I’ll call them Senseis for lack of a better term. They just seem to not give a shit about all my abilities and then they hit for 50-70% of my health with each attack.
He’s one of the ones I’m fed up with. Heres the thing: he doesn’t give a fuck about Mikiri Counter. You land it and he just tosses you off like you’re an insect and then destroys you.
That’s one of my main complaints: Mikiri Counter just stops work apparently? Like every enemy (other than the old ones from the start of the game that I run into occasionally) just ignores it now. You land the counter and they toss you off like it’s a mild annoyance and hit you.
Sure, but mini-bosses are health upgrades. I’m getting 2 shotted by regular dudes. I need health.
I can’t learn a pattern when a single mistake instantly kills me and then I have to run back after a few minutes. Butterfly was tough, but at least it was a quick run. Here I have to 007 just to get in range to try a dude and he can literally one shot me from across the map. My counter… just doesn’t work. Because reasons. I dodge, he tracks. I jump, he tracks that too. He’s fast and has so much reach it’s silly. My attacks do basically nothing to him and I can’t stand near him anyway.
That felt like “here’s the Anor Lando knights part” to me. Good news is that just running works fairly well at a certain point.
It’s my #1 annoyance atm. I guess I’ll grind a bit and get the upgrade (I think it has an upgrade) and see if that fixes it. But having to upgrade a skill to get it to start working again is pretty shitty design imo.
Or there is some wonky timing thing that I’m missing? It’s entirely possible, but until this point it wasn’t a thing. The game is pretty terrible about feedback on a lot of things, but I just know that I land Mikiri, watch dudes flick me off their weapon, and then bitchslap me and it feels stupid.
Edit: Ok, I figured it out. It’s because they have too much Posture. If they’re low enough it works normally. So the upgrade will hopefully make it more like it used to be. Kind of annoying, but at least I figured out what is going on. After I Counter their Posture skyrockets, so its still working, it just feels off because until this point it would overwhelm every enemies Posture.
I didn’t kill that spear guy until 10 hours later. The health upgrade is like a 10% boost. That’s not going to take you from getting killed in 2 hits to 5 hits. There’s no sense getting bloodlust over one miniboss.
I honestly didn’t think twice about the Mikiri counter. To me it’s just a bit of posture damage on the bosses.
Just do the Mikiri counter and move on. It does a bit of posture damage to some bosses I guess?
If you’re not doing the Mikiri counter flawlessly then you need to go to the practice guy. Then practice some more on live enemies. Read that reddit post above, then read the comments below because there appears to be some controversy on exactly how it works.
You might still mess up in a panic because you’re waiting for another attack. But the window for the counter itself is so wide you should be able to hit it 100% of the time if your mind is calm enough to realize that’s the attack that’s coming.
I’m stuck on the flaming bull currently. I just can’t dodge any of its attacks - no matter if I try sprinting in a circle, jumping away from his charges, to the left or right, nothing - he always tags me. It’s aggravating.
Hint: watch how it moves and think about ways to exploit that.
The answer: stand to the rear-side and smack it in the butt. It will try to weakly attack you or turn awkwardly because it’s a big-ass bull. If it runs away, use firecrackers as it charges, then repeat. Completely safe, almost no risk.
Just run a circuit around the edges of the room, in full sprint. You’ll avoid everything.
Ya, they make a big deal of it, but really, the item is not useful. Just kite. Eventually they all dematerialize. But, be advised, they turn into death butterflies, so you need to keep running until they all miss you. But, at full sprint, you’ll end up dodging all of them most of the time.
Oh, she does it more than twice. She does it a bunch of times. It’s just one of her moves in the second phase.
Ya, this is why it’s useless. It doesn’t even guarantee that they’ll all go away.
On the upside, if you do decide to kill them, they’re one hit, and they give you spirit token things.
For big guys, remember that stomping on a spear doesn’t just let you hit them.
Stomping on a spear does a lot of stance damage to them, but unlike grunts, the big guys don’t get their stance broken by it. So after you do it, you need to GTFO of the way, just like any other attack. Or you can deflect the follow up.
It’s just that normally, the thrust attacks aren’t blockable at all. It gives you a way to block them.
Honestly, the swipe attacks, that you need to jump over, are the ones that get me the most, because jumping isn’t something I’m normally doing in combat. So it fucks me over because I’m never in the mode to jump.
Really, the game is just brutally difficult. But, from what I’ve seen thus far, it is in fact doable.
Pretty sure folks are gonna all die from the dragon rot though. I cured them all once, but I think the cure items are limited, and I’m dying a LOT.
I almost never rez. Because odds are one more health flask isn’t going to be enough to save the day anyway, which is all it really is. Plus sometimes you just get hit afterwards anyway. That Rez into a one-shot was the last time I’ll probably ever do it.
Ya, it seems like not rezzing and going to the idol gives you dragon rot anyway, so I rez when I can.
Against bosses, ya, it’s often futile (although I did kill the old bitch after rezzing, so ha to her). If you get ganked by smaller mobs or mini bosses though, rezzing can be good, because it lets you run away to an idol to rest, without losing anything.
Sekiro makes me realize the thing I love about previous soulsborne games is exploring the levels and fighting the rank and file enemies. The boss encounters have always just been obstacles in the way of getting to do more of the parts I enjoy. In previous soulsborne games, if a boss was too much of a pain in the ass, I could spend some time enjoyably grinding out improved stats or just do co-op. In Sekiro, you can’t do either of these things, so there’s nothing left to do but beat your head against the boss wall over and over again. That much prolonged, concentrated displeasure is really turning me off and it sounds like it’s just gonna get worse.
Indeed, I did exactly this with one of the bosses… Died a bunch, said “F THIS S”, and went off to explore other stuff, get skills, etc.
You can’t just grind to directly up your stats, but you can grind to unlock new skills. I did this, and it helped somewhat. Especially later on, after you get a bunch of different skill trees.
Also, along a similar vein, there are also a ton of different paths out there that are not immediately apparent. I had thought I had only one place to go, but then I found that there were other places I could go, so I did that too.
I beat the dude in the hole. Worst part is the time before I missed the dropping stab and killed him almost without trying. Only… he had 2 life bars. :/
Upside is that I learned how to work him over in that failed drop because I figured “whatever just kill me” and what I was doing worked super well, so the next time I just didn’t miss the drop and got him.
Then I opened up an area that scared me so bad I just noped the hell out of that shit.
Edit: Also it was a HELL of a lot more than 10% more health. More like 25-30% more.
The problem is I’ve tried your hint/answer and it doesn’t seem to work. I’ve watched a few videos and everyone seems to handle this thing just a little different, but one thing they all have in common - sometimes the same thing doesn’t work. It’s aggravating when you dodge something once and then the next time you can’t dodge it.
I’ll try blocking/deflecting instead, that actually seems easier. Thanks @Scott_Dobros for that tip, for some reason it never occurred to me. At least I found an awesome shortcut from the Idol to the Bull fight.
Yeah, I’ve found a few things like that. Though eventually you do find all of them that you’re gonna find.
I still have a mini-boss/boss from early in the game, but I’m fairly sure I can’t beat it yet because of a mechanical thing I have yet to see the counter to.
