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[lemon10]

Bleed then frost. Rot is better then frost against bosses assuming you have a decent way to apply it.

Sleep is actually super clutch. Doesn't work against the vast majority of bosses and only has 2 non-consumable ways to apply it, but against the dudes it works against its bonkers.

[nenjin]

Bleed is easier to get earlier on and comes from more sources, but I'd argue Frost is honestly better. Gets better damage scaling off of Int than Bleed off Arcane and they take additional damage while frostbitten. I'd always be surprised to Frost imbue a weapon I'd be using for other things and watch its damage instantly scale to comparable or better than my primary stats, even with low Int investment. Cannot say the same thing for Bleed.

[nenjin]

Well, it's time everybody. From Software announced Elden Ring's first official DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree. No trailer that I can find but there's some concept art out there that makes me think the theme of the DLC will be based around Godwyn or at least the Death aspect of the Lands Between. It has the same color palette as death-related things in ER.

Not much to go on and I'm not digging much deeper yet. But saddle up, the next journey begins soon.

https://www.ign.com/articles/elden-ring-expansion-announced-shadow-of-the-erdtree

[Horizon]

No, no, no. That has to be Miquella. On the horse, or some kind of dream world. That tree might be a or the Haligtree.

[nenjin]

Vaati's take.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYZphgX0YBs&t=592s

Of the things debated, that being a picture of the spirit realm and that tree being the Lamplight tree seems the most plausible. Except for the absence of red Grace.

[lemon10]

I've just been doing some reflecting, and realized that this game more then any other has bosses vastly weaker then they were in their prime.

Out of all the runebearers only four of them are at full strength. Of those three one is explicitly a chump (Godrick) and two others are fell Omens. Which of course makes sense, the only things still at full strength in this debased age are debased creatures themselves.
(Rykard himself is unique in the game, the sole being of power you meet that is truly on the ascendant without your interference, but even he is a foul creature for a foul age.)
This weakening extends to the other strong lore bosses as well. The Dragonlord is missing two/three heads, the lichdragon is slowly being corrupted by the power of death, Malekith has spent the last few centuries insane and weakened.

The greatest being you face that has avoided this weakening has only done so because he wasn't in the lands between and thus him being an exception is completely on theme.

This theme of even the greatest beings being mere shadows of their full glory is common to other soulslikes (eg. Gwyn, Abyss Watchers), but its never taken to nearly the extreme it is in Elden Ring.

In the other games it feels like you slay all that stands before you no matter their power. In Elden Ring you fight only a fragment of a fragment of the true power of the setting.
Hopefully some DLC lets you fight full power bosses. A full strength Renalla or Radhan fight would be great.

[nenjin]

While that is totally on theme and on brand for Souls-like, I've always felt a great disconnect between the storied strength of the Demi-gods and what you as the player can actually do.

Like, the pinnacle of player performance is a one shot kill with a regular attack or at best the fanciest AoW which is like Golden Lands or Golden Wave? And the spells are like, the Kamehameha beam. Is it Godly? I suppose.

Meanwhile full strength Rhadan literally stopped the stars in their tracks. At full power he'd just crush the player in an immense gravity wave and be done with ya. I feel like the player can't bombastically respond on their level.

[Egan_BW]

The player character starts off as some scrub with a sword and eventually graduates to being a stronger scrub with a bigger and sharper sword by the end. The games convey some level of getting more powerful, but they don't really sell godly power.

We're told that a +15 weapon in dark souls is the same quality as the weapons of the gods. But it doesn't look different or do anything different other than have bigger damage numbers.

[Horizon]

I still think it Miquella

[MorleyDev]

We are also fighting most of these characters at the weakest point in their lives, many of them mentally and/or physically already being rather broken by the time we get to them.

And even in the lore being a Demigod just seems to make someone naturally able to become very skilled at what they put their minds to rather than being raw godly powah. Which fits into the Norse Mythology theming, where the gods are more mortal-like than a lot of other mythologies.

[Jopax]

So they announced the artbookS (yes, there are two) for the game. One focusing on locations and story and the like while the second focuses more on the creatures and weapons and stuff. They'll both be bigger than most of the previous stuff they've done for the soulsborne series.

Each costs a bit more than the game itself and I've pre-ordered both :V

[Cthulhu]

Replaying, doing a pure dex build with frozen needle and a fire estoc.  It's pretty good, doing way better than my first run.  Almost to Malenia.

Only problem with frozen rapier is its damage is pretty low alone.  Against enemies that let you do it the rapier powerstance animation builds up frost really fast and the fire immediately cancels it, so you can build it up and get the startup frost damage repeatedly.

[syvarris]

Pretty sizable update today!  It has a lot of good changes, though they seem a little conservative, and questionable in places.  A LOT of weapon classes got general buffs, seemingly only for the non-powerstance movesets, and most of them are the less used weapon classes.  Guard counters in particular were made faster on almost everything, and flails got buffed in basically every way.  Less ideally, halberds got some of the buffs too, which strikes me as odd since they're already top tier without being powerstanced.  Greatswords and colossal swords too, though the buffs sound fairly conservative, so I doubt they'll suddenly be OP.  Just... they didn't really need any improvement IMO.  Thrusting weapons and powerstanced weapons just needed to be taken down a little bit.

This seems to be the buff part of the cycle, there's relatively few nerfs.  The PvP-exclusive nerfs seem focused on reducing oneshots, and mostly targeted compounding buffs like the jellyfish shield, Royal Knight's Resolve, White Mask, the jump attack boosters, physic's cracked tears, etc.  Thrusting weapons in general did have their "hitbox sizes reduced", which is... good, but probably won't make them much less oppressive.  Unless they undersold the actual change by a lot, again.  They also nerfed lightroll's travel distance, so hopefully it's less unfair.

There's a bunch of other stuff, including some pretty funny bug fixes.  Apparently if you actually managed to kill someone in the colosseum with the death status, the person you killed would get credit for the kill.  But those are the parts that stuck out to me.  It sounds pretty good for the most part, though I'm really looking forward to some serious nerfs.  I hope sleep halberd doesn't become even worse to fight.

Edit: I was looking at youtube and apparently there's at least one translation error in the patch notes.  A very, very significant one.  It says they "Decreased the power of two-handed jumping attacks", which made me when I saw it.  They actually nerfed powerstanced jumping attack, which I think everyone will agree was a good decision.  It's PvP-only though, which I kinda question.  I think it's poor design for jumping powerstance attacks to be so clearly the best move for most powerstance setups.  The patch notes also say that flails have "increased poise when using two-handed attacks", which seems reasonable regardless of whether it's a translation error.  Flails suck, whether you have one or two.

Also they added ray tracing.  I don't care about that and I kinda doubt many on the Dwarf Fortress forums care, but hey.

[nenjin]

https://en.bandainamcoent.eu/elden-ring/news/elden-ring-patch-notes-version-109

Yeah, the overall reductions in the 1-shot builds that do upwards of 1400 damage on dual wielded jump attacks is a good thing. Powerstanced great swords, Claw Talisman, Raptors of the Mist, the Raptor Chest piece, Royal Knights Resolve. You add all those up and you can do upwards of 1800 damage on a jumping dual attack against a naked.

Not sure why the first start up attack of many fast weapons (whips, straight swords) needed increased animation speeds and decreased recovery times but ok.....

Also nerfing light rolls a little was definitely called for.

[lemon10]

Thought it was time to get back into the game and get someo work in on a second run. Nooope, the new update made it crash instantly as soon as the game loads in.
I tried playing a different char, turning ray tracing off (why the hell was it enabled by default, it will break the game for like 70% of players), and even lowered all the graphics setting all the way to minimum. All completely useless.
Guess its time to wait for 1.09b.

E: Huh, turns out all I needed to do was validate my files, one was messed up somehow.