The Pest Threads incantation is extremely valuable against large bosses that can be hit with many threads, although it has fairly short range and to maximize the number of threads that hit it's best to be alongside or, even better, underneath the enemy.
Thanks for the information; so for instance, it could be useful against bosses like the Ulcerated (or Putrid) Tree Spirits, Astel, most dragons, Fallingstar Beast, Magma Wyrms, Erdtree Avatars &c assuming no immunity? Perhaps even the Fire Giant? I am curious to try out more of the incantations, I just seem to forget about them when I'm engaging a boss or group of enemies, again with the exception of maybe a Lightning Spear once in a while. Golden Vow, Flame, Grant Me Strength, and a Wonderous Physic with the Opaline Bubbletear and the Thorny Cracked Tear were my default go-to pre-battle preparations for most of the end game serious bosses, but once the battle begins I become completely fixated on the melee dance up close and personal, and tend to roll into attacks or jump over them to stick right on the opponent, with certain exceptions of course. Yet I have all of the memory stones and the talisman that gives you another two memorization slots, and at all times have the basic 10 slots filled. My usual loadout is, in order:
1. Golden Vow
2. Flame, Grant Me Strength
3. Flame, Cleanse Me
4. Lightning Spear
5. Frozen Lightnin Spear
6. Ancient Dragons Lightning Spear
7. Black Flame
8. Stone of Gurranq
9. Flame, Fall Upon Them
10. Ekzyke's Decay
But I end up only regularly using the first two for bosses, then either rest it, or let it rest on the third one or the fourth one, depending on whether I need to heal environmental hazards from consuming my health or the utility of hitting things that are out of reach without having to equip a ranged weapon. Flame, Fall Upon Them is actually a surprisingly good incantation I've found, or at least for my character it is. I was able to kill the Malformed Star that you can come upon in either the Altus Tunnel or the Perfumer's Grotto from the Grotto with it, and it only took 3 casts to the head to die. I initially came up on that Malformed Star from the Tunnel and didn't have enough FP to take care of it at the time, nor did I have any upgraded ranged weapons at that time, so I ignored it and only came back later to explore the Grotto when I discovered that you can get much closer to it from that side. I probably could have hit its head with my greatswords but it looked precarious to me, because if I locked on to it and it moved its head while I was jumping, I'd either miss or plunge to my death off that narrow root you can cross over. So I charged up three Flame, Fall Upon Thems and hit his head with the main fireball on each cast with the lesser fireballs hitting his body and arms, and he died so easily.
For a long time and before I'd gotten some of those spells that I listed as my basic loadout, I kept Pest Threads in the regular rotation, along with several Bestial incants because I use the Claw Seal. I wish that Black Flame's Protection stacked with Flame, Grant Me Strength but I've read that it doesn't. It stacks with Golden Vow though, which is nice if you are looking to maximize your physical damage negation, but it reduces the potency of healing incants and flasks by 20%.
By the way, this is just an aside as irrelevant to the matter, but didn't anybody really like the Cave of the Forlorn in the Consecrated Snowfields? Its the one with the Misbegotten everywhere where you get the Golden Order Greatsword from the Misbegotten Crusader. At that point in the game I thought there was not going to be any more unique sublocations; I'd figured that all of the ruins, caves, graves, &c where going to share the same rough layout and appearance as the many we'd seen before, but lo and behold when you walk in there and almost every detail of the cave is entirely unique, or at least as far as I'm aware and I'm fairly certain I've been to every sublocation in the game. When I saw that you could see down through the "floor" through the ice I was so excited, and then when I saw the faint red glow emanating from the red jellyfish beneath my characters feet I was ecstatic. It was, and by far, the most gorgeous area in the entire game for me, and I lament that it wasn't much larger. The fact that it is the only location that has these unique aspects makes me appreciate it so much more than I would otherwise, but it was a relatively brief romp to the boss. But my God was it stunning to behold. I wish it were a minor legacy dungeon at least, one that was largely vertical so that you could see through multiple layers of the ice with different colored lights radiating through and it got more demented and scary the further you descend, like when you first enter the meteor impact site and marvel at the changing environment as it turns from gaping hole to waterfall, to storied gothic architecture alcoves, to urban sprawl like a mile below the ground.
