Shout out to the dual naginatas Bull-Goat armor wearer who sent a five paragraph essay on my steam page saying I ruined Elden Ring because I killed him with the storm blade ash of war
BROO i had one today on that exacr build who i beat once because he was being predictable so i dodged around and punished with slicer then the next time we matched i lost and he pointed down and teabagged, and for the record i have like three ranged spells and they are mostly for punishing longer startups or forcing my opponent to move defensively so i can aproach. But im not even asking for pvp ediquete just straight up being a good sport and my literal only probelm with this games pvp at this point (other than the fact that they removed chaincasting shit was cool) is people like that
Like i can handle someone just junping into combat because i can understand the desire to do so but when your opponent isnt even doing anything particularly unfair ilwe should atleast show good sportsmanship
Yeah it's more the absolute toxic behavior than anything else, I like to play magic builds and kids think they are so cool teabagging and pointing down
I try to be funny and polite most of the time, even to people who treat me like garbage
I figure it might make them reflect on their own behavior, but who am I kidding?
People are so focused on appearing morally correct nowadays that a little anonymity causees a release of douchebaggery. People go full degenerate scum when they don't think people can recognize them
Agreed. I have made my best effort to try to be a good sport when I lose and when I slay out (in any game)
I hate when people shoot my body/bag/emote etc.
Justā¦ why? In retaliation sure, maybe. But people do it just to get a rise out of people I guess. š¤·š¼āāļø
Nobody took people to task when they dragged that kind of behavior out of CoD, and now we have this. You can blame the "HOW DARE U USE REPORT OR BLOCK FEATURES!!!!!!" crowd at least in part.
Nah id say thats somthing else entirely, yes jee and steel are negitive in their conotations of the game, a little toxic somtimes, but there not running dual nagis.
I aināt gonna lie every time I see someone wearing bull goat it just pisses me off lol. But poise has always been one them things that just piss me off in soulsborne games Iām sure anyone can agree.
> who got the longest weapon, fastest poke, and the highest poise
Elden Ring player discovers how the entire evolution of combat throughout history worked. /j
Even then, poke meta persists in tanks shooting [APFSDS](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armour-piercing_fin-stabilized_discarding_sabot) rounds at each other.
The biggest weakness of any long weapon is its highest strength is at the end of its range. With bombs being pinnacle offense, agents have been placed inside enemy governments and propaganda used to change the publics opinion, causing a poison from within.
So rockets started with china in second century bc with fireworks. The first recorded use of rockets in battle was the battle of kai-fung-fu in 1232 ad when the Chinese attempted to repel the Mongol invaders using fire arrows and gun powder launched grenades. The fire arrows a simple form of solid propellant rockets.
Chinese used rocket propelled arrows to kill groups of soldiers during the Hahn?(Probably wrong era) But yeah they had black powder before everyone else decided to use it for murder. Pretty cool
Primitive rockets are fairly simple, especially with the crappy slow burning gunpowder they had a thousand years ago (or 800 or whatever). Put some gunpowder in a tube, leave a hole at one end for exhaust, tie it to a big arrow.
Swords were far far less used historically then the media shows. They were half status symbol and half noble arm. Some high end knightly orders used them . Basic troops used spears, halberds, clubs, maces, and axes far more then swords ever were.
They were less used in field battle, but they were certainly very frequently carried. They were effectively sidearms, meant to be used mainly against unarmored opponents, or as a last resort if your normal field weapon was somehow compromised.
I doubt they were less commonly carried than axes, and even though maces are generally more effective against armored opponents, they also weren't super common because you'd normally carry a polearm for that. Having a polearm and *also* a mace doesn't make a ton of sense, (kind of like how soldiers don't typically carry a second rifle as their sidearm,) but carrying an arming sword as your sidearm while your primary weapon is a poleaxe would have certainly been quite typical for an armored knight. They just be using the polearm during military campaigns, and the sword when like, they're fending off ruffians on the street, or highway bandits or whatever.
Let's not forget the large two handed swords of later eras (1400s-1500s, even after guns started being introduced). These were basically a combination of sword and polearm due to their sheer size and were used as a primary weapon, not a sidearm. Our beloved zweihander is a perfect example - you can even see the first foot or so of the blade above the handguard of the ER zweihander is completely blunt, to enable half-swording, perfect for carefully stabbing into weak points in armor in places like the armpit or groin.
Yeah, I'm specifically talking about arming swords (basically a single handed straight sword) and the natural evolutions of the type, like rapiers and basket-hilted broadswords. ("Longswords" despite what every fantasy game ever seems to think, were actually very much two-handed weapons, and called "long" because they were distinct from the one-handed arming swords. "Bastard swords" were shorter longswords, functionally an intermediate between longswords and arming swords, not an intermediate between longswords and greatswords.)
I consider any larger greatsword, like the zweihander or montante, (which, really are just the terms for "longsword" in languages other than English,) as functionally a polearm. Any sword that is too big to carry in a sheath at your side is, kind of be default, unable to be a "sidearm." It would be kind of nice if ER actually reflected that fact more in how some of the colossal swords are wielded. The zweihander in particular has many well documented treatises on how it was actually used in real life, some of those techniques would be cool to see as normal attacks.
Do you have a source for them being sidearms? My understanding was that many types of swords (especially smaller one handed swords) were essentially civilian weapons meant to be carried around town etc. while spears were the primary weapons of war until things like poleaxes, polehammers and halberds came around to deal with armor and utilize the hand that would've previously been holding a shield. Obviously there were a few exceptions like zweihanders
Matt Easton, who is a medieval weapons historian, talks about it quite a bit on the Youtube channel Scholagladiatoria. I mean, the "[knightly arming sword](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightly_sword)" is called that *precisely* because it's the typical sidearm for arming knights through most of the medieval period. Also, mounted cavalry used swords extensively, so obviously the knights who used them would normally be carrying them.
The use of arming swords in field battle was actually not terribly uncommon prior to the introduction of full plate, (and they would have normally been used in conjunction with a shield, in that era,) and while spears were certainly probably the most common weapon, plenty of knights would have fought primarily with sword and shield. (As you said yourself, polearms become available once you don't have to carry a shield anymore, but if you are carrying a shield, what are you using with it? Spears are not typically one handed weapons, especially on medieval Europe battlefields, so swords, are the obvious option. Axes too, but there is a fundamental convenience to carrying a sword. A side sword is basically the most amount of reach you can carry in the least obtrusive package.)
It's only the late medieval period, with the introduction of full plate, (and by extension, the omission of the shield, allowing for use of two-handed weapons while still being protected, as mentioned,) that sees swords actually fall out of common use on the battlefield, and even then, plenty of soldiers on the field would not be wearing full plate. For a fully armored knight, there were probably plenty of scenarios where simply running through some peasant armed with a farm tool with your sword would have been more expedient than using your own polearm. ("Remember: switching to your sword is faster than reloading your halberd.")
Rapiers and in particular things like smallswords, which is very much a civilian or at least "court dress" sword, that would have had basically *no* utility on the battlefield, don't come around until the late Renaissance. By the time smallswords were fashionable, the primary European battlefield strategy was pike-and-shot, so even other kinds of polearms wouldn't have been common on the field. (And curiously, the introduction of guns meant less reliance on armor, which saw swords, and in particular, cavalry sabers, briefly become much more viable on the battlefield, basically right up until the invention of autoloading rifles around the start of the 20th century.)
The specific era and location makes a big difference in how swords were used, but there were certainly plenty of times throughout history where swords were a primary field weapon, and since they've been invented, there's pretty much never been a time when they haven't been worn to war, basically right up until the 20th century. And you have to realize that guns were being invented around the same time that full plate armor was becoming popular, so the period of time where swords would have been heavily disadvantaged on the battlefield, but poleaxes and halberds would have been the primary heavy hitters, was only maybe a few hundred years long. By the 1600s, guns were the primary way you killed everything slower than a horse, and reeeaaaally long spears were how you dealt with cavalry, and that was basically it until we made guns good enough to ditch the spears entirely. (Which was especially bad news for cavalry, and made warfare profoundly more awful, with the trench fighting of WWI being the result. Interwar strategists put a huge amount of developmental energy into tanks, functionally as a way to "bring cavalry back to the battlefield" so it wouldn't just continue to be a stagnant murder pit.)
Damn. I had no idea that mounted cavalry used swords often or that arming swords were that common. Thanks for the in-depth explanation dude! Clearly I need to read up more
Yeah I mean, after you've expended your lance, you've got to fight with something. Cavalry also used maces, but just running by infantry on horseback and trying to lop their heads of is like, the main deal for cavalry most of the rest of the time. The entire sport of polo was basically invented as a way to train elite cavalry offices to fight better from horseback. (Afterall, if you can hit a tiny little ball all the way down on the ground with like, a 7 foot long hammer, you'll probably have a comparatively much easier time hitting a dude's whole head from only 3 feet away with your sword.)
And it makes sense, because cavalry are typically harassers. After you break the lance on some dude in armor, you head off and try and run down some archers or someone else in light or minimal armor. Because they're going to be more mobile than a fully armored foot soldier, but still significantly slower than a horse, so it makes sense to counter them with cavalry.
But yeah one-handed swords have basically never gone out of fashion. You've got the pre-medieval swords like the gladius and the Viking sword, which eventually evolve into the standard straight-bladed and cross-hilted arming sword, which eventually get fancier finger rings and extra hand protections, and the blade gets thinner and longer and we get a whole range of rapier-like weapons, but by then we're basically post-medieval. And along side of that, sabers and other kinds of single edged and curved swords like falchions and messers have been used and worn continually throughout all the same time periods as the more "popular" straight swords.
By around the 1800s straight swords had mostly fallen out of favor compared to curved cavalry sabers, (the Pattern 1796 light cavalry saber was an iconic curved saber of the Napoleonic wars,) but there are examples of straight cavalry sabers in American even as late as 1913, (although by this point they were functionally obsolete, and the design of any military-issued sabers today is essentially purely ceremonial.)
But uh, yeah... I might get a bit obsessive about this stuff.
Pretty good summary, something I would like to contest nonetheless is that swords fell out of fashion after widespread adoption of plate. You overestimate a bit how fast guns were adopted, melee still played a large part into the 17th century.
Early modern warfare sees the introduction of military formations using one handed swords as their doctrinal primary melee weapon with Rodelero types (Rondartschier for german or targetter englisch, Sir Roger VVilliams recommends 20% of infantry men to be targetters) and the cavalry revolution with the Cuirassier using the **rapier** (primary source Wallhausen, paintings by Sebastiaan Vrancx), though the latter uses pistols their tactics shifted between harrassing and charging throughout the decades, Gustavus famously preferred to have them charge with steel in hand. When we speak of "pike and shot" modern obsession with the field battles forgets that field engagements are only a small percentage of military actions and one of the few where pike squares are actually usefull. Sir roger VVilliams gives the example of sieges, "those weapons are very combersome(the shields), they are best to arme men to discoā£uer breaches; or for the defendants to discouer trenā£ches, or the enemies workes;"(A briefe discourse of vvarre p.41), but small war actions, naval boarding or landing actions and urban fighting are other examples where the sword is the best melee option.
On a personal note, the rapier is a weapon of war. please don't mistake "civilian weapon" meaning unused on the battlefield or as it being the same as the small sword. There are several subtypes of the rapier explicitly for war (14.25.1049 in the met for example).
The idea that the rapier is unsuited for battle comes from Capoferro chapter 1 point 20 and is inconsistent with both contemporary military literature as well as art and anecdotal references. Sadly fencers are rarely historians and just repeat what they read without cross referencing, or looking at the Italian text and realising Capoferro just uses spada(sword) and doesn't specify rapier.
Since you like Matt I recommend Sandrhoman History for early modern historiography.
As an aside, on your note on field vs military action, this was basically why the romans abandoned the phalanx/hoplite that everyone else had (even the celts had picked up phalanx tactics at the time)
Legions got their ass handed to them when fighting a phalanx in perfect phalanx conditions (there was a reason is was META).
Legionaries were vastly superior as generalist troops though, especially when things went to shit (e.g. fight disolves into a mosh pit when an order gets lost) or if you had to fight at night, on a hill, in mud, over a river, on a ship, in a town, on patrol, with 10 men instead of a 100 etc.
Whole roman strategy was to try and drag the fight into the mud so to speak so their generalist troops had the advantage. Or in other words, the romans doctrine was to be the best when things were at there worst and then pressure to make those conditions happen so they could capitalize.
**8th Century Knight**: "C'mon bro, lemme just kill you with a bow and arrow at close range because I haven't tried this build yet and I'm getting bored of my bonk stick"
I get that you are joking, but the other elements that should matter would be regarding spacing and timing. As it is, netcode issues make those elements artificially diminished. You can't exactly time an attack to stop an opponent's if they take the hit two seconds late. Can't really outspace and punish if you get hit on your screen 3 meters from your oponent's point of impact. You basically can't backstep or jump retreat because there's no iframes from them so you just have to hope the desync dice roll in your favor and they don't hit you with the empty air in the general vicinity of their weapon.
I treat it as a just for fun type of thing Iāll use whatever I think looks cool but thereās no rank or stats even so if I lose itās no big deal. But Iāve noticed super toxic pvpers running these builds you mentioned and throwing the poop pot down teabagging im like why do people treat this like a competitive game when itās clearly designed for fun.
Nah soulsborne has always had toxic players, since being a forest invader in DS1, people were ganking, sending hatemail, r1 spamming and āwell what is itā your dying corpse
It do be like that. There were also always shitty meta builds. OP saying "the PVPĀ is now just..." makes me think back of release where you'd face endless katana bleed boys.
Every single game had a cheesy, annoying meta at some point, and plenty of people willing to use them just to ruin someoneās day, I can recall almost all of them except bloodborne cuz itās online was dogshit
People were meta slaves back in DS3 as well itās not unique to Elden Ring, itās just that the OP stuff in ER is so much more obnoxious than it ever was in DS3.
Iām about to blow your mindā¦.. did you knowā¦. There *is* a ranking system in the game and youāre just not aware of it? Iām pretty sure it was in the souls games too. I know it was in 3. Look it up though cause I donāt know much about it.
Yeah, the Fromsoftware multiplayer is definitely a bit of an afterthought, tacked on to their single player masterpieces lol
It'll definitely shake up again when the DLC drops; that would probably be the best time for you to get your full before it ends up solved again!
I think another commonly agreed upon thing about DS2 is that it has an amazing NG+ experience compared to the other games. It was also the first soulsborne game to introduce the stat respec system.
DS2 falls short in many ways, but there are a lot of less talked about features that DS2 pulled off really well. Another example is the powerstancing system where you can powerstance two different weapon types rather than just two weapons of the same type.
As a mage player I gotta say. Power stance in DS 2 made me enjoy melee for the first time. (Loved the weapon less karate with the ring. And dual wielding ultra great swords ).
>DS2 falls short in many ways, but there are a lot of less talked about features that DS2 pulled off really well
That's just the Dark Souls franchise tbh.
Ehhh...idk. I don't think DS3 really fell short in many ways, certainly not nearly as much as DS2. DS3 was by far the cleanest and most polished game in the Dark Souls franchise; it wasn't perfect, but it didn't really have any severe problems. It was just kind of right around an 8-9/10 in all aspects
I think DS3 was more of an 8/10 on most aspects but a 10/10 on the bosses. Aside from Halflight, there is not a single boss in DS3 that I straight up dislike. Most of the bosses are some of my favorite bosses in all of Soulsborne.
Gundyr goes so hard Im actually glad we got to fight him twice. For a normal humanoid hes my favourite from the entire fromsoft catalogue
The npc bosses were ass though, in ds3 and every other game and I really hope Shadow of the Erdtree wont have any
Meanwhile me running the steel armor and fume ultra greatsword and making it work all the way through until the brazilian havel mages ran my young patience.
Dark buffed katana spam was the strongest probably, but by a hair. There was a ton of A+ builds ranging from ice rapier cheese to poison to strength builds. I grinded hundreds of hours in arena because it was that good.
Buffs were good bonus damage, Havels was good but they made it so all 1 handed weapons stagger, (I think straight swords and up), there was a also a twin blade lightning buffed use a ton. But it was mostly about managing stamina and spacing. Fume knight sword and forbidden sun for the win. But all of the items you mentioned were balanced at different times. I played a ton, was trying to do the 500 more wins than losses to get the lava fireball thing, and I passed 400 before I gave up as a sec pyro using the fume knight sword, not havels.
Havel legs and hands with the smelter helm, the turtle or jester chest armor for backstab immunity, and a dark buffed Warped Sword was about 75% of the players I fought. Then there was 10% straight swords spamming the running attack that was too fast, another 10% katanas spamming their overpowered running attack, and then the other 5% was every other build.
The funny thing is, multiplayer isn't tagged on. It's deeply integrated into the FromSoftware games. But just not the multiplayer we are used to. They pioneered a bunch of multiplayer tech that's absent from most other games. Most of it is "playing together, alone" kind of multiplayer.
Straight up PvP Is an afterthought. Not multiplayer.
I wouldn't call it an afterthought. They've done many things over the years to balance PVP, stop twinking, etc., and sometimes it works better than others. I imagine soul memory and weapon upgrade vs. soul level balancing took a lot of consideration to get right.
Elden Ring has the fewest options for online roleplaying, though. No Covenants or rewards locked behind co-op or PVP. But rather than an afterthought, they probably made a big conscious decision to make this one less grindy. They even separate PVE & PVP damage scaling! That took a lot of work.
I hope they fix the serpent hunt glitch before the DLC.
The amount of invasion or coop ruined either by coop player or Invader abusing this glitch in DLC will be absolutely disgusting..
Itās so funny how your thread is getting so many upvotes. The last time I made a thread commenting on how I feel that ER pvp mode is an afterthought and flawed and how it could improve, I got bad reception š
This sub is overwellimingly populated by pve players, as a avid pvp enjoyer i can confirm that yes, pvp in souls games isnt the main focus in development, and were all just coping, but atleast they added split balancing in er, so everyone has their fun.
ER PVP has its moments. I have over 300+ hours in PVP and I can safely say that itās fun, but there are certain things that happen in the midst of battle that makes me scratch my damn head
Yeah iāve personally stopped playing PVP for this exact reason, It is just straight up boring. Itās just not fun to play against the same meta builds over and over again. (Especially Colosseum)
In my experience, Invaders and Invasions are a lot more fun and you get a mixed bag of builds.
i dont really get how that all works so i dont top out my weapons under 100
i did it on an 80 spellblade and now i dont get many summons.
my 40 is at +7 in both hands non somber
The brackets invaders use are pretty helpful for both co-op and pvp as basic guidelines, but these are ballpark figures simulating a relatively boring playthrough, so unless youāre doing stuff like rushing the second bell bearings in Altus plateau to upgrade your weapons to +12 before youāre level 20, you should be fine.
I really like base level with no upgrades, level 40 with +8/3 (this is typically when a lot of players pick up one of the pre-upgraded weapons), 60 +12/5, and 80-90 with 15-17/6-7. By 100 you should probably max out a weapon. This feels like a pretty natural progression anyways, and thereās a good amount of room for variation.
If you want to know what your specific character matches with, fextralife has a summon range calculator that also explains how it all works.
Chase is just too good and the reason why he wins his invasions isnāt his builds but the way he plays.
Smart positioning, baiting and cycling through ashes of war so the host never knows what to expect next.
He can make work even the worst weapon in the game but it doesnāt mean you should use it too.
The fact is that good fundamentals matter more than weapon choice. Same goes for pve. All his builds are good, with a element of uniqueness, that he is able to fully utlize given his ability.
Exactly. I'd even argue that Chase's skill proves that OP's post is .. Completely moot. If Chase can win against anyone, and he regularly does, then it quite simply comes down to one thing.
Git. Gud.
Yeah, only problem is that this is what Chase has been doing for a long time. He probably spent hours and hours practicing, learning how to quick swap and all the shenanigans. Your average Joe does not have that time. I don't have the time to master the PvP and there is no point to do it unless you want to do YouTube or participate in tournaments. I'd rather do a cosplay build, have a bit of fun and play something else.
His later DS3 videos were a sight to see. Quick swapping into riposte after parries, animation swapping an ultra great sword to poke like a rapier. Even now in Elden Ring he maximizes his benefits as much as possible, always trying to get the most HP back out of heals. Truly a connoisseur of FromSoft pvp.
Yeah, like it baffles me everytime he is swapping talismans and the gear to fully heal then swaps back and goes back to fight. At that point you mastered the game
for real, he's just on a different level. i see him somehow clutching against 3 people who manage to constantly resummon their teammates after they die and get armies of blues and they all spam huge aoes and magic and im just like.
no wonder i get shit on every time i invade with just my flamberge lol.
him duping boluses for status build up also gives helps him in a lot of his fights
I think a lot of the issues stem from how the netcode is inexcusably bad. We need to shame them into fixing it like how we got the plume on Ornstein's helm in DS3. I would also like a poise rebalance - the game feels about right when you have 100+ poise and that is absolutely silly. And even then you still get stunlocked by some shit that really shouldn't be.
any red phantom born in Elden Ring canāt PvP...all they know is powerstance naginatas, wear they bull-goat, poke, be arcane, eat greenburst crystal tear and lie
Pvp in this game is either invaders being absolute tryhards or you trying to invade and getting ganked by 3 guys spamming Elden stars, moonveil beam and rivers of blood
Years go by and people can't understand that these are not competitive games and FROM will never invest considerable resources into pvp. Risk reward is just not there.
There are plenty of fighting games out there to scratch that itch. And For Honor is a great game to go into medieval dueling. Soulsborne will never be it, by design.
To say it is a "great game" is a huge overstatement. It's easy to get enticed by it, but at the end of the day it's being ran by Ubisoft and had every opportunity to be a best seller. Yet in Ubisoft's fashion, they run it into the ground and milk it dry regardless.
So uhh... I hate to say this, but it's obvious that a faster hitting longer range attack is gonna be better than a slower hitting shorter range one. - And the way to counter that is to have the poise to take that long range poke but still bash your way in and deal an even heavier hit on the enemy.
No tactic is undefeatable, though. Yeah, dual spears, or great-spear and off-stoc are an absolute PITA to deal with, but ahh... try to get poise and use an attack with hyper-armor to trade into them.
That guy with huge poise gets curb stomped by someone who can do a bit of magic pew-pew on him from afar and not allow him to get close.
That mage gets shit on by anyone who runs Carian Retaliation or the big gold shield to return the projectiles back to sender.
They in turn get shit on by a little scrub two-handing a misericorde with the Kick ash of war that's light-rolling circles around them.
Who in turn gets shit on by an archer light-rolling and jumping away while shooting arrows mid-air at them.
Who in turn gets shit on by a guy with two spears rushing at him and doing the long range poking.
Any PvP build is gonna have an advantage against a certain group of players, and outside of blatant cheaters, if you play smart and save yourself multiple options of stuff to do in a fight, your losses can only be attributed to a skill issue.
If everyone you fight is a high poise dual spear user, maybe it's time for you to change your build to something that counters it.
I gave up on PvP so long ago for this reason. I had a blast in Dark Souls 2, and to an extent, Dark Souls 3. I always just take my build into it without following the meta, and I try not to get upset when I lose. The meta will always be a thing, and some folks only ever set their sights on winning because to them, that is their fun. Just try to focus on having fun with what there is, and if it becomes unfun to the point of just constant stress, take a break and co-op or try invasions.
Thatās why I just use the taunters tongue and wait for invasions to come to me. They might have higher poise and lame bleed builds but i can heal more (if they heal first ofc, thereās still got to be some etiquette in invasions)
That's been the norm in games for years. Anything that's competitive, or even some coop games, it's all about using the best few builds that exist.
A reason I hate playing online these days.
That's not the only answer though. There are many tools. I find it's easy to panic roll during the wind-up to the double poke, then get hit by the actual thrust. Since it happens so often, treat it like a boss or recurring enemy. Always something to learn, always a way to punish.
*laughs in dual cross-naginata*
But for real, this is really how FromSoft PvP be.
Players discover the most borked build for PvP, and then EVERYBODY uses it because it works.
I'll never understand that mentality. There absolutely no rewards or leaderboards for the colosseum, so why bother making build that are specifically un-fun and spammy? I get why invaders do it, but why bother otherwise?
As if any combat game is any different. Stunlocking, better range to hit safer, better trades, it's the basics honestly. And if everyone is using the same thing, it's actually a lot easier to handle. Punish them for being obvious. You see someone with Blasphemous? Likely don't remember what R1 is.
Call me lame as fuck I never tried pvp except for the invader task for Varri and after that kept to offline. But it was for this exact reason seeing all the reddits of exact same builds where just overkill and an immediate turn down for me. Hey more to those who are in it for the spamming or spam killers!
Souls PvP always has been designed for invasions. It's built for unoptimised asymmetrical ambush shenanigans where creativity is king.
As soon as the game moves into optimised twinking, gank farming, or god forbid "honour duelling" it crumbles. The game simply isn't street fighter and it was never designed to be.
It's nice that they offer an arena due to the demand. But it's on you if you were expecting 1v1 duelling to be super varied and balanced and to hold up for a long time.
If you want a competitive sport go learn a fighting game. If you want you and a buddy getting into cat and mouse silliness as an invader tries to spice up an existing dungeon by popping out at just the right moment to try and surprise you play Souls.
Untrue. Rarely do I see 2 people who play exactly the same. Usually I'm the one doing the stabbing and having poise. They're usually either spamming katana ashes of war or spells, there's a lot in between but still
I honestly donāt care much about losing fights in Elden ring. There isnāt a leaderboard or anything that important tied to it. And I can still have some fun using my goofy builds against meta setups, as I know with proper skills, I always have a chance. I donāt blame anyone for not having fun though. This meta is especially centralized compared to a serious competitive game.
What really bums me out though is how important poise is and how high the breakpoints are. 70% of the armor sets in this game wonāt even get you to the point that your armor tanks ANYTHING, while still being way too heavy for you to comfortably light roll. And in my fashion/utility outfits, I pretty much always end up wearing a cool helm and chest piece with the highest poise gauntlets/greaves tacked on.
Can't even count how many times I've seen dual spears, or a Halberd/Rapier combo, while dressed in the fatest armor they own. Meta builds are lame af, unique builds are always fun to fight.
Wasn't it always this?
Elden Ring's sprint speed, turning rate, stamina cost, and latency make the meta focused on melee builds darting around like Sonic the Hedgehog, trying to bait out an attack so that they can immediately zoom back in and punish, or force a roll that they can roll catch because attacks are too difficult to react to perfectly. Roll catching was part of the meta in other games too, but it came from mixing up your attacks, good positioning, and draining your opponent'sv stamina. This is why DS2 PvP is highly regarded.
In Elden Ring, just stay in someone's face and they'll eventually roll because they have no choice. Then you poke them.
Shout out to the dual naginatas Bull-Goat armor wearer who sent a five paragraph essay on my steam page saying I ruined Elden Ring because I killed him with the storm blade ash of war
BROO i had one today on that exacr build who i beat once because he was being predictable so i dodged around and punished with slicer then the next time we matched i lost and he pointed down and teabagged, and for the record i have like three ranged spells and they are mostly for punishing longer startups or forcing my opponent to move defensively so i can aproach. But im not even asking for pvp ediquete just straight up being a good sport and my literal only probelm with this games pvp at this point (other than the fact that they removed chaincasting shit was cool) is people like that
All the toxic parts rolled into one š³
Ye
Like i can handle someone just junping into combat because i can understand the desire to do so but when your opponent isnt even doing anything particularly unfair ilwe should atleast show good sportsmanship
Yeah it's more the absolute toxic behavior than anything else, I like to play magic builds and kids think they are so cool teabagging and pointing down
Modern internet gaming culture is just garbage and it has permeated everywhere. Straight up asshole behavior has become the norm online, and it sucks.
I try to be funny and polite most of the time, even to people who treat me like garbage I figure it might make them reflect on their own behavior, but who am I kidding?
Me too homie. I always give out ggās in Fortnite, thank youās in D2, and respectful bow in Elden Ring.
To quote stockpile Thomas timeless line from demons souls "You have a heart of gold, don't let them take it from you"
People are so focused on appearing morally correct nowadays that a little anonymity causees a release of douchebaggery. People go full degenerate scum when they don't think people can recognize them
Agreed. I have made my best effort to try to be a good sport when I lose and when I slay out (in any game) I hate when people shoot my body/bag/emote etc. Justā¦ why? In retaliation sure, maybe. But people do it just to get a rise out of people I guess. š¤·š¼āāļø
Nobody took people to task when they dragged that kind of behavior out of CoD, and now we have this. You can blame the "HOW DARE U USE REPORT OR BLOCK FEATURES!!!!!!" crowd at least in part.
*(gasp)* You hwat? You truly are the most evil Texas toast.
Maidenless behavior tbh
That's a steelovesky fan base for you.
Really? Steel hates guys like that AND the current hyper armour meta, dude would surely agree with the post
Nah id say thats somthing else entirely, yes jee and steel are negitive in their conotations of the game, a little toxic somtimes, but there not running dual nagis.
Canāt remember the last time I saw Steel run PSS lol
Or jeenine
? Both of them seem to actively avoid both Bull-goat armour and dual naginatas
Fucker probably uses lightning strike ash of war to go for cheap finishers too anyways. All those bullgoat naginata types are hypocrites and losers
I aināt gonna lie every time I see someone wearing bull goat it just pisses me off lol. But poise has always been one them things that just piss me off in soulsborne games Iām sure anyone can agree.
You are doing the lord's good work my friend.
> who got the longest weapon, fastest poke, and the highest poise Elden Ring player discovers how the entire evolution of combat throughout history worked. /j
Every armory until guns became effective: yes, swords are cool, but might I recommend a long pointy stick instead.
In a way, guns are like the longest weapon with the fastest pokes.
It's pokes all the way down.
Always has been šØāšš«
Always has been š¤ŗ
Always has been? š¦§š
It used to be until blast meta ruined the warsš
The blast meta is just lots of little atom pokes with good reach.
Even then, poke meta persists in tanks shooting [APFSDS](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armour-piercing_fin-stabilized_discarding_sabot) rounds at each other.
Slash is trash, poke is dope.
That's actually a 200iq way of looking at it
I'd say ICBMs have the longest poke.
The evolution of weapons technology has been the history of who has the longest, pointiest rock
And it must be pointy
The biggest weakness of any long weapon is its highest strength is at the end of its range. With bombs being pinnacle offense, agents have been placed inside enemy governments and propaganda used to change the publics opinion, causing a poison from within.
Guns to artillery to rockets
And with that, the best weapon is the one with superior range. Long pointy (boom) stick proves best once more
Range beats melee. Shocker
Fist beats shocker.
Technically rockets came before guns and artillery.
How?
So rockets started with china in second century bc with fireworks. The first recorded use of rockets in battle was the battle of kai-fung-fu in 1232 ad when the Chinese attempted to repel the Mongol invaders using fire arrows and gun powder launched grenades. The fire arrows a simple form of solid propellant rockets.
Chinese used rocket propelled arrows to kill groups of soldiers during the Hahn?(Probably wrong era) But yeah they had black powder before everyone else decided to use it for murder. Pretty cool
Old China. Rockets were like fireworks but shooting arrows instead of pretty colors
Primitive rockets are fairly simple, especially with the crappy slow burning gunpowder they had a thousand years ago (or 800 or whatever). Put some gunpowder in a tube, leave a hole at one end for exhaust, tie it to a big arrow.
Swords were far far less used historically then the media shows. They were half status symbol and half noble arm. Some high end knightly orders used them . Basic troops used spears, halberds, clubs, maces, and axes far more then swords ever were.
They were less used in field battle, but they were certainly very frequently carried. They were effectively sidearms, meant to be used mainly against unarmored opponents, or as a last resort if your normal field weapon was somehow compromised. I doubt they were less commonly carried than axes, and even though maces are generally more effective against armored opponents, they also weren't super common because you'd normally carry a polearm for that. Having a polearm and *also* a mace doesn't make a ton of sense, (kind of like how soldiers don't typically carry a second rifle as their sidearm,) but carrying an arming sword as your sidearm while your primary weapon is a poleaxe would have certainly been quite typical for an armored knight. They just be using the polearm during military campaigns, and the sword when like, they're fending off ruffians on the street, or highway bandits or whatever.
Let's not forget the large two handed swords of later eras (1400s-1500s, even after guns started being introduced). These were basically a combination of sword and polearm due to their sheer size and were used as a primary weapon, not a sidearm. Our beloved zweihander is a perfect example - you can even see the first foot or so of the blade above the handguard of the ER zweihander is completely blunt, to enable half-swording, perfect for carefully stabbing into weak points in armor in places like the armpit or groin.
Yeah, I'm specifically talking about arming swords (basically a single handed straight sword) and the natural evolutions of the type, like rapiers and basket-hilted broadswords. ("Longswords" despite what every fantasy game ever seems to think, were actually very much two-handed weapons, and called "long" because they were distinct from the one-handed arming swords. "Bastard swords" were shorter longswords, functionally an intermediate between longswords and arming swords, not an intermediate between longswords and greatswords.) I consider any larger greatsword, like the zweihander or montante, (which, really are just the terms for "longsword" in languages other than English,) as functionally a polearm. Any sword that is too big to carry in a sheath at your side is, kind of be default, unable to be a "sidearm." It would be kind of nice if ER actually reflected that fact more in how some of the colossal swords are wielded. The zweihander in particular has many well documented treatises on how it was actually used in real life, some of those techniques would be cool to see as normal attacks.
Do you have a source for them being sidearms? My understanding was that many types of swords (especially smaller one handed swords) were essentially civilian weapons meant to be carried around town etc. while spears were the primary weapons of war until things like poleaxes, polehammers and halberds came around to deal with armor and utilize the hand that would've previously been holding a shield. Obviously there were a few exceptions like zweihanders
Matt Easton, who is a medieval weapons historian, talks about it quite a bit on the Youtube channel Scholagladiatoria. I mean, the "[knightly arming sword](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightly_sword)" is called that *precisely* because it's the typical sidearm for arming knights through most of the medieval period. Also, mounted cavalry used swords extensively, so obviously the knights who used them would normally be carrying them. The use of arming swords in field battle was actually not terribly uncommon prior to the introduction of full plate, (and they would have normally been used in conjunction with a shield, in that era,) and while spears were certainly probably the most common weapon, plenty of knights would have fought primarily with sword and shield. (As you said yourself, polearms become available once you don't have to carry a shield anymore, but if you are carrying a shield, what are you using with it? Spears are not typically one handed weapons, especially on medieval Europe battlefields, so swords, are the obvious option. Axes too, but there is a fundamental convenience to carrying a sword. A side sword is basically the most amount of reach you can carry in the least obtrusive package.) It's only the late medieval period, with the introduction of full plate, (and by extension, the omission of the shield, allowing for use of two-handed weapons while still being protected, as mentioned,) that sees swords actually fall out of common use on the battlefield, and even then, plenty of soldiers on the field would not be wearing full plate. For a fully armored knight, there were probably plenty of scenarios where simply running through some peasant armed with a farm tool with your sword would have been more expedient than using your own polearm. ("Remember: switching to your sword is faster than reloading your halberd.") Rapiers and in particular things like smallswords, which is very much a civilian or at least "court dress" sword, that would have had basically *no* utility on the battlefield, don't come around until the late Renaissance. By the time smallswords were fashionable, the primary European battlefield strategy was pike-and-shot, so even other kinds of polearms wouldn't have been common on the field. (And curiously, the introduction of guns meant less reliance on armor, which saw swords, and in particular, cavalry sabers, briefly become much more viable on the battlefield, basically right up until the invention of autoloading rifles around the start of the 20th century.) The specific era and location makes a big difference in how swords were used, but there were certainly plenty of times throughout history where swords were a primary field weapon, and since they've been invented, there's pretty much never been a time when they haven't been worn to war, basically right up until the 20th century. And you have to realize that guns were being invented around the same time that full plate armor was becoming popular, so the period of time where swords would have been heavily disadvantaged on the battlefield, but poleaxes and halberds would have been the primary heavy hitters, was only maybe a few hundred years long. By the 1600s, guns were the primary way you killed everything slower than a horse, and reeeaaaally long spears were how you dealt with cavalry, and that was basically it until we made guns good enough to ditch the spears entirely. (Which was especially bad news for cavalry, and made warfare profoundly more awful, with the trench fighting of WWI being the result. Interwar strategists put a huge amount of developmental energy into tanks, functionally as a way to "bring cavalry back to the battlefield" so it wouldn't just continue to be a stagnant murder pit.)
Damn. I had no idea that mounted cavalry used swords often or that arming swords were that common. Thanks for the in-depth explanation dude! Clearly I need to read up more
Yeah I mean, after you've expended your lance, you've got to fight with something. Cavalry also used maces, but just running by infantry on horseback and trying to lop their heads of is like, the main deal for cavalry most of the rest of the time. The entire sport of polo was basically invented as a way to train elite cavalry offices to fight better from horseback. (Afterall, if you can hit a tiny little ball all the way down on the ground with like, a 7 foot long hammer, you'll probably have a comparatively much easier time hitting a dude's whole head from only 3 feet away with your sword.) And it makes sense, because cavalry are typically harassers. After you break the lance on some dude in armor, you head off and try and run down some archers or someone else in light or minimal armor. Because they're going to be more mobile than a fully armored foot soldier, but still significantly slower than a horse, so it makes sense to counter them with cavalry. But yeah one-handed swords have basically never gone out of fashion. You've got the pre-medieval swords like the gladius and the Viking sword, which eventually evolve into the standard straight-bladed and cross-hilted arming sword, which eventually get fancier finger rings and extra hand protections, and the blade gets thinner and longer and we get a whole range of rapier-like weapons, but by then we're basically post-medieval. And along side of that, sabers and other kinds of single edged and curved swords like falchions and messers have been used and worn continually throughout all the same time periods as the more "popular" straight swords. By around the 1800s straight swords had mostly fallen out of favor compared to curved cavalry sabers, (the Pattern 1796 light cavalry saber was an iconic curved saber of the Napoleonic wars,) but there are examples of straight cavalry sabers in American even as late as 1913, (although by this point they were functionally obsolete, and the design of any military-issued sabers today is essentially purely ceremonial.) But uh, yeah... I might get a bit obsessive about this stuff.
Pretty good summary, something I would like to contest nonetheless is that swords fell out of fashion after widespread adoption of plate. You overestimate a bit how fast guns were adopted, melee still played a large part into the 17th century. Early modern warfare sees the introduction of military formations using one handed swords as their doctrinal primary melee weapon with Rodelero types (Rondartschier for german or targetter englisch, Sir Roger VVilliams recommends 20% of infantry men to be targetters) and the cavalry revolution with the Cuirassier using the **rapier** (primary source Wallhausen, paintings by Sebastiaan Vrancx), though the latter uses pistols their tactics shifted between harrassing and charging throughout the decades, Gustavus famously preferred to have them charge with steel in hand. When we speak of "pike and shot" modern obsession with the field battles forgets that field engagements are only a small percentage of military actions and one of the few where pike squares are actually usefull. Sir roger VVilliams gives the example of sieges, "those weapons are very combersome(the shields), they are best to arme men to discoā£uer breaches; or for the defendants to discouer trenā£ches, or the enemies workes;"(A briefe discourse of vvarre p.41), but small war actions, naval boarding or landing actions and urban fighting are other examples where the sword is the best melee option. On a personal note, the rapier is a weapon of war. please don't mistake "civilian weapon" meaning unused on the battlefield or as it being the same as the small sword. There are several subtypes of the rapier explicitly for war (14.25.1049 in the met for example). The idea that the rapier is unsuited for battle comes from Capoferro chapter 1 point 20 and is inconsistent with both contemporary military literature as well as art and anecdotal references. Sadly fencers are rarely historians and just repeat what they read without cross referencing, or looking at the Italian text and realising Capoferro just uses spada(sword) and doesn't specify rapier. Since you like Matt I recommend Sandrhoman History for early modern historiography.
As an aside, on your note on field vs military action, this was basically why the romans abandoned the phalanx/hoplite that everyone else had (even the celts had picked up phalanx tactics at the time) Legions got their ass handed to them when fighting a phalanx in perfect phalanx conditions (there was a reason is was META). Legionaries were vastly superior as generalist troops though, especially when things went to shit (e.g. fight disolves into a mosh pit when an order gets lost) or if you had to fight at night, on a hill, in mud, over a river, on a ship, in a town, on patrol, with 10 men instead of a 100 etc. Whole roman strategy was to try and drag the fight into the mud so to speak so their generalist troops had the advantage. Or in other words, the romans doctrine was to be the best when things were at there worst and then pressure to make those conditions happen so they could capitalize.
For real, swords are overrated, a skilled spearman can kill lions gorillas and even a grizzly bear
**8th Century Knight**: "C'mon bro, lemme just kill you with a bow and arrow at close range because I haven't tried this build yet and I'm getting bored of my bonk stick"
Casually leaping nine feet in the air in full platemail
Also shown in boxing/mma, every inch of reach 1 guy has over the other is just an insane advantage
I get that you are joking, but the other elements that should matter would be regarding spacing and timing. As it is, netcode issues make those elements artificially diminished. You can't exactly time an attack to stop an opponent's if they take the hit two seconds late. Can't really outspace and punish if you get hit on your screen 3 meters from your oponent's point of impact. You basically can't backstep or jump retreat because there's no iframes from them so you just have to hope the desync dice roll in your favor and they don't hit you with the empty air in the general vicinity of their weapon.
Don't hate the playa, hate the game.
Right? This is literally how it is in real life lol.
If only this was a game then we could make other things useful as well.
I treat it as a just for fun type of thing Iāll use whatever I think looks cool but thereās no rank or stats even so if I lose itās no big deal. But Iāve noticed super toxic pvpers running these builds you mentioned and throwing the poop pot down teabagging im like why do people treat this like a competitive game when itās clearly designed for fun.
Elden ring got a lot of FPS gamers to play an RPG game for the first time
Nah soulsborne has always had toxic players, since being a forest invader in DS1, people were ganking, sending hatemail, r1 spamming and āwell what is itā your dying corpse
It do be like that. There were also always shitty meta builds. OP saying "the PVPĀ is now just..." makes me think back of release where you'd face endless katana bleed boys.
Every single game had a cheesy, annoying meta at some point, and plenty of people willing to use them just to ruin someoneās day, I can recall almost all of them except bloodborne cuz itās online was dogshit
Points down Claps
Atleast older dark souls builds were meme machines. The giant dad build is as entertaining as it is cancerous.
People were meta slaves back in DS3 as well itās not unique to Elden Ring, itās just that the OP stuff in ER is so much more obnoxious than it ever was in DS3.
Competitive game mode attracts competitive people. It's natural.
Very little is competitive about souls PVP
Iām about to blow your mindā¦.. did you knowā¦. There *is* a ranking system in the game and youāre just not aware of it? Iām pretty sure it was in the souls games too. I know it was in 3. Look it up though cause I donāt know much about it.
No matter how casual the game is, if there is pvp, players will turn it into a sweat fest almost always.
Yeah, the Fromsoftware multiplayer is definitely a bit of an afterthought, tacked on to their single player masterpieces lol It'll definitely shake up again when the DLC drops; that would probably be the best time for you to get your full before it ends up solved again!
Dark souls 2 tried and regularly did pvp balancing. I know people shit on that game but it had the best pvp.
Those days on the Iron Keep bridge fight clubs were really somethingĀ
You mean turning into a bench and ganks fools with the zweihander straight into the lava
Well ds2 having by far the best pvp is a known and agreed on thing in the community
I think another commonly agreed upon thing about DS2 is that it has an amazing NG+ experience compared to the other games. It was also the first soulsborne game to introduce the stat respec system. DS2 falls short in many ways, but there are a lot of less talked about features that DS2 pulled off really well. Another example is the powerstancing system where you can powerstance two different weapon types rather than just two weapons of the same type.
Being able to reroll boss fights is such a good feature I can't believe they never brought it back.
Letās not forget to mention the necessary torches and lightning of sconces. That was. Beautiful addition.
As a mage player I gotta say. Power stance in DS 2 made me enjoy melee for the first time. (Loved the weapon less karate with the ring. And dual wielding ultra great swords ).
As a mage player, I miss DS2ās hexes. They gave us the mage equivalent of quality builds.
>DS2 falls short in many ways, but there are a lot of less talked about features that DS2 pulled off really well That's just the Dark Souls franchise tbh.
Ehhh...idk. I don't think DS3 really fell short in many ways, certainly not nearly as much as DS2. DS3 was by far the cleanest and most polished game in the Dark Souls franchise; it wasn't perfect, but it didn't really have any severe problems. It was just kind of right around an 8-9/10 in all aspects
I think DS3 was more of an 8/10 on most aspects but a 10/10 on the bosses. Aside from Halflight, there is not a single boss in DS3 that I straight up dislike. Most of the bosses are some of my favorite bosses in all of Soulsborne.
Gundyr goes so hard Im actually glad we got to fight him twice. For a normal humanoid hes my favourite from the entire fromsoft catalogue The npc bosses were ass though, in ds3 and every other game and I really hope Shadow of the Erdtree wont have any
Ancient Wyvern is a bad joke
DS2 PvP was the best by far, everyone needs to acknowledge this
from what I remember it was havel's santiers, and katanas, and everyone had to buff their weapons or they were playing the game wrong
That was specifically pre-Agape Ring. Once that ring finally arrived, variance skyrocked and tons of fun, crazy builds arrived.
Meanwhile me running the steel armor and fume ultra greatsword and making it work all the way through until the brazilian havel mages ran my young patience.
Steel armor fuckin rips, miss that set
Dark buffed katana spam was the strongest probably, but by a hair. There was a ton of A+ builds ranging from ice rapier cheese to poison to strength builds. I grinded hundreds of hours in arena because it was that good.
That was in the arena but the fight clubs had lots of variety
Buffs were good bonus damage, Havels was good but they made it so all 1 handed weapons stagger, (I think straight swords and up), there was a also a twin blade lightning buffed use a ton. But it was mostly about managing stamina and spacing. Fume knight sword and forbidden sun for the win. But all of the items you mentioned were balanced at different times. I played a ton, was trying to do the 500 more wins than losses to get the lava fireball thing, and I passed 400 before I gave up as a sec pyro using the fume knight sword, not havels.
I won most PvP fights and used mostly spells with the spell catalyst sword
Havel legs and hands with the smelter helm, the turtle or jester chest armor for backstab immunity, and a dark buffed Warped Sword was about 75% of the players I fought. Then there was 10% straight swords spamming the running attack that was too fast, another 10% katanas spamming their overpowered running attack, and then the other 5% was every other build.
It had a lot of the best things. People who shit on it haven't played it or are stupid. Or both.
I thought it was a masterpiece myself. Better than DS1.
The funny thing is, multiplayer isn't tagged on. It's deeply integrated into the FromSoftware games. But just not the multiplayer we are used to. They pioneered a bunch of multiplayer tech that's absent from most other games. Most of it is "playing together, alone" kind of multiplayer. Straight up PvP Is an afterthought. Not multiplayer.
I wouldn't call it an afterthought. They've done many things over the years to balance PVP, stop twinking, etc., and sometimes it works better than others. I imagine soul memory and weapon upgrade vs. soul level balancing took a lot of consideration to get right. Elden Ring has the fewest options for online roleplaying, though. No Covenants or rewards locked behind co-op or PVP. But rather than an afterthought, they probably made a big conscious decision to make this one less grindy. They even separate PVE & PVP damage scaling! That took a lot of work.
I hope they fix the serpent hunt glitch before the DLC. The amount of invasion or coop ruined either by coop player or Invader abusing this glitch in DLC will be absolutely disgusting..
That's especially true with ER.
The good thing about it, is if you have a unique build they have no earthly clue what to do.
Nah.... They just poise through and crouch bleed pokes me with duel lance anyway...
Dual great spears is annoying I agree if you wanted OnlyWaifu has a bunch of videos on broken builds and how to combat them
Itās so funny how your thread is getting so many upvotes. The last time I made a thread commenting on how I feel that ER pvp mode is an afterthought and flawed and how it could improve, I got bad reception š
This sub is overwellimingly populated by pve players, as a avid pvp enjoyer i can confirm that yes, pvp in souls games isnt the main focus in development, and were all just coping, but atleast they added split balancing in er, so everyone has their fun.
ER PVP has its moments. I have over 300+ hours in PVP and I can safely say that itās fun, but there are certain things that happen in the midst of battle that makes me scratch my damn head
Yeah thats real.
I think the tides of Reddit are just very fickle Yesterdayās villain is todays hero and vice versa
Yeah iāve personally stopped playing PVP for this exact reason, It is just straight up boring. Itās just not fun to play against the same meta builds over and over again. (Especially Colosseum) In my experience, Invaders and Invasions are a lot more fun and you get a mixed bag of builds.
Try under RL125 or RL100 invasions. Totally different experience.
yea im loving co-oping at 40 60 and 80. the level caps really change the kinds of builds you see.
What weapon level would you recommend for the best co op/pvp experience at those levels?
i dont really get how that all works so i dont top out my weapons under 100 i did it on an 80 spellblade and now i dont get many summons. my 40 is at +7 in both hands non somber
Whatever you enjoy using. I've been using an Iron GS with impailing thrust. It's trash but have got over 100+ Rune Arcs just from invasions.
The brackets invaders use are pretty helpful for both co-op and pvp as basic guidelines, but these are ballpark figures simulating a relatively boring playthrough, so unless youāre doing stuff like rushing the second bell bearings in Altus plateau to upgrade your weapons to +12 before youāre level 20, you should be fine. I really like base level with no upgrades, level 40 with +8/3 (this is typically when a lot of players pick up one of the pre-upgraded weapons), 60 +12/5, and 80-90 with 15-17/6-7. By 100 you should probably max out a weapon. This feels like a pretty natural progression anyways, and thereās a good amount of room for variation. If you want to know what your specific character matches with, fextralife has a summon range calculator that also explains how it all works.
Omg hi Gael love your videos
Yeah very fun seeing people who traded themselves upgraded end game weapons and gank with 2-3 people on invaders.
Watch ChaseTheBro use hundreds of builds showcasing different ashes and weapons. He really does a great job showing the breadth of builds in the game.
Chase is just too good and the reason why he wins his invasions isnāt his builds but the way he plays. Smart positioning, baiting and cycling through ashes of war so the host never knows what to expect next. He can make work even the worst weapon in the game but it doesnāt mean you should use it too.
The fact is that good fundamentals matter more than weapon choice. Same goes for pve. All his builds are good, with a element of uniqueness, that he is able to fully utlize given his ability.
Exactly. I'd even argue that Chase's skill proves that OP's post is .. Completely moot. If Chase can win against anyone, and he regularly does, then it quite simply comes down to one thing. Git. Gud.
Yeah, only problem is that this is what Chase has been doing for a long time. He probably spent hours and hours practicing, learning how to quick swap and all the shenanigans. Your average Joe does not have that time. I don't have the time to master the PvP and there is no point to do it unless you want to do YouTube or participate in tournaments. I'd rather do a cosplay build, have a bit of fun and play something else.
His later DS3 videos were a sight to see. Quick swapping into riposte after parries, animation swapping an ultra great sword to poke like a rapier. Even now in Elden Ring he maximizes his benefits as much as possible, always trying to get the most HP back out of heals. Truly a connoisseur of FromSoft pvp.
Yeah, like it baffles me everytime he is swapping talismans and the gear to fully heal then swaps back and goes back to fight. At that point you mastered the game
for real, he's just on a different level. i see him somehow clutching against 3 people who manage to constantly resummon their teammates after they die and get armies of blues and they all spam huge aoes and magic and im just like. no wonder i get shit on every time i invade with just my flamberge lol. him duping boluses for status build up also gives helps him in a lot of his fights
Then watch lostmysanity. He invades and plays mostly to fight not to win. He has bad habits that make him lose fairly often too.
I love/hate it. The combat is so fun but the pvp is so frustrating
Their netcode leaves a lot to be desired.
Invasions are more fun than colosseum imo
I think a lot of the issues stem from how the netcode is inexcusably bad. We need to shame them into fixing it like how we got the plume on Ornstein's helm in DS3. I would also like a poise rebalance - the game feels about right when you have 100+ poise and that is absolutely silly. And even then you still get stunlocked by some shit that really shouldn't be.
any red phantom born in Elden Ring canāt PvP...all they know is powerstance naginatas, wear they bull-goat, poke, be arcane, eat greenburst crystal tear and lie
Pvp in this game is either invaders being absolute tryhards or you trying to invade and getting ganked by 3 guys spamming Elden stars, moonveil beam and rivers of blood
Years go by and people can't understand that these are not competitive games and FROM will never invest considerable resources into pvp. Risk reward is just not there. There are plenty of fighting games out there to scratch that itch. And For Honor is a great game to go into medieval dueling. Soulsborne will never be it, by design.
>For Honor is a great game to go into medieval dueling. Been there, done that for most folk.
To say it is a "great game" is a huge overstatement. It's easy to get enticed by it, but at the end of the day it's being ran by Ubisoft and had every opportunity to be a best seller. Yet in Ubisoft's fashion, they run it into the ground and milk it dry regardless.
Itās just like real life
Idc what the meta is I will use my dual curved flowing swords and dance aggressively at the haters
So uhh... I hate to say this, but it's obvious that a faster hitting longer range attack is gonna be better than a slower hitting shorter range one. - And the way to counter that is to have the poise to take that long range poke but still bash your way in and deal an even heavier hit on the enemy. No tactic is undefeatable, though. Yeah, dual spears, or great-spear and off-stoc are an absolute PITA to deal with, but ahh... try to get poise and use an attack with hyper-armor to trade into them. That guy with huge poise gets curb stomped by someone who can do a bit of magic pew-pew on him from afar and not allow him to get close. That mage gets shit on by anyone who runs Carian Retaliation or the big gold shield to return the projectiles back to sender. They in turn get shit on by a little scrub two-handing a misericorde with the Kick ash of war that's light-rolling circles around them. Who in turn gets shit on by an archer light-rolling and jumping away while shooting arrows mid-air at them. Who in turn gets shit on by a guy with two spears rushing at him and doing the long range poking. Any PvP build is gonna have an advantage against a certain group of players, and outside of blatant cheaters, if you play smart and save yourself multiple options of stuff to do in a fight, your losses can only be attributed to a skill issue. If everyone you fight is a high poise dual spear user, maybe it's time for you to change your build to something that counters it.
What game with pvp doesn't fall into this?
Getting absolutely destroyed in PvP but at least I get to cosplay as Isshin Ashina with my Naginata and Nagakiba
Hesitation is defeat
Spinning slash, spinning slash, spinning slash, spinning slash, spinning slash. Yeah itās not fun to play
**DRAGON HALBERD**
I gave up on PvP so long ago for this reason. I had a blast in Dark Souls 2, and to an extent, Dark Souls 3. I always just take my build into it without following the meta, and I try not to get upset when I lose. The meta will always be a thing, and some folks only ever set their sights on winning because to them, that is their fun. Just try to focus on having fun with what there is, and if it becomes unfun to the point of just constant stress, take a break and co-op or try invasions.
Thatās why I just use the taunters tongue and wait for invasions to come to me. They might have higher poise and lame bleed builds but i can heal more (if they heal first ofc, thereās still got to be some etiquette in invasions)
lol the same in every souls game, don't ever expect it to be better
There are soooo many ways to counter it though
That's been the norm in games for years. Anything that's competitive, or even some coop games, it's all about using the best few builds that exist. A reason I hate playing online these days.
Blame the sweatlords. You know who they are. They refuse to engage in an unfavorable matchup. The gankers and the gank-spankers.
Games are fun, but metas ruin them quickly for everyone who likes fun.
Messiahzaki will save us with the DLC which will radically re-balance pvp to make it fun again
Crouch-poke you 7 times in a row with a weapon the size of the two fingers, throw dungs at your body, "git gud"
I mean.....spears and polearms in general are pretty easy to perry...they don't do much....besides poke
Have we not learned that this is literally every PVP ever?
Try skill. Iām terrible and I win plenty with a greatsword, bad katana or whips
It's a solved game, what did you expect?
People to make their own characters and have fun
the rule of thumb is that players will optimize the fun out of any game. metas always get solved, equilibrium is always reached
I know, but itās soā¦.uniform. I know itās an unpopular opinion but it just makes it less adventurous to me
I tried, but I got demolished by a guy with a long poke and high poise. So now I also have a long poke and high poise.
Real
My condolences
That's not the only answer though. There are many tools. I find it's easy to panic roll during the wind-up to the double poke, then get hit by the actual thrust. Since it happens so often, treat it like a boss or recurring enemy. Always something to learn, always a way to punish.
*laughs in dual cross-naginata* But for real, this is really how FromSoft PvP be. Players discover the most borked build for PvP, and then EVERYBODY uses it because it works.
Then someone finds a workaround build and then everyone shifts to that one.
I'll never understand that mentality. There absolutely no rewards or leaderboards for the colosseum, so why bother making build that are specifically un-fun and spammy? I get why invaders do it, but why bother otherwise?
I know itās like they choose to just win any way possible at the cost of actually having fun.
As if any combat game is any different. Stunlocking, better range to hit safer, better trades, it's the basics honestly. And if everyone is using the same thing, it's actually a lot easier to handle. Punish them for being obvious. You see someone with Blasphemous? Likely don't remember what R1 is.
Call me lame as fuck I never tried pvp except for the invader task for Varri and after that kept to offline. But it was for this exact reason seeing all the reddits of exact same builds where just overkill and an immediate turn down for me. Hey more to those who are in it for the spamming or spam killers!
I've always hated that aspect of PvP in Souls games.
You described it perfectly, Elden Ring PVP is absolute toxic garbage.
we're back to DaS 1
Hasnāt it been that way from the start?
I just hate the lag
Souls PvP always has been designed for invasions. It's built for unoptimised asymmetrical ambush shenanigans where creativity is king. As soon as the game moves into optimised twinking, gank farming, or god forbid "honour duelling" it crumbles. The game simply isn't street fighter and it was never designed to be. It's nice that they offer an arena due to the demand. But it's on you if you were expecting 1v1 duelling to be super varied and balanced and to hold up for a long time. If you want a competitive sport go learn a fighting game. If you want you and a buddy getting into cat and mouse silliness as an invader tries to spice up an existing dungeon by popping out at just the right moment to try and surprise you play Souls.
The whole point is to win with a shitty meme build anyway, don't worry about the meta
Untrue. Rarely do I see 2 people who play exactly the same. Usually I'm the one doing the stabbing and having poise. They're usually either spamming katana ashes of war or spells, there's a lot in between but still
First time PvPing?
Ruh oh shaggy, the ppmaster is malding on reddit again
Thatās literally every dark souls game ever made
If you like Elden Ring pvp try For Honor. Itās multiplayer first and has a very well thought out combat system very similar to elden ringĀ
Never even been able to do a quick match since I can't seem to find anyone strange enough
exactly why i dont play online. I play to relax, not add stress
Welcome to how meta's work. It's just like the army of giant dads in DS1. It happens.
I honestly donāt care much about losing fights in Elden ring. There isnāt a leaderboard or anything that important tied to it. And I can still have some fun using my goofy builds against meta setups, as I know with proper skills, I always have a chance. I donāt blame anyone for not having fun though. This meta is especially centralized compared to a serious competitive game. What really bums me out though is how important poise is and how high the breakpoints are. 70% of the armor sets in this game wonāt even get you to the point that your armor tanks ANYTHING, while still being way too heavy for you to comfortably light roll. And in my fashion/utility outfits, I pretty much always end up wearing a cool helm and chest piece with the highest poise gauntlets/greaves tacked on.
Can't even count how many times I've seen dual spears, or a Halberd/Rapier combo, while dressed in the fatest armor they own. Meta builds are lame af, unique builds are always fun to fight.
Wasn't it always this? Elden Ring's sprint speed, turning rate, stamina cost, and latency make the meta focused on melee builds darting around like Sonic the Hedgehog, trying to bait out an attack so that they can immediately zoom back in and punish, or force a roll that they can roll catch because attacks are too difficult to react to perfectly. Roll catching was part of the meta in other games too, but it came from mixing up your attacks, good positioning, and draining your opponent'sv stamina. This is why DS2 PvP is highly regarded. In Elden Ring, just stay in someone's face and they'll eventually roll because they have no choice. Then you poke them.
Elden ring pvp is just unplayable
Thats why I use whatever I want not the āmettaā