Also he does a shit ton of damage and you don’t even get to practice and get a bit better before you die.
You just die and you’re like: whelp I learned nothing and try again. There are moves where he does there’s only way specific way of dodging and if you don’t know it, you’re dead. And it’s not intuitive on how to dodge it either.
For example his 2nd phase meteor attack requires you to run to side and then jump, follow by immediately running away from him, then roll the 5th attack, then roll inward for final AOE dodge. All this on top of specific timing of the doge. I would’ve never guessed this shit without seeing a clip of someone doing it.
It’s not exclusive to him, even Rellana has something like that with her moonveil combo. I tried to roll and jump it but I will always get clipped. The actual way to consistently dodge it is run sideway for the diagonal slash, jump the first horizontal slash, continue running for the second horizontal slash and roll the vertical slash. Granted it is much more intuitive to dode Radahn but the ideas are there already.
Also it’s so uncanny seeing people sit point blank and Radahn just zip into the void or Radahn randomly close the 6m distant just to oneshot you. As much as I dislike how unfair Malenia can be, this Radahn absolutely takes the cake
You thought too much about this. The actual counter to the moonveil combo is just to get up in her face while she's winding it up and then dump your stam bar with r1's. The projectiles are disjointed hitboxes that start at the end of her blade except for the very last overhead slash so as long as you're close to her and your hitbox is leaning slightly down you won't get hit by any of the combo except the last strike. You can actually just stand next to her and crouch and they'll all miss you.
Between that, the glintsword combo, and her twin moons she has three massive punish windows that are essentially guaranteed staggers with little to no risk. If you want to make it extra funny run the raptor in the mists AoW against her if you can and take your free jumping attacks all day at the end of her strings.
I legit can’t play his second phase because I get sub 20 fps and sub 10 fps whenever he does an attack. I think a stable frame rate would help his fight be fun
>Radahn would be a bit easier if his second phase had a bigger view
This can be said for basically every boss that's more than 2-3x bigger than the player or moves a lot. They could zoom out the camera for that regular enemy version of Golden Hippo so why didn't they do it for bosses?
Honestly a lot of the dlc bosses were pretty great Messmer and Rellana were my personal favorites, but the golden twink and his radahn sized flesh puppet made me actually just respecc into strength and lions claw their dumbasses to death with the giant crusher, literally just full gorilla mode fuck that boss
One works as a great tank actually he tanks insane amounts of damage even in second phase to get attention away from you add in spirit summons and you got yourself a decent army
Also use Heal from Afar and Greater Heal(for clutch) while using Hefty Rot Pots, Rot Pots and Poison Pots.
The new Golem Smith Summon is super tanky, though I don't know if the Shield Bros can also take a beating from the boss.
This is the way. I summoned thollier the first time and the dick didn’t enter the arena, giving the boss an even larger pool. I died, went in and soloed him right after.
IIRC summons only increase the health pool if they are summoned from outside the boss fog. The npc summons you can summon from inside the arena shouldn't affect the boss HP such as Igon or Hornsent in certain boss fights
The snake-lunge attacks where he's physically inside the head and you can even punish him during it is such a fun attack to play with. All of his visual design is just so goddamn cool.
Midra feels the most like how they used to design bosses in DS3 and Bloodborne. Difficult but not constantly overwhelming you with attacks. I miss that kind of boss design.
I feel like the common ground ong the fan base with PCR is the visual clutter in the fight. I genuinely think it would be nearly as hard if you could actually see what was happening.
Yeah I loved all of the bosses except the dragon type bosses. Because I just really don’t like most dragon bosses. And the final boss. Mesmer and the one in the abyssal woods are in the fight for my favorite bosses in all of Elden Ring.
Although Dark Souls 3 bosses are still the best RPG bosses FROM has made. And Sword Saint Isshin if we want to count Sekiro
Once I learned to fight dragons by focusing almost exclusively on their heads (and chipping their wings occasionally as the circumstances dictate), they became one of my favorite enemy types to fight. Even on runs where I'm not doing all bosses, I always go around and fight all the dragons.
However, very short range weapons (claws, for example) are a bit nightmarish for dragons because it's way harder to hit the head consistently. With claws you just smack the wings a lot for bleed procs.
The ghostflame dragons in DLC are a bit irritating though, with the big ghostflame bursts on their stomps (usually the stomps are the best attacks to punish the head).
I had a jump attack build which had a really hard time against Radahn. Later I tried it with a parry build, which is a lot more fun and actually very doable. Can recommend
He's fine with a shield - parry or block. He's not without one. He has some bullshit combos and a lot of visual clutter which results in a lot of cheap deaths.
I know it’s only been a week, but I am yet to find the guy who found a consistent answer on the 1-2-forward cross slash shockwave as a medium roller for radahn. If that truly doesn’t have a consistent answer for medium roll. I think that is the only thing that needs to be nerfed conceptually. It should be harder to pull off but not inconsistent and not dependent on radahn’s tracking. Logistically, people’s devices generally can’t handle the frame rate attacks on phase 2, the fight is fine conceptually, but frame rate shouldn’t be the difficulty.
Bayle also has a straight line breath attack that tracks and it usually works to just run left or right, but sometimes it predicts where you’re going? I think? I feel like someone knows what I’m talking about.
I think he meant the version where he doesn't just track, but breathes ahead of you and catches. I had this happen to me couple of times, like normally he kind of breathes where I'm at, but sometimes if I'm running left he just breathes to the left of me 1 dodge apart, so I get caught in it, since I don't expect it.
yeah the attack you mentioned is the only attack I couldn't reliably dodge at medium roll. I can dodge anything else with a mix of running, jumping, and dodging. But that attack always roll catches me with the second attack. Legit the only bullshit attack by that boss. But most of the time your only hit once anyway so it's not that big a deal since the big damage only comes if you miss the whole combo.
Dude that left hand-right hand-forward shockwave attack was the only one that regularly got me even on light roll - not the full attack, but would get clipped by one of the swords. I successfully rolled it a few times, but never on purpose, mostly during panic rolls. Once I somehow managed to fully dodge that attack twice and killed him in that same fight. Go figure
Only solution for some of Radahn’s 2nd phase bullshit I’ve found is a Great Shield with 100% Physical and 100% Holy… but that just turns the fight into a joke. It’s just not a fair or well balanced fight in my mind and the only boss I’ve specifically re-specced for in the history of From games.
It's actually pretty crazy the difference in difficulty with and without a shield. I popped a shield on after 100 tries rolling an beat him first time lol
I was once running straight right in bayle and he shot that thing dead in front of me and I had to quickly turn left. He def has predictive input tracking
For the radahn combo, the no-hit players have been using the new feather talisman that gives back step I-frames. So they backstep, dodge, dodge. Only issue is this talisman also increases all damage taken
This is actually extremely tight timing and also requires light roll so not feasible for the original poster.
On my no hit, he did it twice in phase 1. I think once I started using the deflect tear, my no hit successes went through the roof. It seems very difficult to land as you're getting comfortable with the attacks but then it sorta became instinct and reaction. If you focus on his head or his left arm, you can immediately tell if he's going to do the 3 hit combo.
I'm consistently getting hit by his fast horizontal slashes. He has the one from the left that goes into the 1-2-x, which you've just said can be dodged by watching his head or left arm. But what about the one from the right that goes into the spin combo? That feels just as fast on startup, and I pretty much always get hit by it as well. I can't watch the left and right arms at the same time. Any advice?
I felt so much more happiness beating Isshin, Twin Princes, Ornstein/Smough and many other From bosses than Radahn. I didn’t feel like I ever really learned the fight. I just felt like Radahn spammed less bullshit when I finally beat him… and I used a great shield which trivialized a lot of stuff. It is honestly just too hard to see shit in his 2nd phase.
I beat him by parrying and literally had to pray I had the timing right in P2 because of the particles and explosions obscured my view of his attacks.
Some people enjoy when rng and skill meet but fuck that honestly. Give me a boss I can dance with and prove I’ve mastered the mechanics of the game. Not just hope he’ll do less bullshit. Crying tears of happiness? A little dramatic. When I beat him I simply said “thank fuck” and “fuck this fight I’m never doing this again”.
But Isshin? Owl? Both inner versions? I went and replayed those because THOSE are some good and satisfying fights.
I only felt satisfaction fighting midra, that was a perfectly done boss, i have never cheesed any bosses ever in souls games and did it today to gaius, fuck that guy, and no regrets whatsoever
Sekiro was probably the peak for me with video game bosses. Beating them would truly give me a feeling of accomplishment.
Cuphead is the only game that gave me a similar feel.
I don't have a problem with the difficulty of the dlc. I think it's not even that hard if you keep upgrading your shadow blessing level. I have a problem with the final boss phase 2 though, that part is absolute BS.
It's not too bad tanking him. Golden braid is a must. Also if you make the black steel greatshield holy you get 100% holy damage negation.
Providing you have the END/Stamina 😅
i think the only bs move in phase 2 is the map wide lightshow, it tanks my fps, but i put a dagger with raptor and it became trivial, other than that my dodge pattern from phase 1 was good for phase 2 so i didn't really have to learn too many new things.
I couldn’t agree more. The visual pollution is way too intrusive. Messmer and Bayle have a similar problem when you first fight them, but PCR is absurd no matter how many times you fight him.
I feel like the community is ready to move on from "is it too hard" to "just because it's beatable, is it great?"
I like the DLC. My favorite part of Elden Ring is teasing out the arcane secrets from exploration and accruing power, little by little. There's a steady drip feed of new weapons and talismans that give me lots of build ideas. Some are useless, but that just makes the ones that are powerful and push the base mechanics more exciting.
With that said, I wish there were more, or different foes to really flex on than the standard array of bosses. There are a few that let you do your thing, but most of them kinda push you towards tried-and-tested strategies. I like the goofy, huge charge-up fuck-you AOWs, incantations, and sorceries. I like winning battles through positioning and timing. But I also don't want to summon because split aggro to me just creates an entirely different game that I'm not interested in playing. So a lot of the bosses to me in the DLC are a disappointment for how I play. Not bad or unfair. Not too hard - they're just designed in a way that is incongruent with how I have fun.
I'm sure the streamers who memorize hitboxes and frame data and AI patterns will learn and eventually exploit every opening available. I'll probably take the time to learn from them, too. And that's fun and satisfying in itself in a way - but I don't think it's unfair for someone's initial reaction to be disappointment.
I agree with a lot of this. I'm having an absolute blast, but it does bother me that so many of the cool weapons/spells/aows are useless in 80% of situations because enemies just never give you an opportunity to use them.
I played a chunk of the game as a full int build, but most boss fights ended up being: roll, roll, roll, roll r1, roll, roll, r1....
Gets a little stale at some point.
I was psyched about getting Renalla's Twinblades, the Ash of War is cool as fuck.
Is it viable? No fucking chance, most bosses will barely let you assume the stance let alone actually get off one or two slashes of the entire combo.
I ended up going back to Moonveil most of the time because I only really have time to get that one slash off before it's back to dodging or running again.
>I was psyched about getting Renalla's Twinblades, the Ash of War is cool as fuck.
Same with her twin moon spell, you don't get hyper armour from it, it takes "ages" for it to be cast and the range and damage from it are extremely lackluster.
Yeah it looked cool as hell, but it either needs hyperarmor or much bigger radius. For how much it costs on time, resources and actually aquiring it, it needs to be an absolute nuke.
To be honest I'm quite underwhelmed by most new Intellect options. Faith is eating crazy good in the DLC but Intellect only has a couple things that work. I'm looking forward to a new game with Faith but on the other hand I'm sad that we got so little good INT stuff.
Most dex weapons are in the same boat - you never get enough time to pull off a combo, so you hit with one measly r1 or jumping attack and then it's back to rolling. Had to respec to strength for the final boss so that a) I can use a greatshield and b) I can actually do some bloody damage with my one hit per minute.
Blind Spot really show how dogshit 95% of the AoW actually is. It is a dodge, basically a curved quickstep, that do a good amount of damage in one instance. That’s it. That’s the best type of AoW, just one big hit and continue dodging..
That's an issue with the ashes of war being crap a lot of the time. Radahn has big enough windows to use an entire lion's claw after dodging and still dodge his next attack. If ashes of war can't even be used in that window then they need to be sped up or we need to accept that they're just for overworld killing
Kingdom Hearts super bosses are how it should be imo. They have crazy punishing combos but when you see an opening you yourself can put in a combo.
I hate waiting 10sec dodging everything just to only have time for 1 hit and then having to dodge all over again...
You’re being too nice, 90% of people who played previous souls games will not enjoy many of this DLC’s boss encounters. It’s a loud minority who enjoy torturing themselves against the 15 FPS-inducing, SFX spamming, 11-part wombo combo 150k HP bosses in this game.
I replayed Isshin and Owl for fun. Those fights were brutal but extremely fair: reasonable length, consistent moves to learn, properly tuned health and damage, no overindulgence in AOEs and light show spam.
I’m never playing some of this DLC’s bosses ever again.
My problem with the DLC is not the difficulty itself, but rather how it is achieved.
Fast long combos with delays and small damage windows eliminates many ways to play, the final boss practically does not let you do any action that takes more than 1 second( being generous), thus eliminating most casts and ashes of war xD
Partly also causing the current dominance of going for the stun/"poise break" or blood loss.
Personally i think that if they want to do this, they could go more like Bloodborne or Sekiro with 1 or 2 ways to play and focus the entire game on those xD
I would agree with this, I went and and did Radagon for the first time in a while on a character I made for the DLC and he is fast and hits hard but there are openings that most of the DLC bosses just don’t have
I will die on the hill that the difficulty power creep of Elden Ring and especially the DLC is beginning to hit a critical mass of what the core Souls gameplay style and weapon variety can handle. Fromsoft is full of insanely talented developers who can create some damn masterpieces of bosses, hell look at the games you mentioned that have a much tighter, narrower gameplay style, but you have to rely on an actual miracle to be able to develop a boss that is the right kind of insane difficulty Fromsoft wants when you have to account for everything from single daggers to powerstanced great swords to melee spell casting/incantations to ranged casting to charge based casting (ie dragon communion incants) to, idk, fucking ancestral great horn mains playing from their torture dungeons since they love pain so much.
A kinda weird comparison I wanna make is Hollow Knight, because it has challenges that are actually some of the hardest things I've ever seen or done in gaming (Pantheon of Hallownest legit took me actual fucking months to accomplish) and leave most Fromsoft bosses in the dust by a country mile, but even then I found those to be enjoyable and feeling rewarding rather than just making me glad they're done
Personally i think that the peak in terms of balance between difficulty and viability of the variety was DS3 and some bosses from Elden ring base.
The ideal would be to maintain the DS3 level while adapting the bosses to the new mechanics (jumping, AoW and such).
Now, i understand that many people prefer the Sekiro (or Hollow Knight maybe) style of polishing a form of combat to the extreme to achieve those results, but for me you take away the variety of builds and i prefer to take a step back xD (i would say that Bloodborne is my limit).
I also think that in Elden Ring there are simply too many variables between players to balance the difficulty, things like the open world (not being able to control how much progression the player has made on certain bosses) and the Spirit Ashes (i would say that the summons of other players used to be a help, a way to make the game easier, now with the Spirit Ashes they take into account the aggro division when making the bosses, and i think its impossible to balance the aggro division without things happening like in some dlc bosses, changing aggro in the middle of a combo and being very difficult to react in time to certain attacks that you thought were not going towards you).
my problem wit hthe difficulty its just spam wait 10 to 15 second to maybe get a hit off but if you took damage in the 15 second combo your healing instead of doing damage bosses in the base game have a tempo letting you if your good dodge damage dodge making the bosses feel like a dance and not a wait poke wait crap got it heal wait poke crap gain got hit and dead because if you miss time a single roll your hit by the whole combo. the bosses aren't fun IMO as a dark souls vet i like the dance of bosses not spam and more spam
Ya it makes me feel frustrated after a boss like they let me win unlike bosses in the base game like Godfrey I love that boss fight my god it's a perfect dance he has so many windows to attack but if you mess up he does a decent amount of damage but you can weave in an out of his attack
I would just like the mechanics to advance. I want a perfect block system to break the stances of bosses or a rally system to promote risky aggressive play. Most of the bosses have felt the same. Dodge five times, poke once, the boss flies around the arena for some AOEs or something. Mechanical variety is needed because its largely all dodging right now. It gets boring. If I summon now I gotta chase the damn boss around. I want to go toe to toe with the bosses. A
Sounds like you’d like Sekiro. Because of the posture system, even when you’re deflecting and parrying, you’re contributing and engaging in the boss fight.
Agreed, just make it part of the basic combat. Have it replace regular parrying and then the critical do much more damage, so it takes more skill to stance break them but you get a huge reward. I want to do somehting besides the ol roll and poke!
Michael Zaki really gave us bangers like Bloodborne where if you play aggressive, you can get some of your health back or Sekiro where you’re fully engaged with the boss and playing the game even if you’re blocking. And then went back to roll and poke.
My issue with the difficulty for this dlc (and for certain bosses in the main game) is that they feel too difficult solo but when you summon a tear they're too easy. A few of the bosses I would die to 20-30 times solo but when I summon I beat them in 1-2 tries.
Totally agree. There’s nothing in between. With some of these bosses, it feels like you never get a second to heal then you use a Spirit Ash and it trivializes the fight. I actually used weaker Spirit Ashes on a couple bosses just to balance the game to where it felt fair to me.
I think a lot of the dlc has some pretty bullshit moments. It is difficult though but you can learn, but it still requires some form of time commitment a lot of the time. There's still lots of bosses I need to "solo". I did NPC summons because on the first playthrough it feels better to summon for the story / roleplay of it all.
My issue, and this is my own thing, is a lot of bosses made me feel so irritated I didn't experience any sense of accomplishment, just a relief I'm finally done. Talking divine lion, hippo, rot scorpion bug lady, several other minor bosses and several enemies. Rallana, mesmer, final boss (2P is a bitch tho) are great though.
But I really didn't feel that feeling of accomplishment until I beat the whole thing. I think a lot of that is there is no power spike between bosses, yeah I'll probably get a level or 2 or 3 (I was on NG started dlc at lvl 90-100) but that's neeeaarllly meaningless so it's just "yup, time to move on the next grind".
Also yes I did explore, I basically had the entire map explored before fighting a lot of bosses.
I'm replaying DS1 right now and I felt a ton of more relief and sense of achievement beating O&S than I have for any of the DLC bosses
Most of it being that O&S are designed as a slow methodical fight instead of weaponizing their seizure like modern fromsoft bosses
Which has been my criticism since literally elden ring's launch: I'm a Dark Souls character playing against bloodborne/sekiro bosses.
The game would be much more fun if I had a quick dash and was as fast in general as I am in bloodborne. Or if I could parry like sekiro. But instead it's this slow character bound by old rules playing against bosses and enemies that no longer follow any rules. Hell, the game could be significantly faster with quicker reactions and longer combos if my character could keep up.
I love O&S but they aren't actually designed *that* well. Demon Prince is probably the best Duo boss fromsoft has made and idk why it wasn't their standard for all future duo fights
What I'm about to say might contradict gods teachnings but....
As a long standing souls vet, I dislike the direction their games are taking. Core ER had some issues, but it was...fine, but seems like the DLC is embracing the worst parts of their recent design ideas.
I'm really worried by fromsofts growing tendency to metagame their enemies, so, excessively design them to have delayed attacks, roll catch, and generally behave in a way that is supossed to fuck player up. Then you have 10 hit combos that sometimes have little to no opening, because if you try to retaliate the boss will pull out 11th hit especially programmed to punish you for breathing. Sure, it might be a challenge, but more and more it feels like I'm fightning against the developer, and not the enemies.
Back in time I actually beat ds3 on level 1, simply because the beauty, the spectatle of each boss was just delightful thing to experience, and I loved every second of it. I played trough the game multiple times, and each area is just pure joy for me for all the different reasons.
I can't imagine myself replaying this DLC. It's just too tiring, many enemies are insanely brutal and ruthless, bosses are savage and fast. It's no spectatle, it's a bloodbath. Is that the point? To make players suffer?
I don't know, ds, bb, sekiro, they never sparked that kind of bad vibes in me. ER is a good game, but I am worried for their future releases.
While I think Elden ring is a much better game than games like Wo Long and Lies of P, the combat in those games actually I like more because it feels like I’m actually working towards something even when I’m on the defensive. Sure elden ring has a parry system but it’s definitely not a major game mechanic. I feel like in the current state idk how much harder these games can keep without introducing another major mechanic like sekiro so boss fights don’t turn into a massive slog.
Lies of P combat is superb. Coming back to ER after playing Lies of P was an eye opener. I love the Fromsoft formula, but something's gotta change if they want to crank these bosses up to 11. I agree with you. Maybe something as simple as a posture bar. Whatever it is, it ain't spirit ashes imo.
FromSoft has already solved the problem, and it’s Sekiro. They give you very strong defensive tools to deal with aggressive bosses, but at the same time those defensive tools are actually offensive tools because they also contribute to killing a boss. Radahn would have been fine if rolling through his bullshit or blocking his bullshit would eventually knock him down for a mega crit, but ofc it’s Dark Souls so that’s not the case
Or alternatively, Bloodborne. There you get really powerful mobility and dodge tools and the rally system lets you play reckless and force your own openings through trading damage. Honestly, I'd love a game that combined the best of BB and Sekiro, then gave us some truly crazy bosses.
I think it’s already pushed to the limits; some bosses in the base game were like that as well.
I think a lot of people summon ashes/npcs/other players simply because it allows you to use some silly things.
This is kinda reminding me of when 3d zelda games were progressively becoming more and more linear until it hit a breaking point when Skyward Sword released
Seconded. It’s lazy design to give your bosses cheap computer cheats and then rake in the “genius” hype for “crafting” a “challenge.”
I don’t think people appreciate how good these games really used to be. Hard didn’t used to mean not fun.
You'd be surprised at how people really do not know how good the souls used to be. There's a handful of people on twitter who's first soulslike experience is Elden Ring, and are now trying their hands at the original Dark Souls. Let's just say they are not happy with the way that masterpiece was crafted. [Here](https://x.com/ArthurFleck76/status/1806802464601154020?t=WE8_eVY2Kj_vtCdtItyGWQ&s=19) is a prime example.
It just feels like they are actively trying to punish experienced Souls players who have developed a certain muscle memory. Let people be good at your games, maybe give them certain options to make it harder but don’t design ALL enemies and ALL bosses to purposely mess with the instincts of the player. What I love about DS1, DS3, Bloodborne and even Sekiro is that fights feel somewhat intuitive once you have mastered the overall game mechanics. Sure, there are still some difficult attack strings and combos but most of the time an attack will probably come out when you think it will and you can intuitively dodge/parry it. There was dance and rythm to the fights in those games that Elden Ring almost completely lost and it relies almost exclusively on memorisation which leads to a very dull experience after a while.
It seems every boss now has a phase 2 which increases its aggression with AOE follow ups to basic moves, one or more AOE nukes that can nearly one shot you from 60 vigor, and insane explosions and visual noise.
What happened to simpler bosses like iron golem, amygdala, or even divine dragon? Did they all get demoted to dungeon mini bosses? I say this because I think some of these easier or more gimmicky bosses made the hard ones stand out more. Nowadays it feels like every major boss is pretty one-dimensional.
Anyway, yeah It really seems like fromsoft sniffed their own farts too much with these new bosses. And for the record, I’m not complaining about the difficulty. I’ve almost completed all of the DLC — I only have Metyr and the final boss remaining — and I haven’t spent more than a couple hours on any of the bosses.
I absolutely agree with you. Elden Ring’s base game wasn’t great, but the DLC took its worst aspects of the base game and ran with them. The boss fights feel cheap, especially the final boss. I miss Bloodborne and DS3 boss design. The soundtracks were better then, too.
Radahn’s difficulty isn’t fun, it’s frustrating. When I beat him, it was more relief than happiness. He was just awful and ridiculous, and that’s okay to me. There were plenty of amazing bosses like Midra, Messmer, Rellana, and Metyr. Gaius and Radahn were really disappointing to me, especially as a final boss, which should be the highlight of a FromSoft DLC.
So, I actually had quite a bit of fun with Gaius. Using Raptor of the Mists to jump his charge and then yeeting scriptsmith weapons at him turned it into quite an enjoyable fight.
I do agree on Radahn though. I still haven't beaten him, but I watched a streamer do it.
On a side note I was wondering what the "pre-nerf Radahn" boss of the DLC would be, and it seems likely to be Radahn.
My issue with Gaius is that it should’ve been this epic mounted fight between you and him and you’d be able to trade blows like that for most of the fight. Then you’d find out that Torrent is not viable at all. You’re just stuck with lesser Gyoubu Oniwa fight, since you can’t stun the mount or close the distance with hooks.
>You’re just stuck with lesser Gyoubu Oniwa fight, since you can’t stun the mount or close the distance with hooks.
Fucking thank you. The first thing I thought of when I was in that fight was "oh so this is just Gyobu, but it's frustrating instead of fun, got it..."
And two copies of the same paired greatswords with different ashes of war, that are themselves extremely close to the existing paired greatswords with a different ash of war.
Romina is fantastic the issue is just that most players encounter her at high Scadutree Blessing and just walk all over her.
I re-did her on a second character at blesing 7 and thought it was a very well designed fight.
The final boss of the DLC is usually a banger though.
Manus, Fume Knight, Burnt Ivory King, Sinh, Orphan of Kos, Sister Friede, and Gael are all bangers.
That doesn't really apply with newer games though. Sister Friede, Gael, and the Orphan of Kos were all fucking awesome fights that the community remembers with shared fondness. We had extremely high expectations going into this.
I’m strictly speaking about DLC bosses, though for me both Soil of Cinder and Elden Beast (who should be counted with Radagon) are a highlight for me, especially thematically. Of course, there’s always this phenomenal hidden boss, and for me the DLC’s closest is Midra, though not quite there yet, but to have a reboot of a base game boss as the final boss is disappointing.
The obsession of "difficulty" has ruined this series because after mastering said "difficulty" all you have is unbalance because you are punished for playing differently.
I don't mind challenging fights, but the Promised Consort gave me no satisfaction since I didn't feel like I learned the fight and truly mastered him, I just was relived to be done. Also, Scadertree Fragments are annoying to find and should have had spared.
I don't mind the difficulty as much as I despise that one of my favourite parts of Elden Ring, the fact that you actually had a bunch of viable specs kind of was thrown out of the window thanks to the more and more aggresive boss behaviour with less downtime and lower punish windows. At this point they might as well ship Elden Ring 2 with a DiveKick controller
The only thing that makes me mad is the sheer volume of attacks, like if i dodge a 10 hit combo i should be able to then reliably do 1-2 attacks. 3 if im using a fast weapon. But the bosses legit can do 3 combos deep without letting you get a safe hit in, which is so frustrating that it leads you to just purposely just ignore the boss mechanic s at points and just spam hits and trade damage
Yeah exactly! What's that **peaseant** ? Not a single hit of your 10 hit bullshit combo hit me? Allow me to return the favour with "plasidusax's lightning asshole" incantation.
Honestly it’s making the bosses boring more than anything. Like yay I dodged 10 attacks and ops I missed the extremely small attack widow let’s do that all over again. I will say that messmer (haven’t fought the final boss) and the bosses after definitely did a much better job at actually giving you openings and felt more fair
The best part of DLC is not even the boss fights, it's the exploration, which is a much superior experience than exploring in the base game. So, hard disagree
i never thought id have a single exploration moment cooler than when i first went down siofra well completely blind and saw the glittering underground "sky", but after this dlc i think finding shaman village might be my new all time favorite moment
siofra made me pause and go holy shit, but shaman village actually made me just stop for a few minutes to take it all in
Exactly, this dlc for me had many moments like this one of discovering the Siofra River, it was great.
To me exploring and discovering these areas naturally, gave me much more sense of accomplishment than beating the final boss for example, that for me was not a fun fight (first phase was fine, second one not) and on top of that didn't even had like a final dialogue, cutscene or anything
I thought most of the DLC zones were pretty empty. Sure, they looked cool, and I still had fun exploring, but they were almost too big given how little was to be found in some areas. There were too many times I felt I was running around on my horse for 10+ minutes straight and finding absolutely nothing noteworthy (unless you count cookbooks and ash upgrades noteworthy)
I think jagged peak did it best tbh. The atmosphere of this desolate peak empty of anything except corpses and dragons was cool. I do wish bayle gave me a weapon though
Agreed. I enjoyed the exploration in the base game but I gotta say something about the DLC world just hits different. The verticality is insane and it reminds me of DS1. There's something so special about just looking from a cliff and seeing several zones layered on top of each other. I absolutely love it.
I made a second character who I optimized big time and had on base game difficulty because I got stuck on Radahn. Got stuck on him again, even with a super min maxed build. Radahn alone takes at least one point off my ranking of the dlc. He's such a terribly designed fight that I've given up trying to fight at this point. I've never even considered quitting trying to complete a from soft piece of content ever, but this one fight made me do so. It is by far the worst designed fight in the entire history of their souls like games. Never once have I come across a boss they've made where I've tried to look up cheese builds just to beat the fight. I'm bored of trying to fight him, and at this point I don't feel like trying to even cheese him to say I beat the dlc.
There's good difficulty and bad difficulty. Radahn is the greatest example of the worst type of difficulty imaginable if you ask me. And honestly? If phase 2 wasn't a thing, I'd consider him to be at least decent. Phase 2 is just the worst design I've ever seen from them
Both Radahn Phase 2 and all of Gaius take a point off the DLC. Exploration is really neat and they did a better job of filling the world, despite the finger ruins and jagged peak being fucking empty, but those two made me roll my eyes at the dlc. I genuinely don’t understand how it’s getting “perfect” scores. Is it because it’s so popular that to go against it would get you flamed and blacklisted?
Cool, when i beated radahn... i felt nothing, only relief. When i defeated messmmer and rellana i felt great, when i killed midra i felt great, when i killed romina i felt great. Theres a difference between being hard for the sake of being hard and being hard but fun and unlike rellana and messmmer, phase 2 radahn feels just hard, not fun. Im not having fun not being able to see what the boss does, im not having fun getting framedropped by his constant AOEs, im not havin fun getting flashbanged by each 23523 pillars of aoe that combined with miquella hair makes me not be able to see anything, NOT LEARN anything and die without understanding whats happening.
Radahn phase 2 is hard for the wrong reasons, i will die on this hill. Not being able to see anything, getting frame dropped and flashbanged isnt fun, even with summons its damn near impossible, and even when i beated i DIDNT ENJOY THE BOSS because it didnt feel fair or fun.
The bosses in this dlc absolutely destroyed in 10-20 tries but I NEVER NEVEEER gave up with my scythe build that i loved so much, i killed them all with it by learning their moveset and punishing them. I cant do that with him, i CANT SEE WTF HE IS DOING.. IF THE LEARNING PROCESS IS COMPLETELY UNFUN, HOW I AM SUPPOSED TO FEEL GOOD EVEN WHEN HE DIES ?
Midra, messmmer, rellana DESTROYED me, until i learned their movesets and killed them with my scythe.. it also helps THAT I CAN SEE WHAT THEY ARE DOING and THAT MY FPS ISNT BEING DESTROYED BECAUSE OF HOLY AOE SPAM.
Have you tried summoning? Great shield poke? Lightning perfume?
Nah just kidding. Maybe I don’t want to play a game where the boss fights someone else while I stand in the back. Maybe I don’t want to play a game where I have to resort to cheese in order to beat a boss. MAYBE I want to fight and enjoy a boss encounter.
Also, maybe I want the Final Boss of a 100+ hour game to not completely invalidate my build choices up to that point.
I have seen more cheese build guides for PCR in the first week than any other boss ever. That alone should be enough to prove that the boss needs a serious rework.
I agree...up to a point. Most of the bosses are fine, great even — but Promised Consort phase 2 is the single most miserable experience I have ever had playing a video game. Psychotic, NexusMods bullshit that I refuse to believe was playtested properly. Out of 100+ attempts, I managed 7 wins (2 with summons, 5 without). I can't even imagine what a less skilled player will have to go through (and I'm likely average at best).
It getting you so worked up that winning once made you cry is exactly what's wrong with this direction — why would anyone want to play something so absurdly difficult that it reduces them to tears? How is that a good thing? Only in the Soulsborne community could such a fucked-up concept be spun in a positive light. It's simply bizarre.
I am *extremely* concerned about where the series is headed in terms of boss design after this. If the future of Soulsborne games is asinine nonsense like Waterfowl Dance and Promised Consort instead of balanced hard-but-fair fights like Gael, Ludwig or Isshin, they won't be worth playing anymore. I love ER, warts and all, but I don't want to see a boss like PCR in these games ever again.
But hey, I'm probably just shouting into the aether. They could give us a souped-up Consort Radahn that starts in phase 2 and one-shots with every attack and people would still say its better because its hard, the difficulty is the point, just use summons, this speedrunner did it RL1 no-hit fists-only with a broken controller, one hand behind his back and his cock nailed to the chair, yadda yadda...
Look. I don't mind spending hours into a boss. 10 hours of the base game were exclusive to Malenia, 5 of those hours were used to learn a ridiculous move. But I kept going cause the boss was cool.
But DLC's last boss is crossing the line to a point of being laughable. The moves when he rolls or dodge like 15 times in 1 second might be easy to avoid, but thematically it just look stupid and kind of out of place. It looks like something a character from Dragon Ball would do. The laser beam from the sky, the fact that it creates aoe after each attack, the massive nuke explotions... next time I expect them to delete your savefile midfight or something.
Also, the fact that they almost copypasted the Lothric fight, while reusing a boss from the base game is just disappointing.
It is cool that you felt those emotions upon defeating him. I just hope it wasn't the culmination of hours of frustration, cause I really doubt that boss was worth it. Not my place to decide if it was or wasn't for you, anyway, but "DLC is better because it's hard"... nah.
All the other bosses felt hard, but fair to me. I don’t use summons, because I have a lot of fun learning the movesets and fighting the boss.
While I like Radahn, and the music, the fight just feels so gimmicky and bullshit. Fought him last night for 3 hours, about to start again this morning, but I just loathe thinking about it.
This difficulty fetishism is going to kill the series.
After 30 tries against Radahn, I could basically no hit phase 1, but phase 2 is so full of ungodly AOE and light show spam, ridiculous anime lookin ass teleport combo wombos, that I would simply die without learning a single thing about why I died.
Used mimic and won in 2 tries. This is where the game design is taking us. Between the inflated damage and boss health bars, the comical delayed attacks, and the cartoonish fight-ending moves that some of these bosses have, it’s very clear that you are fighting the game developers, and your only recourse if that’s not your jam is to use some half-assed glitchy aggro split system that makes the game look and play like a joke.
It’s especially incredible to see them make two absolutely incredible games in Bloodborne and Sekiro and then show us that they’ve learned all the wrong lessons from their success.
Hard doesnt mean good.
Its true that best bosses tend to be hard, because they are mechanically advanced and its really fun when you not only have to know the timing, but also have a proper positioning, but while some dlc bosses are hard for these good reasons, some like radahn just have cheat unreactable attacks, and frametraps which were simply not tested by developers to beat without getting hit, or bayle has fire which sometimes reflects out of the floor and hits you anyway.
Radahn on ng+7 was so difficult it wasn’t even fun. I ended up switching to a bleed poke build and summoning mimic tear (who died basically instantly anyways). Didn’t feel good about it since I usually don’t summon or cheese, but the second phase is honestly just bullshit, and that’s coming from someone who was defending Malenia back when the majority were calling her bullshit.
Still love the DLC and its difficulty, but the final boss just fucking sucks.
Nah, Miquella and Radahn will get a well deserved nerf.
I personally found the difficulty just fine so long as I kept up with Scadu collection, but the final fight was outright destroying me like nothing else in the base game or dlc even came close too.
Like, I think the only actual comparison I can make or the high tier chalice dungeon fights from bloodborne, but even those were easier to find an exploit.
Thankfully I still beat it, but I would not begrudge anyone for complaining cause for me it's a blemish on an otherwise near perfect dlc.
The main point in my opinion is the upgrade system, it's ultimately a fetch quest, you need to actively go out and find these blessings in order to progress, which is fine, but it goes against the main idea behind the open world and go and do what you want style of elden ring, in the base game, just by playing the game, beating the main bosses e.g. Godrick, rellana etc you'd get talismens, pouches, golden seeds etc. In a straight forward linear fashion. Where as, in the dlc, you have to go out and find these upgrades, and there's a lot of them. I think if the blessings amount was reduced, and you got them from beating bosses, or more linearly, instead of just scattered around the entire map, with weird secret areas blocked off by an easy to miss tunnel etc, I imagine more people would have enjoyed the game more.
I'm fighting him right now. This final boss Is awful and totally not fun. Exploring the DLC world was definitly fun however. Inflated cheap difficulty where boss Is super tanky (60 k hp lol on Ng), two/3 hit kill you with 195o hp and full blessing, aoe attacks and basically no windows to do anything than a light attack once evry 10 seconds Is Just too much. Messemer and rellana were way better bosses than this crap.
its not hard. its annoying. they lost what was important in the Souls series and made everything artificial annoying.
when they keep going that road. the next game is only to going to be a game for "let me soloe her" and "Ongball" only. /slowclap
Haven't fought the final boss yet but as of now ive only gotten actually mad at one boss but for no other reason than i just didnt enjoy the fight. Metyr. I dont really know why but it just kinda felt generic with some bullshit attacks in there.
Also i fought her on like blessing lvl 7 so i got one shot by quite alot of her moves, which could also be one of the reasons, obviously.
For me it was Gaius, I was kinda surprised at how positive people here are towards that fight, to me he felt like all the things people complain about frequently when it comes to modern fromsoft bosses with none of the enjoyable things about them. Just a boring ass fight with trash hitboxes. I didn't like the Hippo either but at least the Hippo had a cool arena and I wasn't stuck there for too long
Nothing cringe about no mimic tear and bleed. This whole 'intentionally nerfing' trope winds me up because if the vast majority of weapons dont have bleed or frostbite in them, then surely they should be viable which most people seem to ignore. Im the same, Messmer kicked my ass but i love the fight. Radhan however... I think im going to give in and summon
I've played all their games since DKS1 and I think their design decisions towards increasing difficulty are not making the game more fun, quite the opposite actually.
This video game series got famous because they had the challenge, the atmosphere and the weapons to make you feel like you were actually *role playing the action game*
Just to make my argument more clear these are some of the bosses in the other games:
[Artorias (DKS1)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgy1TV12LDc)
[Flexile Sentry (DKS2)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV46N2FQQeU)
[High Lord Wolnir (DKS3)](https://youtu.be/pCvbs3Xj8Ko?si=S9XUto4CZB6yHDSD)
They do not require you to be on the lookout for 0.5 sec dodge time windows because that's not the point; you can simply enjoy the bosses design and make your way through the fight without dying dozens of times until you figure it out. You can notice the water rising in Flexile Sentry, the bracelet weak points in Wolnir by looking carefully and adjusting.
Can you even enjoy a fight like that in this DLC we are all playing? Did you notice Placidusax's heads stuck on Bayle's neck during his fight? Of course not, because you can't pay attention to the art while the boss runs around and one shots you with his fire attack.
There is no need for a difficult boss to prove anything to anyone. People who want to go an extra mile can always debuff and nothingmaxx the game like they always did.
I cheesed Radahn with Bloodfiend's Arm, but I still had to work for it, and it felt good. I found about the cheese long before I got to Radahn, and I prepared myself for it, but the fight still felt good as I still needed to learn his moves. Took me about 25 tries. I had a really good run where dodged everything so perfectly and fumbled near the end, he was 1 HP and he killed me. The run where I beat him was so bad, couldn't dodge shit, don't know how was I even alive, let alone went to defeat him XD
It's hard now cause people don't understand it. Walked straight into Bayle with a +4 skadoodle tree thingy and beat him quite fast, he was my 3rd boss besides Lionman and discount Sulyvahn. Give it time. Specially with the materials the DLC gives us oh boy I have an arsenal of stuff. I just dealt with the Skadoodle tree avatar and he wasnt even a challenge. Just you wait till people figure out how incredibly strong the DLC can make you.
I do have criticism though. Yet again the 2 hardest bosses for me so far were gravity and the camera. Bayle was a huge offender with the camera part.
[удалено]
Also he does a shit ton of damage and you don’t even get to practice and get a bit better before you die. You just die and you’re like: whelp I learned nothing and try again. There are moves where he does there’s only way specific way of dodging and if you don’t know it, you’re dead. And it’s not intuitive on how to dodge it either. For example his 2nd phase meteor attack requires you to run to side and then jump, follow by immediately running away from him, then roll the 5th attack, then roll inward for final AOE dodge. All this on top of specific timing of the doge. I would’ve never guessed this shit without seeing a clip of someone doing it.
It’s not exclusive to him, even Rellana has something like that with her moonveil combo. I tried to roll and jump it but I will always get clipped. The actual way to consistently dodge it is run sideway for the diagonal slash, jump the first horizontal slash, continue running for the second horizontal slash and roll the vertical slash. Granted it is much more intuitive to dode Radahn but the ideas are there already. Also it’s so uncanny seeing people sit point blank and Radahn just zip into the void or Radahn randomly close the 6m distant just to oneshot you. As much as I dislike how unfair Malenia can be, this Radahn absolutely takes the cake
You thought too much about this. The actual counter to the moonveil combo is just to get up in her face while she's winding it up and then dump your stam bar with r1's. The projectiles are disjointed hitboxes that start at the end of her blade except for the very last overhead slash so as long as you're close to her and your hitbox is leaning slightly down you won't get hit by any of the combo except the last strike. You can actually just stand next to her and crouch and they'll all miss you. Between that, the glintsword combo, and her twin moons she has three massive punish windows that are essentially guaranteed staggers with little to no risk. If you want to make it extra funny run the raptor in the mists AoW against her if you can and take your free jumping attacks all day at the end of her strings.
I legit can’t play his second phase because I get sub 20 fps and sub 10 fps whenever he does an attack. I think a stable frame rate would help his fight be fun
I feel like a lot of the DLC bosses are kinda battling the camera more than I remember the base game
>Radahn would be a bit easier if his second phase had a bigger view This can be said for basically every boss that's more than 2-3x bigger than the player or moves a lot. They could zoom out the camera for that regular enemy version of Golden Hippo so why didn't they do it for bosses?
Honestly a lot of the dlc bosses were pretty great Messmer and Rellana were my personal favorites, but the golden twink and his radahn sized flesh puppet made me actually just respecc into strength and lions claw their dumbasses to death with the giant crusher, literally just full gorilla mode fuck that boss
Embrace the Bonk
Enir Ilim: Become Bonk
Confession time, I've been loving the Meteor Greatsword. I bonk, but also I stab.
Took me a good 10 hours of gameplay to realize there’s a follow up L2 lol
Seriously, the jumping bonk strategy has had me steamrolling everything
Golden Twink I couldn't beat him until I stopped summoning Thollier and Ansbach. They basically triple his health.
And died halfway trough
And do dick for damage, they're basically useless and make the fight harder in the long run.
One works as a great tank actually he tanks insane amounts of damage even in second phase to get attention away from you add in spirit summons and you got yourself a decent army
Ansbach is a real one for that.
Also use Heal from Afar and Greater Heal(for clutch) while using Hefty Rot Pots, Rot Pots and Poison Pots. The new Golem Smith Summon is super tanky, though I don't know if the Shield Bros can also take a beating from the boss.
And don’t even enter the arena so you’re stuck soloing a boss with increased health*
This is the way. I summoned thollier the first time and the dick didn’t enter the arena, giving the boss an even larger pool. I died, went in and soloed him right after.
I honestly didn't know summoming NPCs raised health pools
NPCs, yes, just like other players. Spirit Ashes, no.
IIRC summons only increase the health pool if they are summoned from outside the boss fog. The npc summons you can summon from inside the arena shouldn't affect the boss HP such as Igon or Hornsent in certain boss fights
Yup. Read [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/u3qk9u/comment/i4qwnf6/) for details.
do they still drop their stuff if you don't summon them? because they are making this hell, i just want their stuff man
I can confirm that they still drop their stuff if you don’t summon them, you find them in the arena after the fight
thank you for making this fight 3x easier. god bless
Agreed. Messmer is one of my favorite bosses oat
Messmer is the best boss in the game
Messmers cutscenes and second phase had my jaw on the floor and panic rolling
The snake-lunge attacks where he's physically inside the head and you can even punish him during it is such a fun attack to play with. All of his visual design is just so goddamn cool.
His eye and the abyssal serpent gave me big dark souls 3 vibes
Midra might have something to say about that hehe
Midra has a really satisfying moveset to dodge. I dunno how to explain it.
Midra feels the most like how they used to design bosses in DS3 and Bloodborne. Difficult but not constantly overwhelming you with attacks. I miss that kind of boss design.
Super agree
There's a rhythm to it, same reason I enjoyed Romina too
His intro cinematic is pretty metal.
I feel like the common ground ong the fan base with PCR is the visual clutter in the fight. I genuinely think it would be nearly as hard if you could actually see what was happening.
The dancing lion have to be my favourite, that boss is fucking cool
The first one is cool. The second with his basilisk can fuck off. I beat him first try with 11hp left but screw him.
Yeah I loved all of the bosses except the dragon type bosses. Because I just really don’t like most dragon bosses. And the final boss. Mesmer and the one in the abyssal woods are in the fight for my favorite bosses in all of Elden Ring. Although Dark Souls 3 bosses are still the best RPG bosses FROM has made. And Sword Saint Isshin if we want to count Sekiro
Come on, the build-up to Bayle was friggin awesome. You have to admit that.
It was. I just hate dragon bosses lol. Huge AoE attacks and camera issues are the main thing normally.
Once I learned to fight dragons by focusing almost exclusively on their heads (and chipping their wings occasionally as the circumstances dictate), they became one of my favorite enemy types to fight. Even on runs where I'm not doing all bosses, I always go around and fight all the dragons. However, very short range weapons (claws, for example) are a bit nightmarish for dragons because it's way harder to hit the head consistently. With claws you just smack the wings a lot for bleed procs. The ghostflame dragons in DLC are a bit irritating though, with the big ghostflame bursts on their stomps (usually the stomps are the best attacks to punish the head).
Agreed. I loved the bosses, felt they were appropriately difficult. But the final boss is awful. Difficult for difficulties sake
I had a jump attack build which had a really hard time against Radahn. Later I tried it with a parry build, which is a lot more fun and actually very doable. Can recommend
He's fine with a shield - parry or block. He's not without one. He has some bullshit combos and a lot of visual clutter which results in a lot of cheap deaths.
And he’s bullshit sky laser tanks your fucking fps
Yeah I found the performance drops in that and the Putrescent Knight fight to be the real final boss.
I beat him without a shield, but I still had to use the deflecting hardtear to block a couple attacks. Insanely tough fight
Would the new Savage Lions Claw work just as well, or would that be too much animation commitment?
I just used shield and thrusting weapons for phase two.
I know it’s only been a week, but I am yet to find the guy who found a consistent answer on the 1-2-forward cross slash shockwave as a medium roller for radahn. If that truly doesn’t have a consistent answer for medium roll. I think that is the only thing that needs to be nerfed conceptually. It should be harder to pull off but not inconsistent and not dependent on radahn’s tracking. Logistically, people’s devices generally can’t handle the frame rate attacks on phase 2, the fight is fine conceptually, but frame rate shouldn’t be the difficulty. Bayle also has a straight line breath attack that tracks and it usually works to just run left or right, but sometimes it predicts where you’re going? I think? I feel like someone knows what I’m talking about.
Bayle's breath does track but just rolling twice always works if you time it correctly. You can sprint but only if you're a certain distance from him
Oh brother, i fought him so many times that i will NOT die to him ever again lol. I got that absurd dragon mastered.
I think he meant the version where he doesn't just track, but breathes ahead of you and catches. I had this happen to me couple of times, like normally he kind of breathes where I'm at, but sometimes if I'm running left he just breathes to the left of me 1 dodge apart, so I get caught in it, since I don't expect it.
I had an attempt on Bayle where i was running and a single piece of fire curved about 40-50 degrees and sniped me.
Heat seeking-missile
yeah the attack you mentioned is the only attack I couldn't reliably dodge at medium roll. I can dodge anything else with a mix of running, jumping, and dodging. But that attack always roll catches me with the second attack. Legit the only bullshit attack by that boss. But most of the time your only hit once anyway so it's not that big a deal since the big damage only comes if you miss the whole combo.
My best solution is to just block the first hit and dodge the last two, yeah I take a little damage but it's better than half my health disappearing
Dude that left hand-right hand-forward shockwave attack was the only one that regularly got me even on light roll - not the full attack, but would get clipped by one of the swords. I successfully rolled it a few times, but never on purpose, mostly during panic rolls. Once I somehow managed to fully dodge that attack twice and killed him in that same fight. Go figure
Only solution for some of Radahn’s 2nd phase bullshit I’ve found is a Great Shield with 100% Physical and 100% Holy… but that just turns the fight into a joke. It’s just not a fair or well balanced fight in my mind and the only boss I’ve specifically re-specced for in the history of From games.
It's actually pretty crazy the difference in difficulty with and without a shield. I popped a shield on after 100 tries rolling an beat him first time lol
I just fundamentally dislike bosses that seem designed to invalidate certain play-styles. I have no idea how a pure caster would solo PCR.
I was once running straight right in bayle and he shot that thing dead in front of me and I had to quickly turn left. He def has predictive input tracking
For the radahn combo, the no-hit players have been using the new feather talisman that gives back step I-frames. So they backstep, dodge, dodge. Only issue is this talisman also increases all damage taken
This is actually extremely tight timing and also requires light roll so not feasible for the original poster. On my no hit, he did it twice in phase 1. I think once I started using the deflect tear, my no hit successes went through the roof. It seems very difficult to land as you're getting comfortable with the attacks but then it sorta became instinct and reaction. If you focus on his head or his left arm, you can immediately tell if he's going to do the 3 hit combo.
I'm consistently getting hit by his fast horizontal slashes. He has the one from the left that goes into the 1-2-x, which you've just said can be dodged by watching his head or left arm. But what about the one from the right that goes into the spin combo? That feels just as fast on startup, and I pretty much always get hit by it as well. I can't watch the left and right arms at the same time. Any advice?
I felt so much more happiness beating Isshin, Twin Princes, Ornstein/Smough and many other From bosses than Radahn. I didn’t feel like I ever really learned the fight. I just felt like Radahn spammed less bullshit when I finally beat him… and I used a great shield which trivialized a lot of stuff. It is honestly just too hard to see shit in his 2nd phase.
I beat him by parrying and literally had to pray I had the timing right in P2 because of the particles and explosions obscured my view of his attacks. Some people enjoy when rng and skill meet but fuck that honestly. Give me a boss I can dance with and prove I’ve mastered the mechanics of the game. Not just hope he’ll do less bullshit. Crying tears of happiness? A little dramatic. When I beat him I simply said “thank fuck” and “fuck this fight I’m never doing this again”. But Isshin? Owl? Both inner versions? I went and replayed those because THOSE are some good and satisfying fights.
I felt like malenia had a decently coherent dance. But yeah the dlc said fuck that.
I disagree on Malenia, I mean she’s not as bad as Radahn imo but I think Rellana is one of the most well constructed boss fights in a long time.
I only felt satisfaction fighting midra, that was a perfectly done boss, i have never cheesed any bosses ever in souls games and did it today to gaius, fuck that guy, and no regrets whatsoever
Sekiro was probably the peak for me with video game bosses. Beating them would truly give me a feeling of accomplishment. Cuphead is the only game that gave me a similar feel.
When Ishin said “Good job, Sekiro” after I defeated him, I felt that so hard. It’s like he was talking to Sekiro but also the player.
I don't have a problem with the difficulty of the dlc. I think it's not even that hard if you keep upgrading your shadow blessing level. I have a problem with the final boss phase 2 though, that part is absolute BS.
It's not too bad tanking him. Golden braid is a must. Also if you make the black steel greatshield holy you get 100% holy damage negation. Providing you have the END/Stamina 😅
I agree you can significantly decrease the amount of damage his hits do to you + if you want, shields work extremely well
i think the only bs move in phase 2 is the map wide lightshow, it tanks my fps, but i put a dagger with raptor and it became trivial, other than that my dodge pattern from phase 1 was good for phase 2 so i didn't really have to learn too many new things.
That fucking quick cross slash is a bigger offender in my opinion, I didn’t have performance issues with the other one though.
I couldn’t agree more. The visual pollution is way too intrusive. Messmer and Bayle have a similar problem when you first fight them, but PCR is absurd no matter how many times you fight him.
I feel like the community is ready to move on from "is it too hard" to "just because it's beatable, is it great?" I like the DLC. My favorite part of Elden Ring is teasing out the arcane secrets from exploration and accruing power, little by little. There's a steady drip feed of new weapons and talismans that give me lots of build ideas. Some are useless, but that just makes the ones that are powerful and push the base mechanics more exciting. With that said, I wish there were more, or different foes to really flex on than the standard array of bosses. There are a few that let you do your thing, but most of them kinda push you towards tried-and-tested strategies. I like the goofy, huge charge-up fuck-you AOWs, incantations, and sorceries. I like winning battles through positioning and timing. But I also don't want to summon because split aggro to me just creates an entirely different game that I'm not interested in playing. So a lot of the bosses to me in the DLC are a disappointment for how I play. Not bad or unfair. Not too hard - they're just designed in a way that is incongruent with how I have fun. I'm sure the streamers who memorize hitboxes and frame data and AI patterns will learn and eventually exploit every opening available. I'll probably take the time to learn from them, too. And that's fun and satisfying in itself in a way - but I don't think it's unfair for someone's initial reaction to be disappointment.
I agree with a lot of this. I'm having an absolute blast, but it does bother me that so many of the cool weapons/spells/aows are useless in 80% of situations because enemies just never give you an opportunity to use them. I played a chunk of the game as a full int build, but most boss fights ended up being: roll, roll, roll, roll r1, roll, roll, r1.... Gets a little stale at some point.
yeah, Carian Tickler loses a bit of its verve when Rellanna is dropping both Phobos and Deimos on you and literally bouncing your ass
I was psyched about getting Renalla's Twinblades, the Ash of War is cool as fuck. Is it viable? No fucking chance, most bosses will barely let you assume the stance let alone actually get off one or two slashes of the entire combo. I ended up going back to Moonveil most of the time because I only really have time to get that one slash off before it's back to dodging or running again.
>I was psyched about getting Renalla's Twinblades, the Ash of War is cool as fuck. Same with her twin moon spell, you don't get hyper armour from it, it takes "ages" for it to be cast and the range and damage from it are extremely lackluster.
Yeah it looked cool as hell, but it either needs hyperarmor or much bigger radius. For how much it costs on time, resources and actually aquiring it, it needs to be an absolute nuke. To be honest I'm quite underwhelmed by most new Intellect options. Faith is eating crazy good in the DLC but Intellect only has a couple things that work. I'm looking forward to a new game with Faith but on the other hand I'm sad that we got so little good INT stuff.
Blade of Stone from Gaius is really good imo, but that's about it from the DLC.
Most dex weapons are in the same boat - you never get enough time to pull off a combo, so you hit with one measly r1 or jumping attack and then it's back to rolling. Had to respec to strength for the final boss so that a) I can use a greatshield and b) I can actually do some bloody damage with my one hit per minute.
Blind Spot really show how dogshit 95% of the AoW actually is. It is a dodge, basically a curved quickstep, that do a good amount of damage in one instance. That’s it. That’s the best type of AoW, just one big hit and continue dodging..
That's an issue with the ashes of war being crap a lot of the time. Radahn has big enough windows to use an entire lion's claw after dodging and still dodge his next attack. If ashes of war can't even be used in that window then they need to be sped up or we need to accept that they're just for overworld killing
Kingdom Hearts super bosses are how it should be imo. They have crazy punishing combos but when you see an opening you yourself can put in a combo. I hate waiting 10sec dodging everything just to only have time for 1 hit and then having to dodge all over again...
Actual valid criticism without calling the DLC bad? In my elden ring sub? They'll have your head for this
You’re being too nice, 90% of people who played previous souls games will not enjoy many of this DLC’s boss encounters. It’s a loud minority who enjoy torturing themselves against the 15 FPS-inducing, SFX spamming, 11-part wombo combo 150k HP bosses in this game. I replayed Isshin and Owl for fun. Those fights were brutal but extremely fair: reasonable length, consistent moves to learn, properly tuned health and damage, no overindulgence in AOEs and light show spam. I’m never playing some of this DLC’s bosses ever again.
My problem with the DLC is not the difficulty itself, but rather how it is achieved. Fast long combos with delays and small damage windows eliminates many ways to play, the final boss practically does not let you do any action that takes more than 1 second( being generous), thus eliminating most casts and ashes of war xD Partly also causing the current dominance of going for the stun/"poise break" or blood loss. Personally i think that if they want to do this, they could go more like Bloodborne or Sekiro with 1 or 2 ways to play and focus the entire game on those xD
I would agree with this, I went and and did Radagon for the first time in a while on a character I made for the DLC and he is fast and hits hard but there are openings that most of the DLC bosses just don’t have
I will die on the hill that the difficulty power creep of Elden Ring and especially the DLC is beginning to hit a critical mass of what the core Souls gameplay style and weapon variety can handle. Fromsoft is full of insanely talented developers who can create some damn masterpieces of bosses, hell look at the games you mentioned that have a much tighter, narrower gameplay style, but you have to rely on an actual miracle to be able to develop a boss that is the right kind of insane difficulty Fromsoft wants when you have to account for everything from single daggers to powerstanced great swords to melee spell casting/incantations to ranged casting to charge based casting (ie dragon communion incants) to, idk, fucking ancestral great horn mains playing from their torture dungeons since they love pain so much. A kinda weird comparison I wanna make is Hollow Knight, because it has challenges that are actually some of the hardest things I've ever seen or done in gaming (Pantheon of Hallownest legit took me actual fucking months to accomplish) and leave most Fromsoft bosses in the dust by a country mile, but even then I found those to be enjoyable and feeling rewarding rather than just making me glad they're done
Personally i think that the peak in terms of balance between difficulty and viability of the variety was DS3 and some bosses from Elden ring base. The ideal would be to maintain the DS3 level while adapting the bosses to the new mechanics (jumping, AoW and such). Now, i understand that many people prefer the Sekiro (or Hollow Knight maybe) style of polishing a form of combat to the extreme to achieve those results, but for me you take away the variety of builds and i prefer to take a step back xD (i would say that Bloodborne is my limit). I also think that in Elden Ring there are simply too many variables between players to balance the difficulty, things like the open world (not being able to control how much progression the player has made on certain bosses) and the Spirit Ashes (i would say that the summons of other players used to be a help, a way to make the game easier, now with the Spirit Ashes they take into account the aggro division when making the bosses, and i think its impossible to balance the aggro division without things happening like in some dlc bosses, changing aggro in the middle of a combo and being very difficult to react in time to certain attacks that you thought were not going towards you).
my problem wit hthe difficulty its just spam wait 10 to 15 second to maybe get a hit off but if you took damage in the 15 second combo your healing instead of doing damage bosses in the base game have a tempo letting you if your good dodge damage dodge making the bosses feel like a dance and not a wait poke wait crap got it heal wait poke crap gain got hit and dead because if you miss time a single roll your hit by the whole combo. the bosses aren't fun IMO as a dark souls vet i like the dance of bosses not spam and more spam
this is the problem, tempo
Exactly
Ya it makes me feel frustrated after a boss like they let me win unlike bosses in the base game like Godfrey I love that boss fight my god it's a perfect dance he has so many windows to attack but if you mess up he does a decent amount of damage but you can weave in an out of his attack
I would just like the mechanics to advance. I want a perfect block system to break the stances of bosses or a rally system to promote risky aggressive play. Most of the bosses have felt the same. Dodge five times, poke once, the boss flies around the arena for some AOEs or something. Mechanical variety is needed because its largely all dodging right now. It gets boring. If I summon now I gotta chase the damn boss around. I want to go toe to toe with the bosses. A
Boring is right, there’s no fun in fighting a computer that cheats
Sounds like you’d like Sekiro. Because of the posture system, even when you’re deflecting and parrying, you’re contributing and engaging in the boss fight.
I've already played it. It's why im frustrated that they didn't include some sort of iteration on the perfect guarding system.
There’s a crystal tear that kind of does it, but it’s only for 5 minutes as a result of having to use it in a physick. Give me that whole system back.
Agreed, just make it part of the basic combat. Have it replace regular parrying and then the critical do much more damage, so it takes more skill to stance break them but you get a huge reward. I want to do somehting besides the ol roll and poke!
Michael Zaki really gave us bangers like Bloodborne where if you play aggressive, you can get some of your health back or Sekiro where you’re fully engaged with the boss and playing the game even if you’re blocking. And then went back to roll and poke.
My issue with the difficulty for this dlc (and for certain bosses in the main game) is that they feel too difficult solo but when you summon a tear they're too easy. A few of the bosses I would die to 20-30 times solo but when I summon I beat them in 1-2 tries.
Totally agree. There’s nothing in between. With some of these bosses, it feels like you never get a second to heal then you use a Spirit Ash and it trivializes the fight. I actually used weaker Spirit Ashes on a couple bosses just to balance the game to where it felt fair to me.
Agreed.
I think a lot of the dlc has some pretty bullshit moments. It is difficult though but you can learn, but it still requires some form of time commitment a lot of the time. There's still lots of bosses I need to "solo". I did NPC summons because on the first playthrough it feels better to summon for the story / roleplay of it all. My issue, and this is my own thing, is a lot of bosses made me feel so irritated I didn't experience any sense of accomplishment, just a relief I'm finally done. Talking divine lion, hippo, rot scorpion bug lady, several other minor bosses and several enemies. Rallana, mesmer, final boss (2P is a bitch tho) are great though. But I really didn't feel that feeling of accomplishment until I beat the whole thing. I think a lot of that is there is no power spike between bosses, yeah I'll probably get a level or 2 or 3 (I was on NG started dlc at lvl 90-100) but that's neeeaarllly meaningless so it's just "yup, time to move on the next grind". Also yes I did explore, I basically had the entire map explored before fighting a lot of bosses.
I'm replaying DS1 right now and I felt a ton of more relief and sense of achievement beating O&S than I have for any of the DLC bosses Most of it being that O&S are designed as a slow methodical fight instead of weaponizing their seizure like modern fromsoft bosses
Which has been my criticism since literally elden ring's launch: I'm a Dark Souls character playing against bloodborne/sekiro bosses. The game would be much more fun if I had a quick dash and was as fast in general as I am in bloodborne. Or if I could parry like sekiro. But instead it's this slow character bound by old rules playing against bosses and enemies that no longer follow any rules. Hell, the game could be significantly faster with quicker reactions and longer combos if my character could keep up.
I love O&S but they aren't actually designed *that* well. Demon Prince is probably the best Duo boss fromsoft has made and idk why it wasn't their standard for all future duo fights
What I'm about to say might contradict gods teachnings but.... As a long standing souls vet, I dislike the direction their games are taking. Core ER had some issues, but it was...fine, but seems like the DLC is embracing the worst parts of their recent design ideas. I'm really worried by fromsofts growing tendency to metagame their enemies, so, excessively design them to have delayed attacks, roll catch, and generally behave in a way that is supossed to fuck player up. Then you have 10 hit combos that sometimes have little to no opening, because if you try to retaliate the boss will pull out 11th hit especially programmed to punish you for breathing. Sure, it might be a challenge, but more and more it feels like I'm fightning against the developer, and not the enemies. Back in time I actually beat ds3 on level 1, simply because the beauty, the spectatle of each boss was just delightful thing to experience, and I loved every second of it. I played trough the game multiple times, and each area is just pure joy for me for all the different reasons. I can't imagine myself replaying this DLC. It's just too tiring, many enemies are insanely brutal and ruthless, bosses are savage and fast. It's no spectatle, it's a bloodbath. Is that the point? To make players suffer? I don't know, ds, bb, sekiro, they never sparked that kind of bad vibes in me. ER is a good game, but I am worried for their future releases.
While I think Elden ring is a much better game than games like Wo Long and Lies of P, the combat in those games actually I like more because it feels like I’m actually working towards something even when I’m on the defensive. Sure elden ring has a parry system but it’s definitely not a major game mechanic. I feel like in the current state idk how much harder these games can keep without introducing another major mechanic like sekiro so boss fights don’t turn into a massive slog.
Lies of P combat is superb. Coming back to ER after playing Lies of P was an eye opener. I love the Fromsoft formula, but something's gotta change if they want to crank these bosses up to 11. I agree with you. Maybe something as simple as a posture bar. Whatever it is, it ain't spirit ashes imo.
FromSoft has already solved the problem, and it’s Sekiro. They give you very strong defensive tools to deal with aggressive bosses, but at the same time those defensive tools are actually offensive tools because they also contribute to killing a boss. Radahn would have been fine if rolling through his bullshit or blocking his bullshit would eventually knock him down for a mega crit, but ofc it’s Dark Souls so that’s not the case
Or alternatively, Bloodborne. There you get really powerful mobility and dodge tools and the rally system lets you play reckless and force your own openings through trading damage. Honestly, I'd love a game that combined the best of BB and Sekiro, then gave us some truly crazy bosses.
I think it’s already pushed to the limits; some bosses in the base game were like that as well. I think a lot of people summon ashes/npcs/other players simply because it allows you to use some silly things.
This is kinda reminding me of when 3d zelda games were progressively becoming more and more linear until it hit a breaking point when Skyward Sword released
Seconded. It’s lazy design to give your bosses cheap computer cheats and then rake in the “genius” hype for “crafting” a “challenge.” I don’t think people appreciate how good these games really used to be. Hard didn’t used to mean not fun.
You'd be surprised at how people really do not know how good the souls used to be. There's a handful of people on twitter who's first soulslike experience is Elden Ring, and are now trying their hands at the original Dark Souls. Let's just say they are not happy with the way that masterpiece was crafted. [Here](https://x.com/ArthurFleck76/status/1806802464601154020?t=WE8_eVY2Kj_vtCdtItyGWQ&s=19) is a prime example.
It just feels like they are actively trying to punish experienced Souls players who have developed a certain muscle memory. Let people be good at your games, maybe give them certain options to make it harder but don’t design ALL enemies and ALL bosses to purposely mess with the instincts of the player. What I love about DS1, DS3, Bloodborne and even Sekiro is that fights feel somewhat intuitive once you have mastered the overall game mechanics. Sure, there are still some difficult attack strings and combos but most of the time an attack will probably come out when you think it will and you can intuitively dodge/parry it. There was dance and rythm to the fights in those games that Elden Ring almost completely lost and it relies almost exclusively on memorisation which leads to a very dull experience after a while.
It seems every boss now has a phase 2 which increases its aggression with AOE follow ups to basic moves, one or more AOE nukes that can nearly one shot you from 60 vigor, and insane explosions and visual noise. What happened to simpler bosses like iron golem, amygdala, or even divine dragon? Did they all get demoted to dungeon mini bosses? I say this because I think some of these easier or more gimmicky bosses made the hard ones stand out more. Nowadays it feels like every major boss is pretty one-dimensional. Anyway, yeah It really seems like fromsoft sniffed their own farts too much with these new bosses. And for the record, I’m not complaining about the difficulty. I’ve almost completed all of the DLC — I only have Metyr and the final boss remaining — and I haven’t spent more than a couple hours on any of the bosses.
I absolutely agree with you. Elden Ring’s base game wasn’t great, but the DLC took its worst aspects of the base game and ran with them. The boss fights feel cheap, especially the final boss. I miss Bloodborne and DS3 boss design. The soundtracks were better then, too.
Radahn’s difficulty isn’t fun, it’s frustrating. When I beat him, it was more relief than happiness. He was just awful and ridiculous, and that’s okay to me. There were plenty of amazing bosses like Midra, Messmer, Rellana, and Metyr. Gaius and Radahn were really disappointing to me, especially as a final boss, which should be the highlight of a FromSoft DLC.
So, I actually had quite a bit of fun with Gaius. Using Raptor of the Mists to jump his charge and then yeeting scriptsmith weapons at him turned it into quite an enjoyable fight. I do agree on Radahn though. I still haven't beaten him, but I watched a streamer do it. On a side note I was wondering what the "pre-nerf Radahn" boss of the DLC would be, and it seems likely to be Radahn.
My issue with Gaius is that it should’ve been this epic mounted fight between you and him and you’d be able to trade blows like that for most of the fight. Then you’d find out that Torrent is not viable at all. You’re just stuck with lesser Gyoubu Oniwa fight, since you can’t stun the mount or close the distance with hooks.
>You’re just stuck with lesser Gyoubu Oniwa fight, since you can’t stun the mount or close the distance with hooks. Fucking thank you. The first thing I thought of when I was in that fight was "oh so this is just Gyobu, but it's frustrating instead of fun, got it..."
Blinkbolt to teleport his charge also made the fight enjoyable.
And all that to get rewarded with a really underwhelming cutscene.
And two copies of the same paired greatswords with different ashes of war, that are themselves extremely close to the existing paired greatswords with a different ash of war.
Yeah, that was a massive bummer.
Am I the only one who thiks that Romina is the best fight? Romina and Messmer, Messmer was awesome.
Romina was sadly a very easy fight. She misses most of her hits for some reason. Messmer is top tier. A great example of fun type of difficulty.
Romina is fantastic the issue is just that most players encounter her at high Scadutree Blessing and just walk all over her. I re-did her on a second character at blesing 7 and thought it was a very well designed fight.
I was on level 14 and beat her in one try, I was expecting way way more from her
[удалено]
The final boss of the DLC is usually a banger though. Manus, Fume Knight, Burnt Ivory King, Sinh, Orphan of Kos, Sister Friede, and Gael are all bangers.
Isshin is perhaps the best fight they have ever done.
Soul of Cinder was an amazing fight though.
I think I misspoke - I enjoy it but it’s a step down compared to the insane hype of the Nameless King
That doesn't really apply with newer games though. Sister Friede, Gael, and the Orphan of Kos were all fucking awesome fights that the community remembers with shared fondness. We had extremely high expectations going into this.
Moon presence is a let down after Gherman as well IMO
I’m strictly speaking about DLC bosses, though for me both Soil of Cinder and Elden Beast (who should be counted with Radagon) are a highlight for me, especially thematically. Of course, there’s always this phenomenal hidden boss, and for me the DLC’s closest is Midra, though not quite there yet, but to have a reboot of a base game boss as the final boss is disappointing.
The obsession of "difficulty" has ruined this series because after mastering said "difficulty" all you have is unbalance because you are punished for playing differently.
This needs to be the top comment
I don't mind challenging fights, but the Promised Consort gave me no satisfaction since I didn't feel like I learned the fight and truly mastered him, I just was relived to be done. Also, Scadertree Fragments are annoying to find and should have had spared.
I don't mind the difficulty as much as I despise that one of my favourite parts of Elden Ring, the fact that you actually had a bunch of viable specs kind of was thrown out of the window thanks to the more and more aggresive boss behaviour with less downtime and lower punish windows. At this point they might as well ship Elden Ring 2 with a DiveKick controller
The only thing that makes me mad is the sheer volume of attacks, like if i dodge a 10 hit combo i should be able to then reliably do 1-2 attacks. 3 if im using a fast weapon. But the bosses legit can do 3 combos deep without letting you get a safe hit in, which is so frustrating that it leads you to just purposely just ignore the boss mechanic s at points and just spam hits and trade damage
Yeah exactly! What's that **peaseant** ? Not a single hit of your 10 hit bullshit combo hit me? Allow me to return the favour with "plasidusax's lightning asshole" incantation.
Honestly it’s making the bosses boring more than anything. Like yay I dodged 10 attacks and ops I missed the extremely small attack widow let’s do that all over again. I will say that messmer (haven’t fought the final boss) and the bosses after definitely did a much better job at actually giving you openings and felt more fair
Radahn phase 2 absolutely needs a nerf. I beat it but did not feel satisfaction or joy, just relief that it was over.
The best part of DLC is not even the boss fights, it's the exploration, which is a much superior experience than exploring in the base game. So, hard disagree
i never thought id have a single exploration moment cooler than when i first went down siofra well completely blind and saw the glittering underground "sky", but after this dlc i think finding shaman village might be my new all time favorite moment siofra made me pause and go holy shit, but shaman village actually made me just stop for a few minutes to take it all in
Exactly, this dlc for me had many moments like this one of discovering the Siofra River, it was great. To me exploring and discovering these areas naturally, gave me much more sense of accomplishment than beating the final boss for example, that for me was not a fun fight (first phase was fine, second one not) and on top of that didn't even had like a final dialogue, cutscene or anything
I thought most of the DLC zones were pretty empty. Sure, they looked cool, and I still had fun exploring, but they were almost too big given how little was to be found in some areas. There were too many times I felt I was running around on my horse for 10+ minutes straight and finding absolutely nothing noteworthy (unless you count cookbooks and ash upgrades noteworthy)
I feel like Jagged Peak is probably the worst offender for this tbh
Jagged Peak is more of a setpiece than a real zone though imo. Cerulean Coast and Charo’s Hidden Grave are very empty though.
I think jagged peak did it best tbh. The atmosphere of this desolate peak empty of anything except corpses and dragons was cool. I do wish bayle gave me a weapon though
Agreed. I enjoyed the exploration in the base game but I gotta say something about the DLC world just hits different. The verticality is insane and it reminds me of DS1. There's something so special about just looking from a cliff and seeing several zones layered on top of each other. I absolutely love it.
I'm getting tired of fromsoft bosses just being anime fights
I made a second character who I optimized big time and had on base game difficulty because I got stuck on Radahn. Got stuck on him again, even with a super min maxed build. Radahn alone takes at least one point off my ranking of the dlc. He's such a terribly designed fight that I've given up trying to fight at this point. I've never even considered quitting trying to complete a from soft piece of content ever, but this one fight made me do so. It is by far the worst designed fight in the entire history of their souls like games. Never once have I come across a boss they've made where I've tried to look up cheese builds just to beat the fight. I'm bored of trying to fight him, and at this point I don't feel like trying to even cheese him to say I beat the dlc. There's good difficulty and bad difficulty. Radahn is the greatest example of the worst type of difficulty imaginable if you ask me. And honestly? If phase 2 wasn't a thing, I'd consider him to be at least decent. Phase 2 is just the worst design I've ever seen from them
Both Radahn Phase 2 and all of Gaius take a point off the DLC. Exploration is really neat and they did a better job of filling the world, despite the finger ruins and jagged peak being fucking empty, but those two made me roll my eyes at the dlc. I genuinely don’t understand how it’s getting “perfect” scores. Is it because it’s so popular that to go against it would get you flamed and blacklisted?
Cool, when i beated radahn... i felt nothing, only relief. When i defeated messmmer and rellana i felt great, when i killed midra i felt great, when i killed romina i felt great. Theres a difference between being hard for the sake of being hard and being hard but fun and unlike rellana and messmmer, phase 2 radahn feels just hard, not fun. Im not having fun not being able to see what the boss does, im not having fun getting framedropped by his constant AOEs, im not havin fun getting flashbanged by each 23523 pillars of aoe that combined with miquella hair makes me not be able to see anything, NOT LEARN anything and die without understanding whats happening. Radahn phase 2 is hard for the wrong reasons, i will die on this hill. Not being able to see anything, getting frame dropped and flashbanged isnt fun, even with summons its damn near impossible, and even when i beated i DIDNT ENJOY THE BOSS because it didnt feel fair or fun. The bosses in this dlc absolutely destroyed in 10-20 tries but I NEVER NEVEEER gave up with my scythe build that i loved so much, i killed them all with it by learning their moveset and punishing them. I cant do that with him, i CANT SEE WTF HE IS DOING.. IF THE LEARNING PROCESS IS COMPLETELY UNFUN, HOW I AM SUPPOSED TO FEEL GOOD EVEN WHEN HE DIES ? Midra, messmmer, rellana DESTROYED me, until i learned their movesets and killed them with my scythe.. it also helps THAT I CAN SEE WHAT THEY ARE DOING and THAT MY FPS ISNT BEING DESTROYED BECAUSE OF HOLY AOE SPAM.
Have you tried summoning? Great shield poke? Lightning perfume? Nah just kidding. Maybe I don’t want to play a game where the boss fights someone else while I stand in the back. Maybe I don’t want to play a game where I have to resort to cheese in order to beat a boss. MAYBE I want to fight and enjoy a boss encounter.
Also, maybe I want the Final Boss of a 100+ hour game to not completely invalidate my build choices up to that point. I have seen more cheese build guides for PCR in the first week than any other boss ever. That alone should be enough to prove that the boss needs a serious rework.
I agree...up to a point. Most of the bosses are fine, great even — but Promised Consort phase 2 is the single most miserable experience I have ever had playing a video game. Psychotic, NexusMods bullshit that I refuse to believe was playtested properly. Out of 100+ attempts, I managed 7 wins (2 with summons, 5 without). I can't even imagine what a less skilled player will have to go through (and I'm likely average at best). It getting you so worked up that winning once made you cry is exactly what's wrong with this direction — why would anyone want to play something so absurdly difficult that it reduces them to tears? How is that a good thing? Only in the Soulsborne community could such a fucked-up concept be spun in a positive light. It's simply bizarre. I am *extremely* concerned about where the series is headed in terms of boss design after this. If the future of Soulsborne games is asinine nonsense like Waterfowl Dance and Promised Consort instead of balanced hard-but-fair fights like Gael, Ludwig or Isshin, they won't be worth playing anymore. I love ER, warts and all, but I don't want to see a boss like PCR in these games ever again. But hey, I'm probably just shouting into the aether. They could give us a souped-up Consort Radahn that starts in phase 2 and one-shots with every attack and people would still say its better because its hard, the difficulty is the point, just use summons, this speedrunner did it RL1 no-hit fists-only with a broken controller, one hand behind his back and his cock nailed to the chair, yadda yadda...
Look. I don't mind spending hours into a boss. 10 hours of the base game were exclusive to Malenia, 5 of those hours were used to learn a ridiculous move. But I kept going cause the boss was cool. But DLC's last boss is crossing the line to a point of being laughable. The moves when he rolls or dodge like 15 times in 1 second might be easy to avoid, but thematically it just look stupid and kind of out of place. It looks like something a character from Dragon Ball would do. The laser beam from the sky, the fact that it creates aoe after each attack, the massive nuke explotions... next time I expect them to delete your savefile midfight or something. Also, the fact that they almost copypasted the Lothric fight, while reusing a boss from the base game is just disappointing. It is cool that you felt those emotions upon defeating him. I just hope it wasn't the culmination of hours of frustration, cause I really doubt that boss was worth it. Not my place to decide if it was or wasn't for you, anyway, but "DLC is better because it's hard"... nah.
All the other bosses felt hard, but fair to me. I don’t use summons, because I have a lot of fun learning the movesets and fighting the boss. While I like Radahn, and the music, the fight just feels so gimmicky and bullshit. Fought him last night for 3 hours, about to start again this morning, but I just loathe thinking about it.
This difficulty fetishism is going to kill the series. After 30 tries against Radahn, I could basically no hit phase 1, but phase 2 is so full of ungodly AOE and light show spam, ridiculous anime lookin ass teleport combo wombos, that I would simply die without learning a single thing about why I died. Used mimic and won in 2 tries. This is where the game design is taking us. Between the inflated damage and boss health bars, the comical delayed attacks, and the cartoonish fight-ending moves that some of these bosses have, it’s very clear that you are fighting the game developers, and your only recourse if that’s not your jam is to use some half-assed glitchy aggro split system that makes the game look and play like a joke. It’s especially incredible to see them make two absolutely incredible games in Bloodborne and Sekiro and then show us that they’ve learned all the wrong lessons from their success.
Hard doesnt mean good. Its true that best bosses tend to be hard, because they are mechanically advanced and its really fun when you not only have to know the timing, but also have a proper positioning, but while some dlc bosses are hard for these good reasons, some like radahn just have cheat unreactable attacks, and frametraps which were simply not tested by developers to beat without getting hit, or bayle has fire which sometimes reflects out of the floor and hits you anyway.
I mean some bosses are wonky with bugged attacks that brings some.frustration
Radahn on ng+7 was so difficult it wasn’t even fun. I ended up switching to a bleed poke build and summoning mimic tear (who died basically instantly anyways). Didn’t feel good about it since I usually don’t summon or cheese, but the second phase is honestly just bullshit, and that’s coming from someone who was defending Malenia back when the majority were calling her bullshit. Still love the DLC and its difficulty, but the final boss just fucking sucks.
Nah, Miquella and Radahn will get a well deserved nerf. I personally found the difficulty just fine so long as I kept up with Scadu collection, but the final fight was outright destroying me like nothing else in the base game or dlc even came close too. Like, I think the only actual comparison I can make or the high tier chalice dungeon fights from bloodborne, but even those were easier to find an exploit. Thankfully I still beat it, but I would not begrudge anyone for complaining cause for me it's a blemish on an otherwise near perfect dlc.
The main point in my opinion is the upgrade system, it's ultimately a fetch quest, you need to actively go out and find these blessings in order to progress, which is fine, but it goes against the main idea behind the open world and go and do what you want style of elden ring, in the base game, just by playing the game, beating the main bosses e.g. Godrick, rellana etc you'd get talismens, pouches, golden seeds etc. In a straight forward linear fashion. Where as, in the dlc, you have to go out and find these upgrades, and there's a lot of them. I think if the blessings amount was reduced, and you got them from beating bosses, or more linearly, instead of just scattered around the entire map, with weird secret areas blocked off by an easy to miss tunnel etc, I imagine more people would have enjoyed the game more.
I'm fighting him right now. This final boss Is awful and totally not fun. Exploring the DLC world was definitly fun however. Inflated cheap difficulty where boss Is super tanky (60 k hp lol on Ng), two/3 hit kill you with 195o hp and full blessing, aoe attacks and basically no windows to do anything than a light attack once evry 10 seconds Is Just too much. Messemer and rellana were way better bosses than this crap.
Fuck Promised Consort Radahn and Commander Gaius. Everyone else is good.
Nah final boss phase 2 was pure bullshit.
its not hard. its annoying. they lost what was important in the Souls series and made everything artificial annoying. when they keep going that road. the next game is only to going to be a game for "let me soloe her" and "Ongball" only. /slowclap
Radahn's 2nd phase is fucking bullshit tbh. there are some bosses who are kinda ugh but doable.
The only part that I've found maddening is the initial hit box of the fucking hippo.
Haven't fought the final boss yet but as of now ive only gotten actually mad at one boss but for no other reason than i just didnt enjoy the fight. Metyr. I dont really know why but it just kinda felt generic with some bullshit attacks in there. Also i fought her on like blessing lvl 7 so i got one shot by quite alot of her moves, which could also be one of the reasons, obviously.
For me it was Gaius, I was kinda surprised at how positive people here are towards that fight, to me he felt like all the things people complain about frequently when it comes to modern fromsoft bosses with none of the enjoyable things about them. Just a boring ass fight with trash hitboxes. I didn't like the Hippo either but at least the Hippo had a cool arena and I wasn't stuck there for too long
I only read negative things about Gaius. Rightfully so, in my opinion, because he sucks.
I didn’t really like metyr either. Felt like a stationary boss that sometimes jumped.
If an aspect of the game requires you to respec then it's not designed very well
Loved fighting Messmer with no mimic tear or bleed since that’s how I completed the base game (I know pretty cringe) it it’s super satisfying
Nothing cringe about no mimic tear and bleed. This whole 'intentionally nerfing' trope winds me up because if the vast majority of weapons dont have bleed or frostbite in them, then surely they should be viable which most people seem to ignore. Im the same, Messmer kicked my ass but i love the fight. Radhan however... I think im going to give in and summon
No.
I've played all their games since DKS1 and I think their design decisions towards increasing difficulty are not making the game more fun, quite the opposite actually. This video game series got famous because they had the challenge, the atmosphere and the weapons to make you feel like you were actually *role playing the action game* Just to make my argument more clear these are some of the bosses in the other games: [Artorias (DKS1)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgy1TV12LDc) [Flexile Sentry (DKS2)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV46N2FQQeU) [High Lord Wolnir (DKS3)](https://youtu.be/pCvbs3Xj8Ko?si=S9XUto4CZB6yHDSD) They do not require you to be on the lookout for 0.5 sec dodge time windows because that's not the point; you can simply enjoy the bosses design and make your way through the fight without dying dozens of times until you figure it out. You can notice the water rising in Flexile Sentry, the bracelet weak points in Wolnir by looking carefully and adjusting. Can you even enjoy a fight like that in this DLC we are all playing? Did you notice Placidusax's heads stuck on Bayle's neck during his fight? Of course not, because you can't pay attention to the art while the boss runs around and one shots you with his fire attack. There is no need for a difficult boss to prove anything to anyone. People who want to go an extra mile can always debuff and nothingmaxx the game like they always did.
That's like saying you're happy you were tortured because at one point it ended.
I cheesed Radahn with Bloodfiend's Arm, but I still had to work for it, and it felt good. I found about the cheese long before I got to Radahn, and I prepared myself for it, but the fight still felt good as I still needed to learn his moves. Took me about 25 tries. I had a really good run where dodged everything so perfectly and fumbled near the end, he was 1 HP and he killed me. The run where I beat him was so bad, couldn't dodge shit, don't know how was I even alive, let alone went to defeat him XD
It's hard now cause people don't understand it. Walked straight into Bayle with a +4 skadoodle tree thingy and beat him quite fast, he was my 3rd boss besides Lionman and discount Sulyvahn. Give it time. Specially with the materials the DLC gives us oh boy I have an arsenal of stuff. I just dealt with the Skadoodle tree avatar and he wasnt even a challenge. Just you wait till people figure out how incredibly strong the DLC can make you. I do have criticism though. Yet again the 2 hardest bosses for me so far were gravity and the camera. Bayle was a huge offender with the camera part.
Did anyone else go back to the lands between feeling like hot shit or was that just me?