Elden ring!

[wankerness]

I will say I kind of like that it forces you to fight some bosses without an ash. The one that killed me 20+ times was the basic knight guy with a machine gun crossbow and an art of war on his sword that shot wind beams - it was a very simple fight but the guy was just fast enough and his attacks all did well over 50% of your health that I just couldn’t flawlessly execute it for a long time with my crappy INT build that couldn’t stagger. Two other bosses seemed impossible until I realized I could just spam backstab them (one being called DEATH KNIGHT and the other being another black knight that didn’t allow summons).

I like the new summons I’ve gotten - one being a tanky black knight and the other being a little monkey with a lightsaber that flips around like crazy. Brother as good as the mimic tear of course, but fun!

 

[TedEH]

basic knight guy with a machine gun crossbow

It took me a bajillion tried before I realized I could mostly just spam the guard counter to take him down really slowly. Quite literal death by a thousand cuts.

I managed to take down the parade dragon thing in the first shot, but I have a very STR forward character, and had the mimic tear and the gold summon thingie, so I can't take any real credit for it.

 

[MFB]

I'm quite curious to know what level the devs intended for this to be played at, because I'm just shy of 190, with 65(?) vigor and still getting two shot by that Blackgaol Knight. Dodging the crossbow isn't too bad, but his wide arc slash from the back has no wind up like you'd expect. And the reach on his Storm Caller attack, because let's be real, that's what it is, is longer than I would've expected.

 

[Moongrum]

I'm getting my ass kicked in the dlc, but I'm not using summons so that's to be expected.

Spoiler

Golden hippo

was a god damn mess for me, I gave up and respec'd to all faith and killed the poor son of a bitch with a couple casts of ancient lightning strike lol. usually I would have just moved on and kept exploring, but I think I need to go through this area to get to where I want on the map
I really love the map, too, it's so vertical. I'm always having to figure out how to go up/down to get to areas right next to me. Really different/strange for me, so it's enjoyable.

 

[MFB]

I'm quite curious to know what level the devs intended for this to be played at, because I'm just shy of 190, with 65(?) vigor and still getting two shot by that Blackgaol Knight. Dodging the crossbow isn't too bad, but his wide arc slash from the back has no wind up like you'd expect. And the reach on his Storm Caller attack, because let's be real, that's what it is, is longer than I would've expected.

Finally beat him, SOB took probably a dozen and a half tries because of that damn two punch combo of Storm Caller into Front Stab, that'll do 100% damage no questions; I ended up going real aggro on him, immediately charged to avoid crossbow, then I'd sort of kite my attacks when he was open WIDE, and also bait him into crossbow so I could Lion Claw on the reload.

 

[TedEH]

I'm quite curious to know what level the devs intended for this to be played at, because I'm just shy of 190, with 65(?) vigor and still getting two shot by that Blackgaol Knight

I've been doing reasonably ok at level 160-ish.

 

[MFB]

I've been doing reasonably ok at level 160-ish.

Normal enemies have been fine, I took down the Beast Claw guy on my 2nd try (nice to see FS taking some of the best elements from other games into the DLC) and cleared out that Church with ease, but the moveset on that Knight for whatever reason threw me.

Similar to yourself I beat him with a bunch of small moves - although he'd break my poise every time, even at 96 - which isn't how I expected to have to.

 

[wankerness]

The devs tuned it for much lower level than that, the things you collect to upgrade your defense/health are the main thing that increases your survivability in the dlc, not the rune level. That said I have +8 right now and 55 vigor and most enemies still can 2 shot me easily. It’s just how it’s tuned. Mountaintop of the giants was nearly as bad, this is the logical progression.

I fought an absolute dogshit boss that is going in the pantheon alongside some of the bloodborne chalice bosses as worst boss ever to be in one of these games. It’s the hippo!! I fought him like five times and never once figured out the timing to dodge the grab that does like 90% of your health. And the camera is just constantly getting stuck in him or he flies offscreen so you can’t possibly tell when he’s going to land on your head. Pretty much just used mimic tear and prayed.

The second essence boss, elanna, was also kind of ridiculous but very doable first try with a coward build ( magic +mimic tear).

I’ve been using a couple of the great swords that scale with int that I’ve gotten. I like the one that is classified as a colossal weapon a lot, even though the art of war isn’t amazing (summons three glintblades which do decent damage but take a while to fire and often hit walls). I can actually stagger things!

I killed ONE of those furnace giants. I absolutely hate the ones you have to fight legitimately. You have to hit them a ton of times and stagger them THREE times before they actually fall down, it took like twenty minutes and if you make one mistake with torrent jump timing you have a high chance of instant death due to torrent getting killed, you getting knocked down, and the boss immediately doing another 70% of your health attack before you can get up let alone re-summon torrent and jump over the next attack.

 

[MFB]

I killed the Furnace Visage that's out in the open, first time or two I was just testing him out for moveset, see what he can do and how quickly etc. Made a bad move on him on one try and biffed the timing entirely, and he nuked me - literally. They're not bad to deal with, just time consuming if you don't get the critical, but that cuts their health down a shit ton like the golems.

Made it to the kung fu city, not crazy about these guys, they remind me of Boreal Dancer in that they're slinky and fast unlike other enemies so the timing is off.

 

[MFB]

Made it to the roof of Belurat, might as well call it it's name now that I'm thru it, also took down the Fire Knight on my way here and inadvertently lost 120K or so during the second to last attempt since I diverted to him after getting stomped by that horned knight; I figured the enemy ahead of me was what I expected, and so I peeked online and it is, so let's kill this fu-dog/Chinese dragon knockoff.

Thankfully it looks like there's not much you can miss in this place so I'm anxious to leave

 

[wankerness]

Well, I'm getting really annoyed by the tuning. FTR right now I have +10 scadutree blessing and 60 vigor. Here's three particularly annoying enemies I've dealt with this afternoon/evening:

1) A miniboss wielding an Odachi, which is basically a giant katana. Range is like double of a katana, speed is equal. They spam a dual slash art of war that just plain kills you instantly. I tried everything - put on heavy armor, full physical resist talismans, didn't matter, still if I got hit by that I died instantly. Killed it by just putting on the sacred relic sword and spamming the art of war absolutely non-stop until it died. Dumb.

2) A named NPC that you can initiate combat with via a gesture. This guy is not hard, EXCEPT, he has one stupid move that he uses all the time that just plain kills you instantly if it hits you. I mean, if you can make sure you never ever get greedy it's fine cause it's well-telegraphed, but WHY is it an instant 1-shot?!

3) fucking glowing red prawn guys - you know, the ones from caelid that run around and poke you or spam that spell "pest threads." Well, these are glowing red, and if they cast pest threads, it 1-shots you if all the threads connect. Also they're in a den with like 5 of them. AWESOME!

I also encountered 3 or 4 hippos out in the wild - the wild versions are vastly easier cause if they get you with their undodgeable grab it only does like 50% of your health, and they have about half as much health and no second phase where they jump around. Still a terrible enemy! I sort of expect SOME kind of nerf to that grab ability on the main boss one at least.

 

[narad]

It's kind of weird to me that you all seem both massively ahead of me and massively behind me. +10 scadutree blessings? Like jeez, where are these things. Never found a hippo either.

I have one enemy I super hate. They're like these women in red dresses that shoot homing fireballs and can also swing a sword that explodes in flame, and because the fireballs hover for a moment, these things can coincide when they hit you and it's like insta kill. I have not really found any sort of suitable strategy... even when I backstab that's like only starting them out with like 80% health.

At any rate I'm still enjoying it, but the weekend's over so ... just going to be thinking about it for the next five days and this thread is probably going to be complete game spoilers by then

 

[wankerness]

Alright, I finally found one that's going to get me to quit for the night - seems to be Mk II of the lion head chinese dragon guy. Only this one has a grab that 1 shots you from full health (FUN, I LOVE THESE) and also at 50% health spawns in a whole bunch of those goddam basilisks and also starts spraying death clouds everywhere. UGH

EDIT: Nevermind, cheesed it with mimic and rock sling (sort of, still was really really hard)

 

[MFB]

It's kind of weird to me that you all seem both massively ahead of me and massively behind me. +10 scadutree blessings? Like jeez, where are these things. Never found a hippo either.

I have one enemy I super hate. They're like these women in red dresses that shoot homing fireballs and can also swing a sword that explodes in flame, and because the fireballs hover for a moment, these things can coincide when they hit you and it's like insta kill. I have not really found any sort of suitable strategy... even when I backstab that's like only starting them out with like 80% health.

At any rate I'm still enjoying it, but the weekend's over so ... just going to be thinking about it for the next five days and this thread is probably going to be complete game spoilers by then

Sounds like the same Fire Coil spell that Knight Ivengree at Belurat uses. For normal enemies, so far the horned knights have been the worst followed by the slinky, dual-wielding contortionists.

I've managed to get a whooping +2 blessing and +2 sacred ash blessing, think I got some from defeating the Divine Lion Dancer or what ever it's name was. Dude can suck a fat one, his movements caused some gnarly frame drops and then doing EVERY element damage? No thanks. But I honestly have no idea where all the helpful stuff is hiding, and I'm in need of aid enough that I went back to Haligtree to get the Great Dragon Talisman or whatever it is (-20% DMG).

This DLC just eats up time, I swear, one minute it was X PM and then two fights later and it's been an hour and a half.

 

[wankerness]

Alright, so I got to Messmer. I have +11 scadutree blessing now, 60 vigor. Literally the first move he pulls is a grab that 1-shots me from full health. WTF is with Fromsoft's fascination with 1-shot grabs and this DLC?!?! The closest equivalent to this previously was Horah Loux's second phase bullshit where he'd grab you and powerbomb you, but that didn't even come close to 1-shotting you if you'd properly levelled vigor (50+), not to mention it was very easy to dodge in comparison.

As far as basic enemies go, I think most of them are properly balanced. The ones I suck at dealing with are:

1) Those guys with two circular blades that cartwheel all over the place. Either I get the drop on them and can usually take them out easily, or they get the drop on me and I'm left reeling and trying to heal and usually dying. These guys are randomly here and there throughout the map - I think one of them is practically the first enemy you can encounter in the DLC.

2) The flame knight guys that dual wield blades and also spam fire magic. They have a lot of health and a really annoying super knockback and can take off over half your health with one dual blade charge. There's a LOT of them in the shadow keep library. I think they're called Flame Knights, I got a chestpiece off a couple of them called that.

3) The "banished knight" equivalents - there's a few of them here and there, some of them dual wield and some have a curved greatsword. Again, I can either get the drop on them and take them out with spells no problem, or they get the drop on me and it's 50/50 whether I can kill them.

4) the aforementioned red versions of the "pests" (Servants of Rot). I honestly don't know if you're SUPPOSED to kill them they seem so ridiculously bullshit. When guides for this DLC come out I'll be very curious to see what I was supposed to do in that mini-area.

Then of course there are some ludicrous minibosses - the one shortly before Mesmer hilariously murdered me a couple times until I tried just spamming rock sling at them from max distance, which of course killed him no problem without him ever getting close to me.

Anyway my goal right now is to just find the map fragment for the current huge area (unlike the first few, I really like the look of this area - it's very green and loaded with waterfalls). I have like 8 graces in it, but still haven't gotten close to the map fragment. Comically, I see tons of comments from other players on the ground saying things like "still no map" and "map?" at the edge of cliffs and things. So, clearly a common issue!

I think I'm going to use a branch to get my 200k+ souls from messmer's room and just save him for later. The Shadow Keep is ludicrously big. I thought I'd cleared it before, then I looked up online and saw I missed a whole flooded east section of it, and when looking for that (and failing) I found a whole library section that eventually led to Mesmer. I think this legacy dungeon is bigger than any in the base game.

Speaking of much bigger than the base game, some of the minidungeons are HUGE. The one that is especially brutal is the endless underground prison full of jars and jar innards - that thing is seriously like 1.5 hours long and there's no checkpoint until you reach the boss. I was completely out of mana flasks well before the end, and health shortly after that.

Work sucks, I probably won't get more than a couple hours a day to play this till next weekend!

 

[TedEH]

that thing is seriously like 1.5 hours long and there's no checkpoint until you reach the boss.

It does kinda have that video-game-y quality that if you try to play it legit, it takes an hour or two, but you can just sprint through, ignoring everything, in a minute or two. I got killed by the last ambush before you drop down to the boss door, and didn't want to fight everything again, so I just booked it down the whole dungeon.

 

[BlackMastodon]

What I'm gathering from this thread is that there is no reason for me to pick up the expansion any time soon

 

[TedEH]

Folks are gonna nitpick. The environments are as well put together as the base game, there's original enemies and stuff to keep it fresh. But it's still just more of what the base game already did, it's nothing super novel, at least not that I've encountered so far. It's worth it as an excuse to play more of a good game - in the same way that TotK was "not as good" only by virtue of basically being BotW again.

 

[wankerness]

I think that the content is fine and the level design is great but that it's much, much harder than the base game. So, if you are bothered by some bosses being tuned to "fuck you" difficulty then you might want to wait for possible nerfs. It's an equivalent leap from like, DS3 to the Ringed City DLC. But, it's starting from the position where the endgame bosses of Elden Ring were already doing way, way more proportional damage than the DS3 DLC was, so that jump manifests itself via lots of instakill abilities and stuff. While with DS3 it was like, bosses were way harder than base game, but other than Midir, none of them were going to 2-shot you unless you didn't put any points into health.

If you LIKE that these games are hard then definitely don't hesitate. It's a TON of content. I think the world map is practically the size of 2/3 of the world in the base game when you take stuff like the verticality and layering into account. There are a lot fewer minidungeons and whatnot (I think, I might just not be finding them) but the ones that exist are way, way longer than anything in the base game. And there seem to be about as many legacy dungeons (ex Stormveil Castle) and regular dungeons (ex Castle Sol) as the base game had.

As far as "novel content" goes, there's some new weapon types that radically change playstyles. But, they aren't for int builds. Backhand weapons with evasion moves, and a tear for the flask that lets you parry like sekiro are two i've heard about a lot. I'm looking forward to checking it out on a melee character.

 

[MFB]

I think that the content is fine and the level design is great but that it's much, much harder than the base game. So, if you are bothered by some bosses being tuned to "fuck you" difficulty then you might want to wait for possible nerfs. It's an equivalent leap from like, DS3 to the Ringed City DLC. But, it's starting from the position where the endgame bosses of Elden Ring were already doing way, way more proportional damage than the DS3 DLC was, so that jump manifests itself via lots of instakill abilities and stuff. While with DS3 it was like, bosses were way harder than base game, but other than Midir, none of them were going to 2-shot you unless you didn't put any points into health.

If you LIKE that these games are hard then definitely don't hesitate. It's a TON of content. I think the world map is practically the size of 2/3 of the world in the base game when you take stuff like the verticality and layering into account. There are a lot fewer minidungeons and whatnot (I think, I might just not be finding them) but the ones that exist are way, way longer than anything in the base game. And there seem to be about as many legacy dungeons (ex Stormveil Castle) and regular dungeons (ex Castle Sol) as the base game had.

Y'know, it's funny because I was thinking to myself last night, this does remind me a LOT of jumping into the Ringed City DLC where the Hollow Knights can just wreck your shit if you're not careful (or even if you are!) and it's a bit unrelenting in that you move from one area to the next expecting maybe some relief for a second, but nope, just different frustration. I noticed in Belurat there was dudes who were EXACTLY like the Turtle-casters who could hit you with ranged attacks even if you weren't in line of sight, nice to see of all the features they could bring back, THAT was their choice?

I've heard people defending the criticisms that it's hard, but it feels like a different level of hard compared to previous entries including the base game. As you said, you're getting two-shots from bosses, and I've experienced it myself, and it's like, at this level there shouldn't be an entry level boss that's doing that; since they are, it means that they're more powerful than the endgame bosses of the base, and realistically, we should be leveled up much higher than we are. But, that's not possible really as there's a point of diminishing returns due to soft/hard caps on stats, and once you get into NG+ then you're now adding a damage/health modifier onto enemies for your own health pool that'll also continue to go up. So what's the solution? Well, they did give us the Scardutree Blessing and Sacred Ash Blessing, but both of those seem scarce in the beginning (having now beaten two full bosses, and one mini-boss and only found two) so it doesn't seem like they felt the difficult was all that ramped up to begin with, and it's still possible to have that same thing happen even with those buffs. Summons? People are already doing that and still getting wiped.

I'm curious if we'll see nerfs in the next week or two, at a minimum hopefully we can get some patches just for performance issues as if the later enemies are as bad as Dancing Lion was, I'm gonna be fighting the console as much as the enemies themselves