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

[EvilRoy]

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.

I'm kind of 50/50 on the weapon artes. On one hand, yeah its a little dicky to just take away strength from an item in this kind of game, on the other hand, unlike elemental weapons of DS past, weapon artes are really easy to swap around and there's a whole mechanic for re-speccing that, while creepy, effectively keeps you from every being completely stuck as far as build/loadout. Its annoying that the hoarfrost twostep doesn't work as well, but the game is not set up such that you can really go down a path and be completely unable to adjust your approach so I don't think its that egregious.

Seeing if the mimic tear is now useful for me will be interesting this weekend, but so much of my playstyle depends on the type of fast hard hit and retreat strategy that I kind of doubt it.

About 40 hours.

Spoiler

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!

Spoiler

I hate to say it but, I swear in this game you basically don't want to use human summons. Unless you just have a really serious matchup issue where you're a magic-only man and you're going against Rennala who is extremely magic-durable most of the time people are just a liability.

Radahn is the worst example I've found but as you play this kind of thing crops up more and more as bosses get more dangerous and workable strategies thin out. If you summon a human and they don't know exactly what to do they'll get insta-flattened and leave you with an HP buffed enemy. The horse is a way better ally than humans most of the time, and it gets worse and worse as you move forward. You are taking the smart choice here, and a potential skill run for you later would be to try to play against guys like O'Neil with the ball and chain that is a human player trying to tank the rot-splosion.

Maybe as strategies for bosses become more sort of "solved" over time allies will be less useless, but at least for now I really would not bother with people unless you yourself want to beat some runes out of the head of Rennala for some easy levels as a coop summon.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I'm kind of 50/50 on the weapon artes. On one hand, yeah its a little dicky to just take away strength from an item in this kind of game, on the other hand, unlike elemental weapons of DS past, weapon artes are really easy to swap around and there's a whole mechanic for re-speccing that, while creepy, effectively keeps you from every being completely stuck as far as build/loadout. Its annoying that the hoarfrost twostep doesn't work as well, but the game is not set up such that you can really go down a path and be completely unable to adjust your approach so I don't think its that egregious.

This is half true. Weapon Arts on Somber weapons cannot be changed. So if you have a fully leveled somber weapon with hoarfrost you are fucked because that ability cannot be changed.

Yes if you are using a baseline weapon then you're fine you can just swap it to something else though.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

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.

I wonder how well this guy would do with the nerfs now -

Spoiler

Guessing he used a good farming spot.


Anyways, patch notes -

Spoiler

 

[EvilRoy]

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.

Exaggeration is the name of the game these days, maybe always, so I know what you mean. Reading back over release reviews recently I'm starting to wonder if part of the praise came from liking the game but not actually knowing why they liked the game. "The open world is revolutionary!" Well, no, not really, but it does do a bunch of standard stuff really well, and does take a minimalistic approach to non-environment elements, which tends to feel really nice to people who deal with a lot of clutter in their day to day.

 

[Elijin]

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.

They tuned down some spammable skills, and retuned the mimic. They also added some npc QoL markers, fixed scaling on a decent number of weapons and patched up some horrible invader exploits.

Lot of reports are saying the mimic retune is a net buff because of the paired AI touch ups, but it has the words "damaged lowered" in the notes, so wailing incoming.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Guessing he used a good farming spot.

Or he save edited. Getting to over 100 in NG is really really difficult because there just isn't enough shit worth a damn rune wise by then. You're talking something like 80K per level needed.

 

[Casual Shinji]

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.

Well I mean, it's special in that it doesn't follow the trend of what is expected from an open-world game, but when it comes down to it it's really just another Souls world except much wider. Like, you're basically doing the same kind of monster fighting you've always done in these games - the open-world doesn't really add much new to shake up the formula. Even the exploration has always kinda been there in these games, certainly from Dark Souls 1 onward.

It's really the horse mechanics and how fantastic it feels to control within the open-world that's in my opinion the real and only game changer.

And yeah, Miyazaki gets a bit too much blind adoration. I get the appeal of these worlds and the crazy, weird creatures that inhabit it, but there's so much obtuse bullshit that any other game would get lambasted over but here it just gets ignored, laughed off as 'well, that's just Souls, right', or worse; treated as integral to its genius. And really, all the game would need to do is explain its mechanics, that's all. It doesn't even tell you how to two-hand or how to use the d-pad quick select. And why? What does this add to the experience to keep the player in the dark concerning regular mechanics?

 

[Brokencontroller]

What does this add to the experience to keep the player in the dark concerning regular mechanics?

No handholding!!!! Reeeeee!

 

[EvilRoy]

This is half true. Weapon Arts on Somber weapons cannot be changed. So if you have a fully leveled somber weapon with hoarfrost you are fucked because that ability cannot be changed.

Yes if you are using a baseline weapon then you're fine you can just swap it to something else though.

I didn't realize that limitation existed for Somber weapons, although I've always personally considered that style of weapon in this and previous From games to be a bit of a gamble. Its hard to know how a special weapon is gonna shake out longterm before the wiki editors spec it out for everyone.

Or he save edited. Getting to over 100 in NG is really really difficult because there just isn't enough shit worth a damn rune wise by then. You're talking something like 80K per level needed.

I'm sitting at 93 right now, with about 70 hours, so I think its doable. My level involved a reasonable extent of farming (I can kill Rennala in someone elses game inside a couple minutes now, there are some people who used my summon sign for coop who probably think I'm a crazy person), but there are other things you can do long-term that really help. The big one was obsessively riding my horse over glowing skulls. 200 runes each sucks until you sell several hundred at once. As of something like level 75 I was getting a maximum of one or two levels per boss and none in between which is really annoying but the enormous number of field bosses, golden rune drops, and going to literal Hell mitigated the high cost of levels significantly.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I'm sitting at 93 right now, with about 70 hours, so I think its doable

Runewise you are not even half way to where that guy is at 151. It took you 70 hours to get to 93 but you probably didn't grind that much to get there you couldn't have because your save file only has 70 hours on it.

93 isn't even really hard come end-game though I beat the game at level 101 and i grinded really hard at the begining to try and offset my initial frustrations. Plus I needed to get to level 50ish ASAP in order to get Moonveil early in my playthrough.

Now that i think about it though, helping other's with bosses especially mid-late bosses, you could probably farm a lot of runes fairly quickly so long as you were good at the fights and your host wasn't terrible.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I have been watching a few speedrunners today talking about the Hoarfrost Stomp nerf specifically because that was the speedrunning meta. The damage has been reduced by 50% and the animation for the stomp has been doubled. All the speedrunners agree that basically they should have just deleted the ability from the game entirely because it's utterly useless now, even if you aren't speedrunning the stomp just does nothing anymore.

The nerf to the Sword of Night and Flame is also so bad that the weapon is now useless.

Moonveil's nerf is not terrible because the damage nerf is posture mostly. However this has hurt the utility of Moonveil and you are better off using almost any other katana or better bleed weapon in the game now.

Mimic Tear is not used by speedrunners so they didn't really comment. Though the concensus is that Mimic Tear is fine, because the improvement to the AI makes up for the damage nerf. It's a much more consistant summon so this change is fine.

I'm so glad I beat the game before this patch because honestly if this hit while i was struggling with end game i would have quit flat out.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Well I mean, it's special in that it doesn't follow the trend of what is expected from an open-world game, but when it comes down to it it's really just another Souls world except much wider. Like, you're basically doing the same kind of monster fighting you've always done in these games - the open-world doesn't really add much new to shake up the formula. Even the exploration has always kinda been there in these games, certainly from Dark Souls 1 onward.

It's really the horse mechanics and how fantastic it feels to control within the open-world that's in my opinion the real and only game changer.

And yeah, Miyazaki gets a bit too much blind adoration. I get the appeal of these worlds and the crazy, weird creatures that inhabit it, but there's so much obtuse bullshit that any other game would get lambasted over but here it just gets ignored, laughed off as 'well, that's just Souls, right', or worse; treated as integral to its genius. And really, all the game would need to do is explain its mechanics, that's all. It doesn't even tell you how to two-hand or how to use the d-pad quick select. And why? What does this add to the experience to keep the player in the dark concerning regular mechanics?

In the Inventory menu hit L1 once and there is an information section that details a bunch of stuff. I didn’t go through it all but it kinda acts as a tutorial reference I guess.

Also this might be worth checking out -

 

[Brokencontroller]

I have been watching a few speedrunners today talking about the Hoarfrost Stomp nerf specifically because that was the speedrunning meta. The damage has been reduced by 50% and the animation for the stomp has been doubled. All the speedrunners agree that basically they should have just deleted the ability from the game entirely because it's utterly useless now, even if you aren't speedrunning the stomp just does nothing anymore.

The nerf to the Sword of Night and Flame is also so bad that the weapon is now useless.

Moonveil's nerf is not terrible because the damage nerf is posture mostly. However this has hurt the utility of Moonveil and you are better off using almost any other katana or better bleed weapon in the game now.

Mimic Tear is not used by speedrunners so they didn't really comment. Though the concensus is that Mimic Tear is fine, because the improvement to the AI makes up for the damage nerf. It's a much more consistant summon so this change is fine.

I'm so glad I beat the game before this patch because honestly if this hit while i was struggling with end game i would have quit flat out.

It seems the new meta has shifted to arcane weapons because now that the fixed arcame scaling on them, they are turning out to be crazy strong.

There is also an assassin summon who makes mimoc tear look useless. But people have ignore it because of how great mimic tear was.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I didn't realize that limitation existed for Somber weapons, although I've always personally considered that style of weapon in this and previous From games to be a bit of a gamble. Its hard to know how a special weapon is gonna shake out longterm before the wiki editors spec it out for everyone.



I'm sitting at 93 right now, with about 70 hours, so I think its doable. My level involved a reasonable extent of farming (I can kill Rennala in someone elses game inside a couple minutes now, there are some people who used my summon sign for coop who probably think I'm a crazy person), but there are other things you can do long-term that really help. The big one was obsessively riding my horse over glowing skulls. 200 runes each sucks until you sell several hundred at once. As of something like level 75 I was getting a maximum of one or two levels per boss and none in between which is really annoying but the enormous number of field bosses, golden rune drops, and going to literal Hell mitigated the high cost of levels significantly.

I’m going to see if this place still works after the patch now that I beat Godrick. Apparently the location isn’t accessible until a certain quest is triggered from the guy who gives you shit at the beginning in Limgrave.

 

[EvilRoy]

Now that i think about it though, helping other's with bosses especially mid-late bosses, you could probably farm a lot of runes fairly quickly so long as you were good at the fights and your host wasn't terrible.

It seems to be a matter of type-matchup for the most part - as far as I can tell you get about 25% of the runes the host gets, so if there's a boss that gives a fair chunk of runes, say 40 k for Rennala, and you had a fast/easy time beating that particular boss, then it makes a huge amount of sense to just go for it over and over for effectively free runes. I've found a guy worth 180k runes that takes only a few minutes to beat and I can do so consistently so long as the host doesn't rub their face on the boss's hurtbox, so that works out to be 40k per fight, so maybe ten minutes a level for me. That's still not as good as the farm spot in double hell but it works fine and I get to help people get past a boss that I lucked into having an advantage against.

I’m going to see if this place still works after the patch now that I beat Godrick. Apparently the location isn’t available until a certain quest is triggered from the guy who gives you shit at the beginning in Limgrave.

That's what I'm referring to as double hell, you'll understand why if you go there - the video does not do it justice. If Caelid is Hieronymus Boschs' daydream then this place is his nightmare. You can get there in the regular course of the game, but that quest will get you there early. If you decide to do it you'll understand why it may be best left until later game, but if you survive then yes you'll have come to a very good farming location.

 

[CriticalGaming]

It seems to be a matter of type-matchup for the most part - as far as I can tell you get about 25% of the runes the host gets, so if there's a boss that gives a fair chunk of runes, say 40 k for Rennala, and you had a fast/easy time beating that particular boss, then it makes a huge amount of sense to just go for it over and over for effectively free runes. I've found a guy worth 180k runes that takes only a few minutes to beat and I can do so consistently so long as the host doesn't rub their face on the boss's hurtbox, so that works out to be 40k per fight, so maybe ten minutes a level for me. That's still not as good as the farm spot in double hell but it works fine and I get to help people get past a boss that I lucked into having an advantage against.

Id you can beat Malenia, it's worth 480k so helping a host would net over 100k per kill. it's doable but that boss is insanely hard.

 

[Silvanus]

I'm kind of 50/50 on the weapon artes. On one hand, yeah its a little dicky to just take away strength from an item in this kind of game, on the other hand, unlike elemental weapons of DS past, weapon artes are really easy to swap around and there's a whole mechanic for re-speccing that, while creepy, effectively keeps you from every being completely stuck as far as build/loadout. Its annoying that the hoarfrost twostep doesn't work as well, but the game is not set up such that you can really go down a path and be completely unable to adjust your approach so I don't think its that egregious.

Seeing if the mimic tear is now useful for me will be interesting this weekend, but so much of my playstyle depends on the type of fast hard hit and retreat strategy that I kind of doubt it.

Spoiler

I hate to say it but, I swear in this game you basically don't want to use human summons. Unless you just have a really serious matchup issue where you're a magic-only man and you're going against Rennala who is extremely magic-durable most of the time people are just a liability.

Radahn is the worst example I've found but as you play this kind of thing crops up more and more as bosses get more dangerous and workable strategies thin out. If you summon a human and they don't know exactly what to do they'll get insta-flattened and leave you with an HP buffed enemy. The horse is a way better ally than humans most of the time, and it gets worse and worse as you move forward. You are taking the smart choice here, and a potential skill run for you later would be to try to play against guys like O'Neil with the ball and chain that is a human player trying to tank the rot-splosion.

Maybe as strategies for bosses become more sort of "solved" over time allies will be less useless, but at least for now I really would not bother with people unless you yourself want to beat some runes out of the head of Rennala for some easy levels as a coop summon.

Ohhhh, I actually meant the ashes summons, the ones that let you summon a monster or a couple of soldier ghosts or somesuch. I've used them for a few lesser bosses (like Erdtree Avatars or Black Knife Assassins), but not for big dogs like Godrick and Rennala.

Human-wise, I have been co-oping with my flatmate & his brother, but mostly just for exploration.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

@Gordon_4

Thomas the Tank Engine is in Elden Ring now

A new mod keeps the long-running tradition alive.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Dalisclock]

I'm in the high 30's and I think I'm ready to tackle stormveil castle. I've been bumming around exploring and gearing up but I think I've exhausted most of Limgrave and the Weeping Peninsula other then more mini-dungeons and some of the open field bosses. Even did castle Morne. So I'm probably at the place I need to be in order to tackle the castle, and also I don't want to go to caelid yet because that place looks terrifying.

I did Kill an Ent for some shinies though and nearly got murdered when I heard beautiful Italian singing and it turned out to be huge fucking bat monsters. So good times.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I did Kill an Ent for some shinies though and nearly got murdered when I heard beautiful Italian singing and it turned out to be huge fucking bat monsters. So good times.

Those damn Italian bats. Are they gonna kill you or make you a nice spagetti?

Just kidding they gonna kill you.