Elden Ring: Breath of the From Software

The latest patch fixed Vyke not invading. I just tried it and he's there.

I'm way overleveled for almost all the content in the game so I'm having a good time. I dominated Astel in one try and rolled the commander guy in the snowy mountains last night.

I am in the capital! I actually kinda love this area... it's so huge and the battles, while difficult, seem fair so far. When I get close to 50k-ish runes, I sometimes hop out to the Rahdan fight to cap out my level. I'm still bracing for the evil stuff ahead but still really enjoying the game so far. Also, I did go back and beat that nasty Godskin Apostle, and the Crucible Knight + Misbegotten Warrior fight, along with a few other bosses who were giving me grief in other dungeons. I was probably a bit overleveled and the Halo Scythe was quite effective, but eh... the revenge felt sweet.

Had a pretty rad elden ring experience.

I was fighting this incredibly difficult for my build dragon in farum azule, not a boss though. So I summoned help from someone and we went to it. In the middle of fighting this motherfucker, an invader entered our game. They then proceeded to stand off to the side for full 3-4 minutes it took to finish this dragon. We then compose ourselves, turn to this invader, we bow to each other and I throw a "thank you" vocaloid, and start brawling.

That's some peak Elden Ring!

I beat Astel by using Mimic Tear and spamming my Halo Scythe ability (Miquella's Ring of Light), which made for a pretty easy fight.

Such a cool/weird looking boss; so much so that I immediately set a summoning seal at the entrance to see if I could help someone else with the fight. This... wasn't as easy, since the boss's HP scales up and I only had 1 blue flask (and melee'ing him is a pain in the ass). After several failed attempts, I moved on to finish up Ranni's questline & beat the dragon along the way. Her story has now ignited my interest in the lore of the game and I think my NG+ will be a bit more story/quest centric on the next run.

For now, I'm trying to figure out how to get this Faith/Strength build to work better for me and starting to consider a respec since I'm sitting on 10 Larval Tears. Each level up is 80k+ now and every piece of gear I want is just a few STR or DEX above my ability and my encumbrance is always just a bit too low. Meanwhile, any of the zany Dragon abilities are requiring several levels to be placed into Arcane. Decisions decisions...

Life is so much easier when you're a pure strength build. You put points in strength, and then every once in a while vitality and endurance instead. Then you hit stuff with a big sword!

I leveled up Arcane a bit and purchased a few Dragon incantations. The Scarlet Rot breath definitely came in handy for the infamous Fire Giant fight in his second phase. I’d tried a lot of different approaches but it seemed like that last half of the fight just came down to chip damage, dodging, & patience, so I figured some rot would help if I could get it on him while he was doing his lava rock AOE. It worked well, once I remembered to use a Rune Arc and prepped some better equipment (Tree Sentinel gear from the chariot catacombs gave me some good fire damage resistance, but I still didn’t have the endurance level to wear it without the Godrick boost). I was stumped on this boss fight for 2-3 hours, a hurdle I hadn’t encountered since Margit, but finally beat him tonight!

And now… I’m in the bad place.

I beat Mogh and am kind of on the late game challenge bosses and areas in general. They're all kind of annoying but I usually feel this way about these parts of a From game so it isn't new. I typically fight them once or twice and then just summon help. If you're not arcane, I definitely recommend summoning help for Mogh. Especially high level arcane help. Also, you need to use your flask if physik in an annoying way to beat Mogh.

The lore of the challenge areas is really good so that keeps me plugging away at them.

I beat mohg by hitting him in the face with a halberd until he died. I don't know how you're supposed to dodge his super bleed thing where you get the rings around you, but I just spammed heals when it went off and it worked out in the end. The area leading up to him sucked BAD. Why are those bleed dogs the most lethal thing in the game lol.

The unblockable super bleed happens at exactly half his health bar (he is counting down) so you can chug a flask of physick that gives you damage prevention right at that moment and you'll take almost no damage.

I ended up beating him by summoning a guy who had that laser beam spell (comet azur?). We actually dropped so much DPS on him during his super bleed spell at the halfway point he died before he could even grow wings or start his second phase. That spell is fucking sick.

I got to Mohg and did my usual “put down my summon sign first so I can check out the boss risk-free” move. The few times I tried we died during his phase transition. I just got the physik tear for that so I think I’ll go back and try for real.

Ah_Pook wrote: Why are those bleed dogs the most lethal thing in the game lol.

Because they are bugged. Their attack hitbox is missing the limiter of one hit per attack, so instead it can hit every frame.

I have literally never used the physik flask in this game

It's useful in a couple situations but I don't get a ton of use out of it either.

It's also good for any of the heroes graves to prevent bullshit autokills once.

I use it for bosses to boost my STR and DEX for the scaling on my sword