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

[Reinhardt]

Runs are something you get when you eat fast food

Which food would you recommend for a truly fast speed run?

milk and herring

 

[cruel]

Lmao, almost managed to burst Rellana, still had to deal with her balls in my face at the end because the last bleed didn't proc in time, but i was still able to brutalize her:

Did you use the Deflecting Hardtear here or just got very good at parrying in general?

 

[Hell Swarm]

Challenge runs aren't "basically speed runs" but they're generally very ghey. Except randomizers which are a fucking blast.

Elden Ring is nearly unplayable without a randomizer making upgrades something you find as you play instead of an hour long chore.

Depends. SL1 runs are the opposite of speed runs. Any level or increase of power is by its own nature a "short cut" you are taking, which as a consequence speeds up the game.

No they aren't. There's a bunch of fags on Twitch called Teamhitless. They're doing nohit, SL1, no upgrades, no infusion Dark souls 3 runs. They're interesting because they're having to avoid enemies in novel ways. Sneaking through the snow city using chameleon is really interesting to watch. The boss battles are interesting too showing stuff like being able to poison the deacons by poison misting the tomb not the deacons themselves.

You should kill yourself and until your amazon order of rope arrives you should stay in your containment thread. No one cares and your tiny dick being on display shows how pathetic you are.

Look bro, no need to get upset. We can all get along here.

Too much negativity in this thread anyway, even by Codex standards. You guys need to take care of that sand your vagina.

You're the fag repeatedly looking for my attention when we'd all rather you stayed in your containment thread.

 

[Odoryuk]

You're the fag repeatedly looking for my attention

Oh boy

 

[Lyric Suite]

Lmao, almost managed to burst Rellana, still had to deal with her balls in my face at the end because the last bleed didn't proc in time, but i was still able to brutalize her:

Did you use the Deflecting Hardtear here or just got very good at parrying in general?

Just regular parry.

I tried the Deflecting Hardtear but i wasn't feeling it, mostly because there's no sound. One of the most satisfying things about the Sekiro deflection is that bad ass hard "clank" you get. Here you get a muted thud that's barely audible and some sparkles you can barely see. Doesn't feel very satisfying, but perhaps i have to spend some time with it.

 

[Hell Swarm]

You're the fag repeatedly looking for my attention

Oh boy

Have you not noticed he keeps trying to ping me with posts in the thread? He's a faggot.

Game needed more grafting. Fuck madness, give me a graft upgrade path where I get to kill red phantoms and attach their limbs to myself. If besieged can do it, so can Elden Ring!

 

[jaekl]

Runs are something you get when you eat fast food

Which food would you recommend for a truly fast speed run?

Tacos

 

[Lyric Suite]

No they aren't. There's a bunch of fags on Twitch called Teamhitless. They're doing nohit, SL1, no upgrades, no infusion Dark souls 3 runs. They're interesting because they're having to avoid enemies in novel ways. Sneaking through the snow city using chameleon is really interesting to watch. The boss battles are interesting too showing stuff like being able to poison the deacons by poison misting the tomb not the deacons themselves.

People can play the game any which way they want but i don't find those artificial restrictions to be part of the game, where as SL1 runs are. I thought the distinction had to be made given some people seem to have the impression SL1 runs belong to the kind of stuff you are describing, where as they are an "official" way to play the game, supported conceptionally by the SL1 class you get that allows this.

Because of this, one can also make a criticism of the game based on whether it can make those runs entertaining. Dark Souls 1 and the whole pyro concept was great and likely still my favored, even if it wasn't much of a "challenge" (but then it wasn't intended to be. The pyro hand was actually intended to be a substitute for leveling and ideally just as powerful). Elden Ring is also great with all the amount of options you get at your disposal. By contrast, i found Dark Souls 3 to be rather dour to play as a SL1 character. Never even tried DS2 because the whole soul memory shit just fucked with my brain.

 

[Odoryuk]

Game needed more grafting. Fuck madness, give me a graft upgrade path where I get to kill red phantoms and attach their limbs to myself. If besieged can do it, so can Elden Ring!

This reminds me, after the DLC it is apparent that Marika for sure loathed Godrick, who used the same quality of his flesh that Hornsent people used to create the More Fucked Up Jars.

 

[Strange Fellow]

I don't buy that much if any consideration was given to allowing SL1 runs. I think pyro in Dark Souls 1 was done as it was simply to differentiate that branch of magic from sorceries and miracles, which each have their own stat. Connecting it directly to the power of the flame was a neat way to highlight the primal, less sophisticated nature of pyromancy (though really, like all Souls mechanics, it was done primarily for gameplay reasons). And the Deprived class is nothing more than a typical RPG blank slate as opposed to a preset. Games like Fallout have the exact same thing.

 

[Multidirectional]

Not leveling up in a game that has level up mechanic definitely seems like artificial restriction to me. Never found the idea of SL1 runs appealing. Hell, I don't even like that soul level meta shit where players stop leveling up for the sake of matchmaking. Never did it. Yes, those type of restrictions aren't as limiting as some of the retarded shit streamers come up with but I do think they're in the same ballpark.

 

[Silverfish]

"challenge runs" are basically "speed runs". pipeline to tranny.

Challenge runs often take longer than playing normally though. They couldn't be more hetero.

Not leveling up in a game that has level up mechanic definitely seems like artificial restriction to me.

You're missing out. Demon's and Dark 1 are honestly better at SL1. Dark 3 and Bloodborne put up a meatier challenge, but can also be pretty frustrating. Dark 2 is a slog because of agility. Still interesting just because of how powerful you can become. Not a From game, but I know you're big on Nioh, which is very rewarding at SL1 if you're sufficiently familiar with its systems.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I don't buy that much if any consideration was given to allowing SL1 runs. I think pyro in Dark Souls 1 was done as it was simply to differentiate that branch of magic from sorceries and miracles, which each have their own stat, and connecting it directly to the power of the flame was a neat way to highlight the primal, less sophisticated nature of pyromancy (though really, like all Souls mechanics, it was done primarily for gameplay reasons). And the Deprived class is nothing more than a typical RPG blank slate as opposed to a preset. Games like Fallout have the exact same thing.

I disagree. You spend souls on the flame instead of yourself. Pyromancers were clearly intended to remain at SL1. Both Laurentius and Quelana have very low stats in Dark Souls. You are trading the power of souls for the power of the flame. It's only because the game throws a billion of souls at you that you can level up both in reality the intended way was one or the other.

I also don't think it was a coincidence that fire and chaos don't have a stat scaling for their damage.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Except the way the cost of levels scales means that you'd be an absolute retard to not gain levels along with pyromancy even if the game had 1/10th as many souls.

Probably my best build in DS1 was pyro flame with the blacksmith giant's hammer and that one shield that can parry but also deflected like a great shield that drops from the asian guy. 16 Str to wield both, dump rest into vitality and you're a walking tank with a decently powerful weapon with good range, speed, damage and stun, plus pyromancy for backup.

 

[Bloodeyes]

With all I'd heard about the final boss I thought I'd need a few days of hard practice to beat him. I didn't have the energy for that so I'd been putting it off. Today I sat down to do it. This way my third attempt:



The lion at the start too me more tries.

 

[Suicidal]

Just finished the DLC.

I had fun with it up to a point but I expected more.

Environment design is top notch as usual and I liked that the map was more elaborate but ultimately it's still huge fields full of enemies you've already seen, copy pasted bosses and low tier smithing stones and crafting materials.

Most new dungeons are bad or mediocre. Shadow Keep is the only one that I really liked.

The side dungeons are reused the same way as in the main game. There are 3 jar themed dungeons where you go down in a spiral pattern. There are 3 forge dungeons where you have to flip switches to open the way forward and where there is no boss. There are 3 catacombs where you go down an elevator 2 times and each has some sort of trap or gimmick. All of them are filled with the same monsters. Very few new monster types in general as well.

Out of all the new bosses, I thought only 3 were genuinely good. Renalla, who's basically a more fair Malenia without any retarded attacks that will kill you if you happen to be standing in the wrong place when she starts charging it, Messmer, who's an overall very fun human boss (but phase 2 was kinda lame with all the ulcerated tree spirit styled attacks that flail around randomly and clip through terrain) and, surprisingly, the Skibidi Avatar, who's one of the best designed multi-phase bosses From has made. Every other boss ranged from okay to absolute putrid dogshit, with Metyr taking the number 1 spot for me, somehow managing to combine every shit mechanic they've ever given a boss (attacks that you cannot avoid if you stand in the wrong place when it starts, attacks you cannot avoid if you stand in the wrong place that also will kill you from full health if you don't avoid them, attacks you cannot avoid period without using evasion spells or arts, summons that fuck with your targeting, charge moves that make its entire body hurt you on contact).

Also the way they handled DLC progression was very lame. When I heard DLC would have its own progression I thought there would be interesting bonuses or powers you collect by overcoming the DLC challenges, but I guess I expect too much from a $40 DLC with 2 year dev time to a game that made over a billion dollars in sales. It's just a bunch turds you can collect that simply increase your damage and defense. This is very similar to a boring difficulty slider and it made me very hesistant to use them.

Complaints about difficulty are very exhagerrated I think. I wanted to see how far I can far I could go without using any skibidi fragments and I ended up only using them on Radahn and Bayle. If I had been using them from the start I don't think bosses other than Radahn and Messmer would have taken me more than a few attempts. For example, I fought Bayle for like 15 minutes before deciding that the boss was garbage and going to fight Radahn. While fighting Radagn I upped my skibidi blessing level from 0 to 12, decided to take a break, went back to Bayle and killed him on my first attempt. And I didn't even use any cheese shit like bleed.

Speaking of Radahn, what a shit fucking final boss. It's an existing boss model, slightly altered, with a lot of moves and combos taken from other bosses and in the second phase every swing is acompanied by explosions and lots of particle effects. This is a boss I would expect to see in a mod, and not a $40 DLC.

So basically the DLC is just more Elden Ring that doesn't elevate the game in any way and has all of the same problems except now the problems start annoying you even more because you are already aware that they exist from playing the base game. It also feels extremely phoned in with cut corners wherever possible.

I liked it less than the DLCs to the other Souls games. I feel like the DS3 DLCs have as many new good bosses while having much fewer of them overall, have more good dungeons (because the entire game consists of dungeons) and waste less of your time.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Except the way the cost of levels scales means that you'd be an absolute retard to not gain levels along with pyromancy even if the game had 1/10th as many souls.

By that argument you can also say only a retard would decide not to farm souls so they can take their character to SL300 and just stomp everything. The game still isn't balanced for that kind of high levels all the same. What the player can do and what the devs intended are two different things. Sure, you can max the glove AND take your character to SL200 if you want to. Still doesn't mean the SL1 thing wasn't intended by the developers.

 

[Hell Swarm]

I don't buy that much if any consideration was given to allowing SL1 runs. I think pyro in Dark Souls 1 was done as it was simply to differentiate that branch of magic from sorceries and miracles, which each have their own stat, and connecting it directly to the power of the flame was a neat way to highlight the primal, less sophisticated nature of pyromancy (though really, like all Souls mechanics, it was done primarily for gameplay reasons). And the Deprived class is nothing more than a typical RPG blank slate as opposed to a preset. Games like Fallout have the exact same thing.

I disagree. You spend souls on the flame instead of yourself. Pyromancers were clearly intended to remain at SL1. Both Laurentius and Quelana have very low stats in Dark Souls. You are trading the power of souls for the power of the flame. It's only because the game throws a billion of souls at you that you can level up both in reality the intended way was one or the other.

I also don't think it was a coincidence that fire and chaos don't have a stat scaling for their damage.

Another post by lyric and another thing completely wrong.

Dark souls got a massive rebalancing when the DLC came out. They almost tripled the amount of souls dropping and made it much easier to get hold of upgrade materials. Pyro was not intended to suck up all your souls because originally you had to really pick how to spend them. They didn't give you excess souls to dump into equipment until the DLC dropped and they dumbed the game down for faggots like you.

With all I'd heard about the final boss I thought I'd need a few days of hard practice to beat him. I didn't have the energy for that so I'd been putting it off. Today I sat down to do it. This way my third attempt:



The lion at the start too me more tries.

"Hey guys, only my third try. Watch me stack buffs and twice try to glitch the bosses attacks". How strange.. only 3 tries and yet you're acting like you've seen this boss fight before. While using meta builds.. It's all so 3 tries and absolutely no advanced information.

Complaints about difficulty are very exhagerrated I think. I wanted to see how far I can far I could go without using any skibidi fragments and I ended up only using them on Radahn and Bayle. If I had been using them from the start I don't think bosses other than Radahn and Messmer would have taken me more than a few attempts. For example, I fought Bayle for like 15 minutes before deciding that the boss was garbage and going to fight Radahn. While fighting Radagn I upped my skibidi blessing level from 0 to 12, decided to take a break, went back to Bayle and killed him on my first attempt. And I didn't even use any cheese shit like bleed.

What was your build? People saying bleed is cheesy in this thread tend to be playing completely broken stuff. The shards make a huge difference in damage unless you're already bursting for 4 figures which is likely what's happening here.

 

[Suicidal]

What was your build? People saying bleed is cheesy in this thread tend to be playing completely broken stuff. The shards make a huge difference in damage unless you're already bursting for 4 figures which is likely what's happening here.

I didn't really have a "build", but I had an RP idea for my character that I started out as a priest and over the course of the game I started using more and more heretical spells and weapons, like frenzy fire, black fire that the foreskin cultists were using, etc.

For most of the bosses in the DLC I used the gargoyle sword that shoots forward a black wave that I also used in the main game or the holy lightsaber (that I didn't use in the main game but decided to try it out in the DLC and found out that it staggers things like crazy) + buffs + some black fire spells when the opportunity presented itself.

I tried Relanna's dual blades because I also liked using the magic + fire sword from the main game thinking they were a better version of it but turns out they were a worse version.

The only DLC weapon that fit my RP idea that I liked and found a use for was the fire dagger I got from one of Messmer's inquisitor knights.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Dark souls got a massive rebalancing when the DLC came out.

Which has shit to do with how the game was balanced originally when they made the pyro class and concept.

For me it is obvious that they anticipated or "allowed" for the possibility of a SL1 run. I don't know how Demon Souls worked but i wouldn't be surprised if they saw people were doing SL1 runs and said to themselves "wouldn't it be cool if we actually designed the game to allow for that possibility?". Hence the pyro class. And by "allow" i mean to make it actually viable for a normal player, even if it could be still argued the pyro class is a build in hard mode.

It all fits toghether and conceptually the idea you are pouring all your souls on the flame and not yourself is just so damn cool. And anybody who tried a pyro run should know how damn powerful such a class can be even if you remain at SL1. The glove DOES blanace the lack of levels and stat scaling in your weapons (which the fire infusion also makes up for, with lighting given as an extra option for get around fire resistant enemies). In fact the shit you can do with a pure pyro set up is just ludicrous:



I'm starting to think FromSoft is just smarter than the players if people fail to see how much of this is actually intended.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Another way to interpret the implementation of pyro is that there's a democratising aspect to it. With the other magics, how powerful your character is reflects how learned or faithful he is and how much time he has spent studying/praying/whatever. In terms of role-playing, your stats reflect who you are, so anyone with a lot of points in intelligence is a mage or an aspiring mage, with lots of faith you're a cleric, etc. With pyro, you feed your souls directly to the flame, so pyromancy is essentially open to anyone, no matter his background, innate characteristics or other pursuits. This also fits with what Laurentius says about where pyromancy stands in relation to the other disciplines, and just who he is in general.

But anyway, whatever you think about that, it seems clear to me that they meant for you to use every tool at your disposal, and anything else is a self-imposed restriction. Didn't the grand moff Miyazaki himself say he's bad at the games and so makes use of every trick in the book?

 

[abija]

Well at the very least is a good design exercise to see how players not spending souls primarly on levels would fare. The games offer various ways to spend souls and at least early game those choices are meaningful.

 

[Anonona]

I doubt From designed pyromancy with SL1 in mind. After all, they seem to regret the choice of making the flame scale only with its level so they changed it in DS 2 and 3, now necessitating INT and/or Faith, and haven't really revisited the idea neither in Bloodborne nor ER. It looks more like a case of trying to make Pyromancy unique and distinct from the other two, as well as a good option for non Int/Fth builds but they overtuned its strenghts, which is the reason it is so popular for SL1 runs. From's games have never been ones to really nail their RPG designs, from Demon's Souls to ER they have some big oversights and weird choices, as ER many nerfs to both PVP and PVE attest to.

Also many games have level 1 runs, specially jrpgs, doesn't necessarily mean that they were designed with them in mind, more like a side effect of players mastering the systems.

 

[Ravielsk]

I doubt From designed pyromancy with SL1 in mind. After all, they seem to regret the choice of making the flame scale only with its level so they changed it in DS 2 and 3, now necessitating INT and/or Faith, and haven't really revisited the idea neither in Bloodborne nor ER. It looks more like a case of trying to make Pyromancy unique and distinct from the other two, as well as a good option for non Int/Fth builds but they overtuned its strenghts, which is the reason it is so popular for SL1 runs. From's games have never been ones to really nail their RPG designs, from Demon's Souls to ER they have some big oversights and weird choices, as ER many nerfs to both PVP and PVE attest to.

Also many games have level 1 runs, specially jrpgs, doesn't necessarily mean that they were designed with them in mind, more like a side effect of players mastering the systems.

I could accept that Pyromancy was made with SL1 runs in mind if it was done this way in the later games. It would make sense for them to look at the popularity of SL1 challenge runs and design certain parts of the game around that but for that to be the case those runs would first have to first exist and be popular. However neither was really true at the time of DS1 release, those runs really only took off after the PC release when the series actually reached what could be described as mainstream recognition.

Even then I would argue that these sorts of challenge runs did not really pick up in popularity until DS2 but I could be misremembering that. Either way they absolutely were not a staple at the time of DS1's launch.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I could accept that Pyromancy was made with SL1 runs in mind if it was done this way in the later games.

Nothing preventing them from changing their mind later.

I still say it's not coincidence that in Dark Souls 1 the SL1 class happens to be specifically a pyro, with the pyro hand accepting souls as if it was an alternative to leveling, and with pyro oriented infusions being uniquely devoid of stat scaling. Lastly, the fact the pyro class is the only one that starts at SL1. There's too many factors that converge in indication there's at least an invitation to try it.

SL1 runs "not" being a thing at the time can actually be shown to prove the point: what if SL1 runs became a thing BECAUSE of the pyro class?

The pyro flame being something one can tap into without actually claiming to "own" it, or to be the source of that power, it being completely separate from any personal trait of the character wielding it, sort of leads then to the ultimate possibility of someone being devoid of ANY kind of personal power or skill or ability or any learning of any kind still being able to wield the flame and tap into its powers.

So both conceptually and mechanically everything just points to the possibility for the player to be able to do this. The mechanics allow for it. The lore allow for it. How is it not intentional.