Elden ring!

[Flappydoodle]

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).

Haha oh no. Those are the two areas I’m just getting into now. Maybe I spoke too soon?

DS1 was brutal though, since visiting the poison swamp was required early game to get to Quelag. And god forbid if you didn’t have the master key to go in the back. Having to descend right through blighttown was so cruel for new players LOL.

At least this time they let you build a strong character, access all the various protective spells and potions, and learn the mechanics. Oh, and the frame rate is higher than 10fps hahaha

 

[Empryrean]

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.

Conversely I'd like to add that the blackflame blade is by far the worst weapon buff in the game lasting about 6 seconds, it has to be a bug or something cause I got respecced and fully upgraded the godslayer seal to be an awesome blackflame paladin and uh.. I think im gonna respec again

 

[Flappydoodle]

I think Blasphemous Blade weapon art has been nerfed a bit. Nothing like 30% though.

I tested on some groups of mobs. Seems like close up damage is unchanged. Still hitting for 1,900 with 50 STR and 50 FAI. But the damage decreases much more significantly with distance now. Before I’m pretty sure it was uniform for the entire length of the flame. So the dudes at the tail end are taking around 1,000 damage now.

 

[Jake]

I think Blasphemous Blade weapon art has been nerfed a bit. Nothing like 30% though.

I tested on some groups of mobs. Seems like close up damage is unchanged. Still hitting for 1,900 with 50 STR and 50 FAI. But the damage decreases much more significantly with distance now. Before I’m pretty sure it was uniform for the entire length of the flame. So the dudes at the tail end are taking around 1,000 damage now.

This makes sense why I'm not seeing any change then lol. I'm a maniac who only uses it up close.

Hit level 120 last night. I'm at the

Spoiler: Spoiler

Flame Giant right now so once I do that I'm headed to crumblinb Farum Azula

but until then, I'm gonna take my time to go back and complete all the areas and things I just skipped past in the start. Starting with bullying all the bosses I said "maybe later" too lol

Killed the dual Tree Sentinels last night- was hitting them for basically 1/4 health per hit so I'd say the fights have evened out a bit

 

[wankerness]

I think Blasphemous Blade weapon art has been nerfed a bit. Nothing like 30% though.

I tested on some groups of mobs. Seems like close up damage is unchanged. Still hitting for 1,900 with 50 STR and 50 FAI. But the damage decreases much more significantly with distance now. Before I’m pretty sure it was uniform for the entire length of the flame. So the dudes at the tail end are taking around 1,000 damage now.

Yeah, that sounds like it must be the nerf alright. I haven't played that character since the patch. So your experience is it's a MORE than 30% nerf, but only from distance!!

The thing was so good largely because you could use it on those sorts of infuriating bosses with adds or O&S style and hit both of them at once for massive damage from outside of their melee range. Like, I 2-shot Niall's adds from about 30 yds away with 2 casts. Sounds like that's been nerfed pretty hard. Fair enough!!

I'm playing through on a strength build now. It's been an interesting experience. I've been flipping between weapons. At this point I'm mostly switching between a nightrider glaive (from that nightwatch world boss in liurnia) and the brick hammer (from the sneaky path in Stormveil). I had the experience of rushing in and smashing Margit in one try without using an ash and only healing once or twice, but Godrick was still pretty rough thanks to his INSANE delays and gigantic AOEs (died 2 or 3 times). Cleared out the Weeping Peninsula castle (easy) and the Liurnia of the Lakes extended mine dungeon that ends with the magma wyrm and the passage to Altus (less easy). I have two more weapons semi-upgraded that I want to try - one being the bloodhound curved greatsword which is supposedly OP but unfortunately is more of a quality build weapon, and the Greatsword from a chest. I have that legendary grafted greatsword thing but it seems like everyone online thinks it sucks, plus I'm not quite to 40 strength yet. Right now, I'm at 30 vit/13 end/36 str/17 dex, definitely need to start putting some points into mind cause right now the wolves take out all my mana and this go-round I'd like to experiment with summons that aren't the mimic tear.

I beat the Wyrm boss twice now, first in the mini-dungeon in Caelid form and then in the Liurnia Ravine, and he absolutely sucked both times as melee. I don't have the option to back out and spam lightning bolts at his face when things get hairy, and the camera completely can't handle his second phase when he's standing straight up unless I'm really far away from him. It got VERY frustrating. Took about 5 or 6 tries for the Liurnia one and a few for the Caelid one. Though I did make the mistake of trying with summons the first couple times in Liurnia, that definitely made it harder. Today I guess I'll go for the main Liurnia dungeon and the Manor. I was beelining for the Altus plateau so I could get the bell bearing for smithing stone [3] cause those goddam things are such an incredible rarity compared to 4 and 5 and I wanted to try out some different weapons. So, I have everything I want to try upgraded to +12 pretty much. I am REALLY liking the huge reduction to smithing stone cost from vendors.

It's also weird that there are no uniques that are any good yet for pure strength.

The Brick Hammer is really fun with invaders. Pretty much just jump attack with R2 to stagger them out of anything they're trying to do and then hit them with a couple R1s, repeat a couple times, they usually die before they can heal. It's also been REALLY nice in mines since it does full damage to those rock miner guys and to those crystalline bosses. Only problem with it is the range kinda sucks, but oh well, the glaive just has to come out whenever I'm dealing with flying things. I think next priority will be level endurance a lot so I can actually hold both at once.

I found out about the suicidal bird farm yesterday. I also did the quest to get the fingers. That was amusing, you have to invade 3 players, I killed one only to find out it was a group of three guys in matching samurai costumes all with names from samurai movies that honorably were fighting invaders 1v1 each at a time, which I thought was just adorable, and the second guy killed me. The second was fighting that death bird in Liurnia and got killed without me getting within 50 yards of him. The third parried my first attack, hit me with a critical for 90% of my health, and then quickly finished me off and teabagged me. Hey, fair enough, he didn't cheese. After that pvp fun, I went back and stomped the opening game boss, got the item that teleports you straight to Mogh-land, and then I died a few times rushing back to the first Grace point in the level, but I tried it out a few times. It's pretty funny, and gives you about 11.5k every 15 seconds. I'm surprised they didn't nerf that. I mean, they don't tend to nerf soul farms in other souls games and I wouldn't expect them to nerf the other one that that grace point with the huge crowd of little dudes, but this particular one with the bird seems like an error that would be easily fixed with either a slight tweak to AI or putting an invisible wall there or something. Ah well. I've decided I'm not going to use it unless I need to quickly farm to buy stuff off a vendor, no cheesing my actual character leveling, just time saving on weapon upgrading!

 

[Flappydoodle]

Sounds fun. I’m still going with my first playthrough. Around 90 hours now! Still finding new things and new areas. I’m looking forward to trying something totally different for my second playthrough.

Grafted greatsword definitely doesn’t suck. One of the best Souls guys, LobosJr, used it for his entire first playthrough. Maybe there are better greatswords, but grafted is definitely good enough to complete the game.

I’d been using the Morningstar. It does blunt damage, so good in mines like the hammer. But it ALSO does bleed! It’s really good against giants, dragons etc because you hit them a bunch of times and take off a big chunk of health. I turned it to ‘heavy’ so it would scale with strength and it works awesome. Only problem is the short range.

 

[wankerness]

Sounds fun. I’m still going with my first playthrough. Around 90 hours now! Still finding new things and new areas. I’m looking forward to trying something totally different for my second playthrough.

Grafted greatsword definitely doesn’t suck. One of the best Souls guys, LobosJr, used it for his entire first playthrough. Maybe there are better greatswords, but grafted is definitely good enough to complete the game.

I’d been using the Morningstar. It does blunt damage, so good in mines like the hammer. But it ALSO does bleed! It’s really good against giants, dragons etc because you hit them a bunch of times and take off a big chunk of health. I turned it to ‘heavy’ so it would scale with strength and it works awesome. Only problem is the short range.

Oh, that's interesting. I read about the flail that scales with str that does bleed damage that comes from some specific pumpkinhead mobs, but I haven't worked up the will to farm it since the drop rate's like 1% and they're always in the midst of a lot of other enemies. I'm definitely missing the bleed damage so far on this character. I had to switch to a frickin SHIELD that does bleed damage to kill that one mega-dragon in Caelid since none of the weapons I had with bleed were usable with my 13 dex at the time. No one mentioned the morningstar in posts about good starting weapons, but sounds like it might be decent.

I used that for a long time on my first DS1 playthrough as my "blessed" weapon and it was kind of terrible in that form, like a mace with reduced damage.

 

[wankerness]

Haha oh no. Those are the two areas I’m just getting into now. Maybe I spoke too soon?

DS1 was brutal though, since visiting the poison swamp was required early game to get to Quelag. And god forbid if you didn’t have the master key to go in the back. Having to descend right through blighttown was so cruel for new players LOL.

At least this time they let you build a strong character, access all the various protective spells and potions, and learn the mechanics. Oh, and the frame rate is higher than 10fps hahaha

The ONLY thing worse about the poison swamp in DS1 is what happens if you don't get the ring from the asylum that makes it so you can actually walk on the slime. The poison damage is a total joke compared to the rot lake, which does damage about equivalent to Toxic from DS1.

I have only played the Demon's Souls remake so I didn't get to experience the OG version of the poison swamp where you had no option for a rusted iron ring equivalent.

This game has a real dearth of poison healing items, every time I've gotten poisoned I've quickly looked for the poison-clearning boluses, realized I had none, and gone SHIT and just had to deal with healing the stupid debuffs for five minutes. Obviously not an option with Rot since you'd run out of flasks and health, so make sure you stock up first. I don't even know how to farm them. Guessing some vendor has them or you can craft them? DS1 was very nice in that one regard with how you could just farm those plant guys and they'd drop them like crazy.

 

[Empryrean]

The ONLY thing worse about the poison swamp in DS1 is what happens if you don't get the ring from the asylum that makes it so you can actually walk on the slime. The poison damage is a total joke compared to the rot lake, which does damage about equivalent to Toxic from DS1.

I have only played the Demon's Souls remake so I didn't get to experience the OG version of the poison swamp where you had no option for a rusted iron ring equivalent.

This game has a real dearth of poison healing items, every time I've gotten poisoned I've quickly looked for the poison-clearning boluses, realized I had none, and gone SHIT and just had to deal with healing the stupid debuffs for five minutes. Obviously not an option with Rot since you'd run out of flasks and health, so make sure you stock up first. I don't even know how to farm them. Guessing some vendor has them or you can craft them? DS1 was very nice in that one regard with how you could just farm those plant guys and they'd drop them like crazy.

It's also super helpful if you use bloodhound step or maybe even quickstep through the lava/rot areas as they slow you down and rolling only makes things worse

 

[Mathemagician]

Man I was just Pebblin’ errthang. From the update I now have a reason to use other spells. I had like ~130FP and frankly didn’t feel the investment to use other spells more was worth it. Now however I can use glintshard comet and it was worth getting up to ~28 Min (~168 FP) funny how that works.

 

[wankerness]

My favorite change in the patch is that if you’re blocking with a shield and read a message it doesn’t cancel your block anymore. That was infuriating before when I’d read a message, not stop holding L1, and then get nailed with an arrow cause I’d forgotten that block had been cancelled by reading!

This strength build is good for some things. I beat radahn first try without any poison, rot, ranged attacks, or ashes and only two rounds of summoning NPCs!! But it sure does suck not having a ranged ability for some stuff like those giant astral centipede laser things. And man, the rematch with Godrick in the Gaeol was even worse than the first go around. That guy is SO hard to properly dodge and if you try to block his combo he usually flings you upwards and nails you with the follow up. Was much easier when I could just run away and lightning him in the face.

Also when I encounter slimes I just have to run cause it’s insane how little damage I do. I need to get a fire weapon for such situations. Maybe I’ll enchant the long sword.

I just got a mace off a caravan that does bleed damage and can be enchanted, think I’m going to level it up next, but to do so I need to beeline for the 5/6 smithing stone bell bearing in the giant area. Guess I have to do the capital before volcano manor again!

 

[Flappydoodle]

My favorite change in the patch is that if you’re blocking with a shield and read a message it doesn’t cancel your block anymore. That was infuriating before when I’d read a message, not stop holding L1, and then get nailed with an arrow cause I’d forgotten that block had been cancelled by reading!

This strength build is good for some things. I beat radahn first try without any poison, rot, ranged attacks, or ashes and only two rounds of summoning NPCs!! But it sure does suck not having a ranged ability for some stuff like those giant astral centipede laser things. And man, the rematch with Godrick in the Gaeol was even worse than the first go around. That guy is SO hard to properly dodge and if you try to block his combo he usually flings you upwards and nails you with the follow up. Was much easier when I could just run away and lightning him in the face.

Also when I encounter slimes I just have to run cause it’s insane how little damage I do. I need to get a fire weapon for such situations. Maybe I’ll enchant the long sword.

I just got a mace off a caravan that does bleed damage and can be enchanted, think I’m going to level it up next, but to do so I need to beeline for the 5/6 smithing stone bell bearing in the giant area. Guess I have to do the capital before volcano manor again!

Don't forget your throwable items like firebombs! Those are good for melee players.

And I think the mace with bleed is the Morningstar that I mentioned. You find it in a carriage through the Gatefront in the starting area. That weapon got me all the way to the land of the giants region, by which point it was about +20 (but finding so many upgrade materials was very difficult).

 

[wankerness]

Don't forget your throwable items like firebombs! Those are good for melee players.

And I think the mace with bleed is the Morningstar that I mentioned. You find it in a carriage through the Gatefront in the starting area. That weapon got me all the way to the land of the giants region, by which point it was about +20 (but finding so many upgrade materials was very difficult).

Nah, it’s a bigger, buffer version of the Morningstar called Great Stars. Came from a caravan in Altus. It’s classified as a “warhammer,” it’s pretty huge. I have it to +20 now. It’s not as satisfying to hit things with as the brickhammer, but the bleed is very nice.

Another weapon I want to try is the fallingstar beast jaw, but it has an int requirement!

Re:ranged weapons, yeah, I need to engage with the pot system. I did get a golem great bow and level that to 7, it destroys but it isn’t a good all-purpose pull things weapon. Killed that centipede meteor spamming ass in the dungeon in three hits, though. Hits for like 700 a shot with basic great arrows. I’ve mainly been using throwing daggers and darts otherwise like this is bloodborne.

Speaking of which, I’m amused by the “page” enemies that just reuse bloodborne player models and animations.

 

[Flappydoodle]

Nah, it’s a bigger, buffer version of the Morningstar called Great Stars. Came from a caravan in Altus. It’s classified as a “warhammer,” it’s pretty huge. I have it to +20 now. It’s not as satisfying to hit things with as the brickhammer, but the bleed is very nice.

Another weapon I want to try is the fallingstar beast jaw, but it has an int requirement!

Re:ranged weapons, yeah, I need to engage with the pot system. I did get a golem great bow and level that to 7, it destroys but it isn’t a good all-purpose pull things weapon. Killed that centipede meteor spamming ass in the dungeon in three hits, though. Hits for like 700 a shot with basic great arrows. I’ve mainly been using throwing daggers and darts otherwise like this is bloodborne.

Speaking of which, I’m amused by the “page” enemies that just reuse bloodborne player models and animations.

Ooh nice, I'll have to try and find that Great Stars weapon

 

[wankerness]

On a second playthrough, I'm a LOT more impressed with the Royal Capital area. On my first playthrough I was a hybrid build that had crap survivability and thus engaging with all those knights was a death wish. On the strength build, I still have to be careful, but I can generally kill those elite knight guys without having to use a flask, and thus I feel a lot more free to explore the area. It's really cool, and I like how it blurs the lines between open world and "dungeon" since it's SO damn big. I found totally new areas in it this playthrough, while I still haven't found some I found on first playthrough. I might just be higher level, too. I think I'm about 100 now. I don't think I'm MUCH higher level, but when I can pump vitality/endurance/strength and mostly ignore the other stats it's a lot hardier than having to also do mind and focus on faith with the same amount of runes to work with.

On an eventual third and fourth playthrough I'd like to do some kind of bleed build, be it dual katanas or some kind of arcane-scaling thing like Eleonora's poleblade or Rivers of Blood since that seems really fun. I also would like to actually try leveling as a mage, I only did the mage build when I was already like level 140 and had all the overpowered gear and only used it for one major zone and a couple random small dungeons.

Did a few more sidequests that I missed on first playthrough, like the blackguard one and the snake lady one. And I actually initiated the one with the wolf archer lady this time, I didn't find her in the first playthrough till I'd missed it. Still need to find Alexander again (I did buy the oil jar recipe this time while I was in that zone). One of these playthroughs I need to help Seluvis. Fia's questline seems relatively easy to miss and that one's pretty huge in terms of unlocking content, I think I have it set up right but didn't go to the deeproot area yet.

Finished the sidequest that they added in the patch with Nepheli/Kenneth/Gostuc, that was nice. Extra dragon smithing stones are always appreciated; I think that's the first one I could get in the game. Not that I've seen a single Smithing Stone [8] yet and thus won't be able to use it anytime soon.

I'm absolutely dreading doing that huge platforming segment at the bottom of the sewers to reach the frenzy lord/alternate deeproot entrance again. That's the worst thing in this game, besides maybe the similar platforming segment to go down the Caelid tower. Or maybe the one to go UP the Caelid tower. Or the one to get to the painting solution in Caelid. Platforming sections in general are horrible, but the long ones over fatal falls are the worst, and Caelid has those in spades. I'm frequently struck by just how much these games DO NOT respect your time. I absolutely save-scum if I'm going to have to redo 20-30 minutes of progress on a death.

 

[stevexc]

Rather than continuing on with my "Strength oh wait let's go Quality and let's use Polearms" build that was... okay at best I found a really cool Dragon/dual-wield Bleed build that I'm having fun with. Still putting it together, need another charm or two, but it's fun.

 

[wankerness]

I hit a wall with the strength build - that goddam Black Knife Alecto boss is just killing me over and over. I can often get her down to half health but then eventually she staggers me right before a blood explosion that instantly kills me since it hits for 90% health and then applies a dot and she DOES NOT STOP ATTACKING EVER AHHHHH

I get the mechanics, the fight has no second phase, it's just so unforgiving and relentless. What an obnoxious fight.

I think with the faith build I just mashed blasphemous blade weapon art and nothing else and she fell over. I need to get an iwin button on this build. Maybe I should actually put a weapon art on my weapon or shield.

 

[stevexc]

Maybe I should actually put a weapon art on my weapon or shield.

Wait, are you at least setting an affinity on your weapon? If you're running Strength, Heavy will at least boost the Strength scaling, giving you a straight raw damage increase... even if you're not using the actual skill.

Definitely having a time getting used to this dual-wield build. I keep trying to raise my shield and wind up attacking instead... not always ideal! When I remember how to play it's a fun one though. I'm using the Rotten Breath incantation, it can absolutely tear through bosses on occasion.

 

[Mathemagician]

I had magic on my rapier but as a mage the extra general magic damage screwed me whenever I fought a magic resistant enemy. So now it’s blood slash. Muahahaha. Fast blood application and blue missiles to the face.

Is the phalanx ash of war worth using? As in does it scale with INT?

 

[wankerness]

Wait, are you at least setting an affinity on your weapon? If you're running Strength, Heavy will at least boost the Strength scaling, giving you a straight raw damage increase... even if you're not using the actual skill.

Definitely having a time getting used to this dual-wield build. I keep trying to raise my shield and wind up attacking instead... not always ideal! When I remember how to play it's a fun one though. I'm using the Rotten Breath incantation, it can absolutely tear through bosses on occasion.

Yeah, I've just been using whatever dummy weapon art turned the weapon to heavy scaling. Stamp is what I had on the great stars mace, which is functionally pretty useless except for hilarious moves like hitting miriam off the balcony. What I meant was get something overpowered like hoarfrost stomp or whatever since I have the blade to put whatever scaling you want with the weapon art instead of them being tied together.

I just levelled up the Fallingstar Beast Jaw to +9 and have been screwing around with it (I'm at the minimum 20 int). The weapon art on THAT is a pretty solid downward lightning bolt much like honed bolt. I used it to take the last like 10% off of lichdragon fortisaxx. It worked well!! I think I might try this weapon out for a while. The moveset is just a lot of downward slashes, but that seems to be OK. The only real drawbacks of the weapon are that the scaling sucks (C str, C dex - I have 50 str and 18 dex!) and it's twice as heavy as the mace I was using (20 instead of 10).

I still don't have a really good strength weapon that scales with Somber stones, which is dumb, cause you can max out a somber weapon MUCH, MUCH earlier than you can a regular weapon. There's no possible way to get all the stones necessary to get to +24 until you're partway through crumbling farum, while I have the materials to get 1 weapon to +9 with somber and another to +10. I sort of get the impression none of the unique weapons are that good for a strength build, they're all hybrid things. I might level the Radahn swords cause they look fun.