I think it was a good idea that J and I avoided game guides for our first playthrough of Elden Ring. It probably made for a better/soulsier experience and if you want to play with all the cards face up, the game offers like a dozen NG+ rounds. I should caveat the above statement - we absolutely checked out boss vulnerabilities after dying to them a few times if for no other reason than to save ourselves more Erdleaf laps (farming multiplayer consumables). There's also my little flaming finger adventure that I barely managed to complete even with the benefit of a wiki instructional and the cadre of Malenia co-opers.

In any event, playing the main game with fog of war meant the Lands Between still held a lot of unkilled bosses and undiscovered treasures. I should say that we discovered 95% of the sites of grace and dungeons but lacked completion on tough, optional bosses and ones that spawn in the overworld.


We've done alright in our first few hours of SOTE but being repeatedly murdered by a giant hippopotamous who is only weak to lightning damage made me re-realize that I needed to have all elements at my disposal. This meant bouncing through the spawn points in the main game with a shopping list of armaments that were not quest-locked.

Rampage

Elden Ring is like Fallout in that enemies are a fixed level in their respective geographic domains. Other games scale the baddies with the player, either smoothly or at fixed points. So teleporting back from the SOTE zone to the Lands Between at level ~170 meant that I could 1-shot half of the map and 3-shot larger enemies. Considering I've mostly been hiding behind J for our DLC playthrough, slicing through squishy enemies was a relaxing way to remember the combat system.

Smithing stones

From /u/ded_lord

Acquiring Elden Ring's most coveted weapons isn't particularly useful if you can't max level them via the handful of dragon smithing stones available in each playthrough. That's actually not true at all, the max-1 -> max stat change is the same as every other level. But tarnisheds don't leave damage on the table.

Still, the hardest part of gathering the unclaimed stones was remembering which ones I'd already picked up. But since there aren't many and they're thankfully close to sites of grace, this was quick work.

Alecto, Black Knife Ringleader

After collecting rocks, I rode around between the few evergaols I hadn't cleared and administered capital punishment to the bosses therein. I hit an abrupt snag with Alecto. Her endless combo attacks and ults were sufficient to take my overleveled character from half health to You Died in seconds. I considered skipping this one but had vague ambitions of taking another run at Placidusax and her (spirit ash) reward is supposedly ideal for that fight.

The wiki said that the best tactic for Alecto was the five D's of dodgeball (really). After some experimentation I found I could keep a gap to her and this was sufficient to reliably avoid her combos. That is, she could cover the gap with a single combo attack, but it wasn't fast enough to prevent me from stepping a direction that would probably not be in her knife arc. It also helped that Alecto's ranged attack is as easy to avoid as any in the game.

Most importantly, Alecto's ult is an omnidirectional near-instakill and afaict ͥ it can't be avoided or rolled through unless you're already out of range.

So avoiding hits is nice but I couldn't just sit back and throw darts (she dodges everything ranged). But I did find that when Alecto moved to close the safety gap I could easily time an attack to hit her - she wouldn't change intents midstream like some bosses appear to do. For about half of these attacks, Alecto would simultaneously get a weak hit in. This was fine by me since she has no heals. Fine unless she followed the strike up with a flurry attack or ult. The other way to get a hit in was to watch her start a really long combo from distance and dodge far enough to avoid each hit but close enough to get a swing in at the end.

This was all well and good except that it wasn't perfect, I needed to get a bunch of hits in before my focus/luck ran out.

With my normal loadout I came frustratingly close to killing Alecto a few times and not close at all many others. But I learned her timing and switched to my one colossal weapon (a dex axe). The hefty blade my timing and distance needed adjustment, but the axe was fully viable for the float/sting approach. Crucially, with the axe I only needed to string together eight or ten hits to win. And that eventually happened.

Borealis the Freezing Fog

I'd previously taken down most of the main game's dragons but Borealis still roamed the Consecrated Snowfield. He wasn't too tough with a spirit ash and Torrent at my disposal. The key was getting behind his blizzard breath that could quickly frostbite my character.

Death/Rite Birds

Elden Ring has a bunch of overworld bosses called Deathbirds and Death Rite Birds. They're easy to miss because they only spawn at night and in unassuming locations on the map (as opposed to, say, the end of a dungeon).

Most of these birds were not challenging due to my level and having the holy damage of the Sacred Relic Sword. One of the harder birds drops the Death's Poker which is supposedly a great dex weapon. Returning to my shopping list, Death's Poker filled my need for magic damage and frostbite buildup.

The last Death Rite Bird gave me trouble. He sits at the north end of Consecrated Snowfield and has the best stats of the flock as well as an AOE that is instadeath.

Source. Example of an Elden Ring message.

The messages and guides said to hit the bird from range - there are cliffs above his spawn that he "doesn't go up". The downsides were threefold:

1. "He doesn't go up the cliffs" is more like a guideline ͥ than an actual rule. Despite being a bird in a frozen land, this DRB could fly and did so a couple times in my dozen or so attempts.
2. When standing above the DRB, he mostly hung out at the foot of the cliff, beyond the arc of my bow. Thankfully, he would occasionally retreat to an open area and sit still enough to get a couple headshots in.
3. Non-magic ranged weapons suck in Elden Ring; they do low damage, expend ammo, and can't hit moving enemies.*

*Okay so I did fully level a Lion Greatbow and dusted it of for this fight. With my dex/70, str/50 build, I was getting 640 per headshot in DRB's stationary phases. That's not amazing but like 30 arrows was enough for vengeance and a 200k-rune payday.

The game guide said the Lion Greatbow could do ~3k per shot against Placidusax so I kept this engagement in the back of my mind since most Placi easy-win builds involve magic.

Night's Cavalry

Glitched at zero health.

Like the Death/Rite Birds, nighttime brings out a Night's Cavalry bosses in a few out-of-the-way places on the map. The final NC foe happened to be first one I fought (in endgame times, I killed a couple during the main quest). This encounter involves a pair of knights working the grave shift guarding the Consecrated Snowfield caravan.


Unless you go in blasting ͥ , the duo can be handled one at a time. Even so, a couple of weird things happened:

• In all but one of my attempts, the second knight and I were joined by a huge ghost troll whose swipes were hard to avoid, even on horseback. I'm not sure if knighty and ghosty are buddies or if our battle just spilled into the domain of another enemy like that Pulp Fiction scene.
• When I knocked the second knight off his horse in our final battle, he disappeared and the music went mellow. No 'enemy felled' text, no rewards. I eventually gave up and rode away. Then he reappeared. When I rode back to hit him, I had a few seconds before he'd disappear and the cycle would repeat.

While some of the mop up effort has yielded gear not relevant to my build, the Night's Cavalry provided some neat ashes of war that are great for str/dex characters.

Dragonlord Placidusax

The Lands Between were starting to look pretty empty of non-respawning baddies. Last on the list was an epic battle with the creme de la dragon, Pacidusax. I had to drop by his arena for my Three Fingers adventure but still took a few unsuccessful runs at him.

After light research I rolled in with my Death's Poker, Lion Greatbow, and Black Tiche ashes. To my surprise, the first hit from Tiche burned a big chunk of Placi's health and nulled the top tenth of his hp bar (shown in the screencap above). Unfortunately, the rest of her attacks weren't nearly as effective, nor was the greatbow. Still, my first run ended with Placi down to ~20% health. Tiche had long been dead at that point and the Dragonlord was in his aggressive second phase.

For run #2 I used a mimic summon, hoping the game could play my character better than me. Alas, while my doppelganger drew plenty of aggro, it didn't do as much damage or last as long as Tiche.

I went back to Tiche for my third attempt and spent Placi's docile first phase slashing him with my poison katana. This did more DPS than the bow and took some of the heat off Tiche. My Spirit Ash assassin again didn't last the whole battle, but long enough that I could fire off Radahn Spears and dodge/heal my way through the final stages of the fight.

Shadow of the Erdtree

Placi dropped a dex-friendly sword that does lightning damage and bonus damage to dragons. I'm only lacking fire damage which I intend to solve with weapon coatings on my hookclaws and swift spear.

From /u/EduUszh

The internet has a lot of terrible, algorithmically-generated "articles" that summarize popular Reddit posts. That's not great but neither is the idea of user submissions remaining solely on an enshittifying, pre-paywalled platform. With that acknowledgement, here are some neat pics from a couple of posts soliciting users' favorite screenshots.

SSJ_Iceman

Weeb-Hunter_

daemonicotter17

babytigertooth005

KindofBroke

Dual-Blades_Forever

aureolins

DaanA_147

MrRoundtree17

beyblading

tooncake

BigfootIssReal

Illinois_Yooper

blk_roxas

Necessary_Wave_6760

yian01

Educational_Exit_228

eoghan_perra

Nostalgioneer

ApprehensiveWay3843

thorwyn-eu

DragonMaster1_2

hyperrot

javvykino

Certain-Service661

Dull-Fix-6361

Azure_N1ght

DrizzyDro94

Vindold

btha10

empress-_-raven

	I ain't never been to a sugar cane field before. I mean, I seen 'em and all, but no real reason to go into one, but now you go into a peach grove, you find all sorts of cool shit. This one time I was in--	�
	From Ellis in Left 4 Dead 2 (pic unrelated)

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