4151

You don’t have to play Elden Ring, but surely you can come up with something better than this!

4152

I realized pretty quickly I should not fight the tree sentinel until I had more firepower. I leveled up to about 37, got the skeletons summons, meteorite staff, and rock sling. Did a lot of staying back and then rolling around, and had a katana with a spell I forget for whacking a few times before getting away. Of course, the skeletons keep reviving which let me try to stay back and toss rock sling.

Third try, he went down. And I SUCK at melee and never made it past about 5-7 hours in a Souls game before.

4153

I was just going to say how much easier my dex/arcane/bleed dual wield melee build has been than my sorc lol. The speed that you can kill bosses on a bleed character is insane, the higher the mobs hit points, the more potent the bleed is and the tougher it gets for sorcs. Sorcs certainly aren’t bad, but for me at least, I struggled a bit against really high hit point mobs.

My rani fight on my bleed character lasted all of 15 seconds lol.

4154

Not every game is for everyone. FROM games have never held your hand, depending on the community of players to help each other. In a way that is one of the strengths of the game, but as someone who really struggled to finish DS1 I can understand a new players problems with the developers methods.

FROM could make the game more transparent. I don’t think many would disagree with that. At the same time many things are explained in loading scenes, item descriptions and in dialogue.

4155

This is an excellent question, since it appears that both positive and negative ratings add to the rating count, rather than as you’d expect negative ratings subtracting from it. This is no doubt quite on purpose, since Miyazaki is a sadistic asshole. Eventually positively-rated messages get a kind of golden halo effect (the message itself, not its sign on the ground), but the threshold for this is ludicrously high, like over two thousand ratings high, and the number of messages I’ve seen with a rating that high can probably be counted on one hand in over sixty hours. Perhaps there is a corresponding “evil halo” effect for messages with thousands of negative ratings, but if so I haven’t seen it. The best policy for a bad message seems to be to ignore it. If it’s a good one, though, and you rate it so, the person gets a little healing boost and a message in their game. Always feels kinda nice.

In my opinion the Souls games are some of the most story-rich games out there, they just tell their stories somewhat in the manner of a Gene Wolfe novel, which is to say the reader/player is left to fill in a lot of the blanks on their own. No one ever says Gene Wolfe ought to have written his books to suit the kind of people who would prefer to read, say, Dan Brown novels; I don’t see why anyone should demand Miyazaki make his games tell stories in the same way as, say, Ubisoft. The Souls games in particular always get this “accessibility” rap, but like, there’s a lot of games. If you don’t like the way these games do their thing, go play something else rather than demand they be what you want them to be (not saying you should do this, @jpinard, just using a universal you; I’m glad you’re playing this one!).

On the other hand, these games now carry a lot of legacy cruft I would have hoped they would have jettisoned by now, like the godawful upgrade system.

4156

If you want a nudge in the right direction - this is part of Rannis quest. She wants you to retrieve a sword. There is a grace near the city rooftops (near one of the singing Minotaur people) where you can jump on the building. Continue exploring from there.

4157

I’d like the ability to delete some notes from my game. I’m kinda over all the but-hole comments. Kinda takes me out of the moment.

4158

Yeah it was funny the first time, but oh brother.

4159

One re-used joke that still makes me laugh is that the first church in the game has a merchant with a donkey next to him carrying his wares. And in front of the donkey was a message that said “dog”. I wonder who that first person was who started that joke, because it’s pretty much carried throughout the game. Crazy that a joke can go viral in this game.

The finger but hole jokes can still get to me sometimes if they’re used creatively, which they really are sometimes.

4160

Wut? Did not know. Will always use now.

4161

Whoa, I must have done that on accident and thought it was my imagination! Thanks for that. Wish I’d realized it a hundred hours ago lol.

4162

I came a few weeks late to the game and I think I learned the hard way what the early adopters already knew. It seems like maybe the melee-first crowd has moved to dual wield and bleed builds; just hit first, hit hard, keep on hitting and make it bleed. I was trying to learn to block and parry and it makes me miserable in the boss fights especially. The diving and rolling I get a little bit actually; I just need to learn the subtle art of knowing when not to be using target lock.

Or that’s how it seems to me anyway. And I never gravitate toward spell casting in games but the hybrid options here in Elden Ring really speak to me; very much a best of both worlds for my game ‘feel’; if not the best/easiest way to beat the game or whatever. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually been any good at reflex-oriented gaming but I love them anyway. And more than anything, I love to EXPLORE which Elden Ring does as good as maybe any game I’ve ever played and more beautifully than I dreamed was possible.

4163

Parry is impossible. Block works good except for boss fights that aren’t strictly knight types. Not good if you’re outnumbered though. I think I too will try to move to duel wielding for bleed and see how that goes with my melee character.

4164

Maybe this is a silly question, but what do you dual wield with? Just any two bleed weapons, like bloodhound fang and uchigatana, or is it more complicated than that?

4165

You see a shiny on a roof, find a way to get there and when you do there is a kneeling body with the message “finger, but hole” next to it. How can you not laugh,

The “dog” one is new to this game.

4166

I have a rapier that does scarlet rot which I’ve infused with bleed and given a poison ash, and a frost rapier in the other hand. I typically run around with the frost rapier in my primary hand to take advantage of its awesome charge attack and switch to the poison ash one when it’s boss time. I have not been running this setup for very long, but it seems cool. Either way hitting L1 attacks with both.

4167

How did you get 3 things on one weapon?

4168

If you run two weapons of the same type (i.e. two straight swords, or two katana, or two hammers, etc.) then it will automatically go into two handed power stance where L1 activates both weapons.

Weapons of the same type are defined by the way they are grouped in the weapon inventory.

Some weapons, like cestus or claws, come with two weapons and switching into two handed mode (y+r1 if you are holding it in your right hand) will equip one in each hand and or you into the dual wield power stance.

4169

The poison is applied by the ash when used as an active skill, it’s not a passive buildup.

4170

So you have a scarlet rot rapier, which you gave a poison ash of war to, and then you use a crafted bar of soap like stuff to give it bleed?