The Shattered Elden Ring Thread: Tarnished Edition - (Shadow of the Erdtree p. 85)

Catfood220

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So after much trying, I took down the Tree Sentinel. After leveling up a bit and getting some slightly better gear, I decided this dickhead needed to go. So I attacked him on horseback and to my surprise took him down to about half health. Encouraged I attacked with a bunch of ghost wolves and did better. I can do it I thought. And then spent the next couple of hours getting stomped to death. If they could, I'm sure my ghost wolves could of turned on me and joined the Tree Sentinel for getting them killed so often. But after a while, I got it. With the wolves and some damage by me, I got his health down to half and then used hit and run tactics to finish him off. Feeling good, I went to the cave near the church and promptly died.

Also, who decided that the horse dismount button should be L3? I think I died more to accidentally dismounting and then getting squished. That was my main source of annoyance in this fight more than anything else.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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Eh, it's alright.

The most fun so far is fighting the big, giant slob guys on horseback.

Land octopuses or did you mean slow guys? I like the sounds of slashing at the former but also big rock giants are my other favorite so far. Really like doing critical hits on each, especially the latter when they spew molten lava.


So after much trying, I took down the Tree Sentinel. After leveling up a bit and getting some slightly better gear, I decided this dickhead needed to go. So I attacked him on horseback and to my surprise took him down to about half health. Encouraged I attacked with a bunch of ghost wolves and did better. I can do it I thought. And then spent the next couple of hours getting stomped to death. If they could, I'm sure my ghost wolves could of turned on me and joined the Tree Sentinel for getting them killed so often. But after a while, I got it. With the wolves and some damage by me, I got his health down to half and then used hit and run tactics to finish him off. Feeling good, I went to the cave near the church and promptly died.

Also, who decided that the horse dismount button should be L3? I think I died more to accidentally dismounting and then getting squished. That was my main source of annoyance in this fight more than anything else.
I haven’t tried yet but you should be able to remap that in the controller options.
 
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Brokencontroller

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Welp they pushed out a patch last night that nerfs the most popular/powerful ashes of war as well as nerfed the best spirit summon in the game. So the best strategies to help make live easier are now gone.

Good luck.
 
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hanselthecaretaker

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Welp they pushed out a patch last night that nerfs the most popular/powerful ashes of war as well as nerfed the best spirit summon in the game. So the best strategies to help make live easier are now gone.

Good luck.
Idk if they nerfed anything else but I beat Godrick first try last night using Rock Sling with a Meteorite staff at lvl 21 INT. Well, first as in only after reallocating enough FP flasks upon losing a melee fight when he had the smallest sliver of health left. Was kinda poetic.
 

Silvanus

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Miyazaki seemingly has taken it upon himself to make the enemies and bosses in this game as hard as he possibly could. Which would be fine in theory. People have been playing Souls games for 10 years now and as the player-base increases in skill enemies need more tricks up their sleeves to keep up the challenge. Unfortunately Miyazaki's answer to this problem was to give every enemy unrelenting attacks and design them capable of destroying the player's most common defense in a Souls game. The roll.
You and I have very different experiences in this regard. For my money, Elden Ring is easier than Sekiro, Bloodborne, Demon's Souls, and Dark Souls 2.

Still damn hard a lot of the time. But nowhere even near their hardest. I don't share this view at all.
 

CriticalGaming

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You and I have very different experiences in this regard. For my money, Elden Ring is easier than Sekiro, Bloodborne, Demon's Souls, and Dark Souls 2.

Still damn hard a lot of the time. But nowhere even near their hardest. I don't share this view at all.
How far into the game are you?
 

Dalisclock

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Welp they pushed out a patch last night that nerfs the most popular/powerful ashes of war as well as nerfed the best spirit summon in the game. So the best strategies to help make live easier are now gone.
We'll probably find out in a day or so how nerfed they are. I'm sure people are already testing them as we speak. I tried hoarfrost stomp last night and it seems casting time is not appreciably different though the damage might be a bit lower. I was trying to finish Castle Morne last night so I didn't do a lot of experimenting. Castle Morne is a classic souls dungeon, so felt right at home and the storyline associated with it ended pretty much the way I expected it to.
 
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Silvanus

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How far into the game are you?
About 40 hours.
Got 2 great runes; so far beaten Margit, Godrick, Leonine Misbegotten, Rennala, O'Neil, Makar, Loretta, Dragonkin Soldier, and Ancestral Spirit. Pretty sure I can beat Radahn with a few more tries. And with most of them I've intentionally avoided using summons.

So unless the difficulty curve is nuts, I don't see it overtaking the others.... but you've played further than I have, admittedly, so maybe!
 
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Brokencontroller

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About 40 hours.
Got 2 great runes; so far beaten Margit, Godrick, Rennala, O'Neil, Makar, Loretta, Dragonkin Soldier, and Ancestral Spirit. Pretty sure I can beat Radahn with a few more tries. And with most of them I've intentionally avoided using summons.

So unless the difficulty curve is nuts, I don't see it overtaking the others.... but you've played further than I have, admittedly, so maybe!
Bro...you have no idea the bullshit coming for you. This games gets really really stupid later.
 

CriticalGaming

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About 40 hours.
Got 2 great runes; so far beaten Margit, Godrick, Rennala, O'Neil, Makar, Loretta, Dragonkin Soldier, and Ancestral Spirit. Pretty sure I can beat Radahn with a few more tries. And with most of them I've intentionally avoided using summons.

So unless the difficulty curve is nuts, I don't see it overtaking the others.... but you've played further than I have, admittedly, so maybe!
It kind of depends on how much you do and when you do it I guess which is one of the things about Elden Ring that people like it never feels like a wall. Until the end. And if you don't have skills and your build on point there is a string of bosses that definitely are spikes in difficulty beyond anything i've ever seen in a souls game before. And you cannot out level them without dozens of hours of unreasonably slow grinding. But even then the scaling of stats drops off very quickly so there is no real "outleveling" them.

Personally my saving grace was a couple of weapon arts that were nerfed this patch. Not due to them being particularly overpowered imo, but because the skills were easy to use. Both skills are quick, which allows you to use them and have the freedom to dodge roll away from very fast bosses. I know for a fact that the stomp animation locks you in place for a lot longer now, making it much less viable end game imo. Moonveil's slash is not as hard hit of a nerf but the reduced damage makes it harder to break poise.

End game bosses you don't even want to viseral because they have wake-up attacks. Your break their poise just to get a chance to heal because they are all programmed with flask counter attacks.

The window for error was already small late game, and with crippling these abilties I think they've just spat on the players who built their characters around these skills. I'd understand a nerf with compromises. Like if they reduced the stomp's attack power only, then find. Frostbite is the important part of that skill anyway, but they didn't. They nerfed the casting time and the damage which is a double whammy and offered nothing in return like a lower FP cost or higher weapon damage.
 
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EvilRoy

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Most of the people praising it I think would've probably played Morrowind though. At least, they're part of the youtube gaming crowd that would've likely touched on the classics. I myself have never played Morrowind and I'm not really flabberghasted by Elden Ring all the same.

I think what Elden Ring does do better than most open-worlds is keep the player's focus on the world itself rather than on icons. While I will say something like Horizon: Forbidden West has just a bit too much bloat, a more present issue is that your attention is diverted to the map and HUD making the actual gameworld often feel secondary. Ghost of Tsushima tried to alleviate this by making the wind guide you instead of an arrow or marker, but this resulted in kinda the same issue of you just looking at the wind the whole time. Elden Ring doesn't have anything like that apart from a very unintrusive compass, and it really helps the world to take complete centre stage. But the flipside to that is that there's really nothing much concrete to discover in this world other than more enemies.

Horizon: Forbidden West did piss me off with a bunch of bullshit (nothing that really had much to do with its open-world but still), yet I did play it for the better part of three weeks. It's also had some sequences that were really quite memorable. Elden Ring I picked up less than a week ago and I can already feel the monotony set in, since there's just very little to do in this world both mechanically and narratively.

While I think Elden Ring has more artistic merrit than most open-world games, including Horizon: Forbidden West, this does not feel like the next step for open-world games. Both Breath of the Wild and The Witcher 3 feel like better examples of that, but than I'm sure this just comes down to personal taste.
That's fair, although I still honestly blame at very least a short memory for the implication by some that Elden Ring is groundbreaking. That, or maybe gaming is starting to experience the same cycle of new/retro that film and fashion follow, where stuff is just gonna be in vouge for a while and then a blast from the past is considered a welcome change. I think you're right that a big part of the HUD being how it is has to do with showcasing the world and design just on the basis that most elements disappear if you aren't in combat or cycling through your D-pad menu, so it might be more of an artistic choice rather than a UI choice.


Though FROM(or ever any dev) has to know that any secrets in the game aren't going to stay secret any longer once someone with an internet connection discovers them and people are going to use the net to help each other. On the subreddit, there's a lot of discussion on the subreddit about if Summons(spirit ashes) are broken/etc and whether using them is how the devs intended you to play....which again, the internet exists, FROM knows it exists, and knows any OP builds and weapons and summons are gonna become known pretty much instantly to the wider public and it would be stupid to assume they don't know people are gonna be exploiting stuff like the mimic tear.
For all the complaints about stuff like the mimic tear, I think this is reddit kind of acting like a hivemind rather than a group of individuals again. Is the mimic tear super OP? Yes, if you use one of a few builds that reddit really likes. If you use a build like mine, which is not optimal but is good enough for me to proceed through the game perfectly acceptably, the poor little guy is basically useless. Any strategy beyond "hit it really hard and tank" or "spam a lot of magic shit/status effects" doesn't really work because it has at best one of the dumber NPC Invader AIs (probably intentionally to keep it from being unstoppable) and will run in and get flattened instantly if you depend on any sort of nuanced tactic. In my case I made a sort of melee glass cannon. It works. It also dies in a couple hits to most bosses, so I gotta move a lot and heal a lot. This is fine for me and I don't think its particularly better or worse than any other kind of non-optimal build, particularly parry or strength/faith builds probably work the same as mine, but it can't work with the mimic. My fight with the mimic was pathetic, because it didn't know it needed to start running when I started swinging. One shot the poor guy. I'm not surprised that some of this stuff was adjusted in a patch I think last night, but the adjustments don't appear to make the strategies useless, just somewhat less effective so they won't become the "only way to play" type of meta that is horrible for high content games like this.

To your point, I agree, there's no way From didn't intend this stuff. They might tweak it up or down as they try to adjust for player optimization, but its just a bit too clean for it to be unintentional and I wonder if this was a bone thrown to people for the purposes of streamlining their second playthrough. No need to bumble through the game a second time, the joy of discovery only really works once so instead there are a few straightforward ways to quickly level you up, set you up with a decent weapon, and send you on your way. You'll find an even more blatant set up later in the game - there is a location that cannot possibly be interpreted as anything other than a late-game speed levelling location. There is no way it was intended as anything else just based on how the area and enemies work and where the grace is located - if you see videos about "farming millions of runes in only a couple hours!!!" this is what I'm talking about. The videos set it up as this crazy discovery, but honestly you don't have to do anything special to get to this point, you will find it totally organically while playing the game and exploring. Its not hidden or secret at all, with the most difficult part about finding it being that its located in a fairly dangerous area and the area is optional, but its optional in the way that bothering with the basement of Stormveil or more than 50% of Caelid is optional - you don't NEED to go there, but you would be choosing to skip hours of directed game content by not engaging with it.
 
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CriticalGaming

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dumber NPC Invader AIs
Actually with this patch, mimic tear is supposedly smarter in the AI department. This is because it can no longer heal itself and to mkae up for reduced damage it got better at avoiding.

Which is one of the reasons why I'm upset by weapon art nerfs and not upset by the mimic nerf. Becuase there is a trade off. They flat out just nerfed some weapons and weapon arts. However with tear they balanced the nerf by making it a smart fighter when you need it.It shouldn't be able to solo a boss for you (which it used to) but it should be good enough to help get you there.
 
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PsychedelicDiamond

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Today's patch also fixed some previously unfinishable quests. Which, honestly, I've been wondering how no one noticed those during playtesting. I mean, it's not like it's a Bethesda or CD Projekt game with a shitload of quests where some might easily fly under the radar. Surely people who've been testing the game for months for 8 hours a day would have noticed that a bunch of event flags simply do not trigger and accordingly a lot of questlines are cut off.
 
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Silvanus

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It kind of depends on how much you do and when you do it I guess which is one of the things about Elden Ring that people like it never feels like a wall. Until the end. And if you don't have skills and your build on point there is a string of bosses that definitely are spikes in difficulty beyond anything i've ever seen in a souls game before. And you cannot out level them without dozens of hours of unreasonably slow grinding. But even then the scaling of stats drops off very quickly so there is no real "outleveling" them.

Personally my saving grace was a couple of weapon arts that were nerfed this patch. Not due to them being particularly overpowered imo, but because the skills were easy to use. Both skills are quick, which allows you to use them and have the freedom to dodge roll away from very fast bosses. I know for a fact that the stomp animation locks you in place for a lot longer now, making it much less viable end game imo. Moonveil's slash is not as hard hit of a nerf but the reduced damage makes it harder to break poise.

End game bosses you don't even want to viseral because they have wake-up attacks. Your break their poise just to get a chance to heal because they are all programmed with flask counter attacks.

The window for error was already small late game, and with crippling these abilties I think they've just spat on the players who built their characters around these skills. I'd understand a nerf with compromises. Like if they reduced the stomp's attack power only, then find. Frostbite is the important part of that skill anyway, but they didn't. They nerfed the casting time and the damage which is a double whammy and offered nothing in return like a lower FP cost or higher weapon damage.
Hmm, well, we'll see. Wake-up attacks after a poise break are nothing new (fecking Dragonslayer Armour), and neither are focused attacks when you're trying to heal. But I admit those were never very common in past games.

I'll let ya know if my experience changes. But we had similarly differing experiences about Nioh 2 as well: you found it harder than the first, and I found it easier if I remember right.
 
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CriticalGaming

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Hmm, well, we'll see. Wake-up attacks after a poise break are nothing new (fecking Dragonslayer Armour), and neither are focused attacks when you're trying to heal. But I admit those were never very common in past games.

I'll let ya know if my experience changes. But we had similarly differing experiences about Nioh 2 as well: you found it harder than the first, and I found it easier if I remember right.
I think it's definitely harder than the first game, but not by that much. Nioh is hard to compare with because RNG gear can make or break entire sections of gameplay for different people. I still Platinumed Nioh 2 so I played the fuck out of it.

Elden Ring is probably the first hard game i've played where i felt that some stuff is just unfair and it expects too much of the player. Sifu was too hard for me, but I never felt it was unfair, i just couldn't wrap my head around what they wanted me to do in combat with all the different shit in that game.

Though there are people already beating Elden Ring at level 1 with no stats at all so maybe I'm just a shitty player.
 

Silvanus

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I think it's definitely harder than the first game, but not by that much. Nioh is hard to compare with because RNG gear can make or break entire sections of gameplay for different people. I still Platinumed Nioh 2 so I played the fuck out of it.

Elden Ring is probably the first hard game i've played where i felt that some stuff is just unfair and it expects too much of the player. Sifu was too hard for me, but I never felt it was unfair, i just couldn't wrap my head around what they wanted me to do in combat with all the different shit in that game.

Though there are people already beating Elden Ring at level 1 with no stats at all so maybe I'm just a shitty player.
Nah, those people are nuts. It's definitely a hard game. Peeps just have different experiences because of how much these combat systems allow different playing styles.

Also, Nioh 2 platinum club high-five! Collecting all the soul cores was a pain in my ass.
 
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Casual Shinji

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That's fair, although I still honestly blame at very least a short memory for the implication by some that Elden Ring is groundbreaking. That, or maybe gaming is starting to experience the same cycle of new/retro that film and fashion follow, where stuff is just gonna be in vouge for a while and then a blast from the past is considered a welcome change. I think you're right that a big part of the HUD being how it is has to do with showcasing the world and design just on the basis that most elements disappear if you aren't in combat or cycling through your D-pad menu, so it might be more of an artistic choice rather than a UI choice.
I think it's due to the open-world "genre" being generally scoffed at by the more dedicated, hardcore game critics. So whenever an open-world comes along that veers just slightly from the norm it tends to be these people that make a huge deal about it. Granted this is not without reason, but it always comes across rather exaggerated.
 

CriticalGaming

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I think it's due to the open-world "genre" being generally scoffed at by the more dedicated, hardcore game critics. So whenever an open-world comes along that veers just slightly from the norm it tends to be these people that make a huge deal about it. Granted this is not without reason, but it always comes across rather exaggerated.
I couldn't agree more. Eldren Ring is not special in it's open world. And I find it funny that the mere temporary removal of map markers is what has yielded all this praise. That and blind praise for anything Miyazaki makes.