Elden Ring

[briareos_kerensky]

Completed

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Crumbling Farum Azula. Nicely challenging location, and surprisingly I had more trouble with the Treetop Sentinel guarding the boss entrance than the boss himself.
Complete Ranni's sidequest, and it was kinda disappointing to kill Blaid, but he dropped his set and sword...and I'm liking the sword a lot. It has split phys/mag damage, and being a colossal weapon it's slow, but it staggers enemies that standard greatswords won't, so things balance out.
Another surprise was how easy the Lake Of Rot and related boss were.

[Finsbury Girl]

Somehow I managed to find yet another location I missed, purely by looking from afar and thinking, I haven't seen that have i? And then looking at the map to see something there, so I go how the hell do I get there, lo and behold after riding around a bit find way more cool locations and stuff!

This is just so wonderful. Look I loved running around Skyrim and doing the similar stuff but I don't know, I never got that same sense of wonder and awe as I am getting with Elden Ring. And trust me I really liked Skyrim (over 200 hours) I honestly don't know why that is...maybe the passage of time?

I'm well over 100 hours now just into

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Mountain Top of the Giants

I'm thinking I MAY be getting to the end of the game....

I'm definitely over levelled, stomped

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Godfrey and Morgott

first time, me and my gal Tiche. She really is the MVP

Oh yeah Royal Capital was a bloody AMAZING dungeon. Truly EPIC in every sense of the word. That

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dragon

I was like OMG what the hell happened there?

Apologies for the rambling I keep remembering cool stuff about this game

[Lebowski]

I'm only 20 hours in so far as i wanted to finish a few other games before its got its hooks in me as i knew it would. The opening area is wonderful to explore as is the first main story area, it took me a bit to realise that following the main story path is not how they want you to play this. Exploring the first area fully not only got me some cool stuff but leveled me up a bit too. got me a few early boss kills,

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the Knight on the horse, a massive dragon on a lake and a dude in a boat that could summon skeletons, i also found a good early game farming spot in killing the giants as they give you 1000- 5000 a kill. Got myself kidnapped and thought i was screwed but managed to sneak out stupid game

overall I'm absolutely loving it, i thought an open world souls game would make progressing through the world painfully slow but they have managed to for the most part make exploration really intuitive and pretty non oppressive, with pockets of challenge centered around items and dungeons and story progresion.

[briareos_kerensky]

Got to the

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Haligtree and was surprised how big the area was, considering how empty the zone before was. It's a mash of styles that starts LORT-like, then the usual Souls city, poisonous swamp, and a bit of Great Hollow thrown into the mix for good measure.
The soldiers are easy, though the higher ranking knights with their mix of sorceries and incantations proved a tad hard.
And so many mini-bosses! That you can cheese if you have a good bow. Completed Millicent's quest by helping her out against her sisters, and attempted Malenia once...first phase is easy, got killed during by her first attack in the second phase, the huge AoE rot explosion. She takes a good amount of damage from physical weapons and blood loss does wonders, but her healing up at every hit, even we protected by a shield, makes for an intense, if brief, fight.

Also, the savegame says 95 hours on the clock but Steam says 104...I think it's because Steam's timer starts and stops the moment the anti-cheat is enabled/disabled, and takes almost a minute for the game to completely unload from memory.

[gordon]

Okay, I think I was wrong about the boss I complained about in my last post. Having fought it around 60-70 times as a summon, I’m now using a technique to take chunks out of its health and can pretty much avoid every attack. This has given me an appreciation of the grace and fluid beauty of its movements. I actively look forward to fighting it now…

[briareos_kerensky]

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Giant two-headead god dragon? No problem.
Lady that flinches at every hit, bleeds, and can be guard-broken? I've lost count how many times I've attempted her. I got oh-so-close defeating her but then I got greedy and she killed me on more time. Tried some co-ops but they vary wildly in their tactics, like that mage who stayed behind and shot a total of two spells doing risible damage.

[briareos_kerensky]

Well, waddaynow,

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the first attempt at Malenia after the previous message sees the swordmaiden defeated. Plenty of souls too, worth 2 level ups...I've grinded a bit and I'm around level 190. I should bring INT to 50 to use the more advanced incantations but instead I'll bring DEX to 50, same as STR. Then maybe raise END a bit, and after that I can go for INT again.

I think I only have to defeat the last boss now, before going for

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Malenia I defeated Godfrey, and he went down on the first try...

[Yakumo]

Had a crazy glitch on Elden Ring today. No water or particle effects!

[briareos_kerensky]

At the

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Elden Beast...I was able to get it down to around 10% health, then whiffed a dodge on its grab move. I still need to find a reliable way to dodge the chasing stars, once on top of that that thing unleashed the triple ring move and I couldn't really dodge everything. It almost gives me vibes of Ebrietas, meaning that you have to get lucky and hope it doesn't do too many of its sure-kill moves and also not at the same time.

[Tobal]

Took a break and came back, as of starting i was lvl 128 (mid 30's for vit/str, 46 for dex, 30 fth and 25 enh, nothing else levelled up much).

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Opened up the 'secret' snowfield after clearing out Castle Sol which left me with 3 new (large) places to go, haligtree, the forge of giants and after finding a warp gate on the west side of the snowfield, Mohgwyn Palace. Decided on Mohgwyn first, very nice place to get exp, specially after reading the floor messages asking to for a range battle... saw only a nasty crow to shoot at, did so and it ran at me and off a cliff for 13000 points and with the grace right behind me easily repeatable, along with a ton of 2-3k frogmen to kill.

Made it to Mohg, got my ass kicked alot before i headed back to the grace site to regear for bloodloss/fire protection and on messing with my flasks picked up the words Mohg on one of tears... can't remember when i picked it up but it cleanses the blooddrain sigel for the 2nd phase start, combining that with the Mohg chains, auto crossbow with rot arrows and freshly upgraded spiked club with frost on it to lvl 22, i beat him in a couple of tries (with my mimic buddy) after all that i'm now level 140.

Next up i assume is Malenia at the Haligtree, as i assume the rot girl wouldn't be at the giant's place.

I do like that it is quite easy to level up multiple weapons, specially the unique weapons as they only need 1 somber per level to upgrade, have about five +9 somber weapons but only two +20-25 normal weapons. Helps cover all the bases for fire/bleed/frost and Rot.

[Lebowski]

Massive progress again over the last few days, found a ginormous open underground area with some tough enemy's and a really cool environmental puzzle, fully looted it and killed the boss, i then rinsed a massive part of Liurnia, cleared out a load of Evergaol's and that creepy manor at the top, the enemy's in here makes my skin crawl

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The hand spiders are horrifying the way they move and pounce is far to realistic its like your fighting real giant spiders. an offhand fire spell seems to be their weakness making them roll on their back and squirm for an easy 1-2 with a sword.

I'm not finding it any harder than previous souls games if anything its been a pretty steady experience, clearing out an area before moving on to find new areas seems to be how the game is balanced, you get to level up, get loads of loot and weapons its then that you can tackle the end area and move on. i think where many people have come unstuck is charging straight to the castle and getting wrecked by the enemy's in their (the grace points you straight their which is a bit silly). If only they had made it clear that the whole area before the castle contains enemy's way under that level and charging straight to the castle is akin to completing the big dungeon at the end of an area.

if anything the next area feels more like how the first should of been as it set up as you need to find an item to get into its big area forcing you to explore before you can move on.

[briareos_kerensky]

Aaaaand game completed. After a couple of unsuccessful runs when the last boss piled area attacks on top of homing attacks, I summoned help and got this mage that absolutely demolished the boss, he was doing more than twice my damage...I wanted to deal the finishing blow but he did it instead
Now waiting for the two pieces of DLC where we fight Miquella and go to the cloud in the middle of the map.

[Finsbury Girl]

I'm at the

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consecrated snowfield

I hate this area!

[briareos_kerensky]

Eh, wait till you reach the next one.

[Tobal]

Cleared out the Giants and the Haligtree

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Giants area wasn't to bad (**** that giant hand though), Fire Giant wasn't to hard, wasn't even paying attention to the left foot, was just hitting them both when the armour fell off, couple of tries later i beat him 1st time getting him to the second phase as it was alot easier to deal with stabbing him up the bottom with a spear on Torrent. Haligtree was pretty tough, cheesed the tree folk with fire bombs and bolts, found 2 more curse seeds which seemed to finish off Dung Eater as i now have great rune which just sits in my inventory.

Malenia kicked my ass alot, every engagement was me getting better at getting through phase one with 2 or 3 bottles used up and the mimic with 3/4 HP still, however the frost/bleed great club i was using was just to slow to hit phase two, after some trail and error i ended up clearing using the Abductor candle (fire/bleed), bleed doing nice damage to counter the healing and it stabs fast and interrupts her standard swings, i had the mimic on my frost/bleed club and swapped weapons in the menu to candle after the mimic was called, level 150 something at the time. Bought Malenia's sword, man those Katana weapons are broken as heck compared to everything else i've used, this being an almost pure dex weapon slots right in for my spear build with the other katana's i've come across requiring INT/ARC which i haven't levelled.

Got a bit into the crumbling city which seems to be the last place or 2nd to last after torching Melina, once i finish the game i'll read up on alternatives, i bet you can do something else instead of that.