2003

ah ok, glitch runs… I would watch a no glitch run, and how long that would take. That’s way more interesting to me. There are some no glitch runs for all Fromsoft game. Because tha’ts actual content… I wonder how many hours are minimum?

2004

Which weapon is this? The frost hammer one you mentioned. I don’t think I ever found it.

Sekiro does not give you more tools, it gives you far fewer, but I was thinking about this last night as I was brushing my teeth and I think that’s what makes it the by far better game than Elden Ring.

In Sekiro, the player is restricted to a single weapon and a handful of “shinobi tools” that collectively don’t change the options available to the player all that much. There is an umbrella that can be used to shield you from attacks that your sword can’t block, there is a firecracker that can be used to inflict posture damage on enemies, etc. These all take consumable (and farmable, but blech) items to use. But really the possibility space is quite small, and crucially there is no multiplayer, nor is there “leveling up,” although large bosses give you an item to increase your attack power a bit and there are other items to increase your health a bit. These things add up over time but are not total game changers from one step to the next by any means. So the devs know for each encounter basically how powerful the player is going to be and what options they will have available to them. So each encounter really feels pretty tuned to be tough but doable. Plus the posture bar thing means you know pretty well how close you are to inflicting that all important stagger. And as an aside you are just about as mobile as most of the bosses, very much unlike Elden Ring.

In this game there is a ridiculous abundance of tools. Weapons, spells, summons of a huge number of flavors (melee, ranged, multiple, caster, a literal copy of you, etc.) and even other players, either one or two of them. Plus the world is much more open, so for a lot of encounters the devs have absolutely no idea how powerful you are going to be. For some of those encounters you might find them when you are ridiculously overpowered, but for most of them they seem to have opted to just tune up the bosses so much that no matter what you bring to the table you’re going to be on the back foot. I have 60 vigor and that waterfowl dance bullshit is capable, if I don’t dodge right, of taking me out entirely from full health. And that little slash that happens at the very end, like two seconds after the previous attack, when she’s doing no attack animation at all? Garbage.

The heal on hit thing annoys me so much. Why does it happen? There appears to be no justification for it. I haven’t used a shield in a while but apparently she even heals if you block, which is dumb as hell.

2005

It’s this thing. It’s pretty out in the open, on one of the islands in the lakes region, in a treasure chest. I figured everyone had this one.

https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Icerind+Hatchet

I’m kind of looking forward to playing that, but I’m also kind of dreading it, because it’s entirely possible that it requires a level of player skill that I’ll never have, which is not the case with Dark Souls/Elden Ring/Bloodborne because you can level up and have your character get stronger to compensate for lack of player skill.

2006

This is my basic general complaint about ER. For me, it’s just not fun. The ratio of “fighting” vs running, is just way too skewed to the running side of things. It’s a weird game, that actively encourages you to run past as much as possible, picking up loot. Trash mobs give crap experience, hit like trucks, and are rarely worth fighting except to farm a particular armor.

When I start a new playthrough at this point, literally the first 2 hours of the game are running past everything and picking up loot, in an attempt to make my character strong enough to deal with the endless combo spam of mobs.

Ah well, I certainly had my fun with the game, got hundreds of hours out of it, but in the end it was just frustrating. My main character is parked at the final boss, and I just can’t be assed to try this 30 times to figure out what millisecond is open to get my one attack per 30 seconds in. Running like a turtle while the boss chews up 100 yards at a move is just laughably infuriating.

2007

Oh, sick, it’s a spontoon tomahawk. I never found that. Maybe I should go back for it!

Well, 24% of players got what is probably the default ending, the one I got. Lots of people just plain don’t persevere to the end so I don’t think you should worry too much about it. I certainly didn’t master all the various combat options they give you. Someone even made fun of me in the thread for dodging backwards against one of the better bosses in that game. One thing that’s great about it is that a lot of the bosses are human scale, and even the big ones are a lot smaller than in ER, so the camera is less of an enemy than in other From games (although such problems are not entirely absent).

2008

To answer the earlier question, they’re on an older patch before the frost nerf. It used to be faster to get that hatchet and upgrade it to +9 than it was to fight the three (with glitches) required bosses using a starter weapon.

2009

Everything about this fight sucks so bad. She just did the waterfowl dance four times on me.

2010

I just cant run past anything…I kill everything…at least the first time through an area. My kid told me I could run through this one tunnel area to get to the loot and I pooh pooh’d his suggestion and just spent an extra 10 minutes killing all the trash on the way…felt good. But, my love for the game is exploring and slooooowly leveling up…I’m still loving it but have only 36 hours in so far.

2011

I have seen videos of guys parrying bosses over and over again in ER and DS games. But very few of us have that ability.

2012

This in turn also makes powerfarming runes the more optimal way to play. Run past trash mobs that give you low XP per minute, get loot, powerfarm runes at high XP/minute to get levels for boss fights.

Is it a specific choice in ER that you can snipe mobs and not activate mobs right next to them, such that in many cases (as a spell caster) I can nuke entire areas with impunity? It’s so strange to 2 shot all those 1000+XP criters in Bestial Sanctum, and the mobs standing 3 feet away don’t react unless I hit them with splash damage. Of course, if I hit them with splash damage they die at the same time, which means my rune farming efficiency just went up.

On the other hand, the part I like most about the game is exploring the landscape, and going deep into an area way above my level to find that point of grace.

2013

Not just sniping, either. In CFA I was backstabbing and then fighting beasts while their buddies just sat there literally two feet away doing a digging or eating or whatever animation. Kind of bizarre, and it’s not that way everywhere.

I think I may just skip Malenia. I won’t be able to play for a few days, so maybe when I get back to it I’ll feel differently, but this fight is just not enjoyable. Her attacks all feel cheap and the healing mechanic is just so dumb. At least the camera mostly behaves, although I have barely seen enough of phase 2 to have an opinion on that.

2014

A couple invading YouTubers that I watch have said the meta on ER will probably settle between 120-140. That is about where it was with DS3.

Best invasions would be around 80 though.

What does this mean? I guess the 120-140 is where a player has enough levels to play any type character without giving up too much in one place, plus have the mana to use skills.

2015

Being at least a hybrid caster is the only fun way to play the game after a certain point. At the absolute bare minimum you need ranged ashes of war. And yet, the AI has not gotten smarter at dealing with ranged attacks. It’s another place where Elden Ring is in an awkward purgatory.

2016

By the way, I got hit by those sniper shells in the Sofia River area last night. Can I just say “HOLY SHIT”? I felt like I was have a heart attack on each hit.

2017

I gave up on the horse there. It just makes you a bigger target.

2018

And it’s where most people finish the game.

I used to like invasions. I almost certainly spent as much time invading in DS3 as I did playing the game singleplayer.

I don’t even want them in the game anymore. The number of people that gain anything remotely positive out of invasions has been whittled down to a group probably in the hundreds or the low thousands. What I once viewed as quirky design choices are now just emblematic of a blatantly outdated, lazy multiplayer system.

2019

Anybody here heard of AFK farming? Apparently it is a real pain for invaders as players are finding hiding places, summoning in invaders and blues and then just farming the runes as they die. I don’t see how this is a thing (and I don’t know what AFK stands for) but YouTube has many videos on it.

Edit: AFK is “Away From Keyboard”.

2020

I didn’t know the name it went by, but invaded into one at Mountaintops of Giants.

2021

I invaded some in DS3 but I always had my blue covenant badge on and did that. In ER there is no reason to do either.

2022

Haha, those guys suck so bad.

Re: Malenia, I see so many people saying things like, “use bleed and mimic tear and she becomes a cakewalk,” and that’s a straight up lie. I have been using bleed and mimic tear for what would be the entire span of another quite long game (almost 100 hours in this one now), and all mimic tear does is give her free heals. She doesn’t bleed any more than any other boss as far as I can tell (I am not arcane spec’s and don’t make my entire build revolve around bleed proc, although maybe I should). Yes, her poise is low, but it doesn’t matter because she does a quick couple hits and bam she’s back at the same health she was. I don’t believe you can stunlock her, despite claims. Plenty of her attacks have hyper armor and she just does those when we get her staggering back and forth and then she’s back basically at the same health as before but I’m down a flask or the tear is half dead.

Blech.