Elden ring!

[Empryrean]

So I think im about at the homestretch of the game. I didn't realize halig stuff was going to be much more powerful than spiral dragon zone, I still don't want melina to burn herself alive or to get myself frenzy flamed so i found a neat skip that lets me get there without needing to burn the erdree . I wonder if they're gonna patch that out.. either way it's nice to have +24 upgrades available without feeling like I've advanced the plot too far. I'm gonna keep trying out different weps and stuff beefore I finally let the capital turn into ash . does anyone know if that also locks out the subterranean shunning grounds?

 

[wankerness]

so i finished my NG+ run last night. fun fact, if my count is right, there are only 7 bosses necessary to kill to beat the entire game. my NG+ run was about 7 hours total, compared to the 99 hours my initial run took.

Well, if the speedrunner technique is used, the only bosses necessary are godskin duo and then the final boss pair. Think he used some kind of fall/load exploit to get from the early-game portal in west liurnia to Crumbling Farum to the main part of the level, though. Didn't ever even go to the roundtable hold or touch stormveil hold IIRC.

I think most of the fun of this game is all the exploring and doing all the mini-dungeons and building your character out. A replay where you just beeline the main bosses doesn't sound too entertaining to me, unless I wanted to try and learn them without mimic tear now that I don't have the "must complete platinum!!!" goal in my mind. I mainly just want to do a second playthrough eventually to do the handful of quests I screwed up (Letenna, the monkey guy, and then some pieces of the wolf guy and Patches' chains) and farm a couple weird pieces of gear that I missed out on (mainly the two bigger versions of the envoy horn - no way am I trying to farm that shit in the haligtree where 90% of the time when you kill the mobs they fall off the edge and can't be looted). I think I might just retire this character in the hopes they patch the Frostfield mausoleum to work before I skip to NG+.

I am, however, quite interested in replaying with a totally new character. I'd probably go strength build with a greatshield and that overpowered shield weapon art where you jack your defense rating up by 35. Or maybe I'd do some kind of frost/bleed build? I dunno. I played a bit as an int/dex build and didn't find it very fun except when I 100-0'd that goddam bastard corrupted erdtree miniboss in the haligtree's rot pond that seemed like about the hardest boss in the game to fight "legit."

 

[CTID]

I am, however, quite interested in replaying with a totally new character.

That's where i'm at as well. I did a really quick NG+ run to get another ending and the only achievement i'm missing is the third ending now (though i'm not generally an achievement hunter, i figured since i was already so close i might as well get all of them if i can) but as of right now my current plans are to let it sit for a while so i don't burn myself out with another 100 playthrough, and then i'll do my 3rd run with a new character, probably a Wretch, and do the whole hog again instead of the mad dash to the end.

 

[Chri]

Nothing important to say, but holy shit do spell buffs last a long time in this game! I just got and used Order's Blade for the first time and was so surprised. 1.5 minutes of buffed damage is NUTS!

I guess it won't be broken and game breaking for PVP since AFAIK there aren't any true combos anymore due to the way the game handles hit stun, but damn I can imagine this is capable of really neutering some bosses if any have specific elemental weaknesses.

 

[wankerness]

Nothing important to say, but holy shit do spell buffs last a long time in this game! I just got and used Order's Blade for the first time and was so surprised. 1.5 minutes of buffed damage is NUTS!

I guess it won't be broken and game breaking for PVP since AFAIK there aren't any true combos anymore due to the way the game handles hit stun, but damn I can imagine this is capable of really neutering some bosses if any have specific elemental weaknesses.

It's variable. Some spells like Flame Grant Me Strength feel like they last about 10 seconds (wiki says 30, I dunno if I believe it!!) while some other really good ones like Golden Vow last 90.

Either way I'm glad it's not like DS2 where duration is tied to your faith/int stat. In DS2 buffs lasted for almost no time at all unless you had way more of the associated stat than was required to cast the spell, like magic barrier lasting 10/30/60/90 seconds at 10/20/30/50 faith. And DS1 had idiocy like lightning blade offering no benefit durationwise over gold pine resin while only having one charge compared to gold pine resin being reusable as often as you wanted (assuming you had extras, anyway).

I started a new playthrough as sword and shield build. We'll see how this goes. Getting through that first camp sure was a LOT easier with a real shield. Took like 3 minutes to clear the whole thing as opposed to like 10 minutes of creeping around and wimpily poking with a spear on the prophet. Not sure yet what weapon to go for early on, maybe I'll try to get a claymore or just be a cheap bastard and beeline for the frost hatchet.

 

[Mathemagician]

On my mage I switch my simple +5 rapier from magic to holy to blood as needed for whatever area I’m in on the rare occasion I need to use melee. And man that is a game-changer. Just swap the ash and change element. So much easier than farming a million stones. However it makes sense given that we have to farm everything else now lol.

 

[wankerness]

On my mage I switch my simple +5 rapier from magic to holy to blood as needed for whatever area I’m in on the rare occasion I need to use melee. And man that is a game-changer. Just swap the ash and change element. So much easier than farming a million stones. However it makes sense given that we have to farm everything else now lol.

Smithing stones in this game are a very serious problem. Titanite shards always dropped like candy in the previous DS games as you progressed through them, but Smithing Stones are pathetic, I was frequently gated by not having enough to level to even the level of the enemies in the areas I was progressing through, while with my unique weapon I was multiple levels ahead. It makes sense that Somber ones be rare, cause twinkling titanite/petrified dragon bones were the equivalents in previous games and those were mostly playthrough limited, but here the regular ones are almost as uncommon and you need 12x as many of them. You can farm some of them off late game mobs, but it's rare that they drop. And if you want to buy them off the vendor, it's ridiculous too, plus you can't unlock them from vendors till late game.

Once you've finally unlocked all the bell bearings, here's equivalent rune costs for buying materials to fully upgrade a weapon from 1-24 (regular) or 1-9 (somber) assuming you buy everything off the vendors. Every three levels of weapon upgrade takes 12 smithing stones, so you're having to buy 12 of each level of smithing stone. Every level of Somber stone requires 1 stone, so you only need to buy 1 of each level.

Smithing Stone 1 - 800 - 9600 for 1-3
Smithing Stone 2 - 1600 - 19,200
3 - 2400 - 28,800
4 - 3600 - 43,200
5 - 4800 - 57,600
6 - 6000 - 72,000
7 - 9,000 - 108,000
8 - 12,000 - 144,000

482,400 for upgrading ONE weapon from 1-24.

Somber ones scale from costing 2000 to 25,000, for a total of costing 97,000 to go 1-9, so it's less than 1/4 as expensive to just buy out all the materials to max out your weapon if it's a unique one. As the unique ones tend to be far more powerful than the non-unique ones, something's very off with this!!

Yeah, I can't see why anyone would use more than one or two "regular" weapons with how ridiculous their upgrade cost is.

I just read a Reddit thread on this and it seemed like most people thought it made sense cause you can swap enchants/ashes of war on the fly with regular weapons, plus buff them, while you can't do any of that with uniques, and thus in a way the regular weapons are much more powerful. Except for the handful of really good uniques, I guess. I sorta get it, it's just annoying when there are so damn many of them and it's such a huge sink to try any out.

Though now that I have the wave of gold sword I can farm 500k runes in a few minutes with no effort.

 

[Mathemagician]

Yeah I buffed my INT to 60 to use the Carian Regal staff, but since I don’t have a single Somber +6, I can’t get it high enough to outpace my meteorite staff that I picked up some 40 hrs ago. My new staff looks cool lemme use it! And the earliest +6 is comically involved to try to get. I’ve beaten Radahn at this point, and am still using the same staff. It’s admittedly awesome, but my inability to upgrade other options is not lost on me.

 

[Chri]

RE: the drop rates for upgrades. This has been a major problem for me too in the early game. My damage output is fine, but having to decide what to use and stick with it so early is kinda lame. I really wanted to powerstance curved swords because the move set is sick as hell, but I can’t upgrade my second curved sword at all yet because I already upgraded a straight sword a fair bit (vagabond starting class) and then my current main CS. That leaves me with minimal damage on the second CS and the way the game handles dual wield attacks it kinda neutered the upgraded one. At this point I’m better off just using the one CS two-handed. I’m okay with farming for runes to buy the first tier of upgrades once I’ve got that unlocked because I can just warp to one of the later game areas (I forgot the name. It’s got “Dragon something” in the name. There’s a bunch of really tiny dudes running around outside a building that all drop 1200-5000 runes and are easy enough to backstab for the kill.

I will say this game has thrown quite a few curveballs with the learning curve at those of us who have played and grown accustomed to the older games.

 

[Flappydoodle]

Played for hours yesterday, made a little bit of progress. I killed the

Spoiler

Flame Giant boss, who is frustrating and killed me a bunch until I watched one video where the guy was constantly mounting up to close distances and then dismounting to actually hit him. I changed my horse to be in my "pouch" so now I have a consistent "keybind" for it instead of having to cycle through my inventory to mount/dismount. It still took me like 5 attempts once I had the right strategy, and I had to switch back to my scythe cause he was super fire-resistant in second phase.

After him, then I just mostly got mad a lot. Some of the end areas of this game are utter bullshit, they're easily the worst Souls areas of all time when it comes to volume and nastiness of enemies - they make the Ringed City look like Undead Burg. I legitimately am starting to hate this game as I bang my head against the wall with some of these areas.

I'm talking specifically about:

Spoiler

1) Miquella's Haligtree, which is basically a ton of tiny narrow branches COVERED with those little assholes with the trumpets - it seems unless you are rocking an upgraded greatbow or are a mage build, you're in for non-stop frustration. I am a faith build, and none of my spells have the range to hit them, plus they all have the annoyance where my character steps forward to cast. I could always get a ways in, then I get to a part with a huge overlook where a guy that's so high up you can't see him and the ground at the same time starts spamming you with nukes that can take off 3/4 of your health (if you have 40 vigor) as you have to run a LONG way. It would be very difficult to roll through the bubble masses he spams at you even if you could see them coming while also seeing the bridge you're balancing on. And any time you die, you have to carefully creep through all the branches, killing around 15 of those little trumpet assholes/ants again, just to have a second shot at the gauntlet of shit. I'm thinking I'm going to have to respec mage just to get through the first section. I've seen a LOT of complaints about the final boss of that area being insanely overtuned even relative to other endgame bosses, so that should be fun if I ever get there.

2) Crumbling Farum Azula, which is just a nightmare of super overtuned enemies. The worst, by far, are these giant maggot-faced fucks that are basically MEGA basilisks. They absolutely spam deathclouds, have FAR more range with them than the basilisks do, and worst of all, have about 6,000 health and infinite poise so you can't stop them casting. All I can do is just spam my weapon art on blasphemous blade 3 times to kill them as quickly as possible, since there is no hope in hell of legitimately engaging them without dying in a death cloud since you can't interrupt them and they will not stop spamming it everywhere. But some of them are in packs!!!

I did beat the second, 2-phase version of Mohg, via cheese, cause screw that guy. I got him to phase 2 repeatedly but couldn't come close to denting his health at that point, even using

Spoiler

the specifically mixed flask as directed.

I definitely think they're going to nerf the shit out of the late areas of this game when more people get to these end-game areas. I have been looking at completion rates on boss achievements - it's like 10% all the way through flame giant but like .7% for actually beating the game. There's precedent for area nerfs, I know they nerfed the shit out of caster damage in Shrine of Amana and I heard they nerfed the Ringed City DLC archers and angels somehow (not sure how). But yeah, there's a very hard diminishing returns on any actual defense and damage at some point, and I've reached it, so if enemies are still absolutely obscene they're never going to get doable with the game tuned as it is right now.

I did find the Comet Azur kamehamahemaaha spell accidentally yesterday when exploring the basin around volcano manor, so if I do go 60 int right now maybe I could cheese my way through the awful sections before they inevitably nerf that spell! To go int, I'll need a couple more ancient somber dragon smithing stones (one for a staff, one for the katana). Unfortunately I think all others are locked behind these nasty areas. But, +9 is probably high enough!

I know this is old now, but find the frenzied burst spell. Scales with faith and it’s like a sniper rifle

 

[wankerness]

So, they patched the game yesterday to add map icons for npcs, nerf hoarfrost stomp, and nerf a couple major pvp exploits (one involving giving your character a death aura). Also they added a lot more smithing stones in the early game. I haven’t played much, but there were some 1 and 2 stones on the first traveling merchant I found. Good!!

Oh, and they nerfed mimic tear. I haven’t tested it yet, but it was needed. Maybe there will finally be a reason to use a different summon!

I’m still not going back to my main character till they fix the mausoleum glitch, I don’t want to miss out on a duplication by rushing to ng+!

 

[wankerness]

I know this is old now, but find the frenzied burst spell. Scales with faith and it’s like a sniper rifle

Huh. I had that spell and heard it was good but I never once tried using it from more than 20 yds from the enemy. So it's longer range than lightning spear? I wish I'd known that before going through Haligtree. I thought I had to respec int (which worked fine, I basically just was blowing guys away with Loretta's Greatbow) to be able to kill those bubble-blowing assholes.

 

[Flappydoodle]

So, they patched the game yesterday to add map icons for npcs, nerf hoarfrost stomp, and nerf a couple major pvp exploits (one involving giving your character a death aura). Also they added a lot more smithing stones in the early game. I haven’t played much, but there were some 1 and 2 stones on the first traveling merchant I found. Good!!

Oh, and they nerfed mimic tear. I haven’t tested it yet, but it was needed. Maybe there will finally be a reason to use a different summon!

I’m still not going back to my main character till they fix the mausoleum glitch, I don’t want to miss out on a duplication by rushing to ng+!

I saw the nicely updated map. That is quite helpful. Smithing stones was also badly needed, though I haven't actually noticed anything yet.

And they nerfed mimic? Really? I just beat the boss with mimic's help, and it seemed damn powerful to me!

 

[wankerness]

I saw the nicely updated map. That is quite helpful. Smithing stones was also badly needed, though I haven't actually noticed anything yet.

And they nerfed mimic? Really? I just beat the boss with mimic's help, and it seemed damn powerful to me!

They cut its damage down quite a bit, I guess. Survivability I think is unchanged, though, which tends to be the important thing unless you're really bad at doing damage and were letting it basically solo bosses.

Just read they stealth-nerfed Blasphemous Blade's weapon art by like 35%!!! Glad I beat Melania before the nerf.

Moonveil also was stealth-nerfed but it sounds like all they really did was massively decrease the poise damage on its weapon art. So, if you were dependent on it for staggering bosses almost instantly you're in trouble, but the damage is still just as nuts.

EDIT: Wow, they made the sell prices on regular smithing stones from the hold vendor radically lower. That's a VERY positive change. Now it's more in-line to upgrade a regular weapon and a unique weapon.

I'm going through as a strength build now. Seems kind of frustrating. What's definitely noticeable is that R1s totally suck in this game, if I do a lot of jumping R2s on bosses I can chunk them pretty fast, but R1s are basically tickling them. I think maybe I'll try and use this Grafted Greatsword soon. I'm several hours in, cleared Castle Morne but haven't touched Stormveil yet. So far just been using the Battle Hammer (which has garbage range and it's putting me off continuing to use it) and the longsword (piddly damage but very easy to use).

 

[Flappydoodle]

I'm not finished the game yet, but I'm at the point where I'm very close. My review, including spoilers:

I think it's the best yet in the From catalogue. Second place is Bloodborne. The sheer size, depth of mechanics, number of secrets, and enjoyment of first playthrough is off the charts.

It definitely isn't perfect. Graphical glitches are distracting at times. And open world will never have the same amount of "control" as something like DS or Bloodborne. You can easily get into higher level areas and be overwhelmed, or you find some dungeon later in the game and one-shot the boss.

Another complain is the upgrading. There are SO many spirit summons. I'd love to try them, but those plants are rare, so realistically I can only level up 2 summons. At level 1 they're basically useless once you leave the starting area. Same for weapons - tons of weapons but scare upgrade materials. Even now, I can only get to +6 with somber and +18 with regular from the shop. I'm obviously missing two ball bearings somewhere. I have an enormous inventory of weapons now, but only one special at +10 and a regular at +22. Especially a shame since damage seems WAY more influenced by weapon level than character level.

However, I think they've done an awesome job of providing an authentic "souls" experience while also making the game WAY more accessible. There are few actual gate-keeper bosses. For example, I accidentally bypassed the first major boss entirely just by exploring. Think how many people got absolutely stone-walled by Gascoine in BB, or O&S in DS1. Elden Ring really rewards you for exploring. Near some very difficult boss that uses a lot of fire I found a dungeon with a fire protection spell.

You have a lot of freedom in how you play. If you want to go naked with an ultra great sword and rely on dodging, you can. If you want to go Havel style, you can. Dex works well. Magic works well. And hybrid builds finally make sense, like STR/FAI or DEX/INT so you can add spell-based buffs and have ranged attacks. This means the "hardcore" type DS1 players will be happy. I've already seen some people doing level 1 runs. There are plenty of familiar things - big poison swamps, walking on rafters, enemies pushing you off edges, ambushes, invasions, consumable souls, boss souls etc. We can all feel "at home" quickly.

The summons are really cool and can be helpful, or detrimental, to the fight. There are TONS of buffs now, including the exalted flesh, prawns etc. That's more Sekiro style with the sugars. I know it's been around since DS1 with green blossoms etc, but they feel more like things you should actually use this time around. Same for Rune Arcs. They're rare, but not super rare that you end up finishing the game never using them.

The "guidance by grace" system is really well done, and it gives you a direction to go without directly giving you waypoints. It's helped me a bunch of times where I'd bee around an area and couldn't quite figure out where to go. It wouldn't be "Souls" if you just had waypoint markers, but they also can't literally set you out in the world with zero instruction. So I think this was a really nice balance. Interconnectivity is also really cool. Sometimes I'm coming out of an area and I see messages from other players who were clearly heading in.

Combat wise, this is the deepest yet. The moveset for every weapon has a lot of diversity. R1, R2, charged R2, crouch attacks, running attack R1/R2, backstep R1, backstep R1, jump attacks. Then there are 1 and 2 handed versions. And weapon arts. And again, the gameplay seems to lend itself to you actually using all of those. Sometimes you can dodge by jumping over an attack, then attack on the landing (obviously taken from Sekiro). I never used those fancy 2-hand weapon art things in DS3, but in Elden Ring they feel better integrated and you can swap them around for whatever area you're in.

Finally, I'm staggered by the SIZE of the game. You go through a massive area, then find a dungeon. Finish dungeon, then emerge into another massive area. That's not including the "other" area. They're all challenging in different ways, and I like that they are "themed" so there's a magic area, a poison area etc, just like Dark Souls games. There's no brutal area existing just to punish you like Blighttown or the massive poison swamp in Demon Souls.

 

[Flappydoodle]

They cut its damage down quite a bit, I guess. Survivability I think is unchanged, though, which tends to be the important thing unless you're really bad at doing damage and were letting it basically solo bosses.

Just read they stealth-nerfed Blasphemous Blade's weapon art by like 35%!!! Glad I beat Melania before the nerf.

Oh no. End game is going to be tougher for me, haha. I've been using mimic and that weapon art quite a bit!

 

[wankerness]

There's no brutal area existing just to punish you like Blighttown or the massive poison swamp in Demon Souls.

Uh, I'd argue the beginning of the haligtree is far worse than either of those and the lake of rot is also arguably worse since the build-up/damage from the poison is higher than either of those zones plus it's completely impossible to not trigger it until you've raised a lot of platforms.

And that lake of rot is downright nice compared to the pond where you have to fight the erdtree avatar late in Haligtree

Crumbling Farum also is pretty brutal but at least you can avoid the worst section of it entirely (the wormface area).

 

[Jake]

I haven't noticed any change with the blasphemous blade and I've been using it as my primary. Any details on what they allegedly changed?

 

[Mathemagician]

Is that why I was dumped out for an update around 10pm last night? Ok cool that they made it a bit easier to upgrade weapons. Still fishing for my first Somber +6, and the summon I use the most right now is the two arrow marionettes. I like to run to the far side from them which forces a boss to waste time running between myself and them while getting stun locked by my big purple balls.

 

[Flappydoodle]

Is that why I was dumped out for an update around 10pm last night? Ok cool that they made it a bit easier to upgrade weapons. Still fishing for my first Somber +6, and the summon I use the most right now is the two arrow marionettes. I like to run to the far side from them which forces a boss to waste time running between myself and them while getting stun locked by my big purple balls.

Those skeleton archers are amazing. They don’t do mega damage but they really stunlock a lot of bosses. Or because of the constant attacks, the boss gets stuck switching aggro.