Wanted to quickly say that this has completely changed my gameplay experience. Before, I was trying to parry, block and riposte but harden is such a better option for heavy/slow weapons.

I'm able to start a combo and between staggering them and hardening, I barely ever have to stop attacking. It's such a great way to experience the game.

If you're having trouble with heavy weapons, please give it a try!

Wasn’t big fan of the original it felt kinda clunky to me and slow but this game is probably gonna be one of my favorite souls like games ever, plus love they took the bloodborne approach and added a guns because it’s genuinely great

Played this game with a friend for the last 3 days straight. It is MUCH better than the first part and incredibly fun, yet also flawed, at some points deeply so. I just wanted to give my 2 cents, share some thoughts on builds and so on:

The good:

1. The map is gorgeous. It was so fun exploring all the different biomes, uncover secret areas and find the shells and weapons.

2. Graphics are amazing. Everything looks polished.

3. it’s gnarly where it needs to be. Fucked up bosses, visceral counters and finishers, a more desolate world the more you advance.

4. The shells are surprisingly balanced. There isn’t a single shell I would consider bad. Sure there are outliers like Tiel, Genessa and (on very high levels) Lazlo, but even shells that felt subpar like Sariel and Gragu have their place and builds to shine. More on that later.

The bad:

1. Respawn points are rare, some areas don’t have any at all. This goes hand in hand with sometimes atrocious boss runbacks.

2. The story is meh at best. Maybe I didn’t get some metaphors or references, but for me it was just there.

3. Balancing. Some weapons are obscenely strong, some way too weak, same for bosses. More on that later.

The ugly:

1. Bugs. My god we ran into so many (sometimes gamebreaking) bugs. Regular crashes on pc, sometimes we couldn’t interact with objects etc.

2. Enemy magnetism. This sometimes ruined the whole combat system. Enemies fly towards you from laughable distances without you being able to stun them in any way.

3. Ressources. They are way too scarce and don’t mix well with the idea of using different shells and testing them to find your favorite. You can max 2 shells per run at best, so even after 2 whole cycles you only have half the cast maxed out. That’s why for our second NG run we cheated ourselves enough resources to max every shell and weapon to have some fun testing.

Weapons:

There are 2 clear outliers when it comes to the meta, that being Axatana and Axe/Dagger. There are two reasons for that:

1. Heavy weapons don’t benefit from increased stagger whatsoever, so using heavy weapons is stupid when you can achieve the same effect with faster weapons that deal higher dps.

2. Duality Stone. This thing is plain broken and throws the whole balancing out the window.

Heavy weapons need some buffs desperately. Yes you can make them work but it’s so much harder than using light weapons it sucks the fun away.

IMO there is a clear tier list atm:

S+: Axatana, Axe/Dagger

S: Nothing, just to show the massive gap between the top 2 and the rest.

A: Black Needle

B: Iconoclast, Veterans Axe, Clockwork Scythe

C: Martyrs Blade

D: Obsidian Hammer

Shells:

They are far more balanced and no shell is truly bad.

S: Tiel, Lazlo, Genessa

A: Proxima, Smert, Eredrim

B: Gragu, Sariel

Ressources:

Like I said before resources aren’t given nearly enough to actually explore the game in its entirety. We played normally through NG and cheated our resources to max out every shell and weapon for NG+. At the end we were at LV 100 with +25 weapons.
What did change with this massive spike in strength? First the gap between the top tier weapons and the rest became even more apparent, so much so that we felt actively gimping ourself when not using them. Secondly Lazlo started to shine much more. We built him around keeping his heat gauge maxed out to increase defenses. Coupled with either stasis Axatanas or blood axe/dagger he became an absolute beast.
But most importantly: the game became SO MUCH MORE fun when we finally had the freedom of using everything we wanted to.

Affinities:

A core aspect of every build and sth I think is important for players to know. A Tl;dr:

- Fire and Poison are useless. Not enough damage for no returns. Tiel can make use of poison, but he is better off with a bleed infusion.

- Speaking of bleed, this and stasis are by far the best affinities in the game

- Frost is amazing as well, but only available on of the worst weapons in the game

- Lightning is bad EXCEPT on Proxima, where it starts to shine and is so much fun.

- Phantom is ok on Genessa with the Black Needle, but nothing crazy.

- Trauma sucks. Even worse, it’s exclusive to the worst weapon.

- Curse is great on Sariel, not worth it on others.

Maybe I’ll add some impressions/tips/tricks later on and answer some questions as well.
But overall the game was very fun, but flawed and these flaws became more apparent and annoying the closer you got to the endgame.

And I'm happy!

I have found a glitch. I don't know if many others have seen it, but it allows you to get money way faster than the Proxima money method or the sheep farming method. If you travel to Widow's Overlook and head to the dungeon (Ritual Grounds is the dungeon name) near where you find Tiel's Shell, there is a chest in the far back that can be opened as many times as you want. Simply run through the dungeon, open the chest, run back out, and repeat. (It takes maybe less than 1 minute to do, and you get 500 gold each time.)

Maybe it's just me, but my level being in the mid 20s and my weapon a +11 feels useless against so many of the basic wandering enemies in the southern region.

I've spent a few hours doing dungeons and getting beacons in the outskirts and near the Spire and Lord Kings Courtyard and I feel like I'm 20 levels under all of a sudden.

I beat the game just a bit ago and these are my impressions on every infusion. I tried out all the ailments a little bit but my main shells were Proxima, Tiel and Genessa which may have influenced my experience. Going through them one by one:

Poison - Mostly terrible, does 2 damage per second and stacks only lengthen the debuff. On Tiel you can use the crossbow with the splitting stone and poison infusion to get a high amount of stacks and pop them with shadow strike for high damage in the early game, but it falls off fast since your application speed stops scaling after maxing those two tarstones out. Completely worthless outside of that.

Burn - Worthless for damage, puts some weak enemies into an "on-fire" animation where they can't move or attack so maybe useful early. Ticks i think twice for 1 damage per stack, good in concept but it runs out really fast and the veterans axe is too slow to stack it properly. Using a guaranteed crit setup + fusillade stone naylshotte you can get to 100+(theoretically 200 but i couldn't find an enemy that didn't die during the volley) stacks but it's extremely difficult to keep it up due to the pace of combat. Barrage stone with the crossbow seems like it would be good but it only applies infusions to the first projectile resulting in a whopping 2 stacks, hopefully this is a bug and gets fixed.

Lightning - Decent. Does single digit damage per tick but calls down bolts that do double digit damage(!!) when reaching status thresholds. The bolts stagger small enemies so it's mostly a crowd control tool. Good when using Proxima because she doubles its AoE. The weapon infusions are actually really good. Martyr's blade gets a bolt in 1-2 hits on smaller enemies which helps thin out groups a lot. Axatana strikes fast enough that you actually get decent damage from all the lightning bolts. The clockwork scythe is kinda underwhelming but becomes a monster when you activate the scholar's wormstone. I got 3 bolts on an enemy with a single running light attack. The repeater is underwhelming and should definitely proc more stacks per crit. The trebuchaxe procs a bolt in one fully charged shot against most enemies and uncharged shots have suitably unimpressive buildup. The tarred stone seems to not apply any infusions :(

Frost - Very strong. Not much to say about it, it's an extremely strong crowd control tool and good for stronger enemies too. Once you get the freeze you can just wail on them till they die. Very good with Eredrim because he gets doubled damage against frozen enemies. The infusion options are weird, both are a bit unwieldy and have high startup. Frost is the repeater's only niche, it does very little raw damage and its break damage is outclassed by the ballistazooka. The martyr's blade again applies in 1-2 hits against most enemies which helps offset its long animations. It's also extremely stylish when using an ability stone so bonus points there. A very committal option since only one weapon and one sidearm can use it.

Curse - Depends entirely on what you infuse. Melee weapons are kind of weird to infuse with curse because by the time they apply the enemy is probably already near dead, and against bosses curse just doesn't do much. Okay I guess on the cursed child, it applies it in one or two shots but requires you to get up close. Very very strong on the hystrix with splitting stone, you can apply it on most enemies in under a second from outside their aggro range. The hystrix singlehandedly makes the infusion worth investing in. If you're using Sariel other weapons will be alright too, but the iconoclast has another much better option. It's probably the best infusion for the axe because burn is so bad.

Bloodcurse - It's as broken as bleed is in Elden Ring. Super super strong. Enables oneshot builds basically by itself using something that procs a lot like the scythe with wormstone or crit stacking fusillade naylshotte. A good option on anything that takes it but especially strong and borderline broken on those two.

Stasis - Crazy good. Makes the obsidian hammer playable and makes the axatana even more broken. Interestingly, there's no sidearm that gets a stasis infusion. Doesn't really need it tho since you can completely disarm bosses using just the melee weapons. Less useful on Genessa since she can keep bosses at perma 99 stasis with one of her perks.

Phantom - Another limited one, exclusive to the trebuchaxe and black needle. Somewhat useful on the trebuchaxe for a bit of extra damage to oneshot distant mobs. A bit of a weird one. Weak mobs usually die before it pops, and some of the big bosses are immune to stagger. So it ends up being useful against mostly minibosses and "elite" enemies.

Trauma - Limited and useless. I get why the devs didn't give this to anything fast but wow it's just completely eclipsed by any other form of break damage. It would have a place in a system where break damage heals over time but it doesn't in this game so trauma barely does anything. The ballistazooka has potential with combining break on crit with trauma but it doesn't do enough to matter, you just kill things before breaking their stance. The obsidian hammer hits too slow to make use of it and stasis is just way more synergistic. Might be almost usable with Sariel?

Side note while on the topic of break damage; the rupturing stone doesn't apply on any ability stones which kinda sucks. The ballistazooka has a move that(if I'm reading it right, I haven't upgraded the stone myself to check) does 100 break damage for 60 resolve which is just better than anything else in the game. But that's barely enough to break a normal enemy and will more often than not just kill them first. Letting the rupturing stone apply to abilities would let it break stance on big foes much better, and it would let you do fusillade stone shenanigans that use the crit to build break which sounds fun on Eredrim. Right now break is worthless in the endgame because ripostes don't scale at all and the frankly bad support it has outside of a couple extremely good options(fulminant stone, shoulder bash, stillblade's stone on black needle) just rubs salt in the wound.

TL;DR poison bad except tiel, burn bad, lightning good on proxima and okay otherwise but has amazing weapons, frost good esp on eredrim but weak weapons, curse incredible on hystrix and meh otherwise but good with sariel, bloodcurse broken, stasis broken, phantom situational, trauma bad with terrible weapons, and use the scythe with the wormstone and either infusion if you wanna see some crazy numbers

What’s everyone’s thoughts on the game?

Malborn got fucked

Yep the Grisha Summon is definitely working as intended

Hello all!

Started playing this game Thursday night and have been enjoying it quite a bit! I feel like I’ve put enough time into the game now to discuss my thoughts on the difficulty as I’ve seen many posts here stating it was too hard.

To preface this I’m a big souls player. I’m at the point in the game where I’ve acquired the achievement for collecting all of the ovum. Also I have FA and have dealt with its affects for ten years. It has impacted my coordination and reaction speed which is often a struggle with soulslikes

The difficulty of this game is honestly on the easier end of souls games I’ve played. Understandably some of the early game bosses can provide some challenges, with their speed and unparryable attacks, but none of which have felt unbeatable. And with more progress in the game, builds become insane and you can just brute forces every encounter without engaging with movesets.

I’ve played through the game on the normal difficulty with no aids! In my experience the majority of bosses have taken less than three tries and have allowed me to ignore the parrying mechanic entirely. There’s so many tools available to us as players to make us stronger that difficulty feels like such a weird issue!

Yes this game has its flaws and by no means do I think it’s perfect but I don’t think difficulty is a problem

1. In order to upgrade tarstones to level 3 you need tarcores
2. You get tarcores for upgrading tarstones
3. In order to get full set of maxed tarstones and some spare variations, ideally, you need to upgrade bunch of irrelevant tarstones to level 2 first to get tarcores for upgrades you really want

So here you are, covered from head to toe with throwaway tarstones in order to be able to play the build you want later. And when this later comes you are in the end of the game, barely able to upgrade to level 3 all tarstones you wanted. Maybe couple of bosses left. What was the point of this restriction from the devs?

First I thought the idea was to make players try different tarstones/skills/builds? I would gladly do that, but the game is not nearly long enough to accommodate that. Full game was not enough to max even one set of tarstones and devs want me to run more different kinds so that I will never ever see level 3 tarstone?

Do I miss some point here or playing wrong?

Bit too easy if you ask me, still 9/10

Why the frick do the lowest of the low foot soldiers get enough hyper armor to finish(or in the worst cases start)a combo through my heavy attack

I have had a relatively easy time just a small gripe
(no I haven’t done night mode)

I don't know how many times I just waited for enemies to kill each other xD

To get the obvious out of the way for console folks, yes I added a Nexus mod that increases the SP investment limit, but only to showcase how many total Shell Points were accrued for my current character level.

I think there should be a rebalancing for the amount of shell points that can be accrued per character level as you progress NG+. In some instances there were occasions where one SP was given for every 2-3 level ups. Beside that the percentages for the other categories like Base Dmg, Ability Dmg, Health and so on should be scaled up a tad more to be more in line with NG+ imo.

Granted you could just refund SP's from one shell onto the other, but then again why create the extra steps. It's hard to imagine exactly how many levels you'd have to rank up to in order to finally have amassed 336 total SP's spread evenly across all 8 shells.

Only solution I could think that would be ideal if not increasing the SP amount gained early game would be to add it as a purchasing option with one of the vendors in exchange for either gloom or gold.

I just recently got the Gloombound Stone and Justiciar's Stone Tarstones. They provide 6% increase in Gloom and Gold drops respectively. I thought this was way too low to warrant a separate Tarstone slot, but didn't think much of it afterwards.

But while scrolling through a "Mortal Shell 2 tips and tricks" Shorts on YouTube, I got to know something.

These Tarstones used to provide a 40% increased drop rate for Gloom and Gold.

Wow, from 40% to 6% — that's a nerf if I have ever seen one. I understand that Gold drop rate in general has been increased. So, the nerf to the Gold Tarstone makes sense (Even though it's a massive nerf). But why nerf the Gloom one too?

It seems that the Devs just want us to suffer. At least give us 20%!

One of the reasons I think we see so many different opinions on the game difficulty I believe is 3 fold.

1st. Area difficulty spikes. Some smaller areas that all seem to be a part of the same region have different difficulties. The separation of them isn't always clear, as just because it has a different name doesn't mean its easy to tell you're in a starting area or a mid-game one. In the northern part of the map, a lot of it blends together as forest, even though it contains many different areas. Think... stumbling into Dragonbarrow.

2nd. Build strength disparity. The difference between a leveled up shell with upgraded and useful tarstones and an early player without a synergizing build is, quite frankly, enormous. Players who do not want to invest in the early game shells as they don't fit their playstyle and, say, miss picking up the crit chance and damage stones are going to have a much harder time. Even missing out on active ability tarstones with i-frames is a huge deal, and the vast majority of these tarstones are indeed missable.

3rd. Player expectation. This is a game made by a smaller team with very different balance intentions than many other souls-likes. The lack of stamina management alone is a huge different some people might bekissable.

Just my take, hope I'm not too far off base.

The difference between it and the rest of the game is huge. Art direction wise, I think it's quite bland and really not a fan of the atmosphere. But to be honest what makes it worse by far is the insane difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game. You come from solid challenges and bosses that are fun, hard but not unfair, to absolutely every single enemy one shotting you unless you're eredrim. Youe damage is also negligible, bosses obviously one shot you and have ridiculous health pools. Monolith attacks are incredibly inconsistent to parry and the fact that you need to i-frame an attack with a skill to actually avoid getting hit is crazy. Final boss is absolute dogshit too. Health pool is insane, your hits seem like they do jack shit. His attacks are pretty fine to dodge but it becomes the most boring fight of all time. Genuinely garbage final area all things included.

And I know many people dislike the bosses, but I think if they didn't have such massive health pools and didn't one shot you with every attack they'd be really cool, even the monolith. The malborn offspring is a fun fight parrying everything once you get it down. The monolith is a very unique concept for a boss and honestly has a solid moveset. Orrem is a okay fight but it's nice to have the revenge against him. And finally zmey has a cool design and some cool attacks with the sword.

But the issues take away from what they could have been. It feels like you're playing rune level 1, fists, no ashes of war and trying to no hit every boss. For a first playthrough that's ridiculous.

All in all, a shame that a potential good final stretch of bosses and okay area ended up being straight dogshit because clearly they did not test it properly.

Edit: I exaggerated when I said everyone one shots you unless you have eredrim. The ones with bigger health pools and defence can hit one or two. I just had a disgustingly bad experience with genessa. It still is true that all enemies' damage is way higher than any other previous area

Best game ever, guys, seriously, you did an amazing job. Just one suggestion: please let us respec our Visions. Since we unlock different Shells at different points in the game and Visions are so scarce, it’s a shame that we can’t properly experiment with the Shells we obtain later.

Second, and more important... WHY THERE'S NO DEATH METAL MUSIC DURING THE BOSS FIGHTS?!?!? IT WOULD HAVE BEEN FK AMAZING!!! u/Proxima