Elden Ring - George R.R. Martin and Hidetaka Miyazaki

Rivers of Blood nerfed as well.

Not seeing that in the patch notes.

You certainly did if you followed my exploits punching Placidusax to death in the spoiler thread! It was the only way I found to avoid his god damned death beams in the second phase of the fight. I might have mentioned it before then because I ended up calling it BHS in the post I am thinking of.

Sorry. The Ash of War on it is “Corpse Piler”. So it’s a nerf on that RoB katana.

PvP guys hate Bloodhound Step.

Yea, they nerf ROB now that I decide to try it. Thanks Miyazaki.

OK, cool, managed to find my way to the other ruins and rock slinging bug, and got the Wing of Astel. If I have it in my left hand and my Moonveil in my right hand I can’t use the specials on the Wing of Astel, so I put it in my right hand to swap back and forth with the Moonveil, keeping my Meteorite staff in my left hand.

Even though I’ve only got my Mimic up to +3, when I went to clear out this second ruin in hopes of finding some Somber Stones and Ghost Graveworts. I decided to use him to clear the area. Wow. He and I using the Wing of Astel specials at the same time was a very impressive thing to watch as we cleared out groups of bad guys/things. Also excited that I found some higher level Somber Stones and Ghost Graveworts. Ran back to the round table only to realize I’m missing a couple of lower stones and ghost graveworts that I need to use the higher level ones. Argh!

Got to say, though, the speed and the specials etc. on the Wing of Astel, even at only +6, are impressive enough it has, for now, usurped the Moonveil for my main blade.

RIP corpse piler.

I have seen a video or two on this patch and the PVP guys are very happy. It also makes the bigger weapons more viable.

There are some caves and catecombs in western Altus Plateau that have items that should interest you. Also that second part of Ainsel River has a lot of higher level upgrades.

My endgame loadout was +10 Wing of Astel and +10 Moonveil in my right hand, and +10 Carian Regal Scepter and +25 Frost Uchigatana in my left hand.

Powerstancing the two katanas gives me more raw damage output, frost and bleed when needed, but the WOA and the staff was a great set for general exploration. Plus, the final phase of the last boss in the game is very vulnerable to WOA and I cleared that phase in less than a minute with just WOA.

Multiplayer chit-chat

Post patch 1.06 I played for a few hours last night trying out the new systems such as to ‘invade’ or ‘lure invaders’ from near and far. For me it was a mixed-bag and in many ways it felt more unstable than usual. (PC)

While i have had a few hiccups when doing multiplayer (PvP using the taunter’s tongue or as a summoned hunter) last night it felt like about half of the time it was buggy. There were a few categories of failures that happened on multiple occasions. Like the game telling me I’m being summoned and then freezing mid summons or just the summons never happening but leaving me in a state where I cannot do anything like use Torrent, teleport, or use a site of grace. Or, say I’ve lured an invader in and we fight a bit and usually a blue hunter has joined and we eventually kill the invader and the hunter is returned home. But I’m left in that state where I cannot do anything (Torrent, teleport, grace) and have to reboot my rig. Sometimes after one fight ends another invader comes in; sometimes BEFORE the fight ends another invader comes in; and I don’t have a chance to regroup but I think that’s more normal and not a bug.

As I say it felt like it happened a lot; maybe even half of the time. Also, I got summoned to be a hunter to a far region maybe once or twice but the vast majority were still in and around either Limgrave or Liurnia - but maybe others just haven’t broken that habit yet.

But was anyone else, PC or otherwise, having similar issues in multiplayer yesterday after the patch?

Status plus question:

Exploring the underground while getting the Wing of Astel and found some nice Ghost Gloveworts for my new Mimic, which is only +3. Found some 6’s and 7s and even two Greats (I assume that is basically “10s” correct?) Also was pumped to find a 7 and 8 for my WOA and Moonveil, both at +5.

Unfortunately I need 4 and 5 Ghost Gloveworts before I can use the 6 and 7s. And I need two Somber Stone 6s, another 7, another 8, two 9s, and I don’t even know what you find to get them to 10s.

Question: it sure seemed like the WOA was doing more damage than the Moonveil, but perhaps it was because it seems I can swing the WOA faster and get more hits in? When I look at the Physical and Magical Damage for the two (both are STR- E, DEC-C, and INT-C0) the Moonveil is Physical 125+ 36, Magical 150+ 112. WOA is Physical 112+ 28, Magic 134+ 92.

What do the second numbers mean? E.g. the 36 after the 125+ for Physical? Those numbers would seem to indicate the Moonveil hits with more damage but doesn’t feel like it. Of course, the Moonveil does have some bleed damage also.

That second number is the bonus you are getting for ‘scaling’; If the primary scaling was INT the number would be going up the higher your INT. Using higher smithing stones will increase the primary number.

Adding better smithing stones is very straightforward but the second number and scaling is more nuanced. When you get more and more of the ‘whetstones’ you can add and change ashes of war (on weapons which have changeable ashes of war) with ‘affinity’ to be more strength or more dexterity based and so on. When you are at the blacksmith and choosing between the affinities you will see the number change and can decide which does the most damage or has the highest AR or whatever.

Steam has people complaining about problems logging into the games. Seems every patch screws up some people. I haven’t tried PvP since the patch but the biggest complaint seems to be the lost connection errors.

You have kind of jumped past areas by following Ranni’s quest, that’s why you are missing the intermediate stone. Try the Altus Plateau area. The stones with Dragon in the name get you to +10 or +25 depending on the type. They are limited, less than a dozen of each,

Started playing a bit again. Switched over to a new build for some variety. Holy crap-o-matic, Batman, Fallingstar Beast Jaw is amazing. Spam Gravity Bolt and watch shit melt. Dunno how it’ll scale into super high NG levels, but it is absolutely destroying everything in its path, including Melania, in NG+2.

I like how Elden Ring’s updating process still takes longer than redownloading the entire game.

But the upside is that it makes your computer also run like shit the whole time it’s happening.

I just uninstalled it.

Huh. I was having weird framerate issues playing Hitman the other day. I wonder if that was ER updating.

Is that ERs process or Steams? It is strange how it works.

It’s ER’s spin on Steam I think.

It downloads… basically nothing. And then it spends literally an hour unpacking and installing it somehow.

Other games have done a similar thing before, but they download a lot more and the unpacking and installing takes maybe a minute or two tops.

It’s the worst of all worlds. Unless you have insanely bad data caps and slow internet, I guess.
Edit: That said I’m not convinced it isn’t downloading stuff when it’s installing, so maybe it’s bad for that too.