Elden Ring | Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows Update

[Mr EliteL]

What was the reason you couldn't get into it again? I can't remember.

To put simply I sucked, terribly.

To add a bit more, I really wanted to be a build that fights close and personal, and well yeah a newbie going into it like that isn't going to end well.  I lost patience levelling up and I don't usually get like that with a game, because in other games I'd be willing to grind for a long time to become just a little stronger. Got sick of dying to enemies I shouldn't be dying to too, at least what I thought were anyway. I never bothered to start over and try something else either, I don't want to be magic user that stands far away from the action to attack. There's probably better builds I could use but didn't look into what exactly they were or how to get them. Just gave up really.

[Moonface]

What was the reason you couldn't get into it again? I can't remember.  

To put simply I sucked, terribly.

To add a bit more, I really wanted to be a build that fights close and personal, and well yeah a newbie going into it like that isn't going to end well.  I lost patience levelling up and I don't usually get like that with a game, because in other games I'd be willing to grind for a long time to become just a little stronger. Got sick of dying to enemies I shouldn't be dying to too, at least what I thought were anyway. I never bothered to start over and try something else either, I don't want to be magic user that stands far away from the action to attack. There's probably better builds I could use but didn't look into what exactly they were or how to get them. Just gave up really.

Depending on where you went exploring, even I was having trouble in the beginning areas. If you had issue with any of this, I wouldn't say it's due to being shit because some of this stuff even wrecked very experienced Souls players when they first played this game:

• The boss fight in the intro area where you spawn inside a church. Whether you die to it or not, you will inevitably die in this area after that fight anyway because you're intended to, so I wouldn't even bother to judge your performance there.
  
• The bastard boss on a horse who people very likely run into after leaving the tomb you get spawned into after the inevitable death in the intro. I can't even remember if I tried to beat him before allowing myself to move on or if I said screw it and sneaked around him to come back later when I wasn't as weak.
  
• Behind that horse boss is a small abandoned church, and beyond that is a wooded area with trees and random dudes just walking about. In my first playthrough, I used stealth to deal with as many of them as I could because I didn't want to risk fighting them head on and getting overwhelmed by multiple enemies attacking me at the same time.
  
• Beyond them is Stormveil Castle, where you fight the first "main" boss of the game. I can tell you straight up you aren't beating him if you head there early like the game tries to indicate you do; I had to go explore elsewhere to level up enough and find better items to do the fight and so did a streamer I watch who has a lot of Souls experience. I'd say you can get to the level you need by simply exploring other areas of Limgrave; you shouldn't need to spend time actually grinding levels out.
  

@Dragon Lord: Ah, right. I've gotten used to high priced DLC's that my immediate thought at seeing $15 was "Oh this isn't gonna have much in it".

[Mr EliteL]

The first boss fight, yeah I could tell you were meant to die in that area, of course didn't beat, got a few hits in then died. . Tree Sentinel I did eventually beat after getting the horse, that made that fight better to deal with, hit and run/dodge really. Did a good chunk of exploring, went I think beyond Limgrave or if it wasn't then quite far into it. I didn't trigger the dragon off to the right of the Tree Sentinel where there were some slow enemies who weren't a trouble obviously, just didn't go all the way in to fight all of them just the ones on outskirts then went into a dungeon or something. Fought a couple of minor bosses and beat them. Got teleported to a red area and explored there for a while and made my way back near the church.

Did go towards Stormveil but not all the way in, so I never fought Godrick or the lesser version of Morgott...ah Morgit that's it. I remember losing to enemies that seemed to be defending something or just standing guard nearby, can't remember where but there was multiple instances. A gang of soldiers or whatever they were somewhere (yeah could be anywhere) I kept dying to as well. I probably just needed better....everything really.

[Moonface]

The first boss fight, yeah I could tell you were meant to die in that area, of course didn't beat, got a few hits in then died. . Tree Sentinel I did eventually beat after getting the horse, that made that fight better to deal with, hit and run/dodge really. Did a good chunk of exploring, went I think beyond Limgrave or if it wasn't then quite far into it. I didn't trigger the dragon off to the right of the Tree Sentinel where there were some slow enemies who weren't a trouble obviously, just didn't go all the way in to fight all of them just the ones on outskirts then went into a dungeon or something. Fought a couple of minor bosses and beat them. Got teleported to a red area and explored there for a while and made my way back near the church.

Did go towards Stormveil but not all the way in, so I never fought Godrick or the lesser version of Morgott...ah Morgit that's it. I remember losing to enemies that seemed to be defending something or just standing guard nearby, can't remember where but there was multiple instances. A gang of soldiers or whatever they were somewhere (yeah could be anywhere) I kept dying to as well. I probably just needed better....everything really.

Oh dang you did way more than I was expecting! GG on beating Tree Sentinel, I didn't use Torrent but I did do the same run in, smack it a few times, run away, repeat until it died the first time I fought it. The fact you got teleported to Caelid and got out is genuinely impressive; the mine that chest teleports you into was a bastard for me to get out of easily and Caelid proper was just "Give me a grace and let me teleport the hell out of here now" until I had some better stuff.

Considering you've never played a FromSoft game before this and you got that much done, I think you're really underselling yourself. If you're not fully confident about timing dodge rolls and stuff, I'd suggest doing what I did and equipping a shield to block with (not that everything can be blocked I think) because when you do block an attack, you get a window to perform a counterattack right after with your weapon. I ran with a shield for a very large part of the game until I eventually realized I was no longer actually using it and took it off to just wield my weapon in two hands. Speaking of weapons, I forget where you find it but in one of the Gaol's there's a fight that gives you the Bloodhound Fang and that weapon was my baby for like two whole playthroughs.

[Mr EliteL]

I spent a while in the swamp area, but once I got out of that I avoided pretty much anything else. I did see the crows and was tempted to attack one but decided against it, luckily they don't aggro immediately. The sight of them was enough to try another time. Then eventually found where the red ground begins to turn normal. Can't remember what I found in there exactly item wise.

I did select Warrior which was the dual weapons, can't remember if I picked up a shield or not. Makes me want to go back and have a look at what I had last time I played.

[Moonface]

Even then, as soon as I got out of the mine and was allowed to teleport again I immediately fast travelled out of Caelid, so it's still impressive you opted to just walk all the way back to the entrance of it. That area is definitely not meant to be an early game area unless you just want to be a lunatic, so that's a place to come back to at a later point, probably after you do all of Stormveil at least.
Also, if by chance you were passing judgment on yourself for dying to a field enemy after having beaten some minor bosses, none of the FromSoft games are a case of "Oh I beat a boss nearby so the enemies ain't shit"; that only happens when you get really far into one of the games and then go back to an early game area where you just have so much health and strength you just stomp stuff.

I think I went with Bandit for my starting loadout because I liked how they looked and I wanted to try out a bow, but I can't even remember trying to use a bow as a main weapon.
There's shields you can pick up which is how I got mine, but I can't remember where in Limgrave I found it or it might have dropped from an enemy.

[Dragon Lord]

Oh, a lot of stuff to reply to in these posts...

For the struggles at the start of the game, that was intended. They didn't want you to just rush straight to Margit and beat him. They wanted you to explore Limgrave a lot and find upgrade materials, flask upgrades, etc. so that you could come back more powerful to fight him. Though that doesn't mean you're going to automatically win the fight. Bosses in Elden Ring hit harder overall than bosses in previous Souls games, and while leveling up is going to help you survive a bit, it's not going to make you cake walk over any of the bosses (well, the main bosses at least). Even at 60 Vigor (the soft cap for Vigor because anything behind 60 starts giving much lower health total) you're going to be 2-3 shot by a lot of bosses and enemies in the late game.

While some builds and weapons are a lot more powerful than others, that's not really going to change things for you as much as learning the bosses is. Souls games are all about learning the boss patterns, and Elden Ring takes that up a notch because of how hard bosses hit and how more complex their attack patterns are compared to previous Souls games (Dark Souls 3 isn't too far behind, but still not on Elden Ring's level). One piece of really good advice if you're struggling and want to get better in Elden Ring is just go into the boss fight without the intent of fighting the boss. Instead just observe and try to learn the attack patterns and dodge timings. Observe for the times when it's safe to attack and when it's not. Also try to observe what kind of dodge to do. Elden Ring added jumping into the mix, and you can use that to dodge a lot of attacks that you might not think about. I struggled remembering to use the jump on my first play through and I tried rolling everything like in the other Souls games, but then I watched a play through of a really good Elden Ring player and he was jumping a lot of attacks and it made me realize that I never even thought about that. So then when I went back to play Elden Ring for a second, third, fourth, etc. time, I was able to utilize that and it made several bosses a lot easier.

If you ever want to try the game again and start a new character, try out the Samurai starting class. They come with a very good early-game weapon in the Uchigatana (has Bleed + really good Ash of War on it), a bow for taking out problematic enemies from a distance (bows are kinda meh overall in Elden Ring, but they have some decent uses here and there) and their starting armor isn't terrible in terms of defense either. Bleed is very, very powerful in Elden Ring and it can really make a lot of bosses fall in seconds if you have the right build. Some consider it super cheesy and will pull the "Well, if you beat Elden Ring using a bleed build, then you didn't really beat the game", but they're just the typical tryhard elitists who claim they beat the game at RL1 with bare fists and blindfolded while taking 0 hits the entire game with both of their hands tied behind their back and using their feet to play the game -- in other words, they are idiots who try to claim they are badasses but they've likely never beat a single Souls game without using the cheesiest builds imaginable. Play the game however you want, whether or not it's using a super cheese build or not.

If nothing else, find someone to co-op the game with if you just want to experience the full game and don't care about how hard or easy you make it on yourself. Co-op can really trivialize the game since bosses generally struggle to focus on multiple targets at once. Especially if you're co-oping with an experienced player who can take advantage of that with a good build and melt a boss while they are focused on you or something. People like to try and shame others who use co-op in these games, but there's nothing shameful about it, they put it in the game for a reason. Though I will say that co-op in Elden Ring is kind of annoying because you have to summon your friend in every dungeon over again, and there's an item you need to do it, so if you run out of that item you won't be able to co-op any more until you get more of that item. It's really dumb how they made co-op in this game considering it is an open-world game. Thankfully PC players have the option to use the "Seamless co-op" mod which makes co-op how it always should have been, but console players are sadly stuck dealing with the shitty system how it is.

[Mr EliteL]

Exploring was a problem for me as well, I didn't really enjoy that even though I usually adore exploration in games. Perhaps it felt too overwhelming for me, not sure exactly, yet the vast amount of exploration should be a goldmine, both in the figurative and literal sense for a player that does want exploration. I kept running into an enemy I couldn't beat that deterred me from continuing my exploring in that area, go to another area and get screwed another enemy that pushed me away. Didn't give up immediately on them, did try and fight to see if I could win or avoid, but just going "I'll come back later to deal with that" to nearly everything put me off.

I wasn't expecting to win every fight once I had levelled up enough at certain points, and I would've done that try out the boss before giving it a serious go. Perhaps do that every enemy I find difficult with too. Restarting again if I do ever go back, that Samurai would be a good class to try. I'd have to bust out my PS4 though for that as my PS5 is running out of space, already uninstalled Forbidden West as that's another game I own that's basically in purgatory at this point and I don't really care of bringing back.

[Dragon Lord]

Elden Ring's open world is definitely kind of bad. It's way too big with very little to actually find and do. They pretty much just made it open-world because it's the flavor of the decade. It makes for a decent spectacle your first time through, but doing a second, third, fourth, etc. playthrough of the game, it just becomes a huge annoyance. I'd suggest using one of the many Elden Ring maps that you can find around. Not only will this help you stay within a certain area, but you can also see where all the items are so that you can get what you want and avoid anything that doesn't sound interesting to you. Also it'll allow you to see where all the little caves and catacombs are, because finding them through random exploration is boring as hell and they're annoying to do, so just knowing where they are and being able to go and clear them quickly to get it over with cuts down on how tedious the game is.

Elden Ring has a pretty good, meaty core (main story bosses), but then they threw on a ton of unneeded fat (open world, 90% of the bosses just being normal enemies, etc.) that it really makes for an "eh" experience. The game got glazed to hell because unfortunately a huge majority of gamers wet themselves over the words "open-world" and that's enough to make them praise a game way beyond what it actually deserves.

If you do kind of like Elden Ring's game play, but hate everything else about it (very valid), try Dark Souls 3 some time instead. It's got the more tight-knit world that made the first Dark Souls so beloved, but has a bit faster paced combat like Elden Ring, though not on the same level. Boss design in Dark Souls 3 definitely trumps Elden Ring though, outside of maybe like one or two bosses.

If nothing else, just look up how to make a build that absolutely breaks the game instantly in Elden Ring. Since the game is open-world, you can pretty much get everything you need to shit all over the game from the start as long as you know where to go. Like in the first two hours of the game you can get a +10 Somber Weapon (though it does require a little "skip" to get one of the upgrade stones) and just shit all over everything in the main outside of like Malenia and some of the bosses towards the end of the game. I think you can also get a +24 weapon in the standard upgrade path as well in that time. Of course this requires extension knowledge about the game, or following a guide to do it, but if you don't care about doing that just so you can shit all over the game for fun, then it's definitely a viable strategy.

There's a lot of very broken Ashes of War you can get early too. If you poke until Caelid a little bit, you can find the Greatsword weapon and then a little bit from there you can find a castle that has kind of a mini-boss in it that drops the AoW "Lion's Claw" when killed. Lion's Claw + Greatsword is a very powerful early game combination that will pretty much slaughter everything you come across. There's a Knight on a horse in Limgrave that drops the 'Golden Vow' Ash of War, which is a buff. Very nice to have and all you need is a dagger to use it. It doesn't last as long as the spell version of it does, but any bit of extra damage is nice to have.

In the Mistwoods area of Limgrave, you can find a ruin that has a chest that gives the Axe Talisman, which gives you a damage boost to Charged R2 attacks. This is one of the best play styles in the game because Charged R2s do insane poise damage (especially with heavy weapons), and if you learn to play right, you can knock bosses does and get critical hits on them reliably.

Outside of that, there's a few other cheesy early game builds you could go with. Dual-wielded Curved Swords and Twinblades have insane jumping attacks that hit multiple times, and when infused with Bleed, can bleed bosses extremely quickly. Paired up with the Jump Attack talisman in Stormveil Castle and an armor piece later that also increases jump attack damage, you can melt bosses extremely quickly. Even if they can't be bled, the damage you'll do with your jump attacks will still be massive. Another great option for a Bleed build are Claws. The "Hookclaw" weapon can be found pretty much right after Margit (I know this doesn't help with actually fighting him, haha), their two-handed mode turns them into a dual-wielded weapon, they come with innate bleed, they are fast as hell and their Charged R2s are fast and do really good poise damage too. You can shred bosses with these weapons after you get used to using them. Infuse them with Bleed for higher bleed procs or Frost to make use of bleeding bosses and putting frostbite on them (reduces their defense) and you can really dish out some carnage with them.

Oh, another great early-game tip is get the Physick right away and look up where the Tears are you can get in Limgrave. If it wasn't already obvious enough that Fromsoft loved the idea of Charged R2 builds with the early-game Axe Talisman and several really good heavy weapons, they also made it so that the Tear that increases Charged Attack damage is also right there in Limgrave too. You can do some incredible damage early on by just taking a bit of time to get this stuff and go through the mine at the lake that will allow you to upgrade a weapon a few times.

Another thing to grab for some decent early-game damage boosting is the Sacred Blade AoW. This is dropped by a scarab near the church where you get the Physick from. It infuses your weapon with holy damage, which can be pretty good against some early-game bosses. It can't be put on all weapons though, so keep that in mind. It gives a decent boost against Margit though, as I don't believe he resists Holy damage much.

Another good tip is to level Vigor early and a lot. Everything in Elden Ring hits pretty hard, and getting higher Health right away is the best way to go. In other Souls games, I would tell you to ignore Vigor for a bit and just focus on damage stats, but in Elden Ring it's the opposite. Everything hits too hard to ignore Vigor. Getting to 20-30 Vigor right away will make things a bit easier for you than upgrading strength or dex. The end goal for Vigor is 60, but getting to 40 to start with is good enough for the early to mid game.

So yeah, if you do give it another go, if you take some of this advice you can put together a pretty decent early game build. Just in Limgrave alone you can get Axe Talisman + Charged Attack Tear + Sacred Blade AoW + Golden Vow AoW + any weapon of your choosing to like +4 or +5 (make sure it's a weapon that you can put Sacred Blade on if you want to use that). Plus several upgrades to your Flask. Multiple good weapons to get too without having to go through hell. Go to the Southern Peninsula (still part of Limgrave) and you can find the Claymore in a castle (good Greatsword), or there's a merchant on a beach that sells the Zweihander (absolutely amazing Colossal Greatsword). Southern Peninsula also has a Erdtree Avatar you can find that drops the Opaline Bubbletear, a tear for your Physick Flask that negates one hit you take.

Hopefully I didn't overload you with all of this information, but just wanted to give you some ideas of how early you can kind of mitigate the difficulty of the game to help you get a better start. I would definitely at least try it once more since you already have the game and it'd be a shame to feel like you wasted money on it. Use a map, find the good stuff, make a good build early, then see how the game feels. Of course you're still going to have to learn the bosses, that's just one of the growing pains of a Souls-game, but at least having a good base build to use early will help make it feel less hopeless.

And hey, if nothing else, hit me up and I'd be down to co-op the game with you if you just want to get through it without all of the pain.