Asterion's low sweep move can no longer be parried after the patch.

[VVZigel]

So this isn't so much of a discussion but rather a small note to Game Kitchen. (If they even read it)

I see what you did there, I bloody see it! When the DLC was introduced and I've beaten it the same day, I was able to take on Asterion by perfect parrying his move, the low sweeping attack that he does after the overhead smash.

Now this sweep pushes the Penitent One back and can no longer be parried. I don't know which genius has decided on that, but I don't think that making an already obnoxious boss having one less weakness made him any fun. By the Miracle, if you guys make a third game, I hope you come up with something better than a humanoid boss that spams attacks with ridiculous hitboxes, most of which have a 70% reach over the arena, is a swordsman/woman/whatever with no parry window (I know that he has 1 attack that can be parried, but he flies to both sides of the screen on his 2nd encounter that it is too hard to trigger), and has contact damage to boot. I mean, for crying out loud, at least Esdras could be stunned, while Crisanta had at a swift but limited set of moves, and Eviterno literally wants the player to learn how to properly block and parry his attacks!

I mean, I've beaten Astarion on True Torment, but I just don't like him at all. So many of his actions feel like they have an obligatory AoE effect that is just made to annoy and provide artificial difficulty, rather than compensate any of his weaknesses.

By stark contrast Mater Priora is a fun and engaging fight.

P.S. I think what irks me most here is that the fact that this changed is not mentioned in the patchnotes. Like, really, were you guys afraid to to frankly tell the players "Oh, we've thought that this was too easy a method to beat him, so we've changed how it works"?

[N7Mars]

i noticed that too, i don't get why they don't reward you playing well and learning parry timings. Dark Souls 1 allowed you to parry the final boss, so not sure why this boss doesn't reward you for learning to parry by getting some extra damage on him

[koolfy]

So to recap:

- He has powerful, slow loading attacks that incite you to get on his back, but he can reverse direction after having fully raised the sword and even started coming down. Instantly. With a ranged attack. This is madness.

- His swirling attacks not only have two different random frequency between projectiles (the quick succession makes it impossible to dodge by timing jumps)
- they also shoot backwards (?! maybe start here to fix it?)
- they can be randomly chained at least 3 times (I think I saw up to 4, it may be more but I never survived long enough to see a 5th)
- when they are chained, the timing can change in a way that if you were parrying the first, it will be materially impossible to recover from the parry animation and jump out of the way or parry again before being hit by the next wave
- the timing between the end of one such attack and the next one can be misaligned in a way that does not allow for a second parry
- anything going wrong (or just being unlucky with how they are chained) means you'll eat them until you die (or effectively lose any shot at winning the fight)
- Asterion is moving foward, so parrying it might be a death sentence, as you have a 60% chance of being pushed to the edge of the screen, where Asterion will headbutt you, dealing damage and preventing any parry or manoeuver. This is out of your control and can be forced to happen with 100% probability as he keeps chaining them and pushing you. (depending on what attack he choses next, it might be materially impossible to move out of the corner after taking this damage without eating another attack)

- The rate of attack, aggressiveness and ridiculous range makes it almost impossible to reliably heal or drop spells he our Penitent's freeze periods are always long enough to get hit by 40-50% health punitions. I keep dying with full flasks because the rythm of this fight is too sustained to allow for windows to use them

- Depending on the timing, Asterion can actually stack his attacks, meaning you might have at least partial area damage from two different attacks onscreen at the same time. This is what happens when you turn the knob of the rate and speed of attacks without playtesting the result.

- Some attacks can only be avoided by getting close to Asterion, some attacks demand that you put distance very quickly or at least get in the air for long enough, and these attacks can be chained in a way that produce no-win-scenarios (get in close as it's the only place in the screen to land out of the fire, and he will then hit you with his close range attack before the fire from the first one has disappeared)

- Some attacks need pixel-perfect placement that is nigh unreachable from certain starting positions. Some can even be impossible to avoid as they might hint, initiate and hit you all while you're still in the air from avoiding the previous one.

- small terrain fires and huge sword-spiked both produce "get hit twice and you're dead" amounts of damage. If you're visually showing me a less punitive attack, I might make desperate moves to deal with the previous point and chose to eat the one that looks less powerful. Buffing their damage equally just means the small fire feels like a cheap shot from the devs, not proportional damage from the boss himself.

- I keep getting hit outside the range of the actual sword or animation. It's the first time it's ever happenned in Blasphemous I and II combined, I was very surprised to see a lot of people complaining as well. I came to Blasphemous *because* this is something you get right and because I can trust that if my movements put me out of danger, I will not get hit.

This is the context in which the devs decided to make perfect parries useless, a non-strategy to deal damage and too dangerous as a defensive move (as you'll be pushed in range for his other attacks and might not recover in time, also this won't allow you to maintain him in range for your attacks so it has no use)

I was actually going to try doing a screen recording of the many hours I just spent stuck at this point, finding relevant examples and mapping out on the screen the movements required by each different attack to prove how ridiculous and contradictory they are, on top of negating any freedom or strategy. You spend the fight running to avoid damage, and Asterion always gets you in the long run because you're the only one making mistakes.

This is about as fun as playing checkers against OpenAI.

The only winning move is not to play.

So I'll stop playing.


Ping me when the game is playable again, I love it and would like to finish it when the devs make this a possibility.

[koolfy]

In case someone reads this and cares to make this fun/possible again, I would suggest looking at:

- swirling attacks have no reason to shoot backwards, and they shouldn't be initiated back to back, at least a second of pause to allow for a gap in between projectiles to recover from a parry or moving out of the way

- Asterion should probably be moving forward less aggressively during those to reduce the probability of being pushed into a corner with him without a way out

- there is no reason to have two different rate of fire for swirling attacks, keep the slow one it's already almost impossible to land in-between projectiles and initiating a parry before the next projectile (this might be a good thing to tweak to make this viable maybe? Experiment with it? Slowing down the slow one?)

- The two jump attacks are redundant and I keep doing the wrong move (and being punished excessively for it) because the hint comes very late. The jump/angled-dash is good enough, there is no need for a double-terrain-fire-in-both-directions attack, the directional one coming out of his big ranged sword projectile is enough. Remove this one entirely from the deck.

- The small terrain fire should stay onscreen for less time. A lot of movement and timing still land me on it while it will deal damage. This makes it almost impossible to avoid reliably it he middle of an already busy fight where you might not be perfectly placed or have the right momentum in the right direction

- please doublecheck the damage hitboxes for the jump+angled-dash attack. I keep feeling like I get damage outside the animation when I'm up and out of the blast diagonally. Maybe I'm hallucinating but I get the same with the height of some sword hits and the big projectiles (I hope those are not higher than the sword actually gets, that might be why I get hit as they appeat on me?)

- The entire pace bewteen attacks should be revised, these are attacks the require a lot of movement and placement to just no die, there should be breathing space to heal or drop spells if you want us to see the end of the battle or we'll keep dying with full flasks and fervour.

- I get the parry abuse situation had to be addressed, but having anything making other attacks possible under the same conditions would work as well, maintain attack variety, avoid having this one strategy work all the way until Asterion dies and keep things balanced. We need the perfect parry to work here, it's the only tradeoff we have for the huge risk of getting closer to him and having less reaction time. It was the only reliable damage window.

- I honestly think most of his attacks deal too much damage. Chose one very painful attack and stick with it. Hard to avoid attacks should be lighter, big bulky but avoidable attacks can be very painful. Here everything forces you to look for a bile flask opportunity that doesn't exist.

I'm not saying all this is good advice, or this results in a perfect balance, but play around with this as a starting point and tweak it a bit until it feels challenging but fair.

The entire Mea Culpa DLC is good enough IMHO, fun enough and interesting enough to "end" with a satisfactory boss that is not impossible to beat. Let us have some fun. Nobody will count hours spent hitting the wall of an impossible boss until we get lucky with the RNG as "hours of content"

I already spent 45 hours on my first playthough of Blasphemous II, I won't think less highly of this experience if I don't get stuck for 10 hours on that one boss.

[f.ultron]

Originally posted by koolfy:

In case someone reads this and cares to make this fun/possible again, I would suggest looking at:

- swirling attacks have no reason to shoot backwards, and they shouldn't be initiated back to back, at least a second of pause to allow for a gap in between projectiles to recover from a parry or moving out of the way

- Asterion should probably be moving forward less aggressively during those to reduce the probability of being pushed into a corner with him without a way out

- there is no reason to have two different rate of fire for swirling attacks, keep the slow one it's already almost impossible to land in-between projectiles and initiating a parry before the next projectile (this might be a good thing to tweak to make this viable maybe? Experiment with it? Slowing down the slow one?)

- The two jump attacks are redundant and I keep doing the wrong move (and being punished excessively for it) because the hint comes very late. The jump/angled-dash is good enough, there is no need for a double-terrain-fire-in-both-directions attack, the directional one coming out of his big ranged sword projectile is enough. Remove this one entirely from the deck.

- The small terrain fire should stay onscreen for less time. A lot of movement and timing still land me on it while it will deal damage. This makes it almost impossible to avoid reliably it he middle of an already busy fight where you might not be perfectly placed or have the right momentum in the right direction

- please doublecheck the damage hitboxes for the jump+angled-dash attack. I keep feeling like I get damage outside the animation when I'm up and out of the blast diagonally. Maybe I'm hallucinating but I get the same with the height of some sword hits and the big projectiles (I hope those are not higher than the sword actually gets, that might be why I get hit as they appeat on me?)

- The entire pace bewteen attacks should be revised, these are attacks the require a lot of movement and placement to just no die, there should be breathing space to heal or drop spells if you want us to see the end of the battle or we'll keep dying with full flasks and fervour.

- I get the parry abuse situation had to be addressed, but having anything making other attacks possible under the same conditions would work as well, maintain attack variety, avoid having this one strategy work all the way until Asterion dies and keep things balanced. We need the perfect parry to work here, it's the only tradeoff we have for the huge risk of getting closer to him and having less reaction time. It was the only reliable damage window.

- I honestly think most of his attacks deal too much damage. Chose one very painful attack and stick with it. Hard to avoid attacks should be lighter, big bulky but avoidable attacks can be very painful. Here everything forces you to look for a bile flask opportunity that doesn't exist.

I'm not saying all this is good advice, or this results in a perfect balance, but play around with this as a starting point and tweak it a bit until it feels challenging but fair.

The entire Mea Culpa DLC is good enough IMHO, fun enough and interesting enough to "end" with a satisfactory boss that is not impossible to beat. Let us have some fun. Nobody will count hours spent hitting the wall of an impossible boss until we get lucky with the RNG as "hours of content"

I already spent 45 hours on my first playthough of Blasphemous II, I won't think less highly of this experience if I don't get stuck for 10 hours on that one boss.

I reached the point where I can consistently beat Asterion

https://youtu.be/bTTFdbA6QKU

[orian34]

I didn't even think about parrying him, it just felt more natural to dodge his huge swings. That makes him fairly easy as well.

[koolfy]

I finally beat it

The video helped a bit to avoid a few "mistakes", like trying to put distance with him when trying to hug him to have opportunities to properly hit him was a best strategy

Trying to run away from him just means taking huge amounts of damage sooner or later at the first mistake.

Using the bonus that freezes time when using healing flasks also helped land a few hits to kill him before I would die.

"Never" trying to hit him more than 3 times (when I hit him accidentally a 4th it dealt more damage but it's almost never possible to avoid getting hit)

Never trying to use any prayer

Never trying to parry anything (the penalty in movement is very hard to compensate for


I still stand by the fact that I got lucky against a b****t boss that should be tweaked either in damage dealt or aggressiveness.

I haven't seen the double-sonic-boom attack combo more than 3 consecutive times, maybe this was tweaked? I don't know, I just didn't see any effort made to make this boss more fair or fun.

I hope now that this desperately unfun part of the game is behind me, I can go back to really enjoying the world and the game.

I don't even agree with all those saying the sequel is a disappointment, I really like it, sometimes more than the original.

But this part was ridiculous and a chore.


If someone sees this, just stick to f.ulton's video as close as you can, I don't think anything else can work.

[orian34]

Originally posted by koolfy:

If someone sees this, just stick to f.ulton's video as close as you can, I don't think anything else can work.

I don't know, the fight felt fairly doable, although the spinny combo becomes frustrating when it keeps being chained.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3385348031

[TWEAKER TWEAKER PUMPKIN EATER]

Originally posted by koolfy:

I finally beat it

The video helped a bit to avoid a few "mistakes", like trying to put distance with him when trying to hug him to have opportunities to properly hit him was a best strategy

Trying to run away from him just means taking huge amounts of damage sooner or later at the first mistake.

Using the bonus that freezes time when using healing flasks also helped land a few hits to kill him before I would die.

"Never" trying to hit him more than 3 times (when I hit him accidentally a 4th it dealt more damage but it's almost never possible to avoid getting hit)

Never trying to use any prayer

Never trying to parry anything (the penalty in movement is very hard to compensate for


I still stand by the fact that I got lucky against a b****t boss that should be tweaked either in damage dealt or aggressiveness.

I haven't seen the double-sonic-boom attack combo more than 3 consecutive times, maybe this was tweaked? I don't know, I just didn't see any effort made to make this boss more fair or fun.

I hope now that this desperately unfun part of the game is behind me, I can go back to really enjoying the world and the game.

I don't even agree with all those saying the sequel is a disappointment, I really like it, sometimes more than the original.

But this part was ridiculous and a chore.


If someone sees this, just stick to f.ulton's video as close as you can, I don't think anything else can work.

I only did the first fight vs him but it only took like 2 tries... is the final fight really that bad