DS3 has better overall bosses than ER

[Dracula]

I didn't expect any Elden Ring boss to topple Slave Knight Gael and i was right,none came close.
The best boss in Elden Ring imho is Morgott/Margit The Omen King/The Fell Omen.
And he has the best lines of any ER boss,like ''Have it writ upon thy meagre grave: "Felled by King Morgott.Last of all kings''.
And yes,i fought Malenia,and imo the fight with Sister Friede is way more epic.

[Sabaithal]

Really depends on how you're looking at it. I do like most Ds3 bosses, but lets face it, the usual strategy of "just i-frame through all its attacks and counter" works for pretty much every boss, except maybe friede.

In Elden ring...well you can still do that for some bosses (not margit, tried, some of hit combos follow up too quick to dodge in succession), but its gonna take a lot longer if you're just R1ing your way through their health. Margit for example will barely take slivers from R1 spam, but crit him or using weapon arts will take out a much more noticable chunk. Simply put, ER is arguably balanced to force the player to use more diverse approaches. Whether or not this is preferable is subjective.

I like ERs approach, but my god some of these bosses move much faster than they should for something of their size, especially that thing in the depths of the starting area...

[DJBreM]

Originally posted by Morgott:

I didn't expect any Elden Ring boss to topple Slave Knight Gael and i was right,none came close.
The best boss in Elden Ring imho is Morgott/Margit The Omen King/The Fell Omen.
And he has the best lines of any ER boss,like ''Have it writ upon thy meagre grave: "Felled by King Morgott.Last of all kings''.
And yes,i fought Malenia,and imo the fight with Sister Friede is way more epic.

I personally through the Godfrey fight was better than any other boss in ds3 and elden ring however one things for sure, Midir is still the best dragon boss in fromsoft games and elden ring didn't even get close to that level.

[urabe mikoto]

I think DS3 has more memorable bosses overall. But ER bosses are awesome too, although they definitely went overboard with the boss recycling.

[Silent]

The boss recycling is the worst part about the game. Really annoying clearing a dungeon just to see the same boss from the previous dungeon you found.

[ressenmacher]

I think ER is overall better. Yes, a lot of the bosses are repeats, but most of the non-dungeon ones are decent to excellent fights. So far I've had 8 unique fight archetypes (!SPOILER! flying dragons, Margit, Tree Sentinel, Erdtree Avatar, Red Wolf of Radagon, Ancestral Spirit, magic knight ghost lady, magma wyrm !SPOILER!) + 2 of the shardbearers. That's nine total decent to good fights; if we assume the other 3 demigods are also decent to good, we end at a total of 13 decent-good fights.

DS3 has 14 (Lludex, Vordtt, CS, AW, Pontiff, Aldritch, Yhorm, Dancer, DSA, TP, NK, ODK,, AW, and SoC) by my count, and my count is generous because I think the Wyvern is at least decent. I've gone through maybe 50% or less of the content, and ER is already more or less comparable in number of quality bosses. My guess is that I'll be looking at 20-30 really solid bosses once the ♥♥♥♥ fights and duplicates are pruned away.

This is why I really don't mind the boss recycling; there's enough content. More than we've seen before, ever. And in my view, not only is there more boss content compared to previous games, there's enough boss content that I didn't feel any of the field bosses becoming monotonous. That said, I agree the dungeon bosses are not only very monotonous, but also terribly designed in a lot of cases.


Beyond quantity, I think the quality might be better too. ER has two major advantages over DS3, one player end and one enemy side. The player can now jump, which adds another defensive option fights can be built around and thus allows enemy movesets to be more complicated. On top of that, all or virtually all enemies can be poise broken, and it acts like a posture bar from Sekiro instead of the mostly static boss poise from DS3-poise damage heals over time, and so the player is rewarded for finding windows for high-commitment moves like R2s and for mastering a fight. In DS3, damage was all that mattered, which kind of pushed heavy attacks to the side; now the whole moveset is more viable, and on top of that there's a greater reward for learning how to really capitalize on the boss's moveset. As an example, !SPOILER! Margit's !SPOILER! delayed overhead is an opportunity to sneak in some damage and work to the poise break. ER rewards players more heavily for finding these little bits of optimization like that because the more pressure you keep up, the more staggers you get.

[urabe mikoto]

Originally posted by ressenmacher:

I think ER is overall better. Yes, a lot of the bosses are repeats, but most of the non-dungeon ones are decent to excellent fights. So far I've had 8 unique fight archetypes (!SPOILER! flying dragons, Margit, Tree Sentinel, Erdtree Avatar, Red Wolf of Radagon, Ancestral Spirit, magic knight ghost lady, magma wyrm !SPOILER!) + 2 of the shardbearers. That's nine total decent to good fights; if we assume the other 3 demigods are also decent to good, we end at a total of 13 decent-good fights.

DS3 has 14 (Lludex, Vordtt, CS, AW, Pontiff, Aldritch, Yhorm, Dancer, DSA, TP, NK, ODK,, AW, and SoC) by my count, and my count is generous because I think the Wyvern is at least decent. I've gone through maybe 50% or less of the content, and ER is already more or less comparable in number of quality bosses. My guess is that I'll be looking at 20-30 really solid bosses once the ♥♥♥♥ fights and duplicates are pruned away.

This is why I really don't mind the boss recycling; there's enough content. More than we've seen before, ever. And in my view, not only is there more boss content compared to previous games, there's enough boss content that I didn't feel any of the field bosses becoming monotonous. That said, I agree the dungeon bosses are not only very monotonous, but also terribly designed in a lot of cases.


Beyond quantity, I think the quality might be better too. ER has two major advantages over DS3, one player end and one enemy side. The player can now jump, which adds another defensive option fights can be built around and thus allows enemy movesets to be more complicated. On top of that, all or virtually all enemies can be poise broken, and it acts like a posture bar from Sekiro instead of the mostly static boss poise from DS3-poise damage heals over time, and so the player is rewarded for finding windows for high-commitment moves like R2s and for mastering a fight. In DS3, damage was all that mattered, which kind of pushed heavy attacks to the side; now the whole moveset is more viable, and on top of that there's a greater reward for learning how to really capitalize on the boss's moveset. As an example, !SPOILER! Margit's !SPOILER! delayed overhead is an opportunity to sneak in some damage and work to the poise break. ER rewards players more heavily for finding these little bits of optimization like that because the more pressure you keep up, the more staggers you get.

The individual quality of bosses in ER is pretty good and is on par with DS3 imo. So far I had only one boss fight that was terrible (dual crucible knights). But again I think they went too far with the repeated encounters. It feels so disappointing when you enter the fogwall and find that there's 2 of a boss you already killed, or 3 of them, or 3 of them with poison, or a mob used as a boss, or 2 different minibosses together, or an previous boss with different elemental attacks. It's not that bad because the bosses are actually really fun to fight but it gets really tiresome mid to late game

[ZTL-Altima]

Bosses in ER are just huge masses of attack active frames. Once you know this trick and can avoid it, done. They are dumb as ♥♥♥♥ and not even close to the attention that was given to DS3 fights.

It's just another very similar DS2 thing in the game.

Some battles/designs are extremely cool, though. I put Rennala as one of the best boss design/fights ever.

[Silent]

Originally posted by Parsify:

Bosses in ER are just huge masses of attack active frames. Once you know this trick and can avoid it, done. They are dumb as ♥♥♥♥ and not even close to the attention that was given to DS3 fights.

It's just another very similar DS2 thing in the game.

Some battles/designs are extremely cool, though. I put Rennala as one of the best boss design/fights ever.

Renalla was awful. Her first phase was weak and her second phase could be beaten by just running around in circles and using melee on her.

Her phase 2 arena was top tier though.

[ressenmacher]

Originally posted by Silent:

Renalla was awful. Her first phase was weak and her second phase could be beaten by just running around in circles and using melee on her.

Her phase 2 arena was top tier though.

My guess is that her being a caster boss on top of having two phases + summons is what did her in. The second phase was likely made less difficult (in particular, she seems to have very low health) because it was expected that the player would use some flasks in the first phase...but it ends up being a real faceroll once you know what you're doing.

On top of that, Renalla summons melee enemies. Her whole kit had to bear in mind that it could be used while the player was also having to dodge/block/deal with a melee aggressor. Renalla has painfully long breaks between casts and like 0 poise, and I think the intent behind it was so that it didn't become unfair to a player who had to fight the CGS knight or wolves and now has a caster layering attacks over them to create scenarios with unavoidable damage. Unfortunately, this means that when it's just Renalla on the field she's nothing more than a punching bag, and that combined with her low health means you really aren't dealing with the really dangerous and demanding portion of the fight for very long.

I think maybe she needed to summon more frequently or they could have built her adds/an add specifically for this fight instead of reusing previous enemies so that her kit could be tailored around that, a la Demon Prince's first phase.

[Silent]

Originally posted by ressenmacher:

Originally posted by Silent:

Renalla was awful. Her first phase was weak and her second phase could be beaten by just running around in circles and using melee on her.

Her phase 2 arena was top tier though.

My guess is that her being a caster boss on top of having two phases + summons is what did her in. The second phase was likely made less difficult (in particular, she seems to have very low health) because it was expected that the player would use some flasks in the first phase...but it ends up being a real faceroll once you know what you're doing.

On top of that, Renalla summons melee enemies. Her whole kit had to bear in mind that it could be used while the player was also having to dodge/block/deal with a melee aggressor. Renalla has painfully long breaks between casts and like 0 poise, and I think the intent behind it was so that it didn't become unfair to a player who had to fight the CGS knight or wolves and now has a caster layering attacks over them to create scenarios with unavoidable damage. Unfortunately, this means that when it's just Renalla on the field she's nothing more than a punching bag, and that combined with her low health means you really aren't dealing with the really dangerous and demanding portion of the fight for very long.

I think maybe she needed to summon more frequently or they could have built her adds/an add specifically for this fight instead of reusing previous enemies so that her kit could be tailored around that, a la Demon Prince's first phase.

I didn't even know that she had summons. She didn't have a chance to call them in my boss battle.

They definitely need to up the rate of her summons.

[ressenmacher]

Originally posted by Silent:

I didn't even know that she had summons. She didn't have a chance to call them in my boss battle.

They definitely need to up the rate of her summons.

...damn. What WUL were you at? iirc I had a +3 or +4.

[ZTL-Altima]

Originally posted by Silent:

Originally posted by Parsify:

Bosses in ER are just huge masses of attack active frames. Once you know this trick and can avoid it, done. They are dumb as ♥♥♥♥ and not even close to the attention that was given to DS3 fights.

It's just another very similar DS2 thing in the game.

Some battles/designs are extremely cool, though. I put Rennala as one of the best boss design/fights ever.

Renalla was awful. Her first phase was weak and her second phase could be beaten by just running around in circles and using melee on her.

Her phase 2 arena was top tier though.

Was very well designed, different from 95% of the rest.

By this far in the series do not expect to be surprised by any difficulty gatekeeping.

[David Benioff]

I'm not even saying this out of spite towards ER, but I honestly have not liked a single boss fight in that game. They've all felt lazy and/or cheap to me so far. DS3 on the other hand has a small handful of bad bosses, but they're just bad, not cheap or lazy. Most of the bosses are honestly amazing in ds3. Great soundtracks and feel great to fight. I enjoy being able to i-frame attacks, get tight hits in and dodge through some big attack. It feels cool. Having to outpsace what feels like ds3 bosses with the sluggishness of the ds2 protagonist feels really really wrong.

[Silent]

Originally posted by ressenmacher:

Originally posted by Silent:

I didn't even know that she had summons. She didn't have a chance to call them in my boss battle.

They definitely need to up the rate of her summons.

...damn. What WUL were you at? iirc I had a +3 or +4.

I think I was at +7 or 8. Can't exactly remember, but I think it was around there.

Originally posted by Parsify:

Originally posted by Silent:

Renalla was awful. Her first phase was weak and her second phase could be beaten by just running around in circles and using melee on her.

Her phase 2 arena was top tier though.

Was very well designed, different from 95% of the rest.

By this far in the series do not expect to be surprised by any difficulty gatekeeping.

Not even difficulty gatekeeping. Yeah, it's different from 95% of the rest of the bosses, which is great for originality, but when all I had to do is get as close as possible, side step the boss in circles, and then spam light attacks it's not entirely too difficult.

Are you using a caster build? I could see it being extremely difficult for that build style.

[ressenmacher]

Originally posted by Silent:

I think I was at +7 or 8. Can't exactly remember, but I think it was around there.

That would probably explain things