From Software Elden Ring - From Software's new game with writing by GRRM

[MapMan]

Here's your hardcore niche jap arpg bro

 

[Ryzer]

Congrats on From for becoming the Call of Duty developers of the East.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Finally returned to Jarburg:

Pity you can't fight those awful poachers together with Diallos and the Jar Bairn.

That guy actually has a quest?

He keeps blathering about incomprehensible shit but i never met him in the world except once in Liurnia. He relocated to Volcano Manor where he keeps bitching about incomprehensible shit and i sitll have to figure out wtf his quest is.

 

[lycanwarrior]

Congrats on From for becoming the Call of Duty developers of the East.

It's what happens when you have declining IQs all across the West

 

[Lyric Suite]

Declining IQs is the reason a game which say what you want is still infinitely more complex mechanically than most of the garbage that passes as "gayming" today ended up outselling a franchise known for having zero mechanical complexity?

The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Maybe this is decline by From's standards but it's certainly incline by mainstream industry standards. I also love the saltiness of the gayming press. "A lot of people finding value in dying over and over". Imagine that, people actually enjoy a challenge and don't have to be coddled like retards all the time.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Congrats on From for becoming the Call of Duty developers of the East.

It's what happens when you have declining IQs all across the West

Comments like these? Completely agree.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

That guy actually has a quest?

He keeps blathering about incomprehensible shit but i never met him in the world except once in Liurnia. He relocated to Volcano Manor where he keeps bitching about incomprehensible shit and i sitll have to figure out wtf his quest is.

I didn't fulfill any of the Volcano Manor quests, but apparently he relocates to Jarburg anyway after you defeat Rykard (and have also talked to the Jar Bairn enough times that he warns about poachers). Not really a quest, since all you're doing is talking to either Diallos or the Jar Bairn, both in Jarburg, and you eventually reach the end-state with Diallos having died defending the jars from poachers, and the Jar Bairn being inspired to find his destiny as a warrior.

 

[Bloodeyes]

I've respecced to use the clawmark seal so I can use different STR weapons without borking my casting too badly. I've also given myself 13 arc. Rotten breath is amazing. Totally validates playing divine. So now I can do some damage without making a weapon flame art I want to try to make bleeding happen. How do I achieve this?

I've given myself the prereqs for Ghiza's Wheel. The weapon is hilarious but I chose it to make things bleed and I've yet to see that happen (I think. I don't know what it looks like when enemies bleed). I've also tried putting the Bloodflame Blade enchantment on the Forked Hatchet and hoeing into a giant bear's stomach with it. I didn't notice any bleeding. My damage output seemed higher on that weapon using Sacred Blade.

Do I need to take ARC? I'm spread pretty thin right now and don't have the points to spare really.

 

[Lyric Suite]

How much bleed are you gonna get with slow bonk STR weapons?

Try the little bears, not the big ones. They are very succeptible to bleed, so much so i can get a bleed proc on my first hit with the Flambarge, but keep in mind i have 50 arcane right now.

Ghiza's Wheel is a quality weapon, isn't it? Not that efficient to use with a pure STR build.

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW, for reference, check out my fight with Astel:



I was able to break his guard before getting bleed to proc. With 50 arcane.

If you are going for strong bonk weapons i'd pick something with native bleed (like Giant Stars) but focus more on getting the best out of the scaling and not expect more than one bleed proc during a fight, which is usually a lot anyway.

One thing to keep in mind is that the threshold for status effects gets higher each time. It takes longer to get a second bleed proc after the first one and raising arcane is only worth it if you want instant proc on first couple of hits for PvP or if you are hoping to get more than one proc in a boss fight. If you can manage to get at least one proc during a boss with 13 arcane i'd personally leave it at that. And as for PvP, i'd bank more on fancy weapon arts than bleed.

 

[Vibalist]

You need to use the special attack for Ghiza's Wheel to cause bleed reliably.

 

[Andnjord]

I've respecced to use the clawmark seal so I can use different STR weapons without borking my casting too badly. I've also given myself 13 arc. Rotten breath is amazing. Totally validates playing divine. So now I can do some damage without making a weapon flame art I want to try to make bleeding happen. How do I achieve this?

I've given myself the prereqs for Ghiza's Wheel. The weapon is hilarious but I chose it to make things bleed and I've yet to see that happen (I think. I don't know what it looks like when enemies bleed). I've also tried putting the Bloodflame Blade enchantment on the Forked Hatchet and hoeing into a giant bear's stomach with it. I didn't notice any bleeding. My damage output seemed higher on that weapon using Sacred Blade.

Do I need to take ARC? I'm spread pretty thin right now and don't have the points to spare really.

As you're new to the Souls games let me make sure you're clear on the mechanics, so I apologise if this is all stuff that you know.

Weapons that cause bleed will have the "Bleed (x)" towards the bottom of their stat page, with x representing the amount of bleed build-up caused in a single hit. For most weapons that x will be around 45 to 65. You can see your own bleed resistance at the bottom right of your stat page, below your damage reduction values, together your other status effects resistances (which are actually grouped into subcategories likes Immunity, Robustness, and Focus; make sure to press Help button to see which one is which exactly), enemies will also have their own resistances similar to your own.

To actually proc a bleed (or rot, poison, frost...), you need to deal enough hits to equal the corresponding resistance of the target, which you yourself can see when done to you by a bar that appears in the middle of your screen when subjected to bleed; that bar is not displayed for enemies, so you'll have to guess how far it's filled up. When that bar fills up fully you'll see a big splash of blood on the target and a burst of percentage-based damage (which is why it's so strong against bosses). So for example, a weapon that cause 45 bleed per hit will need 7 hits to cause bleed on Margit who has 316 bleed resistance according to the wiki. There is no corelation between size of the weapon and bleed build-up strenght, which means a slow weapon will be much worse at causing those bleeds than a faster one, they'll need the same number of hits but obviously a dagger will get you there much faster than a Colossal sword.

BUT, as is the case for you, the bleed build up you've inflicted on an enemy will gradually go down over time, meaning that if a boss does a long combo, hits you forcing you to back off to heal, then does another long combo that you need to stay away from, any bleed build up that you might have caused him will likely have completely disapeared by the time you attack him again, preventing any bleed damage to proc. This means that bleed works best with steady aggression and fast weapons that can get multiple hits in whenever you have a window of opportunity rather than slow ones that can barely squeeze one hit in between boss combos. A result of this is that our previous Margit example is much more likely to require 9 to 12 hits to proc bleed, as he's not going to stand there letting you wail on him uninterrupted.


As for scaling, the amount of bleed caused by a weapon scales with arcane only if that weapon has an arcane scaling in its stats. This means that the Winged Scythe, a faith weapon that causes bleed (55) but has no arcane scaling, will never see an increase in that bleed value. On the other hand, the Uchigatana causes bleed (45) but natively doesn't scale with arcane, but you could put a bleed ash of war (such as bloody slash) which would give it arcane scaling thus allowing that bleed build up value to increase with your arcane stat. Ghiza's Wheel has Bleed (70) but doesn't scale with arcane, BUT its weapon art causes a lot of hits in rapid succession, making it proc bleed reliably. But as it only scales with DEX and STR, it's probably a poor choice for a Faith build like yours.

Generally speaking dedicated Bleed builds will do less damage per hits than other builds but focus on getting that bleed to proc as fast as possible to compensate (and largely overtake really once it gets going), hence why your Forked Hatchet was doing more damage with Sacred Blade than Bloodflame.


Hope this was helpful, and apologies if you already knew that stuff. I find it better to explain the mechanics so you can make your own choices rather than telling you "nah bro, your build sux, do dis instead!" with no explanations.

 

[Vibalist]

All of the above is really good info, but Ghiza's Wheel is actually an amazingly fast weapon if you use its special ability. Do that and you'll be stacking bleeds up faster than with most high speed weapons.

 

[Andnjord]

All of the above is really good info, but Ghiza's Wheel is actually an amazingly fast weapon if you use its special ability. Do that and you'll be stacking bleeds up faster than with most high speed weapons.

I see your Ghiza's Wheel and I raise you my powerstanced Twin Blades

But ok, I've amended to it to say "probably a poor choice for your build".

 

[Lyric Suite]

Ho no, a double crucible knight boss fight.

Fuck my life lmao.

 

[Andnjord]

Ho no, a double crucible knight boss fight.

Fuck my life lmao.

Porky managed to solo them, they can't be that hard :D

Spoiler

It IS a dumb fight though, good luck

 

[Bloodeyes]

Info

Thanks for putting it all together for me. That really helped. I won't worry about bleed.

I've dropped DEX back to 12, dropped Ghiza's wheel and switched to a colossal sword with flame art on it. I know there's one of those with STR and FTH scaling in the game so I'll just wait for that one. I was still more effective with my straight sword, but this weapon looks cooler. I've actually got a collection of giant weapons now that scale off STR. So when I get bored I can just flame art or sacred on any of those. Ditched the clawmark seal too and went back to Godslayer's. Feeling strong again. But squishy. I can't wear my chest armor any more lol. Too heavy. Need to grind up endurance post haste.

Btw: The blood splat from bleed was happening so I was triggering it, I just didn't realize it. It didn't do shit so I'd obviously need more arcane to make it work. Not happening this time around. I'll just keep giving everything scarlet rot then melting their health bars with flames or holy.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Phew, there you go:



I practiced the first guy several times but apparently my brain was tuned so well to him that i couldn't re-adjust to the second guy so i fumbled a bit there lmao. Got it done all the same.

 

[NJClaw]

Btw: The blood splat from bleed was happening so I was triggering it, I just didn't realize it. It didn't do shit so I'd obviously need more arcane to make it work

Your Arcane score only determines how fast bleed will proc. The damage dealt is a fixed percentage of the enemy's HP.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Meh, pointless, he just has a wide hitbox on his attacks that tripped me over a few times:

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

 

[Bloodeyes]

Btw: The blood splat from bleed was happening so I was triggering it, I just didn't realize it. It didn't do shit so I'd obviously need more arcane to make it work

Your Arcane score only determines how fast bleed will proc. The damage dealt is a fixed percentage of the enemy's HP.

I'm inclined to think it's not as OP as people say then. It's obviously a good ability, but far from game breakingly good.

I don't think I'm doing exceptional melee damage but enemies, bosses included, never last long enough for me to notice such small amounts of extra damage. Sometimes it's ridiculous. Lion's claw can take out 1/3 or more of a dungeon boss' health bar in a single hit and it's so fast and easy to hit with. Against small enemies like bloody fingers or evergaol dudes it kills them in 4 hits, and if you hit first they never even get to attack because it flattens them and you can do it again before they stand back up.

Then there's rotten breath. I just killed the ancient dragon that cuts the whole battlefield with red lightning using only rotten breath. I was able to hit him twice and he died from the scarlet rot. I just had to ride my horse around healing until he fell. Magic generally seems way more OP. I've only played a low level Sorc briefly but the stagger on glintstone pebble trivialized everything in the early game.

Situationally bleed is obviously very strong. I struggled against the Godskin noble and bleed wrecks him. I think this was compounded by my using a piercing attack. I've since looked him up and he's strong to piercing but weak to slashing. Given his armour is made of skin I guess it's weak to bleed as well. Still, it's not like bleed is so strong that using it is cheating. There are other abilities that seem just as strong, if not stronger generally.

 

[Andnjord]

I'm inclined to think it's not as OP as people say then. It's obviously a good ability, but far from game breakingly good.

With a proper setup, you can have power stanced twinblades where each of them has more than 150 bleed build up per hit. Add to this that the jumping attack from twinblades actually does two hits per L1/R1 input, a jump attack from powerstanced twinblades hits four times per input. The result? You proc bleed every single time you do a jump attack, chopping off 15% of the bosses health and staggering them out of most attacks which allows to combo into more hits thus dealing more damage for free. Late game bosses will have health in excess of 20k HP, so you're dealing more than 3000 dmg per jump attack.

I do love me my Lion's Claw too though, it's extremely powerful and easy to use.

 

[NJClaw]

I'm inclined to think it's not as OP as people say then. It's obviously a good ability, but far from game breakingly good.

If you think bleed isn't OP, bookmark this post and come back to it once you finish the game. Here are the videos of me facing 4 endgame bosses with a bleed build:

endgame bosses

If you're still in the dark about what awaits and don't want to spoil the surprise for yourself, just keep in mind that the fights last that much only because I didn't know how to dodge their attack and just kept getting hit over and over. Now that I'm used to their moveset, with that build each encounter would probably last 20-30 seconds (people, please don't joke about my sexual performances).

 

[Nathir]

Holy shit I've just discovered what to do with the paintings on my second playthrough.