3064

The one at the Evergaol near Stormveil is a great place to practice. Great way to learn when to dodge his swoop attack thing.

3065

Heh, I beat Godrick on the first try. I guess I’m overleveled. Oleg kept his attention a little too well. I almost got his attention a couple of times, but then Oleg got it right back before he could actually hit me.

3066

Some Spirit ashes work better than others.

3067

I spent hours of trepidatious exploring, expecting slithery beasts to crawl out of those. It’s so good.

3068

Progress. I reached level 100 in my character, I beat Baleful Shadow with greatsword + lion skill + rot poison grease (ironically, a giant bear fight in a cave in Caelid was much harder). I completed the witch’s quest. I got the medallion for Dectus LIft (not that I needed it, I had opened the cliff tunnel passage), and finished exploring Caelid, so now I will focus on Altus.

3069

So I turned in Godrick’s rememberance for a Grafted Dragon fist. My last character couldn’t use the Axe or the Fist, but this one has high enough Faith that I can use the Grafted Dragon. But I don’t get it.

https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Grafted+Dragon

This thing seeeeeeeems worthless? It does a tiny bit of physical and fire damage? And the “Bear Witness” ability seems like a joke since it does so little fire damage. What the heck? Is this things supposed to be worthless?

3070

It’s why I’ve been finding, overall. Like, I open a chest guarded by giant insects, in a red temple beyond the lake of rot, which is beyond the normal underground, the place screams to you ‘this is a unholy, forbidden area close to the secrets of the lore’ , one would think you would wing a great weapon… and what you get is something that is very equivalent to a normal dagger or a normal claymore.

In summary, weapons have been designed to be mostly ‘sidegrades’, not upgrades. You don’t get a weapon B that is twice as powerful as weapon A, and 20 hours later weapon C that is twice as powerful than B. Weapons with higher damage that seems better have drawbacks like attack speed, increased stamina comsuption, etc. There are weapons that are sliiiightly better than others, in exchange of having high stat requisites, that’s it.
The main way to get power is to upgrade yourself the weapons with the smithing stones. In fact the game design doesn’t allow to swap easily your old weapons for new weapons, because you invested rare high level smithing stones in the old weapons (unless until the endgame).

In my opinion, the game would have been better using an approach somewhat closer to the ‘weapons as upgrade’ system. Something that would promote trying new weapons as you play. What’s the point of having 300 weapons if you use the up to 7 during all your run. The game is 100 hours long, it isn’t like it’s feasible to do multiple runs trying different weapon types in each. And it’s hard enough that the player is always ‘pushed’ towards the most efficient, higher level weapon that is available.

3071

It’s definitely a new problem, since their previous games were not open world games. But in those games, basically each weapon is a unique way of playing the game. You get a lot of player choice. But you’re right, since the length of Elden Ring is so much longer, and it’s open world, it’s going to be a much more monumental task for the player to start over and do another run using different weapons. But I think the idea is still the same. Each run with a different style of weapon will provide you with a different experience through the game.

3072

If you go to ng+ you should have obtained what you need for infinite upgrades but you lose the fun (frustration) of starting over.

3073

The bell bearings for smithing stones don’t go all the way up, IIRC. You need the ancient dragon stones for that, and those are always a limited supply. That said, there are enough of them that it’s typically not a significant problem unless you’re looking to max out everything or something crazy like that.

3074

Yea, ball bearings don’t cover the last upgrade, those are limited in each play thru,

3075

I think the whole weapon upgrade system is probably the weakest part of Elden Ring IMO. You’re basically incentivized to stick with a couple weapons that you’ve upgraded and everything else is garbage because you don’t have enough stones.

3076

Yeah, yesterday I was toying with the idea of changing my build, maybe try to do a poison build as I had a few items (weapons, helmet, talisman) related to that, and in the process I examined more deeply my inventory, and my conclusion was, before I thought it was an issue in the game, now I think it’s a big issue, I agree with you…

This doesn’t subtract from the part that the game really does great (say, the enemies, even if we were to remove the dozens of bosses, it still has like 100 types of enemies, with distinctive visual styles, attributes, and behaviors) but the entire upgrade system sucks.

Let’s look for a moment to the fact the game has a respec system. There is a quest for it, and an item you get to use it in that way. Cool, that way you can convert to high Strength dude in a high Intelligence/Arcane caster. Except… it doesn’t, because it doesn’t turn your colossal sword +22 into a +22 staff. So if you choose to respec beyond a certain point in the game, where you have spent your high level stones in five melee weapons (as you tried different ones over the first 60 hours), you are a bit screwed.

Or let’s think how you chose what weapons to upgrade. If I have a +20 sword and I’m around that part of the game where it’s normal to have a +20 sword, just past the mid game, and I thinking in upgrading a new weapon, how am I supposed to do it? With this, I mean, if precisely the high level stones are rare, I want to try the weapon before investing the stones on it, and compare it with my current +20 sword. Maybe see if that new weapon could serve me to kill some hard boss with a new tactic that my current sword is failing me.
But I can’t, the +0 weapon will suck in comparison with my +20 weapon against the current enemies I fight against. You can google at the wiki what damage and scaling will have that weapon at a theoretical level 20, and do the math but apart from being a pain in the ass solution, it doesn’t tell the whole story, you need to use it in a real stuation, animations almost matter more than damage numbers.
So… you are supposed to pick a few weapons blindly, and hope for the best? Maybe once upgraded to level 20 that new weapon will really work against that pesky boss, but there is no way to know it without trying and well, the upgrades are permanent.

This in addition of how it disincentivizes trying new ideas in the same run, like maybe doing a bleed build, or maybe trying with dual weapons instead of using a shield, etc.

3077

I am in that Haigtree area, the one that has Melenia. This is the first time I have been there, as I have missed this area with my other characters.

I must say, I hate this area, maybe the first part until you get to the more proper city part. My total lost runes up until this area was probably like 20k. In just this area I think I have lost at least 500k runes.

3078

I lost about 30k runes in Leyndell when playing today. Kept on looking for a site of grace when I got ambushed by a knight and killed. Was so pissed off that I turned off the game. About five minutes later I remembered that I could have just fast-travelled to one and leveled up. Looks like old Dark Souls habits die hard…

3079

I finally was able to beat a particularly pesky Crucible Knight. After some attempts, where it showed the knight was nigh invulnerable to almost anything*, I just discovered how good is Lion’s Claw with a colossal sword. I think maybe it does a poise damage multiplier from the base poise damage of the weapon? So no only you do a nice damage with the skill, after a pair of uses they fall to the ground, which allows me to finally beat their asses.

*: I dislike this part a bit, half the time I find a tough boss I try to use some consumables like grease, pots, magical glint stones, special arrows, etc, and they barely do anything to their hp bar nor I can get a status to trigger (or their able to avoid my shit or have a shield, etc). It’s like these tools are designed to serve against normal enemies and not bosses, which is counter intuitive as I already can beat normal enemies with just a shield + sword, and in an easier way than having to fiddle with the inventory.

3080

Many bosses do get affected or are even weak to some status or another, but since there’s no gauge for it it’s impossible to tell if you’re getting close or if it’s totally pointless.

3081

I tried to do the Cliffbottom Catacombs this morning. I had never found this place in my previous playthrough, so it was a complete surprise. I must say, I really love exploring new dungeons in this game. And I really appreciate the help from the messages, where they tell me to watch out for traps, or to look out on my left, or to watch out behind me. It’s funny that the messages don’t reduce the tension, if anything they make it more exciting. When you read a message that says “Behind!”, and you turn around and there’s actually an enemy, you still feel the adrenaline, but also you feel grateful that you got help.

Also, holy shit this catacomb is hard. I spent the hour before work this morning, thinking that was enough time to do one dungeon. Nope. I might have to rethink my spells and weapons a bit for this dungeon. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow with more FP potions, and less HP potions.

3082

I worry about some of these bad guys when I read things like this, as I have a pretty much pure Int build and will never be able to use a colossal sword (at least an upgrade one) or Lions Claw. I haven’t run into a Crucible Knight yet (that I know of) but surely there are ways for an Int build to take them on.

3083

That’s what I was thinking too, surely you have some OP spell in exchange? I remember seeing some gifs when the game was released where the player was able to burn through half of a boss life bar with some kind of ‘energy stream’ spell.