Elden ring!

[pahulkster]

Cleared everything out with my poison/rot double pokey thrusting sword build but have hit a brick wall on Radahn. 17/6 on my blessings but I have no idea how I missed so many spirit ashes because I was everywhere and my last playthrough I got to 9. I'll probably go around with a guide and get them all but I still don't know if it will help. Already beat him once with my first character on NG+ so I'm not going to go crazy. This build massacres everything else and Radahn is weak to it but I just can't get the hits in like I could with my longer katanas. I also die half the time just trying to get into the fight and get the mimic out. I can get Thiollier and he helps with that but he doesn't do shit otherwise and the health buff on Radahn is brutal. I might be the only person alive excited for Star Wars Outlaws so I'll likely just chill until that comes out.

 

[wankerness]

Cleared everything out with my poison/rot double pokey thrusting sword build but have hit a brick wall on Radahn. 17/6 on my blessings but I have no idea how I missed so many spirit ashes because I was everywhere and my last playthrough I got to 9. I'll probably go around with a guide and get them all but I still don't know if it will help. Already beat him once with my first character on NG+ so I'm not going to go crazy. This build massacres everything else and Radahn is weak to it but I just can't get the hits in like I could with my longer katanas. I also die half the time just trying to get into the fight and get the mimic out. I can get Thiollier and he helps with that but he doesn't do shit otherwise and the health buff on Radahn is brutal. I might be the only person alive excited for Star Wars Outlaws so I'll likely just chill until that comes out.

Do not use thiollier. He's garbage and will just make the fight harder. Ansbach helps a ton if you're a bleed build but if you screwed up his quest you're out of luck there.

You might just end up having to respec to the build I outlined earlier (greatshield with lots of holy resist and a bleed weapon you can use while blocking, basically). It's a seriously tough fight for just about every other build.

 

[p0ke]

New Londo (the swampy ghost area that you drain the water out of and then fight a ton of darkwraiths and then the four kings are the boss)

Ah, yeah, that place sucked. I didn't think of that, because there's a shorter way to 4k once you've opened the gate to the Valley of the Drakes. On my first playthrough I managed to run past everything unscathed from that side to get to the boss with full health and estus.

I dunno if I'm imagining it, but I'm finding the bosses to be a little more.... simple? Which makes sense, it's an earlier game, but I find the bosses in this easier to read than in ER. In ER, it sometimes would take me a dozen attempts to still think "how in the hell am I supposed to beat this?" and the solution ends up being to change your build to match a weakness like a pokemon game and tank hits or whatever else. In DS1 so far it feels like the solution is usually to stop panicking and learn the patterns, because they aren't that complicated. I killed the Gaping Dragon yesterday, for example - after a few attempts I figured out you can just keep a distance to stay out of danger until it charges, which gives you a chance to run around it and attack the tail from relative safety. When it jumps in the air run away. When it swings the tail, dodge roll. Repeat until dead. This seems like good boss design to me - intimidating at first, but manageable once you learn to read it.

Yeah, and generally the bosses didn't have many phases until DS3. Even in DS2 they just go a little more nuts (light their weapon on fire etc) at 50% HP, but in Elden Ring pretty much every boss has multiple health bars.I don't mind the epic end bosses or whatever being like that but it kinda gets old when every boss does that. Of course there are exceptions to the phase thing, like the Darklurker splitting into two, but at least the health bar doesn't lie
I like the more simple design too. Just take a deep breath and don't get greedy with the attacks, and that's it.
+ Like @wankerness said, especially in DS2 the same strategy works for almost every boss - you just circle around them (mostly right is better but a few are easier to dodge left) and poke them when their combo is done.

 

[dr_game0ver]

 

[wankerness]

I am guessing that's a parody video, but I've absolutely seen dummies who are used to all those action games like God of War reboots, Assassin's Creed, etc where you have infinite stamina and can animation cancel and have auto-lockon play this game just like that and immediately bounce off of it because of it. I mean, even some games that are equivalently hard if not harder like say Bayonetta would teach you to play basically like that.

 

[Jarmake]

Today I cleared Radahn on the shadow of the erdtree dlc. It was the most challenging boss in the dlc this far... Took like 15 tries to get through.

Now I'll just have to figure out where to go next.

 

[wankerness]

Today I cleared Radahn on the shadow of the erdtree dlc. It was the most challenging boss in the dlc this far... Took like 15 tries to get through.

Now I'll just have to figure out where to go next.

After finding all the bosses I could and generally trying to fill out the map, I just looked at the "all bosses" list for shadow of the erdtree on powerpyx. There were a few I missed! That's a really big DLC.

 

[narad]

Just beat Radahn... I was stuck on him for a month or so? The only time except for Gaius that I was properly stuck. With Gaius I just went around and gathered scadutree blessings, but with Radahn, I was basically maxed out there. I was originally a katana bleed build, but I didn't do the quests that would get you a bleed-helper NPC, and I just wasn't making a dent really. Could make it to phase II, then insta death.

So I hadn't respecced at all in the last 2 or so playthroughs I've done, and it feels a little like cheating, but respecced to a faith/dex build around Euporia. That was fun, and it was new to me to cast all these faith buffs before the fight, but I still couldn't get anywhere. Then I pivoted in the same build to trying to summon guys and then just mass heal them from the sidelines, and that would sort of work but something always seemed to go wrong. I think if I had 50 tries of that it probably would have happened, but that seemed really cheating too.

So I went to the last resort -- shield/poke bleed build. Got the fingerprint shield, which I had somehow missed up until now, and upgraded Mohg's spear, went in just blocking everything, which is very interesting! In all my playthroughs, I've never done a shield build. Beat him on the 2nd try.

Still not sure how I feel about it. That Phase II just seems like such BS... almost everyone who beats that, which of course there are many strategies, all of them seem to be not in the spirit of Elden Ring IMO. Very few are about timing and dodging, and more about the right equipment or stacking buffs in super effective ways. It made the whole thing feel a bit anticlimactic IMO.

 

[Moongrum]

So I went to the last resort -- shield/poke bleed build. Got the fingerprint shield, which I had somehow missed up until now, and upgraded Mohg's spear, went in just blocking everything, which is very interesting! In all my playthroughs, I've never done a shield build. Beat him on the 2nd try.

DLC was when I first did shield+poke, too. It's actually fun imo, because I'm not panic rolling, and can actually watch what's happening. Like, I was able to figure out dodging Radahn's hug pretty quickly because I was just chilling behind a shield and was able to learn his telegraphs more easily.

 

[wankerness]

All of Elden Ring was able to be played with shield/poke, and it even introduced that shield counter thing that has been so underutilized so it was clearly encouraging people to try out a shield build, people just didn't tend to spec that since they viewed it as nooby. But I don't think shields "aren't in the spirit of elden ring" considering how many are in the game and how there's new blocking mechanics. I know I, as a bad player, leaned heavily on the brass shield on every single one of my characters. I only used a greatshield on my strength character and only on a couple fights (partly cause you don't get the fingerprint shield till liek the very end of the game).