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

[Suicidal]

I only have 1 boss left and one achievement left to 100%. I'm on NG+2. I don't want to stop playing, so I went and killed Malenia. It kind of sucks. I'm thinking of purposely not getting the achievement to replay one more time. However, bosses have gotten somewhat harder on NG++. Not hugely, but enough to notice.

I don't know what to play next.

Nioh 2. We can be bromosexuals in coop. It's the natural progression from Elden Ring if you've already played through all the other Soulsborne games.

I've already 100%ed that shit. I loved Nioh. I wish I could play it again......for the first time.

This is everything I've played. Someone give me recs:

https://steamcommunity.com/id/derungrund/games/?tab=all

Darksiders 3 is basically a Souls clone and it's missing from your list. Can't say if it's good or not, haven't played yet.

 

[cretin]

Ghost of Tsushima was better than this, and Tsushima is a Ubiworld game. Enough said.

Not really an indictment; Ubisoft has some of the best game world designers in the world - it's just that they go and shit on that absolutely stunning work with the most boring, banal and uninspired game mechanics, every single time.

 

[SumDrunkGuy]

I'm curious, how did you all go about NG+? I killed the "tutorial" boss guy then rushed to the swamp and killed the dragon. Then I killed Margit, went back to the swamp and opened the chest in the ruins so I could get to Caelid quick. I'm currently trying to get to Radahn early.

 

[JDR13]

Did the goats pay you for the blowbang?

 

[Bigg Boss]

Didn't expect but hole.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

That's it, I'm dropping this for good. I realized I'm still in Leyndell and I'm already forcing myself to play. Didn't like the (DS3) mechanics, didn't like the spastic enemies that get samey and repetitive fast, didn't like the vanilla fantasy aesthetics and didn't like this world design.

This is worst than DS3 for me, because for all this game's pros (like legacy dungeons) it has a flaw that's simply game-killer for me: it's quality time ratio is really low. I must be around 60-70 hours in it but the really good time must be less than half that. The game forces you to spend too much time wandering through its boring, flacid open world for it's own good. For all DS3 flaws in the end I found it's corridor levels mode fun than this. Oh, and if DS3 has linear world design, Elden Ring has linear enemy design, because every enemy behave the same and require the same patterns to defeat - enter, attack once or twice, dodge helicopter or delayed attack, repeat. After a time enemies really feel like different skins over the same bot, and this is the worst curse a combat-based game could commit.

Tl;DR: this game is shit. Ghost of Tsushima was better than this, and Tsushima is a Ubiworld game. Enough said.

Is this your first playthrough? Once you're through Leyndell you're close to the end, particularly if you don't care about which ending you get. Just a few short areas to go if you ignore the open world & side content. The last few bosses are worth fighting.

 

[Lutte]

The lack of poise damage is actually one of the things that bugs me the most about many dex weapons like twinblades and katanas. I hate being able to whale on a knight, have him not flinch and counter with something that's at least as bad or worse than whatever I was dishing out. Better to have something meaty to hit them with and rattle their cages a bit. Besides, it's funny to send someone flying across the room.

Twinblades don't stagger?

That was just three successful hits of the weapon art (you can see I didn't use too much of my FP bar, and I did miss a few hits while it was moving) and down it went. Early game in NG+, but it works just as fine on late game dragons. Damage is so obscene I don't even bother avoiding damage on myself from the rot cloud and just whail on it until it dies.

For katanas, power stance jump L1 or unsheathe L2->R2. Only the tankiest of enemies don't flinch after this one, this is true even for moonveil post nerf (they mostly nerfed the ranged bit of the attack, not all of the stagger done by the art, it seems).

For the tanky bozos, usually three hits, four at most would give you the critical.

This guy recorded a video showing Moonveil stagger on a late game dragon post nerf :

It only took four hits for him to bring the dragon down. (there's technically five, but that one is a whiff since his weapon didn't connect in melee and the ranged attack does almost no posture damage now).

A colossal, might, what do it in one or two less hit, as a reward for a batshit amount of stats invested to even make the build work?

For trash groups of enemies, rivers of blood is prolly one of the best clearer because of its wide and long reaching arc on its weapon art.

Katanas and twinblades are sweet.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

What's playstyle variety like at this point? My girlfriend wants to co-op and I'm looking for something new for another playthrough. Seem to be 4 or so archetypes based on build guides out there and posts here:

• Weapon art/spell nuke
  
• Status killa
  
• Shieldchad/Parrychad
• Jump attack

I ended up building a mix of the 1st three during playthrough one and I'm not interested in Jump2Win. Anything more niche or interesting about?

 

[Olinser]

Ok I changed my mind, STR builds are actually good in this but the investment before it gets any good is significant you and simply must colossal weapons and good armor (and thus its actually an STR/END build)

Secondly while some have complained about the lack of care given to the colossal swords, I actually think they've done quite a good job here. By mid game you will probably have access to the zweihander, the guts greatsword and the grafted greatsword. People getting tunnel vision about the scaling or damage miss a trick: the zwei offers a lightweight option for a colossal (huge poise damage and range), allowing you to utilize heavy armor or a shield while keeping the med roll. The zwei also has a crouch poke, that is very fast and VERY long range. Words can't describe how satisfying it is to stunlock rivers of blood katana fags who werent expecting to suddenly get hit.

And the other thing, armor actually seems pretty worthwhile quite unlike DS3. I was laughing at my friend who was screeching at me to stay away from a particular enemy because their grab attacks would knock off half his health bar every time, but in the banished knight set they were doing less than a quarter to me so i just waded in and swang n banged.

The secret to getting the most out of colossal weapons in PVE is lots of jump attack, but in general the stagger potential when you have some investment is so fucking good, I was melting enemies that many players think are hard just because of the staggers.

The lack of poise damage is actually one of the things that bugs me the most about many dex weapons like twinblades and katanas. I hate being able to whale on a knight, have him not flinch and counter with something that's at least as bad or worse than whatever I was dishing out. Better to have something meaty to hit them with and rattle their cages a bit. Besides, it's funny to send someone flying across the room.

Fake news.

'OMG GUYS Y CAN I NOT SPAM LIGHT ATTACK WITH FAST WEAPON AND STAGGER LOCK ANYONE I WANT REEEE'

Dex weapons, particularly katanas, DO stagger non-armored enemies, they just don't stagger heavy armored enemies with their their light attacks. That's the tradeoff you accept with a fast attack weapon - actual armored enemies WILL hit you back. You want to stagger with every hit? Go get an actual heavy weapon and accept the much slower attacks as the price.

You CAN still stagger knights with light weapons, you have to use a heavy attack. Katana jump heavy attacks will stagger even heavy armored knights like Cleanrots or Banished, and some bosses. You can cheese pretty much any knight in the game with a katana by backing away, running jump heavy attack, one light attack as they recover, roll away. Only way it fails is if they happen to keep their shield up for the jump attack, and then you just have to roll away immediately.

 

[Olinser]

What's playstyle variety like at this point? My girlfriend wants to co-op and I'm looking for something new for another playthrough. Seem to be 4 or so archetypes based on build guides out there and posts here:

• Weapon art/spell nuke
  
• Status killa
  
• Shieldchad/Parrychad
• Jump attack

I ended up building a mix of the 1st three during playthrough one and I'm not interested in Jump2Win. Anything more niche or interesting about?

I mean unless you wanna do something weird like do a pure ranged bow build yeah that's pretty much it.

The major problem is that most of the weapons just don't feel any different. A falchion/club/hammer/1handsword the only real difference is the animation and hit area but they all play functionally the same, the same with the heavy weapons. There's very few weapons that really CHANGE your playstyle and most of those are only because of their unique arts, so you're honestly just making the call of 1hand + shield, 1handpowerstance, 2handheavy, dual wielding as far as weapons go.

 

[Lutte]

What's playstyle variety like at this point? My girlfriend wants to co-op and I'm looking for something new for another playthrough. Seem to be 4 or so archetypes based on build guides out there and posts here:

• Weapon art/spell nuke
  
• Status killa
  
• Shieldchad/Parrychad
• Jump attack

I ended up building a mix of the 1st three during playthrough one and I'm not interested in Jump2Win. Anything more niche or interesting about?

Paladin? Faith has some potential for making hammer time feel better than doing constant jump attacks. Instead of investing high points into faith per se, just get the necessary for some utility spells, like the beast incantations, the point blank flame spells, The Flame of Frenzy and other "crowd flinch" or "single target high stagger" potential types. You start with the spell which are fast cast, then bonk with your hammer. Not the most efficient thing in the world, but that should be novelty enough from the other playstyles. Otherwise, I don't see it, the categories you mention cover most things. No matter which weapon you use, weapon arts are the good stuff. People underestimate the "normal" upgrade path weapons too, their weapon arts aren't as damaging (except for things like Seppuku on status weapons :> or single use buff like Resolve but that's too cumbersome to use imho) as some of the unique weapons but look at that stagger from a glinstone weapon art :


The real glintstone spells would never be able to do that this is why INT builds are best played with weapons and not a stupid staff and spells.

People are sleeping on many ashes of war because you wouldn't expect something like a stupid glintstone being able to make a boss go into a critical after a few hits. Well, you could spam the real spells for days before it made anything stagger, but the weapon art.. weapon art are Elden Ring's heart and soul.

 

[Sunri]

I've already 100%ed that shit. I loved Nioh. I wish I could play it again......for the first time.

This is everything I've played. Someone give me recs:

https://steamcommunity.com/id/derungrund/games/?tab=all

Seems to me you're gonna have to find a cheap PS4 and play yourself some Bloodborne. It's one of From Software's best. It's amazing from start to finish. It doesn't even feel rushed in the later half like some of their other stuff. It's a must play.

I've never played Demon Souls or Bloodborne. I've waited this long for PC, I can wait longer.

You can play Demon souls on ps3 emu it works better than on original ps3

Spoiler

 

[perfectslumbers]

• Weapon art/spell nuke

• Status killa

• Shieldchad/Parrychad

• Jump attack

Faith has a lot of variety, you can focus on blasting or stacking buffs or healing or arcane w/status effects (which feels very different from status effects with weapons.) You could also get a really high stagger ash of war and misericode and go for stun into riposte. There's also powerstancing fast weapons and stacking talismans that buff combos to do very high dps (it was the strongest build in ds3 and is still strong here.) There's a pretty wide variety of ashes of war so I wouldn't say it's simply "ash of war nuke spam," although that is quite meta.

 

[Lutte]

There's also powerstancing fast weapons and stacking talismans that buff combos to do very high dps (it was the strongest build in ds3 and is still strong here.) There's a pretty wide variety of ashes of war so I wouldn't say it's simply "ash of war nuke spam," although that is quite meta.

Unless he cripples himself by rejecting status effects on purpose, this build you describe is also a status build in Elden Ring. Dual wielding scimitars, katanas, daggers or twinblades and using buff combo talismans and mixed physick is 100% compatible with using blood type ash of war on them (and many of these weapons already have bleed anyway).

Yes, it was the best in DS3, and status effects made the build even better.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Thanks for the suggestions lads. The idea of a pure archer is interesting but I'll need to be able to tank and carry for coop purposes. Paladin and faith in general sound like they have potential.

There's a pretty wide variety of ashes of war so I wouldn't say it's simply "ash of war nuke spam," although that is quite meta.

'Weapon art nuke' is a bit reductive on my part to be fair. I really meant builds that rely on repetitive ash of war or spell use with that descriptor. Could be a classic nuke like old hoarforst stomp or something more situational like bloodhound step.

Personally want to try to avoid resorting to the awesome button this time. That Pebble AoW build Lutte posted above looks obscene, never seen someone clown the ogres like that.

Edit: As a career 1st playthrough = qbuild guy still butthurt that qbuilds and the qbuild playstyle (flexible use of phys scaling weapons to solve problems) are pretty much dead now. It was on life support in DS3, ER pulled the plug. Miyazaki must have come to hate them or something, god knows the cancerous MLG PvP children always did. Would have been a great fit for exploring a huge open world too!

 

[Lutte]

Personally want to try to avoid resorting to the awesome button this time. That Pebble AoW build Lutte posted above looks obscene, never seen someone clown the ogres like that.

There's a lot of obscenity in this game once you start looking. Introducing, the Blasphemous Blade. Better range than moonveil, pushback/stagger level of a colossal sword doing a pushback type move, among the top 10 in damage potential (if you have the right build and buffs).



Look at Malenia getting pushed back like a ragdoll. This isn't even clowning the ogres anymore, it's a whole another level.

Oh, and did I mention, it does a heal that is more significant than one would think, and the latest patch enhanced the healing provided by the sword?

Its only weakness is enemies like the magna wyrms.. but who cares, those enemies aren't common and they're easy pickings.

 

[Alphard]

so guys, i was playing on a pirater copy.since i was having a lot of fun i purchased the game and redid everything in exploring limgrave plus other things i didnt found first time around, like

Spoiler

the cave on the beach that leads to thr item on the ledge at beginning

. that blew my mind like firelink shrine elevator.
this time however i went for a str/faith archetypes with some ARC to use dragon sorceries and i can say at least for early game str weapons (at least vassal sword) shits on all light weapons.
Btw even this time margit was challenging , even if i was higher level (21) , but brated him barely at 7-8 th try without summons this time. i think his second phase is poorly designed though. there is no correct strategy to his combos of attacks: if you block you take chip damage and get staggered, you cant roll because his attacks are too fast and long chained, basically you have to keep distance and hit with ranged spells, or you must be madsively overleveled. also find the deathbird and its shitty 1shot grab. the best boss i fough funnily enoughis tree sentinel: not too simple and with clear telegraphed attacks you can react too

 

[Nathir]

I'm sorry to say but dual wielding twinblades look gay as fuck.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Ok I changed my mind, STR builds are actually good in this but the investment before it gets any good is significant you and simply must colossal weapons and good armor (and thus its actually an STR/END build)

Secondly while some have complained about the lack of care given to the colossal swords, I actually think they've done quite a good job here. By mid game you will probably have access to the zweihander, the guts greatsword and the grafted greatsword. People getting tunnel vision about the scaling or damage miss a trick: the zwei offers a lightweight option for a colossal (huge poise damage and range), allowing you to utilize heavy armor or a shield while keeping the med roll. The zwei also has a crouch poke, that is very fast and VERY long range. Words can't describe how satisfying it is to stunlock rivers of blood katana fags who werent expecting to suddenly get hit.

And the other thing, armor actually seems pretty worthwhile quite unlike DS3. I was laughing at my friend who was screeching at me to stay away from a particular enemy because their grab attacks would knock off half his health bar every time, but in the banished knight set they were doing less than a quarter to me so i just waded in and swang n banged.

The secret to getting the most out of colossal weapons in PVE is lots of jump attack, but in general the stagger potential when you have some investment is so fucking good, I was melting enemies that many players think are hard just because of the staggers.

The lack of poise damage is actually one of the things that bugs me the most about many dex weapons like twinblades and katanas. I hate being able to whale on a knight, have him not flinch and counter with something that's at least as bad or worse than whatever I was dishing out. Better to have something meaty to hit them with and rattle their cages a bit. Besides, it's funny to send someone flying across the room.

Fake news.

'OMG GUYS Y CAN I NOT SPAM LIGHT ATTACK WITH FAST WEAPON AND STAGGER LOCK ANYONE I WANT REEEE'

Dex weapons, particularly katanas, DO stagger non-armored enemies, they just don't stagger heavy armored enemies with their their light attacks. That's the tradeoff you accept with a fast attack weapon - actual armored enemies WILL hit you back. You want to stagger with every hit? Go get an actual heavy weapon and accept the much slower attacks as the price.

You CAN still stagger knights with light weapons, you have to use a heavy attack. Katana jump heavy attacks will stagger even heavy armored knights like Cleanrots or Banished, and some bosses. You can cheese pretty much any knight in the game with a katana by backing away, running jump heavy attack, one light attack as they recover, roll away. Only way it fails is if they happen to keep their shield up for the jump attack, and then you just have to roll away immediately.

You're a special sort of retard. I know all this. I've played a lot of time on dexers. And yet, I have a preference that somehow makes you butthurt.
I prefer to use a variety of combinations and few weapon arts. Weapon art spam is noob cancer (and boring af). As a result, yeah, I prefer if a light attack registers as more of an impact against knights and similar enemies. Good thing there are a shitload of weapon types in the game. Meanwhile you can cradle your honourabrue nippon steel and have a cry because it's not my favourite.

 

[cretin]

Fun day today.

We got the usual assortment of gay bleed nerds and wrecked them all. These fags really aren't any good at PVP without being able to get their broken shit off. One of them we wrecked so badly so rapidly that he instantly severed after invading a second time, seeing my name.

Then I got my first real proper PVP fight in. Got invaded by a golden halberd user, who quickly made short work of my friend. Then we squared off and the fight lasted quite a long time for souls PVP, I want to say about 4 minutes. No cheap stuff, just very good positioning and trying to counter one another. Very close fight but I perished in the end in the midst of a trade. He was a little braver with his R2s than I was.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Just finished it, clocked just under 200 hours, tldr fucking loved it.
Finished lvl 150, full strength longsword+25 brickhammer+25 golemgreatbow+25 fingerprintshield. Did just about everything except last few mini-dungeons and sidequests (lost track of most of them).
Biggest glaring problem, I feel player power should run along the bell's high curve a bit longer, buckled and switched to frost lategame to combat the HP bloat. Not horrendous or anything but far from ideal.
Some BS bosses but I have no qualms about using anything and everything the game has to offer, so this was fine.
Loved the crafting since it enabled the "use everything" for me. No more must save everything for Later-that-never-comes™. Good.
Open world was cool, enough interesting stuff/scenes but at the same time very blaze-throughable. After 150 hours in 2 weeks you start seeing through the matrix but this is to be expected, a nice break fixed that.
Horse was well done except for the yes/no to revive it. This is too retarded if not intentional so I guess it is, like an extra "cost" to re-summon. Still sucks.
Remembering the horse was a challenge, felt retarded a bunch of times. Thought the horns looked dumb at first but soon got the joke .
Didn't mind the crypts etc., stopped doing them when I had my fill. Same with repeated bosses. That tree worm in the rot place? I chuckled and moved on along .
Enemy reuse was fine, seen it before will see it again. Nothing egregious.
The dragon fights became enjoyable after getting into the flow of mixing horse and foot, shit looks cool.
Redhead bitch took me through all 5 stages of grief culminating in gloriously concocted cheese, was great, best boss in the game.
Story was cool as long as you don't try to nail everything down, there's enough interesting shit scattered in items and scenery to jogg the nogg but ultimately

There's no need of analysis, the souls worlds never been believable or realistic. Imagine being sick with fever , reading berserk and playing video games all day, when you try to sleep the kind of nightmare you make looks like the soul games. You are just exploring a dream.

FS' strongpoint imo.
All in all the thing that struck me most is the sheer volume. You could design 20 more enemies and just cut it in half. You could cut it in half and run a 2 year season pass.
While that would up the diversity/quality of the later areas, I'm not about to start bitching about a game with unlocked on-disk DLC.
Can't stress the volume enough, it's quite crazy.

TLDR2 good outweighs the bad about 9 to 1

 

[HeatEXTEND]

I want another Souls-like, but I've played them all.

Give shmups a try, might scratch the itch

 

[Alphard]

Fun day today.

We got the usual assortment of gay bleed nerds and wrecked them all. These fags really aren't any good at PVP without being able to get their broken shit off. One of them we wrecked so badly so rapidly that he instantly severed after invading a second time, seeing my name.

Then I got my first real proper PVP fight in. Got invaded by a golden halberd user, who quickly made short work of my friend. Then we squared off and the fight lasted quite a long time for souls PVP, I want to say about 4 minutes. No cheap stuff, just very good positioning and trying to counter one another. Very close fight but I perished in the end in the midst of a trade. He was a little braver with his R2s than I was.

how do you invade/get invaded tough? i found the duel finger but not the invasion one and never got invaded by human players

 

[Sunri]

Fun day today.

We got the usual assortment of gay bleed nerds and wrecked them all. These fags really aren't any good at PVP without being able to get their broken shit off. One of them we wrecked so badly so rapidly that he instantly severed after invading a second time, seeing my name.

Then I got my first real proper PVP fight in. Got invaded by a golden halberd user, who quickly made short work of my friend. Then we squared off and the fight lasted quite a long time for souls PVP, I want to say about 4 minutes. No cheap stuff, just very good positioning and trying to counter one another. Very close fight but I perished in the end in the midst of a trade. He was a little braver with his R2s than I was.

how do you invade/get invaded tough? i found the duel finger but not the invasion one and never got invaded by human players

talk to WHITE MASK VARRE in Rose Church.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I tried my first invasion today. I use the bloody red finger.

"Invaded the world of Uchiha Madara". Ok. Then I run around for 10 mins and I can't find him anywhere. I stop running and contemplate what to do. A dual katana wielding weeb appears right next to me and kills me in 1 attack. He was invis while approaching somehow.

Now this was my first fight, but I think the game might be slightly unbalanced. Maybe I should try lower level pvp.

Sounds like he was invisible.

Same thing happened to me once.

I also died randomly a few times while the invader was still very far away, but on one of those i saw the other people i was playing with engage the invader normally while my death screen was playing out so i guess it's just the shit net code?

I mean, on the last time the invader was VERY far away but i could have been hit by some spell that i didn't see because the shit connection didn't make the graphics appear.