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

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

I took a break because the expansion wasn't challenging me and I got bored. I guess I should atleast try to get to Messmer and see what all the fuss is about.

 

[Mortmal]

Carrying a main and a secondary weapon is standard for light weapon users but the game punishes you for carrying multiple weapons if you're a heavy weapon user. So it's menu time while you get killed if you don't have it already equipped.

Yeah so? That's what you do, you go adventuring and die then look through your inventory and think "hmmm what do I have that could help me here?" and in elden ring, you have approximately 90,000 different things that could help you there including different weapons, spells, items, summons, ammunition, armors etc. Picking through your backpack after a defeat to jury rig a solution to get some revenge is half the fun of the game. Probably the only fun of the game by the end because it was starting to get real annoying as I recall, would hate to have only had one weapon and nothing else.

That's unfortunately not how these games work. It goes more like

"Hmm, what upgrade material do I have to make another +8 weapon? Fucking none. Well I guess I'm stuck with this one or a +3 weapon" so you're doing better damage with your ineffective weapon than you are your alt one.

It's especially true for the end of the DLC. The only way to do it is with a greatshield and a specific weapon, and we all know which ones. That means upgrading those two to level 25, and I don't have the resources anymore. I'm out of larval tears to respec for them anyway. I would have been okay with the DLC if it ended with the Esmer fight. The last part ruined my fun. As a caster, you have zero window of opportunity to strike in phase 2. Summons and Mimic do not survive phase 2, and most people—well, 99% of them—are not doing better or worse than me, which is not helping.

 

[Hell Swarm]

I'm tempted to take my Bubble mage through the DLC to see how bad casters have it. He can only use the bubble weapons weapon arts to deal damage. I wonder if I could find windows to blow my horn on most of these bosses.

 

[Anonona]

Summons and Mimic do not survive phase 2, and most people—well, 99% of them—are not doing better or worse than me, which is not helping.

Possible combo to make mimic tanking work, spoilers about DLC talismans and a bit of lore

I haven't try it myself, so this is just theorical. But I think if you equip a great shield only, the Pearl Shield Talisman and the Golden Braid then summon the mimic, it may be possible for it to actually tank the fight. The problem is that you would have to equip your weapon of choice mid fight.

But I don't know if something like that could work.

 

[Mortmal]

Summons and Mimic do not survive phase 2, and most people—well, 99% of them—are not doing better or worse than me, which is not helping.

Possible combo to make mimic tanking work, spoilers about DLC talismans and a bit of lore

I haven't try it myself, so this is just theorical. But I think if you equip a great shield only, the Pearl Shield Talisman and the Golden Braid then summon the mimic, it may be possible for it to actually tank the fight. The problem is that you would have to equip your weapon of choice mid fight.

But I don't know if something like that could work.

Wont work, i already use those talismans , and the mimic does not survive, while the damage mitigation should be reasonable enough.

 

[Alphard]

never finished ER despite having 150 ish hours in it . i almost reached Melania and quit because real life issue but also how boring the open world was. i agree with what was said in this thread. the combat system has grown stale and bosses became unfun to fight. of the hundreads of bosses i fought in ER i only had real fun with the horseman tree sentinel and draconic sentinel , because how old school they were and with memorable yet fair movesets. i think FROM should either go back to DS1 methodical and slower combat, with special care put on level design, or go full nioh with more complex and deep combat while at same time more frantic pacing, as they obbiosly are going to. this pacing with souls combat is simply unfun for the player because bosses are just cheating

 

[processdaemon]

I'm out of larval tears to respec for them anyway.

Have you got the larval tears in the DLC yet? Some of them are pretty easy to find, you just need to make sure you're looking at night. Even if you can't fully upgrade the shield you should consider trying the respec, I did a dry run without upgrading my shield before committing and even that got me further than my ranged incant build did, so even if you don't max it out a few upgrades should make it workable. I agree that it would be nice if the fight didn't favour those sorts of builds so much but if you just want to get it over and done with it'll probably be quicker to go searching out a tear than banging your head off a wall.

 

[Mortmal]

I'm out of larval tears to respec for them anyway.

Have you got the larval tears in the DLC yet? Some of them are pretty easy to find, you just need to make sure you're looking at night. Even if you can't fully upgrade the shield you should consider trying the respec, I did a dry run without upgrading my shield before committing and even that got me further than my ranged incant build did, so even if you don't max it out a few upgrades should make it workable. I agree that it would be nice if the fight didn't favour those sorts of builds so much but if you just want to get it over and done with it'll probably be quicker to go searching out a tear than banging your head off a wall.

There might be one larva left to find, but I'm not sure. I already used two to test the new things , specially to cast the impenetrable thorn spell, which is hilariously broken and shows the lack of testing. It's really not fun to be forced into a boring build like this just for one fight.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Gave in and bought it. Waiting for the DL to finish.

Haven't played since 1.07 and performance now sucks cock for some reason? On the same system I used at launch without any issues. Not clear why as I didn't enable RTX.

Are there more overworld crafting pickups than before as well? Feels like there's some kind of plant everywhere.

Going to go great hammer guard counter as it seems to be the most efficient way to deal with the new bosses for now.

 

[processdaemon]

There might be one larva left to find, but I'm not sure. I already used two to test the new things , specially to cast the impenetrable thorn spell, which is hilariously broken and shows the lack of testing. It's really not fun to be forced into a boring build like this just for one fight.

There are 9 in the DLC altogether so you still have a good few left to find if you decide you want to go down the respec route. I agree that it's a bit disappointing that the boss seems to melt ranged builds so easily though.

 

[Mauman]

The mimic was useless to me because of all my weapons and gadgets though so I suffered in that regard.

Mimic was nerfed a long time ago. If there's something I liked in base game was the different spirits playing different roles effectivelly. Tycha for melee, Blackflame monk for tanking, Aubinaric bitch for sniping, etc, etc. There are a bunch of useful spirits.

Mimic can be quite good depending on your build, but yeah I'd pick something else if you're like a spellcaster or something.

Personally, for tanking I'd go

Spoiler

Dung Eater

Though I think the new king of the hill summon for both tanking AND damage is probably the secret

Spoiler

sisters

summon that can be acquired in the dlc.

Why not Yoda?

Yoda summon seems more like a meme.

Regardless, it's hard to beat 2 summons that are nearly as tanky as Dung Eater individually that can cause bleed as well.

Granted, you have to jump through some serious hoops (and give up a pretty good sword for it), but they feel like they're the best now.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Haven't played since 1.07 and performance now sucks cock for some reason? On the same system I used at launch without any issues. Not clear why as I didn't enable RTX.

Have you checked your settings? It may have enabled itself. It did for me.

 

[Bloodeyes]

I took my thorn sorcerer to level 200 to get max cast speed on the build. It was a good choice, I love RL 200 characters. They feel so complete.

I've noticed I get hard countered by fast, spammy ranged attacks because of my low poise and that I struggle against evasive ashes. I'll learn how to deal with that though. I may put a soft swap shield on the build or start endure casting in those circumstances. Great build IMO, very, very strong.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Poise is the most overrated stat ever.

 

[Mortmal]

Finally made it, and guess how? With another guy using a greatshield and katana who tanked, while I stayed behind spamming the impenetrable thorn spell. There's no strategy involved at all, no skill besides having a guy who knows how to tank and draw aggro. Otherwise, there's zero window of opportunity.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Finally made it, and guess how? With another guy using a greatshield and katana who tanked, while I stayed behind spamming the impenetrable thorn spell. There's no strategy involved at all, no skill besides having a guy who knows how to tank and draw aggro. Otherwise, there's zero window of opportunity.

You cheated instead of coming up with a strategy and using skill, so therefore the game has no strategy or skill. Mmmkay. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried.

 

[Mortmal]

Finally made it, and guess how? With another guy using a greatshield and katana who tanked, while I stayed behind spamming the impenetrable thorn spell. There's no strategy involved at all, no skill besides having a guy who knows how to tank and draw aggro. Otherwise, there's zero window of opportunity.

You cheated instead of coming up with a strategy and using skill, so therefore the game has no strategy or skill. Mmmkay. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried.

There's no cheat when only using tools available.

 

[Silva]

Lore of the DLC cracked:



Melina is still a mystery to me. Sure, she's probably the Gloom Eyed Queen but how? Did she went against her mother with the power of death and then was beaten in the head by Marika until losing his memories and waking up at the foor of the erdtree like an amnesiac? Questions, questions.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Haven't played since 1.07 and performance now sucks cock for some reason? On the same system I used at launch without any issues. Not clear why as I didn't enable RTX.

Have you checked your settings? It may have enabled itself. It did for me.

Already had a look after reading around, not the culprit. Playable but intermittent bad stutter and the odd short lock up.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

The best thing about the DLC is that they increased the usage of heavy armors and big shields, also they added the equivalent to a Chaos zweihander from Dark souls



We are so back boiz

 

[S.torch]

Do people really watch these lore videos with everything giving to them chewed off? 0 interpretation on their part, just eating a poor made summary?
For me half the fun or more of these games is making your own canon and discovering it by yourself.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

The best thing about the DLC is that they increased the usage of heavy armors and big shields, also they added the equivalent to a Chaos zweihander from Dark souls



We are so back boiz

Interedasting. I left off at Shadow Keep too. What's the drop rate of this beast? I'd like to try dual weilding two of them.

 

[Hell Swarm]

A lot of the lore videos coming out are rushed and objectively wrong. It's funny how desperate they are for youtube clips they will straight up lie about key story elements.

PvP is even worse than it was in the base game. I invaded about 20 times tonight and had 1 "fun" fight while the rest were complete non starters.

New maps are too large and you can't use torrent. I spawned in the opening area with no clue where the host was. How the fuck am I supposed to find the host in an area that large? It would take me 10 minutes to run round it and if he's running another direction I'm fucked. Similar issues constantly. I'd bitch about individual maps but I don't want to spoil things. Invaders need a way to know where the host is if maps are this big and From had TWO YEARS to fix that. They made it even worse with how the maps work in this game.

Gank squads are still a problem but now they often have the upper hand in the map design. There's a lot of verticality in these maps so you can bet 3 guys with ranged weapons are camping the ledges you have to climb or they're waiting in a long hallway you can't move left or right in.

Some of the new weapons are really fun but getting to actually fight is an issue. I had 1 guy who wasn't a gank squad and he used a bunch of warmth spells to make himself unkillable. We ended up dueling with shields only and it was a laugh but there was no way I could kill him in heavy armour with a great shield and constant healing. Other than that I never got to actually dual any one despite spending 3 hours trying.

Ran into a hacker who instantly killed me on spawn. I don't really see how that's fun for him but okay.

From have made the stupidest waste of time in history with the bonfire placement. Many of the bonfires are on the door step to the boss so you load in and immediately load out and this is a constant if you set it to invade any where. I repeatedly got loaded into the castles only to be told the host made it to the boss. I can accept this happens some times but it shouldn't happen in almost half my invasions.

I dressed as a fucking raw chicken trying to kick people to death and I got zero fun out of the whole experience. They made it worse than the base game invasions and they were already miserable because of all the issues listed above and From fixed none of them.

 

[Dobkeratops]

Melina is still a mystery to me. Sure, she's probably the Gloom Eyed Queen but how? Did she went against her mother with the power of death and then was beaten in the head by Marika until losing his memories and waking up at the foor of the erdtree like an amnesiac? Questions, questions.

I'm not sure I want to spend 1h 38m of my SotE time watching that, especially since I pride myself on avoiding loretubers entirely. So sorry if I repeat something that's already covered there. But as far as I know the DLC provided nothing on Melina aside from a vague tidbit that she may be Messmer's sister...which...even if true doesn't matter at all. Much like Messmer.

I doubt she is the GEQ herself, being very very convinced that she's Marika's daughter to the extent that she wants to see her suicidal mission through of her own volition and also Marika's propensity for belching out tainted kids like its going out of style. Like Messmer she seems to have some other-godly influence sealed up in one eye and I can believe its GEQ related given the clawmark tattoo that's reminiscent of Gurranq's beast eye stone.
Unfortunately it seems that planned GEQ content in the DLC was repurposed as the Putrescent Knight was labeled knight of the gloam-eyed queen (in Japanese) in the game files. And his striking lack of skin might explain why members of her faction are so eager to get their hands on god skins. But who knows, it's lost to us forever.

There's something of a bizarre theory out there that Marika is the GEQ which has more circumstantial evidence than you'd expect. Especially with the visual simularity of Shaman Village and the godskin's Dominula Village.

 

[Silverfish]

We are so back boiz

We told everyone twelve years ago that the legend never dies. Should have listened.