*** Elden Ring ***

^JP^ said:
This was my first souls game and I just finished Journey 2, played with keyboard and mouse from the start as I’m rubbish with a pad.
First play through was mostly dragon incantations and bleed. Which with rot breath made most things that were susceptible a little trivial.
Second journey I went full 80 points in dex, 60 vigor dual keen katana / Hand of Malenia, all the dex attack bleed trinkets and didn’t cast anything. Was a lot more difficult having to get stuck in melee range all the time but could still melt bosses with combo successive attacks.
I’m now level 230 odd and don’t know if I should start a new character or keep going new journey until it gets really difficult.
Want to try a strength or int build to test out some of the weapons and spells I’ve collected but not equipped yet.

What are others doing?
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I started off with strength and using a halberd and then switched to a claymore as soon as I found one. Stuck with that for several hours and then started adding some Int when I found a good staff, and then concentrated primarily on Int and Mind until I could cast some of the more decent spells.

I ended up around Str 40, Int 70. This probably wasn't optimal since I didn't ever actually go back to Str weapons in the end and Dex would have been better for my Moonveil and would also have improved my cast speed a bit. Str did boost my off-hand Meteor Blade somewhat I guess, but as I stuck with dual katanas and magic for the last 70 hours or more it didn't make the most sense. I did upgrade and try out a heavy lance and greatshield combination, which was really good for survivability but not as fun to play.

And that's how I beat the game - dual Int-scaling katanas and spells - but I just could not get the infamous optional boss down with this build. I rebirthed to 50/50 Dex/Arc for that boss, with enough Str to still hold one of the lighter greatshields and mained Rivers of Blood. That turned the tables well enough. Her health bar just melted away when I could get attacks in to the extent I didn't have to worry about the healing through my blocking.

Now undecided what to do for Journey 2: spec back to Str/Int and try a different weapon alongside magic, go to Dex/Int, stick with bleed and RoB, try out Str/Fth. I imagine the playstyles will be different for each.

Sorcery felt cool right throughout, thoughout. I mean, you can throw a moon at enemies! Or conjure giant swords of frost. Or risk the super-slow, super-dangerous but super-damaging lazer of death (which got me killed more often that it killed tbf). But I hear great things about Incantations too, which I never touched.

Or maybe I should hang around in Journey 1 to be summonable by one of my kids, who is currerntly struggling with Godrick.
 
Got all the steam trophies and still playing. I love it (big DS fan though to be fair)
10 out of 10, would forgive that eternal scoundrel Patches again
 
Truth be told, I got a bit bored of this after about 35 hours, so I've not played much the past 2 weeks, but I beat Renalla yesterday, so took the opportunity to respec, which will hopefully make things a bit more interesting. I started as a Samurai and almost exclusively used an Uchigatana+13, which has comfortably carried me till now, but I gave myself a few more Int points this time round, so I'll try some magic, and I put the other points into STR, so I'll try warhammers or the Greatsword (I love Berserk). Kinda surprised how high some of the Int spell requirements are.
 
Smeghead said:
Truth be told, I got a bit bored of this after about 35 hours, so I've not played much the past 2 weeks, but I beat Renalla yesterday, so took the opportunity to respec, which will hopefully make things a bit more interesting. I started as a Samurai and almost exclusively used an Uchigatana+13, which has comfortably carried me till now, but I gave myself a few more Int points this time round, so I'll try some magic, and I put the other points into STR, so I'll try warhammers or the Greatsword (I love Berserk). Kinda surprised how high some of the Int spell requirements are.
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I'm at the same point now. I did Renalla and then did a fair bit more exploring, but I'm a little bored at the moment. It's nothing to do with the game, it's totally me. I want to read though some builds guides, go back and respec at some point before continuing as my build is a bit random.
 
Smeghead said:
Truth be told, I got a bit bored of this after about 35 hours, so I've not played much the past 2 weeks, but I beat Renalla yesterday, so took the opportunity to respec, which will hopefully make things a bit more interesting. I started as a Samurai and almost exclusively used an Uchigatana+13, which has comfortably carried me till now, but I gave myself a few more Int points this time round, so I'll try some magic, and I put the other points into STR, so I'll try warhammers or the Greatsword (I love Berserk). Kinda surprised how high some of the Int spell requirements are.
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Some of the spells are super powerful, so high INT requirement is a balancing measure as you have to make sacrifices elsewhere to use them. Most will skimp on Vigor points and rely on damage to keep them alive.
 
I've just found out the game doesn't support cross play between Xbox and pc. Wanting to play with my brother who has a series X and I'm on pc. So I thought I could then just buy it on Xbox and it would use my pc saved game but apparently not as it's not cross save either. Bad crack this.
 
Apex said:
Again. Enjoyable for you. You're saying for yourself it wouldn't be enjoyable, that's why others can't have a different optional mode, that would be enjoyable for them. Weird
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you can pretty much do what you've been asking for with mods, just DONT play online

https://www.nexusmods.com/eldenring/mods/146

there's a bunch more stuff on there you can try as well, starter save files with crazy stats or money, ones with all items already found etc
 
SonicSW20 said:
Some of the spells are super powerful, so high INT requirement is a balancing measure as you have to make sacrifices elsewhere to use them. Most will skimp on Vigor points and rely on damage to keep them alive.
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I am interested which spells people are getting the most mileage out of. I loved the ones I used, but I don't think I had that many in my rotation for very long. 95+% of my casts were one of:

  • Pebble (generally the most damage to FP efficient spell throughout the game, I found, though DPS is quite low)
  • Loretta's bow/mastery (the best long-range option for when nothing else will reach, and decent damage too if you charge it up)
  • Stars of Ruin (great tracking, quickish cast, decent dps. Good to fire off when you're rolling a lot with a fast boss - I finished off Maliketh with a few casts of this whilst frantically back-rolling)
  • Dark Moon (great tracking, good damage, good range, plus a debuff on magic and cold resistance. But a fairly long cast time so you need to be positioned carefully. I opened with this one on lots of bosses where they started a reasonable distance away)
  • Adula's Moonblade (great damage, good poise/stagger damage, decent range, not too long a cast time, also procs frostbite quite quickly. Bread-and-butter for mid-range damage)
  • Rock Sling (good stagger, good tracking that beats enemy evasion, and good for magic-resistant enemies)
  • Meteorite (if you can get underneath a big enemy and channel it, this does great damage and usually procs a stagger too. I used this to obliterate Radahn in three or four casts, and it's great against dragons too: get around their feet after an attack and pummel them with space rocks - then flask and pummel them again just as they're getting back up)
Did I miss using something spectacular? I tried several others, but went back to these old reliables every time. Most other spells felt a bit disappointing to me. Of those, only the Moon has an Int requirement much above 40, I think. I probably slept on some really good other options, tbf.

Of course, special mention has to go to Comet Azur, which can be super powerful, but it's so slow and you're so totally immobile and vulnerable while channeling. To do any significant damage with it you really need the no FP cost physik and plenty of time and a boss that isn't going to just move out of the beam. So that's practically never! I did manage to take off a quarter of Godfrey's health before he jumped out of the way, about a third with Mohg, and I totally deleted the sentinel outside the final CFA room with it. Other than that, I didn't have a huge amount of joy with this one and only memorised it for boss fights to see if I would get a chance to use it (the answer was generally no). I saw some videos of people bascially one-shotting lots of enemies and bosses with this, but I couldn't reproduce their results. I guess they may have gone through multiple failures to get their one impressive take.
 
This game has properly sucked me in. I've racked up 60 hours in the past week, hit level 65 and I've only killed the first 2 bosses! I've gone for a STR build and am using a Banished Knights armour set currently, can anyone point me in the direction of something better?
 
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One spell type attack is massively powerful but a highly obscure technique to use and likely to be nerfed soon.

You need Carian Retaliation on a shield and use Wraith Calling Bell which isn't a spell, but a reusable like calling your ashes. It usually summons a weak wraith but Carrion Retaliation powers it up.

You then quickly Carrion retaliation/parry the wraith with your shield and it will form 3 magic daggers that surround you and cause huge ranged homing damage to enemies when you get in range. So you can load one up and then do all your other normal attacks at the same time too. Though it does use FP it still works well even on my 70 str, only 15 int build, I don't use it much though as is fiddly and melee still just fine. It works on the final boss too as I saw a video of someone beating it using just using that, I even tried it a bit on an attempt but gave up as was better with melee. Even if they do likely nerf its damage, it's still a nifty little trick to pull out.

Been testing out a lot of weapons before going NG+, some have really interesting properties, like Radhan's great sword that I used through much of game, in that it gives you dual wielding in power stance but with a single weapon, something that lets you still use block, which you can't do when normal dual wielding weapons. There's a few weapons with that property, 2 handing them gives dual wielding instead, plus you can still block.

Also with the traditional paired weapons you still get 2 hand block ability as well like claws, etc, but even some of them are single hand only, more designed for off hand use. Got a dragon claw with a massive fire nuke spell special that's only 2.5 weight, really nice to carry around as an extra. Tested crossbows after using them a bit in other Dark Souls games, even with no scaling they're so useful for quick hip firing, especially that multi bolt Guts style crossbow. There's a couple of cannon type weapons too not yet tested.

Even keeping a simple high strength/low faith buffs build like mine there's a massive amount of ways to play just changing weapons within the same build.


El Jimben:

Quick early game tips if you haven't done these already:

Being under 70% weight is more important than any armour so you can dodge quicker. Make sure you're medium weight or less in the stats, it tells you in menu. Can wear whatever armour you think looks cool unless specifically building poise or a damage type defence. Many melee will use as high poise and damage reduction as they can carry while still being medium weight.

Make sure you're upgrading healing flasks, you can check this in grace rest menu.

Choose a weapon you like that scales with your stats. EG: high strength build go for a weapon with at least C str scaling or better, etc (it shows on the weapon description) and upgrade it early as possible, makes it much easier. You can "convert" weapons to suit your stats, but better save that for later.

Also learn to use ashes summons or human summons for help on bosses or hard mobs.
 
PC777 said:
One spell type attack is massively powerful but a highly obscure technique to use and likely to be nerfed soon.

You need Carian Retaliation on a shield and use Wraith Calling Bell which isn't a spell, but a reusable like calling your ashes. It usually summons a weak wraith but Carrion Retaliation powers it up.

You then quickly Carrion retaliation/parry the wraith with your shield and it will form 3 magic daggers that surround you and cause huge ranged homing damage to enemies when you get in range. So you can load one up and then do all your other normal attacks at the same time too. Though it does use FP it still works well even on my 70 str, only 15 int build, I don't use it much though as is fiddly and melee still just fine. It works on the final boss too as I saw a video of someone beating it using just using that, I even tried it a bit on an attempt but gave up as was better with melee. Even if they do likely nerf its damage, it's still a nifty little trick to pull out.
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Ah, there was another similar exploit with a shield ability that I saw, which let you shoot projectiles if you set yourself on fire.

I imagine that like that one it won't be nerfed so much as corrected because it probably isn't supposed to work by self-proc'ing the effect from your own spells. Pretty sure that's how the other exploit was patched.

PC777 said:
El Jimben:

Quick early game tips if you haven't done these already:

Being under 70% weight is more important than any armour so you can dodge quicker. Make sure you're medium weight or less in the stats, it tells you in menu. Can wear whatever armour you think looks cool unless specifically building poise or a damage type defence. Many melee will use as high poise and damage reduction as they can carry while still being medium weight.

Make sure you're upgrading healing flasks, you can check this in grace rest menu.

Choose a weapon you like that scales with your stats. EG: high strength build go for a weapon with at least C str scaling or better, etc (it shows on the weapon description) and upgrade it early as possible, makes it much easier. You can "convert" weapons to suit your stats, but better save that for later.

Also learn to use ashes summons or human summons for help on bosses or hard mobs.
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On top of that I always like to have a ranged option in Souls games, but it seems especially necessary in this one. Either a good bow or a bit of sorcery or some incantations.

Some bosses seem really fast and with long combos and small windows, so I think heavy str weapons might bring their own challenges, though I guess people do manage with them. My game started to feel much more manageable once I added some magic to my arsenal (I still stuck with my claymore for a bit). Meteoric Ore Blade scales reasonably well with Str and is probably the only katana to do so natively. That's a good, fast damage option and I much preferred it to any greatswords once I got it and met the Int requirement (18).
 
I've done a few side quests and my god some of the mid to late sorcery is powerful! Also swapped the Moonveil for the Dark moon greatsword which is epic as usual. I'll probably switch between both though tbh as I do love the Moonveil katana.

Volcano Manor is cool. Most Bloodborne like area I've come across
 
Tried for 2 hours to beat the balefull shadow with a melee build and its got me stumped. I summoned someone to help, we beat it but I dont get the key I need to progress the quest so back to square one.
 
Made some good progress yesterday by beating Godfrey 1 and Morgott, the latter was probably about 10 tries but got there in the end.

I then spent almost 3 hours trying to beat the godskin duo in the spirit caller caves, the feeling when I finally got them was amazing!

I ended up using the carrian retaliation to parry their spells as I just wasn't getting anywhere with pure melee on them. Another tip is they're really susceptible to sleep so make some sleep pots for them.

Just picked up the Rivers of Blood katana as well but need some more Sombre smithing stones to get it maxed. Going to head back and complete Ranni's storyline for now.
 
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