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I played roughly half of my 112 hours in Elden Ring as a melee class specifically using guard counter. It is very satisfying but it unfortunately falls off late game due to weapon arts and magic becoming so much more powerful.
You don’t have to keep wiping at a boss, if you are stuck go somewhere else and get stronger.
If you're making the comparison to Sekiro, they are completely different beasts, Sekiro is a fast paced game where you have little room for error.
Sekiro's combat style definitely requires more finesse on the player's part. Some fights you simply can't brute force your way through it. Gotta learn the enemy movesets, timing, and spacing.
I use my right thumb to cycle through items on the D-pad.
This is the way for XB controller users, did it this way for years. Now I use a Dualsense so use my left index finger ezpz.
Practically all but 2 zones are possible to reach without defeating a story boss. This is pretty much how I've been playing the game. That doesn't mean you won't have to face a boss though. To get up the cliffs to one of the other zones, you need to go through an optional dungeon, which means facing a sub boss. Not easy to do, mind you, but still possible.
Thanks for the link, I was going to search for something like this tonight before playing.
You don't lose the Ashes of War by using them (Maybe you can lose them if you sell a weapon with one attached but you can remove them first). You'll have enough summon upgrades to do a few different summons so just pick a couple you like. Save the rune things until you're wanting a level or to buy something and then use however many it takes; you'll end up with plenty.
Depending on the ash of war, it may infuse better scaling stats. You're weapon level will remain the same and you can remove the ash of war and apply it to another weapon. You'll lose the infusion but retain whatever level the weapon is at.
You can play with ashes of war as much as you want and there are no negative effects. So if you want to bring your favorite weapon in doing magic damage, and switch it to normal after you can.
- bank some "runes" (the number in the bottom right) to level up, this is key for players who aren't very skilled to be able to overcome more challenging enemies
Well, Sekiro has some optional bosses, and they are without question the toughest bosses in the game. You don't have to beat them to 'beat' the game, you just won't get the best ending. Owl father took me days of attempts. I basically tried to beat him for about 2-3 hours every night for about a full week. I've yet to encounter anything in Elden Ring that compares to some of the bosses in Sekiro.
(No melee except dagger)
The way I understood the Named weapons was that they could not be infused with ashes of war; they are what they are. As for their weapon level, the ones that are upgraded with Somber Smithing Stones, are roughly 2x the level of a un-named weapon. Definitely, that Bloodhound's Fang punches above its percieved level. Also, it's a Dex scaling weapon of a C quality, vs the D scaling on the claymore. If you've dumped stats into dex, it'll hit harder.
You mean the knight wielding the spear patrolling the middle, or the one guarding the approach from the west? The former is tougher than the latter. The best way to deal with spear-wielding enemies is to bait them into their charging attack, which you can either easily sidestep or parry. The charging attack they do has a wide parry window, making it easy. That leaves them open for attack. Your starting weapon is not strong enough to stagger them with their shield using a jumping or charging attack, so I wouldn't try that.
That is outside the Church of Elleh, though. Gatefront Ruins is the encampment outside Stormfront Gate where you get your first map piece.
That spear dude is nowhere near as hard as the golden one though.
This is what I figured as well. I will mess with claymore and ashes but the fang kicks balls in have 40 STR and 25 DEX right now I think and will get DeX up moar.
I played blind until post game. I was in the f*cking Well of Sofria exploring the subterranean map before I even took on Margit and let me tell you, doing your own thing in this game is the most fun part about it, but also makes it very, very hard.
They made 3 small patches (including the day 1 patch).
Seems like it is stable for most people at this point, so I'm sure they're working on including fixes and updates needed in other areas for this next one.
Really cool to see the inside even though it's likely nowhere near complete. I bet this comes with the first expansion like they did with DS3 since they already did a little work on it.
Definitely hope to see more from this game. I tried to boot up DS3 last night and it was just so meh comparatively that I couldn't bring myself to play it at all.
IMO Dark Souls 3 feels better to play. There's less input delay and every action is generally also faster. Elden Ring has more gameplay options and features. But the input delay is really annoying and I hope they tone it down. Especially for an overall slower game than Dark Souls 3.