Elden Ring

[Adramelch]

One try. Malenia took me about I'd say 15 tries, but I was very gung-ho in my approach. I noticed it was very easy to stagger her so I played very aggressive, resulting in some very fast deaths, but I killed her the second time I got to second phase.

[Adramelch]

I actually started a new playthrough (I don't really like ng+ concepts to be honest), with the intention of playing as a mage, and the early game feels very boring compared to melee. I would say it also feels easier, even spamming the one spell for the most part, but it would be an unfair comparison since I'm more experienced in the game.

[Yevrah]

Glintstone Pebble?

[Adramelch]

Yes. The only real alternative early doors is carian slicer and/or the rapier, but then you're back to sort of being melee. The rest of the glintstone projectile spells seem kinda crap (though the arc is a lot of fun for big crowds) and the glintstone greatsword one that Rogier sells has the longest wind-up in recorded history. It was similar with incantations, but you get access to more of them from the get-go.

All that said, I expected the second playthrough to be much less fun for me since I cleared most of the game in the first go and you don't quite have the same sense of adventure/exploration, but it's still a lot of fun.

[Raoul Duke]

You can get Rock Sling pretty early too I think, and it's pretty handy

[Raoul Duke]

Expansion announced :drool:

https://twitter.com/ELDENRING/status/1630478058103734274?s=20

[Andrew]

Expansion announced :drool:

https://twitter.com/ELDENRING/status/1630478058103734274?s=20

Today is a good day 🤤

Pllaying dark souls 3 on the ps5 at the minute but might bin that save and start this all over again

[Yevrah]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z52pRB5qIPY

Yet more balance changes coming. It's just ridiculous at this point.

[Vercetti]

The latest update has somehow wiped hours of progress from my save game. As far as I can tell, I've lost at least 12 levels, and have been pushed back to before my last respec, several bosses and untold hours of exploration ago.

Fecking bollocks.

I'd been banging my head against the Fire Giant for a while, anyway, the massive ginger cunt, but I doubt I'll go back to it now. It's a daunting thing of a game, at the best of times, without now trying to figure out what I have and haven't done at the point the save has reverted to.

What a game, though.

[phonics]

That guys easy to cheese in like 2-3 tries if you know the tactic.

[Yevrah]

Finally got back into this and currently attempting a no summons run. Commander Niall is a bad man.

[Adramelch]

I never actually ended up playing this with summons even though I've gone through it 3 times (for the platinum achievement). I remember struggling in my first encounter with the Misbegotten boss thingy in that castle in the south and then easily one-shotting it once I discovered that summons were a thing. I just started a new save after that, as it felt unrewarding.

What are you struggling with on Niall? Is it the summons or Niall himself?

[Shindig]

Misbegotten was alright for me. I just waited for the jump attack and then got my hits in. Naill brings in a phantom or something, doesn't he? Not a fan of bosses that do that. It works if the main boss decides to hang back and whilst the other one goes on the offensive but not if their AI's are independent of one another.

[Yevrah]

I never actually ended up playing this with summons even though I've gone through it 3 times (for the platinum achievement). I remember struggling in my first encounter with the Misbegotten boss thingy in that castle in the south and then easily one-shotting it once I discovered that summons were a thing. I just started a new save after that, as it felt unrewarding.

What are you struggling with on Niall? Is it the summons or Niall himself?

Yeah, Niall. Can take his summons out quite easily but he's such an aggressive mother fucker I struggle to stay alive once he's on his own and he starts going for it.

[Adramelch]

Misbegotten was alright for me. I just waited for the jump attack and then got my hits in. Naill brings in a phantom or something, doesn't he? Not a fan of bosses that do that. It works if the main boss decides to hang back and whilst the other one goes on the offensive but not if their AI's are independent of one another.

It was my first boss in my first souls game, hence the struggle. Which actually made him a great introductory boss as he has punishing but very telegraphed attacks.

Niall starts with two phantoms, one of which is that bastard that's dual-wielding. All three are very easy to kite though and Niall himself is very passive in that phase. If memory serves me well, in my dex save where I was playing bloodhound fang, I think I sort of ignored the phantoms and just whittled Niall down until he phased and despawned the phantoms. On a mage the phantoms were easy pickings but I had to be more careful in his second phase as some punishment opportunities are too short for most spells.

@Yev: I think he's one of the prime examples where you just need to stop trying to punish and just learn his moveset. Strafing is also really helpful on this fight.

[Yevrah]

Yeah, think he's as clear a case of 'git gud' as there is. Parked him for now and went through the Subterenean Shunning Grounds instead, taking out little Mohg and doing some annoying but rewarding platforming.

Elsewhere I'm up to the Fire Giant but don't want to progress that just yet as as soon as I beat him the temptation to light the fire and progress to Farum Azula will be too great to resist and it'll fuck a few quests I have on the go.

Which reminds me, let's call a spade a spade on that, they're absolute dogshit. I know we all had a circle jerk at the time due to no map markers and quest logs (lol Ubisoft etc.), but the game absolutely does have those things, you just have to use the Wiki to find them.

[Adramelch]

They are yeah. I'm fine with no markers and the more cryptic style, but at least give me a journal that has the discussions I've had with the npcs (in a sort of RDR style). Expecting the player to remember all of that and/or write it down is a bit too much.

[Dark Soldier]

Love it or hate it that's been the From way all the way back to King's Field tbh. They were never gonna change it, and I can see why a lot hate it, but it's just part of their USP.

Still the best game ever made.

[Shindig]

Lies of P handily marks the bonfire locations when an NPC quest progresses.

[Yevrah]

Love it or hate it that's been the From way all the way back to King's Field tbh. They were never gonna change it, and I can see why a lot hate it, but it's just part of their USP.

Still the best game ever made.

I think they realised themselves that it doesn't lend itself well to a game of this size, hence all the markers in the game now for merchants and other NPC's.

[Dark Soldier]

I think its more this brought more non-From fans to the table and they listened to the feedback. The 'hardcore' (shudder) don't care.

[Yevrah]

Niall down. :cool:

[Dark Soldier]

Watched a bit of your stream Yev, using my fav weapon. It's so fucking good. Have you overlevelled again to about 450?

[Yevrah]

Haha. I am the Elden Lord again, 159 this time with no summons. Didn't do much grinding bar when I didn't want to waste a pile I was sat on, there are just so many runes in the game when you do a fair bit of the side stuff.

Now for Melania. :eyemouth:

[Raoul Duke]

DLC trailer out today. 3pm UK time


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLZenOn7WUo

[Shindig]

Well, I guess I'm reinstalling that.

[Raoul Duke]

Story trailer:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uT8wGtB3yQ

Usual incomprehensible wibble. We'll need to wait for Vatividya's breakdown, as per usual

[Shindig]

Yeah, I grow tired of the lore bollocks. And the bosses have become more about combat prowess rather than "GUYS, I'VE GOT A DUMB BUT MEMORABLE IDEA!"

[Yevrah]

Amazing how you can fill three minutes with absolutely nothing.

[Dark Soldier]

Its got me moist ya miserable cunts.

[Shindig]

I still want a character for Shadow of the Erdtree, even if I might never pick it up. Starting from scratch is a pain in the arse. I seem to have found very few bosses I can actually take on so I ran to Caelid and offed Greyoll. Didn't make much of a difference. :moop:

Every boss is a jumpy twat.

[Adramelch]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JugxpebuS_E

Sadly I'm swamped at work and I'll be away this weekend so I won't be playing it anytime soon. Been planning to get a new pc soon(ish), so I might as well just wait for that I guess.

[Shindig]

Well, a code's come in so I'm stuck trying to get a character ready for it. :moop:

Day 1: 11 hours in. One shard bearer down but I'll open up the magic ... palace place for Rennala. I'm probably alright to blast through Caelid for Radahn. I have never beaten Mohg which will be the last obstacle to the DLC.

[Yevrah]

Anyone bothered with this yet? Can't put my finger on why but I just can't be arsed.

EDIT: Missed your edit Shinners. Be curious to hear how you get on when you get levelled enough.

[Shindig]

I am desperately trying to get to Mogwyn Palace for the farming spot. Rennala and Radahn are down and I've got the mimic tear. Although I'm 90 levels off the recommended levels for the DLC. :D

What I've heard is the DLC is (unsurprisingly) very difficult. It has it's own levelling system to prevent people grinding past which ... I'm not okay with.

[Yevrah]

How does that last bit work?

[Shindig]

I believe there's seeds you grab that do something to the scaling.

One boss away from Mogwyn Palace. I fucking hate Naill. Luckily you can still snipe him with arrows outside the boss room. Good.

[Shindig]

I'm in after 38 hours. I did beat Naill the dishonest way after realising I'd need 140 arrows to beat him. I think I sent him to sleep with Trina's arrows by mistake and had to run in to finish the fight. I got bored of grinding the rolly-poly lads at Mogwyn's Palace and beat Mohg easy enough to unlock the DLC. I'm at level 109, way under the recommended 140 but I'm not sure if that matters.

Primarily because I've encountered the levelling system in Erdtree:

- Damage taken in Shadow of the Erdtree seems massive. I can die in two hits at 49 vigor. To mitigate this, you find Scadutree blessings which effectively tip the scales back in your favour. I've found a couple and it'll probably be a while before I feel a difference. You also get blessings for your ash summons because they're also weakened over here.

So that's where the difficulty complaints seem to stem from. In short, I'm a glass cannon. I could possibly level past the problem but I'd rather press on until I'm completely brick walled. I died to the first boss I found but I was doing okay damage. The world itself looks gorgeous. You're started off in a wide-open plain that really hammers home scale very well. It's made a decent first impression on me but I'm suspicious of the disconnect between publication reviews (10/10's) and user reviews being more scathing.

[Dark Soldier]

I'm not suspicious at all. Some of the complaints I've seen have been people saying they refuse to use summons, the Scadutree things etc, then moaning its too hard. Or people pissing and moaning cos they're rushing bosses with no explanation. Also its the first 'huge' Fromsoft game which is drawing newer players in as well. Their DLCs have always upped the challenge.

Performance I get, but I use a fix on PC, means I have to play offline, FOV and FPs unlocker on a 4090 and its buttery smooth. Ready to dive in tomorrow, pure STR. 70 vig, 40 mind, 70 end, 80 str.

My boy:

https://i.ibb.co/WH9Yskw/a.jpg

[Shindig]

Get you with your matching armour set. :(

Yeah, their DLCs have done well to instil a little bit of fear back into the game. I've just ran through (minus the boss) the first legacy dungeon and it had a nice element of risk to it. Enemies that are easily doable but can take me out in 2-3 hits. I kill almost everything en route and end up with 112k runes. Considering my little ramshackle build with shite talismans and a +7 shield or some shit, I'm quite happy with that. :D

In terms of the stats that matter, I'm 50 Vigor, 38 Dex, 26 Strength or something, 40 Endurance. Bloodhound Fang is maxed out. I want to wear Lionel's full set instead of just the hat and trousers. :D

[Dark Soldier]

Oddly that's not a full set :D The helmet for that set is horrific though so used another.

Good to know it has a proper sense of scale. Couldn't resist and loaded in for the first ten minutes or so. Holy shit. First enemy - five flasks :D

[Yevrah]

You're dragging me in gents. :drool:

[Dark Soldier]

You're dragging me in gents. :drool:

If you do be warned level means fuck all. It's basically back to level 1. DLC has its own system for levelling. Even with 70 vigor I can get 3/4 shot. Its bastard hard.

[Yevrah]

Sounds perfect. It would have been dogshit if you could just rock up with a character from the base game and steam roll your way through it.

[Yevrah]

And I'm confident there'll be a way to make it much easier within the DLC itself.

[Dark Soldier]

And I'm confident there'll be a way to make it much easier within the DLC itself.

Ah yeah there will be some broken stuff already.

I do want to say though it is fucking gorgeous, and the complexity of the map is insane. You can see areas all over the place and its kinda like a puzzle how to get there. Stupidly huge for DLC too.

[Shindig]

Okay, this map is way more open than I thought. Found my way to two more areas.

[Dark Soldier]

First 'major' boss down. Some fight that jesus. Still absolutely in love with big hammer smash. This is amazing.

[Shindig]

I've beaten one major boss and about 6 other small ones. I should get a move on but I want more tree fragments. I'll say this: The layout of the map is shit. Fragments don't appear at locations you can intuit, unlike everything else in Elden Ring. They feel placed at random rather than a journey you're supposed to be retreading. There's a lot of verticality to the world but getting into new areas usually requires a clumsy fiddle. In the base game, I'm decent at reading the map in terms of plotting a course. Here, it's a lot less straight forward.

The sub dungeons are cool, though. A lot less copy-pasted catacombs in favour of more bespoke locations. Elden Ring needed that.

[Dark Soldier]

I love the structure of the world, its like a puzzle. Had no issue finding fragments, think I'm at level 5 for each.

[Shindig]

11 for me. 5 for my summons and horse. I've visited what many consider to be the last boss. It didn't go well.

EDIT: The last area is a genuine cunt. Heavy hitters with spells that can ping you from miles away. Disgusting. I'm now level 156 though. 16 blessings, 8 for the summons.

EDIT 2: Alright, that staircase of death is out of my life. I have a verdict on this thing. It's alright. Lots of new stuff but the lack of proper, proper dungeons is a bit shit.

[Dark Soldier]

Yevrah Giant Crusher, respec into Pure STR and END and VIG. Win the DLC. Do it lad. Enjoyed watching you v Death Knight.

When you tried fat rolling lol

[Yevrah]

Haha, cheers DS.

I'll post my thoughts later, but suffice to say doing it on New Game + is proving to be a mistake.

[Yevrah]

Completely forgot about the stamina bar when fighting the guy in the mausoleum. :face: As soon as I remembered, he crumbled.

[Shindig]

I've still not beat the last boss. I may scrap Mimic Tear because I don't have a window to spawn him. As soon as I'm through the door, it's ON. I'm mainly using this save as a chance to mop up some trophies now.

[Dark Soldier]

Completely forgot about the stamina bar when fighting the guy in the mausoleum. :face: As soon as I remembered, he crumbled.

Your no dodge stand there tank everything R2 build is intriguing.

[Yevrah]

Your no dodge stand there tank everything R2 build is intriguing.

L2, but I get the point. If that claw hammer move works on a boss you can basically do it ad infinitum until they die, as long as you manage the stamina, which is the key bit I was forgetting due to using a dodgy controller that I thought was the problem rather than my in game management. :cab:

Hit them, they fall over, time it so you strike again as soon as they stand up and then they stagger and you go to town on a critical.

[Dark Soldier]

That works with the base R2 as well basically mate on the hammer. Stagger is stupidly OP in the DLC.

[Shindig]

I did notice that. Like it was to compensate for the player coming in one or two hits from death. I typically had the stamina to keep smacking.

[Yevrah]

I'm about 6 hours into this now and I can't lie to myself any longer, I'm bored.

It's basically more of the same and I should therefore be loving it but I'm not and I think I've pinpointed it to these reasons:

The World is not as good as Elden Ring and it's not even close. Ok, so I haven't seen all it has to offer yet, but I've seen nothing like stepping out onto Hyrule Field or exploring through Stormveil castle. What I have seen are just sub-standard knock offs of those and other things, washed in shit colour grey. There's bit where things brighten up, but you then proceed to spend most of the time underground.

Runes are now basically pointless. You're already a high level, the whole thing revolves around how many Scadutree fragments you can find and as a result, the wondrous sense of progression that was there in the base game is gone.

The weapon upgrade system. It was shit in the first place, but this DLC takes a lantern to it and reveals it for what it is in all its ugly glory. The game throws new weapons at you thick and fast, but you need to go through the tedious upgrade grind for each and every one of them for them to be anything other than functionally useless. I don't want to be doing that - I want to be rewarded for exploration or killing a boss with a weapon I can use now. Worse still, if you haven't saved any Ancient stones (or found any in the DLC) you can't even upgrade the new weapons you find to be on the same level as the ones you already have. It's dumb as it leans you into relying on weapons from the base game and that just isn't what DLC content should be about. I want new, shiny arse kicking shit, ready to use from the get go.

These things might sound like small gripes, but they were such fundamental mechanics of the gameplay loop in Elden Ring the game feels brutally exposed without them. It'd be alright if the level design, World and monsters had had a refresh, but alas that's barely the case either with Far Cry style re-skins of open areas and a paint job on the dungeons (with fucking re-used enemies again) so you're left with the base game design but worse and very little of the RPG/progression stuff that made the original so rewarding.

While I've stayed away from spoilers I did clock that there's been a lot of noise about the difficulty, which FromSoft must have been loving, as it's taken the focus away from the actual problems with it. It is clearly harder than the base game but not to the point where that's a problem and I'm confident it won't be as soon as you've collected the appropriate level of fragments for the boss you're facing.

[Shindig]

The 8/10 (shock of the new, every cunt does it :D) I gave it is looking dafter every minute. I gave that largely on the new gear. Of that, there's plenty. In terms of everything else, it's spread very thin.

[Yevrah]

I'd genuinely give it 6/10, maybe even 5/10 vs. the 10/10 Elden Ring deserved, it's just poor in comparison, so far at least anyway. Which is another problem, in that I don't even feel that inclined to bother to see if it does get better, which is a remarkable turnaround from the base game.

[Yevrah]

What's this Elden Ring Nightreign all about then?

[phonics]

It's like a Co-Op Fortnite Elden Ring if I've understood correctly.

[Yevrah]

Fromsoft's version of Fallout 76 then?

[Yevrah]

As you were. Couldn't get my head around it being a shrinking map like Fortnite. What a weird idea.

[Shindig]

Elden Ring with time pressures just isn't what I'm after. And the fact it doesn't scale for solo players.