Elden ring bosses were bad, DLC's are terrible

[Juanill0]

So, here we are, I finally completed the entire DLC with the final boss included. This said, I think Elden Ring is an incredible game brought down by bad bosses.

These bosses never feel satisfying to beat, neither do they feel like a challenge like those of Sekiro, Bloodborne or DS3. They aren't tests of skill, but rather of how fast you can memorise all their moveset... the cause? Delayed attacks and how unnaturally the bosses move.

This is the single worst thing about Elden Ring for me. Delayed attacks can be a good tool to catch the players off guard when they aren't paying attention, the dancer of the boreal valley is a great example of an incredible boss that uses an irregular rythm and delayed attacks to surprise the player.

But what happens when virtually every single combo of every single boss spams them? That you completely break the rythm of the fight.

Let's take Slave Knight Gael, a true last boss that tests all you have learned through DS3, however, he couldn't be more different from ER bosses. His combos are relatively short (between 3 and 6 attacks), with only one important delayed attack and very little AoE, as well as very telegraphed finishers with big gaps to hit back.

This is what makes a good boss, he has rythm. The entire fight is an epic back and forth, a dance of death where he desperately tries to kill you as you grit your teeth through his phases, dodging as you can and punishing him. Most importantly, you have more than enough time to strategise and heal in between combos, or punishing him with a combo.

Now let's take ER DLC bosses... not a single one has rythm, why? Every single attack is a cheesy delayed attack, every 3 attacks 1 is a crazy AoE, every combo is 20 seconds long so you just sit there with your thumb up your ass waiting for him to finish so you can poke him once. Oh, and let's not forget even after they finish their combos, if you as much as touch the estus button half the time they will instantly turn around halfway through their animation and hit you with another 20 hit combo.

And let's not forget how now every single boss has to zoom across the arena every single time he gets bored, meaning you can spend half the fight chasing a boss around as he spams his ''beyblade of death'' attack on you.

ER bosses (and specially those of the DLC) are clearly meant to be fought by 2 people, a summons and you, this sucks if you prefer to solo them and becomes incredibly obvious when even the most bassic attacks of the easiest DLC bosses have giant reach and cover 210º, hitting you even behind the boss.

This also messes completely with the balance up, with bosses doing ridiculous damage and having ridiculous healthpools (and don't you dare summon someone or it gets even worse).

So in the end these bosses aren't fun and don't feel rewarding. They are so grossly agressive and overpowered that after beating the last DLC boss I felt nothing, in fact I didn't feel anything with none of the DLC bosses, they felt like boring roadblocks rather than engaging fights. This is due to how lacking they are in Rythm.

Weirdly enough, even the DLC bosses were relatively simple to beat, with the last boss being the only one that took more than 10 tries, so I don't think difficulty is the issue. And I think these bosses wouldn't be bad if we had Bloodborne's rally mechanic and mobility.

This is so sad because everything else about the game (except the subpar soundtrack) is almost perfect, and it kinda sucks the bosses are so boring and gnerally bad. God bless.

[JP]

Havent even touched the DLC yet but I agree. The bosses in the first 2/3rds of the game were very enjoyable. Last 1/3 of the game really left a bad taste in my mouth. Its my 4th playthrough, and my third 100% items and dungeon playthrough on NG, and my feelings towards the game haven't really changed since release.

Its not a skill issue. I solo'd malenia with no bleed, frost, buffs, parrys only (and yeah after 20 hours of practice, I don't think she is a good boss, she is a fair boss but absolutely cruel to the average player). I am decent at this game. The boss design felt either boring or overtuned with no in between. The lack of openings and rhythms in fights starts to feel very frustrating towards endgame. The AOE attack spam is ridiculous, with some attacks feeling impossible to dodge.

Its not about bosses being beatable. Its about them being fun. I straight up did not have fun, and it just made me crave games with tighter combat like sekiro and lies of P.

I've been seeing the term phyyric victory being used more and more to describe these games and honestly I agree. We are at the point where these games are so difficult that it costs the average player too much.

If you want the game to be hard, nerf yourself. the game is all about self imposed difficulty. Do a rl1 run or something.

[andrei.cc]

BingusDingus님이 먼저 게시:

His point wasn't that they were necessarily harder, it's the type of difficulty and the variety in the boss fights. Talking about Dark souls 3, it has lots of mechanically interesting fights even if some of them are lame like the Deacons of the Deep, one of my favourites being the Abyssal Watcher because it's such a unique fight.
Pontiff Sulyvahn was cool, but that's largely because he was unique at the time. Elden Ring is basically if you make every boss Pontiff Sulyvahn and when you make every boss fall into the exact same formula it gets repetitive and boring. Elden Ring needed more mechanical creativity than just attack after attack.

It is interesting that people who brag that they solo bosses because they learned all the moves and how to dodge them, seem to fail to acknowledge that they are fighting the same boss again and again. Beyond esthetics all bosses are the same.

[Juanill0]

Chibbix님이 먼저 게시:

Pescado님이 먼저 게시:

So, here we are, I finally completed the entire DLC with the final boss included. This said, I think Elden Ring is an incredible game brought down by bad bosses.

These bosses never feel satisfying to beat, neither do they feel like a challenge like those of Sekiro, Bloodborne or DS3. They aren't tests of skill, but rather of how fast you can memorise all their moveset... the cause? Delayed attacks and how unnaturally the bosses move.

This is the single worst thing about Elden Ring for me. Delayed attacks can be a good tool to catch the players off guard when they aren't paying attention, the dancer of the boreal valley is a great example of an incredible boss that uses an irregular rythm and delayed attacks to surprise the player.

But what happens when virtually every single combo of every single boss spams them? That you completely break the rythm of the fight.

Let's take Slave Knight Gael, a true last boss that tests all you have learned through DS3, however, he couldn't be more different from ER bosses. His combos are relatively short (between 3 and 6 attacks), with only one important delayed attack and very little AoE, as well as very telegraphed finishers with big gaps to hit back.

This is what makes a good boss, he has rythm. The entire fight is an epic back and forth, a dance of death where he desperately tries to kill you as you grit your teeth through his phases, dodging as you can and punishing him. Most importantly, you have more than enough time to strategise and heal in between combos, or punishing him with a combo.

Now let's take ER DLC bosses... not a single one has rythm, why? Every single attack is a cheesy delayed attack, every 3 attacks 1 is a crazy AoE, every combo is 20 seconds long so you just sit there with your thumb up your ass waiting for him to finish so you can poke him once. Oh, and let's not forget even after they finish their combos, if you as much as touch the estus button half the time they will instantly turn around halfway through their animation and hit you with another 20 hit combo.

And let's not forget how now every single boss has to zoom across the arena every single time he gets bored, meaning you can spend half the fight chasing a boss around as he spams his ''beyblade of death'' attack on you.

ER bosses (and specially those of the DLC) are clearly meant to be fought by 2 people, a summons and you, this sucks if you prefer to solo them and becomes incredibly obvious when even the most bassic attacks of the easiest DLC bosses have giant reach and cover 210º, hitting you even behind the boss.

This also messes completely with the balance up, with bosses doing ridiculous damage and having ridiculous healthpools (and don't you dare summon someone or it gets even worse).

So in the end these bosses aren't fun and don't feel rewarding. They are so grossly agressive and overpowered that after beating the last DLC boss I felt nothing, in fact I didn't feel anything with none of the DLC bosses, they felt like boring roadblocks rather than engaging fights. This is due to how lacking they are in Rythm.

Weirdly enough, even the DLC bosses were relatively simple to beat, with the last boss being the only one that took more than 10 tries, so I don't think difficulty is the issue. And I think these bosses wouldn't be bad if we had Bloodborne's rally mechanic and mobility.

This is so sad because everything else about the game (except the subpar soundtrack) is almost perfect, and it kinda sucks the bosses are so boring and gnerally bad. God bless.

Just beat DS3, like 90% completion.

Bosses were kind of really really easy as a caster. Few of the magic resistance ones gave me trouble. Playing through as a str build now and it's like a joke. Smogh's hammer just annihilates everything with ease, and I'm not using FP estus, so I rarely drop below 7 of them in any fight.

Can't say any of the bosses hold a candle to Commander Gaius, let alone the final boss.

Oh, also, I thought the final boss of the rings city was, like, the halfway point or something. Laughably easy. apparently both of my characters are "underlevel'd" for the dlc, too. They both level 79.

I find this funny because Gaius must be universally considered the most bs boss in the DLC due to the bugges charge hitbox.

However, it seems you merely measure how good a boss is based on how difficult it is, so whatever.

[Key]

Zoid13님이 먼저 게시:

p0k314NET님이 먼저 게시:

This DLC is FromSoftware's worst-rated product in the last 15 years. Something like this didn't appear out of nowhere and unfortunately it says a lot about the serious internal problems of this studio.

i personally think that has less to do with the DLC directly and more to do with the general modern complaining about everything (not just games)
these days everything is constant overreactions. its all either a 10/10 if you liked something or a 1/10 if there was something that rubbed you the wrong way lol

i think the dlc is fantastic personally. and yeah its "hard" (until you get scadu then its even easier than the base game because you do like double damage lol) but the entry condition for the DLC is Mohg. a high level 'end game' boss. the difficulty makes perfect sense.

its also a sudo character reset on entering DLC world so the geared people don't just steamroll it in an hour and complain that there's no content.

cant please everyone. i loved it and am still loving it :)

This sounds like what Disney says when pretending their new shows don't suck.

It would be a valid point if AC6, that released last year from the same studio wasn't 1% away from being Overwhelmingly Positive.

I like the DLC, and I will play it several times again, and again, but pretending it's anywhere near the quality of other FS products is just beyond dishonest.

Obsolete upgrade materials everyhwere used as rewards, over 20 cookbooks containing a single item each, entire areas with 30 of the same exact enemy just randomly plopped down just so there's something there, that's the kind of stuff you see in a low budget korean MMO or something. 80% of enemies are straight up lifted from the base game and the few new ones are reused to an absurd extent, to the point that legacy dungeons are filled with enemies from the open world, which wasn't a thing in the base game.

It's beyond obvious that they designed the environments and they just didn't have the content to fill them, even with the absurd amount of repetition, there's huge areas with absolutely nothing in them.

[JP]

andrei.cc님이 먼저 게시:

BingusDingus님이 먼저 게시:

His point wasn't that they were necessarily harder, it's the type of difficulty and the variety in the boss fights. Talking about Dark souls 3, it has lots of mechanically interesting fights even if some of them are lame like the Deacons of the Deep, one of my favourites being the Abyssal Watcher because it's such a unique fight.
Pontiff Sulyvahn was cool, but that's largely because he was unique at the time. Elden Ring is basically if you make every boss Pontiff Sulyvahn and when you make every boss fall into the exact same formula it gets repetitive and boring. Elden Ring needed more mechanical creativity than just attack after attack.

It is interesting that people who brag that they solo bosses because they learned all the moves and how to dodge them, seem to fail to acknowledge that they are fighting the same boss again and again. Beyond esthetics all bosses are the same.

I firmly believe that most if not all players could solo even the hardest bosses with enough practice and dedication. Its not demanding some kind of insane reaction time or skillset. Sure, some people may have physical limitations and they would be the exception.

Its like learning to perform an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo. Just takes a ♥♥♥♥ ton of practice. Some people will be able to apply skills they already know and learn it in an hour or 2. Some people will needs weeks or months to learn the fundamentals. It will never be as perfect as the original, sure; but for all, its is an achievable goal. Its not something inaccessible like competing in the olympics.

That being said, I think with each game from has released since ds1, the artificial difficulty meter went up incrementally. I think now we are reaching the point where the artificial difficulty has gone too far. Back to the original comparrison, Its like if Miyazaki started clipping the guitar strings every now and then while you were performing.

[JP]

I think what people really craved was the power fantasy. The tarnished should have been the one oneshotting every mob in the endgame areas. By the time people reach consecrated snowfield, they likely have somewhere between 40-100 hours. After 100 hours of elden ring I was ready to be done, and proceded to get disrespected by everything from the mountaintops of the giants to the elden beast. The player should be rewarded by the time they are ready to become elden lord. I think this was why gwyn was such a pushover in DS1, They wanted you to KNOW you earned this win.

[Anatolius]

LagggP님이 먼저 게시:

I think what people really craved was the power fantasy. The tarnished should have been the one oneshotting every mob in the endgame areas. By the time people reach consecrated snowfield, they likely have somewhere between 40-100 hours. After 100 hours of elden ring I was ready to be done, and proceded to get disrespected by everything from the mountaintops of the giants to the elden beast. The player should be rewarded by the time they are ready to become elden lord. I think this was why gwyn was such a pushover in DS1, They wanted you to KNOW you earned this win.

le me - Elden Lord lvl 200 ... struggling with some random hobos in a grace-forsaken place - huh?!?

[☦ Грйсёлдо ☦]

+1 to thread. Beating the boss never felt fulfilling but a grudging 'finally' and a question 'how many more?'

[Sgt. Flaw]

andrei.cc님이 먼저 게시:

BingusDingus님이 먼저 게시:

His point wasn't that they were necessarily harder, it's the type of difficulty and the variety in the boss fights. Talking about Dark souls 3, it has lots of mechanically interesting fights even if some of them are lame like the Deacons of the Deep, one of my favourites being the Abyssal Watcher because it's such a unique fight.
Pontiff Sulyvahn was cool, but that's largely because he was unique at the time. Elden Ring is basically if you make every boss Pontiff Sulyvahn and when you make every boss fall into the exact same formula it gets repetitive and boring. Elden Ring needed more mechanical creativity than just attack after attack.

It is interesting that people who brag that they solo bosses because they learned all the moves and how to dodge them, seem to fail to acknowledge that they are fighting the same boss again and again. Beyond esthetics all bosses are the same.

The cope 😂

I can tell neither of you actually learned a bosses moveset

[Juanill0]

Sgt. Flaw님이 먼저 게시:

andrei.cc님이 먼저 게시:

It is interesting that people who brag that they solo bosses because they learned all the moves and how to dodge them, seem to fail to acknowledge that they are fighting the same boss again and again. Beyond esthetics all bosses are the same.

The cope 😂

I can tell neither of you actually learned a bosses moveset

Tbf if you have to learn a moveset, the boss is badly designed, since it turns from a skill-based match to a learning-based match. This is my main complaint about delayed attacks, they inhibit skill (punishing it) and reward learning every move.

It turns a fast paced fight into a sweatfest where none of the attacks can really be predicted.

[Sham!]

dmg and healthpools of dlc bosses are kinda in line with endgame bosses

many bosses are absolute pushovers if you approach them already knowing their attack pattern or what they are weak to

yes, they are obviously over the top compared to bosses of older souls games, but you cant just squeeze yet another capra demon reskin and give it a boss health bar (nvm they did, they added one extra dog too)

my biggest complain is that 90% of dlc bosses have a second phase, it just feels silly after the 6th time

[Lynfinity]

Sham!님이 먼저 게시:

my biggest complain is that 90% of dlc bosses have a second phase, it just feels silly after the 6th time

*Laughs in all major base game bosses*

[Sham!]

Lynfinity님이 먼저 게시:

Sham!님이 먼저 게시:

my biggest complain is that 90% of dlc bosses have a second phase, it just feels silly after the 6th time

*Laughs in all major base game bosses*

true actually, i just forget about it since they are actually forgettable at this point

hora loux is the only boss the pulled second phase properly, from cutscen to actual fight

[Sibriex]

me when i post bait

[Karamell]

The final boss of the DLC just ruins everything, not even gameplay or balance wise (the fight utterly sucks, it's dog water dealing with phase 2 the most unfun ♥♥♥♥ ever lol), but lore wise, story wise, and such- like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ what were they trying to cook with this??

Drags the whole DLC and even the journey down. Really am worried about future games cause if this is what From Software thinks is a great way to make difficulty, I might stop being a fan. They're losing touch with what made us love the original Dark Souls 1, 3, and Bloodborne. They scored with Sekiro and there are people who even love Dark Souls 2.

But whatever they're doing with Elden Ring's DLC, like chill on the insane combos and tedious fights; they're NOT fun. It's a slog and just obvious they want people to co-op or use summons otherwise soloing these is really a drag. Final Boss especially I can't stand the final boss everyone I know hates it. Even if you like phase 1, NO ONE likes phase 2.