze]

2 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Another area where the other games are tougher is that you can't just escape a difficult fight or go around tough minibosses like you can in Elden Ring. Elden Ring rarely forces you to stay fighting an enemy you're not ready for unless it's a boss in an enclosed area. Most of the time you can get a couple of licks in, see you're not ready fro that particular challenge, and then back off and try again later. You can't really do that in most of the other From Games. Once you're engaged in a mini-boss battle, you're stuck until you win or die.

 

That's not true. It's actually easier to nope out of a boss fight in earlier games because of the Homeward Bone. It allows you to travel out of a boss encounter with all your souls to the last bonfire you visited. As far as I've seen there is no such item in Elden Ring.