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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. 94 OC/95 MC. Is it too hard? Poll.

 

Is the DLC too difficult...

Yes 5 21.74%
 
No 7 30.43%
 
A bit but manageable 8 34.78%
 
No opinion 3 13.04%
 
Total:23
LegitHyperbole said:

Afro definitely doesn't suck and he ended up breaking his phone, lol.

Well here's a Japanese anime bunny girl beating her in under an hour on the first day, by pretty much just doing lunge attacks.

I don't think she considers herself particularly good. But I don't think you need to be.

LegitHyperbole said:
Farsala said:

I beat her today. Quite enjoyable boss. I decided to beat her 1v1. Summons or mimic tear would make it too easy. I am not good at this game at all, so it still took many deaths, but I was having fun each time.

You ARE good at the game though. Simply by beating this boss you've proven you are good at the game and if you beat it solo all the better. 

I would categorize that based on how people approach the game rather than which bosses they beat, since there are so many different ways to go about it.

If someone considers themselves to be good enough, when there may be a lot of things they probably should consider, but don't, then their conclusion will be that it's the game's fault if they are struggling.

Judging the difficulty within a day or two of its release is probably not a good idea considering the many different approaches to the game.

Maybe the tough regular enemies act as a tutorial, signaling to you that you're not properly prepared. That you should re-evaluate your stat distributions. That you should go find Scadutree Fragments, which make a big difference, and there are as many as 50 of them.

That's how I played the original game. I set out to explore, and didn't concern myself with most bosses for a while.

Mummelmann said:

Those bastards clad in red and dual-wielding curved blades are the worst, the whole keep is full of them. A lot of enemies have some real BS-length combos in tight quarters areas, and they often roam around in areas with a bunch of other mobs as well. Damn, I need a break! Attempted Messmer a few times, but grew tired. Phase 1 isn't so bad, his attacks are mostly easy to dodge, especially when you roll into him instead of away from.

I was about to say that you don't even need to roll away from some of his close range attacks. You can just stand right in his face and several of his close range attacks will miss you. But I may be thinking of Rellana.



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It's always fun to see people who refuse to engage with the game's systems and failing because of it only to blame the game. Again.

When the base game came out, so many of the people I used to watch for Souls boss and build content started unironically bitching about Elden Ring being unfair because they found a lot of the bosses to be utter BS...but also refused to use Ashes of War, Spirit summons, help in the Radahn fight, or any of the status effects that are clearly all part of the intended design.

and now I'm seeing people complain how 'unfair' this DLC is because they don't know about or refuse to use Scadutree Fragments and engage with the new mechanics.

"Gamers playing the game wrong and blaming the game for it" is my favourite genre of reactionary content.

To be fair I also prefer to 1v1 all my bosses and don't even use buffs but I'm not bitching at the game for being cheap or badly designed when I fail. This is how I like playing the game, but I think that using all the game's mechanics are AMAZING. IT's also fun when I do that, but I prefer to raw dog it for the first run. The difference between me and the others is that I don't blame the game for not catering to what is essentially a challenge run (Don't use spirit ashes, ashes of war, magic, or summons challenge).

Like, all the bitching about Godskin Duo or other gank fights is so funny. Bro. Summon. spirit ashes. The tools are RIGHT There, they are clearly the intended method. USE THEM if you're so angry about it.

I actually really LOVE that the DLC is basically forcing people to use the Realm of Shadow Blessings so they can't just buff up their build prior to the DLC. I love that it's basically a sequel yet also built upon the base game. I feel it's balanced really well between 'go in with your build' then 'get strong here'.



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Only boss in the souls series I found unfair was Bed of Chaos. Trial and error BS. But the others have always been fair, minus some camera issues. Though the final boss in Elden I thought was bad design. I don't think it has ever taken me more than 8 tries on any boss, including Malenia.



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Chrkeller said:

Only boss in the souls series I found unfair was Bed of Chaos. Trial and error BS. But the others have always been fair, minus some camera issues. Though the final boss in Elden I thought was bad design. I don't think it has ever taken me more than 8 tries on any boss, including Malenia.

How the heck did you struggle with sekiro you seem like a elite player in souls games.



zeldaring said:
Chrkeller said:

Only boss in the souls series I found unfair was Bed of Chaos. Trial and error BS. But the others have always been fair, minus some camera issues. Though the final boss in Elden I thought was bad design. I don't think it has ever taken me more than 8 tries on any boss, including Malenia.

How the heck did you struggle with sekiro you seem like a elite player in souls games.

Sekiro was more rhythm based and that isn't my strong suit.  I hated Sekiro.  Only made it half way, just a bit past Butterfly.



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Chrkeller said:
zeldaring said:

How the heck did you struggle with sekiro you seem like a elite player in souls games.

Sekiro was more rhythm based and that isn't my strong suit.  I hated Sekiro.  Only made it half way, just a bit past Butterfly.

Sad cause it gave me the same feeling as bloodborne which was my first dark souls style game it felt impossible but once you replay it and start getting the hang of it felt amazing what impossible is starting to feel very doable and best story by far in a fromsoftware game. My favorite fromsoftware game easily.



Runa216 said:

I actually really LOVE that the DLC is basically forcing people to use the Realm of Shadow Blessings so they can't just buff up their build prior to the DLC.

Yeah, the way Blessings work essentially prevent people from overpowering themselves in the base game.

People need to remember all the crazy buids from the base games. Fromsoft had to make sure that some of them cant just breeze through the DLC, so a new leveling system separate from the base game makes sense.


I like how Kai Cenat, who is new to the Soulslike series and just started Elden Ring a few weeks ago, was able to beat Messmer and seems to understand the game better than some hardcore Souls players.


"It's a skill issue. I'm ass, and you're ass."
"Why would they take 2 years to make a DLC for you to breeze past in a day or two"?

He has his rage moments. But never stops trying to find solutions.

The sooner people accept that they're not as good as they thought, the sooner they'll start thinking outside their comfort zone and realize that their approach may not be suitable for the DLC.

And if that's not how you want to play, I hear you. It may not be for you then.
But that's not a valid criticism of the game. This roundabout approach to getting stronger was also an option in the original game. You go to dangerous areas with much stronger enemies that you can't comfortably deal with, just to get that powerful weapon or spell in order to get stronger. Etc.

Last edited by Hiku - 2 days ago

I also think people lacks the gaming mechanics. This an RPG, understanding stats and how to correctly use weapons and make use to the vast mount of options this game gives you is part of the game

ER even purposefully gives you a significant amount of Larval Tears for you to respect whenever I see fit or when you think yqou've hit the wall messing up with your stats spread

I think base game is so expansive that it allows you to easily finish on 160-180 level range, at this point almost "anything goes" really, so many people just brute-force their way to final bosses


Souls games are interesting in a sense you can beat the game with either high skill or high understanding of the gaming mechanics. I've done a test: My roommate who never played Souls before but is an avid RPG player. I simple taught him how stats works, how to increase damage output and how to find good weapons and sorceries

He beat the game effortlessly at level 130. Only boss he had problem (died more than 6 times) was Malenia. This was the proof you don't need skill to beat ER, if you understand the game deeply



IcaroRibeiro said:

I also think people lacks the gaming mechanics. This an RPG, understanding stats and how to correctly use weapons and make use to the vast mount of options this game gives you is part of the game

ER even purposefully gives you a significant amount of Larval Tears for you to respect whenever I see fit or when you think yqou've hit the wall messing up with your stats spread

I think base game is so expansive that it allows you to easily finish on 160-180 level range, at this point almost "anything goes" really, so many people just brute-force their way to final bosses


Souls games are interesting in a sense you can beat the game with either high skill or high understanding of the gaming mechanics. I've done a test: My roommate who never played Souls before but is an avid RPG player. I simple taught him how stats works, how to increase damage output and how to find good weapons and sorceries

He beat the game effortlessly at level 130. Only boss he had problem (died more than 6 times) was Malenia. This was the proof you don't need skill to beat ER, if you understand the game deeply

No, they've bypassed the RPG mechanics for this DLC, doesn't work like an RPG in the shadow realms. It works like an old school boomer shooter where the power ups are placed in the level design. And that level design is infuriatingly complex which very much lets the open world aspect that made Elden Ring Great take a back seat, everything is funneled into tunnels which branch out again like JRPG instance map design. It's not technically a bad thing but it's not elden ring but along with tying stat upgrades to exploration is headscratching. Lots of dead ends, lots of places where you'll miss a massive area very easily, lots of checking online to see howbyou get there after failing for half an hour. 

I don't get people minimising the complaints above, the first boss is objectively bad, the Hippo is objectively bad and then spammed again around the map. Mostly fodder enemies scathered endlessly across the map that mean nothing to kill only to have enemies that are mini bosses every other mob group feels like they fucked up somewhere and got the contrast in difficulty wrong. I suppose that is subjective but no, I took 30 tries to beat Rellana and loved it so I'm not afraid of difficulty but I've died dozens of times running through Shadow keep and had no fun at all whether I win or loose. It's not fun. It's not free and tuned right like the base game was. I want to run past enemies whether they are to weak to be bothered to kill or too annoying to deal with and that's a sign of the core games juice being spoiled. 



haxxiy said:

A reminder that one can always use Dragonmaw or Great Hunt to mow down high-damage-dealing human-sized enemies. You can stunlock even Black Knights with those.

Do you mean Giant Hunt? It's really good against human-sized foes. Most of the knight-type enemies are also stunned by jumping heavy attacks, all but the strongest of them. You can pack a decent wallop and the roll back. Right now, the camera is the most annoying thing for me, and I have severe frame drops in certain areas. I've died at least 2-3 times due to unfortunate frame drops; they're not fun in the middle of a boss fight. I've tried tweaking settings in the nvidia control, display settings, my drivers are up to date etc. It seems to be something that some people struggle with, I hope they fix it soon, the base game didn't run all that well either upon release.

Edit; the Scadutree Blessing is a good idea overall, but its execution is a bit lacking. The idea presented by FromSoft in the base game is that the open nature of the world design enables players to bypass or wait with certain challenges to get better gear and more levels. That's a nice idea, but the Fragments don't and can't function in that way since many of them are locked behind story and area progress. Runes can be farmed, whereas Fragments must be found on specific enemies, in certain areas, or as rewards from certain bosses, it's a very different system. I understand the concept, and it works for me, but I could see how it would deter some players from trying the DLC since their strategy and option of "coming back later" doesn't really work here. On the other hand; hearing how many have such issues with taking down Mohg, perhaps they should just stay clear of the DLC as a whole.

Last edited by Mummelmann - 3 days ago