Elden Ring: YOU DIED on a horse

I would call them a poor substitute for spells or incantations, but they can be handy for proc-ing certain kinds of damage/status effects (Rot Pot is a particular favorite)

i fought the draconic tree sentinel with honor by cheesing it with scarlet rot and then running away 3 times

This was me. The way I see it is, in almost every battle the bosses, if not all enemies, have the upper hand. Limitless stamina, stupid hit boxes, crazy moves/powers/weapons, and so on. So I figure if there's anything the game allows me to do to make it easier, that means the developers are OK with that. For example, my aforementioned gargoyle over the cliff. There is a cliff there, *I* can certainly fall off the cliff (and did, often), so why not the gargoyles? They have wings, if the devs didn't want them to fall off the cliff they wouldn't.

Mountaintops, I think the storm dies down if you kill the dragon (which I never did). The invisible bridge, it's a PIA that really requires using those magic glow stones.

I'm not sure I ever crafted anything or used pots or perfumes. I think I did craft some poison darts once or twice, which were useful. Maybe anti poison/rot stuff? I found the places where I was most likely to get rotted or poisoned, it happened so often and so fast that using the boluses was pointless, since I was just going to get rotted/poisoned again. Better to just heal through it and get where I needed to go.

kind of annoyed i can't do the varre quest without having an online membership

do you all feel like the online aspects of this game make it worth a PS+ membership alone? now that you can get the cheap essential membership i'll probably try it out at least for a few months. but i'm not really interested in invading/dueling/etc, at least i don't think i am. but even that brief morning where i could see the messages and had the option to summon help was pretty enticing.

hard to say... i never did PvP but i find the messages feature in souls games when there are a large number of players to be something special

tim rogers said that the message system is a callback to japanese arcades where there would be a clipboard on the cabinets for people to share tips asynchronously. thought that was super cool

I can't imagine playing any of the ds games or elden ring without the online component, it's such a big and funny part of the games to me

thanks, i signed up for it

yeah I don't really play any of the online stuff, but going through these games with the messages, calling for help, and and seeing ghosts of people running around makes the games feel so alive. I'm relatively new to the ds series, but when I played the first one it was during a big 10 year anniversary event that the community had and there was tons of online activity everywhere in the game. Really confusing at first because I didn't know what all the blood stains were, etc, but it gave the games a unique feel.

I'm honestly impressed how well all of these games work in single player mode, though I can always tell I am missing out.

xp agree - I don't invade or duel etc but when I have to play in offline mode it does feel too empty - I miss all the messages and bloodstains and fleeting ghosts.

Apparently the latest patch actually assigns a value to the various Golden Runes etc. I would have liked that at the time, to know how much each was worth.

That’s easy - they’re worth some, many, a great, and a great many!

Ive used pots a bit. Best use for pots and warming stones is to have them loaded for use when you summon your mimic tear, because they will also use them, and they seem to have unlimited supplies (i havent checked this but it seems so?)

Was VERY helpful fighting Morgott, my tear mans kept popping down warming stones so he would self heal.

And those Redmane Fire pots are great, they have a really massive firebomb kick.

I finished collecting all the crystal tears just for the craic today.. looking forward to NG+ while feeling daunted about starting all over again

after about 1000 tries, i finally beat malenia. the winning strat ended up being me and mimic me brutally beating her down with two handed greatswords

the waterfowl dance counter ended up being "hoping she's targeting my mimic"

jordan just watched your malenia fight and holy shit! popping open the inventory menu and using a rune arc! well done, i can barely manage to juggle my dpad slots mid-battle.

my aggro strat involved using the moonlight greatsword projectile to position her against a wall and stun-lock her, so just slightly more finesse than brute forcing it. i ended up going this route because it ended up being the quickest way to get to practice the second phase. spending 5+ minutes carefully whittling her down only to be annihilated by her first attack in phase 2 was not super fun

one thing i did learn is that you can bait her into making a move during the "standoff" periods during phase 1 with the moonlight projectile. she usually counters with the kick which is easily dodged and punishable

having the online options was enough to get me back in the saddle. i ran through varre's quest and the medal he gives you lets you transport to a part of the underworld that has some great rune farming options - lots of easy baddies worth 2.5k each

Thanks dave! Yeah, I still regret using the mimic in phase 2, but similarly it was taking me so long to get a clean phase 1 that I was getting psyched out by phase 2, and wanted to move on with the game. I've seen so many people do it by now that I think I could do it legit -- really the only difference in phase 2 are the added non-waterfowl jump attacks, and circling around behind her to avoid the scarlet rot blasts after she hits the ground. I don't know if I'll ever do another full playthrough though (but I'm still having fun with my low-level invader).

That makes sense about the moonlight blade during her idles, I've seen others use throwing knives etc to get her to make a move. I found that I could walk up to her and get in a quick R1 with the nagakiba (which is both fast and long) and still dodge her counterattack.

Lol, youtube just served me a video of a mod where every enemy and boss has been replaced with Malenia.

part of the underworld that has some great rune farming options

i never had the proper area-of-effect spells to use this place to farm effectively. my mid-game farming spot was the war-dead catacombs where i just let the enemies kill eachother. late game was the elphael area after the prayer room, where i could just backstab every enemy

Fwiw the best farming spot I found was in The Nameless Eternal City, where right by a site of grace is one of those living statues that spits fire. This one is mounted on a felled tree and, oddly, is facing away from you. It can't turn around, it's fixed in place, there are no other enemies, so it's just a sitting target, and if you have the golden scarab equipped it nets you something like 4000 runes a pop. Just go back to the grace and repeat. I kind of assume that's why this enemy is there at all.

the area described at the beginning of this article is where i've been farming - no spells needed. most of the enemies are asleep and don't attack until you attack. the hard part is getting to that area, but once you're there, it's pretty easy to rack up runes.

ahhh ok yeah i found that area after i'd already found the elphael spot where i could rack up 100k runes in 5 minutes

You can also bait a monster chicken in the distance into running off a cliff there, netting you something like 20K runes a pop.

Just started NG+. It's amazing how much gobbledegook I now understand. I feel like I've come back from a foreign language course

I fucking hate how the answer to every good farming spot and/or weapon is "oh you have to complete this end-game vast and complex area first". Whats the point of only having all the good shit once you're basically done?

God help me I'm thinking of buying both volumes of the strategy guide. Never done anything like that as an adult but… I've already spent 150 hours of my life in this world, so it might be nice to have a physical memento of the good times/you died times.

I know... I want them too. Are they really £40 each though?

Albinauric Farm is the one. Equip a golden scarab and you're good. You can get there early/mid game if you know what to do (although it's not exactly obvious what you're meant to do)

xp yeah, fraid so. fwiw the comparable From guides seem to end up going for a lot more 2nd-hand, but I'm not really thinking of it as an investment, just a nice thing to have.

I'd like to know more about what's in them. Would I garner more from them, or are they just reiterating what's on Fextralife? I'd love it if they were a bit more lore based than just game guides

full list of Elden Ring cheat codes or I'm not interested

Up, Down, Left, Right, circle, triangle, square, cross: completes Ranni's questline

I fucking hate how the answer to every good farming spot and/or weapon is "oh you have to complete this end-game vast and complex area first". Whats the point of only having all the good shit once you're basically done?

I totally agree. The whole leveling system, while a huge part of these games, makes experimenting with builds and weapons and stuff pretty fraught. If you find, I dunno, a sword that requires 50 strength and 45 magic to wield, there's no way to even try it out without investing all that time into stats you may not even want or need. Though the fact that so many great farming spots come late (at least via regular game progression) may coincidentally coincides with the slight uptick in difficulty (not that I found the end game enemies *that* much harder than earlier enemies, but when I had not much game left I was definitely more inclined to still farm a bit just to try out a few fresh approaches; like I mentioned, I wish I had gotten rotten breath earlier in the game, it's as OP if not more than even the nerfed Mimic or Horefrost Stomp).

There's a really easy early (like, super early) farming spot involving one of those giant balls that tries to kill you in Caelid. You can hoof it there fast to a nearby grace, avoiding all the bullshit/dogs/birds/dragons, then repeatedly get it to spawn and roll off a cliff for I want to say 2000 runes. That's nothing later, but early on that's a great fast way to level up enough to wield a couple of good weapons you can get early whose stats seems irritatingly out of reach.

Speaking of mimics, did anyone else play this with a slight sense of dread every time they opened a chest?

I dunno. Felt there were reasonable farms all the way through:

- Stonetroll at Stormgate who you can double-back and shoot with an arrow from a vantage point
- Stonetroll field in Limgrave near (I think) Artist's Shack
- Vulgar Militia field in Caelid
- Bird farm
- Albinauric farm

You'll come across these as you progress and level-up, and they'll reap more runes as they go along

i was pretty annoyed when i summoned another player for the first time to help me with the draconic tree sentinel, only to find that doing so prevented either of us from using torrent, which is an essential part of that battle. i did finally end up beating it myself a few tries later though, i guess i did just need to level up a bit more.

going back and reading through my posts on this thread has made me realize that since i am not great at the finesse/timing aspects of combat in this game, my most successful approach has been to make sure i'm slightly overpowered for each boss. like if level 50 is the standard to fight a certain dude, i'm better off waiting until i'm at level 60.

I felt the opposite re: levelling. Fully exploring an area before attempting the hardboss would generally leave me feeling overlevelled with the rune payout. I think I farmed outside the Beast Priest for about five levels on my first playthrough but that was the only incident

Regarding respecs, or trying things out, it had for me the same appeal as perusing baseball stats. I found myself equipping four of my favourite weapons and tweaking my stats with Rennala and eyeballing the damage output— it’s administrative pleasure, but pleasure nonetheless

It’s such a far cry from DS1 (or 3) where you were seriously limited by your decisions and options. You couldn’t respec at all in DS1! those resistance points you wasted are a shame you have to live with

What has amazed me even now with Elden Ring is the realization that pretty much every Ash Of War is useful to a degree, once you understand them. I’m playing strength focus right now (mostly duels and invasions around level 80) and it’s so so fun to be quick swapping to different weapons as is context appropriate

Last night I fought the balcony gargoyle before Shade Godwyn with a halberd and flaming strike and felt for the first time like it was a beautiful dance instead of a boxing match

Mm that was reductive toward boxing. Replace “boxing” with “shoving match”

Unless I misunderstood, to respec you need a larval tear, right? And those are rare. I just googled and apparently there are only 18 of them in the game (don't know if they ever drop), so that right there seems to *discourage* respecing, doesn't it? Why not just make them easier to come by? Likewise, the Ashes of War, there are so many, which is cool, yet to level them all up to try them out would take so much time/runes, right? Or items to +10/+25 your weapons; you are outright severely limited in how many weapons you can max short of playing the game over and over again. Rune arcs, on the other hand, are practically infinite, right? And yet I don't think I used them at all on my playthrough.

I keep thinking that I never farmed, which is mostly true, although I did do invasions as I went and that definitely can rack up some runes. I ended the game at 150.

Being higher level (ie being able to do more damage and also take more hits) just means you spend less time in a boss battle, and can make more mistakes. If you don't do much damage and can die in 1-2 hits, then you really need to know all the boss's moves and how to avoid them. And there's nothing wrong with needing a high mistake threshold! I love that the game accommodates different ways to play (ie low level challenge runs and blasting the boss with spells/spirits/summons).

I fucking hate how the answer to every good farming spot and/or weapon is "oh you have to complete this end-game vast and complex area first". Whats the point of only having all the good shit once you're basically done?

I think all the weapons are actually good! But the really flashy ones and boss weapons are endgame, yeah. Maybe to encourage you to go into new game plus and wreck shop?

Btw it's funny to do invasions and encounter weapon skills you've never seen before, but know how to dodge because they're all boss attacks. Miniature little Malikeths, Radagons, and Elden Beasts running around.

18 respecs is a lot! And if you really want to, you can back up a save and re-download it later.

I do agree about weapon upgrades, it would be so nice if you could downgrade your weapons and get the materials back. They made the Ashes of War so easy to swap around (those don't get levelled up btw), why not everything else.

i need 30 respecs

xpost Whoops, I was thinking of Spirit Ashes.

Between 18 respec opportunities and the very real fact that you can back-up your game and revert after trying out some stuff, I think I have zero complaints about this aspect

I don't know how to backup and revert my game, and tbh, that's more work than I'm willing to do, lol.

but wait...how many times have you respec'd your character?

i haven't reached the endgame level spike bullshit yet but i've been super overleveled since limgrave and i've never intentionally leveled up. combination of doing everything humanly possible in the areas i've been and making use of my golden runes whenever i need to. i would definitely appreciate better early game farming spots if smithing-stone miner's bell bearing 2 and 3 came up earlier in the game though. i've avoided messing around with my build because i don't want to waste smithing stones on weapons i may not like.