Criticism is fair.

Might be a weird criticism but some of the bosses have so many particle effects going around that I am sometimes confused what is even happening.

The only two bosses I did not enjoy this dlc were Hippo and Gaius and I think its entirely down to the arenas we find them in Gaius especially since its just annoying fight of getting rushed down, and wombo comboed into the dirt or chasing him around for the next 5 minutes as he rides around.

I've had fights with him end instantly because I got knocked over at the first and pinned against the wall

Same reasoning for the Hippo except that's all the camera working against you

My criticism is that there is too much visual noise in bosses design, many attacks just don’t have enough visual information about their range or moves, you go by the errors/deaths not by just observing the attack itself. Some hitboxes are also just plain stupid and illogical, can’t just go „ok, this doesn’t look like it will hit me from behind” and it totally does. Also bosses tracking and doing 180s in milliseconds is sooo boring and stupid.

I feel like they should have made the deflecting crystal tear a talisman instead, so you could always have the mechanic available. Perfect blocking helps so much with a lot of the boss ability spam, but 90% of the people aren’t going to use it because they probably don’t even know it exists or don’t consider the duration worthwhile.

The DLC enemies are super aggressive, which has led to shield builds being the most popular; every co-op summon has at least one person hiding behind a fingerprint because it is absolutely the best way to deal with the boss’ hyper aggression.

A deflecting talisman would have opened up so much more build variety which I feel like the content was balanced around.

The only boss I would consider excessively hard is final boss phase 2. Every other boss has been manageable at worst, whereas that second phase is manageable at best for the audience that's come with Elden Ring, or even for me who has played every non-exclusive souls game for probably a few thousand hours altogether.

The only boss I have complaints about is that mounted guy, you know who I am talking about. His hit-boxes are unreal. That was the only boss I resorted to using a shield against.

I definitely think it's a fair criticism to say that Fromsoftware constantly increasing the difficulty, in some sort of arms race with the hardcore no-hit run YouTubers, is a worrying direction to be going in. Souls games have always been difficult, but that wasn't the main appeal. The appeal was the exploration, cool fights and weird lore. The difficulty level was already perfect, just leave it like that. But now they seem to be focusing on the difficulty as the main selling point and cranking it up all the time.

theres only really ONE issue with these bosses and its always the same

They barely stop attacking. They sometimes punich you for getting 2 hits in with a dagger. its that outrageous.. thats why Rellana and the Lion beast are my 2 least favorite bosses in the DLC, when i saw that the pretiscent knight had a similar issue mid fight i just summoned my mimic and said "fuck it , if youre unfair, im unfair"

Can we stop jerking each other off already

no

World is too big for its own good. Abyssal wood in particular and to a lesser exten Ruin of Rauh. Also less than ideal enemy variety.

We’re all under Miquella’s charm; that’s why we are blindly loving the DLC and can’t see the flaws. Break that great rune then come ask us.

I definitely feel negative towards the bosses I had to fight that summon or bring extra guys to fight, like the second Ghost Dragon and the Death Rite Bird, because most mobs can kill you with a complete combo.

Also the camera is a point to work on indeed. Senessax sucks and a lot of that comes from the camera that does not show him for 80% of the fight, unless you actively fight against it. And I love Bayle, but there’s no greater death sentence then the camera losing him during one his flight combos.

Honestly OP, just save yourself the headache and don’t even bother with it. Trust me. There are some people out there that do want to discuss these types of things, but anything you say will just be refuted/nitpicked to the bone.

When people played BB and struggled, they don’t just say stop using X for this boss, that’s a bad build, just use X instead. The cool thing about that game was that a lot of the weapons are viable and never felt like you “needed” to change from Blade of Mercy to say Moonlight Greatsword. You learn their unique moveset and make it work.

But this ER though of course. And, this is coming from someone who generally liked/was okay with close to 90% of the SOTE bosses. There are a lot of times I praised From’s good boss design that seemingly improved on earlier renditions of their work. But there were also times I criticized aspects that I felt could be stepping too far in the wrong direction, for the sake of pushing the envelope of difficulty further and further perpetually, even at the expense of what is still “fun” and “fair” to the player.

I’m sorry you want to talk criticism, but the game is incredibly popular and there are a lot of criticisms mixed in with overwhelming complaints. As a result, people are probably just tired of hearing any of it. Maybe wait for things to settle/calm down, but yes, I get the frustration of wanting to just having a normal discussion on boss design, whether it’s good or bad.

I loved most of the bosses so far, especially Rellana and Messmer - despite being difficult they were really enjoyable fights, learning their movesets and dodge timings was satisfying af. But honestly, fuck the hippo at the gates of Shadow keep and fuck whoever thought that putting this monstrosity in the tiny room was a good decision. Fighting these things in the open world is ok, but this one in particular is just awful, giving me sorta Capra Demon PTSD, but with a worse camera. Saying it as a person who wasn't irritated even by Commander Gaius, the hippo really made my blood boil. Otherwise, 9/10 (for now, I'm on my way to the final boss)

Commander Gaius and the last boss are the only two bosses that feel unfair, at least to me. The rest are punishing but it never feels like I have no recourse whatsoever.

You are right, thought, criticism is fair, overall. It just loses some meaning when people don't do the things you are supposed to do to ease what they are complaining about. This goes in particular for the shadow tree blessings. Some people insist on throwing themselves against bosses with very low blessings and get thoroughly trashed and then criticize the game for being too hard.

The only bosses that seem remotely unfair (to me at least) are gaius and the final one. Bayle is hard, but fair. Most others were only hard because i fought at like 1 blessing before going to explore more

This. I think the greater offender is the second phase of the last boss. I beat the entire game many times, beat all bosses in the DLC without needing to change my build (great katana, no shield, without summons), but second phase Radahn was the only that made me say "fuck it" and respec into Fingerprint shield + bloodfiend fork. Is good seeing people doing no hit or one shots of this boss, but this don't excuse the design. Remember, people can do the same thing on Godskin Duo or the many bad bosses on the base game, but the fact that no hit and one shot of them exists don't make them good.

Somebody has to say it. The amount of dickering that I’ve seen this past week is insane to the point people get mad defensive if you have any criticism of the game

What bosses are you specifically referring to with artificial difficulty?

Imo most of them are pretty well designed, and I have rarely felt that I died because a move was cheap (there are exceptions of course). I enjoyed figuring out how to avoid attacks (dodge direction, should I jump, can I side step this).

That being said, the last boss can fuck off; as epic as the fight is, I did not enjoy it one bit

My problem is the bosses that just never stop with far reaching combo attacks that need to be perfectly dodged. It just becomes stupid. Some might find them to be "fun", but I don't have 24/7 to devote to non-optional bosses. Do that with optional bosses.

I think people need to drop the words "unfair" and "artificial difficulty" from their vocabulary and better articulate what they mean. For example, let's take a look at Rellana. There's nothing Rellana does that fits either of these definitions. The closest thing I got to this is one time she pulled out her magic swords and then did her moon attack immediately afterwards. I'm not sure if there's any solution to this. I either dodge the swords and die to moons, or tank the swords, get staggered, and still get killed by the moons. Other than that, she's not unfair.

However, there are absolutely some issues a person might have from a subjective view.

Some of her attacks are hard to tell what exactly is hitting you, especially the first one in a combo.

It can feel weird to get hit on some of her combos even though you seemingly dodged it correctly.

Her phase 2 rapid moonveil move is very awkward to dodge. I spam dodge and sometimes it works, but this is only with decent distance from her. If she decides to use it close (even though close should trigger the much easier to dodge flame tornado) it is very difficult to dodge. I might even say impossible (although I'm sure it isn't).

Her phase 2 combo additions are not easy to understand. Her phase 2 also suffers from the additional element effects making it a bit difficult to see what she's doing next.

Her phase 2 can also be quite unforgiving, with mistakes leading to death much more easily than phase 1. This can lead to a very tedious learning process. Phase 2 changes what were once safe dodging, forcing the player to unlearn muscle memory they gained from the first phase.

Someone might look at my list and not agree with it at all, which is perfectly understandable. I've seen criticism for Isshin for example that I don't agree with it, but I understand come from a subjective view.

Conclusion: People just need to articulate better, or in some cases just understand their "issue" is completely subjective (or in some cases just not correct). Also people just need to start being honest and just use the word "fun". I have revisited both Rellana and Dancing Lion as a summon since beating them. I have gained a greater appreciation for Rellana, meanwhile my opinion has actually decreased on Dancing Lion. I won't say Dancing Lion is impossible or unfair, I however did not have much fun leanrinits second phase, not do I enjoy fighting the camera just as much as the enemy.

Just look at the sub for 5 seconds there's plenty of criticism idk why people act like there isn't

The only criticism I have with the game is the plot and last boss.

So much build up regarding what exactly is Miquella doing in the Land of Shadow, just to build up to Radahn.

And people say "Lore wise it makes sense" which is ridiculous because the lore can be whatever the writers want it to be and make up whatever reason they wanted.

Mechanically the bosses are more aggressive and it takes a little bit of adjusting, but nothing that can't be overcome with a little perseverance.

Won't excuse the camera issues - those are apparent with large bosses in small arenas.

My only criticism is that the way they've made the map layout is really fucking with the way I like to explore because in vanilla ER I could always tell which path was to progress the area/dungeon/story and which way was the sidepath that would lead to some loot/secret boss/etc..

I would take the side path then wrap around back to the main path and complete the area. Nice and tidy.

But now whenever I take a side path I end up in a completely different adventure. Like when I was doing Mesmers castle I took a side path to check for extra loot and ended up in a scary forest full of madness and rats and worse things, then I ended up in another castle and fought a completely different boss just to then realize he had nothing to do with the quest I was originally on and I've somehow made it all the way to the south shores of the map and my brain is like "wait what?" And I have to fast travel all the way back to Mesmers castle just to find another side path that takes me on another adventure and now I'm in some ruins fighting rot bugs and the whole time I know that I SHOULD be enjoying this exploration but I can't get over the feeling that "I shouldn't be here yet, I should be here later" and that creates a sense of anxiety instead of the wonder of discovery.

this isn't a criticism about the game by the way, I'm criticizing my brain.

What criticisms do you have on boss design?

Some people start frothing at the mouth when they see any criticism of a Fromsoft product, it's kinda crazy.

I think all of the bosses are fine apart from the camera problems on some of them. Fromsoft souls gsmes always had that problem but it's especially bad with the more giant bosses and their erratic moves. The one exception to all of this is the final boss, which I know can be learned an all that, but it's the only one I busted out a spirit ash because it just seemed like such an insurmountable task.

I beat my head on the first phase for hours, even getting a good grasp on it, but as soon as I entered the 2nd phase I was greeted with so much bullshit I didn't know how to handle that I always died in seconds. I gave up because I never got any real experience fighting the second phase and that was incredibly frustrating.

I am replaying the dlc right now , i don’t even feel there is artificial difficulty on anything other than radahn phase 2 and gaius’s charge , if they patch that undodgeable double sweep into cross sweep and gaius’s charge attack they would be 10x better , maybe also tone down the flashbangs in radahn’s phase 2 , other than that all the bosses are very manageable

Tbh some times it felt like you could wasp boss positions at anytime in the game and you wouldn't notice, they all seemed designed to be the final boss, like dude rellana is basically Malenia level, and that was considered to be the hardest fromsoftwer boss ever

Only thing I can think of that I wish would happen is enemies in general have some sort of stamina they have to manage so they can't just pummel you. I know some are gods, but a lot of enemies aren't. And it's silly to get next to know breathing room dealing with a dude who's barely taller than you just spinning around you infinitely

Anyone else thinks the world is empty?

I think it's fair to criticize elements of boss design, various mechanics, etc. But I don't see hardly any of that, really. The most valid criticisms around boss design that I've seen have to do with visual clutter and certain nearly unbeatable move sets. By and large, though, I see a lot of complaining about bosses being "unfair", while never defining what fair would mean, and bosses being "overtuned", while never describing what that means or what a proper tuning would like like, or that bosses are not "fun", which is completely subjective. I also see a lot of veteran DS players bitching about ER "casuals" and making ridiculous claims that using core game mechanics like summons, shields, magic/incants, status effects, and certain AoWs is "playing the game wrong."

What I dont like about the DLC:

• The areas are empty. Beautiful, but completely empty many a times. They could've reduced the size of the dlc by half and it would be a better experience imo.

• the story is way worse than that of the basegame

• the bosses have a few problems:

1. the camera on many fights is absolutely awful

2. bosses have way too many attacks, which makes it much harder to learn a moveset as many attacks have very similar combos that end differently and makes it much harder to react

3. the aggression of bosses coupled with their ability to jump half the arena with basic attacks is just annoying, barely any time to observe / heal

   1. too long combos, the base game already had the problem in the latter half of feeling very unfair when it comes to how many attacks you get in vs how many a boss does. This is at least twice as bad in the dlc

Overall I enjoyed the dlc and beat it without too much trouble, only radahn gave me a hard time. If they reduced the areas, toned down on boss aggression and their reach I'd enjoy the dlc way more. The damage numbers are fine, the attacks are fine, its just not very fun beating a boss atm - feels more like a chore

I'd go out on a limb and say all the remembrance boss fights have been cranked up to the max, the ai is always overly aggressive, I play with spirit ashes (because I'm trash) but even they can seem to take any of the aggro from the bosses, and everything is super quick, it's hard to learn the combo's, field and dungeon boss's I've no problem with i think mostly because they don't tend to have much hp compared to remembrance, I've got through most the remembrance boss now, and they've all taken me at least and hour + to defeat, im just stuck on phase 2 radahn at the moment and that... That phase just sucks

disregarding criticism as nothing is what makes the pokémon franchise one of the worst developed games on Nintendo Switch and i'm afraid this fanbase will do the same to From's games and reward them for their mistakes.

Of course the DLC is fucking incredible, but the scadufragments are nowhere as intuitive to find as a golden seed or chalice, and for some reason you need up to three to level up one time, so by the end you'll have no clue where you missed the rest of them.

Another criticism of mine is how lame their bosses design are (COMBATWISE). Once again, not only do they have unpunishable comboes, but the thing i hate the most is their obscene amount of passive poise. Why does the naked skinny headless man got more poise than a full bullgoat player? Why can't it stagger without riposte like an actually good boss like Gael? Why does the game incentive so much L2 (one of the few things that can poise break consistently) spam and punish light/heavy attacks?

Too hard isn't my criticism, artificial difficulty is. There are a lot of well designed challenging and most importantly fun bosses in the dlc and then there are some that I never wanna fight again and I don't think that's a good thing in a video game. As hard as she is I like fighting Malenia but there are some bosses in the dlc I legitimately will never fight again because it's just not fun to

Boss openings are too short and attack frequency is too high. Bosses pigeon hole you into using certain things.

Well...Before you crucify me I think DLC has the best area design in any game I played and some bosses are incredible cool (Mesmer, scorpion lady, orphan of knight, madness guy, Bayle to name my favs) but some are garbage that are artificial hard by throwing shit ton of aoe etc.

Solid 9/10 from me couse I love the series but beign fair I dont blame people for bad reviews and leaving.

1. Bosses doesnt give a damn about spacing and dancing around them. They suck you in, dash in constantly just to jump off.
2. AOE AOE AOE AOE. Remember times when you were rewarded for circling around to find a dead zone? Nope.
3. Weird hitboxes especially on big raider fight.
4. Final boss was no rewarding, it was no fun clusterfuck of animations - when I beat him I didnt have dopamine rush like after mesmer or renalla. It was just relief that its over. And quite frankly I was just lucky he did combos that I could actually see with all this bullshit on screen.
   
5. Overall, I think they run out of ideas and overdid Radahn. It felt like moded boss, with all this bullshit flying around you.
6. Input reading on flash is cheap.

My biggest problems with this DLC are the following:

1. The boss design. Specifically the defensiveness you have to adopt if you want to fight the bosses legit. The dodge to hit ratio is 5:1, and that is not a fun playstyle imo. But if you want to play solo and without shields and parries, you HAVE to play like that against every boss. They all have the same combos, aggressiveness, mobility, gap closers, input reads, delayed attacks, roll catches, tracking, visual clutter (that sometimes tanks performance too), and they all transition into phase two with the same area wide AOEs. It's just the same fight again and again.
2. The scadutree blessings system. I like rewarding exploration, I do. But these blessings are absolutely not optional. Without them you are doing an unintentional challenge run. And they are too numerous, too spread out and too hidden. You straight up need a guide for many of them, unless you just happen to stumble upon them. Others are locked behind pretty tough bosses.
3. The map. While the areas are beautiful and the atmosphere is top notch, there is nothing to find. Hope you like crafting and I hope you forgot to collect your bell bearings because cookbooks and low level smithing stones are the only things on the menu.
4. Reskins. There are hardly any new enemies. There are reused bosses from the main game and even reused bosses from the DLC itself (and they are much worse the second time around). Two years for reskins.
5. The final boss is a huge disappointment, both as a fight and lore wise.

I hope these criticisms sound legit to you because I sure do think they are legit criticisms.

I think that a lot of the complaints stem from the classic fromsoft camera issues. They need to fix their camera if they want to have a million particles in your face with every attack (messmer, manor boss, final boss, and the lion all had this issue)

I haven't been struggling in the least against any boss. Might just be about how much you truly learn the games thru Ur playthroughs but the most tries I've had given against a boss has been around 20 or so on the first dlc playthrough. The difficulty hasn't felt artificial. The only annoyance has been the abundance of particle effect on the last boss fight. Other than that I have felt like the game has a spike in difficulty. But not that much different as of for example going from the mountaintops to the consecrated snowfield and the haligtree

You can't defend the Lamenter boss you just can't thats just abhorrent boss design okay it's a dungeonboss so not too important but feels like waisted potential could have put something better there tbh

Im not going to act like I can spot truely good boss design or not,im sure theres people who think a boss is balanced and then another who thinks its completely off. I thought the Rellana fight was amazing,took me forever and it didnt bother me at all to keep dying but Messmer wasnt nearly as fun but ive seen others say they really like that one.

I fought that fucking pink scorpion person thing last night and holy fuck I hated that boss so much,think I got it on my 2nd try but holy shit was it a boring fight,the thing was hard to hit but it also missed so much

If this is the boss design they are gonna go with from now. They gotta optimize their game and fix that damn camera. I haven't had this much camera issues in any other souls game. Avatar's thorns completeley block your vision even if you succesfully avoid all of them.

personally i loved most of the bosses. only one that i have a real complaint against is the final boss 2nd phase. his first phase is perfectly fair and balanced. nothing over the top of crazy, but a good design. they definitely went flashy with a lot of stuff with this dlc, but that personally didn't bother me. except when it comes to the casters. poor int/faith casters get garbage for this dlc. spells look great and flashy, but hit like a noodle. hope their spells get buffed

Putrecent knight made me kinda mad with how spazztastic moveset, but turns out trying a different weapon and damage type made him super trivial.

Its refreshing when trial and error shows you a way to handle a boss super easily.

Rakshasa in the eastern masoleum can eat a heaping bag of phallic objects for resisting any form of stagger.

Honestly I think Metyr is the coolest boss fight by far.

Which bosses do this? I found that with summons and mimic tear and Skadu fragments i am basically steamrolling it with intelligence build.

It was hard for me to accept that over some boss attacks i just cant roll over, but have to jump which in the end ended up being quite fun and visually niice.

I feel like I had less issues with camera compared to the base game. I loathe ancient dragons because locking on is utterly pointless. It's just not a fun fight for me.

One complaint I do have though is there only being the bare minimum scooby snacks to level up. Even if I check a map now, there's no quick way to find my missing 6. There's also certain zones that I wish had more in them, like the abysmal forest feels way too empty.

Yea… at least in terms of ability/effect spam i can see how that is certainly irritating. The only redeeming thing that made bayle tolerable as a boss is that you can tank your way through his big hits that aren’t the grab with a good enough shield. Because otherwise i don’t see how you are supposed to be able to run out of the attack range on some of it without a good head start.

Most the bosses Ive had a good time with, but most second phases knock your attack time into 10% of what it already was. Bosses in the DLC are mostly waiting simulators, and it gets kinda boring pretty quickly. Even enemies like the fire knights just simply dont stop attacking.

Ive seen a slow rise of the Thrusting Shields in popularity, and I think thats because it allows you to be very aggresive while being equally defensive at the same time. I dont want to dodge attacks for 2 minutes straight that has a .1 second window. Oh you missed that window? Back to dodging.

Cant we introduce a flair seperating people using mimic and summons? I am eager to know who is talking. Its a totally different game with mimic and summons. I want to talk to people using no summons and mimic. Its okay to do that but i would filter out comments by people playing „the other playstyle“ game.

My only criticism is regarding wanting Godwin as a boss or some resolution with his story after us all talking about it since the dlc was announced, but that because I’m so enthralled with his story, which really only means it’s a good story so I guess I can’t really criticize.

I would disagree, the boss design seems fine to me- the only boss that is unfair remains as malenia with waterfowl- I haven’t finished all of them yet though

I have just started the dlc, the only boss ive encountered is not a boss I think, it's that giant at the start, and I can't do shit to it, but I'm really enjoying getting my ass smacked around.

I like the discovery aspect, I need to figure it out on my own, and when I don't want to discover it on my own I can summon people and watch them either die or do something truly amazing.

So far (although I'm just barely started) I have no complains

Might be a weird criticism, but I don't have enough fent to support my skill. Like, holy damn, it's not even hard, it's just straight ridiculous.

The golden hippo just pushed me so far into the wall that i could see his innards.

Difficulty and design is perfect to me. I want it to take an hour + to best bosses. I’m a masochist

My criticism is;

All yisser fools tryin to bonk the bosses stop.

I stand back and make my stick go pewpewpewpew.

Personally, I'm not quite at the point that I'd say I think the bosses are unfair or badly designed. Of course, I'm not done the DLC yet, so maybe my opinion will change later on. We'll see.

The real problem for me is the performance. I have an RX 7800XT and even on the lowest graphical settings, I can barely keep the game above 40 FPS. It's not my hardware; my GPU is barely cracking 60% usage, my CPU is hovering around only 40% usage and I'm not even hitting half my total RAM usage. The game's just horrendously optimised. If it actually utilised my system hardware properly, I'm sure it would run fine, but it doesn't. That's the key reason it's currently so frustrating to play for me. I'm getting eye-strain and headaches from the stuttering and attempting to time my inputs to, ya know, play the game properly, is nearly impossible. It's awful to play for the wrong reasons.

I'm thinking I'm just gonna stop until there's a major performance patch of some kind because, currently, it's actually unplayable.

So let me ask this. As far as difficulty is concerned, to those who are new or returning players: Did you complete the game in entirety (or mostly) and of higher level, or did you just defeat the two required bosses in order to access?

Agreed, camera struggles suck. Even out in the world I’ll try to lock onto something in my clear line of sight, but then it won’t lock and I miss my attack and get comboed into oblivion. That and the zoom thing.

The other problem I have is looking for items in the world and finding crap. I used to get excited seeing a legendary item glow, but I’ve found too many great ghost gloveworts. Even regular item glows, some are just string or bits of glass, makes finding items feel like a letdown most of the time and I hate it.

Fire knights bro

I still honestly find my only criticism of the game to be the Rebirth Tear system. I just want to be able to respec whenever I want

When I fight a tough boss I just want to be able to swap my build out for what i think will work

But instead I either just swap my weapons to the closest thing that I want to use that my current spec will allow

Or I have to spent a rebirth tear and fully commit to whatever that new build is for longer than I would wish. Would be nice to be able to build specific for each boss whenever I choose but it’s not thaaat bad imo

Not sure if there is way to buy more rebirth tears with runes but if there is that would alleviate my pain a little bit

I don't know how I managed to do the final boss because I still don't know how you dodge some of the attacks

I was talking with a friend and we agreed that because we essentially played the same game for 10 years the bosses must get really flashy and fast movesets to give players a challenge. Also we are fighting beings that have reached insane Power levels and can nuke you on command but our characters barely look like they can fight. This was fine in previos entries because It felt like you were fighting the enemies on the same ground.

I think the difficulty is fair. However, I see more and more that they are choosing spectacles over gameplay. I really did not like fps drops during some fights just because they wanna emphasize how epic the fight is. I also think Malenia is still their best boss design because it is more like a dance unlike majority of the dlc bosses where you have to wait out their very long attack chains.

This is the most sigma post I’ve seen

Compared to the original games, bosses have a way higher frequency of attacks, and have pushed the difficulty of winning with rolling to the extreme. You can't just roll one move and retaliate anymore. Yet you can also summon a mimic tear and shield poke for less stamina than rolling. It creates an awkward mismatch between what players think because it comes down to the rules they impose on themselves and what builds they use.

Its also a problem because if things are balanced for using summons, and you simply don't find that fun, then a casual player has to play on hard mode when what they actually want is simpler bosses. Its why Godfrey is often well liked.

Just making bosses having almost infinite health is not good game design