I stumbled into magma wyrm way under leveled as well but was afraid to leave the area before beating it due to an event close to the fog door. I’m scarred from past games clearly. Eventually I gave up though, fortunately with no repercussions.
Only had time for a short play session so decided to take a few swings at Margit, forgetting that I was risking quite a few runes in doing so. On the one hand did not seem to make any progress against him; on the other it did remind me what I like about this game.
Maybe it makes me basic, but I kinda enjoy following internet info that helps me find things that I otherwise would probably not have found, and getting some heads up on boss behavior before going in so I at least have a toehold on winning feels better than just getting my ass beat over and over. In this game, running into, like, two zombie dogs is a legitimate threat of death, especially if you’re in a situation where visiting graces would be limited (either by availability or not wanting to respawn a bunch of shit) and thus you’re faced with a choice of consuming a scarce resource, your FP or HP, or trying to avoid them, or trying your hand at melee with them. I die plenty often enough to feel challenged. I don’t also need to feel lost at the same time to enjoy the game, but I can respect the opinion of people who seek that additional challenge.
And even with all the information I’m consuming about the game, I’m still puzzling things out for how I play and how I’ve built my dude relative to what anything else I read about says. E.g. I recently got the mimic tear ashes, which, of course, is awesome. Lets me just faceroll some bosses, even having never experienced its power pre-nerf. Leveled him up to 5 or 6 now, because he seemed like obviously the best I had available. I took him in against Elemer Fudd in the castle of poison and death in north Altus, and he would be promptly murdered shortly before I got the same treatment. Tried different strategies of spells and melee without much success. But trying out the Greatshield Soldier Ashes, even at level 0? Done and done. Those pesky, blocky fuckers aren’t really mentioned as a cheat code for this guy anywhere else, but 4 dudes tap-tap-tap-tapping him with their shields was pretty great.
Margit’s definitely one of the harder fights in the game though, even you find and use the shackle. His timing is weird. His range is longer than you think. And rolling towards him tends to work better than rolling away, no matter how terrifying he seems.
Well once I internalized rolling towards him I was able to beat him, although still took a few tries. Going to explore Weeping Peninsula and then check out the castle to determine whether I ultimately want to sink tons of hours into the rest of the game. Boss battle was enthralling but the minute I’m back in the world I start to feel restless.
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+1, the game tries to mess with your head by making the bosses look huge and playing scary music. Realizing that you can get up in their faces and trade blows is key.
Honestly the bigger the boss the tighter you should hug it.
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One thing that tilts me about this game a little bit:
All of the greases you can apply to your weapon seem to do nothing. Like they maybe give a 5-10% bump in damage, but they also don’t last very long, so for big boss fights, using one maybe means you need to get 1 less hit over the course of the boss fight.
I get not wanting to make them OP but I kinda like having a limited supply and making significant progress towards figuring out a boss, then committing to using the grease for extra damage. As it stands I just never use them because they don’t really do much.
Add to this that most of the best weapons imo can’t even use grease.
Yeah my biggest complaints are:
- Heavy reuse of enemies and bosses, especially later on
- Consumable system has no improvement over previous games (except for the flask, that’s cool)
- Can’t use consumables during fights due to dark souls type bosses not ever giving you windows, making them even worse.
- Adding a crafting system that is unusable beyond maybe boluses since the consumables suck
- Summons make the game about trading aggro rather than learning the bosses, and if you don’t use summons the bosses are much, much harder than any other souls game.
- Quests as cryptic and impossible to follow as ever, and no even barebones notes system like Morrowind to remember who you’ve talked to.
- Game doesn’t encourage exploration of different weapons or summons, very difficult to upgrade multiple other weapons to your current level since the ball bearings (which you can easily miss) are usually a ways after you’re past that stage.
- Bosses still do the thing where the timing is mixed up and have delayed attacks to prevent dark souls veterans from beating them too easily (but makes them much less fun IMO)
- Having an open world means that people get to bosses at different levels, which is I guess sorta cool, but takes away from the bosses being designed around a certain difficulty to keep the intensity up through the entire game.
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You aren’t wrong here but a lot of these are just normal fromsoft nonsense that have been there for 5+ games. Clearly the spirit ashes were a mistake though. Game is balanced with everyone using them all the time. Most of the mid combat spells and buffs you simply cannot get off if the boss isn’t being tanked. That and other things certainly bumped it down a notch for me but its still their best game by far imo and probably still GOTY.
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Some other games have implemented a soft or hard cap before beating certain bosses (think Pokemon rebelling without the right badges). With some opt puts like skipping past stormveil will remove it as well. Might have been semi-good here. That way you’re still progressing and finding new items but you’re not ridiculously over leveled for the key bosses.
How much of a tryhard am I for doing the entire game using no shield or spirit ashes?
I’m getting kind of frustrated because I chose a STR build, and apparently it’s basically the weakest possible option in the late game. I’m going to have to respec, grind some more levels or get used to dying a million times.
I’m way beyond judging how people play this game, at least as long as they’re actually having fun and not torturing themselves. There are clearly a lot of ways to play: caster, bows, melee, or some sort of hybrid; focusing on one of the 4 damage stats or some sort of hybrid; using conventional or unique weapons; one progression all the way through or multiple respecs as things change; with or without summons; parry god, dodger, or overleveled; completionist, speed runner, or just focusing on the materials you care about; power fantasy vs. facing bigger challenges; lore explorer or pure violence seeker. It’s clearly a strength of the game that players are allowed to find their own niche in a game that at least certainly can be unforgiving and challenging, and definitely is at the start. It’s really satisfying to overcome that difficulty, whether you choose to do it by improving dodge/parry/spacing/attack timing, or by gear progression, or by leveling, or by seeking out that one weird trick.
A lot of this boils down to the fundamental problem of ARPGs: what do you use for rewards, especially when the bigger world means you need to have more rewards. Like, Path of Exile solved this problem by giving you so much garbage you literally have to get a loot filter from a 3rd party to hide 99% or more of it in order to make the game even playable (without one you literally run the risk of there being too much worthless loot on the screen that you can’t attack monsters, or that the game outright crashes). Diablo 3 went with build-constraining sets and super generic gold, and then a neverending grind for marginal improvements on those sets.
It’s not an easy problem to solve, because it’s fundamentally impossible to make all the rewards “the best.” The best you can really do is making a modest number of options “the best” for a number of different cases (whether that’s best for a gear slot, best in the context of certain builds, etc.). In a super linear game, you can put new gear in a neat little line for the player to get as they progress, so then even if yesterday’s treasure is today’s trash, it’s only because you found a new treasure today. That’s impossible in an open world game, especially this one that may have nominal gating between regions but that also has accessible, non-glitch means of violating that gating.
So, Elden Ring elected to attack the reward problem with extra slots for rewards, namely consumables (with huge amounts of ingredients that can be geographically gated), ashes of war, and spirit ashes (and some basically interchangeable weapons and armor and such). It’s at least reasonably successful for a game that doesn’t really intend to be played forever (so they don’t need to use the Path of Exile model of making ideal gear incredibly improbable to acquire). But by adding novel slots for gear, if you make any of it meaningful, it’s almost certainly because it’s overpowered (like spirit ashes and certain ashes of war), or if you don’t players ignore it (like consumables). Bottom line, I guess I’m glad this isn’t a solved problem, because it inspires new games with new approaches to the problem. If it does get solved, we run the risk of every subsequent game feeling the same.
I like this progression
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Thought Rykard was easy, just upgrade the spear to +4 or +5 and you can wreck shop.
https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/tyjcp1/temporary_rule_shut_up_about_elden_ring/
Party is over everyone, go home. Mods please lock the thread
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Holy hell Malekith was hard to beat.
Went back to fight margit after roaming around everywhere for 30 hours. Finally beat him after about 30 deaths, lordsman sword +4, level 26 level 21 vigor.
Does anyone know if I should not be using a lordsman sword further into the game or is it just preference?
lol, I’ve been reading it wrong this whole time…it’s the lordsworn’s straight sword - 3.5 weight. I maxed it out because it seems to swing pretty quick for its damage so I stuck with it.