Elden Ring (DLC hype room)

[languid tiger]

a juiced to fuck version

[dusty kraken]

She invented it, I guess she gets the prototype gundam version of the spell

[languid tiger]

i wish i got access to the interdimensional flash step version :(

[left willow]

Thunderstep is one of my favorite 5e spells XD

If you're casting Death Spells [https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Death+Sorceries] 70/34 is the breakpoint for the Death's Prince Staff

[grave plinth]

Idk its doing work for me in the Haligtree

[steel scroll]

Final dlc boss spoiler

[frozen olive]

watching Marcomeatballs video on the SOTE soundtrack and he's gotten to the bosses and he's speculating about things/confused about things cause he doesn't have any of the lore knowledge 😭

nooooo Marcomeatball you can't just look at the fights you need to read the boss items, they give so much context...

[frozen olive]

trying to decide if it's worth farming Golem fist for its r2 rocket punch for a build i'm doing

[golden pond]

yes

[frozen olive]

doing a cosplay build and rocket punch would be sick for the build

it's perfect for the build

but the golems are the absolute worst enemies in the game

[languid tiger]

i farmed one

i can dupe my file and drop it for you

[frozen olive]

would love that

which grace you wanna meet at

[languid tiger]

actually shit, i didn't realize what time it was, i'll ping you later today if it ain't pressing

i gotta get out

[frozen olive]

it ain't

dw

how much later btw

like rough estimate

[languid tiger]

uh, work day later

[frozen olive]

aight

[gray leaf]

Okay, question about the final boss, now that I've finally gotten a good look: ||Why is Miquella missing an arm? I mean, he has three, but you can also see where a fourth one would be, which fades out shortly below the shoulder. So... why?||

image of the thing in question (i.e. part of the final boss fight)

It's just such a specific thing.

[golden pond]

||other one is also spectral, i'ts probably akin to ranni how she got 2 faces but they'er offset||

[gray leaf]

Which makes sense, but... ||he has a physical right arm, a spectral right arm, and a spectral left arm. His physical left arm is gone, in a very peculiar way almost reminiscent to the legs of albinaurics.|| Why did that happen?

[golden pond]

design choice i guess

[gray leaf]

||I mean... I had wondered why his sacrifices called out his arms specifically... but at the same time, both his arms were sacrificed, so that doesn't change anything.||

...I'm not asking why the character on-screen looks like that, I'm asking why the character in-universe looks like that.

[old brook]

Could be an empyrean thing, but Malenia's something a special case

[modest berry]

||in the belurat tower there is one cross where miquella specfically denotes that they discarded their sinistral (or left) arm ||

[old brook]

But could be ||something about Miq's dual nature, could be about the arm sacrifices, could simply look cool||

There's both iirc

||Dextral and sinestral or something||

[golden pond]

yeah

[modest berry]

||the left hand if we think about historical associations might be denoting a shedding of sin||

[golden pond]

alternatively

||Miyazaki wanted another hot twink since ds3 didn't have one||

||and went wild with design again||

[gray leaf]

||Miquella the Kind is the child of Marika and Radagon, not Hideo Miyazaki.||

[modest berry]

||the 10 sec amputee twink foot shot is 100 percent plot necessary||

[obtuse halo]

This just means "right" and "left" respectively if you're wondering

[golden pond]

||First thing you see on screen are feet, that's classic miyazaki||

||it's his signature move||

[obtuse halo]

God I was thinking that the first time I hit phase 2 like goddamn it Miyazaki

[golden pond]

||the moment dogs come out, it's Miyazaki. If there's no dogs, it's George||

[modest berry]

||and if theres incest its the latter, truly the final fight is an authorial dialectical synthesis ||

[obtuse halo]

I think it's an ||Empyrean Shedding their Body|| thing moreso; ||there are multiple statues of Miquella at the Haligtree with two arms and his appearance in the memory also only has two arms||

[gray leaf]

I agree that there's probably a connection there. It's just... ||he shed his whole body. In fact, the shedding of his arms is explicitly called out, but it calls out that he shed both arms, and they're treated equally. So why is this one part of his body different?|| I agree it could be symbolic, though... ||was there any evidence of Marika missing part of her body after returning through the Gate of Divinity? Or, actually, did she make up for that loss with the whole "shaman flesh melding harmoniously" thing?||

[frozen olive]

@languid tiger i got the weapon btw, thanks for the offer anyway

[obtuse halo]

||She does appear to be grabbing up parts of other shamans during the story trailer||

[modest berry]

||well radagon after the explosion of the elden also has no left arm if i remember right||

[obtuse halo]

Wait, that's a good point

[frozen olive]

||there are crosses denoting the sacrifice of both arms||

[obtuse halo]

||he's got a shadow hand||

[modest berry]

||miqella has one hand inside him like a muppet to control him for phase 2||

[golden pond]

such a hottie

[gray leaf]

I need to watch that trailer in depth I think. But the fact that ||the limb fades out is interesting. And... if Marika was missing a substantial amount of flesh, it could explain how she fused with Radagon — if we're still going with the theory that Radagon and Marika were originally separate and then fused, rather than originally being connected and/or forming as a result of splitting apart.||

[obtuse halo]

||actually though, maybe that's why Marika maintains the appearance of two arms - because Radagon is also Marika, and is holding the other one||

[gray leaf]

One other conspicuous absence I just realized: ||whatever happened to Miquella's shadow? I mean, presumably he'd have charmed them, but where are they?||

[modest berry]

||well malenia has none either ||

[gray leaf]

||Are empyrians naturally dualistic, and it's just that the nature of those two halves aren't always directly connected? Like... is that why Malenia phase 2 has both arms? I assumed it was regeneration, but it could just as well be some sort of "swap" with the other, more divine, less mortal self. Or... something.|| I can say a lot of words and make a lot of justifications to make something seem reasonable, and yet I have no idea how true any of it is.

[obtuse halo]

||Yeah Miquella and Malenia not having obvious shadows has been a weird open question since the basegame||

[gray leaf]

||There are statues of them with wolves, actually, so it's clear the shadows exist and weren't forgotten about. But we haven't heard a thing about what happened to or with them.||

[golden pond]

||? malenia doens't have 2 arms in phase 2, what?||

[obtuse halo]

||Despite her title, Malenia Phase 2 is still a demigod||

||and not a full goddess||

[gray leaf]

...doesn't she? I distinctly remembered her doing so. ||Or maybe I'm just thinking about her eyes?||

[golden pond]

||no she's explicitly still using a prosthetic||

[modest berry]

true, though they are different than other demigods, being the child of one dual god

[gray leaf]

||I'm not denying that. Her second phase is only part of her.||

[gray leaf]

...well, never mind, then.

[obtuse halo]

That said the stuff about ||empyreans shedding their bodies|| makes me wonder if ||the Scarlet Rot wasn't attacking her per se, but merely forcing this process over time in pursuit of her Godhood||

[golden pond]

reminds me of that time in jojo that Josuke at 4 years old is rescued by another Josuke and it's just never acknowledged

[old brook]

According to her mythos aren't we sort of setting Malenia up for godhood

[gray leaf]

!!!! I just realized something very, very important.

||I think I know where Miquella's left arm is: it's sticking out of the cocoon in Mohgwin Palace.||

[golden pond]

||wrong arm||

[gray leaf]

Well, that would have been cool if it was correct.

[golden pond]

||it's a righty||

[gray leaf]

never mind, then.

[golden pond]

[obtuse halo]

||Malenia's left arm also isn't missing. Her right arm is.||

oh wait I misread

lol

[golden pond]

reading is hard

[obtuse halo]

too many M names

[golden pond]

m m m m m mm m MAMASITA

[gray leaf]

It does make it easier to trace families when they have alliterative names, though.

[frozen olive]

think i've finished my cosplay setup

[obtuse halo]

at any rate I think the Doylist reason for ||Miquella and Malenia not having a shadow|| is that ||Malenia plays the same role as a shadow for Miquella, except insofar as obedience to the fingers||

[golden pond]

i can't wait for my brain to let me play the game more so i can ptu this drip to good use

[obtuse halo]

unsure what the Watsonian in-universe reason is though

it's good drip bront

[golden pond]

it's my commander setup for when i go through the game primarily using Soldier ashes

with a phase 2 sword

[modest berry]

also like, there are some other empyreans we have no need to see the shadow of, radahn for instanc, maybe rykard ate his shadow already we'll never know, though miquellas was probably pertinent

[golden pond]

for when they die

or i might just use the banner ngl

[obtuse halo]

I don't think Radahn is an Empyrean

Empyrean =/= demigod

[modest berry]

got it got it

i thought so but i wasnt entirely sure

[gray leaf]

Yeah. That's a stumper, and it's been a mystery for a while, but it feels like it might've been resolved. Instead we get ||jar lore|| (which, although blithely described, actually isn't anywhere near as trivial as it might sound).

[obtuse halo]

the confirmed Empyreans are, IIRC: Marika, Ranni, Miquella and Malenia, Gloam-Eyed Queen

Maybe Godwyn? I'm not even sure about that one

[golden pond]

at least we got twink toes

[gray leaf]

I think Messmer is Empyrean, since ||he hosts the Base Serpent in the exact same way Marika hosts the Greater Will and Malenia hosts the Scarlet Rot||.

[frail sky]

I don’t think Godwyn is one

[modest berry]

why is ranni one then actually

[gray leaf]

Unclear.

[obtuse halo]

possible, but I don't know if there's any real support for that

[gray leaf]

||The whole thing with the eyes is implicit support, I think.||

[frozen olive]

as i understand it it's pretty unclear as to how one is an empyrean but you seem to be born as one

[obtuse halo]

I only really list it as possible because Messmer's total erasure from the Lands Between and basegame means there wouldn't necessarily be any corroborating evidence

[frail sky]

I wonder how different Messmer would have turned out if he wasn’t told to gestures at land of shadow

[golden pond]

i love thsi lmao

[frozen olive]

i don't think you can become an empyrean

you either are, or aren't

[golden pond]

Role: First one to kick the bucket

[gray leaf]

||Judging by Ranni, being an empyrean is also at least partially a physical quality.||

[frozen olive]

also i have finished my cosplay build that i'm going to run with my friends when we end up doing a co-op DLC run

[obtuse halo]

Location: Deeproot Depths

Photo is from Stormveil Castle

[frail sky]

Justfextrathings

[golden pond]

he's also in half hte catacombs bruh

[obtuse halo]

True

[frozen olive]

(Final Boss Spoilers) Behold, the Genesic GaoGaiGar build

[gray leaf]

...wait, is Radahn empyrean after all??? Big giant spoilers ||The description for the Remembrance of a Lord and a God mentioned "their cursed selves" for both Miquella and Radahn, and it's clear that hosting outer gods can be and frequently is described as a curse.|| It's a huge reach, though.

[frail sky]

Speaking of fextra, why does literally every page have “note: as of patch X, Y stats were changed”? Like, we don’t need to know that we just need to know the current stats

[frozen olive]

spoiler all of that please

[gray leaf]

...me? I'm willing to spoiler stuff but I'm not sure what to spoiler.

[frail sky]

(Admittedly the better question is “why fextra”)

[gray leaf]

ah, sorry, I was being cavelier with base game stuff, I should fix that.

[umbral portal]

Because they have the site already

[obtuse halo]

eh, I think keeping a version history is fine

it's useful for understanding old comments if nothing else

[frail sky]

The thing is is that they don’t actually keep the old stats anywhere

They just say “oh hey this changed”

And only sometimes

[gray leaf]

Also ||isn't this backwards? I thought she was reborn because she was Empyrean, and didn't want to be, so she shed her flesh to escape that (or at least escape some of the consequences of it).||

[frozen olive]

||Ranni specifically killed her flesh because she was beholden to the Two Fingers as an Empyrean||

[golden pond]

real shti tho

I hadn't expected any soul to recognize me in this guise.

[frozen olive]

||she did not become an Empyrean after her rebirth, she was one before, there are several reasons we know this but the one i can think of off the top of my head is Blaidd||

[golden pond]

bestie, wtf was your plan

[frail sky]

I assume she meant “how the hell did you figure out my soul was in here”

[golden pond]

||`
Let us speak of the past, a while.

I was once an Empyrean.
Of the demigods, only I, Miquella, and Malenia could claim that title.
`||

nokron doll dialogue

[frail sky]

I’m pretty sure base game spoilers are fair game here

Okay they definitely are

[gray leaf]

DLC but ||I still think Messmer is an Empyrean and Ranni just doesn't know that about him (and/or doesn't know that he exists)||.

But, otherwise, yeah.

[modest berry]

|| it is backwards,,, im just trying to figure out why she among others who arent is one (an empyrean), and why she was able to become a god still even though she did the plan to divide herself from that status||

[gray leaf]

It does mean ||Radahn almost certainly wasn't, so then why is he described as cursed? Unclear.||

[frozen olive]

well

||she still has the backing of something akin to an outer god doesn't she?||

[modest berry]

||her moon? ok that tracks ||

[frozen olive]

||not entirely clear on if that is entirely necessary considering we don't know if Miquella is associated with one||

[gray leaf]

||I think that's because she's empyrean. Or, alternatively, she's empyrean because of that but then that just begs the question of why she has that support.||

[frozen olive]

||an exceedingly powerful Celestial object, the Dark Moon||

[golden pond]

||Each of us was chosen by our own Two Fingers, as a candidate to succeed Queen Marika, to become the new god of the coming age. Which is when I received Blaidd. In the form of a vassal tailored for an Empyrean.||

[frozen olive]

||one of the two moons that is possible to be seen in the game||

[gray leaf]

||I assumed he was, and that's why he was eternally youthful.||

[golden pond]

||maybe what makes you empyrean is that 2 fingers chose you||

[vestal night]

I do love her first line when you keep talking to the mini Ranni

Oh?
A dogged fellow, aren't we?
Or is it merely thy habit, to talk to dolls?

[old brook]

I thought ||'their cursed selves' was referring to Miq and Malenia in comparison to Radahn||

[golden pond]

You know me, sweetheart

[obtuse halo]

that was my read on it too

though ironically (still dlc final boss spoilers) ||by the time of the dlc boss fight, Radahn is in a reshaped Mohg's body and appears to be able to utilize Mohg's cursed blood||

[frozen olive]

||it's entirely possible, but also there is an extremely relevant link to outer gods that is still unaccounted for||

[gray leaf]

||"His strength, and his compassion, in contrast to their cursed selves." I had read it as "His (Miquella's) strength, and his (Radahn's) compassion, in contrast to their (Miquella's and Radahn's) cursed selves."||

[old brook]

And I'm sure spending ||decades? centuries? just absolutely rotted to hell makes you really normal in the longterm||

[obtuse halo]

the timeline of the shattering is pretty vague but ||i'd be pretty surprised if it was centuries - things seem to be a mess but on the order of a couple decades out rather than centuries||

[old brook]

it doesn't help that everyone ingame describes things like epochs

[gray leaf]

Very true, and that connection's still a bit odd that it works, but ||using cursed blood doesn't seem to require any especial connection to the Formless Mother beyond what an incantation can do, and it's clear that those can be created even by mortals.||

[old brook]

clearly this all happens in one whacky afternoon like Bloodborne

curses seem to be like actively formed by group emotions/god will so it's hard to judge sometimes

[frail sky]

||To me it kinda feels like the golden order has only been around for like maybe a century by the time of the shattering too||

[old brook]

also random thought but does the fact you still get runes outta folks mean they haven't been spurned by grace

[obtuse halo]

yes

though also i'm not sure runes are quite that tightly connected to grace - you also get runes for killing tarnished

[old brook]

miriel is right as ever

[frail sky]

I like how bloodborne can take about as much time to beat as it takes for the game to actually take place
Like, base game bloodborne isn’t too hard to beat in a little over a night if you don’t do chalice dungeons

[obtuse halo]

that said plenty of characters have the grace of gold in their eyes, and zullie did a neat vid on it

[old brook]

god, there's so much eye stuff

eyes and fingers, and sometimes they touch and it's bad

I wonder how Fingercreepers.. sense ya. Ground vibrations maybe

[gray leaf]

||Outer gods, and their influences, dwell in the eyes. Arguably any influence does, given the effects of Dragon Communion? But Messmer provides a very clear example.||

[obtuse halo]

||Not to mention the frenzied flame||

[old brook]

||such a good phase 2 cutscene, lordt. but that does track. blood star, madness, the golden irises.. malenias I s'pose||

||let us see under those helmets, Cleanrot knights, all the other subscribers to this god are eyeless(?) bugs||

[gray leaf]

||The appearance of scarseals and soreseals look a lot like eyes too.||

[old brook]

and of course..

[obtuse halo]

Truth be told I don't have a single idea what's up with those things

[umbral portal]

Worm

[golden pond]

YOOOOOOOOOOOOO

GRAVWORM

[obtuse halo]

i'm sure there's lore somewhere, but hell if I know

😛

[old brook]

crystal golem smith got bored

made some worms

everyone was like 'hell yeah'

[vestal night]

[frail sky]

hell yeah

[old brook]

clearly something to do with evergoals.. just some sort of watcher.. golem

bomb

[golden pond]

better thing i wanna ask

[old brook]

oh that we do know

[golden pond]

who the fuck approved this fucked up project

[obtuse halo]

actually we do know what's up with those

Unironically, maybe ||Sellen||

[old brook]

nobody, that's why Sellen got kicked out

[obtuse halo]

or someone following a similar line of research

[golden pond]

aight

[old brook]

in a way they're sort of ||sorceror jars||, huh

[golden pond]

time to drug sellen with the sleepy powder and turn her into a puppet

[obtuse halo]

you're not wrong!

[golden pond]

alex should've just went to school and learn magic

[obtuse halo]

So what I'm hearing is ||Sellen needed to find a Sorcerer Shaman||

[golden pond]

||you think Miquella would eb pissed if we threw Alex's innards at him?||

||hey catch! throws a shaman remain||

||walk in wearing a fucking pot head, throwing jars everywhere||

[gray leaf]

...apparently ||in the original japanese "shaman" was closer to "miko" which has female implications... which is a shame in some ways, because otherwise (as has been stated before) it cleanly explains how Godrick was able to just stick the stump of a severed limb onto the severed head of a dragon, and just... turn that head into a hand.||

[golden pond]

||ALEX IS A TBOY, WOOOO||

[gray leaf]

||...not the conclusion I was expecting at all... also it's not clear whether jars are made in the same way in the Lands Between as in the Lands of Shadow, or what's going on there? Or if the people in the jars are at all the same person as whoever the jar turns out to be?||

...oh no. I just realized something Very, Very Bad.

[paper badge]

eww, dolly-botherer

[gray leaf]

||Each of those jars has a person in the middle, right? It's not clear how exactly the process works, and how living or dead various people are when they're put into the jar, or any of what's going on... but. There exist small jars. Far too small for an adult to fit into.|| uhhh TW negative implications involving children

[golden pond]

||well yeah, they're kids c:||

||i bet it's a jarring experience||

[gray leaf]

||If this whole process is so abhorrent that it prompted Marika to declare a crusade against the hornsent, though, how come it's continuing in the Lands Between (and with wax seals bearing the crest of the Erdtree, no less)? Is something different? And how come all of the jars in the Lands Between have wax seals still, while many of the ones in the Land of Shadow are wandering around without one?||

[golden pond]

||It's entirely possibel that Messmer wanted his crew to unjar them and retrieve the shamans||

[gray leaf]

||I think there's a few of them in his castle, including one on a hospital bed, even. But I'm also talking about the ones still in the gaols.||

[frozen olive]

||All of the Shamans are gone||

||that includes any children that may have been||

[golden pond]

||I think they mean the tiny jars that are literally kid-sized ||

[gray leaf]

||Yeah, true, but there's a difference between logically understanding that, and properly considering it.||

[golden pond]

||one even speaks like a kid||

[frozen olive]

||well yeah, that's what i'm alluding to as well||

[paper badge]

||I think the unsealed jars/innards are cases where the flesh melding was imperfect. And perhaps the jars of the Lands Between were made in the realm of shadow too, and just. settled down in places and survived a long time. We don't see any talking jars in the realm of shadow, maybe we only get alexander and jar-bairn because they've existed long enough to learn to talk? as for the seals, the wax could've just been reheated to imprint a new pattern, and the seal must not need to be perfectly impermeable, or else Alexander and Jar-Bairn couldn't possibly add to their innards||

[gray leaf]

||I mean both. I think the jars are kid-sized because they have a kid inside of them.||

[frozen olive]

||All of the Shamans didn't die since Marika survived but it was a genocide||

[paper badge]

hell, maybe ||only the jarburg jars can talk because they're so close to the carian study hall and found old discarded books idfk|| @gray leaf

[obtuse halo]

The Grafted Scions are also ||conspicuously blonde||

[golden pond]

||Both lands were together at some point and that's when the jarring happened. Then it got ripped out of that space||

[paper badge]

||yeah that's what I meant||

[obtuse halo]

idk I think it's a strong enough speculation that it's tied to the bloodline even if the specific japanese word has feminine implications

[gray leaf]

||The wax is also a different color. And it's implied the jars can and will be "reborn" by stuffing their innards into a new jar. That said... perhaps this was a compromise, of sorts? Jars are allowed to make new jars, perhaps using their own cultivated flesh as the binding agent for new jars, but they don't want new people being stuck in jars.||

[frozen olive]

||Grafter Scions are of the Golden Lineage||

||which is SPECIFICALLY Marika's lineage||

[obtuse halo]

Yeah.

[frozen olive]

||same as Godrick||

[obtuse halo]

Correct

I was agreeing with this theory!

[frozen olive]

||and they do grafting, same as godrick, and ostensibly the jars||

[obtuse halo]

I don't think the added information is strong enough to disrupt it

[frail sky]

Zullie vid on Rellana stuff:
||https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itipQQjJHnI||

[gray leaf]

||But I find it deeply and darkly ironic how closely Godrick is emulating the very evils which led to the formation of his much-vaunted Golden Order to begin with. And, as the only demigod two generations removed from Marika, he's probably the one who knows the least about his home.||

[frozen olive]

everything points to that being the case

[frozen olive]

it is ironically fucked up isn't it

[frail sky]

...dang discord has the worse thumbnail, here's the better one

[obtuse halo]

It also retroactively makes Godefroy a little less obnoxious to exist, because grafting being a truly heinous crime worthy of being locked away forever makes more sense

[frozen olive]

yeah

[paper badge]

could be that ||Grafting is like. the least, most shittiest/devolved possible application of Shaman Flesh properties, befitting Godrick's diluted blood, and accounting for the fact that they're not female descendants of the golden lineage, wrt shaman = something feminine in original japanese|| @gray leaf

[frozen olive]

gods SOTE lore is so fucking good

and adds so fucking much

[paper badge]

also

[frozen olive]

genuinely just changes so many things and expands on so much that we already knew about

[paper badge]

talking about ||shaman fleshmelding|| has made me think about something

[gray leaf]

||Godrick: "Someday... we'll return to our home... bathed in rays of gold..."

Minor Erdtree incantation description: "Marika bathed the village of her home in gold, knowing full well that there was no one to heal."||

[frozen olive]

absolutely masterful stuff

[golden pond]

boooooooba

[frozen olive]

i did NOT think about that

[paper badge]

maybe ||marika constructed the divine gate with some small portion of herself, like some blood, and a shitload of hornsent corpses, since it used to be all wet and meaty in the trailer||

[frozen olive]

||that sure is a fucked up line for Godrick the Grafted to pull||

[gray leaf]

||Is Godrick repeating the legends of his family without knowing what those words mean? Or is it just more of his tragicly ironic tale?||

[paper badge]

thoughts on this?

[gray leaf]

||...possible! it did not occur to me that she would have created the Divine Gate, but I have no idea why that didn't occur to me.||

[obtuse halo]

To be honest I always interpreted that as promising to return to Leyndell as Lord, when he previously failed to challenge King Morgott for it

but this could also be true

[frozen olive]

no matter what the case

it's disturbingly ironic

[obtuse halo]

for sure

[golden pond]

oh hey

you can kill the abyssal woods dudes without parrying

Fun

[paper badge]

||Enir-Ilim was probably built on some site where an intangible 'crucible current' sat (as talked about in the Spira incantation iirc), and the Hornsent cultivated it through various means known to them, and when Marika had the chance, she went to the terminus of that current and created the divine gate with her shaman blood, the corpses of hornsent she betrayed, and the grace of gold bestowed upon her by her two fingers, to tap into the divine power of the Crucible and fuel her ascension||

[obtuse halo]

Destined Death?

[golden pond]

yeah

petty af

[paper badge]

to quote that incantation

[golden pond]

combat is not an option
look inside
combat

[paper badge]

The spiral is a normalized Crucible current that, one day, will form a column that stretches to the gods.

[gray leaf]

Makes sense. Follow-up: how come, if you look at the dangling pillars ||on the bottom of Enir-Ilim, that look like they would connect to the ground but broke||, how come ||they have people coming out of them||?

[paper badge]

maybe ||Enir-Ilim originally wasn't floating in the air, and Marika did something to raise it up by however much it took to get to the exact right spot to put the divine gate, and the extra petrified bodies are leftovers from the whole event?||

that's just an idea I've made up on the spot

take it or leave it

[golden pond]

imma leave it, you can have it

[gray leaf]

There's a lot we'll probably never know.

[frozen olive]

The problem for me is usually just

[old brook]

I do wonder about the Golden Lineage, are there just other unnamed Godfrey-Marika childrens

[frozen olive]

What's there that has some insane story reason

And what is there cause it looks cool and fits with the overall themeing

[golden pond]

yeah, godefroy

[old brook]

Are they direct children though they seem removed

[obtuse halo]

Yes, quite a lot of them

[golden pond]

you think the fact that like all of the most powerful things have their toes out is a power scaler?

[obtuse halo]

many are unimportant or died in the Night of Black Knives; they're mostly filling the wandering mausoleums

[frozen olive]

i think it has something to do with being a signifier of the divine and a sign of purity

[obtuse halo]

oh definitely a lot of them are removed though

[golden pond]

oh man

just realized for my soldiers playthrough i'm gonna need to run around finding all the gloveworts

at least i can skip out on raya lucaria soldiers

and halig

[modest berry]

so true maliketh helmet plus exile armor and that weapon is my great value cosplay for this dude

[gray leaf]

So. This is the Erdtree's Favor talisman. I want you to tell me: ||does it look like Marika is missing a braid in this depiction, as she is when we see her while crucified||?

[steel scroll]

Afaik Marika is only ever portrayed with one briad.

Tangentially, googling "queen Marika concept art" returns a flood of ai slop. My blood boils.

[umbral portal]

AI has ruined google

in more than one way

[real shadow]

...y'know this brings up something I've been wondering: why is Godwyn's droopy-ass face ||in the land of shadow? It appears in the boss arena for the death knights.||

[gray leaf]

I was just trying to figure out a timeline of events, given ||we know why she only has one braid, and when that happened||.

[steel scroll]

||why would it be a second braid. Hair grows back. Cutting your hair short is a pretty common shorthand for 'i am moving on to the next stage if my life' in storytelling.||

[modest berry]

everyone who bows to you and then hits you while you bow has their own special place in hell

[obtuse halo]

true

[golden pond]

||This must mean that land of shadow was severed from land betweens after godwyn died||

[gray leaf]

||What I mean is that the way her hair is set up, and the way Miquella's hair is styled, it implies that it's a style which would have two symmetrical braids. But she very symbolically cut off one of them at some point, hence the asymmetry.||

[modest berry]

||or marikas baldachin simply has no effect on him, the scadutree is the reflection of the erdtree and his roots grow all under the lands between its not like, in the air in the same way faram azula is ||

[obtuse halo]

||Also death specifically flows into the Land of Shadow anyway||

[real shadow]

||I think most people, myself included, believe that the LoS was severed before the Shattering, which would predate Godwyn's Ganking, so perhaps his undying corpse really did sort of trickle down there.||

[frail sky]

||Trickle down corpsenomics||

[modest berry]

||if only he'd had trickled into the narrative of the dlc||

||but thats godwyn under the bridge||

[real shadow]

||Messmer's been at this for a while. Just continuing his crusade without word from Marika, likely thinking she'd eventually contact him and, well...she doesn't. Godwyn's death triggers the Shattering so he had to have been sent there before all that; if I'd hazard a couple guesses, he was sent there either before Marika and Godfrey finished their war, or just after that when Radagon came a'knockin' and the two had Messmer first and then sent him off to his crusade before any of the other kids were born.||

[vernal imp]

There’s a whole subtle thing in Elden ring about everything just being endless layers of corpses

Quite literally civilizations built on the dead of the past

I read || Godwyn’s corpse as being a thing so corrupt and malign it is growing and seeping through both rhe land of shadow and the lands in between ||

[grave plinth]

||Godwyn is somehow able to grow deathroot in Farum Azula, i don’t think he’s bound by ordinary spatial limitations||

[vivid spire]

||https://open.spotify.com/album/4BYjgs1SCc7D4HXbCnjRUy?si=UiG8-mCaRAmIyLJi-lR4Kw&utm_source=copy-link||

It's here

RAHHHHHHJH

Just in time for dnd

YES

[vale mountain]

bald balled

[mellow silo]

[slender loom]

I’d wanted to get a fair way in before hopping in here and, well, I’ve found where ||Miquella abandoned his love and hoo boy does that sound like a bad thing for a “kindly” god to give up||

[obtuse halo]

||the spirit next to that cross strongly agrees!||

[slender loom]

Yeah ||I spoke to it first and was like “oh, what could this be? I’ve already found his rune so it must be something really important” 💀||

…and now ||there’s a bunch of animals around a site of grace, which somehow feels spookier that the abyssal area||

[frail ferry]

https://fxtwitter.com/TendoDdoggo/status/1811365888446083571

[feral linden]

the world may have cats but the lands might not

[frozen olive]

There's a cat talisman???????

[dusty kraken]

Jumping at you with swords stuck to them.

[old brook]

The Cat Talisman might as well be a prank with how falling damage functions in this game

[signal harness]

3.99 meters of heaven

[slender loom]

Well there’s ||the dancing lion||, that’s a cat (maybe?)

[frozen olive]

I am seriously confused as to why the person in the tweet thinks this is the first confirmation of cats

[signal harness]

Yeah lol

They got Pikachus are cats so hard to believe?

[frozen olive]

We have tons of examples of bigger cats and the literal cat talisman for like, house cats

Serosh is weirdly enough like, the anti pet cat

Cause he's tamed Godfrey, not the other way around

Godfrey continues to be the funniest and coolest guy in the Lands Between

[frozen olive]

Fuck those golems though, absolutely awful to fight

[frozen olive]

This is what i wanted to use it for btw

[languid tiger]

nice!

[frozen olive]

I'm technically missing the Dividing driver but Genesic doesn't actually use it so i think it's fine

Got the Goldion Hammer, it's nail, the rocket punch, protect shade. And its melee fighting aspect

Overall really happy with how it turned out

Gonna use it on my co-op run of SOTE with my friends

Hopefully anyway

[stone cove]

Hmm

I am gonna try do something real dumb and funny in my Chill Optimizer run

BREAK INTO THE DLC >=3

Hohohoho.

(I have killed exaclty 1 shardbear so far in this run)

[obtuse halo]

Oh are we going for minimum% 😛

It's still so funny for me that the minimum% run requires killing Radahn and Mohg as your two Runebearers to get into Leyndell

[stone cove]

Oh, no, it's just a chill "Here's various tricks you can do to get STRONK" type run

[stone cove]

Okay that's amazing and i'm trying to figure out how that even works

[obtuse halo]

Pureblood Medal, mostly

[stone cove]

Yeah, i'm assuming the new npc they added a while back speeds that up

Radahn being faster than frigging Godrick thoguh is very ????

[obtuse halo]

Well, killing godrick requires you to defeat Margit

[stone cove]

Oooooh, right ofc.

[obtuse halo]

While you can trigger the radahn festival just by grabbing dectus halves

So with this route it’s possible to enter leyndell with only 3 boss kills: Radahn, Mohg, and DTS

The rest is pretty linear: goldfrey, morgott, fire giant, godskin duo, malekith, gideon, godfrey, radagon/EB

[stone cove]

DTS?

[obtuse halo]

Draconic Tree Sentinel

[stone cove]

oh, right

Who has teh funniest fucking Do It Fast

Parry then SMACK THE BUTT

[obtuse halo]

The only bypass for that one is through mimic tear and valiant gargoyles so you gotta

[stone cove]

DTS Horse "Oh shi- wha"

[glossy stag]

kibty

[frail ferry]

cat*

[gray leaf]

Zullie had a whole thing about that kitty if you watch her video on ||the Lion Dancers|| which I don't feel like I can adequately summarize right now but wish to pass along.

[stone cove]

the "Fight" agaisnt godrick ends up a Grafting Competion. With the tree sentinel judging.

[gray leaf]

...amazing.

[dusty kraken]

"ANCESTORS, WITNESS!"

[stone cove]

He looses for using the dragon, as it's declared very lame.

[dusty kraken]

Poor Godrick. He tries. He's just bad at things.

[stone cove]

Yes.

Ranni no.

[left willow]

I support women's rights and women's wrongs.

[steel scroll]

speaking of ranni's wrongs -
https://vxtwitter.com/All_Lee24/status/1811416568552993056/photo/2

[gray leaf]

Honestly, that's a pretty good summary of him in general, yeah.

Is it weird to want to describe Elden Ring pvp stuff with fighting game terms? And is it weird to talk about okizeme in that context when knockdowns don't work in the same way?

[steel scroll]

while i dont think there's any way to attack out of prone, it sounds ||oki|| to me

[gray leaf]

...also, I think Miriam's Vanishing -> Radagon's Rings of Light would actually be a good combo, because Radagon's deals very good damage to a pretty large area, and you can charge it to stagger the dodge timing. Also Vanishing -> Inescapable Frenzy sounds at the very least extremely funny.

The whole reason I was thinking about oki was Vortex of Putrescence though. It's a weird sort of... inverted shockwave thing.

[left willow]

Time for [Shadow Keep Boss] ||Messmer||. Should be an interesting fight, seeing as I stumbled into his boss arena with less than half of both flasks, the entirely wrong spells, and no summon in my bar :)

holy mother

||Phase 2 is an ass-kicker, damn||

[steel scroll]

||the snakes are very intimidating but I found them weirdly easier to dodge than his first form.||

[dusty kraken]

||They telegraph really heavily, I found. Moreso than first form.||

[left willow]

||Yeah, snakes aren't too bad? He just has some really big moves that come out faster than it feels like they should in phase 2||

||ah yes, the classic move: Command grab|| T^T

[stone cove]

Fuck yes!

First tried Mohg, Lord of Blood on my streaming character =3

Even got it on stream.

it was kinda disgusting how quickly he folded

I uh, i may have massivelyo verprepared but hey, taking him down at level 80ish

and then getting 570k runes off him

feelsgood.exe

[left willow]

3 tries, a short break, 2 more. ||Scratch Mesmer the Definitely Not Vlad Wannabe||

||I'll show Mesmer where he can point his tired blade 😏 ||

[glossy stag]

[left willow]

What should I level here?

I have basically 2 levels worth of runes

[obtuse halo]

if you're in doubt, it's hard to go wrong with taking vigor up to the 60 softcap

other than that, uh, more mind or end? I think I'm looking at an int caster build but that's a lot of faith so maybe faith if you're using prince of death/golden order seal for anything other than static buffs?

[left willow]

I use it for exploration healing and enabling some Sorceries, honestly. Technically have the ability to cast Golden Vow, if I remember to cast it

(and obviously status or damage resist as the boss demands)

[obtuse halo]

ah yeah, sounds like static buffs and things that don't scale with faith

[left willow]

the main issue is that going to break point with the PoD staff is it'll take 20+ levels :|

[obtuse halo]

yeah you'd need to go up to 50 faith for it to outpace the carian scepter

that was my build for the dlc but that build was a little wackypants in the first place

[left willow]

Oh! There's a field-boss ||hippo!|| My day is made

[left willow]

at 70 int it's 43, technically

at 80, the breakpoint is 51, iirc

ok, I think I need help

Because I CANNOT figure out where to go from here

[Post Shadow Keep] ||I just found and killed the hippo-thing field boss. Where the hell do I go from here?||

||Or do I need to backtrack somewhat?||

[obtuse halo]

i'm just going by the calculator

[obtuse halo]

assuming you're in ||Rauh||, look for a tunnel on a road northwest from the first grace

[stone cove]

You're still pure int caster right?

[left willow]

||Is the "first grace" Viaduct Minor Tower?||

A little faith for some buffs, as well as enabling the Briar spells

otherwise, yeah

[stone cove]

Yeah, i woulda just toolssed the levels into vig/mind/end

[left willow]

Technically some amount of dex for +cast speed and ability to use some weapons

[stone cove]

The only other thing of note would be getting to 40 dex.

[left willow]

yeah, tossed 'em into mind

[stone cove]

Which then with radagon's gives you max cast speed

Which like, aint bad or anything. (quite good in point of fact)

[left willow]

Oh, I did ||find and kill the Scarlet Bud Saint, but I was hoping to get to the place where the map is, no idea how tho||

[obtuse halo]

Oh! Completely wrong area then

||Rauh is weird. The map is completely inaccessible through the ruins post shadow keep; you’re going to be looking for a cave northish of Moorth Ruins with perfumers to follow to Rauh Base||

[left willow]

wtf

I'm not wrong in saying that, right?

Like, wtf??

[obtuse halo]

It’s an apparently common refrain

I did it in the opposite direction though. Found the bottom and map first, looked for a way up

[wild sierra]

yeah the map is on the lower level and there's no crossover

[stone cove]

It's one of the weakness of how they do maps and how they do multilevel areas

coulda been way cleaner

(should have been, for that matter)

[median rock]

god I did the entirety of the mountain region and spent so long looking for the map. only for it to just be in a straight up different subregion

[real shadow]

https://vxtwitter.com/PraiseTheFrom/status/1811448258658439616

[jaunty jungle]

Truly enlightening cut dialogue (spoilers) || https://youtu.be/fSR-kQKQn5c?si=7MQSoQFDIjLL21m5||

[languid tiger]

WAIT, THERE USED TO BE A GRACE THERE?

aww, nevermind

sadge

lmfao

it just keeps fucking going

[real shadow]

https://fixupx.com/oldwitchsring/status/1811739509140152413?t=aBe9iG2zq6gQJFKAbcj3ng&s=19

[kind garden]

You know, if you think about it

Godrick really one-upped the fuck out of the ||Hornsent|| when he grafted that dragon head

That was kind of a flex, actually

[grave plinth]

What do you think they put in the Great Jar at Caelid Colosseum?

[kind garden]

I don’t think they made that one frankly

But

Who knows what’s in that big ass jar

[obtuse halo]

probably all the bleed builds it summons for you to fight

😛

[kind garden]

Lmao

[steel scroll]

just found it like that

but yeah im willing to headcanon that's dragon soup. it doesn't fight us cus it wouldn't be sporting.

[kind garden]

Nah I just think that Erdtree faithful made it

To be clear

[atomic marsh]

Oh Messmer uses some of Radagon's motifs in his theme.

I think that's as close as confirmation that he's a Marika/Radagon son as we're gonna get barring some esoterica.

[frail ferry]

https://fxtwitter.com/MenasLG/status/1811753779559035326

[atomic marsh]

I mean Elden Ring has kinda consistently had MPREG

[obtuse halo]

radagon moment

[frail ferry]

that was theoretical tho

this is very blatant

[kind garden]

https://www.tumblr.com/x1702x/755373555717406720?source=share

Click through there’s another post in the link lol

[grave plinth]

Real

[noble acorn]

somehow i got all the way to shadow keep without ever meeting thiollier

if i've already beaten|| putrescent knight ||am i locked out of his quest?

[real shadow]

Nope.

[gray leaf]

...if we assume that the current jars are of a lineage with the Land of Shadow ones, ||it would explain the whole weirdness about them being "poached" and also specifically legally protected. Especially if all of their flesh sort of... took on the properties of shaman flesh.||

For a bit of added disturbingness (which isn't anything new at all but I want to point it out), ||living jars dramatically explode when killed... implying their contents are under pressure. They're packed full to the point of almost bursting.||

...Also, I want someone to try to PvP with the matriarchal staff (I... think it's the matriarchal staff? Whichever one casts both sorceries and incantations), Miriam's Vanishing, Inescapable Frenzy, Radagon's Rings of Light, and Vortex of Putrescence. Although maybe going a split stat built like that would lead to requiring pvp at a higher character level?

Maybe you could toss on one other spell, probably that one frenzy eyebeam laser. The idea is that warp casting inescapable frenzy will chunk people, Radagon's Rings of Light is harder to dodge since you need the right timing to do so (you can't just get out of the way) and it can be charged to vary the timing, and Vortex similarly punishes early rolls while allowing for space control. Having something like the eyebeam so you can teleport backwards and chuck that out would also be strong, especially if your opponent reads a forwards teleport and tries to hit you rather than dodging.

[frail ferry]

https://fxtwitter.com/PraiseTheFrom/status/1811764164420849758

[lucid furnace]

Anybody have a spare milady that they wouldn't mind dropping by a new character of mine?

I want to replay the game but with the weapon.

[gray leaf]

I am going to post part of the description of the Companion Jar talisman from the base game, without context. Just... consider it in light of the DLC.

Though the jars are brought to life by human flesh and blood, they are all rather kindly folk. Perhaps they were made to be better than their innards.

[trail sail]

The thing is that ||the jars in the Realm of Shadow and the ones in the Lands Between are made completely differently for different purposes||

||Lore regarding one can't be applied to the other||

[gray leaf]

||The exact relation between the two is still unclear, but yeah. I just thought it was interesting that they had that line in the base game.||

[dusty kraken]

||https://vxtwitter.com/anatoliaknight/status/1811705619633832420|| Cool Fight (DLC boss)

[lucid furnace]

||They both have the same origin no? Like Alexander is scooping up corpses to heal himself like the jars in SotE are just meshes of people||

[signal harness]

I think there might be some commonality between them

[lucid furnace]

||Sure they are different but I think the methods are the same||

[dusty kraken]

||There's some commonality in design physically but I don't think there's commonality in specifics and definitely not in cultural context.||

[signal harness]

I think the distinction is that ||LB Jars are filled with the bodies of heroes to take them to the roots of erdtrees and LS jars are filled with shamans in a flesh melding attempt||

[gray leaf]

||Did we ever hear anything about living jars being intended to take the bodies of heroes to erdtrees?||

[lucid furnace]

||Yeah true the cultural differences are still there||

[frail sky]

Damn, iron jar aromatics fuck

[signal harness]

I’m not sure if there’s an explicit thing but ||they are filled with heroes and go to rest at the foot of minor erdtrees||

[gray leaf]

I kind of forgot that second part, although I'm remembering it only just now.

regardless of any cultural context differences or not, though, that's still a direct quote from the base game.

[signal harness]

Yeah

I think it’s relatively uncontroversial to ||say that Marika’s plans in the Lands Between are heavily influenced by her past in the lands of Shadow (erdtree burial, defeating death, destruction of the Hornsent and Fell God, etc) and I think her repurposing the Jars original purpose into a “brighter” use fits into that very well||

[dusty kraken]

||Yeah, taking the tool that was used to turn the undesirable into something valuable and making it a heroes funeral is a very large recontextualizing of what the jars are supposed to mean/an attempt to reclaim agency over how her people were treated. At least, that's my read.||

[grave plinth]

||Yeah the Living Jars definitely appear to be a bastardized cultural remnant of the Saint Jars, possibly deliberately repurposed by Marika, but just as easily being a cultural practice that survived and changed and Marika wasn't able or inclined to stamp it out||

[gray leaf]

Of course, even with that, ||there's still a question of how the jars are made, since obviously they wouldn't use the same methods. Are they like... passing along flesh from one jar to the next as "starter"? I mean, we know flesh gets passed along, but it's unclear if that's the primary method. Or even if the flesh needs to meld at all.||

[grave plinth]

||making golems just seems to be like, a common-ish practice||

||these golems just have people meats inside them||

[gray leaf]

||The potentate's cookbooks make it clear that the saint jar methods are not only cruel, but arguably unnecessary. But it's still not quite certain the extent to which they're unnecessary.||

[grave plinth]

||Notably the Hero Jar stuff largely just seems to be Alexander's deal, most of the living jars seem content to just vibe||

||The Jars at the minor erdtrees are all notably smashed open, so those might actually have been the original hornsent jars that Marika broke and liberated the insides from||

[gray leaf]

||The item descriptions make it seem like the hero jar stuff isn't unique to Alexander.||

[languid tiger]

||also jarburg||

||alexander is more infatuated with the romance of it than most seem to be||

[grave plinth]

||and the actual living jars could be like, people in Marika's empire seeing the god-queen taking the innards from those jars and treating them with great care and respect and like, completely misunderstanding what she was doing||

[languid tiger]

||but "Warrior Jars" are a pretty consistent thing within the Lands Between's culture, it looks like||

[gray leaf]

||I'm wondering if they're basically just... a continued culture of the saint jars, with no "new" ones being made save for from the flesh of the old ones, voluntarily. Then again, there's the broken ones, and the fact that new jars (as in, the physical pottery) seem to be being made (plus of course the wax seals)... the exact relation between saint jars and warrior jars is still very unclear.||

[glossy delta]

The ||saint jars do seem specifically intended to be a darker twist on the whole 'living jars are better than their constituents' line from the base game yeah||

[gray leaf]

||We know they're not totally different, despite the weird... golem limbs... because there are saint jars which wander around in jar form rather than just escaping (particularly the young ones).||

[left willow]

Idk if anyone has responded to this yet, but I'll just let you know that I do have a spare Milady. I'm not free tonight, but I can try to find a time to hop on with you and pass it off

(I pinged to make sure you saw it, if you would prefer I don't going forward, lmk)

[Post Shadow Keep Spoilers] ||I'm at the point where I can burn the sealing tree. How far from the end of the DLC am I and are there any super important things I should do before I burn the tree?||

||Also, why was the damn centipede lady harder than Mesmer for me?||

[grave plinth]

Been thinking about the Fort of Reprimand and what it means for both Messmer's Crusade and the overall timeline

||So, there are Omenkillers in the Fort, which implies that the genocide of the Hornsent actually post-dates the appearance of Omen in Marika's empire. Interestingly the fort's torture dungeon is probably the cleanest and emptiest torture dungeon out of all of Elden Ring's many torture dungeon. There's the corpse-pit sure, and the bodies hanging in the castle square, but those bodies actually seem to be Messmer's soldiers, like the Fort of Reprimand started out as a death camp for Hornsent but later on got repurposed into a penal camp for deserters. A body with Marika's Rune is found in the corpse pit. Given how every Marika statue that the Crusade built is defaced (save the one in Messmer's room), its possible that, after they killed most of the Hornsent and realized Marika effectively abandoned them in a pocket dimension with no hope of escape, there was a little civil war among the crusader forces between Marika loyalists and Messmer loyalists.||

[gray leaf]

The remembrance of the boss you just beat can be used to get what is, in my opinion, the single most Anime thing in all of elden ring.

[languid tiger]

||wait, you found romina hard????||

[median rock]

||afaik it's only npc quests, no environmental things||

[languid tiger]

||damn, i thought consensus was that she was one of the easier bosses in ER||

[left willow]

||Took me nearer a dozen tries relative to 5 for Mesmer||

[languid tiger]

||i had zero trouble with her, and she felt like she was too squishy and didn't hit hard enough||

[median rock]

||romina didnt seem to have much hp for how late she was, for me. she died quick||

[languid tiger]

||what's your build for it?||

[median rock]

||same w metyr||

[gray leaf]

||While that last observation makes some sense, it's worth noting that Messmer was a Marika loyalist. It took until his literal death to acknowledge any ill feeling towards Marika, at least consciously.|| That first observation is really, really interesting, though.

[left willow]

Full Caster Sorcerer, basically. Summoned Lhutel who was just ignored.

||My spells were Zamor Ice Storm, Glintstone Comet, Glintblade Phalanx, and Flame! Cleanse Me||

[grave plinth]

||Messmer's feelings towards Marika seem rather complex. He has an intact statue of her in his room and continues following her orders, but he's also not particularly enthusiastic about it and he seems actually a bit pissed that Marika seems to value you more than him. We know he didn't do anything to stop his forces from defacing the temples to her that they built elsewhere.||

||Messmer seems to simultaneously hate Marika and crave her affection||

[stone cove]

https://youtu.be/PkkC5boqZNU no real spoilers here, just a fun pvp video

[gray leaf]

...have you seen The Tarnished Archeologist's weird theory that ||the Erdtree was burned before||? I'm not sure exactly where that fits, but it would do something to explain why ||the snake is thought of as a traitor. Treachery is a very specific thing for someone to be accused of.||

[stone cove]

Also @left willow Do all the npc questlines before you do the thing you were asking about

the ||Tree burninating|| is the cut off point for them.

[gray leaf]

If we assume that ||Messmer burnt the Erdtree (on Marika's orders, but pretending to be acting on his own)||, that would explain a number of things.

[left willow]

The build that killed her swapped to
||Yosh Summon, Stars of Ruin, Glintstone Phalanx, Golden Vow, Clarifying Boluses||
||I think part of it is her funny movement incidentally dodged the majority of my spells||

[left willow]

||Ah, thank you. What do I need to do to teach Redmane lady how to read? XD||

[stone cove]

||Help Ansbach find the thing he's looking for, talk to him, he'll give you a letter to take to her||

[grave plinth]

||Possible, but gladiator combat, where snake imagery is prominent, was at its height during Godfrey's time, while Messmer actually seems to have been a figure of note in the capital well after Godfrey's exile. He knows what a Tarnished is, so his crusade likely post-dates the view of snakes as traitors||

[gray leaf]

My grasp on the timeline is, apparently, rather shaky. In my (meager) defense, it's a lot to keep track of?

[grave plinth]

||I think Messmer was selected as Marika's exiled attack dog because he had snake features and thus was a controversial enough figure that his exile could be swept under the rug||

||its possible that the Abyssal Serpent he incarnates was actually the traitor and its been reborn in his form, just as the God of Rot was reborn within Malenia.||

Messmer's forces consist of four groups ||penal legionnaires, former erdtree fanatics, Rellana's personal guard, and noble scions of the capital who are personally loyal to Messmer||

[dusty kraken]

I should totally try a throwing weapon build but I"ve got so many characters as-is. XD

[left willow]

Also, i finally got Pest Threads, so Furnace Golems better watch their ankles

[gray leaf]

The eternal question is, of course, ||treachery requires some sort of allegiance or friendship to betray. So how did the Base Serpent get into a position for betrayal? Or whatever other serpent?||

[grave plinth]

||This suggests that Messmer was seen as kind of the family black sheep, possibly the bastard that everybody knew about but wasn't fit for polite company, but nevertheless was also a charismatic personality in the capital. The 'bad boy' who appealed to dissolute idle noble youth who stood little chance to inherit anything in an empire where the ruling class is effectively immortal||

[left willow]

What characters do you have, currently?

[gray leaf]

One other thing Vaati noted, which I have no idea of the importance of but might maybe have something to do with this: ||there's a shed snakeskin near Bonny Villlage. It doesn't look like any of Messmer's snakes. It almost looks like the one from the Volcano Manor.|| What does this mean?

[stone cove]

We reused an asset we already had.

[median rock]

anybody know if the ||red colored pests|| drop anything interesting? like a ||red pest glaive||?

[languid tiger]

nope, they don't drop anything new

[median rock]

damn

would be ncie if they got a recolor one that did minor scarlet rot or smth

[gray leaf]

Fromsoft is generally very good about being conscientious of what they're doing, especially visually. They make full faces (complete with detailed facial features) for characters who wear full-face-concealing helmets. It's possible that this is asset reuse, but it seems unlikely.

[stone cove]

I am, admitedly, being somewhat snarky

[dusty kraken]

Gravity Knight with Thrusting Shield, Dex-Based Perfumer, Arcane-Heavy Brawler (Previously Cetsus, now Beast Claws) as the main 'I'm actively running this'.

With a few I've played before but havn't used in ages.

[stone cove]

Beast Claws is so fun

[dusty kraken]

I could redo that Str/Faith character I was planning with a Fire Smithing Hammer or something.

[stone cove]

They do surpsingly well with status, interesitngly enough

[glossy delta]

I figure the perfumer likely has at least the stats for the throwing knives

[gray leaf]

Throwing weapons don't really seem like a build simply because they all use different stats and behave differently? But they actually also have really split scaling if I recall correctly, so maybe never mind?

[stone cove]

No, their scaling got fixed

[gray leaf]

But they aren't really A Build; I feel like either you'd build around one of them, or you'd build around the weapon class they belong to and then toss in a throwing one alongside that (i.e. spears with a throwing spear).

[stone cove]

They used to have a bug that made them get phys damage scaling from int while also still being flame art/holy/magic infused.

[left willow]

Those sound like fun

[stone cove]

And i mean, watch the video i linked Banantron, they are very good at bieng full on weapons

Throwing daggers are their own unique thing in a lotr of respcts

[left willow]

Oh, I still need to poke someone when I'm at home to transfer my Dry Leaf Arts

Cause I want to continue that run and getting experience with the weapon I intend to use will be good

[gray leaf]

I'm not saying they're not good at being weapons, so much as that they aren't really interchangeable, and don't really work with each other. Maybe I'm wrong.

[stone cove]

There ius literally a shield that's throwable and pairs with them, and you can use the throwing daggers as an offhand

since they're all throwing all the time

[gray leaf]

Yeah, maybe I'm completely wrong.

[stone cove]

Yes. Yes you are.

Like the majority of them are "X weapon, but your heavies are ranged"

So... tehy function just fine as X weapon but.

It's no different to any other weapon with a modified moveset.

[gray leaf]

To be clear, I always thought a throwing hammer build was viable. And so was a throwing spear build, or a throwing axe build, or a throwing knife build, or a build with the throwing shield. But I thought a generic "throwing weapon" build, which used multiples of those (besides maybe one as an offhand), or used them interchangably with each other, wasn't viable.

[stone cove]

That seems an overly sepcific/narrow thing, it's not like most builds use multiple of weapons anyway, simpyl because of equip weight issues (Which leads to goofy hotswitching, but anyway)

[gray leaf]

True, true. But even assuming switching between fights or areas, I just feel like they'd be fundamentally different builds.

Also: this is admittedly infused, and those actual numbers aren't high, but I was right about the weirdly scattered scaling/requirements even if most of the scalings are extremely low. (screenshot from the video you linked.)

[left willow]

Ugh, I want to watch a run of Elden Ring (ng+ or just ng) where someone uses the DLA, but all the videos are "check out this Crazy Uber Combo and silly beat down on a boss I do with the DLAs"

Which is not what I want to watch

[gray leaf]

very happy more people are pronouncing "scadu" correctly now, though!

[stone cove]

Yes, the scaling is basically ignorable on tehm

that is, the E stuff

[median rock]

DLA?

which wep is that

[left willow]

Dry Leaf Arts

[median rock]

oh

oh yeah have u found the second ash of war for them

[left willow]

Yeah, cause they're a new dlc weapon, so all the videos are the "over the top" builds, rather than just someone playing the game with them

[stone cove]

No wonder you've been enjoying my streams, lol

[left willow]

Not yet, I think I need to [Post Shadow Keep] ||burn the sealing tree?|| Unless ||Dane|| doesn't have it, in which case, I'm just poking around until I find it

[median rock]

nope, it's not there

[stone cove]

Actually useful look at how they scale, using 80 str with heavy.

Note that the int/faith is a measily 0.07 to 0.18 ar for int/faith, which is pretty crud.

It makes them very slightyl better ikf you go caster build of some kind

[median rock]

it's ||in the south end of the ancient ruins of rauh, roughly. don't remember the exact location but its near the east side grace - and this is on top, not in the lower area||

[left willow]

Sounds good. In which case, Operation: Poke Everything with a Stick will commence next time I'm free

[median rock]

(location spoiler for hades)

[trail sail]

https://youtu.be/B2WE2PyTz-0?si=CxkxBake77MCIOqQ

Enjoy

[left willow]

Context?

[median rock]

dont look if u dont' want, but if you get tired of searchign lol

[left willow]

Ah, ok

Well, I'm tossing them to a fresh character who isn't even into the dlc yet (technically haven't even fought Margret the first time on the character) so I probably want the ash sooner, rather than later

[median rock]

lmk if u want me to drop u a copy

[left willow]

Bless you, ty

[median rock]

i don't think i have a non-upgraded copy of ||the second martial arts weapon||, but i should have the fists + copies of palm blast & the second ash of war

[left willow]

Nah, I've got my own, so I just need to poke people when I'm on tomorrow to move them

[median rock]

sg

[stone cove]

Anyway, even with default scalings - Scriptsmith weapons get C-B in their given stat (STr for the Axe/Hammer, Dex for Spear, Cirque, Daggers), and get E in faith/int - with 0.09 AR per int/faith, to... 0.18 AR for Dagger/Cirque.

id ont even know why they bothered to give it scaling on those stats, tbh

[median rock]

does having any amount of scaling in that affect when it's infused?

[stone cove]

It did! Which was bugged.

[median rock]

like, is adding an infusion strictly additive scaling-wise, or does it care more than that about preexisting scaling?

[vestal night]

Used to, not anymore

[median rock]

so it was bugged to be really good but now it has no effect whatsoever? interesting

[vestal night]

Well it still has an effect, just only the regular infusion effect

[median rock]

i meant specifically preexisting scalings

[gray leaf]

I suspect it was there to justify having requirements there as well. Which of course begs the question as to why they have int and faith requirements, which I have no answer to.

[stone cove]

Eh, tehy're magical weapons, having requiremnts doesnt bother me and is kinda neat

so the b ugged effect was that you would add Faith scaling say - which normally only gives you scaling fire/holy damage.

But because they already had innate physical scaling with Int/Faith, it d ouble-dipped, so you'd get the scaling Fire ANd scaling physical.

That's since been fixed, and it works like every other infuesable weapon, the scaling only adds to the eelmetnal damage

[gray leaf]

yeah, but it's still a bit odd.

[vestal night]

Infusing AFAIK adds scaling if there isn't one in the respective stat
If there is already scaling it improves it, and for elemental infusions makes it scales the elemental damage instead of physical

[stone cove]

Anyway, Sacred/Flame art infusing them gives them B or C scaling in faith, same thing with magic

[median rock]

yes, i know that

[stone cove]

https://www.tarnished.dev/weapon-calculator

You can check out their exact scaling here if you care

[median rock]

the question is what does the scaling actually do with preexisting scaling when converting it to elemental

is it strictly additive with the previous scaling it converts? or does that scaling count for more, or less, or what

[gray leaf]

I saw a video of someone doing Vanishing -> Madness combos, actually, although they were casting with a different seal; I couldn't quite tell if they were animation cancelling in the same way as if they were doing it with the single staff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOnlGUnozXA

Interestingly, the seal that boosts Miquella's invocations does boost Radagon's Rings of Light still.

[left willow]

Holy mother Palm Blast deals so fuckin much damage

[gray leaf]

...if you're doing these kinds of int/faith Shenanigans, but really going all in on just casting invocations (presumably still the dual scaling ones, using the Golden Order Seal or even the Frenzied Flame Seal but probably not), you could use the Carian Sorcery Sword as your sorcery catalyst with which to cast Vanishing, and then you get a melee attack as a side benefit.

[dusty kraken]

The Carian Thrusting Shield is disgustingly fun. I've also got the Idiot Queen's Staff to let me do half-decent magic while not absolutely tanking my str/dex I need for hitting with the shield.

Blood Tax on the Carian Thrusting Shield is also really good

As it's only got 93% physical resistance

But you can Blood Tax a bit of HP back to not mind.

[left willow]

Ooh, what spells do you pair with the thrusting shield?

[dusty kraken]

Rock.

[left willow]

Rock.

(I assume you mean Rock Sling, rather than any of the incantation variants)

[dusty kraken]

More seriously: I use the Shield Buff spell. Shield Buff + Carian Shield's innate high magic resistance lets you just bulldoze through enemy mages.

[left willow]

Sad that the DEATH status effect is only usable in pvp T^T

Like, I understand why, but just 🙃

[dusty kraken]

Scholar's Shield lasts a full 60 seconds.

And with that + greatsheild talisman is 50% stamina cost to blocking on top of solid base shield values.

I tanked the entire carian death laser from our favorite carian queen.

Just pushing foward blocking

[left willow]

mm, I'm considering looking at how/where to get the various finger sorcereries, but I'm afraid some of them will be spoilers :/

[dusty kraken]

Also: First time trying eternal darkness. Pretty cool spell against mages.

[left willow]

"I cast Fuck You, Mage."

Does it also mess with Incantations?

[dusty kraken]

It does!

[kind garden]

eternal darkness eats all spell projectiles

it's brutal

[gray leaf]

May I offer an answer with minimal spoilers as to where you get them?

[left willow]

If they're found [Post Shadow Keep] ||after the sealing tree burning|| just lmk, otherwise, I'd be fine with just where they are straight up

[gray leaf]

Count Ymir in Manus Metyr has a quest. As you do the quest, he'll expand his inventory to include all but one of the finger sorceries. The last one can be found after completing his quest entirely.

(to be clear, he just sells them to you for runes, nothng special. You just have to progress his quest for him to start selling them.)

Also, just to reassure you, you don't have to worry about missing out on them somehow.

[covert schooner]

I have a dlc lore question - ||were the lands of shadow separated when Marika BECAME a god, so before the golden order was even established, or later||

[languid tiger]

||timeline is unclear, but i'm relatively confident that they weren't banished until after Messmer's crusade began||

[gray leaf]

||It wasn't just banishment; they were once one land. The people weren't the ones to move, per se.||

[languid tiger]

||just for logistical reasons||

[covert schooner]

||And that’s likely a decent ways into marika’s rule||

[languid tiger]

||the land itself was banished, no||

[gray leaf]

But, yeah, there isn't an obvious or explicit answer.

[gray leaf]

Fair. I just misunderstood you.

[covert schooner]

||Yeah the land was shorn from the center and seemingly pocket dimensioned||

[languid tiger]

||yeah, based on what we know, that had to have come after Godfrey's time||

||Messmer is aware of what a Tarnished is||

[covert schooner]

I’ve been thinking about running tabletop stuff in the lands between pre or just post shattering for a while

[languid tiger]

||and some of the equipment and information around further suggests it||

that sounds fucking incredible tbh

[covert schooner]

My favorite thing I’ve come up with for it is a guy whose all over the lands between being like

“Guys there’s a major geological event coming we gotta prepare, it’ll hit liurnia and gelmir super hard”

[languid tiger]

oh?

[gray leaf]

Yeah, that sounds amazing. I would almost suggest immediately post-Shattering (i.e. during the Shattering War) as a decent setting? You could have characters from different regions or nationalities there which are either not yet at war, or at war recently enough that it hasn't gotten to every individual yet, if that makes any sense.

[covert schooner]

Obviously with the joke being that the shattering overshadows his warning

Liurnia sinks into the earth, gelmir erupts

Seems reasonable these events might be linked tbh

There’s a lot of implications that the lands between had some seriously fucking weird geological shit happen like all the roads that lead into cliff sides with the road continuing high above and so on

[languid tiger]

aiui the Shattering is the name of the war, rather than the physical annihilation of the Ring

[gray leaf]

I've heard it used for both things, I think.

[covert schooner]

Yeah

The shattering is more a period of time that begins with the literal event

[gray leaf]

Fair enough.

[covert schooner]

Also get to include a bunch of different races that are widely at odds in the main game being linked together in society

[gray leaf]

...one thing worth noting: news did not travel quickly back then. There's no evidence of any magic changing that, and while the demigods who have great runes would know more about what's going on, the average person in somewhere like Limgrave? For an extended period of time, they might not even know the shattering's happened, up until Godrick starts being an idiot (and even then, they might not fully understand what's happened or why). Of course, the actual breaking of the Elden Ring would also have longer-term metaphysical effects.

[covert schooner]

Humans, Numen, Beastmen, Demihumans, Misbegotten, weird tree people

[languid tiger]

weird tree people?

[gray leaf]

But especially when the closest thing to a unified ruling power has just imploded, there's not going to be any way of sending news anywhere.

[gray leaf]

I think their armor confirms them as humans who agreed to be reborn?

[covert schooner]

Just a catchall for shit like the erdtree guardians

Yeah

[languid tiger]

oh

those are just humans, yeah

[covert schooner]

But also like

Idk if someone wanted to play a literal tree person in the lands between honestly it’s not too far fetched

That that would exist

[gray leaf]

Fair enough, I suppose.

[languid tiger]

hm, i don't agree, but fair

[covert schooner]

Oh and the Crystal guys

[gray leaf]

Humans becoming trees, or at least plantlike, is a Thing. I don't know any more about it, but it's a Thing.

[covert schooner]

And albinauric

Whatever the fuck the uh

The horn dudes are

(Also albinauric?)

[languid tiger]

i'm still pretty confident that omens and hornsent are the exact same thing

yeah, albinauric

that's the correct spelling

[covert schooner]

Oh no by horn guys I mean the uhhhh

[gray leaf]

Crystallians are literal aliens. Albinaurics... I don't know the timeline on when the different generations were created (the frogs, and the ones with fading legs) but they'd be reasonable for sure.

[covert schooner]

The heralds

[languid tiger]

oh

[covert schooner]

In leyndell and haligtree

[noble acorn]

there are like 4 different horn dudes now, it's confusing

[languid tiger]

the oracle envoys

[covert schooner]

Yeah

[gray leaf]

Those... I think weren't showing up in the Lands Between until around when the PC shows up?

[noble acorn]

Omens, Misbegotten, Hornsent, Crucible Knights arguably?

[covert schooner]

Anyway there’s just so much space for people to play around with

[noble acorn]

oh you mean horn as in blowing, nvm

[covert schooner]

Eh I mean kinda unclear

[languid tiger]

they're heralds of a new god, yeah

so they were probably around when marika ascended

[covert schooner]

That’s part of what I like about a TTRPG of a souls game tho is so much of it is just

Do whatever

It’s open to interpretation

[languid tiger]

and then now again

[gray leaf]

Hornsent might be Omens, but Omens are notably larger than most humans, and have nonhuman traits beyond just horns.

[noble acorn]

oh yeah, and the ancient nature worshipper guys underground

[covert schooner]

If someone wants to play a serpent man, fucking go for it

They were probably still hanging around gelmir a little even before tbh

[noble acorn]

those are antlers, not horns strictly but they might count

[languid tiger]

ancestral followers seem to be humans of a sort

[covert schooner]

I could see little groups of them like the weird blood guys in the dlc

[languid tiger]

they're described directly as "horned folk"

[gray leaf]

I really want more lore on those, actually. There's a lot of mysteries that were called into contrast there actually. Like... how do they relate to... uh, everything?

Or do they not relate, and they're just an entirely separate ethnic group?

[languid tiger]

Brawny, and versed in distinctive spiritual arts, this particular tribesman wields a heavy bow.```

[covert schooner]

Yeah

There’s a lot of stuff in ER were never gonna get elaboration on

Since this world is almost certainly closed now

Miyazaki is not famously in love with working in the same worlds repeatedly

[languid tiger]

awaiting new buds. They are certain to sprout from their very
flesh, and indeed, their souls```

[noble acorn]

dark souls is the closest he's come and even then they were very distinctly doing different, overlapping worlds rather than the same world

[covert schooner]

Anyway point being you can do a lot of weird different shit

[covert schooner]

Ds3 is, in short, basically about how he didn’t wanna make another souls game

[languid tiger]

Ancestral spirits exist as a phenomenon beyond the purview of the Erdtree. Life sprouts from death, as it does from birth. Such is the way of the living.

[gray leaf]

Barring a second DLC (not impossible; DS3 got two), yeah.

[languid tiger]

they've said this was the second dlc

[covert schooner]

I think they’ve essentially said they aren’t making another

Yeah this is two dlc merged into one

[languid tiger]

it was going to be multiple that got folded in

because they got extremely expansive and interconnected

[covert schooner]

If I had to guess, the other one was gonna be just dragon shit maybe

[noble acorn]

yeah i believe it, i could see some of the side stuff like the finger ruins and jagged peak originally being slated for their own dlc

[languid tiger]

i think it was going to be messmer and miquella

as related but not intertwined plots

[gray leaf]

I feel like they're pretty inexorably intertwined... though I supposed that's why they got combined to begin with.

I guess one would be about Messmer and Marika and the past, and the other about Miquella and his current plans? I suppose I could see that.

And then Bayle and the finger stuff is kind of... Also There. It provides backstory, I suppose?

[covert schooner]

God the finger shit is so weird

[languid tiger]

i am rather disappointed at how badly the variety of int stuff is dwarfed by the variety of fth stuff in both the base game and dlc

[covert schooner]

So fucking weird

[languid tiger]

and i would love to see a second dlc that's just

weird cosmos esoterica

the moons, the stars, the Primeval Current, the Procession of Stars

the Greater Will/Elden Beast and how those are connected to the fingers and ||Metyr, and how she's explicitly also a star fallen to the earth||

||The mother of all Two Fingers and Fingercreepers was in turn a magnificently gleaming daughter of the Greater Will, and the first shooting star to fall upon the Lands Between.||

[covert schooner]

I kinda felt like the base game was more int heavy personally
I think w the dlc is balanced out some though

Ranni’s quest line and related materials is a big chunk

Especially since holy damage got shafted so bad base game

[noble acorn]

yeah there are faith weapons and incants but you don't get them directly for going down a route like the MLGS

[languid tiger]

holy damage got fucked, but there was just

infinitely more to do in faith

than in int

[gray leaf]

Beyond the specific details like ||where's Miquella's wolf shadow||, and the clarifications on events of the DLC and how exactly certain things work... honestly, anything resembling a clearer timeline of events would be nice?

[covert schooner]

Tbh I prefer it muddy like this

[gray leaf]

I think 101 incantations and 70 sorceries, to put it into numbers. Even with some padding with redundant resistances and healing, incantations also got a ton of variations of Glintstone Pebble, so it probably almost evens out in my opinion.

[covert schooner]

I feel like incants have more duds

Some of the dlc incants are uh

Really bad

[gray leaf]

yeah...

[old brook]

But in the same vein sorc has 30 versions of Glintstone Shoot

[covert schooner]

There’s a lot of really good ones in there but

Oh boy

[languid tiger]

unfortunately so are some of the sorceries

[left willow]

I think there's a pretty even split of "good" and "dud" sorceries in the DLC?

Cause like, Twin Moons is situational at best

[gray leaf]

Sorceries have a lot of things that aren't duds so much as they are just The Same Thing. Three different glintblade phalanxes. A ton of straightforward glintstone projectiles with no variation besides power, not even counting stuff like Icecrag (which inflicts chill and I think has several variations itself) or Shard Spiral.

[languid tiger]

||cherishing fingers, vortex of putrescence, grav missile, the moons, & glintblade trio, and i've desperately tried to make blades of stone feel good but it ain't||

[languid tiger]

no icecrag is the only cold sorcery that's just a cold rock

[left willow]

Ice Crag has "Ice Crag but Mist" and "Ice Crag but Storm Stomp"

[languid tiger]

you've got it, ice storm, moonblade, freezing mist, and the bad buff

for ice spells

[left willow]

There's also "Ice Crag but it goes into my sword" and "Ice Crag but it's a Carian Sword Sorcery")

[languid tiger]

there's also some ghostflame stuff, but i'm not looking at mixed-stat stuff for these purposes, since that's a third avenue

that i'm glad to see expansions to with the dlc

[gray leaf]

I love how there's one category of sorceries added by the DLC which has exactly two members:

• Incredibly powerful sorcery which is basically an existing sorcery but substantially stronger, and dealing absurd DPS
• The most useless gimmick imaginable, and, I think, a reasonable contender for the worst spell in the whole game (base and dlc).

[languid tiger]

||cherishing fingers for the latter?||

||because mantle of thorns is goofy but...acceptable||

[gray leaf]

||No, there's four finger sorceries. I'm talking about the Scadutree Sorceries.||

||Mantle of Thorns does almost nothing, last I looked.||

[covert schooner]

CF is at least extremely good in it's niche

it deflects..... a LOT of projectiles

[languid tiger]

||it makes the briar armor deal like 800% damage||

||it's part of a comically goofy niche, but it makes the briar set deal like 100 damage per roll from uhh...15?||

[noble acorn]

that also applies to an extent to the incants....no idea what the watchful protector one is supposed to actually do

[covert schooner]

also man its really funny not knowing how much stuff ive seen in general that ive just fucking missed and whats in the tiny portion of the dlc i havent finished yt

[gray leaf]

Also, regarding your list, ||I've heard nothing but good things about Gravitational Missile; you can use it for area control with good stagger power, or huck it into a solid object (including the floor) for an instant detonation.||

[covert schooner]

yet

[languid tiger]

watchful spirit is pretty bad, yeah

i can't really think of many other dlc incants that i'd call trash, though

||just rotten butterflies||

[covert schooner]

also ||fire rain and the feathers incant are both kinda garbo||

[gray leaf]

||Seriously? I wouldn't even be surprised if that was some sort of weird bug, regrettably, becuase when I saw it used without briar armor it was dealing like 80 damage. If that's stacking with the damage of each piece separately that would substantially change things.||

[languid tiger]

||and the minor erdtree||

[covert schooner]

there are scenarios they can be good in but

[gray leaf]

That one's garbage in a cool way, as opposed to garbage in a dull way, at least.

[languid tiger]

||i actually think divine feathers is quite good, because it has a super high damage-to-fp rate||

[covert schooner]

||unfortunately its very short range, doesnt stagger enemies consistently ime, and has absolutely no hyperarmor at all||

[gray leaf]

Really? Have I been seeing stuff from before some patch? When I saw footage of it, it was doing comically low damage after eating all your FP.

[covert schooner]

||you can't really pull it off on someone attacking you||

[languid tiger]

huh, maybe they fixed a bug

i tested it a couple times and it shot like

10x "casts" per 3 fp

nothing will beat pest thread spears or ring of light, though

for the most ridiculously powerful spells in the game

[covert schooner]

pest threads was already insane

[gray leaf]

I think it was doing that before too, but the internal hit limit made it so that any single enemy could only take damage from the spell from about 1/3 of those? Hence, garbage.

i.e. once they were hit they had a short period of time before they could be hit again (which was logical), but that short period of time wasn't quite short enough.

[noble acorn]

the new lightning spear is also great, and there's a bunch of stuff that buffs dragon incants

[covert schooner]

also its just really fuckin hard to use it

[left willow]

I have decided to see if I can hack a Genesys variant to play an Elden Ring-inspired ttrpg.

[covert schooner]

for what its worth i consider dragon stuff to be like

not reall incants

[left willow]

I might regret this

[covert schooner]

theyre more like

a third category of thing

because they require an entirely different build

and theres almost no overlap with a normal cleric

[languid tiger]

i think my complaint is mostly that faith has every damage type other than magic (but including magic with a bit of arc), and has the strongest burst damage and sustained damage spells, and the strongest fast spell, and all of the defensive and most of the offensive utility

and int has like 60 ways to throw a projectile at you

[covert schooner]

I kinda wish arcane was it's own spell type

[gray leaf]

The dragon communion incantations are a bit weird and arcane scaling, yeah (although they usually require faith too).

[languid tiger]

it just spends all of its budget on progressively better ways to throw 1-3 projectiles

[noble acorn]

they've historically struggled with the 'third spell type' in souls games, and elden ring has like, three different third types

[covert schooner]

also man im sad rotten butterflies isnt good

[left willow]

Also, us int casters get fuckin.... Frost as our only status we can reliably inflict without a 20+ in faith as well

[covert schooner]

i want it to be good so bad, the boss its from is so fucking cool

[noble acorn]

arc-scaling spells, spells that scale off both int and faith, and uhhhh it might just be 2 actually

[left willow]

Which is a bummer

[dusty kraken]

I really want to get Gravitational Missile for my gravity mage. It will finally give her a Big Spell. As her magic right now is 'buff' or 'rock'. XD

The push and pull spells are kinda cool but they mostly feel like 'worse repulsion'.

[languid tiger]

and int does "yeet a thing" really well, but it doesn't beat out discus of light

[gray leaf]

The rock spells have a fun niche of dealing physical damage as a spellcaster, which is sometimes meaningful? But they are somewhat anticlimactic, yeah.

[left willow]

As a point: I really like Collapsing Stars as a "Big Spell" for gravity mages

[covert schooner]

i do kinda respect that elden ring is committed to making sage builds real

[gray leaf]

Int gets the carian sword sorceries. That... might be the niche unless you look too hard at dragonclaw and dragonmaw?

[languid tiger]

stone of gurranq is also a pretty cracked phys spell

i really wish that it and the phys sorceries did strike, though

instead of fucking standard

[noble acorn]

stone is a beast incant and not a gravity sorcery though, right?

[languid tiger]

i really dislike standard damage

[covert schooner]

I'll take miracles being better than magic in one game considering the usual shit

[languid tiger]

yes

i just want a game where they're equally good and complex

[covert schooner]

oh i mean ideally yes

they're pretty close in ER

[languid tiger]

instead of a ds2 where lightning is the best thing in the game and then gets nerfed into oblivion

[gray leaf]

I think that the issue in part is that the different types of incantations are more different from each other than the different types of sorcery. I mean, there's magma sorceries? I guess?

[covert schooner]

the closest its ever been at least

where both are 100% viable

[languid tiger]

or a ds1 where dlc sorceries are the only spells you should ever cast

because why press a button that isn't dark bead?

[dusty kraken]

Not played with that one yet. How is it? Gravity Well is...like, okay?

[dusty kraken]

Rock Sling is Gravity Sorcery.

[covert schooner]

nah they mean stone of gurrnaq

[left willow]

It feels kinda like a variant Star Shower that trades longer cast time for better Stance Damage, I think?

And Star Shower is pretty good, imo

[dusty kraken]

I suppose Meteorite of Astel is also there as a Big Gravity Magic but you rarely need to blast an entire castle at the same time.

Still, likely good on big bosses.

[languid tiger]

i've tried it on big bosses

its big problem is terrible tracking

[left willow]

mmm, having used it into [Shadow Keep Early Boss] ||the golden hippo thing in shadow keep|| I disagree? I find it a terribly lack luster spell, overall

[languid tiger]

so it's not actually as good on them as you'd think

by which i mean it has no tracking and fucking sucks

the "entire castle" premise would be a good one, but unfortunately you can't shove the spell down rykard's throat

[covert schooner]

also is it just mean or is item placement in this dlc fucking mean

*just me

[languid tiger]

no you're right

[left willow]

I think so too? I am chronically TERRIBLE at perception checks in ER though

[languid tiger]

fromsoft got tricky with some of it and angry with some more

[covert schooner]

theres so much shit where im like "idk how a human being reasonably could find most of the stuff in this"

[dusty kraken]

Yeah but it Looks Cool.

[covert schooner]

I really hate the layout of ||Ruah|| as a sidente

[left willow]

true

[languid tiger]

my only experience with "impossible" items was the bell bearing pots

but yeah

[covert schooner]

i just gave up on those

fuck those

i found the string one

[left willow]

It's so damn confusing. ||The map being on a different level is just bs||

[languid tiger]

i found that trick pretty funny ngl

[gray leaf]

||The fact it's all underground, so you're denied anything even resembling a map, makes it clear that it's intentional. This is not remotely a defense. It's just dickery, not a mistake.||

[covert schooner]

It's not like the map even helps

the dlc not having map layers kinda pisses me off a little

[dusty kraken]

Also, man that ||Talisman that restores FP|| looks really good.

[languid tiger]

it def is

[covert schooner]

it's just on the edge of not actually needing it

[left willow]

Also, as a note on how bad I am at ER perception checks:
[Cerulean Coast] ||There's at least 2 dungeons on the Cerulean Coast. I journeyed through it, poked about, and then concluded that they must not have put any dungeons in here. -_-||

[covert schooner]

okay so

I feel insane but

theres a lady with dual blades in the coast in the trailer who i just.... haven;t ever found

am

am i stupid????

[left willow]

I haven't found her either :|

[languid tiger]

oh

do y'all want to know where she is?

[covert schooner]

sure

[gray leaf]

random interjection, but apparently this is depicted on a stele in the Mohgwin Dynasty Mausoleum; the symbol in the center was just described as a stylized tree by The Tarnished Archeologist, but that was immediately pre-DLC. Now, post-DLC, that's an interesting place for that general design to appear.

It is of course heavily distorted, but it doesn't look totally unlike ||the double spiral||.

[languid tiger]

||southwest of cerulean coast, following the westmost grace along the coast itself, there's a walkable segment of earth along the water||

[covert schooner]

oh fuck you

[languid tiger]

||leads into a small cave that goes underground to an island with the nameless mausoleum||

[covert schooner]

wait

||shes the mausoleum lady? i did fight her i just.... thought there was another one||

[languid tiger]

oh

what other lady with dual blades are you thinking of then?

[covert schooner]

uhhh

[languid tiger]

i think she's the only one near the coast

[covert schooner]

huh no thats her

shes just outside in the gameplay trailer

weird

[languid tiger]

must be to make her location more immediately recognizable

[covert schooner]

fair

[languid tiger]

cerulean coast is so pretty tbh

it's an understandable thing to do

[covert schooner]

I'm definitely pretty closee to the dlc's end and for what it's worth i think my friend and i have

found almost everything