It's true lol it's just some guy with sun for a head coming at you with a sword........ The creepy build up to him was okay... A bit slow but fine... But the fight itself is pretty meh and soooo not worth the effort to get to again lolz. Didn't go to him again in my 2nd dlc run for a reason... It just wasn't THAT worth it...
I wanted to love this boss so bad but I have to say, the game really let me down in terms of maintaining my engagement and interest. Only so many cheap unearned deaths I can take before I find something more rewarding to do with my time
In the next Souls game, the first boss will follow you around the arena with their weapon raised for five minutes, then the fog wall will dissipate. You will continue through the rest of the game with the boss trailing behind you
and then when you killed the last boss the boss that trailed you will attack and one shot you making the win in the extremely hard final boss not count.
@@heideknight7782 Better comparison would be the forlorn because the pursuer encounters are scripted and guaranteed every time whereas the forlorn can invade randomly in dozen or so different places.
@@Astreon123always depends on what point in the game you are when you get to a boss. If you try to rush the volcano manor godskin noble for the somber stone +7, it can be really frustrating to be one shot by his super delayed mega thrust move.
@@Astreon123thats not the point the point is that its a design flaw which makes the boss harder and more awkward to read in a really cheap way difficulty is completly besides the point
Part of the issue is that you have to visually justify the delay. Mohg for example has a certain weighty flow to him. Whereas Horah Loux sill leap at you and literally go into slow-mo mid air. The first time I saw this attack I started laughing.
Omg yes, THIS. I really have no issues with delayed attacks but this one I fuckinf hate. Not because it's difficult but because it's so goddamn dumb. While they're at it should've given us time to have a flashback and power boost
@@thecatinthehatwithabat9903 It is dumb. It is there only to kill you. There is nothing about what you're seeing that suggests "oh maybe I should delay my dodge". Its why a lot of these fights feel tedious because none of it is reactionary its just a checklist of moves to memorize individual timings.
I have honestly never understood the complaints with this attack. It looks cool and it's just fun to dodge. It also successfully conveys the feeling of having a fast hulking man rapidly closing in on you without it feeling unfair or cheap.
@@calebfouts7118 A fast hulking man that freezes in midair. There are more logical and intuitive ways to have a delayed attack that doesnt require the player to have to go against every instinct a break the flow to the fight. Instead of attacks being reactionary they become a checklist of attacks that you have to memorize and then internalize thw different timings of each. Mohg and Midra do it better imo because there's a more consistent flow and line of logic to their movements. When that particular attack is there ONLY to trick you. Tricking the player as a mode of difficulty isnt my favorite. Its still an overwhelmingly cool fight but they could have gotten the desired result in a less annoying way like aforementioned bosses
I like the idea of having delays sprinkled in, because they should realistically be used by enemies to catch you off guard. But having almost every attack be delayed makes no sense from a combat perspective for most enemies. Why would you leave yourself wide open expecting your enemy to dodge when there's no reason to expect them not to just attack you? And if the plan is just to hit trade because you're stronger, then why bother delaying at all?
"Why would you leave yourself wide open expecting your enemy to dodge when there's no reason to expect them not to just attack you?" Uh, because it is an AI attack based pattern designed for you to observe and understand, not another human player. You definitely do not want enemies to be mixing you up as if it were a human, thinking how to trick you by using delayed attacks sometimes and sometimes not. You think you're annoyed by attacks always being delayed, now just think of how much more you would complain if you could never truly adjust to the attack because the boss suddenly decided to let the attack rip instead of holding it. Fighting games are niche because this level of dedication to beating a thinking opponent takes significantly more focus and effort. You'd immediately alienate a majority of the players if bosses functioned this way.
@@Tjerty It would also make bosses actually interesting to fight and not just boring 1 trick ponies. Games are generally better when they don't try to cater to everyone.
@@102ndsmirnov7 I'm certain your takeaway from elden ring wasn't "oh god all these bosses are just 1 trick ponies". You and I both know they aren't. You just felt compelled to respond.
I have no problems with delayed attacks per se, as long as they make sense. Mohgs bloodflame explosions never bothered me because I figured that that's just how all those attacks work and they are a type of magic. But I always found it extremely ridiculous with how long Margit holds his cane because no serious combatant would ever fight like that. That is also why Midra was fine for me, since it suits his style - he gracefully swings his swords like some sort of dance and thus delays almost every attack all while being a lord of frenzied flame rather than a knight that you duel. I know that this is no reliable metric, but for me personally it needs to be in line with what the enemy is and if it suits him, the weapon swung, etc. but as soon as I get the feeling that it's just a game mechanic meant to punish you, I'm lost.
My guess is that Margit underestimates the tarnished on first meeting them, which seems right since when we get em to his midphase he be saying "Thou art of passing skill" and seems to do less of the delayed attacks and more rush down oriented moves. But I just thought of this, so I could be wrong but that is the impression I always got. Then when we fight morgot he goes all out to kill us.
So yeahh a normal fighter wouldn't delay their attacks in actual combat, but this is a demigod fighting a lowly tarnished that he thinks is of no skill whatsoever so why not play with your food and slap them around a bit
@@Shishakind86 well in my eyes it's like in his head, "Sure hit me as much as you want weak tarnished, watch me hit you 10x harder" kinda deal but I dunno maybe I'm seeing stuff that isn't there. But I don't think Morgot out of the gate would take the tarnished any bit serious, he's probably killed countless tarnished out of there league trying to become a lord.
No serious combatant would ever shift to a high guard waiting for the right moment to strike ? Pretty sure that's a classic stance in many martial arts
Dodging too early for a delayed attack isn't "panic rolling". It's instinctive rolling. There's a difference. Panic rolling is when you're rolling randomly out of panic without intention or deliberate timing. Instinctive rolling is when you think the attack will hit before it actually hits based on the animation. I understand when the devs try to punish panic rolling, because it makes sense, they want you to time your rolls, but when they punish instinctive rolling that's what gets me the most. I absolutely hate that shit. They artificially delay the actual landing of the hit.
And like mentioned before some enemies can have delayed attacks but if most enemies have them, they start to feel artificial aka like a video game, same problem arises how grace checkpoints are placed and how vast majority of the game has reused content.
I think that’s probably why I dislike Elden Ring’s combat so much. In the previous games (including Sekiro) you could get away with just having decent reactions and instincts based on visual cues and still have a pretty easy to moderately difficult time with the games. Sure, you would have it easier if you did memorize combos and patterns but that just is not fun to me whatsoever. That is not what I enjoy when playing a game. And you don’t have to. In Elden Ring it IS mandatory unless you go in to a fight very over leveled. Most bosses no longer work on instinct, they all try to fool you… wow so difficult that you held your attack for 7 seconds before instantly striking me. Oh how much fun I’m having… I really wish they would ditch this design philosophy because however much people always used to claim that you “have to learn the bosses attack patterns” it really wasn’t an obligation until Elden Ring. In Elden Ring if you don’t, you’re cooked
No. Panic rolling is when you see the boss start to move and incorrectly time your dodge to get hit. It occurs because you dont actually know the moveset of the boss, youre attempting to just roll off of reaction to movement. Youre panicking. Instead of waiting for the actual attack, you "instinctually' make the wrong fucking move 😂. What a joke of a video and even more laughable comment section.
Theres no fucking way you said they artificially delay the landing of the hit. Man, sometimes i wish elden ring wasnt as popular as it is so these skyrim ass players can go back to where they feel strong, in games made for 12 year olds.
Honestly I thought the way Midra and Bayle did delay attacks was pretty engaging, fair and added a lot to the rythm of the fight. Both fights are in my top 10 most enjoyable souls bosses.
Midra and Mohg are bosses I'd call the "Nameless King of Elden Ring". All 3 bosses play similarly in the way that their attacks and combos are defined by delayed attacks and specifically designed to roll-catch you. They're not like Margit who can purposefully drag out his attack super long and have a fixed interval
Forget the terrible looking delayed attacks why is every boss fight in a square boring looking areana i mean whats the story with this guy being in here? God from soft have gotten lazy
@@_CrimsonBladesimplistic or square boss rooms are the most fair for the player to fight in. Having complex terrain and elevation can make dodges and attacks feel more inconsistent, as seen in Consort Radahn’s fight (some moves are undodgable depending on the terrain)
Yeah screw that tracking unironically. Positioning is very important in combat and now it just feels like fights are quick time events where you press your invincibility button at the right moment.
A lot of these moves have good tracking so that they're not all invalidated by just mindlessly strafing to the right or left, but most of them can still be dodged positionally by running. And some of these can just be dodged by walk-strafing.
His dash grab isn't that bad in all honesty, the only incredibly weird attack in the main game is radagon's double swing, which looks like it could easily be rolled back to back but actually has the slightest delay to it
They aren't delayed, though. Godfrey and Hoarah Loux are my favorite and. iMO, the best bosses in the game because they have a distinct tempo to their fight. They always move to the rhythm of their soundtracks, and it makes predicting their attacks better.
I wouldn't include Midra. When you complain about delayed attacks, it's important to take into consideration the most important quality that can make or break said attack: animation legibility. Midra's attacks are very well animated from his weird cape/cloth thing to his actual sword swing, you can absolutely dodge his attacks on reaction just by paying attention to the animation. That's not the case for every boss, Margit/Morgott's overhead swing is infamous because....there's not much distinguishing animation work to telegraph when the swing will occur. That's not the case for Midra. In fact, I'd say Midra is an example of a well done delayed attack boss. All his physical sword attacks are delayed, but his frenzy AOE attacks can be quick and erratic. It's actually a good way to clue you in on how to deal with the boss pretty quickly. I'd say I had much more pleasant time learning Midra than Consort Radahn for example. The other factor that makes delayed attacks obnoxious is tracking. Consort Radahn tracks excessively, his cross slash attack can turn him on a dime, which makes the delayed aspect worse. So all in all, I'd say delayed attacks by themselves are not a problem. They're a problem when animation legibility isn't good and attack tracking is overtuned. Which surprise surprise, is the main issue with Dark Souls 2. It's also why I give Dark Souls 3 a pass most of the time, the animation quality in that game is very good. Gael phase 2 is another example of a boss with entirely delayed attacks on top of another layer of delays, but he's amazing because of the animation work. Also you seem kinda salty over the fact that he's the only frenzy related content...which yeah sure I guess that's fair. It's not really enough for me to ding the boss quality. If we're talking about narrative dissatisfaction, Consort Radahn is worse in almost every regard. also final edit...the deflection tear more or less dumpsters delay based attacks. Did you play Sekiro? It's waaaaaaaaaay more intense with the delays than Elden Ring.
One thing to remember, whoever, is that Sekiro's perfect block combat and Dark Souls' dodge-roll combat are fundamentally the opposites of each other. In Dark Souls, e.g. Elden Ring, you see an attack's wind-up, you roll. You may roll early, but you can never roll late. Your I-frames are simply not instant. In Sekiro, though, no matter what attack is thrown at you, unless it is a special Kanji attack, you always wait for the last moment, before enemy's hitbox collides with you to the perfect block and deflect it. TLDR, in Elden Ring you react to an attack before it happens, in Sekiro you react to an attack, the moment it hits you.
@@israfel916yes that’s why you use the correct tool for the correct problem. I personally was not satisfied by PCR and rellana mechanically, but Bayle, Gaius, Midra, and Messmer(in that order) are some of my favorite fights in the game for how they allow you to win by just rolling, but become the dance that Souls and Bloodborne used to give you when you learn where to mix in jump attacks over low sweeps, crouching under high sweeps, guard counters at the end of combos, and throwables to maintain stance damage. I absolutely agree that the combo structures need more polishing for the next game, but I think From’s biggest issue is poor communication on how to apply the tools at your disposal and poorer incentives to try new things.
@@israfel916 your s are instant on an elden ring roll from when you release the dodge button also sekiro parries are much more forgiving with early inputs than an elden ring roll if ur not spamming block both points wrong + you type like a bot + L + ratio
@@ETBrooD this is due to hardware/driver issues or controller input lag (differs by indivdual consoles). if you have this delay it will apply to all inputs in many games u can prove me wrong if u want but of the 3 vids i watched none of them had a fair test of other inputs to compare
even as a fan of delayed attacks, and a massive fan of midra, you're completely right how overused delayed attacks are in elden ring, sure they've made me stop panic rolling as much, but every fight feels like a game of timing and it all blends together, in dark souls 3 I find I can reaction roll on almost every boss and get away with it, and the delayed attacks are a good mix-up that keep me on my toes, in elden ring however that reaction roll feeling is gone, which is a shame because it feels like I go into every boss on a blank slate and I don't actually get better at the game, just that one specific boss.
You can tell their goal is to stop souls vets from transferring their skill from prior games, or even within the game game, to new challenges. You're right. It never feels like you got better at the game. Past souls game rewarded you for mastering the fundamentals of combat. ER? Not so much.
@@enigmatic8280can't you argue that er rewards yors abilities of finding punishing windows, by transferring your experience from past bosses to new. Founding, jump in, crouching, high low stances, positioning. Founding when you can land r1, test if in that window r2 fit, then charge r2 or skill . Of course this gonna need some testing, some time lucky observation. Clearly higher skill level players have easier time fighting new bosses than people who less knowledgeable about er mechanics. P.s. I'm not good at this games, I'm just confused by statement
What a baffling incorrect comment. In DS3 the fact that you just reaction roll and hell, spam, everything is fucking dogshit. It rewards nothing. Any boss in ER has a more interesting moveset to learn, and most attacks have at least two ways of dodging, not wven considering the inclusion of the Deflect Year now. @@enigmatic8280
Sure dude, the game that is just reaction rolling and mildly side-strafing 95% of bosses doesn't blend together, but the one that asks you to pay attention does. Very insightful and not stupid claim.
@@AlexAndriy1995 yes elden ring rewards finding punishing windows. However, you cannot transfer experience from fighting one boss to another unless they are literally the same boss or have basically indistinguishable movesets. When you can land an r1 or r2 is entirely different for everyboss. For example, learning the fire giants timing has no impact on whether you can learn radagons timings. Each boss fight is different because each boss has different recovery timings, hitboxes, posture values, dmg,etc.
Since dark souls 3 the games became like a "guitar hero" of rolling. For someone who plays this games again and again and again, it helps to don't make them feel boring from one playtrough to another, i have to adjust my timing, it makes me think, and that is entertaining for me.
Pretty much, delayed attacks exists because without them it becomes way to easy to just see a boss twitch and Iframe, now you have to fully take in the move. Delayed attacks are still very reactable.
@@boredomkiller99 I used to be on the hater side so I can tell you its all just cope If elden ring was just dark souls 3 again where once you get a feel for general dodge timings you can beat all bosses in a couple attempts it would have been way too easy I used to say "In elden ring it feels like you're not getting better at the game, but better at that one singular boss" as a negative, but now I see how varied and interesting the movesets are that switched to a positive
Yeah first time playing this game and fighting Margit when he does that ridiculous overhead attack and holds it for like 5 minutes, it told me that we were in for a rough ride with boss design and that they were doing everything they could to trip up us experienced players. There are so many cheap tricks in the game.
If youre having trouble with margit you just suck. Hes an introductory boss designed to be beaten by everyone and a joke after your first playthrough. You suck. Thats all.
@@kindlingking You can be more aggressive by attacking in between combo. The bosses have long combos but they also have slow attacks or delayed attacks that you can utilize as opening. For example I'd recommend you watching pro players like Ongbal or Ginomachino. Those players manage to play more aggressive by utilizing opening in between combo.
i think the majority of people just have more fun fighting a boss when they can use their reaction time to their advantage and maybe get a first try victory instead of going into every boss fight and feeling like they have to study for the boss exams
then they can play ds 1 2 or 3. Which all take far less knowledge of the bosses to beat. Or just use any of the broken items in the game if you don't want to have to learn it.
"Muh realism" I am playing a game. The enemies are fighting me in this game. When the enemies are not so much fighting me as they are playing the game with these awkward pauses after readying attacks, it just feels gimmicky and inauthentic. Just beat my ass ffs.
Two years into the game's release and people still haven't learned the one lesson Margit was supposed to teach you: "delayed" attacks are openings. It's actually pretty crazy that so many people still haven't recognised this. And if even if you don't go for the opening they are windows for stamina regen so you can keep being aggressive without backing off to neutral. Margit has that extremely delayed staff raise attack to show you that these "delayed" attacks are openings and sometimes it is better to strafe than to roll. If you just circle to the right the attack will completely miss you and it's an opening for a charged heavy. The reason it's so delayed is to give the player plenty of time to realise that maybe rolling over and over again is not the solution (although it seems that even two years is not enough for some people). Later bosses will have similar moves but the windows for strafing and punishing (and thus the length of the "delay") are much smaller. Rellana in the DLC for example has a number of somewhat "delayed" moves which can be avoided by simply strafing. You could have said this if you were actually interested in analysing the purpose delayed attacks played in Elden Ring's combat, which would actually be helpful to people who haven't got it and might help people enjoy the game more, but instead, like most of the people whining about Elden Ring, you are just venting uninformed frustration under the guise of analysis, with little interest in understanding, improving, or enjoying something new. The general reaction to the DLC (which actually has substantially fewer "delayed" attacks than the base game) has really solidified my belief that some people have no interest in learning to have fun with new systems and would instead rather vent their frustrations to each other wishing Fromsoft just remade DS3 forever.
You know i was replaying trough elden ring again after beating it a few months ago and got to margit and started to get frustrated again at the delayed attacks, but you actually make a good point on why they are delayed, it makes sense, the devs probabbly wanted player to just stop spamming the roll button and mix up the gameplay. Still what do you think about how fast the bosses go from attack to attack? it sometimes feels like there is no room for attack.
Too bad ER bosses almost never stagger, even with "colossal swords", so attacking twice will get you hit and attacking once is just risking 70% of your life to take 1% of theirs.
@@metalema6you just need to figure out the optimal way to punish the openings you are given based on your weapons moveset, while still being safe. If your punish takes too long and you get hit, try something a bit quicker. If you want to stagger bosses, the most important thing is upkeeping the poise damage. Every boss has a certain timer, after which the poise damage gets reset. This timer is reset every time you hit the boss. So to stagger a boss, keep hitting as frequently as possible, preferably with jumping or charged attacks. If an attack takes too long or the boss creates some distance, you can use any ranged attack to keep the poise damage from resetting.
@@metalema6 huh? Theyre 2nd to great hammers & most collosals when it comes to stance breaking, + against bosses like malenia you *always* stagger her, bullying her like she's a ds1 boss even.If youre gonna complain about ugs, complain about the same-y movesets & *inconsistent* staggers. Can think of a few dlc enemies that just ignore attacks unless it's a crouch poke, like the curseblade enemies. Oh & sht like the ruins' & watchdogs not being strike weapons. I love stagger locking enemies like it's ds1 too dude, but thatd be really boring. You can cram *safe* jumping r2s & even charged heavies against alot of the dlc bosses if you adapt well enough man. Theyre fine, just bland
@@GetUrFunnyUp margit's also the most complex boss when it comes to him reacting to your position vs him. That stormveil fight can go so many different ways on repeat playthrus, just based on how/where you attack & dodge. Goes for basically all the rememberencd level bosses. I wouldnt try it on margit with how complex he is, but other bosses can be easily "read" or bait rather, into certain attacks/combos. My 1st playthru i got plasidusax stuck in his initial lightning spam just by circling him, greatbow only. He never teleported, even after stance breaking him
They have created the problem themselves by making the combat more agressive. Dark Souls and Demon Souls had a much slower and punishing combat, but DS3/BB/ER are noticeably faster and with way less recovery frames, so naturally it's much easier to be agressive and doge bosses, hence FS has to come up with something new to make enemies hard again. P.S.: In DS1 you'd get even more recovery frames if you wiff with certain weapons. DS2 had the best combat pacing imo.
Delays are a bad thing, but the fights get horrible when the delays are accompanied by the bosses dealing insane amounts of damage, constantly attacking (with combos too) without letting you do anything, and also having huge health bars. I don't feel like I'm fighting a boss that I could imagine being "real", I just feel like I'm fighting against an unfair bot.
I hate how the delayed attacks read your rolls in an attempt to try and stop you. It genuinely feels like they made the enemies try their absolute hardest to kill you and trip you up without making it straight up impossible
I want to have a go at trying to explain the real issue in combination with highlighting some of your observations Berto. A good fight is usually attributed to ones that have a good rhythm to it. Such as when you dodge, you can feel the right timing for when the next dodge is going to be without even looking (after you've experienced the combo's). Kind of like Sekiro. These feel fun and fluid and you know your windows to punish or heal. When combo's are being chained it's more difficult but aslong as you recognise them it's fun to dodge through and around. These delayed attacks become absolute absurdity when say for example Melenia while she's floating in the air waiting to water fowl you, she has extremely tight tracking on you the whole time so in a really stupidly physically impossible way, she just rotates around to keep her facing you exactly where you are at all times. She just spins on a dime. This happens with a lot of bosses, it's not just the extremely unrealistically long wind up time, but it's that they also just turn around as if air doesn't exist causing them any drag whatsoever. They just spin on a dime and likely 1 shot you with an attack that looks like there was no power behind it because it took so long to come out. And you mentioned the regular enemies, holy crap don't get me started on those messemer soldiers, the axe wielding ones. I mean wtf is that attack? They stomp, then slow-mo swing at you while running, fully leaning forward like they're gonna fall flat on their faces, and swing again to roll catch you. It's designed as an egregious 1 shot. Then there's the dog-head imps with the staff. That thing just chases you holding the staff in the air and they'll chase you for ages before they decide to swing down on you. They also spin on a dime if you run around them because of their physically impossible tracking.
Ishin is the best from boss of all time. Hard af. Takes several tries and each time you feel closer to besting him. He demands the player use all of the main things that needed to be learned to get to this point. It's sooo good. Legendary even. COME SEKIRO! It's the best ninja game ever made hands down. Vs the bigger elden ring bosses which are sooo less varied up. Malenia pretty much just demands not getting hit so much to heal her... and then look up how to dodge watever patch of water foul you're currently dealing with haha. Rad dan of the dlc demands the player to either shield poke it tf up which is slow and boring and unskillful... OR struggle for forever until you get lucky with parries or roll butt pokes. And then there's radagon and the big yellow pokemon who keeps running away lol. Do I even have to get into this one?
Fights like messmer have extreme amounts of fun rhythm in my experience The difference is that you just have to earn the right to feel that rhythm with each new boss as skill doesn't really carry across between them But that's not necessarily a bad thing, I want each boss to be it's own experience
Imho the thing with these new "delayed" attacks is that they're made of two parts: the charging and the swing. The charging part is not the issue, because it's almost always telegraphed and recognizable. The swing is where it all falls apart. No matter how long or slow the charging portion of the animation is, if the actual hit takes less than a quarter of a second, you'll likely be unable to dodge it because of simple human reaction time. Knowing that an attack is coming is only half the battle, you also have to know _when_ the attack is coming. What this all means is that you have to internalize the timing of the attacks through trial and error to be able to predict when the swing is gonna come out. Needless to say that your internal clock is never going to be perfect. You'll never count seconds as well as a real clock. Add to all this the fact that enemies can randomly choose to mix up the timings of their swings, and you have a well oiled machine that ensures you will get hit from time to time, never truly able to react to attacks.
I played this game a lot, almost all enemies in the game have fixed timing for their delayed attack so you can memorize them. The delayed attacks can be consistently used as a punish window by pro player because of this. The only enemies I know with mix up timing delayed attack are Margit and watchdog holding their attack, even then they have telegraph and tell when they actually decide to swing.
@@rizuki9983 Yes, memorizing the timing is indeed the way to go. However, I'm trying to say that as human beings we sometimes _feel_ time differently due to a variety of reasons. If you count seconds along with a clock, and then you stop looking at the clock and start counting by yourself, you'll very quickly fall out of sync with it. That said, there are a few (not many) enemies that do delayed attacks right. One example is the Watchdog (like you mentioned), who slightly raises their sword before they swing, so you can react immediately after seeing that animation.
@@sonikku997 idk the only delayed attack I found to be bad are the Radahn one (because he is doing it while riding his horse so is unpunishable) and scally misbegotten (he has attack that similar to delayed one but come out so much faster) the rest I found to be not hard to memorize or learn the timing. I rarely struggled with delayed attacks after learning a lot of them can be used for your advantage for more opening and punish window, I like them mechanically but I do agree they look jarring.
You know how fromsoftware fans are when you point out a flaw in any souls like game. They instantly start to suck and blow miyasaki with no hesitation 😂
@@pancakes7483 it's not an objective flaw so it will obviously get criticism. Many like delayed attacks, without delayed attacks you get the problem that is ds1 bosses. They are far too easy, every single boss in that game you can beat by just rolling the moment you see an attack, with no thought. The direction you roll doesn't even matter either, there's almost no attacks before elden ring that require you to roll in a certain direction or time it well. You just roll and swing while circling the boss and you clear all the games easily.
@@ragegaze3482 Gael doesnt have any. But he is consistently #1 boss. Some people like eating shit from toilet, but that doesnt mean its objectively good food
@@nurikkulanbaev3628 Gael is easy though, so that matches my point. He's a highly rated boss because he's cool, that's it. He wouldn't even be top 10 in the hardest fromsoft bosses. Plus there is no agreed upon #1 boss in the community. He's normally in the top rankings of people's list though.
@@nurikkulanbaev3628 It'll depend on how people rate their bosses. Some take in music, lore, arena and not just gameplay into consideration. Gael is great and an S+ tier fight but Messmer and Soul of Cinder are just better for me
My 2nd playthrough of the DLC is when I say to myself, "ok I will not use any summon & learn all the bosses pattern" and hell they kicked my ass mostly from their delayed attack lol, but it was worth it, it was sooooooo satisfying when you deveated them by pure skill.
I don’t mind NORMAL delayed attacks. Those are in every fromsoft game including Sekiro. What I have a problem with is when they LITERALLY FREEZE FRAME THE DAMN ANIMATION. It looks completely unnatural and is just confusing for no reason. Godfrey on his second phase freezes MID AIR like WTF.
I majorly dislike delayed attacks because it makes fights feel less authentic to me. I used to box so it is very deeply ingrained in me that when an opening resents itself you instinctually need to punish by beating them to the punch A good trade always happens when both people are on the offensive because you will almost never land when the other person is in defense mode. Typically what you want to do is make a prediction about what the next punch your opponent will throw then have a punch lined up to exploit the opening that you hope will open up the split second their hand moves from their chin. So moving to eldenring as my first souls game it severely severely messed with my head and annoyed me when I would attack the enemy really quickly before they could land their attack and then I get punished for it. We're getting to a really really silly point in fromsoft games where the "best" warriors are getting worse and worse fundamentals, and are now blatantly disobeying the laws of gravity as long as it surprises you. So to steel a term from gabe newell, im getting a narcissistic injury when I get punished by enemies that bend the rules of the world to their advantage just to subvert my expectations of a fair fight. When I jump in the air, I cant float there in the sky for an awkward amount of time like godfrey, and I cant just charge up a charge attack that I cant be interrupted or poise broken out of to do massive damage to the enemy. I have to play by the rules of the world, but the enemies play by them much less often.
delayed attacks are tricks on the player. and it feels bad to get tricked over and over and over again. there's just no way to beat the trick other than getting hit until you memorize it
i dont get the complaints, for the most part. delayed attacks in elden ring are almost always just a part of a fights rhythm and tempo, not an interruption of them. if all of midra's attacks are "delayed", then whats the problem? that also means that all of his attacks are consistent. very rarely are these attacks not telegraphed, or woven into the general flow of the fight. messmer's spear scrapes against the floor before releasing forwards towards you. mohg's attack have a consistent weight and heave to them, due to his massive trident. margit/morgott give you plenty of time to react once they swing, making their roll-catches a game of patience and intuition. even when just looking at his feet, you can predict the fire giants delayed attacks just off of his body movement and heavy battle style. all of these delayed attacks have their own purpose in their individual fights, and are given their own worthy justifications and consistencies. i really dont get what the problem is.
Firstly They look stupid lol And the attack technically isn’t “telegraphed” When Margot raises his sword. That isn’t the attack. The attack is the swing after the 45 minute delay. The follow up swing has no telegraph. It’s pure reaction. Also the dodge input delay makes reacting a bigger pain in the rear
You don't need to react to margit's swing though, as soon as you see the staff go up you just get close and circle around him and you get a bunch of free attacks while he misses entirely. So you have all the telegraphing you need Also, him holding the staff up is a telegraph to the player to stop trying to predict when the swing will come and instead just react to it. And yes, you can roll it on reaction, I've done it plenty of times I can understand the frustration with the dodge input delay though, and if that isn't fun for you then that's fair. I think Quickstep comes out on button press, and not release
Just wrong. Hitting someone with anything is a fluid motion once the motion is begun. It doesn't matter what kind of weapon you have or what kind of creature you are, it's just physics. Pausing the motion and restarting it defies physics and makes the motion uncanny. And it means instead of dodging when a move you see start would normally hit, you have to instead turn off the logical part of your brain and simply memorize and arbitrary timer value for every enemy and all of their moves. It's a terrible experience.
Elden Ring has three major problems: Homogenization, no rhythm to the fights, and speed. Every single boss follows the exact same formula - start out relatively manageable, have a second phase that is designed to utterly fuck over the player. I can't tell you how many bosses in ER I can describe as "Okay, yeah, this was pretty good. THEN the second phase happened." How cool would it be to have a boss who's second phase was them getting WEAKER, instead of stronger? Y'know, like how a real person gets weaker the more you just obliterate them. Not only that, but as you touched on, even the biggest of bosses are allowed to just move around as quickly as they want, as though their actual weight has zero bearing on how they're able to move - which was something they put a lot of consideration into for previous games. The rhythm is pretty obvious. If you have a boss fight who's intentionally designed to throw off the rhythm of a player, then the fight ends up feeling as though it has no rhythm - it has no flow. If the player knows they have to wait for every attack a boss has before rolling, they're not in the moment, trying to whittle down a living opponent - they're a player outside the world, gaming the AI. Lastly there's the player speed. In every previous game, whenever the devs wanted to speed up the combat, the player was sped up with it. BloodBorne is the biggest example obviously. The player stamina is generous, and the actions they can perform consume less stamina on average than in previous games. Hell, even Greatswords and large weapons are the fastest they've ever been. However in Elden Ring, they wanted to have the bosses speed up without doing the same to the player. As such they're able to make moves that at times the players just cannot dodge unless they are hard memorizing every boss fight. And when you're turning every boss fight into a test of memorizing all of their attacks, you're not presenting the player with a natural back and forth fight, which they have to react to, and pay attention to. You're turning it into homework. Where the player simply has to memorize every little action, or they get punished. The Souls/Borne combat is not built for combat that's as fast as Elden Ring wants it to be, and FromSoft has pushed it as far as the combat can go. They, and fans, unfortunately just don't wanna accept it.
Sorry dawg but the flow state is still there. There's just a learning phase behind every boss instead of getting better at the game as a whole. Sounds like a bad thing but who wants another dark souls 3 level of difficulty? That shit is so easy nowadays. In my first dark souls 3 run I almost first tried Gael because I was simply good at dark souls 3 by that point. That would have been unsatisfying... Having each boss be its own challenge helps to offset the growing skill of the playerbase Like I can lock in and fight Messmer without even thinking now. You just need to learn his attacks, which for some reason is an alien concept to a lot of souls fans. It's not like you're constantly referring to a spreadsheet of timings in your mind, they do get ingrained as you play. It's the same as it used to be. Remember your first dark souls experience, how weird the attack timings felt until you got an instinct for it? It's the same now, but the instincts are for bosses instead of games now if you know what I mean.
My biggest gripes with Elden Ring boss design are input reading, animation canceling, free flowing combo extensions, and inconsistent punish windows. Morgott will delay his swing for ungodly amounts of time... but if you roll before the delay is over, he'll immediately snap to catch your roll because he read that you pressed the button, which cancels the rest of the animation to perform the attack earlier than he would have normally if you didn't roll. An example of two enemies that I believe have wacky combo extensions are the Crucible Knights and Bell Bearing Hunters, once a Crucible Knight has entered phase 2 they can swipe with their tail to smack you to cover their previous whiff punish window, meaning you either need to delay your punish until they've reached the moment of their recovery animation that they can no longer use that move (which limits your selection of weapons due to speed-related concerns) or you need to bait the tail swing with something really fast with low recovery like a Dagger so you have enough time to dodge it afterwards. Bell Bearing Hunters have a thing where if they do their shield slam attack, they have an optional extension that will make the shield explode in a massive AoE if you attack into them before the animation is over, so you have to wait until they start the animation for putting the shield on their back before you can start attacking them, which just feels unnecessary? Just make the explosion happen every time so I don't have to guess when it's safe to start attacking him. Malenia breaks all of these rules and more, having endless free flowing combo extensions on top of being able to cancel her "damage level hit stun" stagger animation into a dodge away from you which reduces the damage of your attack, or she can perform an attack that will punish you for attacking her, both of which gives her an inconsistent punish window, which is made even more inconsistent because of her Super Armor that makes her Stance unbreakable during many of her attacks, which means that despite her only have 80 Poise she can tank a 100 Poise damage attack with her Super Armor which will then put her Poise into the negatives and immediately start regenerating it without waiting for the 30 second Poise recovery timer, _without_ breaking her Stance. She can recover her health when hitting a 100% Physical Block shield, she can recover her health from hitting the _air_ due to having a poor connection with your Host if you are fighting the boss as a Phantom, she has two phases with entirely separate health bars that give her more equivalent health than the Fire Giant when accounting for innate Negation and the fact that percentage-based damage sources will be cut in half due to her having two phases with two separate health bars, you need to parry her _three_ times to break her Stance and open her up to a Riposte, she has an incredibly short Riposte window meaning if you end up smacking her because of input buffering you'll miss your opportunity for a critical hit, and as a further punishment she has an extremely high likelihood of performing a Waterfowl Dance when you fail to Riposte her. Don't even get me started on her Phantom Spirits attack having extremely poorly telegraphed and arbitrary dodge windows with precise directions so you can actually dodge the attack (two backward rolls with a small delay between them, two forward rolls, two rolls to the left, good luck figuring any of this out without looking up a guide.) Elden Ring is a fun game, but it's heavily flawed.
1. Morgott doesn't read your dodge roll timing as far as I'm aware 2. I really hope Morgott reads your dodge roll timing because that is an amazing feature that punishes panic rolls, which I think is amazing, especially when you have like no HP, about to die and then the tension of waiting and the strength of will required to refrain from panic rolling, just to perfectly make it through the next attack and heal in the opening. omg please I hope this is a prevalent feature in the next game.
I find it more fun when the bosses have delayed attacks. It makes you constantly pay attention to its attacks and learning it is satisfying Ishin, for example, has mostly simple attacks but it has a certain delay in them that confused me a little at first but then it was very rewarding to know how to react properly
@@StrangeLeapFor Malenia, I agree with you. For Radahn, I disagree. He has a few problems that keep him from being an all time great boss fight in my opinion
I feel like FromSoftware is on an "Arms-race" with their fanatical followers and Malenia (Blade of Miquella) is the proof of that, IMO. Being an optional boss that in lore is legendary for being deadly, justify she being so hard (although Radahn defeated her, so she saying she never knew defeat is bullsh1t), HOWEVER Waterfowl Dance is designed to kill "Souls-veterans". Why after she stops moving is there a damaging wind strike out of (her ass) nothing? To kill players who are used to keeping close to an enemy to try punishing after their big attacks. A new player would not have that mindset, but people who are playing this games for years and even decades, would. Adding to that, the sheer amount of enemies with delayed attacks, the horrible multifights of Elden Ring (with duo gargoles and duo crucible knights being unexcusebly bad) and NPCs that have no stamina are just annoying and tiresome by now. P.S: How could I've forgotten, the ennemies with 5 min combos that jump away the moment they finish their kata presentation. Fuck that! It's annoying and unfair, since enemies don't have stamina to manage.
FS will eventually hit the bottom. Many players have gotten bored of this boss design, myself included. memorizing patterns just isn't fun anymore. its slop.
@@ShaunRFeven millicent says that malenia was overpowered by radahn and had to use rot power to meat his measure, meaning that without rots help she would lose
@@ShaunRFno, she bloomed, which only happens when she's about to die, so it's safe to assume Radahn was ready to finish her off. But then rot nuke happened.
I feel that the DLC is a lot more fair than the end game of base Elden Ring. There are no 13 hit waterfall moves or Elden Beast garbage. The DLC fixed many problems from the base game imo.
I just replayed a bit of Code Vein to see where its combat stacked up to Elden Ring just because I could and was surprised to find many of the same tactics used to throw off players in the endgame, including super tracking on even basic attacks, erratic high speed maneuvers and opponents with delayed attacks (at least there are no attacks which unnaturally extend airtime on jumps). There really is only so much that can be done to shake up this gameplay formula.
9:53 Fighting Elemer at any range other than direct contact is pure suicide because of these unreadable moves. Fighting this guy at low level became much better once I accepted this fact.
Yeah the footage I showed was from a RL1 run, I figured out the fight was a piece of cake up close, but wanted to learn the differences of the jedi attacks, and was just baffled at how punishing these attacks were. It really punishes ranged builds to an unnecessary degree
Good video, I just don't agree with your points so I will try to keep this as understandable as possible sorry if I make any grammar mistakes :) (also I won't talk about previous games since that's not what I disagree with even tho I feel like the nameless king point makes no sense, his attacks are clearly telegraphed) BASE GAME SECTION: 1. Margit --> 9:10 "Yeah, you won't learn this attacks by reaction." first you won't NEED to memorize any attacks, this tip is simple and easy, look at his movement. Every attack is telegraphed he charges up and then you can clearly see his body twitch. That's your moment to dodge. IMO it's a good thing every attack was a delayed one, since you WILL NEED to learn how to dodge delayed attacks in this game. Also quick tip you can jump this attack and get a free heavy jump attack hit (9:58) I just disagree with the points of margit's boss design being "muddy" I always knew when to attack there is clear openings, I know not everyone has the same opinion, but I think his attacks are telegraphed and easy to know when to punish :) 2. Radahn (???????) --> Radahn is extremely slow and heavily telegraphed. It's actually insane how easy it is to tell when he's doing an attack. 11:27 you show him phase transitioning as to say he's fast? this just makes no sense. 11:34 "What telegraphs that about his design?" the purple lighting and light around him. If you went through Caelid, you would've seen soldiers using gravity magic, which has the same light and effect, not to mention that he's also referred to as "the conqueror of the stars" like cmon. 3. Radagon (??????????????) --> Radagon might be one of the most telegraphed bosses in ER. 12:29 Dodge forward. Nothing about his attacks are complicated, just dodge forward that easy, the aftershocks will NEVER hit you. 12:58 "heal punishing" aka you tried to run from the boss to heal on neutral instead of dodging and actually healing after an attack combo. This never worked in any FROM game and it was always a huge risk to take. 13:14 "just to panic roll" well I kind of agree that's usually how any first attempt with any boss goes no matter the game, but instead of continuing to do that in the next couple of attempts, what if you actually tried to learn it? SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE SECTION: Main point is "there is too many delayed attacks" like sure I can see your point, but simply learn the boss? like genuinely do you find it fun to first try a boss never having learnt it because it's attacks are easy to dodge and predictable or do you want to learn a boss and engage with their mechanics and get better at them? just maybe we have a different view of what makes this games fun. 14:45 "It's become predictable and boring."... are we acting dumb on purpose? Are we going to ignore the last 6 GAMES of easily predictable, easy asf attacks that became a boring repetition and was the most predictable shit ever, even with just 1 attempt on the boss? Also makes the point that it wrapped back around to making the boss easier, but then doesn't that mean that the game taught you how to play? Isn't that the point of these types of games? The more you play it, the more you recognize patterns, and now, with even new bosses, you can interpret what they are going to do without even seeing it. You learned to play the game, which in my opinion is excellent. You don't like Midra? Sincerely, what can I even say about this? Just not something I agree with at all; I won't go into detail, but he's one of my favorite bosses from this new DLC. 16:32 I just want to call out how almost all of these are either big-ish enemies, knights, or have big weapons. Didn't you earlier say big enemies and weapons matter when considering delayed attacks? Also, didn't you excuse the penetrator's attacks because he's a knight? 17:28 Now this is your opinion but I disagree heavily. Bosses are fun, enjoyable, beautiful, and all the positive words I could use to describe them, ER bosses are the best thing FROM has made and will ever make, in my opinion. Now, if you haven't been able to tell by now, I love Elden Ring, which might make you think that I don't have complaints against it, but I do, but one of my complaints is not delayed attacks or "unfair fights", The fights are as fair as ever. IMO we are focusing on the wrong thing when complaining about ER, delayed attacks? Learn them, look at animations for tells, and something I haven't mentioned is that delayed attacks help you regen stamina, which makes it almost impossible to break the flow of the fight like you had to do in previous FROM games. Also the whole unfair fight thing makes no sense, these fights are extremely fair and unique, if you want to look at unfair fights, look no further than Bloodborne the same game that took 4 years to no-hit. Look at ds2 with it's shitty hitboxes. Not ER, this is not an unfair game. 18:05 Be aggressive, its the most fun and easiest way to play the game (IMO) Just don't be stupid and attack the boss expecting it not to attack back, don't attack mid combo, etc. In general, just think a little before acting. 18:28 OFC This game has flaws, but delayed attacks? really? Also, the point about how it changed a lot from the original games, like? Don't you want an evolution of the old games, or do you want to play games that do the same shit for 20 years? Again let me say I think this video is good and I'm sorry if I was condescending in any of my points. I assure you, it was not my intent, I just disagreed with your points and felt the need to put my thoughts out there, also I agree that we SHOULD criticize games, especially games we love, so we can see them better in the future, but I don't think delayed attacks are flawed or bad. At the end of the day it doesn't matter its just our opinions :)
Totally agree, majority of the delayed attacks complained about in this vid are completely fine. Sure delayed attacks can be difficult to dodge the first time you see them, but once you learn the timing they become the easiest attacks to dodge. And the aftershocks mentioned in radagon and consort radahns fights are not cheap ways to extend the difficulty. For consort radahn phase 2 has many of the same attacks as phase 1 with added lightbeams that punish where players would intuitively dodge to in phase 1. For most of these attacks, if you dodge into radahn instead of away, you won't have to dodge the follow up lightbeams. Same with radagon, just dodge the initial attack in a way that puts you out of range for the follow up aftershock (usually dodge forward). And he doesn't "heal punish", he teleports and uses gap closing moves if you try to run away from him. If you want to heal, don't run away and heal after dodging one of his attack combos. These "aftershock" attacks are teaching the player that not just timing, but the direction of your dodge matters, which is great game design imo. I think Berto's is wrong in thinking that changing some of the fundamentals of the game design from dark souls is a bad thing.
I am genuinely puzzled by how much discourse the delayed attacks have been generating. I do understand why it is likely design that serves to make fights more difficult, but this disregards that it is also likely intended to be design that makes bosses more engaging too. I do not think that being able to smash your face into the circle button the moment a boss moves its sword arm is particularly interesting. These attacks actually force you to learn and engage with a boss’s moveset in a way that previous series bosses did not really do. Additionally, though it was not explicitly brought up in this video, the complaint of delay attacks in tandem with the complaint about punish windows is something I find crazy to reconcile. If the boss is delaying their attacks, that’s your punish window. Hit them! It makes the fight so much more engaging and even complements the aggressive playstyle you mentioned you enjoy.
@@justifano7046 They are not the only way, nor did my comment imply that they were the only way. What I said was that it was likely an intended design goal of adding them, and I do believe this to be the case, understanding that it does also have the knock on effect of making the boss harder. I think a happy middle ground for people would probably be roll-catch attacks similar to Nameless King, but more straightforward in the presentation of their animation. Attacks such that you need to delay between the first and second roll, but starting the animation for the second attack at a time when you will not be punished for reaction rolling when it starts. The downside to this, in my eyes, is that you do not have a window to attack the boss mid-combo, and you are forced to dodge through the whole thing. I do legitimately see this as an advantage of the egregious delays that ER likes to employ on some bosses.
@@hrr2b239 of course it's intended they input them into almost every single enemy. But its just bad difficulty. Fromsoft has tried too hard to make the game difficult that it's come at the cost of good gameplay. Luckily, the total package is quite good allowing many to overlook these issues.
@@danielantony1882then you're not timing correctly...even on margit, when he does his infamous delayed overhead swing, you can even see in the video you have an extremely forgiving window to attack. you probably won't get off something like a lions claw without trading, but you can light attack and be safe. it's not an insane suggestion to understand when your openings are, because the more damage you do, the faster the fight ends, and the lesser the chance of you dying
6:56. "I saw a reddit thread that puts it really well, a lot of the bosses were like Nameless King." -Penguinz0 during a stream of his 1st playthrough, he was in Altus Plateau.
I dont think bro is "completely right" like others are saying. Elden rings boss design does use unintuitive swing timings. Other times, bosses like Midra may have slow swings, but they're perfectly readable if you watch their hand movements. Souls games were always rhythm games to some degree. Changing or slowing the rhythms doesnt make bad boss design.
@@Apophes sometimes that's just memorization/quick reaction times. Not saying it's always perfect/intuitive, but get hit by it once or twice and the average human should be able to get timing down. It's not a fatal flaw.
i think my biggest issue with the DLC bosses is more the fact that every single one of them has a grab attack with a broken hitbox. but the delays dont help
Fromsoft can't make a good grab hitbox EVER 😂 from Dark Souls 1's Iron Golem to Dark Souls 2's mimics to Dark Souls 3 Demon Prince's to Elden Ring's Messemer 😂 grab hitboxes are something they've never done well
@@BertoPlease Dont pretend like this is exclusive to DS2 tho. Ds1/3 and ER have way more egregious grab hitboxes like with iron golem, Curserotted great tree, Mesmer, and Dancer of Boreal being the worst examples with hitboxes bigger than a truck.
I think you forgot one important thing when it come to bosses delay attacks, they are also your breather, small break between attacks for your charater to stablize and manage your own stamina Take well, Margit, he have alot of delay attacks, yes they are there to make him harder but it’s also there for you to recover your stamina, your attacks and rolls aren’t limitless, if you simply remove these attacks then it will probably be boring and just take to effort to learn or react cause without variations then what’s gonna stop people from spamming roll without bring punish?
So far as the delayed attacks were concerned, I think they're most ill used on creatures who shouldn't have the intelligence to psych you out. If its a knight or Radagon deploying feint tactics, that's sensible - but every common wolf and rat? That's silly. Like footsoldiers' arrows curving toward you, there's no narrative reason for it.
so i still dont get really get why you dont like midra? he's too easy? i thought the fact he was a character that thematically utilizes delayed attack for all of his attacks to the point it becomes unambiguous reinforced his thematic style of being flashy and visually interesting. what's the big issue? there wasn't really a concrete reason given why there's a dislike for him
While I understand your grievances against delayed attacks, I disagree. Just as you brought up the "trend of second phases", I think delayed attacks are a natural evolution as part of a game's enemy engagement, not simply as an arbitrarily hard challenge. The way you describe delayed attacks is in such a generalized way that much context is removed from a boss's overall toolkit. Godrick's delayed attacks have the purpose of moving you back into mid-range and away from being close to him, while Margit's delayed attacks serve to punish reckless positioning or over-reactive dodging. In addition to this, delayed attacks do pose a danger within the flow of combat but also have the caveat of giving you an opening to punish the boss. This keeps the flow of combat engaging. I played my first playthrough of Elden Ring with the colossal Greatsword primarily (because my friend sold me on this because of the Berserk reference and showed me how to reach it early) and finding these openings through trial and error during my boss fight attempts was crucial for me being able to land jumping heavy attacks or charged heavy attacks on these bosses. If Margit takes a year to swing his cane or to stab it into the ground, he's going to be winded long enough for a light weapon to land a charged heavy and a jumping heavy, and a heavy weapon can land one charged heavy or one jumping heavy. Malenia's delayed attack in her first phase ends with her performing a downward sword slash with a recovery window that is long enough for me to land a jumping heavy with my Greatsword. /// Your perspective on delayed attacks is also that attacks may be delayed but they are also fast upon striking...which to me is a really unusual complaint. From your script, it sounds as if you prefer for boss attacks to have attacks in which you have to reactively dodge upon a visual/audio cue, which these attacks DO have with their long delay. The delay is the visual cue that an attack is approaching that you must avoid. I think the differentiation you did with "delayed, slow moving attacks" vs "delayed, fast moving attacks" stuck with me though not in a good way. This comparison attempts to present the latter form of delayed attacks in a bad light but I don't think one form of delayed attack is inherently superior or inferior to another. The more I think on your video, the more I get the impression that your bad experiences from these delayed attacks have just ultimately soured your overall game experience. I don't think its a "skill issue" like a lot of players love to say, but if what I said is true, I think this stops you from evaluating the boss fights as a whole and appreciating their flow of combat. I think with how you mentioned "healing punishes" and then how Pontiff can "combo", it just gives me the ick, the same ick that I get when frustrated players want to transform their venting into a talking point or criticism. In spite of this, I think you did bring up a good conversation point: are DELAYED ATTACKS OVERUSED? /// Going back to what I said earlier about the natural evolution of a game's enemy engagement, I think delayed attacks fit right in just as with "boss second phases". I do not believe that they are overused. I do not believe that these design elements exist as a method to arbitrarily heighten a game's difficulty, but rather to compliment the combat engagement with enemies and bosses. Enemies that perform quick, immediate attacks when they see you and when you are in range...are already such a common occurrence even within Elden Ring. The usage of delayed attacks serves as a means to disrupt traditional combat expectations and to create better combat engagement through making the player more observant instead of simply being reactive. I will confess that I too have fallen prey to delayed attacks given how I play and with what weapon I play. Midra caused me a bit of frustration with his delayed attacks on top of his health pool, to where my impatience started to take a toll on me and caused me to not enjoy Midra's fight as much as other people did. And this is a good transition into the "fun" of it all. Can you find delayed attacks to not be fun? Sure. Though when presented as good faith criticism, it fundamentally sounds like a complaint disguised as criticism and propelled by misunderstanding. It is similar to when the popular community sentiment against Elden Ring bosses was that "they're unfair because they never stop attacking" or "its impossible to heal against them". I think the community has a collective desire to gather together to rationalize their frustrations instead of overcoming them or understanding them. This isn't to say that I play FromSoft video games without ever getting frustrated but what ultimately drives me push on through and enjoy the experience is because I enjoy playing these games. Like everyone else, I too got stuck at Malenia and felt overwhelmed but I never felt like there was an outside force that tried to rob me of my enjoyment.
Fantastic analysis. This is similar to my feeling on delayed attacks. While I don't feel like they're overused I feel like they should be a smaller percentage of a boss's total attacks (outside of bosses like Margit who are intended to train you to dodge them) because I like being surprised when they hit me. I feel like regular enemies should also get fewer of them. Overall, however, I'm happy that so many bosses have at least some form of them to keep me on my toes. I can see this being very difficult for new players though. Especially in a not-elden ring game where you can't just go somewhere else when you're having trouble with one area. I don't think FromSoftware has found the balance quite yet. But they're getting there. And I look forward to when they finally perfect it. And I'm sorry you didn't enjoy midra as much as others. Go back on another playthrough when you're awake and alert. Maybe try fighting him with a light roll setup. He's a blast.
The problem I see in your argument is that you talk ONLY about the mechanical layer of the combat. My main takeaway from the video was that delayed attacks make no sense from the perspective of the enemies not mechanicaly but from the in-game world logic. It makes no sense for the boss to open themselves up for a punish from the player just to throw you of with a delay. As it was shown in the video delayed attacks have been a thing since Demon's Souls and the author explained why they were well implemented back then. From that perspective Elden Ring having majority of the bosses use delayes should be obvious to anyone as a thoughtless attempt to increase the difficulty for the sake of difficulty and that also was explained in the video. I will be an asshole and say that If you want mechanicaly complex and demanding experience then play multiplayer fighting games or any competetive title against real humans, I guarantee you will find a lot more depth in there. The biggest strength of Souls games has never been the combat but their immersive quality and putting you in unique scenarios to overcome. If the "natural evolution" of Souls games is having every boss be a hyper agressive moveset exam than I'd rather play Devil May Cry.
@slei4676 delayed attacks used to keep the players in engaged in the fight let me explain. Games luke hogwarts legacy every attack is indicated by a visual effect it light yellow or red because of this I could realistically just stare at the top of my players head and beats the game only have to occasionally look at the opponents shield color. But with the souls born games you are forced to engage with the fights or you will lose. If they didn't use delay attacks you would eventually be able to panic roll your way to victory. The whole point of delayed attacks are to keep the players ingaged it's the whole reason the games does not let you pause. Once your in the game your in your ment to lock in. That's my take on it.
@@slei4676your opinion is absolutely nonsensical. things making sense according to the logic of reality in a fantasy game is an extremely stupid standard for a game to be good. it makes perfect sense for an enemy to throw out attacks with different timings so the player can't dodge at the same way for every attack. like, i don't know what to tell you. if you want to reject the concept of player versus enemy in video games, then that's fine, but then you don't have any ground to criticize pve games.
I feel that this discussion about delayed attacks misses a good question, what even is a delayed attack, a boss charging an attack? A boss using a stance of some kind? Or the attack being simply slower than the others?
@@La0bouchere holy shit a round of applause for this counterargument, if they wanted the player to die then a roll would not have s it would be impossible to lv vigor Here's an actually counterargument, delayed attacks allow the player to regain stamina and they punish react rolls so the player has to learn how to dodge instead just pressing the button, tldr delay attacks increase risk and reward which is engaging for a player that wants to learn
I don't think Souls-combat is very interesting at all but the atmosphere, visuals and the strange world you are thrown into more than make up for it. Combat against bosses in all the From-souls games has always been a pattern recognition game, where the pattern recognition can be mostly skipped by using a defensive build with a large shield, lotsa armour and a big slab of steel to pound enemies to dust with. The other way to skip all the learning, is to play a mage and blast things to bits from a distance before they get to show their stuff, of course. The way I see it, addition of delays and longer combos makes the game harder only for the "ninja" style, where you don't wear heavy armour and where you only use some little stick which hardly staggers anything. Thus having more things to recognise, makes "rolly-polly punish style" the most difficult way to go until you've learnt all they got to throw at you. At the same, the players that do decide to go for that style can always feel good about having actually learned the patterns. I figure this will never change. I think there's some stuff in the DLC that was made to combat mage tactics, very similar to rolly-pollying ninjas having to deal with delays; long-range charges that trigger when you go too far from the boss, etc. Even if you play a glass cannon that usually stays far away from danger, you need to atleast learn how to dodge the few longer range moves and then retreat to fire your gun again. Grabs were, of course, already in the game to punish shielders, but becuase those actually also punish everyone else, the shield-tank is still the easiest.
Yeah in truth Souls combat isn't very deep at all, which is weird that not only so much of the fanbase makes it such a big deal of it, but also Fromsoft these days lol. However I would say that the "ninja style" combat has become the optimal melee style of play since Bloodborne because of how little stamina it requires to roll now. In Demon's, DS1, and 2 even, rolling wasn't always the most reliable method of evading damage, and usually they didn't pretend that the combat was the game's greatest strength either, it put equal focus on loads of the other aspects of the game too, but because of how much emphasis they are putting on bosses and combat now, there's so much more to critique. I would love to just go back to the older style of game at this rate tbh
Delayed attacks can give you openings for quick hits with a fast weapon, or a moment to regen stamina in the middle of a long combo. I don't think it's right to call it a "design flaw." You can not prefer attacks in this style, but it's a preference. I find it boring when every attack can be intuitively rolled purely by reacting to the animation. I greatly prefer bosses that require you to really learn their movesets and master them.
Exactly. I liked the video, but his main point is that he personally doesn’t like it As you point out, there are reasons to like it I think they make sense too, and I enjoyed this new style. I also like how enemies more often have aggressive flurries that you have to respect I do think regular enemies being more intuitive and easier to deal with is a positive direction. But I also get that others probably think this would make it too boring (also have to consider all the challenge run folks who play the games for years)
I feel like DkS3 shows this well. Almost the whole game can be dodged intuitively, which seems like good design, however it can quickly become dull for experienced players. I already played tons of DkS1 when I played DkS3. As a result, I enjoyed DkS3 while playing it but I never replayed it nor was i felt it was very memorable. The only part that I remember well is the nameless king.
@@josephbornman8462 the "flurry" or combo hits almost all enemies do in elden ring are soo bad. The only way to deal with them is backing off, trying not to fall asleep, and then re-engage physically and mentally with the fight
Midra was honestly some of the best combat fluidity I’ve seen in Elden Ring. And Radahn didn’t really have too many. Regardless, “just for artificial difficulty” always confuses me. Yeah, you have to learn the move set of the boss, if having to learn patterns is artificial, most games are artificially difficult
Delayed attacks are a good thing and they mix up the flow of combat so it’s not just panic roll simulator. You are pretty much arguing that learning bosses is bad design philosophy
yeah I roll my eyes every time someone says a boss is bad because it took them multiple tries to learn as if that isn’t a good thing. Observing attack animations and committing them to memory has literally always been what Souls combat is about
My guy, just because Midra has delayed attacks doesn't make him a bad fight. I think your forgetting that even tho his attacks are delayed, they are similar to Mohg's in which they are all delayed slightly. That gives the fight a consistent tempo and rhythm. Also Midra's delays are extremely telegraphed, so much so you don't really need to guess on the timing unlike Margit or Godrick.
@@AA_AlegriaApenasblood flame talons delayed explosion. Blood boons 3 variants all have slightly different delays. His flying attacks delays that are telegraphed by him building moment(real talk tho bayles first phase flying stomp fails at doing this) He basically has a full half second pause before every swing as he builds momentum. Like literally go to 7:34 in the video bro the man himself says his shit is delayed.
@@GoulaLegamer Yeah I did. He was mad that Midra had delayed attacks. That wasn't his only point, he said how the overabundance of delays in er made Midra incredibly unenjoyable and stuff as well as other things but that's now what I wanted to focus on.
I adore the Midra fight, tho I get the point you're making. It's that if we can abuse a pattern of having a lot of delayed attacks, or that you have to wait solely to memorize the moveset, and thus not have a chance to beat the boss by sight reading, it leaves a worse and less immersive challenge. I however do think there are worse ways to make a boss difficult. Like how they did Radahn 2. Man has deceptive hitboxes, but worse, he has a pocket attack that can't ever be reacted to unless you hug his right leg. Which forces even less variety in playstyle and encourages cheesing moreso
it's when an enemy telegraphs a swing, so thinking you're prepared you DON'T panic roll, only for the actual swing to be so quick it's unreactable and you just need to memorise the timing anyway. At least Lady Maria had a small mody movement + sound in the moment before the attack so that an observant player knew when to dodge
Between the delay-spam and the physics-breaking tracking (you see a boss jump in a certain direction, your mind calculates a trajectory based on its speed, size, and probable weight on where it must end up... only to have it turn in the air to fall on your head in whichever way you moved after it left the ground.), it seems Elden Ring bosses are designed specifically to punish instinct and reaction, and favor memorisation. This makes them overall less _fun_ than previous FromSoft games, even if more challenging.
The problem is instinct reaction skill doesn't disappear between games, if it was just dark souls 3 again it would have been far too easy. Having to learn each new boss as they come due to their unique flow solves that problem Unless you wanted to be the cool guy who can beat elden ring easily just because you played the older games then I don't see a reason to dislike it
I was very surprised you didn't like Midra, especially since you mentioned Mohg as a good use of delayed attacks. My first thought when fighting Midra was Mohg, a lot of delayed attacks, to the point it was predictable and fun, had a rythm to it. I guess maybe you were just tired of the delayed attacks which I understand completely XD Great video
I've never played Demon's Souls, but from what I can see those faints really should be incorporated into more fights in souls games. It's so much better when an opponent actually tricks you with their movement whilst still keeping the fight dynamic, instead of awkwardly stopping in the middle of an attack. In Elden Ring, the amount of times you have to awkwardly do nothing when the opponent holds their weapon in the air is ridiculous. You can't roll without waiting or you'll get hit. You can't even attack, the boss will ignore it, hit you before you are able to roll, and trading is usually not worth it. In previous souls games you were able to intuitively figure out when to roll/parry an attack, even if it was your first time seeing it. In ER you pretty much have to get hit by an attack the first time you see it to figure out how long to wait before rolling.
The attacks in this game feel so unintuitive very often. It seems like they design the attacks around tricking the player at the cost of losing immersion
Love how the delays are slow enough to look like you can sneak a hit in but are fast enough to hit you before you can roll out of the recovery animation and you get hit for DARING to do something that isnt watch the boss do his super flashy anime combo till the end
two things I love about Elden Ring. Unlike every other Souls game, ER does really punish the spam/panic rollers. In ER, you can't just circle around big bosses and booty slapp them with ease. You have to actually learn the dodge timings on almost every single boss
Same! I love that Elden Ring stop what Dark Souls 3 did which was make it a reflex test on how good you can abuse s, in Elden Ring you have to jump attacks, crouch under attacks, blocking attacks since shields actually are good unlike in DS3, and parrying which isn't as OP as it was in Dark Souls 3. Elden Ring took all the combat issues I had with Dark Souls 3 and fixed them.
i would agree if there was more than 0,5 sec of opening to actually attack , we also have weapons that have combos but can't never use them because if u do more than one or two attack u get punished , so the best against boss is jump attack or charged heavy that deals heavy poise damage or bleed , bosses are cheating so u are forced to do so and in the end it can't fell more than annoying
@@GoulaLegamer That is only true if you fight the bosses the same way you would in other games and wait for them to finish what they are doing and just go into some idle animation. Most fights in ER you can get off tons of attacks, especially if you use a fast weapon. The openings just aren't as obvious, if you watch a sl1 run or something youj will see that
Elden Ring rewards memorization through repetitive exposure to unintuitive movesets. There is no real adaptation until you die, or use of reflexes other than recognition of an incoming move/combo or even a need for on-the-spot decision making for the majority of fights. Well, that's not entirely true. What will happen most of the time is you'll vigour through most attacks and out-damage the boss with a busted build or being grossly overlevelled for the area. But in both cases, the skill expression is minimal. Any godawful aging gamer can do this. Denigrate the 'circle around and booty slap' all you want, at the very least skilled people could beat difficult fights like Friede and Midir in very little tries because the moves were intuitive and they could adapt to them using a variety of skills they'd acquired. Meanwhile, those that needed to memorize everything died upwards of 50 times against these bosses. Now even the best are reduced to the common denominator of memorizing like a gifted student stuck in a terrible public school system that only rewards reciting the exact methodology give by the teacher. It's fine if you enjoy it, but I wouldn't use the term 'ease' for DS3 bosses. There was more than just spam rolling.
This has to be the laziest thing to complain about. It really just feels like you want to be able to panic roll everything and be fine. If you’re not that great at dodging every attack, just pick up a shield dude. They’re in the game for a reason🤦🏻♂️
Delayed attacks with different timings force you to not just instinctively or reaction roll making the boss not just 100 attack spam that comes out immediately
While I do agree on a whole, I think you misunderstood what made Pontiff so good and fair. His follow-ups aren't random, they're position based and almost guaranteed to come out whenever you're in a specific spot after a specific attack. This could seem somewhat unfair to the player as it looks like they're being locked out of an attack window, but it's not, *The Key is to Parry* Pontiff's opening move is a large, forward jump with a flaming greatsword, does that remind you of anyone? If you guessed Gwyn, you're correct! The attack is visually referencing that attack and trying to get you to parry Pontiff, there's also multiple attacks that ease you into parrying him such as the sidestep/reposition into greatsword swing, the greatsword swing after the thrust, and the greatsword 360 after the magic sword swing. Almost all of his attacks are parryable besides his slams, magic blasts, and his magic sword thrusts. Think of him like Gwyn on crack. TLDR; Pontiff is fair, try parrying him, you might like it! You're also misinterpreting DS2 as a whole near the end of your video, if you're not gonna play it and like it, that's fine, however I suggest you watch Domo3000's videos talking about DS2 as he points out why most of the criticisms are misguided or straight up uninformed.
@@ggnore546 that’s what literally all criticism for this dlc has been… somehow even challenge runners don’t want to learn bosses… like isn’t that your thing
on Rellana, you are not meant to dodge roll her. You certainly can and it's a rewarding experience, but she is designed to teach you how to use the deflecting hardtear, and her long combos are proof of this, as the deflecting hard tear scales with the more successful deflects you get. You only need 3 deflects to get the full buff, meaning you can screw up a few deflects and still get the full buff
I think it’s telling that the best boss in the DLC, Messmer, feels more like a DS3 fight than an ER fight. You actually get openings and time to breathe between attacks and after combos which makes the fight feel very dynamic, rather than having to dodge a long combo string to get one or two attacks off, on a boss with an outrageous health bar
0:54 that attack can be one of two attacks. If you're close then it'll be just the one swing, but if you're far away then it'll be two and he'll rush towards you. The delay gives me enough time to know which attack is coming based on the distance away. Malenia has the same thing.
You never explain why you think that delayed attacks are bad, you just say they are. Why do you think that? I like them quite a lot to be honest. It feels very rewarding to me to memorize the timing of rolls for a combo to be able to finally dodge it completely. Delayed attacks elevate those fights and make them more memorable in my opinion. A lot of those delays in Elden Ring are an opening to attack which creates a more interesting dynamic between the enemy and the player as well.
I am in my late 30s and i've been playing the Souls Series since 2012, day one of the Prepare to Die Edition. I still remember EpicNameBro (truly the best Dark/Demon's Souls creator of all time), saying that these games is not about ultra skill and reflexes but KNOWLEDGE. You have to know the Boss. Delayed attacks are fine. They promote you learning the moveset. What is NOT fine is 15 hit combos, (including delayed attacks, roll catches, AoE particles, deceptive range..... you name it) that barely leave an opening for a dagger attack and not really a flask usage, and if you get hit once you are as good as dead. Though, even if i don't like it, i recognise that these bosses were NOT designed for the average player to be played solo and dodge all the moves perfectly (this is reserved for the Elites, the Ongballs, the LetMeSolo her etc.). They were designed, so that the player could dodge ENOUGH, in order to survive with the help of the spirit summon. Spirit summons (which are an upgradable weapon and should not be viewed as NPC/player summons) were their way of introducing Classic RPG aspects (aka Baldour's gate, Icewind dale etc.) in the Souls formula. IMO it was not done particularly well. I have beaten all the bosses solo, even in NG+7, and it was not FUN. I always had fun in NG+7 in the Souls games, especially in DS1 and DS2. Come to think of it, DS3 is the time were i felt that the movesets were becoming frustrating, and it was not that fun in NG+7 as well.
Dude for my first playthrough I soloed the DLC with a poor weapon, I was so proud of it that I posted it on my channel. But if you watch it you can see I am NOWHERE NEAR as good as those guys! And Radahn took hundreds of tries. I can confirm that they are definitely designed with solo fights in mind. I could write essays about how to fight Messmer and Bayle. If it was just a "throw shit at the wall who cares, they have summons to take aggro" situation like you and others would have people believe, I wouldn't be able to do that and I would not have completed my run. Handwaving it off as "only top 1% challenge runners can do this, I don't need to feel bad about giving up" is just a way to cope instead of getting good. Funny how that gets used towards long time players now. Souls vets are not beating the allegations...
What delayed attacks do is test your anticipation resistance, and train away the trigger finger which has you move before thinking. The main thing I took away from most of ER's bosses is that they want you to actually think when fighting, so they're more complex and dynamic fights than just "press direction and dodge when I see non-walking motion". Fights are already heavily skewed in your favour, since you can press a single button and become completely invincible for quite a while. As ER's strongest mechanic, it needs some counterplay. Honestly, the video irritates me a lot, since conscious thought, thinking before acting (self-control) is the entire point of delays. It trains you to fight against instinct. Speaking meanly, the video was: "I don't want to put more effort into learning or fighting a boss. I want to be able to know how to dodge all the attacks on my very first try. It's okay later, since it's muscle memory by then, and it doesn't take more effort to pull off."
This is so insane I'm sorry. If you have to "think" in order to dodge an attack that is already in motion, you are simply playing a stupid timer puzzle that lazy developers forced upon you. Not a fighting game.
Anticipation resistance would be all well and good if the attack then didn’t come out a million times faster than you can react. It stops being a panic roll deterrent and instead becomes an annoying muscle memory test.
All of the bosses in froms other games have delayed attacks. People acting like ER is the only game that does this is ridiculous and acts like they haven't played any of the souls games. Maybe they haven't idk. It's literally nothing new.
@@mfspectacular it's not a bad thing at all. I think it adds a ton of variety to the fight and can make the pacing very fun. People just have a hard time dodging delayed attacks and then get mad at the game itself instead of properly learning the timing of when to dodge. It's ridiculous and it is crazy to act like ER is the only souls game that uses this mechanic.
@@Lordfarquad1415 No bosses in DS3 had these ridiculous delayed attacks that lasts for 2 whole seconds mid combo. That's simply verifiably false. The only super delayed attack I can remember from DS3 that would be an ER type of attack is the one Nameless King gets low into the ground, charging his Spear with Lightning then releasing it. Which is very reminiscent of Godfrey's "super moves".
@@Lordfarquad1415 And at what point does game design stops being "complex combo charts" and turns into an inconsistent RNG fest?? Bayle personifies this better than any other Boss. He's absolutely cancer for no hitting, cuz there's no rhyme or reason at all for when he finishes his combos or just keeps going. The one where he starts with either the left "hand" swipes or the bites can branch out to just one singular follow up or a 7/8 combo that if your RNG is bad enough you don't even get to punish cuz he simply jumps away and does the fire breath attack. How can anyone rationalize this being good design or "fun" LMAO This would all be fine if mid combo there was a slightly different attack to let you know how the combo is gonna end. Make it the second bite come in a different angle or something so we can know what the rest of the combo is gonna be... Literally anything at all. PS: Also, positioning has no effect AT ALL in these.
@@HopefulNihilist Lol you thought you solved an aspect of the moveset, it turned out to be wrong and you flipped the table instead of re-evaluating Bayle's retreat into firebreath is actually good when it happens, you chase him down and get a way longer opening in return while he's stuck doing the breath. But I agree if you can't manage catch up it's kind of cheap to be cheated out of an opening. Rellana does a similar thing where she backs off into a spellcast but that's also an opening if you just chase her down anyway. As for the combos having multiple RNG ways to go literally why is that bad? You want to guaranteed know the next 10 seconds of a boss's movements based purely on the first twitch of their muscles? No thanks... It's much more fun to at the first sign of movement be aware of all the possibilities and be ready for each one no matter how it shakes out. As for knowing when a combo will end, I have no problems with that on Bayle I'm not sure what you mean. Like he can double bite, or he can double bite into a rising headbutt. To avoid that, just wait a split second to see if he does the optional headbutt and attack him if he doesn't. I love the feeling of slowly whittling down the gaps in my knowledge of responses, I'm at the point now where I can respond decently to anything Bayle can throw at me and I could probably no hit it if I spent a couple hours. The only sus bit is the nuke attack where you have to just feel the timing of the AOE. I can do it but I end up getting in my own head about it and mess up the more times it happens
I personally never had an issue with the delayed attacks--I can see where other people might--but I never did. I just learned to dodge when they attacked rather than dodge when they started to attack. I ended up using the delays to get damage in or heal. Honestly, it'd say the delays make the game more easy with how often they allow me to finish off the boss when they should've killed me
I'm glad someone is finally bringing this up. All the way back during initial Elden Ring release, Margit's hold into an instant full speed and strength slam was always jarring to me coming from Dark Souls. Elden Ring threw the semi-realism in how bosses move completely out the window.
Once you cast off the ego-driven desire to be able to show off in the new game with your experiences in the older ones, it becomes much more fun Trust me I was the exact same way. I would always complain about elden ring's undynamic animations. But as my opinion on Elden Ring has changed I realise it's the opposite! While dark souls 3's actual hitboxes come out at more predictable intervals, the animation fluidity is so much worse! Having to learn each new boss instead of having skill carry across means you don't get to steamroll everything just because you played the older games. Which I suppose is a bad thing if you wanted to do that...
I didn't even notice that DS1/2 might have delayed attack because the problem for me since I tried anything from DS3 and above wasn't the one delayed attack. In DS1/2 if some enemies had alternative patterns to confuse you to roll early or too late, at least it was well telegraphed and it would be 1 delayed attack, separated from their other moveset which could be 3 regular combo attacks. The worst would be in the DS2 DLCs and those would still be managable. Like the fume knight will do the slower attack but sometimes surprise you with a finishing of a little thrust with his smaller sword. I also like in fume knight that much slower slow swing that is beautiful and you might roll at the exact time to avoid it and feels good. But when this happens you know it and it's separated from the other attacks. The problem since DS3 and beyond is that the mix of slow/mid/fast/grab/variations of small/big weapons and endless barage of combos, I don't know anymore and can't predict when to avoid what. Everything is so chaotic and mix together. It's not even the speed of the game or that one delayed attack that you can kinda know. It's that they are all mixed together. I am playing DS3 for the second time because I couldn't like the game first time. I came back from DS2 which is considered horrible thinking I will like DS3 more and I couldn't like it. Most times if I finish a boss I don't feel like I learned something, I feel like I somehow rolled at random times and survived or got hit many times I didn't want to and managed to heal without the boss punishing me (which is also random, you don't know when the compos and and you don't know if you run away if they punish you from distance or should you drink estus in front of those huge bosses?). Something in DS3 doesn't work for me. And the only reason I enjoy Elden Ring more at this moment is because if you explore the whole area around and finish the mini bosses in the caves and do all things and upgrade weapons and vigor and also use spirit asses, then suddenly Margit becomes extremely easy, like the first time I didn't do that and went directly I was like wtf I am playing this shit for 50 times and keep dying. The second playthrough were I overlevelled and got some high upgraded bleed weapon, I enter the arena terrified, I give him few hits and see some big chunks of health and also his hits took much less. Now the thing is, in ER too, I never felt like I learned the bosses. I never felt like I actually understand the attack patterns, it's so chaotic mixed with delayed and fast and after-compos (like you feel after 3-5 compos you have a window of opportunity, and he does a little thrust with his second weapon and be like where did that come from, I thought you finished?) that I only beat ER bosses because I over-leveled and used sprit asses, not because I actually learned the bosses. I have a breeze playing classic DS1/2 because now I can roll around boss attacks like a breeze, I feel like I've learned and mastered the enemy and boss attacks. In DS3 and above I feel bad even if I progress in the game, like I learned nothing.
I just don’t get your conclusion that “delayed attacks are the norm and you have to admit that is bad”. Why is that bad, it’s just different. It is harder and that was the design philosophy they approached this game with. It doesn’t support the same aggressive playstyle you liked from the original games, but that’s because it’s a different game. Just because something is changing doesn’t make it inherently bad. I do get your argument that sometimes they feel unnatural, but it really is just stylization, Messmer can jump in the air and float for ten seconds while he unleashes a barrage, it’s just cool fantasy stuff it’s not all meant to look real. I’m just not on board with the idea that having to spend a few attempts to learn what a boss is doing is cheap and bad, it’s just a different way to play than the old souls games where you could just react to everything. Even now, once you learn that the game is going to throw delayed attacks at you, you really can react to a lot of it, you learn to watch when the weapon moves towards you instead of watching the windup, it’s different but it’s just how the game works, it’s not inherently bad.
That's not what I said, I said they're the norm and you gotta admit they're overdone. Pretty sure I never used the word "bad" in the video either, at most "misguided" or stuff like that, because I understand this is still a subjective thought
@@BertoPlease I just don’t think they’re overdone, if we’re gonna be caught up on somantics then whatever. I still standby exactly what I said if you replace when I said bad with overdone. I just think it’s the norm now, it was a gimmick before and now it’s not, it’s how this game decided to be difficult. You might not like it but it is not objectively overdone like you are saying, it’s just the norm for this game
@@justifano7046 because I don’t see why delayed attacks are any different from normal attacks, they’re just how the enemy is attacking. Just because everything has it doesn’t mean it’s too much, it’s just how it is. I personally think delayed attacks add some much needed challenge and are a benefit as a whole
@@aaronmiller1009 so is elden ring the only difficult Fromsoft game to you? Because their other titles don't have this obnoxious and goofy looking mechanic yet are still considered challenging.
Idk there are some decent indicators of when to dodge these delayed attacks-- Margit for example, his phase 1 delayed attack which was featured in this video, can be dodged reliably if you know what to look for; his elbow on his sword arm will bend right before he attacks. This is where you dodge. It will always work. Same with Romina- her attack where she jumps up above you and slams down onto you, if you watch her closely, there’s a small sparkle that appears the moment before she attacks which again is when you dodge and you will almost always dodge it. Obviously, the boss AI can be troublesome and may even seem unfair with its adaptability (PROMISED CONSORT RADAHN CHAINING COMBOS TOGETHER THAT YOU HAVE PREVIOUSLY NEVER SEEN HIM DO BEFORE AFTER HOURS OF LEARNING HIS MOVESET) but of course this bs can be mitigated with enough damage, poise damage and knowledge to bait out easier to punish/ dodge attacks
Yeah man I agree 100% with you and I'll even add to it. Due to the over abundance of these ridiculous and oftentimes comic delayed attacks, the overagressiveness plus huge health bars and roll catching combos with little openings, I feel like playing this game has become a chore to me. Case in point, most people resort to greatshield and thrusting sword or spear to even finish the game, avoiding the entire mechanic of having to guess when to dodge and when to attack entirely. The cherry on top for me are the over the top anime style weapons and focus on weapon art spam. Between this and the boss designs I feel like FromSoftware games are not made for people like me anymore. They desecrated everything I loved about the Souls series. It's sad to say but I think I won't be playing their next title, unless they go back with alot of these designs, which I'm pretty sure they won't.
you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about the game mechanics, "lots of delayed attacks" and "little openings" can't be true at the same time, the delayed attacks ARE your openings. Someone else here said it best, in earlier souls series people learned to attack after the enemy attacks, if you play exactly like that in Elden Ring you will struggle because now you sometimes have to attack BEFORE the enemy attacks. I don't see that as a bad thing, just another thing you need to learn.
In Elden Ring 2 the first boss is a dog with instant hit 12 hit combos with no punish windows and delayed ones that start with the exact animation of the instant hitters but then wait until you panic roll or attack to punish you, dealing percentage damage equal to 200% of your hp and the leftover damage is subtracted from your rune level instead. The dog also heals instead of taking damage every time you hit it unless you found the super secret sword of blarney which can only be acquired by hitting a wall 200 times, speaking to the npc hidden behind it exactly 3 times and then reloading your game
You‘re right. Personally I still think Midra is a great boss because this delayed style fits his theme. Same with Pontiff but besides that you’re completely right. Also I absolutely despise Margit as a first boss. He’s way harder than most of the other earlygame bosses and his attacks aren’t fun to dodge. As you said, it teaches the players to just learn the timing instead of using reflexes. Gundyr, I miss you.
The one thing that genuinely gets me upset is when a boss runs at you, is currently at your location, and KEEPS RUNNING IN PLACE. Brother, you're already here, you don't need to keep running forward 😭😭
I think Asmongold said it best. From overdid the delayed attacks so much that it doesn’t feel like we’re facing off against the bosses anymore. We’re just facing off against the developers.
I'm not going to lie, Midra among all of the every other dlc bosses easily conquered my heart as my personal top tier souls boss fight i have ever experienced in every existing souls games i've been hoarding up, i'm not afraid to define it as an actual spectacular masterpiece of a battle under every single point of view. But even then, i gotta admit that this dude's definitely right, designing every single boss encounter to be as much aggressive as you can manage and as well making them do nothing but fill the battlefield with delayed attacks after delayed attacks, you'll inevitably end to strip them of their uniqueness as each other fight will literally feel as the exact same thing but with slightly different mechanics. No, the fact that Midra's moveset consists solely in delayed attacks doesn't bother me, i think that figuring out his timing and attack patterns is genuinely fun. But when all of the other bosses literally do the same thing as Midra does, then there's a fundamental issue with the new boss fight design philosophy From Software decided to adopt.
You're100% correct in saying that they only exist to make sure you don't first-try the bosses. That's it. They want you on twitter and reddit and other public forums talking about how many tries it took, so they take what might be an intuitive attack and give it unnatural timing so that it'll hit most players the first time. Once you learn the timings, they become just like any other attack. It's just that now, you have to spend more time memorizing the move sets. And the stronger your muscle memory from past games, the harder this is to do.
I get that they had to make these games harder somehow and I understand that conceptually there's a point in punishing instinct and rewarding repetitiveness and memorization, but some (if not most) of the delayed attack animations in Elden Ring have this "gotcha" thing to them which is honestly kinda irritating.
Godrick holds his attacks even longer than Margit he just has more distinct animations. The delayed attack style does make phase 2 of Morgott's fight where he swings a lot faster and more fluidly. Also Melania deserves an honorable mention since she can legit actually animation cancel her combos to suddenly switch to another one. It's not delayed but the suddenness makes it feel kind of similar. Switching to watching a boss's swinging arm works a lot better. It's easy to reaction roll based off the arm movement for delayed attacks.
While I don’t have problems with delayed attacks mechanically, as a story, some can be really immersion breaking. You have Mohg, clear and natural delayed attacks based on the weapon he wields. And then you have Margit, holding his cane for an unnatural time in the air because mechanics go first in the battle, rather then the logic and lore behind his powers. And many others, like Godfrey and Radagon. This breaks the roleplay that this a living world with characters and stakes, and just turns into a game with A.I built to fight especially against you.
Like normal radhan (that is mistyped idc) you see his bs delays and you think oh OK it's a slow boss, that's neat, and then bro hits you 70 times in 5 seconds
Delayed attacks used to be a rare thing to catch you off guard. Now it's the norm and everyone does it for everything. I wouldn't be shocked if for ER2 every enemy and boss has 12 hit combos, always aggressive, AoE on every hit, perfect tracking on every hit so on so forth. And they'll probably kill you in two to three hits and be even bigger health sponges. Cuz it's gotta be harder right? If it's not harder than consort Radahn then it's not following the evolution that fromsoft has always done. Delay ring 2 with super drawn out but also fast combos for nearly a minute are the future logically, and I hate that...
It's interesting to me to see Midra brought forward as a prime example, because of all the bosses in Elden Ring he was one which I found rather intuitive to learn most of the attacks on. Compared to most bosses with delayed attacks (even Mohg) his attacks are a lot less snappy when they go off and after the wind-up/delay there's still a sweeping motion to most of them that comes before the actual swing. The main problem I had with Midra is the same problem I have with most of Elden Ring's later bosses (Mohg being a solid exception) in that they move too fast. Like literally I feel like for so many bosses and some elite enemies they'd feel completely fair and even look more natural if they were at 90-70% speed for their animations. The fact that when you die it's uncommon for the enemy to pull off less than 2 more attacks before you finish dying speaks for itself.
I can't say I agree. With DS3 making rolls so free, the enemies adapted to that trend by being more flaily, longer combos and more precise tracking to hit you with but I think you could get away with so much by just panic rolling, it wasn't enough. DS3 is the game that made shields feel irrelevant, the game where you rolled, it's the game that made sure everyone understood that even the older games were easier if you rolled than if you blocked, it just wasn't as obvious before. They could have reverted to making dodges worse in some ways (limit i-frames à la DS2, limit the directions when locked on à la DeS/DS, drastically increase the damage of a failed dodge à la Bloodborne) but instead from soft left them in the same state as DS3 and instead tailored the enemies to force reactions out of you. I think it fits the basics of the games pretty well. And makes shields more valuable again. They were never games were you were meant to be aggressive, they were reactive games where enemies dictate the pace of the fights. I'd argue Elden Ring is the one out of them all that rewards aggressivity the most through stance-breaking. It's surprising how often you can bring enemies to their knees when you sneak in a rolling attack in some of their delayed attacks. Midra is used as an example of a fight solely made of delayed attacks (should this be better than bosses that mix-up fast and slow attacks, given what was said prior in the video ?) who can be absolutely destroyed by being aggressive due to how fast he breaks. Hell, I can add to the "use a shield, it's good for your bones" argument that guard counters make shields genuinely great tools to play aggressively with. Seriously tho. I know it's damn-near a meme for FS fan to just use "use the tools instead of complaining !" but just use a shield. Just a medium one. It's just training wheel for the timing since blocking is still worse than dodging because the stamina drain can be intense -- unless you use the deflecting tear or stack up every possible buff to your blocking, which again, I know using the tools doesn't magically solve the issue of the attack timing feeling wrong but that's so many options to mitigate the perceived problem. There's also been a clear shift in the boss design philosophy coupled with the level design. The challenge used to be : can you reach the boss with enough healing left after running through the level to erach it ? But now the checkpoitns are right next to the bosses. They just shifted the difficulty from one spot to the next. The downside is that checkpoint and shortcut placement felt far more meaningful than it does in Elden Ring, yet even with that nugget of appreciation I cannot say I ever liked running back to a boss. It bored me. But struggling against a boss ? If I'm having fun learning the moves (which I don't always, waterfowl can suck my dong), I'll gladly take it. It's subjective what is fun and not obviously, but from my perspective, I don't think delayed attacks and their frequency is a flaw. I think it's a good balancing act to mitigate how good they made dodges. I don't disagree with everything otherwise, I do agree that the bosses have a mold now, especially in the DLC where there isn't a single more creative fight that asks for something novel except maybe the Lamenter ? Whose gimmicks I still don't understand at all... I wish there were more creative fights, fights that require you to think a little more and rely less on the typical "learn the moves then punish !" formula.
Honestly Elden Ring fixed so many of the issues with Dark Souls 3 where the roll button was the only way to play and almost every boss fight was about abusing s. Elden Ring mixes up the combat but including jumps and crouching and making shields actually good with gaurd counters
@@JellyJman I mean, almost nothing changed. Jumping has i-frames and dodge is still great. Plus shield playstyle has always been i thing. When you "jump" an attack, its just your entire lower body being invincible.
@@sweetbabyrayso5262 shield playstyle was not a thing in Dark Souls 3. The only two shields in that game are shields you get near the very end of the game. Black Knight Shield and Lothric Knight Shield, the rest suck so much and can easily be gaurd broken
@@sweetbabyrayso5262that's a very "person who doesn't play the game saw a video about jumping s" take. It's not incorrect, but it's not as simple as what you make it out to be. And it did change a lot. From who you're encouraged to use more than R1, mild side-strafe, and roll to dodge every single thing with no thought. No good positioning, no adapting. ER doesn't encourage that so when you're finally asked to play a videogame, you claim it's a "flaw."
@@sweetbabyrayso5262 Disagree i played ds3 right after elden ring dlc and i only used r1 and i just beat every boss doing that exactly r1 spam. On elden ring you got wayy more mixups for attacks and how you think of it. The game isn't ds3 or DES or bloodborne its elden ring. You can not like it or like it but its different then those games the whole game has lots of delayed attacks since the beginning of base game.
Your video made it really clear to me that delayed attacks are not the problem. I observed your fight against Midra and I have to say... I think I would call him out for only two attacks with delay. The first is the jumping attack when he bums the sword into the ground, the second when is the last hit of his 5 hit combo. In general I think Midra just has slowerish moves. Now we compared this to a boss with no delayed attacks. Or lets just say Midra has a little faster moveset in general. Would I like the boss without delayes attacks more? Would I like the second version of Midra more? My answer is no. I don't think delayed attacks are a problem at all. I just think that Fromsoft became "better" with their boss design. The bosses have more advanced moves than before and also more delayed once. And yes, some bosses might have more delayed attacks than other onces. Still, I don't think it is bad. Some delayed attacks might be really stupid yes. But this doesn't get the game down for me. Changing the boss design from what it is to the average reaction based boss design would not make a better boss.
![Marika's Ascension was NOT legitimate; AND IT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING [Elden Ring Lore]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Uo7Froo5xS8/mqdefault.jpg)
MORE LIKE MID-RA AMIRITE 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
can u tell i couldnt think of what to put for the pinned comment
fuck you he's good
Midra is goated
It's true lol it's just some guy with sun for a head coming at you with a sword........ The creepy build up to him was okay... A bit slow but fine... But the fight itself is pretty meh and soooo not worth the effort to get to again lolz. Didn't go to him again in my 2nd dlc run for a reason... It just wasn't THAT worth it...
I wanted to love this boss so bad but I have to say, the game really let me down in terms of maintaining my engagement and interest. Only so many cheap unearned deaths I can take before I find something more rewarding to do with my time
bro how do you talk about delayed attacks and forget HORA LOUAX
In the next Souls game, the first boss will follow you around the arena with their weapon raised for five minutes, then the fog wall will dissipate. You will continue through the rest of the game with the boss trailing behind you
Sounds like a fun modded challenge run ngl
Like the Pursuer in Dark Souls 2, but worse.
and then when you killed the last boss the boss that trailed you will attack and one shot you making the win in the extremely hard final boss not count.
Sounds ok
@@heideknight7782
Better comparison would be the forlorn because the pursuer encounters are scripted and guaranteed every time whereas the forlorn can invade randomly in dozen or so different places.
"Imagine trying to fight a thrusting attack boss with delayed and non delayed attacks"
Godskin Noble- "You called?"
🤣
The easiest boss in the game you mean? Took 2 tries
@@Astreon123always depends on what point in the game you are when you get to a boss. If you try to rush the volcano manor godskin noble for the somber stone +7, it can be really frustrating to be one shot by his super delayed mega thrust move.
@@martinvraniskoski7379 i went it at 153 with a bloodhounds fang blackflame blade build
@@Astreon123thats not the point the point is that its a design flaw which makes the boss harder and more awkward to read in a really cheap way difficulty is completly besides the point
Part of the issue is that you have to visually justify the delay. Mohg for example has a certain weighty flow to him. Whereas Horah Loux sill leap at you and literally go into slow-mo mid air. The first time I saw this attack I started laughing.
Omg yes, THIS. I really have no issues with delayed attacks but this one I fuckinf hate. Not because it's difficult but because it's so goddamn dumb. While they're at it should've given us time to have a flashback and power boost
@@thecatinthehatwithabat9903 It is dumb. It is there only to kill you. There is nothing about what you're seeing that suggests "oh maybe I should delay my dodge". Its why a lot of these fights feel tedious because none of it is reactionary its just a checklist of moves to memorize individual timings.
@@thecatinthehatwithabat9903 Perfect example of a dumb looking attack that is only there to fuck with those who played prior souls games.
I have honestly never understood the complaints with this attack. It looks cool and it's just fun to dodge. It also successfully conveys the feeling of having a fast hulking man rapidly closing in on you without it feeling unfair or cheap.
@@calebfouts7118 A fast hulking man that freezes in midair. There are more logical and intuitive ways to have a delayed attack that doesnt require the player to have to go against every instinct a break the flow to the fight. Instead of attacks being reactionary they become a checklist of attacks that you have to memorize and then internalize thw different timings of each. Mohg and Midra do it better imo because there's a more consistent flow and line of logic to their movements. When that particular attack is there ONLY to trick you. Tricking the player as a mode of difficulty isnt my favorite. Its still an overwhelmingly cool fight but they could have gotten the desired result in a less annoying way like aforementioned bosses
I like the idea of having delays sprinkled in, because they should realistically be used by enemies to catch you off guard. But having almost every attack be delayed makes no sense from a combat perspective for most enemies. Why would you leave yourself wide open expecting your enemy to dodge when there's no reason to expect them not to just attack you? And if the plan is just to hit trade because you're stronger, then why bother delaying at all?
Because haha made you roll. Wait, you can't run a giga hammer build bro that's not fair.
Ye, it feels like playing against a game rather than fighting the boss. Just feels artificial and boring.
"Why would you leave yourself wide open expecting your enemy to dodge when there's no reason to expect them not to just attack you?" Uh, because it is an AI attack based pattern designed for you to observe and understand, not another human player.
You definitely do not want enemies to be mixing you up as if it were a human, thinking how to trick you by using delayed attacks sometimes and sometimes not. You think you're annoyed by attacks always being delayed, now just think of how much more you would complain if you could never truly adjust to the attack because the boss suddenly decided to let the attack rip instead of holding it. Fighting games are niche because this level of dedication to beating a thinking opponent takes significantly more focus and effort. You'd immediately alienate a majority of the players if bosses functioned this way.
@@Tjerty It would also make bosses actually interesting to fight and not just boring 1 trick ponies. Games are generally better when they don't try to cater to everyone.
@@102ndsmirnov7 I'm certain your takeaway from elden ring wasn't "oh god all these bosses are just 1 trick ponies". You and I both know they aren't. You just felt compelled to respond.
I have no problems with delayed attacks per se, as long as they make sense. Mohgs bloodflame explosions never bothered me because I figured that that's just how all those attacks work and they are a type of magic. But I always found it extremely ridiculous with how long Margit holds his cane because no serious combatant would ever fight like that. That is also why Midra was fine for me, since it suits his style - he gracefully swings his swords like some sort of dance and thus delays almost every attack all while being a lord of frenzied flame rather than a knight that you duel.
I know that this is no reliable metric, but for me personally it needs to be in line with what the enemy is and if it suits him, the weapon swung, etc. but as soon as I get the feeling that it's just a game mechanic meant to punish you, I'm lost.
My guess is that Margit underestimates the tarnished on first meeting them, which seems right since when we get em to his midphase he be saying "Thou art of passing skill" and seems to do less of the delayed attacks and more rush down oriented moves. But I just thought of this, so I could be wrong but that is the impression I always got. Then when we fight morgot he goes all out to kill us.
So yeahh a normal fighter wouldn't delay their attacks in actual combat, but this is a demigod fighting a lowly tarnished that he thinks is of no skill whatsoever so why not play with your food and slap them around a bit
@@05-Overseer Even for something "playing with its food" it's a long ass time but yeah, as mentioned, it's subjective.
@@Shishakind86 well in my eyes it's like in his head, "Sure hit me as much as you want weak tarnished, watch me hit you 10x harder" kinda deal but I dunno maybe I'm seeing stuff that isn't there. But I don't think Morgot out of the gate would take the tarnished any bit serious, he's probably killed countless tarnished out of there league trying to become a lord.
No serious combatant would ever shift to a high guard waiting for the right moment to strike ?
Pretty sure that's a classic stance in many martial arts
Jumping in the air and staying mid air for 3 seconds is RIDICULOUS
So is summersaulting and having things go through you.
Dodging too early for a delayed attack isn't "panic rolling". It's instinctive rolling. There's a difference. Panic rolling is when you're rolling randomly out of panic without intention or deliberate timing. Instinctive rolling is when you think the attack will hit before it actually hits based on the animation. I understand when the devs try to punish panic rolling, because it makes sense, they want you to time your rolls, but when they punish instinctive rolling that's what gets me the most. I absolutely hate that shit. They artificially delay the actual landing of the hit.
And like mentioned before some enemies can have delayed attacks but if most enemies have them, they start to feel artificial aka like a video game, same problem arises how grace checkpoints are placed and how vast majority of the game has reused content.
I think that’s probably why I dislike Elden Ring’s combat so much. In the previous games (including Sekiro) you could get away with just having decent reactions and instincts based on visual cues and still have a pretty easy to moderately difficult time with the games. Sure, you would have it easier if you did memorize combos and patterns but that just is not fun to me whatsoever. That is not what I enjoy when playing a game. And you don’t have to.
In Elden Ring it IS mandatory unless you go in to a fight very over leveled. Most bosses no longer work on instinct, they all try to fool you… wow so difficult that you held your attack for 7 seconds before instantly striking me. Oh how much fun I’m having…
I really wish they would ditch this design philosophy because however much people always used to claim that you “have to learn the bosses attack patterns” it really wasn’t an obligation until Elden Ring. In Elden Ring if you don’t, you’re cooked
Yeah that's why I put in "panic rolls" in quotes the first time lol, it's a "lack of a better term" kind of situation. Wholeheartedly agreed
No. Panic rolling is when you see the boss start to move and incorrectly time your dodge to get hit. It occurs because you dont actually know the moveset of the boss, youre attempting to just roll off of reaction to movement. Youre panicking. Instead of waiting for the actual attack, you "instinctually' make the wrong fucking move 😂. What a joke of a video and even more laughable comment section.
Theres no fucking way you said they artificially delay the landing of the hit. Man, sometimes i wish elden ring wasnt as popular as it is so these skyrim ass players can go back to where they feel strong, in games made for 12 year olds.
Honestly I thought the way Midra and Bayle did delay attacks was pretty engaging, fair and added a lot to the rythm of the fight. Both fights are in my top 10 most enjoyable souls bosses.
Idk..visually I couldn't figure midrange out and dodge everything...also w
too Worried about cheap magic damage too..from's design is offy
Midra and Mohg are bosses I'd call the "Nameless King of Elden Ring". All 3 bosses play similarly in the way that their attacks and combos are defined by delayed attacks and specifically designed to roll-catch you. They're not like Margit who can purposefully drag out his attack super long and have a fixed interval
Forget the terrible looking delayed attacks why is every boss fight in a square boring looking areana i mean whats the story with this guy being in here? God from soft have gotten lazy
@@_CrimsonBladesimplistic or square boss rooms are the most fair for the player to fight in. Having complex terrain and elevation can make dodges and attacks feel more inconsistent, as seen in Consort Radahn’s fight (some moves are undodgable depending on the terrain)
@@Mo167ose fair my arse when have these games ever been fair? gtfo just another excuse
The delayed attacks also suck because the vast majority of them have 360 degree tracking, making poisitional dodging irrelevant.
Yeah screw that tracking unironically. Positioning is very important in combat and now it just feels like fights are quick time events where you press your invincibility button at the right moment.
Many attacks tho you can dodge by just walking or running around to the enemy's back
A lot of these moves have good tracking so that they're not all invalidated by just mindlessly strafing to the right or left, but most of them can still be dodged positionally by running. And some of these can just be dodged by walk-strafing.
The only delayed attack I have am issue with is Horaux Loux's bullshit dash grab where he suddenl6 fucking freezes mid air without any explanation
Warrrriorrrrrrrrr!
He's anime like that xD
His dash grab isn't that bad in all honesty, the only incredibly weird attack in the main game is radagon's double swing, which looks like it could easily be rolled back to back but actually has the slightest delay to it
They aren't delayed, though. Godfrey and Hoarah Loux are my favorite and. iMO, the best bosses in the game because they have a distinct tempo to their fight. They always move to the rhythm of their soundtracks, and it makes predicting their attacks better.
Lol horrible lou drags the player along in a slap fight haha
combat feels exhausting sometimes because of all those delayed slow motion ahhh attacks
I wouldn't include Midra. When you complain about delayed attacks, it's important to take into consideration the most important quality that can make or break said attack: animation legibility. Midra's attacks are very well animated from his weird cape/cloth thing to his actual sword swing, you can absolutely dodge his attacks on reaction just by paying attention to the animation. That's not the case for every boss, Margit/Morgott's overhead swing is infamous because....there's not much distinguishing animation work to telegraph when the swing will occur. That's not the case for Midra. In fact, I'd say Midra is an example of a well done delayed attack boss. All his physical sword attacks are delayed, but his frenzy AOE attacks can be quick and erratic. It's actually a good way to clue you in on how to deal with the boss pretty quickly. I'd say I had much more pleasant time learning Midra than Consort Radahn for example. The other factor that makes delayed attacks obnoxious is tracking. Consort Radahn tracks excessively, his cross slash attack can turn him on a dime, which makes the delayed aspect worse.
So all in all, I'd say delayed attacks by themselves are not a problem. They're a problem when animation legibility isn't good and attack tracking is overtuned. Which surprise surprise, is the main issue with Dark Souls 2. It's also why I give Dark Souls 3 a pass most of the time, the animation quality in that game is very good. Gael phase 2 is another example of a boss with entirely delayed attacks on top of another layer of delays, but he's amazing because of the animation work.
Also you seem kinda salty over the fact that he's the only frenzy related content...which yeah sure I guess that's fair. It's not really enough for me to ding the boss quality. If we're talking about narrative dissatisfaction, Consort Radahn is worse in almost every regard.
also final edit...the deflection tear more or less dumpsters delay based attacks. Did you play Sekiro? It's waaaaaaaaaay more intense with the delays than Elden Ring.
One thing to remember, whoever, is that Sekiro's perfect block combat and Dark Souls' dodge-roll combat are fundamentally the opposites of each other.
In Dark Souls, e.g. Elden Ring, you see an attack's wind-up, you roll. You may roll early, but you can never roll late. Your I-frames are simply not instant.
In Sekiro, though, no matter what attack is thrown at you, unless it is a special Kanji attack, you always wait for the last moment, before enemy's hitbox collides with you to the perfect block and deflect it.
TLDR, in Elden Ring you react to an attack before it happens, in Sekiro you react to an attack, the moment it hits you.
@@israfel916yes that’s why you use the correct tool for the correct problem.
I personally was not satisfied by PCR and rellana mechanically, but Bayle, Gaius, Midra, and Messmer(in that order) are some of my favorite fights in the game for how they allow you to win by just rolling, but become the dance that Souls and Bloodborne used to give you when you learn where to mix in jump attacks over low sweeps, crouching under high sweeps, guard counters at the end of combos, and throwables to maintain stance damage. I absolutely agree that the combo structures need more polishing for the next game, but I think From’s biggest issue is poor communication on how to apply the tools at your disposal and poorer incentives to try new things.
@@israfel916 your s are instant on an elden ring roll from when you release the dodge button
also sekiro parries are much more forgiving with early inputs than an elden ring roll if ur not spamming block
both points wrong + you type like a bot + L + ratio
@@gevurah6 It has been proven by several people on RUclips that the Elden Ring dodge animation has a significant input delay.
@@ETBrooD this is due to hardware/driver issues or controller input lag (differs by indivdual consoles). if you have this delay it will apply to all inputs in many games
u can prove me wrong if u want but of the 3 vids i watched none of them had a fair test of other inputs to compare
even as a fan of delayed attacks, and a massive fan of midra, you're completely right how overused delayed attacks are in elden ring, sure they've made me stop panic rolling as much, but every fight feels like a game of timing and it all blends together, in dark souls 3 I find I can reaction roll on almost every boss and get away with it, and the delayed attacks are a good mix-up that keep me on my toes, in elden ring however that reaction roll feeling is gone, which is a shame because it feels like I go into every boss on a blank slate and I don't actually get better at the game, just that one specific boss.
You can tell their goal is to stop souls vets from transferring their skill from prior games, or even within the game game, to new challenges. You're right. It never feels like you got better at the game. Past souls game rewarded you for mastering the fundamentals of combat. ER? Not so much.
@@enigmatic8280can't you argue that er rewards yors abilities of finding punishing windows, by transferring your experience from past bosses to new. Founding, jump in, crouching, high low stances, positioning. Founding when you can land r1, test if in that window r2 fit, then charge r2 or skill . Of course this gonna need some testing, some time lucky observation. Clearly higher skill level players have easier time fighting new bosses than people who less knowledgeable about er mechanics. P.s. I'm not good at this games, I'm just confused by statement
What a baffling incorrect comment. In DS3 the fact that you just reaction roll and hell, spam, everything is fucking dogshit. It rewards nothing. Any boss in ER has a more interesting moveset to learn, and most attacks have at least two ways of dodging, not wven considering the inclusion of the Deflect Year now. @@enigmatic8280
Sure dude, the game that is just reaction rolling and mildly side-strafing 95% of bosses doesn't blend together, but the one that asks you to pay attention does. Very insightful and not stupid claim.
@@AlexAndriy1995 yes elden ring rewards finding punishing windows. However, you cannot transfer experience from fighting one boss to another unless they are literally the same boss or have basically indistinguishable movesets. When you can land an r1 or r2 is entirely different for everyboss. For example, learning the fire giants timing has no impact on whether you can learn radagons timings. Each boss fight is different because each boss has different recovery timings, hitboxes, posture values, dmg,etc.
Delayed attack look so weird and unnatural it make sense for bosses like midra and fire giant but for all the bosses is a bit excessive
Since dark souls 3 the games became like a "guitar hero" of rolling. For someone who plays this games again and again and again, it helps to don't make them feel boring from one playtrough to another, i have to adjust my timing, it makes me think, and that is entertaining for me.
Pretty much, delayed attacks exists because without them it becomes way to easy to just see a boss twitch and Iframe, now you have to fully take in the move. Delayed attacks are still very reactable.
@@boredomkiller99 I used to be on the hater side so I can tell you its all just cope
If elden ring was just dark souls 3 again where once you get a feel for general dodge timings you can beat all bosses in a couple attempts it would have been way too easy
I used to say "In elden ring it feels like you're not getting better at the game, but better at that one singular boss" as a negative, but now I see how varied and interesting the movesets are that switched to a positive
Yeah first time playing this game and fighting Margit when he does that ridiculous overhead attack and holds it for like 5 minutes, it told me that we were in for a rough ride with boss design and that they were doing everything they could to trip up us experienced players.
There are so many cheap tricks in the game.
How is it cheap tho? Its a huge opening. maybe i see it differently because Eldin ring was my first soulsborne.
Don't play like ds3 waiting for your turn. Play aggressive and punish those slow ass 5 minute delayed attack
If youre having trouble with margit you just suck. Hes an introductory boss designed to be beaten by everyone and a joke after your first playthrough. You suck. Thats all.
@@rizuki9983 how exactly are you supposed to play aggressively when 90% of time you just roll around trying to avoid bosses combo?
@@kindlingking You can be more aggressive by attacking in between combo. The bosses have long combos but they also have slow attacks or delayed attacks that you can utilize as opening.
For example I'd recommend you watching pro players like Ongbal or Ginomachino. Those players manage to play more aggressive by utilizing opening in between combo.
i think the majority of people just have more fun fighting a boss when they can use their reaction time to their advantage and maybe get a first try victory instead of going into every boss fight and feeling like they have to study for the boss exams
"just use mimic/spells/cheese/that one specific weapon that you probably aren't even built for"
then they can play ds 1 2 or 3. Which all take far less knowledge of the bosses to beat. Or just use any of the broken items in the game if you don't want to have to learn it.
“I want to beat everything first try and not have to learn the bosses, one of the basic principles of the genre”
Damn, imagine asking Fromsoft do the opposite of what made them get to this point specifically.
@@Zayd-bg1pt let me guess you either abuse mimic or some other broken AOW
I like when ppl say delayed attacks are not realistic while rolling on heavy armor or dual wielding 2 giant hammers
Ok. It's bullshit.
"Muh realism"
I am playing a game. The enemies are fighting me in this game. When the enemies are not so much fighting me as they are playing the game with these awkward pauses after readying attacks, it just feels gimmicky and inauthentic. Just beat my ass ffs.
Two years into the game's release and people still haven't learned the one lesson Margit was supposed to teach you: "delayed" attacks are openings. It's actually pretty crazy that so many people still haven't recognised this. And if even if you don't go for the opening they are windows for stamina regen so you can keep being aggressive without backing off to neutral. Margit has that extremely delayed staff raise attack to show you that these "delayed" attacks are openings and sometimes it is better to strafe than to roll. If you just circle to the right the attack will completely miss you and it's an opening for a charged heavy. The reason it's so delayed is to give the player plenty of time to realise that maybe rolling over and over again is not the solution (although it seems that even two years is not enough for some people). Later bosses will have similar moves but the windows for strafing and punishing (and thus the length of the "delay") are much smaller. Rellana in the DLC for example has a number of somewhat "delayed" moves which can be avoided by simply strafing. You could have said this if you were actually interested in analysing the purpose delayed attacks played in Elden Ring's combat, which would actually be helpful to people who haven't got it and might help people enjoy the game more, but instead, like most of the people whining about Elden Ring, you are just venting uninformed frustration under the guise of analysis, with little interest in understanding, improving, or enjoying something new. The general reaction to the DLC (which actually has substantially fewer "delayed" attacks than the base game) has really solidified my belief that some people have no interest in learning to have fun with new systems and would instead rather vent their frustrations to each other wishing Fromsoft just remade DS3 forever.
You know i was replaying trough elden ring again after beating it a few months ago and got to margit and started to get frustrated again at the delayed attacks, but you actually make a good point on why they are delayed, it makes sense, the devs probabbly wanted player to just stop spamming the roll button and mix up the gameplay.
Still what do you think about how fast the bosses go from attack to attack? it sometimes feels like there is no room for attack.
Too bad ER bosses almost never stagger, even with "colossal swords", so attacking twice will get you hit and attacking once is just risking 70% of your life to take 1% of theirs.
@@metalema6you just need to figure out the optimal way to punish the openings you are given based on your weapons moveset, while still being safe. If your punish takes too long and you get hit, try something a bit quicker.
If you want to stagger bosses, the most important thing is upkeeping the poise damage. Every boss has a certain timer, after which the poise damage gets reset. This timer is reset every time you hit the boss. So to stagger a boss, keep hitting as frequently as possible, preferably with jumping or charged attacks. If an attack takes too long or the boss creates some distance, you can use any ranged attack to keep the poise damage from resetting.
@@metalema6 huh? Theyre 2nd to great hammers & most collosals when it comes to stance breaking, + against bosses like malenia you *always* stagger her, bullying her like she's a ds1 boss even.If youre gonna complain about ugs, complain about the same-y movesets & *inconsistent* staggers. Can think of a few dlc enemies that just ignore attacks unless it's a crouch poke, like the curseblade enemies. Oh & sht like the ruins' & watchdogs not being strike weapons.
I love stagger locking enemies like it's ds1 too dude, but thatd be really boring. You can cram *safe* jumping r2s & even charged heavies against alot of the dlc bosses if you adapt well enough man. Theyre fine, just bland
@@GetUrFunnyUp margit's also the most complex boss when it comes to him reacting to your position vs him. That stormveil fight can go so many different ways on repeat playthrus, just based on how/where you attack & dodge. Goes for basically all the rememberencd level bosses. I wouldnt try it on margit with how complex he is, but other bosses can be easily "read" or bait rather, into certain attacks/combos. My 1st playthru i got plasidusax stuck in his initial lightning spam just by circling him, greatbow only. He never teleported, even after stance breaking him
15:12 so many bosses have second phases that they’ll need to start adding third phases to make it special
Although I barely noticed it the Scadutree Sunflower has 3 phases.😅
They have created the problem themselves by making the combat more agressive.
Dark Souls and Demon Souls had a much slower and punishing combat, but DS3/BB/ER are noticeably faster and with way less recovery frames, so naturally it's much easier to be agressive and doge bosses, hence FS has to come up with something new to make enemies hard again.
P.S.: In DS1 you'd get even more recovery frames if you wiff with certain weapons. DS2 had the best combat pacing imo.
Delays are a bad thing, but the fights get horrible when the delays are accompanied by the bosses dealing insane amounts of damage, constantly attacking (with combos too) without letting you do anything, and also having huge health bars. I don't feel like I'm fighting a boss that I could imagine being "real", I just feel like I'm fighting against an unfair bot.
Can we talk about the massive flashing aoe and gigantic lingering hitboxes
I hate how the delayed attacks read your rolls in an attempt to try and stop you. It genuinely feels like they made the enemies try their absolute hardest to kill you and trip you up without making it straight up impossible
I want to have a go at trying to explain the real issue in combination with highlighting some of your observations Berto. A good fight is usually attributed to ones that have a good rhythm to it. Such as when you dodge, you can feel the right timing for when the next dodge is going to be without even looking (after you've experienced the combo's). Kind of like Sekiro. These feel fun and fluid and you know your windows to punish or heal.
When combo's are being chained it's more difficult but aslong as you recognise them it's fun to dodge through and around.
These delayed attacks become absolute absurdity when say for example Melenia while she's floating in the air waiting to water fowl you, she has extremely tight tracking on you the whole time so in a really stupidly physically impossible way, she just rotates around to keep her facing you exactly where you are at all times. She just spins on a dime.
This happens with a lot of bosses, it's not just the extremely unrealistically long wind up time, but it's that they also just turn around as if air doesn't exist causing them any drag whatsoever. They just spin on a dime and likely 1 shot you with an attack that looks like there was no power behind it because it took so long to come out.
And you mentioned the regular enemies, holy crap don't get me started on those messemer soldiers, the axe wielding ones. I mean wtf is that attack? They stomp, then slow-mo swing at you while running, fully leaning forward like they're gonna fall flat on their faces, and swing again to roll catch you. It's designed as an egregious 1 shot.
Then there's the dog-head imps with the staff. That thing just chases you holding the staff in the air and they'll chase you for ages before they decide to swing down on you. They also spin on a dime if you run around them because of their physically impossible tracking.
Ishin is the best from boss of all time. Hard af. Takes several tries and each time you feel closer to besting him. He demands the player use all of the main things that needed to be learned to get to this point. It's sooo good. Legendary even. COME SEKIRO! It's the best ninja game ever made hands down.
Vs the bigger elden ring bosses which are sooo less varied up.
Malenia pretty much just demands not getting hit so much to heal her... and then look up how to dodge watever patch of water foul you're currently dealing with haha.
Rad dan of the dlc demands the player to either shield poke it tf up which is slow and boring and unskillful... OR struggle for forever until you get lucky with parries or roll butt pokes.
And then there's radagon and the big yellow pokemon who keeps running away lol. Do I even have to get into this one?
@@soyborne.bornmadeandundone1342 Agree with Elden Beast but there's absolutely nothing wrong with Radagon
💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯
Reading this all I could think about was the bitch ass draconian tree sentinel fucking pivoting and shooting the fire ball is straight horse shit 😂
Fights like messmer have extreme amounts of fun rhythm in my experience
The difference is that you just have to earn the right to feel that rhythm with each new boss as skill doesn't really carry across between them
But that's not necessarily a bad thing, I want each boss to be it's own experience
Imho the thing with these new "delayed" attacks is that they're made of two parts: the charging and the swing.
The charging part is not the issue, because it's almost always telegraphed and recognizable.
The swing is where it all falls apart. No matter how long or slow the charging portion of the animation is, if the actual hit takes less than a quarter of a second, you'll likely be unable to dodge it because of simple human reaction time.
Knowing that an attack is coming is only half the battle, you also have to know _when_ the attack is coming.
What this all means is that you have to internalize the timing of the attacks through trial and error to be able to predict when the swing is gonna come out. Needless to say that your internal clock is never going to be perfect. You'll never count seconds as well as a real clock.
Add to all this the fact that enemies can randomly choose to mix up the timings of their swings, and you have a well oiled machine that ensures you will get hit from time to time, never truly able to react to attacks.
I played this game a lot, almost all enemies in the game have fixed timing for their delayed attack so you can memorize them. The delayed attacks can be consistently used as a punish window by pro player because of this.
The only enemies I know with mix up timing delayed attack are Margit and watchdog holding their attack, even then they have telegraph and tell when they actually decide to swing.
@@rizuki9983 Yes, memorizing the timing is indeed the way to go.
However, I'm trying to say that as human beings we sometimes _feel_ time differently due to a variety of reasons.
If you count seconds along with a clock, and then you stop looking at the clock and start counting by yourself, you'll very quickly fall out of sync with it.
That said, there are a few (not many) enemies that do delayed attacks right.
One example is the Watchdog (like you mentioned), who slightly raises their sword before they swing, so you can react immediately after seeing that animation.
@@sonikku997 idk the only delayed attack I found to be bad are the Radahn one (because he is doing it while riding his horse so is unpunishable) and scally misbegotten (he has attack that similar to delayed one but come out so much faster) the rest I found to be not hard to memorize or learn the timing.
I rarely struggled with delayed attacks after learning a lot of them can be used for your advantage for more opening and punish window, I like them mechanically but I do agree they look jarring.
I feel like you're going to get a lot of angry comments from this video, so I just want to say, you're completely right
You know how fromsoftware fans are when you point out a flaw in any souls like game. They instantly start to suck and blow miyasaki with no hesitation 😂
@@pancakes7483 it's not an objective flaw so it will obviously get criticism. Many like delayed attacks, without delayed attacks you get the problem that is ds1 bosses. They are far too easy, every single boss in that game you can beat by just rolling the moment you see an attack, with no thought. The direction you roll doesn't even matter either, there's almost no attacks before elden ring that require you to roll in a certain direction or time it well. You just roll and swing while circling the boss and you clear all the games easily.
@@ragegaze3482 Gael doesnt have any. But he is consistently #1 boss. Some people like eating shit from toilet, but that doesnt mean its objectively good food
@@nurikkulanbaev3628 Gael is easy though, so that matches my point. He's a highly rated boss because he's cool, that's it. He wouldn't even be top 10 in the hardest fromsoft bosses. Plus there is no agreed upon #1 boss in the community. He's normally in the top rankings of people's list though.
@@nurikkulanbaev3628 It'll depend on how people rate their bosses. Some take in music, lore, arena and not just gameplay into consideration. Gael is great and an S+ tier fight but Messmer and Soul of Cinder are just better for me
My 2nd playthrough of the DLC is when I say to myself, "ok I will not use any summon & learn all the bosses pattern" and hell they kicked my ass mostly from their delayed attack lol, but it was worth it, it was sooooooo satisfying when you deveated them by pure skill.
I don’t mind NORMAL delayed attacks. Those are in every fromsoft game including Sekiro. What I have a problem with is when they LITERALLY FREEZE FRAME THE DAMN ANIMATION. It looks completely unnatural and is just confusing for no reason. Godfrey on his second phase freezes MID AIR like WTF.
I majorly dislike delayed attacks because it makes fights feel less authentic to me.
I used to box so it is very deeply ingrained in me that when an opening resents itself you instinctually need to punish by beating them to the punch A good trade always happens when both people are on the offensive because you will almost never land when the other person is in defense mode. Typically what you want to do is make a prediction about what the next punch your opponent will throw then have a punch lined up to exploit the opening that you hope will open up the split second their hand moves from their chin.
So moving to eldenring as my first souls game it severely severely messed with my head and annoyed me when I would attack the enemy really quickly before they could land their attack and then I get punished for it. We're getting to a really really silly point in fromsoft games where the "best" warriors are getting worse and worse fundamentals, and are now blatantly disobeying the laws of gravity as long as it surprises you. So to steel a term from gabe newell, im getting a narcissistic injury when I get punished by enemies that bend the rules of the world to their advantage just to subvert my expectations of a fair fight. When I jump in the air, I cant float there in the sky for an awkward amount of time like godfrey, and I cant just charge up a charge attack that I cant be interrupted or poise broken out of to do massive damage to the enemy. I have to play by the rules of the world, but the enemies play by them much less often.
delayed attacks are tricks on the player. and it feels bad to get tricked over and over and over again. there's just no way to beat the trick other than getting hit until you memorize it
i dont get the complaints, for the most part. delayed attacks in elden ring are almost always just a part of a fights rhythm and tempo, not an interruption of them. if all of midra's attacks are "delayed", then whats the problem? that also means that all of his attacks are consistent.
very rarely are these attacks not telegraphed, or woven into the general flow of the fight. messmer's spear scrapes against the floor before releasing forwards towards you. mohg's attack have a consistent weight and heave to them, due to his massive trident. margit/morgott give you plenty of time to react once they swing, making their roll-catches a game of patience and intuition. even when just looking at his feet, you can predict the fire giants delayed attacks just off of his body movement and heavy battle style.
all of these delayed attacks have their own purpose in their individual fights, and are given their own worthy justifications and consistencies. i really dont get what the problem is.
Firstly They look stupid lol
And the attack technically isn’t “telegraphed”
When Margot raises his sword. That isn’t the attack. The attack is the swing after the 45 minute delay. The follow up swing has no telegraph. It’s pure reaction.
Also the dodge input delay makes reacting a bigger pain in the rear
You don't need to react to margit's swing though, as soon as you see the staff go up you just get close and circle around him and you get a bunch of free attacks while he misses entirely. So you have all the telegraphing you need
Also, him holding the staff up is a telegraph to the player to stop trying to predict when the swing will come and instead just react to it. And yes, you can roll it on reaction, I've done it plenty of times
I can understand the frustration with the dodge input delay though, and if that isn't fun for you then that's fair. I think Quickstep comes out on button press, and not release
Just wrong. Hitting someone with anything is a fluid motion once the motion is begun. It doesn't matter what kind of weapon you have or what kind of creature you are, it's just physics.
Pausing the motion and restarting it defies physics and makes the motion uncanny.
And it means instead of dodging when a move you see start would normally hit, you have to instead turn off the logical part of your brain and simply memorize and arbitrary timer value for every enemy and all of their moves. It's a terrible experience.
Elden Ring has three major problems:
Homogenization, no rhythm to the fights, and speed.
Every single boss follows the exact same formula - start out relatively manageable, have a second phase that is designed to utterly fuck over the player. I can't tell you how many bosses in ER I can describe as "Okay, yeah, this was pretty good. THEN the second phase happened." How cool would it be to have a boss who's second phase was them getting WEAKER, instead of stronger? Y'know, like how a real person gets weaker the more you just obliterate them. Not only that, but as you touched on, even the biggest of bosses are allowed to just move around as quickly as they want, as though their actual weight has zero bearing on how they're able to move - which was something they put a lot of consideration into for previous games.
The rhythm is pretty obvious. If you have a boss fight who's intentionally designed to throw off the rhythm of a player, then the fight ends up feeling as though it has no rhythm - it has no flow. If the player knows they have to wait for every attack a boss has before rolling, they're not in the moment, trying to whittle down a living opponent - they're a player outside the world, gaming the AI.
Lastly there's the player speed. In every previous game, whenever the devs wanted to speed up the combat, the player was sped up with it. BloodBorne is the biggest example obviously. The player stamina is generous, and the actions they can perform consume less stamina on average than in previous games. Hell, even Greatswords and large weapons are the fastest they've ever been. However in Elden Ring, they wanted to have the bosses speed up without doing the same to the player. As such they're able to make moves that at times the players just cannot dodge unless they are hard memorizing every boss fight.
And when you're turning every boss fight into a test of memorizing all of their attacks, you're not presenting the player with a natural back and forth fight, which they have to react to, and pay attention to. You're turning it into homework. Where the player simply has to memorize every little action, or they get punished. The Souls/Borne combat is not built for combat that's as fast as Elden Ring wants it to be, and FromSoft has pushed it as far as the combat can go.
They, and fans, unfortunately just don't wanna accept it.
One of the best comments yet 💯💯💯
Sorry dawg but the flow state is still there. There's just a learning phase behind every boss instead of getting better at the game as a whole. Sounds like a bad thing but who wants another dark souls 3 level of difficulty? That shit is so easy nowadays. In my first dark souls 3 run I almost first tried Gael because I was simply good at dark souls 3 by that point. That would have been unsatisfying... Having each boss be its own challenge helps to offset the growing skill of the playerbase
Like I can lock in and fight Messmer without even thinking now. You just need to learn his attacks, which for some reason is an alien concept to a lot of souls fans. It's not like you're constantly referring to a spreadsheet of timings in your mind, they do get ingrained as you play.
It's the same as it used to be. Remember your first dark souls experience, how weird the attack timings felt until you got an instinct for it? It's the same now, but the instincts are for bosses instead of games now if you know what I mean.
My biggest gripes with Elden Ring boss design are input reading, animation canceling, free flowing combo extensions, and inconsistent punish windows. Morgott will delay his swing for ungodly amounts of time... but if you roll before the delay is over, he'll immediately snap to catch your roll because he read that you pressed the button, which cancels the rest of the animation to perform the attack earlier than he would have normally if you didn't roll. An example of two enemies that I believe have wacky combo extensions are the Crucible Knights and Bell Bearing Hunters, once a Crucible Knight has entered phase 2 they can swipe with their tail to smack you to cover their previous whiff punish window, meaning you either need to delay your punish until they've reached the moment of their recovery animation that they can no longer use that move (which limits your selection of weapons due to speed-related concerns) or you need to bait the tail swing with something really fast with low recovery like a Dagger so you have enough time to dodge it afterwards. Bell Bearing Hunters have a thing where if they do their shield slam attack, they have an optional extension that will make the shield explode in a massive AoE if you attack into them before the animation is over, so you have to wait until they start the animation for putting the shield on their back before you can start attacking them, which just feels unnecessary? Just make the explosion happen every time so I don't have to guess when it's safe to start attacking him.
Malenia breaks all of these rules and more, having endless free flowing combo extensions on top of being able to cancel her "damage level hit stun" stagger animation into a dodge away from you which reduces the damage of your attack, or she can perform an attack that will punish you for attacking her, both of which gives her an inconsistent punish window, which is made even more inconsistent because of her Super Armor that makes her Stance unbreakable during many of her attacks, which means that despite her only have 80 Poise she can tank a 100 Poise damage attack with her Super Armor which will then put her Poise into the negatives and immediately start regenerating it without waiting for the 30 second Poise recovery timer, _without_ breaking her Stance. She can recover her health when hitting a 100% Physical Block shield, she can recover her health from hitting the _air_ due to having a poor connection with your Host if you are fighting the boss as a Phantom, she has two phases with entirely separate health bars that give her more equivalent health than the Fire Giant when accounting for innate Negation and the fact that percentage-based damage sources will be cut in half due to her having two phases with two separate health bars, you need to parry her _three_ times to break her Stance and open her up to a Riposte, she has an incredibly short Riposte window meaning if you end up smacking her because of input buffering you'll miss your opportunity for a critical hit, and as a further punishment she has an extremely high likelihood of performing a Waterfowl Dance when you fail to Riposte her. Don't even get me started on her Phantom Spirits attack having extremely poorly telegraphed and arbitrary dodge windows with precise directions so you can actually dodge the attack (two backward rolls with a small delay between them, two forward rolls, two rolls to the left, good luck figuring any of this out without looking up a guide.)
Elden Ring is a fun game, but it's heavily flawed.
@@michaelbowman6684 there is no animation cancelling in Elden Ring. Grow up already.
@@ferrywogg6590 yeah when I read that I stopped reading, can't take seriously a comment that just invent stuff
Skill issue
@@TheLexere Two years later and people are still crying that a boss hurt their feelings.
1. Morgott doesn't read your dodge roll timing as far as I'm aware
2. I really hope Morgott reads your dodge roll timing because that is an amazing feature that punishes panic rolls, which I think is amazing, especially when you have like no HP, about to die and then the tension of waiting and the strength of will required to refrain from panic rolling, just to perfectly make it through the next attack and heal in the opening. omg please I hope this is a prevalent feature in the next game.
I find it more fun when the bosses have delayed attacks. It makes you constantly pay attention to its attacks and learning it is satisfying Ishin, for example, has mostly simple attacks but it has a certain delay in them that confused me a little at first but then it was very rewarding to know how to react properly
Agreed. Consort was the best boss of the dlc, on par with malenia in the base game. Best two bosses in Fromsoft history
@@StrangeLeapFor Malenia, I agree with you. For Radahn, I disagree. He has a few problems that keep him from being an all time great boss fight in my opinion
@@StrangeLeapslave knight and lord ishin laugh at this take lolz
@@soyborne.bornmadeandundone1342 npc opinion.
Yes someone with a good opinion 🤝
I feel like FromSoftware is on an "Arms-race" with their fanatical followers and Malenia (Blade of Miquella) is the proof of that, IMO. Being an optional boss that in lore is legendary for being deadly, justify she being so hard (although Radahn defeated her, so she saying she never knew defeat is bullsh1t), HOWEVER Waterfowl Dance is designed to kill "Souls-veterans". Why after she stops moving is there a damaging wind strike out of (her ass) nothing? To kill players who are used to keeping close to an enemy to try punishing after their big attacks. A new player would not have that mindset, but people who are playing this games for years and even decades, would. Adding to that, the sheer amount of enemies with delayed attacks, the horrible multifights of Elden Ring (with duo gargoles and duo crucible knights being unexcusebly bad) and NPCs that have no stamina are just annoying and tiresome by now.
P.S: How could I've forgotten, the ennemies with 5 min combos that jump away the moment they finish their kata presentation. Fuck that! It's annoying and unfair, since enemies don't have stamina to manage.
FS will eventually hit the bottom. Many players have gotten bored of this boss design, myself included. memorizing patterns just isn't fun anymore. its slop.
Radahn didn't defeat her, they fought to a stalemate.
bro just admit you're bad at the game and aren't willing to engage with the mechanics
@@ShaunRFeven millicent says that malenia was overpowered by radahn and had to use rot power to meat his measure, meaning that without rots help she would lose
@@ShaunRFno, she bloomed, which only happens when she's about to die, so it's safe to assume Radahn was ready to finish her off. But then rot nuke happened.
I feel that the DLC is a lot more fair than the end game of base Elden Ring. There are no 13 hit waterfall moves or Elden Beast garbage. The DLC fixed many problems from the base game imo.
I just replayed a bit of Code Vein to see where its combat stacked up to Elden Ring just because I could and was surprised to find many of the same tactics used to throw off players in the endgame, including super tracking on even basic attacks, erratic high speed maneuvers and opponents with delayed attacks (at least there are no attacks which unnaturally extend airtime on jumps). There really is only so much that can be done to shake up this gameplay formula.
9:53 Fighting Elemer at any range other than direct contact is pure suicide because of these unreadable moves. Fighting this guy at low level became much better once I accepted this fact.
Yeah the footage I showed was from a RL1 run, I figured out the fight was a piece of cake up close, but wanted to learn the differences of the jedi attacks, and was just baffled at how punishing these attacks were. It really punishes ranged builds to an unnecessary degree
Good video, I just don't agree with your points so I will try to keep this as understandable as possible sorry if I make any grammar mistakes :)
(also I won't talk about previous games since that's not what I disagree with even tho I feel like the nameless king point makes no sense, his attacks are clearly telegraphed)
BASE GAME SECTION:
1. Margit --> 9:10 "Yeah, you won't learn this attacks by reaction." first you won't NEED to memorize any attacks, this tip is simple and easy, look at his movement. Every attack is telegraphed he charges up and then you can clearly see his body twitch. That's your moment to dodge. IMO it's a good thing every attack was a delayed one, since you WILL NEED to learn how to dodge delayed attacks in this game.
Also quick tip you can jump this attack and get a free heavy jump attack hit (9:58)
I just disagree with the points of margit's boss design being "muddy" I always knew when to attack there is clear openings, I know not everyone has the same opinion, but I think his attacks are telegraphed and easy to know when to punish :)
2. Radahn (???????) --> Radahn is extremely slow and heavily telegraphed. It's actually insane how easy it is to tell when he's doing an attack.
11:27 you show him phase transitioning as to say he's fast? this just makes no sense.
11:34 "What telegraphs that about his design?" the purple lighting and light around him. If you went through Caelid, you would've seen soldiers using gravity magic, which has the same light and effect, not to mention that he's also referred to as "the conqueror of the stars" like cmon.
3. Radagon (??????????????) --> Radagon might be one of the most telegraphed bosses in ER.
12:29 Dodge forward. Nothing about his attacks are complicated, just dodge forward that easy, the aftershocks will NEVER hit you.
12:58 "heal punishing" aka you tried to run from the boss to heal on neutral instead of dodging and actually healing after an attack combo. This never worked in any FROM game and it was always a huge risk to take.
13:14 "just to panic roll" well I kind of agree that's usually how any first attempt with any boss goes no matter the game, but instead of continuing to do that in the next couple of attempts, what if you actually tried to learn it?
SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE SECTION:
Main point is "there is too many delayed attacks" like sure I can see your point, but simply learn the boss? like genuinely do you find it fun to first try a boss never having learnt it because it's attacks are easy to dodge and predictable or do you want to learn a boss and engage with their mechanics and get better at them? just maybe we have a different view of what makes this games fun.
14:45 "It's become predictable and boring."... are we acting dumb on purpose? Are we going to ignore the last 6 GAMES of easily predictable, easy asf attacks that became a boring repetition and was the most predictable shit ever, even with just 1 attempt on the boss?
Also makes the point that it wrapped back around to making the boss easier, but then doesn't that mean that the game taught you how to play? Isn't that the point of these types of games? The more you play it, the more you recognize patterns, and now, with even new bosses, you can interpret what they are going to do without even seeing it. You learned to play the game, which in my opinion is excellent.
You don't like Midra? Sincerely, what can I even say about this? Just not something I agree with at all; I won't go into detail, but he's one of my favorite bosses from this new DLC.
16:32 I just want to call out how almost all of these are either big-ish enemies, knights, or have big weapons. Didn't you earlier say big enemies and weapons matter when considering delayed attacks? Also, didn't you excuse the penetrator's attacks because he's a knight?
17:28 Now this is your opinion but I disagree heavily. Bosses are fun, enjoyable, beautiful, and all the positive words I could use to describe them, ER bosses are the best thing FROM has made and will ever make, in my opinion. Now, if you haven't been able to tell by now, I love Elden Ring, which might make you think that I don't have complaints against it, but I do, but one of my complaints is not delayed attacks or "unfair fights", The fights are as fair as ever. IMO we are focusing on the wrong thing when complaining about ER, delayed attacks? Learn them, look at animations for tells, and something I haven't mentioned is that delayed attacks help you regen stamina, which makes it almost impossible to break the flow of the fight like you had to do in previous FROM games. Also the whole unfair fight thing makes no sense, these fights are extremely fair and unique, if you want to look at unfair fights, look no further than Bloodborne the same game that took 4 years to no-hit. Look at ds2 with it's shitty hitboxes. Not ER, this is not an unfair game.
18:05 Be aggressive, its the most fun and easiest way to play the game (IMO) Just don't be stupid and attack the boss expecting it not to attack back, don't attack mid combo, etc. In general, just think a little before acting.
18:28 OFC This game has flaws, but delayed attacks? really? Also, the point about how it changed a lot from the original games, like? Don't you want an evolution of the old games, or do you want to play games that do the same shit for 20 years?
Again let me say I think this video is good and I'm sorry if I was condescending in any of my points. I assure you, it was not my intent, I just disagreed with your points and felt the need to put my thoughts out there, also I agree that we SHOULD criticize games, especially games we love, so we can see them better in the future, but I don't think delayed attacks are flawed or bad.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter its just our opinions :)
I completely agree with you 🙏
Totally agree, majority of the delayed attacks complained about in this vid are completely fine. Sure delayed attacks can be difficult to dodge the first time you see them, but once you learn the timing they become the easiest attacks to dodge. And the aftershocks mentioned in radagon and consort radahns fights are not cheap ways to extend the difficulty. For consort radahn phase 2 has many of the same attacks as phase 1 with added lightbeams that punish where players would intuitively dodge to in phase 1. For most of these attacks, if you dodge into radahn instead of away, you won't have to dodge the follow up lightbeams. Same with radagon, just dodge the initial attack in a way that puts you out of range for the follow up aftershock (usually dodge forward). And he doesn't "heal punish", he teleports and uses gap closing moves if you try to run away from him. If you want to heal, don't run away and heal after dodging one of his attack combos. These "aftershock" attacks are teaching the player that not just timing, but the direction of your dodge matters, which is great game design imo. I think Berto's is wrong in thinking that changing some of the fundamentals of the game design from dark souls is a bad thing.
I am genuinely puzzled by how much discourse the delayed attacks have been generating. I do understand why it is likely design that serves to make fights more difficult, but this disregards that it is also likely intended to be design that makes bosses more engaging too. I do not think that being able to smash your face into the circle button the moment a boss moves its sword arm is particularly interesting. These attacks actually force you to learn and engage with a boss’s moveset in a way that previous series bosses did not really do. Additionally, though it was not explicitly brought up in this video, the complaint of delay attacks in tandem with the complaint about punish windows is something I find crazy to reconcile. If the boss is delaying their attacks, that’s your punish window. Hit them! It makes the fight so much more engaging and even complements the aggressive playstyle you mentioned you enjoy.
Are attack delays the only way to get you to engage with a boss?
@@justifano7046 They are not the only way, nor did my comment imply that they were the only way. What I said was that it was likely an intended design goal of adding them, and I do believe this to be the case, understanding that it does also have the knock on effect of making the boss harder. I think a happy middle ground for people would probably be roll-catch attacks similar to Nameless King, but more straightforward in the presentation of their animation. Attacks such that you need to delay between the first and second roll, but starting the animation for the second attack at a time when you will not be punished for reaction rolling when it starts. The downside to this, in my eyes, is that you do not have a window to attack the boss mid-combo, and you are forced to dodge through the whole thing. I do legitimately see this as an advantage of the egregious delays that ER likes to employ on some bosses.
You’re even more insane for suggesting to hit a boss during its attack charge-up. That literally never works for me in Elden Ring.
@@hrr2b239 of course it's intended they input them into almost every single enemy.
But its just bad difficulty. Fromsoft has tried too hard to make the game difficult that it's come at the cost of good gameplay.
Luckily, the total package is quite good allowing many to overlook these issues.
@@danielantony1882then you're not timing correctly...even on margit, when he does his infamous delayed overhead swing, you can even see in the video you have an extremely forgiving window to attack. you probably won't get off something like a lions claw without trading, but you can light attack and be safe. it's not an insane suggestion to understand when your openings are, because the more damage you do, the faster the fight ends, and the lesser the chance of you dying
6:56. "I saw a reddit thread that puts it really well, a lot of the bosses were like Nameless King."
-Penguinz0 during a stream of his 1st playthrough, he was in Altus Plateau.
I dont think bro is "completely right" like others are saying. Elden rings boss design does use unintuitive swing timings. Other times, bosses like Midra may have slow swings, but they're perfectly readable if you watch their hand movements. Souls games were always rhythm games to some degree. Changing or slowing the rhythms doesnt make bad boss design.
Its doest when done bad. For example if you have delayed attack that have 2 years wind up, for accualy attack to be like mach 6
@@Apophesisnt that the whole gimmick of dark souls 1 ennemies ? im pretty every single ennemie does that in ds1, except maybe gwyn and queelag
@@Apophes sometimes that's just memorization/quick reaction times. Not saying it's always perfect/intuitive, but get hit by it once or twice and the average human should be able to get timing down. It's not a fatal flaw.
@@joshuabober9171 dosent change that these moves just bad.
@@Apophessounds like a skill issue. Try adapting to moves that aren’t completely braindead to dodge
i think my biggest issue with the DLC bosses is more the fact that every single one of them has a grab attack with a broken hitbox. but the delays dont help
Fromsoft can't make a good grab hitbox EVER 😂 from Dark Souls 1's Iron Golem to Dark Souls 2's mimics to Dark Souls 3 Demon Prince's to Elden Ring's Messemer 😂 grab hitboxes are something they've never done well
grab attacks always requires you to dodge at the right time
@@JellyJman theres nothing wrong with messmers grab attack all you have to do is dodge backwards as he does it thats literally it
real DS2 moment
@@BertoPlease Dont pretend like this is exclusive to DS2 tho.
Ds1/3 and ER have way more egregious grab hitboxes like with iron golem, Curserotted great tree, Mesmer, and Dancer of Boreal being the worst examples with hitboxes bigger than a truck.
I think you forgot one important thing when it come to bosses delay attacks, they are also your breather, small break between attacks for your charater to stablize and manage your own stamina
Take well, Margit, he have alot of delay attacks, yes they are there to make him harder but it’s also there for you to recover your stamina, your attacks and rolls aren’t limitless, if you simply remove these attacks then it will probably be boring and just take to effort to learn or react cause without variations then what’s gonna stop people from spamming roll without bring punish?
Great point, I agree
So far as the delayed attacks were concerned, I think they're most ill used on creatures who shouldn't have the intelligence to psych you out. If its a knight or Radagon deploying feint tactics, that's sensible - but every common wolf and rat? That's silly. Like footsoldiers' arrows curving toward you, there's no narrative reason for it.
so i still dont get really get why you dont like midra?
he's too easy? i thought the fact he was a character that thematically utilizes delayed attack for all of his attacks to the point it becomes unambiguous reinforced his thematic style of being flashy and visually interesting. what's the big issue? there wasn't really a concrete reason given why there's a dislike for him
While I understand your grievances against delayed attacks, I disagree. Just as you brought up the "trend of second phases", I think delayed attacks are a natural evolution as part of a game's enemy engagement, not simply as an arbitrarily hard challenge. The way you describe delayed attacks is in such a generalized way that much context is removed from a boss's overall toolkit. Godrick's delayed attacks have the purpose of moving you back into mid-range and away from being close to him, while Margit's delayed attacks serve to punish reckless positioning or over-reactive dodging. In addition to this, delayed attacks do pose a danger within the flow of combat but also have the caveat of giving you an opening to punish the boss. This keeps the flow of combat engaging. I played my first playthrough of Elden Ring with the colossal Greatsword primarily (because my friend sold me on this because of the Berserk reference and showed me how to reach it early) and finding these openings through trial and error during my boss fight attempts was crucial for me being able to land jumping heavy attacks or charged heavy attacks on these bosses. If Margit takes a year to swing his cane or to stab it into the ground, he's going to be winded long enough for a light weapon to land a charged heavy and a jumping heavy, and a heavy weapon can land one charged heavy or one jumping heavy. Malenia's delayed attack in her first phase ends with her performing a downward sword slash with a recovery window that is long enough for me to land a jumping heavy with my Greatsword.
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Your perspective on delayed attacks is also that attacks may be delayed but they are also fast upon striking...which to me is a really unusual complaint. From your script, it sounds as if you prefer for boss attacks to have attacks in which you have to reactively dodge upon a visual/audio cue, which these attacks DO have with their long delay. The delay is the visual cue that an attack is approaching that you must avoid. I think the differentiation you did with "delayed, slow moving attacks" vs "delayed, fast moving attacks" stuck with me though not in a good way. This comparison attempts to present the latter form of delayed attacks in a bad light but I don't think one form of delayed attack is inherently superior or inferior to another. The more I think on your video, the more I get the impression that your bad experiences from these delayed attacks have just ultimately soured your overall game experience. I don't think its a "skill issue" like a lot of players love to say, but if what I said is true, I think this stops you from evaluating the boss fights as a whole and appreciating their flow of combat. I think with how you mentioned "healing punishes" and then how Pontiff can "combo", it just gives me the ick, the same ick that I get when frustrated players want to transform their venting into a talking point or criticism. In spite of this, I think you did bring up a good conversation point: are DELAYED ATTACKS OVERUSED?
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Going back to what I said earlier about the natural evolution of a game's enemy engagement, I think delayed attacks fit right in just as with "boss second phases". I do not believe that they are overused. I do not believe that these design elements exist as a method to arbitrarily heighten a game's difficulty, but rather to compliment the combat engagement with enemies and bosses. Enemies that perform quick, immediate attacks when they see you and when you are in range...are already such a common occurrence even within Elden Ring. The usage of delayed attacks serves as a means to disrupt traditional combat expectations and to create better combat engagement through making the player more observant instead of simply being reactive. I will confess that I too have fallen prey to delayed attacks given how I play and with what weapon I play. Midra caused me a bit of frustration with his delayed attacks on top of his health pool, to where my impatience started to take a toll on me and caused me to not enjoy Midra's fight as much as other people did. And this is a good transition into the "fun" of it all. Can you find delayed attacks to not be fun? Sure. Though when presented as good faith criticism, it fundamentally sounds like a complaint disguised as criticism and propelled by misunderstanding. It is similar to when the popular community sentiment against Elden Ring bosses was that "they're unfair because they never stop attacking" or "its impossible to heal against them". I think the community has a collective desire to gather together to rationalize their frustrations instead of overcoming them or understanding them. This isn't to say that I play FromSoft video games without ever getting frustrated but what ultimately drives me push on through and enjoy the experience is because I enjoy playing these games. Like everyone else, I too got stuck at Malenia and felt overwhelmed but I never felt like there was an outside force that tried to rob me of my enjoyment.
Fantastic analysis. This is similar to my feeling on delayed attacks. While I don't feel like they're overused I feel like they should be a smaller percentage of a boss's total attacks (outside of bosses like Margit who are intended to train you to dodge them) because I like being surprised when they hit me. I feel like regular enemies should also get fewer of them. Overall, however, I'm happy that so many bosses have at least some form of them to keep me on my toes. I can see this being very difficult for new players though. Especially in a not-elden ring game where you can't just go somewhere else when you're having trouble with one area. I don't think FromSoftware has found the balance quite yet. But they're getting there. And I look forward to when they finally perfect it.
And I'm sorry you didn't enjoy midra as much as others. Go back on another playthrough when you're awake and alert. Maybe try fighting him with a light roll setup. He's a blast.
The problem I see in your argument is that you talk ONLY about the mechanical layer of the combat. My main takeaway from the video was that delayed attacks make no sense from the perspective of the enemies not mechanicaly but from the in-game world logic. It makes no sense for the boss to open themselves up for a punish from the player just to throw you of with a delay. As it was shown in the video delayed attacks have been a thing since Demon's Souls and the author explained why they were well implemented back then. From that perspective Elden Ring having majority of the bosses use delayes should be obvious to anyone as a thoughtless attempt to increase the difficulty for the sake of difficulty and that also was explained in the video.
I will be an asshole and say that If you want mechanicaly complex and demanding experience then play multiplayer fighting games or any competetive title against real humans, I guarantee you will find a lot more depth in there.
The biggest strength of Souls games has never been the combat but their immersive quality and putting you in unique scenarios to overcome. If the "natural evolution" of Souls games is having every boss be a hyper agressive moveset exam than I'd rather play Devil May Cry.
@slei4676 delayed attacks used to keep the players in engaged in the fight let me explain. Games luke hogwarts legacy every attack is indicated by a visual effect it light yellow or red because of this I could realistically just stare at the top of my players head and beats the game only have to occasionally look at the opponents shield color. But with the souls born games you are forced to engage with the fights or you will lose. If they didn't use delay attacks you would eventually be able to panic roll your way to victory. The whole point of delayed attacks are to keep the players ingaged it's the whole reason the games does not let you pause. Once your in the game your in your ment to lock in. That's my take on it.
@@slei4676your opinion is absolutely nonsensical. things making sense according to the logic of reality in a fantasy game is an extremely stupid standard for a game to be good. it makes perfect sense for an enemy to throw out attacks with different timings so the player can't dodge at the same way for every attack. like, i don't know what to tell you. if you want to reject the concept of player versus enemy in video games, then that's fine, but then you don't have any ground to criticize pve games.
i don't like the trend of every song having a chorus. it just makes them cheap and predictable.
I feel that this discussion about delayed attacks misses a good question, what even is a delayed attack, a boss charging an attack? A boss using a stance of some kind? Or the attack being simply slower than the others?
I think it’s just an attack that doesn’t connect right after the animation starts
@@Hayden-pg4og So... like a charge attack
It's an attack intentionally made to be off rhythm to catch players trying to rolle normally (on reaction).
It's the game designers really trying to make sure people die on bosses
@@La0bouchere holy shit a round of applause for this counterargument, if they wanted the player to die then a roll would not have s it would be impossible to lv vigor
Here's an actually counterargument, delayed attacks allow the player to regain stamina and they punish react rolls so the player has to learn how to dodge instead just pressing the button, tldr delay attacks increase risk and reward which is engaging for a player that wants to learn
I don't think Souls-combat is very interesting at all but the atmosphere, visuals and the strange world you are thrown into more than make up for it.
Combat against bosses in all the From-souls games has always been a pattern recognition game, where the pattern recognition can be mostly skipped by using a defensive build with a large shield, lotsa armour and a big slab of steel to pound enemies to dust with. The other way to skip all the learning, is to play a mage and blast things to bits from a distance before they get to show their stuff, of course.
The way I see it, addition of delays and longer combos makes the game harder only for the "ninja" style, where you don't wear heavy armour and where you only use some little stick which hardly staggers anything. Thus having more things to recognise, makes "rolly-polly punish style" the most difficult way to go until you've learnt all they got to throw at you. At the same, the players that do decide to go for that style can always feel good about having actually learned the patterns. I figure this will never change.
I think there's some stuff in the DLC that was made to combat mage tactics, very similar to rolly-pollying ninjas having to deal with delays; long-range charges that trigger when you go too far from the boss, etc. Even if you play a glass cannon that usually stays far away from danger, you need to atleast learn how to dodge the few longer range moves and then retreat to fire your gun again.
Grabs were, of course, already in the game to punish shielders, but becuase those actually also punish everyone else, the shield-tank is still the easiest.
Yeah in truth Souls combat isn't very deep at all, which is weird that not only so much of the fanbase makes it such a big deal of it, but also Fromsoft these days lol.
However I would say that the "ninja style" combat has become the optimal melee style of play since Bloodborne because of how little stamina it requires to roll now. In Demon's, DS1, and 2 even, rolling wasn't always the most reliable method of evading damage, and usually they didn't pretend that the combat was the game's greatest strength either, it put equal focus on loads of the other aspects of the game too, but because of how much emphasis they are putting on bosses and combat now, there's so much more to critique. I would love to just go back to the older style of game at this rate tbh
Delayed attacks can give you openings for quick hits with a fast weapon, or a moment to regen stamina in the middle of a long combo. I don't think it's right to call it a "design flaw." You can not prefer attacks in this style, but it's a preference. I find it boring when every attack can be intuitively rolled purely by reacting to the animation. I greatly prefer bosses that require you to really learn their movesets and master them.
Exactly. I liked the video, but his main point is that he personally doesn’t like it
As you point out, there are reasons to like it
I think they make sense too, and I enjoyed this new style. I also like how enemies more often have aggressive flurries that you have to respect
I do think regular enemies being more intuitive and easier to deal with is a positive direction. But I also get that others probably think this would make it too boring (also have to consider all the challenge run folks who play the games for years)
I feel like DkS3 shows this well. Almost the whole game can be dodged intuitively, which seems like good design, however it can quickly become dull for experienced players. I already played tons of DkS1 when I played DkS3. As a result, I enjoyed DkS3 while playing it but I never replayed it nor was i felt it was very memorable. The only part that I remember well is the nameless king.
@@josephbornman8462 the "flurry" or combo hits almost all enemies do in elden ring are soo bad. The only way to deal with them is backing off, trying not to fall asleep, and then re-engage physically and mentally with the fight
Midra was honestly some of the best combat fluidity I’ve seen in Elden Ring. And Radahn didn’t really have too many. Regardless, “just for artificial difficulty” always confuses me. Yeah, you have to learn the move set of the boss, if having to learn patterns is artificial, most games are artificially difficult
Delayed attacks are a good thing and they mix up the flow of combat so it’s not just panic roll simulator. You are pretty much arguing that learning bosses is bad design philosophy
yeah I roll my eyes every time someone says a boss is bad because it took them multiple tries to learn as if that isn’t a good thing. Observing attack animations and committing them to memory has literally always been what Souls combat is about
My guy, just because Midra has delayed attacks doesn't make him a bad fight. I think your forgetting that even tho his attacks are delayed, they are similar to Mohg's in which they are all delayed slightly. That gives the fight a consistent tempo and rhythm. Also Midra's delays are extremely telegraphed, so much so you don't really need to guess on the timing unlike Margit or Godrick.
Mohg swings his spear, he don't delays atacks like margit or Radan gay consort
@@AA_AlegriaApenasblood flame talons delayed explosion.
Blood boons 3 variants all have slightly different delays.
His flying attacks delays that are telegraphed by him building moment(real talk tho bayles first phase flying stomp fails at doing this)
He basically has a full half second pause before every swing as he builds momentum.
Like literally go to 7:34 in the video bro the man himself says his shit is delayed.
did u actually watched th vid ?
@@GoulaLegamer nah I don't watch, that's cuck behavior
@@GoulaLegamer Yeah I did. He was mad that Midra had delayed attacks. That wasn't his only point, he said how the overabundance of delays in er made Midra incredibly unenjoyable and stuff as well as other things but that's now what I wanted to focus on.
I love that the first boss in Demon's Souls already had an delayed attack
Dear diary, the attacks are slower than i expected.
I adore the Midra fight, tho I get the point you're making. It's that if we can abuse a pattern of having a lot of delayed attacks, or that you have to wait solely to memorize the moveset, and thus not have a chance to beat the boss by sight reading, it leaves a worse and less immersive challenge.
I however do think there are worse ways to make a boss difficult. Like how they did Radahn 2. Man has deceptive hitboxes, but worse, he has a pocket attack that can't ever be reacted to unless you hug his right leg. Which forces even less variety in playstyle and encourages cheesing moreso
it's when an enemy telegraphs a swing, so thinking you're prepared you DON'T panic roll, only for the actual swing to be so quick it's unreactable and you just need to memorise the timing anyway. At least Lady Maria had a small mody movement + sound in the moment before the attack so that an observant player knew when to dodge
Elden Ring has that too though for some of its delayed attacks. Sound cues exist and careful observation of the animation of the boss can do wonders.
Between the delay-spam and the physics-breaking tracking (you see a boss jump in a certain direction, your mind calculates a trajectory based on its speed, size, and probable weight on where it must end up... only to have it turn in the air to fall on your head in whichever way you moved after it left the ground.), it seems Elden Ring bosses are designed specifically to punish instinct and reaction, and favor memorisation. This makes them overall less _fun_ than previous FromSoft games, even if more challenging.
The problem is instinct reaction skill doesn't disappear between games, if it was just dark souls 3 again it would have been far too easy. Having to learn each new boss as they come due to their unique flow solves that problem
Unless you wanted to be the cool guy who can beat elden ring easily just because you played the older games then I don't see a reason to dislike it
I was very surprised you didn't like Midra, especially since you mentioned Mohg as a good use of delayed attacks. My first thought when fighting Midra was Mohg, a lot of delayed attacks, to the point it was predictable and fun, had a rythm to it. I guess maybe you were just tired of the delayed attacks which I understand completely XD
Great video
I've never played Demon's Souls, but from what I can see those faints really should be incorporated into more fights in souls games. It's so much better when an opponent actually tricks you with their movement whilst still keeping the fight dynamic, instead of awkwardly stopping in the middle of an attack.
In Elden Ring, the amount of times you have to awkwardly do nothing when the opponent holds their weapon in the air is ridiculous. You can't roll without waiting or you'll get hit. You can't even attack, the boss will ignore it, hit you before you are able to roll, and trading is usually not worth it.
In previous souls games you were able to intuitively figure out when to roll/parry an attack, even if it was your first time seeing it. In ER you pretty much have to get hit by an attack the first time you see it to figure out how long to wait before rolling.
The attacks in this game feel so unintuitive very often. It seems like they design the attacks around tricking the player at the cost of losing immersion
Love how the delays are slow enough to look like you can sneak a hit in but are fast enough to hit you before you can roll out of the recovery animation and you get hit for DARING to do something that isnt watch the boss do his super flashy anime combo till the end
two things I love about Elden Ring. Unlike every other Souls game, ER does really punish the spam/panic rollers. In ER, you can't just circle around big bosses and booty slapp them with ease. You have to actually learn the dodge timings on almost every single boss
Same! I love that Elden Ring stop what Dark Souls 3 did which was make it a reflex test on how good you can abuse s, in Elden Ring you have to jump attacks, crouch under attacks, blocking attacks since shields actually are good unlike in DS3, and parrying which isn't as OP as it was in Dark Souls 3. Elden Ring took all the combat issues I had with Dark Souls 3 and fixed them.
i would agree if there was more than 0,5 sec of opening to actually attack , we also have weapons that have combos but can't never use them because if u do more than one or two attack u get punished , so the best against boss is jump attack or charged heavy that deals heavy poise damage or bleed , bosses are cheating so u are forced to do so and in the end it can't fell more than annoying
@@GoulaLegamerthis this this. Why can't these brainless from soft scrubs get it? Being forced to play a certain way to win blows.
@@GoulaLegamer That is only true if you fight the bosses the same way you would in other games and wait for them to finish what they are doing and just go into some idle animation. Most fights in ER you can get off tons of attacks, especially if you use a fast weapon. The openings just aren't as obvious, if you watch a sl1 run or something youj will see that
Elden Ring rewards memorization through repetitive exposure to unintuitive movesets. There is no real adaptation until you die, or use of reflexes other than recognition of an incoming move/combo or even a need for on-the-spot decision making for the majority of fights.
Well, that's not entirely true. What will happen most of the time is you'll vigour through most attacks and out-damage the boss with a busted build or being grossly overlevelled for the area.
But in both cases, the skill expression is minimal. Any godawful aging gamer can do this. Denigrate the 'circle around and booty slap' all you want, at the very least skilled people could beat difficult fights like Friede and Midir in very little tries because the moves were intuitive and they could adapt to them using a variety of skills they'd acquired. Meanwhile, those that needed to memorize everything died upwards of 50 times against these bosses. Now even the best are reduced to the common denominator of memorizing like a gifted student stuck in a terrible public school system that only rewards reciting the exact methodology give by the teacher.
It's fine if you enjoy it, but I wouldn't use the term 'ease' for DS3 bosses. There was more than just spam rolling.
This has to be the laziest thing to complain about. It really just feels like you want to be able to panic roll everything and be fine. If you’re not that great at dodging every attack, just pick up a shield dude. They’re in the game for a reason🤦🏻♂️
Delayed attacks with different timings force you to not just instinctively or reaction roll making the boss not just 100 attack spam that comes out immediately
While I do agree on a whole, I think you misunderstood what made Pontiff so good and fair. His follow-ups aren't random, they're position based and almost guaranteed to come out whenever you're in a specific spot after a specific attack. This could seem somewhat unfair to the player as it looks like they're being locked out of an attack window, but it's not, *The Key is to Parry*
Pontiff's opening move is a large, forward jump with a flaming greatsword, does that remind you of anyone? If you guessed Gwyn, you're correct! The attack is visually referencing that attack and trying to get you to parry Pontiff, there's also multiple attacks that ease you into parrying him such as the sidestep/reposition into greatsword swing, the greatsword swing after the thrust, and the greatsword 360 after the magic sword swing. Almost all of his attacks are parryable besides his slams, magic blasts, and his magic sword thrusts. Think of him like Gwyn on crack.
TLDR; Pontiff is fair, try parrying him, you might like it!
You're also misinterpreting DS2 as a whole near the end of your video, if you're not gonna play it and like it, that's fine, however I suggest you watch Domo3000's videos talking about DS2 as he points out why most of the criticisms are misguided or straight up uninformed.
delayed attacks aren’t a design flaw you’re just playing like it’s dark souls 😭😭 I can’t with the content surrounding this game rn
this video is just a guy crying that he had to learn boss move sets
@@ggnore546 that’s what literally all criticism for this dlc has been… somehow even challenge runners don’t want to learn bosses… like isn’t that your thing
@@ggnore546yup
on Rellana, you are not meant to dodge roll her. You certainly can and it's a rewarding experience, but she is designed to teach you how to use the deflecting hardtear, and her long combos are proof of this, as the deflecting hard tear scales with the more successful deflects you get. You only need 3 deflects to get the full buff, meaning you can screw up a few deflects and still get the full buff
I think it’s telling that the best boss in the DLC, Messmer, feels more like a DS3 fight than an ER fight. You actually get openings and time to breathe between attacks and after combos which makes the fight feel very dynamic, rather than having to dodge a long combo string to get one or two attacks off, on a boss with an outrageous health bar
0:54 that attack can be one of two attacks. If you're close then it'll be just the one swing, but if you're far away then it'll be two and he'll rush towards you. The delay gives me enough time to know which attack is coming based on the distance away. Malenia has the same thing.
You never explain why you think that delayed attacks are bad, you just say they are. Why do you think that? I like them quite a lot to be honest. It feels very rewarding to me to memorize the timing of rolls for a combo to be able to finally dodge it completely. Delayed attacks elevate those fights and make them more memorable in my opinion. A lot of those delays in Elden Ring are an opening to attack which creates a more interesting dynamic between the enemy and the player as well.
I am in my late 30s and i've been playing the Souls Series since 2012, day one of the Prepare to Die Edition. I still remember EpicNameBro (truly the best Dark/Demon's Souls creator of all time), saying that these games is not about ultra skill and reflexes but KNOWLEDGE. You have to know the Boss. Delayed attacks are fine. They promote you learning the moveset. What is NOT fine is 15 hit combos, (including delayed attacks, roll catches, AoE particles, deceptive range..... you name it) that barely leave an opening for a dagger attack and not really a flask usage, and if you get hit once you are as good as dead.
Though, even if i don't like it, i recognise that these bosses were NOT designed for the average player to be played solo and dodge all the moves perfectly (this is reserved for the Elites, the Ongballs, the LetMeSolo her etc.). They were designed, so that the player could dodge ENOUGH, in order to survive with the help of the spirit summon. Spirit summons (which are an upgradable weapon and should not be viewed as NPC/player summons) were their way of introducing Classic RPG aspects (aka Baldour's gate, Icewind dale etc.) in the Souls formula. IMO it was not done particularly well. I have beaten all the bosses solo, even in NG+7, and it was not FUN. I always had fun in NG+7 in the Souls games, especially in DS1 and DS2. Come to think of it, DS3 is the time were i felt that the movesets were becoming frustrating, and it was not that fun in NG+7 as well.
most of the time you can hit bosses mid combo with the right positioning and methods(jumping/crouching/running)
Dude for my first playthrough I soloed the DLC with a poor weapon, I was so proud of it that I posted it on my channel.
But if you watch it you can see I am NOWHERE NEAR as good as those guys! And Radahn took hundreds of tries. I can confirm that they are definitely designed with solo fights in mind. I could write essays about how to fight Messmer and Bayle. If it was just a "throw shit at the wall who cares, they have summons to take aggro" situation like you and others would have people believe, I wouldn't be able to do that and I would not have completed my run.
Handwaving it off as "only top 1% challenge runners can do this, I don't need to feel bad about giving up" is just a way to cope instead of getting good. Funny how that gets used towards long time players now. Souls vets are not beating the allegations...
What delayed attacks do is test your anticipation resistance, and train away the trigger finger which has you move before thinking.
The main thing I took away from most of ER's bosses is that they want you to actually think when fighting, so they're more complex and dynamic fights than just "press direction and dodge when I see non-walking motion".
Fights are already heavily skewed in your favour, since you can press a single button and become completely invincible for quite a while. As ER's strongest mechanic, it needs some counterplay.
Honestly, the video irritates me a lot, since conscious thought, thinking before acting (self-control) is the entire point of delays. It trains you to fight against instinct.
Speaking meanly, the video was:
"I don't want to put more effort into learning or fighting a boss. I want to be able to know how to dodge all the attacks on my very first try. It's okay later, since it's muscle memory by then, and it doesn't take more effort to pull off."
This is so insane I'm sorry. If you have to "think" in order to dodge an attack that is already in motion, you are simply playing a stupid timer puzzle that lazy developers forced upon you. Not a fighting game.
@@hulkingmass so again, "thinking bad, want easy game".
Not having delays just makes it a thumb moving simulator. "
Anticipation resistance would be all well and good if the attack then didn’t come out a million times faster than you can react. It stops being a panic roll deterrent and instead becomes an annoying muscle memory test.
it seems like this guy just doesnt want to learn boss move sets, saying midra was a bad fight is crazy
All of the bosses in froms other games have delayed attacks. People acting like ER is the only game that does this is ridiculous and acts like they haven't played any of the souls games. Maybe they haven't idk. It's literally nothing new.
same with bosses having varying combo flow charts, i think ds2 was the one to start that trend lmao. Would not call that a bad thing either
@@mfspectacular it's not a bad thing at all. I think it adds a ton of variety to the fight and can make the pacing very fun. People just have a hard time dodging delayed attacks and then get mad at the game itself instead of properly learning the timing of when to dodge. It's ridiculous and it is crazy to act like ER is the only souls game that uses this mechanic.
@@Lordfarquad1415
No bosses in DS3 had these ridiculous delayed attacks that lasts for 2 whole seconds mid combo. That's simply verifiably false.
The only super delayed attack I can remember from DS3 that would be an ER type of attack is the one Nameless King gets low into the ground, charging his Spear with Lightning then releasing it. Which is very reminiscent of Godfrey's "super moves".
@@Lordfarquad1415
And at what point does game design stops being "complex combo charts" and turns into an inconsistent RNG fest??
Bayle personifies this better than any other Boss. He's absolutely cancer for no hitting, cuz there's no rhyme or reason at all for when he finishes his combos or just keeps going.
The one where he starts with either the left "hand" swipes or the bites can branch out to just one singular follow up or a 7/8 combo that if your RNG is bad enough you don't even get to punish cuz he simply jumps away and does the fire breath attack. How can anyone rationalize this being good design or "fun" LMAO
This would all be fine if mid combo there was a slightly different attack to let you know how the combo is gonna end. Make it the second bite come in a different angle or something so we can know what the rest of the combo is gonna be... Literally anything at all.
PS: Also, positioning has no effect AT ALL in these.
@@HopefulNihilist Lol you thought you solved an aspect of the moveset, it turned out to be wrong and you flipped the table instead of re-evaluating
Bayle's retreat into firebreath is actually good when it happens, you chase him down and get a way longer opening in return while he's stuck doing the breath. But I agree if you can't manage catch up it's kind of cheap to be cheated out of an opening. Rellana does a similar thing where she backs off into a spellcast but that's also an opening if you just chase her down anyway.
As for the combos having multiple RNG ways to go literally why is that bad? You want to guaranteed know the next 10 seconds of a boss's movements based purely on the first twitch of their muscles? No thanks... It's much more fun to at the first sign of movement be aware of all the possibilities and be ready for each one no matter how it shakes out. As for knowing when a combo will end, I have no problems with that on Bayle I'm not sure what you mean. Like he can double bite, or he can double bite into a rising headbutt. To avoid that, just wait a split second to see if he does the optional headbutt and attack him if he doesn't.
I love the feeling of slowly whittling down the gaps in my knowledge of responses, I'm at the point now where I can respond decently to anything Bayle can throw at me and I could probably no hit it if I spent a couple hours. The only sus bit is the nuke attack where you have to just feel the timing of the AOE. I can do it but I end up getting in my own head about it and mess up the more times it happens
I personally never had an issue with the delayed attacks--I can see where other people might--but I never did. I just learned to dodge when they attacked rather than dodge when they started to attack. I ended up using the delays to get damage in or heal. Honestly, it'd say the delays make the game more easy with how often they allow me to finish off the boss when they should've killed me
I'm glad someone is finally bringing this up. All the way back during initial Elden Ring release, Margit's hold into an instant full speed and strength slam was always jarring to me coming from Dark Souls. Elden Ring threw the semi-realism in how bosses move completely out the window.
Once you cast off the ego-driven desire to be able to show off in the new game with your experiences in the older ones, it becomes much more fun
Trust me I was the exact same way. I would always complain about elden ring's undynamic animations. But as my opinion on Elden Ring has changed I realise it's the opposite! While dark souls 3's actual hitboxes come out at more predictable intervals, the animation fluidity is so much worse! Having to learn each new boss instead of having skill carry across means you don't get to steamroll everything just because you played the older games. Which I suppose is a bad thing if you wanted to do that...
Least delayed attack in Elden ring is all I was thinking throughout the dlc 😂
This genuinely sounds like a skill issue 😭😭😭
I didn't even notice that DS1/2 might have delayed attack because the problem for me since I tried anything from DS3 and above wasn't the one delayed attack. In DS1/2 if some enemies had alternative patterns to confuse you to roll early or too late, at least it was well telegraphed and it would be 1 delayed attack, separated from their other moveset which could be 3 regular combo attacks. The worst would be in the DS2 DLCs and those would still be managable. Like the fume knight will do the slower attack but sometimes surprise you with a finishing of a little thrust with his smaller sword. I also like in fume knight that much slower slow swing that is beautiful and you might roll at the exact time to avoid it and feels good. But when this happens you know it and it's separated from the other attacks.
The problem since DS3 and beyond is that the mix of slow/mid/fast/grab/variations of small/big weapons and endless barage of combos, I don't know anymore and can't predict when to avoid what. Everything is so chaotic and mix together. It's not even the speed of the game or that one delayed attack that you can kinda know. It's that they are all mixed together. I am playing DS3 for the second time because I couldn't like the game first time. I came back from DS2 which is considered horrible thinking I will like DS3 more and I couldn't like it. Most times if I finish a boss I don't feel like I learned something, I feel like I somehow rolled at random times and survived or got hit many times I didn't want to and managed to heal without the boss punishing me (which is also random, you don't know when the compos and and you don't know if you run away if they punish you from distance or should you drink estus in front of those huge bosses?). Something in DS3 doesn't work for me.
And the only reason I enjoy Elden Ring more at this moment is because if you explore the whole area around and finish the mini bosses in the caves and do all things and upgrade weapons and vigor and also use spirit asses, then suddenly Margit becomes extremely easy, like the first time I didn't do that and went directly I was like wtf I am playing this shit for 50 times and keep dying. The second playthrough were I overlevelled and got some high upgraded bleed weapon, I enter the arena terrified, I give him few hits and see some big chunks of health and also his hits took much less. Now the thing is, in ER too, I never felt like I learned the bosses. I never felt like I actually understand the attack patterns, it's so chaotic mixed with delayed and fast and after-compos (like you feel after 3-5 compos you have a window of opportunity, and he does a little thrust with his second weapon and be like where did that come from, I thought you finished?) that I only beat ER bosses because I over-leveled and used sprit asses, not because I actually learned the bosses.
I have a breeze playing classic DS1/2 because now I can roll around boss attacks like a breeze, I feel like I've learned and mastered the enemy and boss attacks. In DS3 and above I feel bad even if I progress in the game, like I learned nothing.
I just don’t get your conclusion that “delayed attacks are the norm and you have to admit that is bad”. Why is that bad, it’s just different. It is harder and that was the design philosophy they approached this game with. It doesn’t support the same aggressive playstyle you liked from the original games, but that’s because it’s a different game. Just because something is changing doesn’t make it inherently bad. I do get your argument that sometimes they feel unnatural, but it really is just stylization, Messmer can jump in the air and float for ten seconds while he unleashes a barrage, it’s just cool fantasy stuff it’s not all meant to look real. I’m just not on board with the idea that having to spend a few attempts to learn what a boss is doing is cheap and bad, it’s just a different way to play than the old souls games where you could just react to everything. Even now, once you learn that the game is going to throw delayed attacks at you, you really can react to a lot of it, you learn to watch when the weapon moves towards you instead of watching the windup, it’s different but it’s just how the game works, it’s not inherently bad.
That's not what I said, I said they're the norm and you gotta admit they're overdone. Pretty sure I never used the word "bad" in the video either, at most "misguided" or stuff like that, because I understand this is still a subjective thought
@@BertoPlease I just don’t think they’re overdone, if we’re gonna be caught up on somantics then whatever. I still standby exactly what I said if you replace when I said bad with overdone. I just think it’s the norm now, it was a gimmick before and now it’s not, it’s how this game decided to be difficult. You might not like it but it is not objectively overdone like you are saying, it’s just the norm for this game
@@aaronmiller1009 how are they not overdone when damn near every enemy in Elden ring has them?
@@justifano7046 because I don’t see why delayed attacks are any different from normal attacks, they’re just how the enemy is attacking. Just because everything has it doesn’t mean it’s too much, it’s just how it is. I personally think delayed attacks add some much needed challenge and are a benefit as a whole
@@aaronmiller1009 so is elden ring the only difficult Fromsoft game to you?
Because their other titles don't have this obnoxious and goofy looking mechanic yet are still considered challenging.
Idk there are some decent indicators of when to dodge these delayed attacks-- Margit for example, his phase 1 delayed attack which was featured in this video, can be dodged reliably if you know what to look for; his elbow on his sword arm will bend right before he attacks. This is where you dodge. It will always work. Same with Romina- her attack where she jumps up above you and slams down onto you, if you watch her closely, there’s a small sparkle that appears the moment before she attacks which again is when you dodge and you will almost always dodge it. Obviously, the boss AI can be troublesome and may even seem unfair with its adaptability (PROMISED CONSORT RADAHN CHAINING COMBOS TOGETHER THAT YOU HAVE PREVIOUSLY NEVER SEEN HIM DO BEFORE AFTER HOURS OF LEARNING HIS MOVESET) but of course this bs can be mitigated with enough damage, poise damage and knowledge to bait out easier to punish/ dodge attacks
Yeah man I agree 100% with you and I'll even add to it. Due to the over abundance of these ridiculous and oftentimes comic delayed attacks, the overagressiveness plus huge health bars and roll catching combos with little openings, I feel like playing this game has become a chore to me. Case in point, most people resort to greatshield and thrusting sword or spear to even finish the game, avoiding the entire mechanic of having to guess when to dodge and when to attack entirely. The cherry on top for me are the over the top anime style weapons and focus on weapon art spam. Between this and the boss designs I feel like FromSoftware games are not made for people like me anymore. They desecrated everything I loved about the Souls series. It's sad to say but I think I won't be playing their next title, unless they go back with alot of these designs, which I'm pretty sure they won't.
you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about the game mechanics, "lots of delayed attacks" and "little openings" can't be true at the same time, the delayed attacks ARE your openings. Someone else here said it best, in earlier souls series people learned to attack after the enemy attacks, if you play exactly like that in Elden Ring you will struggle because now you sometimes have to attack BEFORE the enemy attacks. I don't see that as a bad thing, just another thing you need to learn.
In Elden Ring 2 the first boss is a dog with instant hit 12 hit combos with no punish windows and delayed ones that start with the exact animation of the instant hitters but then wait until you panic roll or attack to punish you, dealing percentage damage equal to 200% of your hp and the leftover damage is subtracted from your rune level instead. The dog also heals instead of taking damage every time you hit it unless you found the super secret sword of blarney which can only be acquired by hitting a wall 200 times, speaking to the npc hidden behind it exactly 3 times and then reloading your game
The Sword of Blarney also only scales with faith and at max upgrade its scaling is D tier and it lowers your Vigor by 5
You‘re right. Personally I still think Midra is a great boss because this delayed style fits his theme. Same with Pontiff but besides that you’re completely right. Also I absolutely despise Margit as a first boss. He’s way harder than most of the other earlygame bosses and his attacks aren’t fun to dodge. As you said, it teaches the players to just learn the timing instead of using reflexes. Gundyr, I miss you.
The one thing that genuinely gets me upset is when a boss runs at you, is currently at your location, and KEEPS RUNNING IN PLACE. Brother, you're already here, you don't need to keep running forward 😭😭
I think Asmongold said it best. From overdid the delayed attacks so much that it doesn’t feel like we’re facing off against the bosses anymore. We’re just facing off against the developers.
That is the dumbest line of logic I’ve ever heard
I do agree. The delayed attacks started to get pretty tiresome in ER
Bro tried to make a point, and then named all my favorite bosses
I'm not going to lie, Midra among all of the every other dlc bosses easily conquered my heart as my personal top tier souls boss fight i have ever experienced in every existing souls games i've been hoarding up, i'm not afraid to define it as an actual spectacular masterpiece of a battle under every single point of view.
But even then, i gotta admit that this dude's definitely right, designing every single boss encounter to be as much aggressive as you can manage and as well making them do nothing but fill the battlefield with delayed attacks after delayed attacks, you'll inevitably end to strip them of their uniqueness as each other fight will literally feel as the exact same thing but with slightly different mechanics.
No, the fact that Midra's moveset consists solely in delayed attacks doesn't bother me, i think that figuring out his timing and attack patterns is genuinely fun.
But when all of the other bosses literally do the same thing as Midra does, then there's a fundamental issue with the new boss fight design philosophy From Software decided to adopt.
You're100% correct in saying that they only exist to make sure you don't first-try the bosses. That's it. They want you on twitter and reddit and other public forums talking about how many tries it took, so they take what might be an intuitive attack and give it unnatural timing so that it'll hit most players the first time. Once you learn the timings, they become just like any other attack. It's just that now, you have to spend more time memorizing the move sets. And the stronger your muscle memory from past games, the harder this is to do.
I get that they had to make these games harder somehow and I understand that conceptually there's a point in punishing instinct and rewarding repetitiveness and memorization, but some (if not most) of the delayed attack animations in Elden Ring have this "gotcha" thing to them which is honestly kinda irritating.
Godrick holds his attacks even longer than Margit he just has more distinct animations. The delayed attack style does make phase 2 of Morgott's fight where he swings a lot faster and more fluidly. Also Melania deserves an honorable mention since she can legit actually animation cancel her combos to suddenly switch to another one. It's not delayed but the suddenness makes it feel kind of similar. Switching to watching a boss's swinging arm works a lot better. It's easy to reaction roll based off the arm movement for delayed attacks.
While I don’t have problems with delayed attacks mechanically, as a story, some can be really immersion breaking.
You have Mohg, clear and natural delayed attacks based on the weapon he wields.
And then you have Margit, holding his cane for an unnatural time in the air because mechanics go first in the battle, rather then the logic and lore behind his powers.
And many others, like Godfrey and Radagon.
This breaks the roleplay that this a living world with characters and stakes, and just turns into a game with A.I built to fight especially against you.
Like normal radhan (that is mistyped idc) you see his bs delays and you think oh OK it's a slow boss, that's neat, and then bro hits you 70 times in 5 seconds
Delayed attacks used to be a rare thing to catch you off guard. Now it's the norm and everyone does it for everything. I wouldn't be shocked if for ER2 every enemy and boss has 12 hit combos, always aggressive, AoE on every hit, perfect tracking on every hit so on so forth. And they'll probably kill you in two to three hits and be even bigger health sponges. Cuz it's gotta be harder right? If it's not harder than consort Radahn then it's not following the evolution that fromsoft has always done. Delay ring 2 with super drawn out but also fast combos for nearly a minute are the future logically, and I hate that...
I just hate it when people complain about delayed attacks, while also crying "there's no openings". My brother in Christ, THOSE ARE YOUR OPENINGS
They don't have the brains for it. They think DS3 is good mechanically.
@@DrnMontemayor Bait used to be believable
It's interesting to me to see Midra brought forward as a prime example, because of all the bosses in Elden Ring he was one which I found rather intuitive to learn most of the attacks on. Compared to most bosses with delayed attacks (even Mohg) his attacks are a lot less snappy when they go off and after the wind-up/delay there's still a sweeping motion to most of them that comes before the actual swing.
The main problem I had with Midra is the same problem I have with most of Elden Ring's later bosses (Mohg being a solid exception) in that they move too fast. Like literally I feel like for so many bosses and some elite enemies they'd feel completely fair and even look more natural if they were at 90-70% speed for their animations.
The fact that when you die it's uncommon for the enemy to pull off less than 2 more attacks before you finish dying speaks for itself.
I can't say I agree. With DS3 making rolls so free, the enemies adapted to that trend by being more flaily, longer combos and more precise tracking to hit you with but I think you could get away with so much by just panic rolling, it wasn't enough. DS3 is the game that made shields feel irrelevant, the game where you rolled, it's the game that made sure everyone understood that even the older games were easier if you rolled than if you blocked, it just wasn't as obvious before. They could have reverted to making dodges worse in some ways (limit i-frames à la DS2, limit the directions when locked on à la DeS/DS, drastically increase the damage of a failed dodge à la Bloodborne) but instead from soft left them in the same state as DS3 and instead tailored the enemies to force reactions out of you. I think it fits the basics of the games pretty well. And makes shields more valuable again.
They were never games were you were meant to be aggressive, they were reactive games where enemies dictate the pace of the fights. I'd argue Elden Ring is the one out of them all that rewards aggressivity the most through stance-breaking. It's surprising how often you can bring enemies to their knees when you sneak in a rolling attack in some of their delayed attacks. Midra is used as an example of a fight solely made of delayed attacks (should this be better than bosses that mix-up fast and slow attacks, given what was said prior in the video ?) who can be absolutely destroyed by being aggressive due to how fast he breaks. Hell, I can add to the "use a shield, it's good for your bones" argument that guard counters make shields genuinely great tools to play aggressively with.
Seriously tho. I know it's damn-near a meme for FS fan to just use "use the tools instead of complaining !" but just use a shield. Just a medium one. It's just training wheel for the timing since blocking is still worse than dodging because the stamina drain can be intense -- unless you use the deflecting tear or stack up every possible buff to your blocking, which again, I know using the tools doesn't magically solve the issue of the attack timing feeling wrong but that's so many options to mitigate the perceived problem.
There's also been a clear shift in the boss design philosophy coupled with the level design. The challenge used to be : can you reach the boss with enough healing left after running through the level to erach it ? But now the checkpoitns are right next to the bosses. They just shifted the difficulty from one spot to the next. The downside is that checkpoint and shortcut placement felt far more meaningful than it does in Elden Ring, yet even with that nugget of appreciation I cannot say I ever liked running back to a boss. It bored me. But struggling against a boss ? If I'm having fun learning the moves (which I don't always, waterfowl can suck my dong), I'll gladly take it. It's subjective what is fun and not obviously, but from my perspective, I don't think delayed attacks and their frequency is a flaw. I think it's a good balancing act to mitigate how good they made dodges.
I don't disagree with everything otherwise, I do agree that the bosses have a mold now, especially in the DLC where there isn't a single more creative fight that asks for something novel except maybe the Lamenter ? Whose gimmicks I still don't understand at all... I wish there were more creative fights, fights that require you to think a little more and rely less on the typical "learn the moves then punish !" formula.
Honestly Elden Ring fixed so many of the issues with Dark Souls 3 where the roll button was the only way to play and almost every boss fight was about abusing s. Elden Ring mixes up the combat but including jumps and crouching and making shields actually good with gaurd counters
@@JellyJman I mean, almost nothing changed. Jumping has i-frames and dodge is still great. Plus shield playstyle has always been i thing. When you "jump" an attack, its just your entire lower body being invincible.
@@sweetbabyrayso5262 shield playstyle was not a thing in Dark Souls 3. The only two shields in that game are shields you get near the very end of the game. Black Knight Shield and Lothric Knight Shield, the rest suck so much and can easily be gaurd broken
@@sweetbabyrayso5262that's a very "person who doesn't play the game saw a video about jumping s" take. It's not incorrect, but it's not as simple as what you make it out to be.
And it did change a lot. From who you're encouraged to use more than R1, mild side-strafe, and roll to dodge every single thing with no thought. No good positioning, no adapting. ER doesn't encourage that so when you're finally asked to play a videogame, you claim it's a "flaw."
@@sweetbabyrayso5262 Disagree i played ds3 right after elden ring dlc and i only used r1 and i just beat every boss doing that exactly r1 spam. On elden ring you got wayy more mixups for attacks and how you think of it. The game isn't ds3 or DES or bloodborne its elden ring. You can not like it or like it but its different then those games the whole game has lots of delayed attacks since the beginning of base game.
Your video made it really clear to me that delayed attacks are not the problem.
I observed your fight against Midra and I have to say... I think I would call him out for only two attacks with delay. The first is the jumping attack when he bums the sword into the ground, the second when is the last hit of his 5 hit combo.
In general I think Midra just has slowerish moves. Now we compared this to a boss with no delayed attacks. Or lets just say Midra has a little faster moveset in general. Would I like the boss without delayes attacks more? Would I like the second version of Midra more?
My answer is no. I don't think delayed attacks are a problem at all. I just think that Fromsoft became "better" with their boss design. The bosses have more advanced moves than before and also more delayed once. And yes, some bosses might have more delayed attacks than other onces. Still, I don't think it is bad. Some delayed attacks might be really stupid yes. But this doesn't get the game down for me.
Changing the boss design from what it is to the average reaction based boss design would not make a better boss.