Off Topic Discussion Megathread

[Vyrerus]

I dunno how people can respond to criticism about the bosses in Elden Ring being poorly designed by essentially saying '' just cheat bro '' lol.
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Sounds like you don't want to adapt your play style to actually give yourself an advantage in the fights. It's no different than any previous souls game. Every boss has buttons to press that you can take advantage of by design. Elden Ring's design is merely one that encourages you to use the Spirit Ash system. That's why there's so many duo bosses, and why so many bosses can turn on a dime. They're all designed to be possible to beat alone, but simultaneously designed for the player to have helpers. Except for the Evergaol bosses, obviously.

It's extra funny that you bring up reading inputs, but say the last two fights are fun. Radagon, second to last boss, literally reads player input, and he has/had a glitch where if you move up to him as the cutscene ends, he will not move, allowing you to cheese him with any attacks that do not cause your character to move (bows, certain spells).

The real problem with the Souls community is this very ideal trail. "I must be able to fight every boss with a wet noodle, making every fight an elegant dance of attrition where I eventually win due to dodge mastery." That is stale and boring, if you ask me. But it's still doable in Elden Ring. Just watch Ongbal or Faraaz Khan.

Almost every boss in Elden Ring can be utterly obliterated with weapons that inflict status ailments. Bleed, Frostbite, Poison, Scarlet Rot, Sleep, and Blackflame. It is designed to be beaten, but to still challenge you while you do it. Are a lot of the duo / gauntlet boss fights bull crap? Yeah. But I assure you that the game provides you the tools you need to defeat all of them. How much they make you swear and sweat is up to you. The design is clearly deliberate in that sometimes they just want to pound you into the ground.

Cheesing is so prevalent due to the expanded mainstream playerbase, but also due to the original playerbase for these games. OG Playerbase for Demon's Souls looked for ways to kill the bosses while expending minimal effort. That was the old mastery. The new mastery(dodge gods) is just as flawed if you obsess over it being the standard. Particularly when From doesn't shy away from fights like Rykard's.

[Kolsykol]

I went ahead and bought TW Warhammer 3, I had put it off since no blood DLC ( yes that's a thing rofl ) and no Immortal Empires ( big sandbox map with ALL of the factions ).
I just really wanted to play the Daemons tho.
It honestly looks pretty silly without blood especially Khorne who are all about blood and violence, you have literal rivers of blood in the background but then the units look like toy figures bumping into each other lol.

Either way I am still enjoying it, I've been thinking of getting into the PvP side of things in the TW Warhammer games too.
I probably have like 2k hours in total in the games but never touched the PvP but I love to watch the tournaments being streamed.

Snip

You're missing my point a bit, I am aware that cheese and such has always existed, just not to the extent as in Elden Ring.
And it also didn't feel borderline mandatory or like you severely gimped yourself as much for not using a handful of weapons.
Radagon does indeed read inputs but he's not behaving like a Sekiro boss ( altho Elden Beast was more fun imo ), I am also aware of the glitch with him too and that you can cheese him but I don't think that Radagon actually incentives you to do so as heavily and severely as other bosses do.
It's not only about reading inputs it's about how they act on it when they do.
There's bosses in the late game especially where you literally have to guess if it's safe or not, because the boss can choose to extend their combo if you hit them and it won't be avoidable you'll be animation locked.
I don't think that leaving it up to RNG whether it's safe to actually attack or not is good design either.
And even if you wait for their full combo to be done 100% they can choose to instantly start a new one immediately when you hit them and you're just screwed.

I am not saying that it isn't designed to be this way what I am saying is that it's poor design and it SEVERELY punishes you for playing melee with almost every weapon.
And when people criticize the boss design the response is often '' just use this glitch bro '', which is totally missing the entire point and is essentially admitting that yes the bosses are poorly designed and instead you should be using glitches or all of these new things so that you don't actually have to do the fight.
People shouldn't feel compelled to go and use a weapon that shoots a laser that kills bosses in seconds after they entered the room or to use a glitch or shoot bosses from miles away without aggroing them to death.

I mean... "I must be able to fight every boss with a wet noodle, making every fight an elegant dance of attrition where I eventually win due to dodge mastery."
Yes?
Cheesing and completely borked weapons, summoning etc has been there to help people who aren't very good or are just having a rough time with a certain boss.
There's not a problem with that, there is a problem when the devs design things to heavily incentivize it with artificial difficulty.
Artificial difficulty is rarely a good thing imo and Elden Ring is full to the brim with it.

Edit: Even a lot of these dodge gods so to speak still have to spend like 9 minutes on a boss WITH Bleed weapons and aren't actually dodging the boss a lot of the time, but are just baiting attacks and sprinting away.
And these are top tier players.

When you say '' encourage '' I think you're putting it very mildly and are being incredibly generous.
I fail to see how what you're describing is more stale and boring too than running in with a Mimic and spamming left trigger, it's essentially just borderline enforcing ranged builds or a handful of weapons it's actually MORE limiting.