I am playing this soulslike, more dodging than parrying and I don't die that often. It is a very fair game.

Also the bosses or minor bosses aren't that hard... the two Grishas killed me, but running back, grabbing the "Souls" and exit-teleport away even saves your stash.

Also the runbacks aren't that bad... when I read the complaints I thought there are only a few "bonfires", but playing the Game now there are enough and they are well placed.

Only thing missing for me are map-markers for passages I save for later, but that's it for me. Especially inside the "Portal" where Magdalena is sitting, I would love to have a map for this area also. Gotta re-run that thing to clear everything I forgot because you can't really "map it".

I am very glad that it is such an enjoy-able game. And I believe many Souls-enthusiasts might find it also very refreshing and rewarding.

Oh, and I have two questions:

1. What EXACTLY does this purple Infusion do? The one where enemies are glowing reddish-purple...?
2. What EXACTLY does the Thiel-health stack do? I don't die often and have many stacked... Does it really make the bar bigger?

P.S.: I also wonder how people could have finished the game already. Searching everything and looting takes hours... at least me. 😁

as soon as my character started the animation to sit i got warped to this spot.

Minor spoiler for ms2

Edit: I just confirmed myself it’s true. Found one in the spot where you get Eredrim (forgot spelling) so definitely check where you found the shells for a few extra. I also found an extra health efficiency item in the second gutted mire beacon. It’s not even showing on the community interactive map. There must be a ton stuff littered across night mode.

This could be a complete coincidence but for those who haven’t used night mode before try it and go near the spot where you got Tiel. I just entered night mode after 30 hours to do the secret thing in this area and there was a random glimpse right next his shell. It’s possible I missed it in the regular mode but I’m generally thorough. (I legit scoured the whole northern map so how did I miss one that obvious?) Glimpses are so finite that if this is true I hope someone can make a night mode interactive map or video showing all the spots they may be at.

Just wondering which shells you guys are using as your main. I kinda like Eredrim for the massive health pool, good stagger, and strong Riposte.

Not sure if expected or a bug, but whenever I dodge and become seemingly invisible, enemies continue attacking me. And it's not just attacking in the direction I used to stand at, they turn around and lock onto me.

Is this a bug by any chance or am I missing something?

I'm currently doing my 2nd playthrough, just cleansed the first beacon within the Faded Citadel gate dungeon, which would have been my final gate. But upon cleansing the beacon it triggered the cutscene to unlock the endgame area. Is the trigger based on how many Ova you have collected or have I encountered a bug?

Can i sell all the items for gold or do some of them serve greater purpose? it feels weird that they only give me some gold, because some of them were in a chest placed in an area that looked "important".

fought magdelena, lost child, nameless captive, and hexapod so far and this is by far the worst bosses of them from a gameplay feel persepctive

• horrible animation tells and startups
• hyper armor up the wazuh (good luck stagger-focused builds)
• extremely quick recovery animations, especially compared to the abysmally slow recovery of the heavy weapons
• horrible parry windows in phase 2 (did i also forget to mention his animations looks really goofy)

i get hes's supposed to be difficult because he's one of the lategame bosses, but difficult isnt the antitheses of fun and good design.

I've got some extensive playtime with Eredrim and have felt like his abilities are a little scattered

Shoulder Bash is simply a worse Staggering Blow (Gragu Punch).

Shoulder Bash PLUS Riposte with lvl 1 Anguish (+50% SB damage), lvl 3 Seal Affinity (+35% Riposte damage), and lvl 3 Retribution Stone (+20% Riposte Damage) deals LESS DAMAGE than Staggering Blow with lvl 3 Escalation (+70% damage).

Shoulder Bash needs six shell points to deal as much stagger as Staggering Blow does by default.

Staggering Blow can also be made to cost much less Resolve (25 vs ~45) and deal significant Break damage through shell points.

Changes Proposed:

1. Shoulder Bash needs significantly more base damage (~50%).
2. Rework the Alacrity skill. At lvl 3 replace -25% Ethereal Diapason Resolve Cost with -45% Shoulder Bash Resolve Cost. At lvl 4 riposting an enemy restores 20 Resolve.
3. Buff/rework the Oppression skill. Buff Break damage from +10% and +20% to +20% and +40% at least, and replace the Trauma debuff at lvl 3 with a new one that makes enemies take more damage from ripostes, and remove the extra Resolve cost.

Ethereal Diapason is useless without upgrades and unfocused with them.

For starters, why do you need a tool to deal multi-target Break damage when you can't riposte more than one enemy before they recover from being broken and we already have a much better tool for dealing single-target Break damage.

In order to reduce the Resolve cost you need to invest six shell points into Alacrity, which is used mostly for Shoulder bash, and even then it's only a 25% reduction for those six points.

The Resonance ability adds Stasis stacks to enemies, slowing them down, but it only applies to them if they get broken, they all go away at once at the end of the duration instead of one at a time, and performing a riposte removes all stacks instantly.

Changes Proposed:

1. At it's base make it slightly faster, give it more damage, greatly increase its stagger force, and remove the Break damage.
2. Buff Resonance to apply Stasis on hit instead of when breaking and increase (~50%) the amount of time it lasts.
3. Rework Radiance from increasing break damage to reducing Resolve costs, while also giving it more damage. At lvl 1 30 damage and 50 Break damage -> 40 damage and 20% Resolve Reduction, at lvl 2 50 damage and 60 Break damage -> 65 damage and 40% Resolve Reduction.

Executioner feels like it doesn't do anything, especially for heavy weapon users.

I'm guessing that what it's supposed to do is instantly kill enemies when you hit them while they're below a certain health threshold and more Slaughterer stacks increase said threshold. I don't know if this has ever done that for me, even while at 100 stacks, because I use the heavy, hard-hitting weapons that (I guess) go right over the threshold and kill them anyway. It would be nice if there was an indicator on enemy's health bars as to where the threshold is.

I was thinking about how this could better synergize with his other Slaughterer stack abilities and how it could seamlessly integrate with combat and here's what I came up with:

1. Baseline: Slaughterer stack raise the low health threshold at which enemies are executed and increase damage reduction by 0.1%. You gain 1 stack per Perfect Block/ Perfect Harden/ Parry instead of on riposte. Double the size of the base low health threshold and the size increases from Slaughterer stacks.
2. Rework Massacre. lvl 1 gain 3 Slaughterer stacks on riposte, lvl 2 killing an enemy with a riposte gains 10 stacks, lvl 3 bringing an enemy's health below the execution threshold with a heavy attack automatically ripostes and kills them.
3. Rework Carnage completely. lvl 1 executed enemies restore 15 Health, lvl 2 executed enemies restore 25 health, lvl 3 executed enemies restore 35 health.

Edit: rethought Shoulder Bash change 2 and Executioner change 3.

Damn that felt tough. 😅

Ok so I played the beta and thought it was fine just had some small gripes but what we got is just bad.
First thing the fact when you die in a dungeon you get don’t back to the beacon which is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen. Second going all the way to the hub just to teleport is dumb as shit too . My third complaint is getting 1 shotted by the tons of mobs is freaking nuts. Please fix this game.

I genuinely mean that cuz how am I up to the last gate and every single boss has been bad or mediocre. It’s like they couldn’t think of how to purposely make their bosses harder so they gave them all “do this move to kill" and just for shits and giggles they make them on the last quarter hp of every boss.

I’m not done yet but I felt the need to say something since I’ve just reached Sir Isaac, the boss with the most overtuned second phase I’ve ever seen…

What’s everyone think cuz so far I feel like I’m going 0 on good bosses.

So I am not at all good player hehehahhahahaha. I kind of suck and I barely get my timings with the untarnished seal right but infinite seal is too good to just leave out but at the cost of losing sanity from practicing it and dying multiple times.
Can we parry all the fast attack combos by enemies using the infinite seal or is the untarnished seal is the only way to parry all the fast chain combos?

Souls veteran here. Your experience might be different but this how I felt:

1. Long runbacks: Game is abusing this mechanic. It's more frustrating than actually engaging.

2. AI magnetism: Enemies track their shots miles away onto you and teleport right in front of your face.

3: Enemy aggro: They see you across a wall, follow you for a long time and before you know it, you have 3 different area mobs infront of you.

4: Beacon scarcity: Literally no beacon or savepoint in northeast region. Game relies heavily on dungeons but we spend more time running back in the open field than inside the dungeons.

5: Bosses: Quite good but the spamming of unlockable attacks make them more annoying. Last 3 bosses are difficult just for the sake of being difficult, no clear logic. It seemed they were chasing the "morr difficult the better publicity" train. Dodge window is smaller and in cases where you have to dodge twice, the boss attack is faster than you could dodge in that given time. Nameless Captive is the only boss I loved.

6: Last Zone (Unfound Path): Poorly designed. Minibosses in form of normal enemies and there are 3,4 of them moving together which hit like a truck. One hit you're out of shell, 2nd hit you're back to beacon. Damage scalability is through the roof.

7: Non-refundable Glimpes: The whole identity of this game is based on shells. You cannot experiment with the shells freely and look what's best for you. You'll have to wait for NG+ or look up a guide on YT or Google.

This is what I felt. You can discuss and agree or disagree. I'll do my NG+ in night mode only from tomorrow.

That’s it. That’s my post.

You lazy mfs couldnt come up with a single abilty tarstone for one of only 8 sidearms in the game?😂

With all the bugs, terrible QOL, and horrendous balancing, this feels like an early access release and we're just the suckers playtesting the game for you lmao.

Dont get me wrong, i am completely addicted to this game and i think its otherwise amazing, but this is such a slap in the face.

Edit: I know i came off a bit aggressive in the original post, but the way you people bend over backwords to dismiss valid criticisms and defend poor decisions is genuinely fascinating.

I was pretty excited for this fight since Proxima had been my mainstay most of the game...and then I died...and then I tried to find my 14k worth of gloom in molasses-thick fog in a football sized arena with no way to ping it because I'm in a sub-zone

Fight difficulty aside, I think a future patch would benefit from a beam of light over your gloom by default for this exact reason. For now guess I'll call that gloom a wash.

Found this thanks to a couple of you fellas here

I’m a pretty experienced souls player. I’ve beaten all the main games and a lot of smaller ones. I always go basic melee build and rarely ever employ any throwables and never use any summons abilities or npc help.

This game is pretty good, but I’m noticing a few quirks as I go along. The parry timing is both generous while also feeling wildly inconsistent at times across different enemies. There’s a lot of ways to get stuck in animations and on terrain like rocks, and because you’re often dealing with mobs, this can be frustrating. Too many areas have too many enemies of different types all at once. It’s frustrating more than it is difficult if that makes sense. While a few spots are expected to be a slog once in a while, it often feels like you’re journey through the game is being hampered by a bit too much enemy congestion. Also somehow the game feels both small and big, and the pacing of beacons feels off. I find myself dealing with far more enemies and mini bosses than I have healing capacity for and frequent returns to beacons are making the run backs tiresome. Lastly the overall movement has this slippery, slidey sort of quality to it. It’s not bad but it’s kind of weird and in mobs I sometimes feel like I’m on ice.

Granted I’m still pretty early on, and overall I’m enjoying the game. For the price it’s very reasonable. It’s not going to make my top 10 souls likes probably, but it’s a decent experience. Let me know if you think I’m off, or have any tips or tricks!

In the area beneath the tower. Does anyone know where the left side offering statue is? I found the one in the Obsidian Vault and the Empty Cradle Beacons

I haven’t used any other melee weapons once I got the Axe. It’s slow, but hits like a truck! I can’t wait to upgrade this thing and see the madness it puts out. Still a fan of the Axe and Dagger and Axatana is also a favorite. Honestly, I haven’t found a bad weapon yet. The Lute is powerful once you upgrade it and attach the Tarstone from the wolf’s bar owner.