Elden Ring - gamertags on first page

Messmer down, I thought that was going to be hellish but bloodhound blade wrecked him.

Bosses so far have been great.

Could always just try a different summon, they're not all as insanely strong as Mimic/Tiche.

13 Ancient Dragon Smithing Stones and 8 of the Somber kind in the base game. 6 and 4 for Great Grave/Ghost Gloveworts, respectively, for your summons. The DLC has a few more of all those.

So more than usual, but some of them are questline rewards and/or in rather obscure locations, plus there's many more weapons to work with in this game as it is.

That said, for a decent amount of weapons the difference between +24 and +25 (or +9 and +10, as applicable) isn't too big. Unless your weapon would gain higher scaling grades, most of the time you'd only get a marginal damage increase, same with shields and their guarding/damage absorption. And you can buy every kind of Smithing Stone besides the Ancients for the final upgrade, as long as you've found the Bell Bearings, so an arsenal of +24/+9 is both very possible and entirely serviceable.

Bayle is fantastic yeah. Honestly I think a lot of the bosses (so far) have been really cool, and often quite hilarious. Whilst I have no real interest in learning attacks etc I always appreciate just how mad and beautiful the boss fights are.

I'm still exploring Shadow Keep, it's massive. I think exploring a new From Soft castle might be top 5 things to do in life, for me. Shadow Keep is a pretty fucking good one too.

Bayle is a massive example of the DLC bosses charging you aggressively from the off. It's fucking stupid and feels incredibly artificial.

I'll mention something I've mentioned a couple times already: Opaline Bubbletear.

Drink that sucker before you even enter the arena and tell that initial charge to go pound sand while you do your thing. It seriously helps.

I know about it, I've used it. A lot. It still doesn't excuse some of the weaknesses of the game and I think there's a conversation to he had that Elden Ring seems to be at the line where the combat and movement options available to the player do not match those of the bosses.

I saw someone complain that From have left out the tools that Sekiro gave you, but kept the boss' capabilities the same. Sounds about right tbh

That sounds like a good plan, peacemaker, I haven't done that (helping others with bosses) since Dark Souls 3, thanks!

...Does it though? Elden Ring has a metric fuckton of consumables, spells, Ashes of War, summons, talismans etc as tools, most of which every build can use because they don't even have stat requirements... I don't think there's been a FromSoft game with more tools at your disposal, there's like four different AoW for parries alone! Heck, there's video proof of multiple people doing shit one-shotting (or two-shotting, for bosses with cutscenes) every boss in both the main game and the DLC, beating all bosses while never dodging or blocking and all kinds of crazy shit, simply by stacking up buffs and making proper use of said tools!

Don't get me wrong, Sekiro's combat is absolutely brilliant, and I completely understand if you enjoy it more than Elden Ring's, but to say it gives you more tools and capabilities... it just seems objectively wrong to me tbh.

There was a video on Youtube i watched ages ago that went into why ER is a departure from the previous titles regarding boss design.

Think it was called Elden Ring Bosses: An unbalanced disappointment. A fractured design philosophy.

Seems to come down to bosses have more hp, higher damage output, less recovery time after animations, more delayed attacks, can chain combos, then go straight into other combos or abilties so less fair counter opportunities, more hyper armour, more mobility and aggression.

This is countered with being able to use ashes

Case in point, you can straight up have Sekiro in Elden Ring now, much like Malenia's Great Rune gave you Bloodborne

Edit: and even before the Deflecting Hardtear... (although the bit about Carian/Golden Retaliation being able to parry your own spells may have been patched by now...)

Personally I think the root of the problem (I've probably mentioned this before) is in how they balanced vitality in this game. It's broadly accepted that to not get absolutely shit on by stuff in the endgame you want a bare minimum of 40, which is the first soft cap, and for the hardest content, the ideal is 60 - the second soft cap, after which more points are almost literally worthless.

Hitting those doesn't give you this big pool of health and forgiveness, it just lets you take like 2 hits without dying. If you wanted to make a 2 hits and then you're dead glass cannon build in other souls games then that's like... no stat investment. ER is kinda demanding everyone spends a shitload of points just to even qualify as a glass bb gun - there's no room for people to build into extra survivability in ER.

I think I would be happier if they cut down the obvious input reading.