Unfortunately Fromsoft has cultivated in Elden Ring players the mentality of "a win is a win." Doesn't matter if they learn the boss fights or use summons or even whether they learn how to play their own character, a solid chunk of them are still using meta builds from 2 years ago and happily ganking invaders 3v1 because this is the game Fromsoft built.
Always. Skill in any of its forms should matter and should be rewarded. I'm not a big fan of giving the win to someone who lacks the skill to earn it (even worse when it's by means of extremely disproportionate advantages). You let toddlers win to make them happy, unskilled adults are way past that point.
I don't let toddlers win. Even my own nieces and nephews have to earn their win. They learn all kind of problem solving skills when facing an opponent of vast skill differences and feel so happy about any victory they can muster.
Copying ans pasting my main comment since this one will likley get more visibility. I just want to throw my 2 cents into the ether Skill. I'm all for low skill entry with a high ceiling. My problem is "skill" can be considered mastering glitches and exploits now called, "tech". To have a high skill ceiling requires tight mechanics and consistent interactions begween mechanics. ER just doesn't allow for that. Look at how long aimpunch took to fix, (which I still see sometimes). Allowing simple spam and unpatched exploits to beat skill just makes for a lackluster pvp with no longevity.
@@OnlyWaifuYT when the gane functions well. I lost a lot to bloodflame aura and deathblight shield a lot when they workXD. Plus swift slash and blind spot pre nerf....skill wasn't beating that when they dropped...unless you count spamming it better than them the skill issue😅
It is night and day if I try to invade with an rp build vs an optimal build. But when I get an rp build to work this game is so much more fun (to me personally, there is nothing wrong with running optimal stuff as long as you have fun). But the amount of skill it requires to pull off is definitely higher than roll catching a noob who has no idea what’s going on with a curved greatsword killing them in 3 seconds. My favorite thing about elden rings “skill expression” is the viability of assassin builds in this game when you couldn’t really pull off being a true assassin in the other games.
and the funny thing? cgs rollcatch spam isn't even that high of a skill... when it comes to high level skill techs and glitches we'd be looking at things wavedashing(aka goblin step), handy tech, teh variety of special backstabs and of the cancels(crouch and guard cancels mainly) as well as of course hardswaps, with the hardest ones likely being armor and mid-parryswaps, but even in the competitive scene things have reached such a ridiculous point that some of them have started being banned, handytech in certain contexts has now been banned completely due to being extremely overpowered on things like dual straight swords by making them far safer than intended,(despite handy tech being a presumably intended mechanic) and parries, like ALL PARRIES have recently been outright banned in ladder and some other places now because while due to the matchup-based nature of the game hardswaps are important, hardswapping to a parry tool and getting a random parry, possibly ending the fight right then and there is... anticlimactic at best, at least at those skil levels. personally i love technical play, but with the systems and balance currently present in elden ring, things have started to go a bit crazy, and the worst part? the actually interesting mechanics have been dying down to other changes, like poise being optimal at 121 now because currently you can tank the first R1 of some weapons, whereas before you could only tank second hits of weapons, and the best poise range was between 88 and 104, this means that now you're almost surely gonna give two talisman slots to bullgoat and great jar tali, and this also reduces the armor variety, niot just talisman(and as such build) variety. i also have no clue what's going on with some of the recent changes, like greatsword now having R2s so fast that you can use them on reaction to abuse the hyperarmor despite previous patches making it so no hyperarmor could come out that fast, and they're as fast as the R1, or things like the swift spear change, a sub-mediocre but cool weapon that shined only in mixed-weapon setups... got nerfed specifically so it's now trash when not used two-handed. what is going over at fromsoftware to make these changes? what are they thinking? at least i guess the massively op and broken stuff is getting fixed... sometimes, recently the great katana offhand attacks have been nerfed but they forgot to change the rakshasa, meaning that most likely only the rakshasa was supposed to get that nerf and not the great katanas, but they effectively nerfed the wrong weapons... sigh...
@@iota-09 optimal play is rarely necessary for most invasions, but when you do run across the sweaty optimal meta gank squads it’s infuriating if you don’t have the same basic pvp build they do. As you said, “optimal builds” at meta level (125) you are basically going to run into this exact same build or a similar version of it: Vig - 58 Mind - 10 (vagabond) Endurance - 39 STR - 54 Dex - 18 INT - 9 FTH - 9 ARC - 7 It’s extremely effective and lets people use almost all the busted weapons but to me that’s lame because at that point to your really have a build or a character? You’re just an avatar who probably looks ugly asf because all the high poise armor in this game looks terrible minus the new black armor. As you touched on with the cgs, this build I listed above does incredibly well with the freyja greatsword. When I play on this build the amount of noobs I immediately kill in 3 roll catches is absurd, because they have no idea what to do because they don’t understand frame data or the fact that if they roll out of hit stun I am going to roll catch them every single time if I immediately input another running r1. As you also said, against players who understand that this build allows me to switch to so many other weapons that it doesn’t matter, but is that really a build at that point? In my opinion not really, but I understand that as an invader having access to everything (especially in elden ring) is what will win you a lot of invasions. What I like about rp builds is my ability to work around the shortcomings of my build in order to still get the job done. To me that’s more fun but after I die 5 times in a row to dedicated gank squads I will switch to my mega build in order to boost my ego once again.
@@chrisr4066 if you use a combination of assassins gambit and concealing veil, not only can enemies not lock onto you unless you’re right on top of them, but you are extremely transparent. If you are in a dark area of a map you are basically completely invisible to most players. That on top of extremely cool assassin like tools such as the the red respawn fingers that can get you out of situations where you corner yourself, ashes of war like raptors of the mist, the ability to one shot backstab people at any level with dagger talisman/mersiricorde/royal knight resolve, all kinds of tools for your tool belt like poison daggers, ansbachs bow and the bone bow, rain of arrows, bloodhound step. There’s more but to me these are all assassin kind of tools that when you put them all together makes you feel like a sneaky guy. Not to mention the obvious ones like the concealing veil.
you summed it up pretty well, it's best to have a pvp experience where the scope of a fight is comprehendible, and easy methods of play are viable as well as easily countered. i'm the type of invader that doesn't try to improve my build with meta-level gear. it's more fun for me to build a character that either fits into the world of the game, or references a different thing as well as i can manage. it was basically impossible for me to exist in elden ring's pvp because i didn't have the most powerful options of every system in the game. i would get blasted down by myriad projectiles because i refused to use carian retaliation on any build that wasn't already sorcery aligned, and my poise was always terrible because i didn't want to/couldn't run stacked enough armor (WHY IS THE REDMANE SET EXACTLY 50 POISE I HATE IT). not even great equalizers like gravity are as useful as before, which i feel is a small but significant point. i want my skill to have a good chunk of the importance, but if it were all skill no fun, i'd be playing something else like a fighting game. i dabble in enough already.
I feel like the reduvia dagger has an underrated ratio of useless in 1v1s to OP in 2v1/3v1 that doesn’t get talked about enough. One L2 spamming reduvia player hiding behind phantoms and bleed proccing you every 2 hits is so incredibly annoying, and yet in a 1v1 I’ve never once felt the reduvia was any more than a D-tier weapon. Truly a gankers treat
I mean that’s the case with most weapons and spells. Everything is good and viable if you are sitting behind two friends just throwing out random projectiles.
Every time I forget this thing exists Then a varre headed, double reduvia, scare, learned helplessness idiot who needs 2 furled to carry them while they spam whatever they see is meta +build
You should give Reduvia another chance on 1 v 1. I'm currently using it alongside catch flame with dragon comunion seal and it allows for some fun combos and rollcatches with the ash. And with the buffed R2 you can do some quick hits that always break the poise It also works as an off hand for arcane builds, like main hand halberd and off hand Reduvia. I'd go as far as to say that Reduvia is the one of the top 3 daggers in PvP
@@Panurome maybe I’ll try it next time I go arcane build. I don’t disagree that it’s top 3 dagger in the game but I don’t think any dagger is above C-tier just because of the lack of poise damage and range. I actually paired reduvia with spiked palisade shield on a low level bleed build and it was pretty fun
@@Panurome while I mostly agree, reduvia is only held back by its ash of war, since most players are used to it at this point, you might be better off with like a wakazashi with a better ash of war for most cases, but I personally love running a reduvia in the main hand (for those nice r2s) and a weapon in the offhand mostly stuff I can use for handy tech which I feel compliments it much more than using it the offhand. Just my personally preference. Gotta agree though reduvia is probably top 3 daggers
If AoW and spells feel oppressive and un-fun, then perhaps Elden Ring would be better if the FP costs of AoW''s and spells (and Spirit Summons, just because) were increased by something like 25%. This might even make Mind a more appealing attribute!
Skill. I'm all for low skill entry with a high ceiling. My problem is "skill" can be considered mastering glitches and exploits now called, "tech". To have a high skill ceiling requires tight mechanics and consistent interactions begween mechanics. ER just doesn't allow for that. Look at how long aimpunch took to fix, (which I still see sometimes). Allowing simple spam and unpatched exploits to beat skill just makes for a lackluster pvp with no longevity.
I agree with you. I like a tighter floor to ceiling ratio so that it doesn't take X000 hours to get down, but I like when a game always lets you always get a little better. I've never enjoyed exploit play because it's so immersion-breaking and everyone has a line for where those things become an issue. Elden Ring has less of an exploit problem (though there have been many) and more of a spam problem, at least as I see it, and it really takes a toll on invasions. They went a little too far in the opposite direction from where they started and I'd love to see them course-correct.
EldenRing is L2 souls. Or gimmick souls. Everyone has one little strategy they either spam over and over again or to surprise and kill you within a couple of seconds. The only skill comes in spacing, which is just one aspect of the diversity older souls PvP offered.
I’ve always loved some of the intuitive logic in Elden ring that goes unspoken by the tutorials, like resistance changes during rain or in water. Weight thresholds should definitely apply to inventory for hard swaps for the same reason. Part of the charm of low levels in RPG’s is making sacrifices; you shouldn’t be able do everything at once.
I’ve always preferred knowledge checks and always will. It’s the best of everything. Knowing what to do but also having the timing/space to actually do it. That will inherently make it harder for more people to get into but the people who do get into it will be that much more committed. You have to be or you wouldn’t even know how to do or get out of whatever. Great example is reverse rolls into chain stabs. It’s something you can see coming, if you know how to not get caught you won’t, and if you still do there are ways to get out, unless you don’t know how then you’re just done.
That sort of deeper skill knowledge is always a cool thing to acclimate to in a game. I think I'm always craving those sorts of interactions at their most intentional, and chafing against them at their least. I really just want the game to be as intuitive as possible to play while still retaining that deep sense of complexity, where the interactions aren't dependent on system inconsistencies or exploits. It's a tough thing to get right, especially in a video game, but I hope the next game will get closer than where we are now.
@@emotionaljonxvx I get that. It is a really hard line to walk, to make it intuitive enough for someone new to play but complex enough to have real depth. And yea all we can do at this point is hope I guess. Don’t go hollow
@@emotionaljonxvx the problem i feel is that even competitive fighting games often have such issues, you look at tekken for example, and the game hardly ever explains how animation priorities(i.e. low jab after guarding from a high), sidestepping, wavedashing, grab techs and so much more works, despite all these things being at the base of high level play. it's just gonna be a part of these games no matter what... what could be don though is make it so that these mecahnics and interactions don't get overly abused, you metioned hardswapping for example, and with hardswaps you still need to take in account weight load after all(which is why i never do armor swaps, too much math to take account of), but what's stopping someone from just hardswapping to a parry tool at the last second and getting a(relatively) easy parry that ends the fight there? sure it might be a high level skill from the perspective of those who don't know, but when you are at the highest levels that's basically just cheesing the game of its gameplay opportunities as it's fairly simple and second-nature compared to other techs that get made use of at higher level play. the real issue is that with how thing currently stand with elden ring's balance, between the optimal poise cap making it so you can't have many tlaisman slots unlocked, nuke spells and ashe sof war, easy to get big damage buffs left and right and so on so forth, the game's structure crumbles the moment someone at high level knows what they're doing, or when there's more than one player against a single target, the fundamentals get thrown out the window despite things like hardswapping not really getting in the way of it in past title,s in fact hardswapping used to be enhancing all this, and mind you, i'm saying this as someone who loves to hardswap... it's not so much about removing these mechanics as much as it is about making it more of an even playing field by making the tools, well, tools, not weapons of mass destructions.
"Skill" in elden ring varies from someone learning to dance and predict openings all the way to hard swapping and space "baiting." Honestly, i loved pvp and the arena, but im done. Im tired of facing poke halberd, estoc poise tanks, and the like. Also the damage is out of control, i pvp at 125 and last night i got hit by a two handed straight sword square off that did over 1700 dmg... so ya im done for good. Its just not fun for me. Glad its fun for some, but i miss the dance. Good luck guys.
Love the way you acknowledge multiple perspectives of players. Honestly, ER is one of a few games where I love the potential, but the execution is lackluster. I want fun immersive fights and can take an L respectfully, but I'm just not interested in learning janky tech. Yeah, it is what it is and there's some due respect in learning subsystems, but part of me cant help but ask "Why are there so many problems this many souls games in, especially when the solutions are right there in previous entries?"
if you're on PC, pontiff's has a decent amount of activity in the evenings. just tonight i did consistent aldrich faithful invasions for a good 30 minutes, summoning duelists and doing regular invasions whenever there was a lull. it was really fun
I also miss hosting fight clubs, and fighting the winner. Good times, I miss those types of interactions. having only 4 players per world is lame. ER killed fight clubs.
Kinda reminds me of cod where they are trying to cater to noobs. In cods case its even worse than Elden Ring with its EOMM. Your matches are decided before you even load into a game and the outcome is impossible to change. Skilled players lose health, and there guns dont do as much damage as they did last match, essentially letting the noobs have a better advantage. In Elden Ring its AOW. As long as you have a good aow you could essentially spam it to a win unless the person you are facing has the knowledge of what they AOW does.
If they remastered Ds3 and patched all the cancel tech and unscaled’s phantoms,I would happily go back. I don’t mind dedicated ganks,but I just didn’t enjoy gank city and unfortunately invading in ER feels like you’re always invading at pontiff,minus the back up in a 3v1.
In these games, I recognize four types of skill, present in each and every one. Mechanical skill - how good are you at the actual fighting and using inputs? Buildcrafting/planning skill - how good are you at making a build tailored to your needs? Tactical skill - how good are you at using your build and all of its tools? Strategic skill - how good are you at making and applying a plan before engaging the encounter? Success is always conditional, and failure common. That's the common thread that binds From Software's games, that we love. The existence of these different types of skill and ways to focus on play is a good thing. Just like how you build a character that sacrifices something to have access to something else, you have to sacrifice investment into a skill to learn another skill; eventually you'll be skilled at all types, and that is its own reward. But in Elden Ring specifically, Buildcrafting skill provides the most reward for the least investment, whereas Strategic skill can bring the second most rewards due to how many items and build options are available, while Tactical skill and Mechanical skill are poorly incentivized and some times downright disincentivized compared to the other two types of skill. No matter how mechanically skilled you may be, or know exactly when and how to use weapons and tools with special effects to win, you still may be fighting against enemies that deal absurd amounts of damage that prevent you from taking chances or making worthwhile trades. It isn't a matter of a type of skill being more focused on in this game, but rather that it is too easy to reap the rewards of one of the skills, without the investment necessary to get there - some times to an insulting amount, like with overlevelled phantoms not being (down)scaled properly and giving the host way too much of an advantage. People loved Dark Souls 2's pvp because it was generally well-balanced for Mechanical skill and Buildcrafting skill, but it did lack in the other two facets. Dark Souls 3 improved upon all, which made DS3 pvp so enjoyable for so many, even despite its flaws. Perhaps one of those flaws that From perceived was that fights between skilled opponents end up being slow and attritive due to more or less low damage. So, they corrected that perceived flaw in Elden Ring and made fights more snappy and dangerous due to higher damage... in the process perhaps overcorrecting the issue and causing an imbalance in the other direction. It's not easy to strike a good balance, but at least Elden Ring provided fantastic Buildcrafting skill expression and options, that bleed into the other types of skills. Hopefully they learn from both ER and previous Souls games, and manage to strike that balance in a future game.
clearly they never the pvp update doesn't have any effort in it. just a piss poor balancing update and no changes on the anti cheat bypass exploit nor anything about region lock. which was the core issues. all the balancing and changes to pvp won't matter ifthey don't fix the core issues.
I kinda hate the pvp in elden ring. It’s more of a nuisance than fun. There is no point in it other than trolling. IMO, ds3 has the best pvp. There’s covenants, rewards for doing it, which led to some crazy battles especially in farron and anor Londo.
Dark souls 3 has some of the worst meta, like the hand scythe being able to practically permanently stun any player, or just how bad spells and most weapon arts are in that game in general, or how anything that isn't a straight sword or dagger is far too slow to actually land a hit against an average player who isn't completely dog shit making over half the weapons in the game useless in pvp. The pvp in dark souls 3 is objectively bad, not as bad as elden ring, dark souls, or demon's souls, but it's still bad.
That's a fair point, though if you're talking about when you get your starting weapon in that little alcove with the archer in the asylum, that's not exactly the same sort of maneuver. At least, I don't think of them as the same. I switch to a cannon when I'm fighting far away, and it does invalidate the equipment load mechanic, but it's not much of a skill. I usually think of hardswapping as rotating between weapons or talismans mid-fight. Things like swapping to dagger talisman just for a riposte or changing between different versions of the same weapon to get different Ashes of War. More skill-focused techniques that give you a specific kind of advantage based around exploiting the game's timing for animations and limitations. And I don't want to paint it as controversial. It's solely my personal preference that I would like to see the game designed without that as a function because I've never liked it as a playstyle. No shame on anyone who uses it.
@@emotionaljonxvx From the perspective of a Cooperator or Invader, it’s silly to watch other players swap their equipment because the newly equipped armament or armor instantly appears *POP!* with no animation to accompany it. Proposal: In a similar vein to the player having a Spectral Steed Whistle to summon Torrent, the player also has a special item that grants them access to equipment not on their person - an item that functions much like a Portable Hole in D&D. And just as there is a quick animation to accompany the Spectral Steed Whistle, there is a quick animation that accompanies the player accessing their Equipment menu, and also additional animations for the player equipping armaments, armor, and talismans. Although this would reduce the speed of hard-swapping an item by about 1 second in total, I still think that hard-swapping would still remain worthwhile tactic in some situations.
Booted up ER yesterday voor the first time in a month. Tried some invasions. First three: host entered the boss arena. Then some dumb shit in abandoned cave that spawned me in the rot and then a ganksquad in liurnia. Yep, thats why i put the game down.
Shadow of the Erdtree doubled down on all the problems you mentioned, including one: A win is a win. You can fight BS with BS and be justified, no need to learn anything. Why do you think Spirit Summons can be upgraded like you can?
Also worth pointing out, that when hardswapping, your weight limit is just as, if not more important as if you ignore it, you swap onto a setup that makes you fatroll, the mechanic is integral to the character building system
I primarily play bloodborne pvp and exploiting glitches and flaws in the game is mostly what you'll see out of the "meta" However, that's not to say there's no skill in it at all--especially when you consider mastering your momentum
I disagree that building gameplay that makes the better skiled players consistently win or have a huge advantage is gonna kill the community like you said. I think it's gonna do the exact opposite and in my opinion we can look at DS1's history for proof to that. For example, during the DS1 pvp times there were so many streamers with thousands of viewers each, their main content being DS1 pvp. To such a big extent that the numbers for DS2 or DS3 or ER are not even close for that specific category, especially taking the souls series and streaming into context which in 2012-2014 were both significantly less popular than today. High skill gameplay is more fun to engage with and it makes for more fun content. It is also a huge motivation for new players to sink their teeth into it and get better. WInning so often by just spamming buttons, be it in pve or pvp isn't gonna make anyone want to get better or learn mechanics. The game has to push you to get better and learn. And when you do, it will feel incredibly rewarding. It could be argued that with every game they drop the skill ceiling bit by bit. Or more accurately they make skill unnecessary for winning.
Competitive DS1 player here (yes I am old), thanks for making this video. Just wanted to chime in that in my personal opinion, "skill" as a general concept, is the single biggest predictor of success in competitive PVP in every single souls game. It's the reason that each one of these games has it's own group of a few top players who consistently win tournaments, very rarely dropping sets to people outside the top 10 or so. This would simply not be possible if overall skill wasn't the most important aspect. The difference between the PVP in each of the games is simply which skills are emphasized in each one. Spacing, positioning, poise counting, menuing, prediction, understanding latency, executing various techs; all of these are individual skills that will impact your success in every single souls game. Mastering spacing is no more noble than mastering menuing or poise counting, they are all equally valid skills to learn. The questions that PVPers in any souls game should be asking themselves are: - Which skills are the most important in my preferred game? - How can I focus on getting better at those skills?
Dark Souls 3 PVP and co-op was more fun because there was skill and coordination involved. Casual Hosts also gave lots more rage-mail which was a classic bro.... i miss that the most.
You articulated my problem with hard swapping really well. It's skillful sure but the reward is you get to sidestep both the endurance Stat and the drawbacks of whatever equipment you brought, which feels cheap even if it was hard to pull off. Souls PVP is often compared to fighting games, but we can all agree it would be weird as hell if in Smash you could open the character select screen mid-match and switch to Fox. That's basically what's happening whenever someone pulls a buckler out of their pocket with no transitory animation. It's not fun
i doesn't sidestep endurnace/weight load as you still need to claculate for that and it is an intended mechanic(that is what they expect you to do against yhorm and all the other storm ruler bossfights after all), but what you say about parrying tools on command is absolutely true. the issue imho isn't so much with the tech itself as much as with how expanded and extreme the arsenal of elden ring is, you could be invading with a cold build and the moment you see your opponent back away to cure their frost, hardswap to a moonveil and get a free 500+ damage from 10 meters away. if you had swapped to any other weapon you would have had to work for that damage after that swap, but because the moonveil(or other tools) exist, the only actually hard part was doing a fast enough swap. add on top of it the plethora of damage buffs that you can get and stack on top of one another and you see that the issue isn't so much hardswaps as it is the way hardswaps allow to get *all* the buffs in quick succession at command... and yet you could do the exact same thing if instead of hardswaping you just had friends covering your ass.
Tie carry weight to strength like the ER beta, and I would care less about this, I currently like being able to swap, cause if I'm running a claymore and heavier if I run someone is running thrusting sword bhs/quickstep, I'd like to not just lose because I can't swap while fighting a cheesy set up. Also this would make mages twice and cancerous, need a magic parrying shield? Well your shit out of luck, you brought an off dagger instead, have fun.
@@UrVidaGameMum I can acknowledge that it's a necessary evil to counter the amount of nonsense in this game - I do it for the same reason - but I still don't like fighting it
i dont think hard swapping would be an issue if the elden ring PVP community didint normalize using cheats to get a ton of items that realistically no one would have. if you look at a UA-camr like steelovsky, sure he has probably the best weapon swaps ive EVER seen and hes certainly a great player, but when i look at his account i see 15 star fists 10 guts greatswords 10 golem great bows 30 golem great arrows. a shield for every situation. everything plus 25. it genuinely starts to become unfair. i dont see anyone swapping as much as people who cheat in their items. people will use 3rd party programs, file manipulation, and dupes and act like theyre not cheating. farm your items like anyone else. resource management is an important skill in these games that i have to have and cheaters dont
its fromsofts fault they made you farm items and go ng+ to level up weapons to +25. why not have a merchant for every crafting material/consumable? why not reward people for invasions/duels with +25 stones ds2 style? why not let you duplicate weapons/ashes after you do something like ng+7? this wouldnt be hard to implement, just a small patch with a random npc that gives you stones after like 5 or 10 won invasions and bell bearings with crafting materials
@@Turaloid i agree with you for the most part. blame the game and not the gamer. people are gonna cheat in every game. especially if its competitive. but you're right i wouldn't care if fromsoftware made it possible to do in the game. the unfortunate part is its not. its dam near impossible to get an account like some UA-camrs. it would take hundreds of hours to even try. i dont think that should justify cheating tho and i dont think the community should be so chill about it. especially since Elden Ring has the strongest consumable items in souls game history.
Yeah I really dislike the duping in this game. It feels bad when you do it the right way and farm your life away while others dupe and are able to profit just as much and much more.
Farming is just wasting your life away there's literally no point other than feeling better about yourself or trying to get a moral high ground. At that point just play a different game that respects your time that *doesn't* make you farm your life away to get the best set up you can.
I disagree on hard swapping being an exploit of the weight mechanic or being unintentional. If it was unintended then they wouldn't have limitations on when you can hard swap (you can't during attack animations for example there's even an in game pop up for it) and they just wouldn't let you do it in combat in general instead (like they do with crafting). People swapping for different set ups and ash of wars are just taking the mechanic the furthest it can go and being rewarded for it. On the weight aspect most weapons don't weigh that much in the first place especially compared to armor (which you probably don't want to swap around too much in the first place in most cases). So the weight limit mostly controls how good your armor can be and if you need to use a talisman slot on an equip load tali sacrificing some offense. Also you still need to take weight into account with hard swaps in your set up. I've had multiple occasions where I hard swapped to certain talismans that weigh juuuuust a tad too much and make me heavy roll, because I thought the weight of the tali wouldn't matter since they're all pretty light, but sometimes that's all it takes to push you over the threshold. Also hard swaps don't invalidate soft swaps by any means either, soft swaps are much faster and convenient, so sometimes it's good to make enough space for them anyway.
I honestly want a middle ground between ER and Ds3. I play both regularly and I wish a had a game with ERs expanded moves and no solo hosts but with DS3s general area quality for pvp, covenants, player limits and time to kill
Ds3 was so good. The fact that you knew if you hit someone with an r1, you were getting 2 hits in and you had to figure out how to trap them into a third hit. ER is just flashy garbage.
I do agree that hard swapping can break immersion, but I simple do not see enough viable stools I could fit on a character realistically to deal with the amount of situations I can be put in. Invaders don’t get to choose who they invade
Well, this is about how I feel, though I guess I don't feel too bad about hard swapping. I played a shitton of dark souls 1 pvp, and when I saw they removed the ability to swap mid animation, mid roll, etc, I was pretty happy with where it landed overall, but I really understand the criticism. It feels weird to have a greatsword in your back left pocket that weighs nothing until you take it out. I think I don't mind the anime level skills/spells so much, if they were more balanced. I think the problem really arises, like you said, when you start getting gankers and 3v1 situations. At that point they're playing a shooting gallery game, and you're playing a bullet hell. At least in dark souls 1 I knew that if somebody was spamming I could avoid it for a while until they were out of casts. In ER I know the guy spamming elden stars in the back behind his two summons isn't gonna stop until I shove a sword down his throat, and its hard to manage that when his buddies are near one shotting me with jumping attacks on their bleed builds. That, combined with some of the weird things they did with online features, like gratuitous fog walls, blocking off some areas you could jump to and teleporting you back, or not letting you ride torrent during invasions (that might be controversial but if you fall off your horse you know you're gonna get deleted by a guy with a great hammer, risk reward I guess), really seems to stack things heavily against invaders. I'd like to see full flasks for invaders, and a lot of the changes seamless coop added in general. It always sucks when you're playing cat and mouse with a gank squad and you realize there's a big ass fog wall that's just in the middle of this field because fuck you in particular.
Like most here, there are some things I like about Elden Ring and other things I dislike. What I do like is how approachable it is as a game. The skill floor is much lower, and you can really feel that with how they designed a lot of the mechanics. It doesn't mean there is no challenge, just that the bar to entry is much lower than the previous titles. I sometimes go back to the older Souls games to see where they differ, and between Demon's Souls and DsR, there is a bigger emphasis on startegy. Knowledge is arguably the most important thing in the early souls titles. You had to know what your build was going to look like before you even got past character creation. You had to take into consideration how you were going to get your equipment as early as possible, what route was most effective, etc. Elden Ring made that knowledge gap more approachable by giving access to very powerful tools in the form of ashes of war and with the right know how you can become super overpowered without ever needing to go further than weeping peninsula. Elden Ring still has knowledge checks, it just gave you more options thanks to having an open world. That being said, I agree with you on disliking the open world, weapon swapping, and rewarding those who mindlessly mash. The open world becomes a sheer drag after a while, and it only gets more tedious on NG+ or when making new characters. And I do severely wish that weapon swapping wasn't such a highly needed skill in this game but it often is since it provides quick access to many "get off me" tools or pressure tools to finish off opponents but making such a loadout requires duping that while easy for PC can be quite tedious for those on console. And while I was super happy about ashes of war being a thing as the weapon art system of Ds3 was one of my favorite concepts, I really feel like they overtuned it to the point that theres little skill expression within the system. I don't even like half of the ashes anyways. Most of the time I just use the ones that provide a weapon buff or some other kind of utility because I like actually using my weapons and not just constantly pressing L2. Elden Ring to me is far more engaging and rewarding to me when I dont just monkey mash my L2 button and instead purposefully think about my next attack or whether or not I can make a trade. Much like you though, I hope From takes certain concepts and does better with them in future titles. The last thing I want to see is the death of PvP in a series of games that only ever tried to make fantasy style PvP that felt fun.
elden ring hardswaps is a must not like ds3 or ds2 where you only needed to hardswap to counter small amount of weapon or glitch like rkss cancels or spear running attack.
I’ve been obviating skill with stealth and trickery, host trick mirror, highwayman armor, concealing veil, mimic veil, light bows, using traps, etc. it takes a lot of patience though.
Some people are just incapable of winning without crutches. I had a friend who was trying to beat the dlc and despite using impenetrable thorns with a level 400 character on new game he couldn't do it alone without summons. Everytime he would lose with summons in the arena he would blame the summons instead of his own lack of skill. I tried to tell him to learn the bosses move set and stop blaming his inability to win on the game being unbeatable. In the end I beat radhan for him as a summon because he essentially quit the game due to how much trouble he was having. He never learned any of the bosses attack patterns, and he's never going to play Fromsoftware games the way they're intended to be played, it is what it is.
from software trying to hard to appeal to the casuls. they clearly can't handle why bother trying to appeal to them? they tryna get more money? sure they got their money but would they stay and play? or even bought older games? absolutely not. most ELDEN RINGERS refused to play older souls games. they're afraid of old souls
6:00 Guy giving divine advice while literally L2ing into an R1 spam, this is what Michael Zaki did to our game lol, RIP souls combat, You will be sorely missed.....
To put it bluntly, mage gameplay (INT) is actually the lowest skill playstyle, no contest. Other builds using projectile weapons, bows, crossbows, Smithscript weapons, none of em have tracking, mages is just press button an the game plays it for you. Its a shame tbh
I think hard swapping is a problem too. I had the feeling that all veteran Dark Souls players were okay with it, and I am glad that this was not true. It reduces the understanding of "skill" to instant "build optimization" for convenience, along with surprise weapon and ashes of war changes that make no sense. You take away from a combatant the ability to "know his/her enemy." If you cannot know your enemy, you cannot fight it. Being able to carry six different weapons is already enough to make a diverse, combined, and coherent build. Due to the ability to hard swap, most players, even the best of them, completely ignore the ability to (soft) swap, which feels more natural, faster, and more comprehensible. There were a few suggestions to make hard swapping an out-of-combat mechanic or one with an animation. I agree with both suggestions. I think it should be done with a specific item that can be equipped. It should also have a "reasonable" animation, even for a fantasy game. Otherwise, it makes no sense that the longest animation in the game is "drinking" a flask, while changing your entire gear and weapons happens instantly.
in DARK SOULS 3 hardswapping is not rly needed most of the time you only swaps because you can't counter something like say RKSS Cancel with another normal Straight Sword like Gotthard or Lothric Sword. you had to counter it with a curved sword specifically a scimi or ghru. or you use ledo or gundyr swap because it was kinda effective but against a experienced player it won't work you'll be punished.
i have always felt that balancing from both pvp and pve in any game should be balanced around skill expression, in short the easier something is to do the weaker it should be. with the easiest weapon/combat style etc in the game being the absolute weakest. and the easier it is the greater that margine should be.
3v1 encounters being the norm make the question of skill in this context feel kind of misplaced. I think it can't be understated how much the 3v1 thing stirs the cauldron in all the wrong ways due to the numbers advantage being that oppresive. Worth also remembering, most people do not participate in any sort of online Elden Ring conversations. It's only a minority that does. Easy to prove too, if you see Elden Rings sales numbers, and then look at the number of people who participate in any online dialogue about it. In the context of skill, what the bulk of the 25+ milion people feel about it may be quite different to discussions online. Heck, even the few that do engage in this talk are divided on quite a number of matters. Including what is considered skill or skillful.
Liked the video, but I dont have many comments on this, yes skill matters but if you want to win you want to make things as Easy to you as possible, in the case of a person beign invaded, the simple way is to kill fast, and get rid of the issue, thats all.
L2 spam, Jump attack spam and crotch poking spam are what I don't like most about Elden ring. I have counters for them without stooping to my opponents level but I can just feel its these lame tactics that are simply giving people hope to win. How utterly boring and sad. Oh well...
elden ring should or shouldnt be a lot of things, but at the end of the day the community likes cheating, ganking, and weird gay brother marriage lore so what does it matter lmao?
I do not understand half of this rant complain about flashy spells and moon etc when they are so fucking trash that it can never hit anyone who even knows 30% of what souls PVP is all about. The strongest and most meta builds in the game are melee builds + poises. All that matters is how fast an attack comes out, hyper armor, poise damage and range. Even in the majority of tier lists, not a single spell makes it to either B or A, freaking catch flame and slicer are at C tier. By using int or Faith stats you are gimping yourself from a sweaty meta lord stand point
the game is too piss easy. just made a monster build kill everyone in few clicks got bored quits the game. DARK SOULS 3 already has the system correctly with how r1 spam still punishable. and all you learned in DS3 matters, spacing, weapon knowledge but this only true to ds2 and ds3. ELDEN RING ain't go t no spacing with how the latency is more fucked up than DS3. and people in arena resorting to poke stick woth rot grease to delete a player in high lat fight because they don't know how to fight in high latency and resorting to cheesing. ELDEN RING has lowest skill ceiling there's no reason to git gud there. i already wiped out countless ELDEN RINGERS Since release and it was boring. DS3 and DS2 mid level and meta level invasion with wex dust offers me more challenges than ELDEN RING ever get me.
Can't call someone skilled who uses glitchs like chainsaw an hacked charecters that are encouraged by certain youtubers then cry about it when it's used against them when they encourage chainsaw an hacked charecters to win invasions or duels an call thenlm self's skilled. Why not cover players that used an uses those
@TheMuslimMan1337 just disconnect they get zero runes they lose. Doing anything to win even if their cheating is a cowards way out. Host that's afk farming is just as a coward as those using chainsaw when people could. Hardly did I ever see host afk farming.alqaya in invasions when the invader was losing he or she get desperate an use chainsaw. Seen it in arena an figgt.clubs.
@crimson1953 if you disconnect as an invader they get runes back, do you even play invasions? And no one smart who play invasions calls hacked characters skilled
@@Emil-e6w am asking him a question? Where is the disrespect. He plays like average player and I believe he would agree with me. I like his takes on some matters.
Unfortunately Fromsoft has cultivated in Elden Ring players the mentality of "a win is a win." Doesn't matter if they learn the boss fights or use summons or even whether they learn how to play their own character, a solid chunk of them are still using meta builds from 2 years ago and happily ganking invaders 3v1 because this is the game Fromsoft built.
Always. Skill in any of its forms should matter and should be rewarded. I'm not a big fan of giving the win to someone who lacks the skill to earn it (even worse when it's by means of extremely disproportionate advantages).
You let toddlers win to make them happy, unskilled adults are way past that point.
I don't let toddlers win. Even my own nieces and nephews have to earn their win. They learn all kind of problem solving skills when facing an opponent of vast skill differences and feel so happy about any victory they can muster.
Copying ans pasting my main comment since this one will likley get more visibility. I just want to throw my 2 cents into the ether
Skill. I'm all for low skill entry with a high ceiling. My problem is "skill" can be considered mastering glitches and exploits now called, "tech". To have a high skill ceiling requires tight mechanics and consistent interactions begween mechanics. ER just doesn't allow for that. Look at how long aimpunch took to fix, (which I still see sometimes).
Allowing simple spam and unpatched exploits to beat skill just makes for a lackluster pvp with no longevity.
@@xenosayain1506 Simple spam will beat skill only in a Xvs1 scenario. A skilled player won't lose against a brainlet spamming X ash of war.
@@OnlyWaifuYT when the gane functions well. I lost a lot to bloodflame aura and deathblight shield a lot when they workXD.
Plus swift slash and blind spot pre nerf....skill wasn't beating that when they dropped...unless you count spamming it better than them the skill issue😅
@@OnlyWaifuYT there are more examples that been progressively addressed. In the months waiting for the fixes these were true statements.
The mental attitude is part of the problem, they want the game to be as easy as possible forgetting that the difficulty is part of the charm
It is night and day if I try to invade with an rp build vs an optimal build. But when I get an rp build to work this game is so much more fun (to me personally, there is nothing wrong with running optimal stuff as long as you have fun).
But the amount of skill it requires to pull off is definitely higher than roll catching a noob who has no idea what’s going on with a curved greatsword killing them in 3 seconds.
My favorite thing about elden rings “skill expression” is the viability of assassin builds in this game when you couldn’t really pull off being a true assassin in the other games.
and the funny thing? cgs rollcatch spam isn't even that high of a skill...
when it comes to high level skill techs and glitches we'd be looking at things wavedashing(aka goblin step), handy tech, teh variety of special backstabs and of the cancels(crouch and guard cancels mainly) as well as of course hardswaps, with the hardest ones likely being armor and mid-parryswaps, but even in the competitive scene things have reached such a ridiculous point that some of them have started being banned, handytech in certain contexts has now been banned completely due to being extremely overpowered on things like dual straight swords by making them far safer than intended,(despite handy tech being a presumably intended mechanic) and parries, like ALL PARRIES have recently been outright banned in ladder and some other places now because while due to the matchup-based nature of the game hardswaps are important, hardswapping to a parry tool and getting a random parry, possibly ending the fight right then and there is... anticlimactic at best, at least at those skil levels.
personally i love technical play, but with the systems and balance currently present in elden ring, things have started to go a bit crazy, and the worst part? the actually interesting mechanics have been dying down to other changes, like poise being optimal at 121 now because currently you can tank the first R1 of some weapons, whereas before you could only tank second hits of weapons, and the best poise range was between 88 and 104, this means that now you're almost surely gonna give two talisman slots to bullgoat and great jar tali, and this also reduces the armor variety, niot just talisman(and as such build) variety.
i also have no clue what's going on with some of the recent changes, like greatsword now having R2s so fast that you can use them on reaction to abuse the hyperarmor despite previous patches making it so no hyperarmor could come out that fast, and they're as fast as the R1, or things like the swift spear change, a sub-mediocre but cool weapon that shined only in mixed-weapon setups... got nerfed specifically so it's now trash when not used two-handed.
what is going over at fromsoftware to make these changes? what are they thinking?
at least i guess the massively op and broken stuff is getting fixed... sometimes, recently the great katana offhand attacks have been nerfed but they forgot to change the rakshasa, meaning that most likely only the rakshasa was supposed to get that nerf and not the great katanas, but they effectively nerfed the wrong weapons...
sigh...
@@iota-09 optimal play is rarely necessary for most invasions, but when you do run across the sweaty optimal meta gank squads it’s infuriating if you don’t have the same basic pvp build they do. As you said, “optimal builds” at meta level (125) you are basically going to run into this exact same build or a similar version of it:
Vig - 58
Mind - 10 (vagabond)
Endurance - 39
STR - 54
Dex - 18
INT - 9
FTH - 9
ARC - 7
It’s extremely effective and lets people use almost all the busted weapons but to me that’s lame because at that point to your really have a build or a character? You’re just an avatar who probably looks ugly asf because all the high poise armor in this game looks terrible minus the new black armor.
As you touched on with the cgs, this build I listed above does incredibly well with the freyja greatsword. When I play on this build the amount of noobs I immediately kill in 3 roll catches is absurd, because they have no idea what to do because they don’t understand frame data or the fact that if they roll out of hit stun I am going to roll catch them every single time if I immediately input another running r1. As you also said, against players who understand that this build allows me to switch to so many other weapons that it doesn’t matter, but is that really a build at that point? In my opinion not really, but I understand that as an invader having access to everything (especially in elden ring) is what will win you a lot of invasions.
What I like about rp builds is my ability to work around the shortcomings of my build in order to still get the job done. To me that’s more fun but after I die 5 times in a row to dedicated gank squads I will switch to my mega build in order to boost my ego once again.
Can you explain assassin play viability? I did it pretty well with backstabs in DkS1
@@chrisr4066 if you use a combination of assassins gambit and concealing veil, not only can enemies not lock onto you unless you’re right on top of them, but you are extremely transparent. If you are in a dark area of a map you are basically completely invisible to most players. That on top of extremely cool assassin like tools such as the the red respawn fingers that can get you out of situations where you corner yourself, ashes of war like raptors of the mist, the ability to one shot backstab people at any level with dagger talisman/mersiricorde/royal knight resolve, all kinds of tools for your tool belt like poison daggers, ansbachs bow and the bone bow, rain of arrows, bloodhound step. There’s more but to me these are all assassin kind of tools that when you put them all together makes you feel like a sneaky guy. Not to mention the obvious ones like the concealing veil.
@@DreyfusLagoon Thank you!
you summed it up pretty well, it's best to have a pvp experience where the scope of a fight is comprehendible, and easy methods of play are viable as well as easily countered. i'm the type of invader that doesn't try to improve my build with meta-level gear. it's more fun for me to build a character that either fits into the world of the game, or references a different thing as well as i can manage.
it was basically impossible for me to exist in elden ring's pvp because i didn't have the most powerful options of every system in the game. i would get blasted down by myriad projectiles because i refused to use carian retaliation on any build that wasn't already sorcery aligned, and my poise was always terrible because i didn't want to/couldn't run stacked enough armor (WHY IS THE REDMANE SET EXACTLY 50 POISE I HATE IT). not even great equalizers like gravity are as useful as before, which i feel is a small but significant point.
i want my skill to have a good chunk of the importance, but if it were all skill no fun, i'd be playing something else like a fighting game. i dabble in enough already.
I feel like the reduvia dagger has an underrated ratio of useless in 1v1s to OP in 2v1/3v1 that doesn’t get talked about enough. One L2 spamming reduvia player hiding behind phantoms and bleed proccing you every 2 hits is so incredibly annoying, and yet in a 1v1 I’ve never once felt the reduvia was any more than a D-tier weapon. Truly a gankers treat
I mean that’s the case with most weapons and spells. Everything is good and viable if you are sitting behind two friends just throwing out random projectiles.
Every time I forget this thing exists
Then a varre headed, double reduvia, scare, learned helplessness idiot who needs 2 furled to carry them while they spam whatever they see is meta +build
You should give Reduvia another chance on 1 v 1. I'm currently using it alongside catch flame with dragon comunion seal and it allows for some fun combos and rollcatches with the ash. And with the buffed R2 you can do some quick hits that always break the poise
It also works as an off hand for arcane builds, like main hand halberd and off hand Reduvia.
I'd go as far as to say that Reduvia is the one of the top 3 daggers in PvP
@@Panurome maybe I’ll try it next time I go arcane build. I don’t disagree that it’s top 3 dagger in the game but I don’t think any dagger is above C-tier just because of the lack of poise damage and range. I actually paired reduvia with spiked palisade shield on a low level bleed build and it was pretty fun
@@Panurome while I mostly agree, reduvia is only held back by its ash of war, since most players are used to it at this point, you might be better off with like a wakazashi with a better ash of war for most cases, but I personally love running a reduvia in the main hand (for those nice r2s) and a weapon in the offhand mostly stuff I can use for handy tech which I feel compliments it much more than using it the offhand. Just my personally preference. Gotta agree though reduvia is probably top 3 daggers
If AoW and spells feel oppressive and un-fun, then perhaps Elden Ring would be better if the FP costs of AoW''s and spells (and Spirit Summons, just because) were increased by something like 25%. This might even make Mind a more appealing attribute!
Skill. I'm all for low skill entry with a high ceiling. My problem is "skill" can be considered mastering glitches and exploits now called, "tech". To have a high skill ceiling requires tight mechanics and consistent interactions begween mechanics. ER just doesn't allow for that. Look at how long aimpunch took to fix, (which I still see sometimes).
Allowing simple spam and unpatched exploits to beat skill just makes for a lackluster pvp with no longevity.
I agree with you. I like a tighter floor to ceiling ratio so that it doesn't take X000 hours to get down, but I like when a game always lets you always get a little better. I've never enjoyed exploit play because it's so immersion-breaking and everyone has a line for where those things become an issue.
Elden Ring has less of an exploit problem (though there have been many) and more of a spam problem, at least as I see it, and it really takes a toll on invasions. They went a little too far in the opposite direction from where they started and I'd love to see them course-correct.
EldenRing is L2 souls. Or gimmick souls. Everyone has one little strategy they either spam over and over again or to surprise and kill you within a couple of seconds. The only skill comes in spacing, which is just one aspect of the diversity older souls PvP offered.
I’ve always loved some of the intuitive logic in Elden ring that goes unspoken by the tutorials, like resistance changes during rain or in water.
Weight thresholds should definitely apply to inventory for hard swaps for the same reason. Part of the charm of low levels in RPG’s is making sacrifices; you shouldn’t be able do everything at once.
I’ve always preferred knowledge checks and always will. It’s the best of everything. Knowing what to do but also having the timing/space to actually do it.
That will inherently make it harder for more people to get into but the people who do get into it will be that much more committed. You have to be or you wouldn’t even know how to do or get out of whatever. Great example is reverse rolls into chain stabs. It’s something you can see coming, if you know how to not get caught you won’t, and if you still do there are ways to get out, unless you don’t know how then you’re just done.
That sort of deeper skill knowledge is always a cool thing to acclimate to in a game. I think I'm always craving those sorts of interactions at their most intentional, and chafing against them at their least. I really just want the game to be as intuitive as possible to play while still retaining that deep sense of complexity, where the interactions aren't dependent on system inconsistencies or exploits.
It's a tough thing to get right, especially in a video game, but I hope the next game will get closer than where we are now.
@@emotionaljonxvx I get that. It is a really hard line to walk, to make it intuitive enough for someone new to play but complex enough to have real depth.
And yea all we can do at this point is hope I guess. Don’t go hollow
@@emotionaljonxvx the problem i feel is that even competitive fighting games often have such issues, you look at tekken for example, and the game hardly ever explains how animation priorities(i.e. low jab after guarding from a high), sidestepping, wavedashing, grab techs and so much more works, despite all these things being at the base of high level play.
it's just gonna be a part of these games no matter what... what could be don though is make it so that these mecahnics and interactions don't get overly abused, you metioned hardswapping for example, and with hardswaps you still need to take in account weight load after all(which is why i never do armor swaps, too much math to take account of), but what's stopping someone from just hardswapping to a parry tool at the last second and getting a(relatively) easy parry that ends the fight there? sure it might be a high level skill from the perspective of those who don't know, but when you are at the highest levels that's basically just cheesing the game of its gameplay opportunities as it's fairly simple and second-nature compared to other techs that get made use of at higher level play.
the real issue is that with how thing currently stand with elden ring's balance, between the optimal poise cap making it so you can't have many tlaisman slots unlocked, nuke spells and ashe sof war, easy to get big damage buffs left and right and so on so forth, the game's structure crumbles the moment someone at high level knows what they're doing, or when there's more than one player against a single target, the fundamentals get thrown out the window despite things like hardswapping not really getting in the way of it in past title,s in fact hardswapping used to be enhancing all this, and mind you, i'm saying this as someone who loves to hardswap...
it's not so much about removing these mechanics as much as it is about making it more of an even playing field by making the tools, well, tools, not weapons of mass destructions.
"Skill" in elden ring varies from someone learning to dance and predict openings all the way to hard swapping and space "baiting." Honestly, i loved pvp and the arena, but im done. Im tired of facing poke halberd, estoc poise tanks, and the like.
Also the damage is out of control, i pvp at 125 and last night i got hit by a two handed straight sword square off that did over 1700 dmg... so ya im done for good. Its just not fun for me. Glad its fun for some, but i miss the dance.
Good luck guys.
Right there with you brother.
Love the way you acknowledge multiple perspectives of players. Honestly, ER is one of a few games where I love the potential, but the execution is lackluster. I want fun immersive fights and can take an L respectfully, but I'm just not interested in learning janky tech. Yeah, it is what it is and there's some due respect in learning subsystems, but part of me cant help but ask "Why are there so many problems this many souls games in, especially when the solutions are right there in previous entries?"
Jon has delivered greatness once again
Thank you
incoming Steelovsky reaction: “ehhh I toe-tally diz-agree bro honestly, skeell issue.”
Every time I die to a laser beam attack I recall hayao miyazaki saying anime was a mistake
I really miss DS3 pvp. ER pvp is a cheese fest
if you're on PC, pontiff's has a decent amount of activity in the evenings. just tonight i did consistent aldrich faithful invasions for a good 30 minutes, summoning duelists and doing regular invasions whenever there was a lull. it was really fun
I also miss hosting fight clubs, and fighting the winner. Good times, I miss those types of interactions. having only 4 players per world is lame. ER killed fight clubs.
Kinda reminds me of cod where they are trying to cater to noobs. In cods case its even worse than Elden Ring with its EOMM. Your matches are decided before you even load into a game and the outcome is impossible to change. Skilled players lose health, and there guns dont do as much damage as they did last match, essentially letting the noobs have a better advantage. In Elden Ring its AOW. As long as you have a good aow you could essentially spam it to a win unless the person you are facing has the knowledge of what they AOW does.
An npc that punishes you situationally: lord of cinder
skill = time played.
skill just translates to how long you’ve gone without touching grass.
I have nothing to add to this. I agree with everything you say, more or less.
If they remastered Ds3 and patched all the cancel tech and unscaled’s phantoms,I would happily go back. I don’t mind dedicated ganks,but I just didn’t enjoy gank city and unfortunately invading in ER feels like you’re always invading at pontiff,minus the back up in a 3v1.
7:50 - 8:20 unironically the reason i don't do invasions anymore, yet i still can have a lot of fun doing 2v2 in fightclubs on den maps and such.
In these games, I recognize four types of skill, present in each and every one.
Mechanical skill - how good are you at the actual fighting and using inputs?
Buildcrafting/planning skill - how good are you at making a build tailored to your needs?
Tactical skill - how good are you at using your build and all of its tools?
Strategic skill - how good are you at making and applying a plan before engaging the encounter?
Success is always conditional, and failure common. That's the common thread that binds From Software's games, that we love.
The existence of these different types of skill and ways to focus on play is a good thing. Just like how you build a character that sacrifices something to have access to something else, you have to sacrifice investment into a skill to learn another skill; eventually you'll be skilled at all types, and that is its own reward.
But in Elden Ring specifically, Buildcrafting skill provides the most reward for the least investment, whereas Strategic skill can bring the second most rewards due to how many items and build options are available, while Tactical skill and Mechanical skill are poorly incentivized and some times downright disincentivized compared to the other two types of skill.
No matter how mechanically skilled you may be, or know exactly when and how to use weapons and tools with special effects to win, you still may be fighting against enemies that deal absurd amounts of damage that prevent you from taking chances or making worthwhile trades.
It isn't a matter of a type of skill being more focused on in this game, but rather that it is too easy to reap the rewards of one of the skills, without the investment necessary to get there - some times to an insulting amount, like with overlevelled phantoms not being (down)scaled properly and giving the host way too much of an advantage.
People loved Dark Souls 2's pvp because it was generally well-balanced for Mechanical skill and Buildcrafting skill, but it did lack in the other two facets. Dark Souls 3 improved upon all, which made DS3 pvp so enjoyable for so many, even despite its flaws. Perhaps one of those flaws that From perceived was that fights between skilled opponents end up being slow and attritive due to more or less low damage. So, they corrected that perceived flaw in Elden Ring and made fights more snappy and dangerous due to higher damage... in the process perhaps overcorrecting the issue and causing an imbalance in the other direction.
It's not easy to strike a good balance, but at least Elden Ring provided fantastic Buildcrafting skill expression and options, that bleed into the other types of skills. Hopefully they learn from both ER and previous Souls games, and manage to strike that balance in a future game.
ER is one of my favorite games but I feel like whoever is behind the pvp updates has never played pvp a day in their life
clearly they never the pvp update doesn't have any effort in it. just a piss poor balancing update and no changes on the anti cheat bypass exploit nor anything about region lock. which was the core issues. all the balancing and changes to pvp won't matter ifthey don't fix the core issues.
I kinda hate the pvp in elden ring. It’s more of a nuisance than fun. There is no point in it other than trolling. IMO, ds3 has the best pvp. There’s covenants, rewards for doing it, which led to some crazy battles especially in farron and anor Londo.
Dark souls 3 has some of the worst meta, like the hand scythe being able to practically permanently stun any player, or just how bad spells and most weapon arts are in that game in general, or how anything that isn't a straight sword or dagger is far too slow to actually land a hit against an average player who isn't completely dog shit making over half the weapons in the game useless in pvp. The pvp in dark souls 3 is objectively bad, not as bad as elden ring, dark souls, or demon's souls, but it's still bad.
You are taught to hardswap mid combat in the Dark Souls 1 tutorial, I don't understand how it's still controversial AT ALL.
That's a fair point, though if you're talking about when you get your starting weapon in that little alcove with the archer in the asylum, that's not exactly the same sort of maneuver. At least, I don't think of them as the same. I switch to a cannon when I'm fighting far away, and it does invalidate the equipment load mechanic, but it's not much of a skill.
I usually think of hardswapping as rotating between weapons or talismans mid-fight. Things like swapping to dagger talisman just for a riposte or changing between different versions of the same weapon to get different Ashes of War. More skill-focused techniques that give you a specific kind of advantage based around exploiting the game's timing for animations and limitations.
And I don't want to paint it as controversial. It's solely my personal preference that I would like to see the game designed without that as a function because I've never liked it as a playstyle. No shame on anyone who uses it.
@@emotionaljonxvx From the perspective of a Cooperator or Invader, it’s silly to watch other players swap their equipment because the newly equipped armament or armor instantly appears *POP!* with no animation to accompany it. Proposal: In a similar vein to the player having a Spectral Steed Whistle to summon Torrent, the player also has a special item that grants them access to equipment not on their person - an item that functions much like a Portable Hole in D&D. And just as there is a quick animation to accompany the Spectral Steed Whistle, there is a quick animation that accompanies the player accessing their Equipment menu, and also additional animations for the player equipping armaments, armor, and talismans. Although this would reduce the speed of hard-swapping an item by about 1 second in total, I still think that hard-swapping would still remain worthwhile tactic in some situations.
@@benzost920 Actually a really clever solution, cool idea!
Booted up ER yesterday voor the first time in a month. Tried some invasions. First three: host entered the boss arena. Then some dumb shit in abandoned cave that spawned me in the rot and then a ganksquad in liurnia. Yep, thats why i put the game down.
What must matter most is pure fundamentals like dark souls 3
Shadow of the Erdtree doubled down on all the problems you mentioned, including one: A win is a win. You can fight BS with BS and be justified, no need to learn anything. Why do you think Spirit Summons can be upgraded like you can?
ELDEN RING just ain't Souls we had to learn to accept itthat the game does not represents Souls in all it's glory
Also worth pointing out, that when hardswapping, your weight limit is just as, if not more important as if you ignore it, you swap onto a setup that makes you fatroll, the mechanic is integral to the character building system
I primarily play bloodborne pvp and exploiting glitches and flaws in the game is mostly what you'll see out of the "meta"
However, that's not to say there's no skill in it at all--especially when you consider mastering your momentum
I disagree that building gameplay that makes the better skiled players consistently win or have a huge advantage is gonna kill the community like you said. I think it's gonna do the exact opposite and in my opinion we can look at DS1's history for proof to that. For example, during the DS1 pvp times there were so many streamers with thousands of viewers each, their main content being DS1 pvp. To such a big extent that the numbers for DS2 or DS3 or ER are not even close for that specific category, especially taking the souls series and streaming into context which in 2012-2014 were both significantly less popular than today.
High skill gameplay is more fun to engage with and it makes for more fun content. It is also a huge motivation for new players to sink their teeth into it and get better. WInning so often by just spamming buttons, be it in pve or pvp isn't gonna make anyone want to get better or learn mechanics. The game has to push you to get better and learn. And when you do, it will feel incredibly rewarding.
It could be argued that with every game they drop the skill ceiling bit by bit. Or more accurately they make skill unnecessary for winning.
Competitive DS1 player here (yes I am old), thanks for making this video. Just wanted to chime in that in my personal opinion, "skill" as a general concept, is the single biggest predictor of success in competitive PVP in every single souls game. It's the reason that each one of these games has it's own group of a few top players who consistently win tournaments, very rarely dropping sets to people outside the top 10 or so. This would simply not be possible if overall skill wasn't the most important aspect.
The difference between the PVP in each of the games is simply which skills are emphasized in each one. Spacing, positioning, poise counting, menuing, prediction, understanding latency, executing various techs; all of these are individual skills that will impact your success in every single souls game. Mastering spacing is no more noble than mastering menuing or poise counting, they are all equally valid skills to learn.
The questions that PVPers in any souls game should be asking themselves are:
- Which skills are the most important in my preferred game?
- How can I focus on getting better at those skills?
Dark Souls 3 PVP and co-op was more fun because there was skill and coordination involved. Casual Hosts also gave lots more rage-mail which was a classic bro.... i miss that the most.
You articulated my problem with hard swapping really well. It's skillful sure but the reward is you get to sidestep both the endurance Stat and the drawbacks of whatever equipment you brought, which feels cheap even if it was hard to pull off. Souls PVP is often compared to fighting games, but we can all agree it would be weird as hell if in Smash you could open the character select screen mid-match and switch to Fox. That's basically what's happening whenever someone pulls a buckler out of their pocket with no transitory animation. It's not fun
i doesn't sidestep endurnace/weight load as you still need to claculate for that and it is an intended mechanic(that is what they expect you to do against yhorm and all the other storm ruler bossfights after all), but what you say about parrying tools on command is absolutely true.
the issue imho isn't so much with the tech itself as much as with how expanded and extreme the arsenal of elden ring is, you could be invading with a cold build and the moment you see your opponent back away to cure their frost, hardswap to a moonveil and get a free 500+ damage from 10 meters away.
if you had swapped to any other weapon you would have had to work for that damage after that swap, but because the moonveil(or other tools) exist, the only actually hard part was doing a fast enough swap.
add on top of it the plethora of damage buffs that you can get and stack on top of one another and you see that the issue isn't so much hardswaps as it is the way hardswaps allow to get *all* the buffs in quick succession at command... and yet you could do the exact same thing if instead of hardswaping you just had friends covering your ass.
Tie carry weight to strength like the ER beta, and I would care less about this, I currently like being able to swap, cause if I'm running a claymore and heavier if I run someone is running thrusting sword bhs/quickstep, I'd like to not just lose because I can't swap while fighting a cheesy set up. Also this would make mages twice and cancerous, need a magic parrying shield? Well your shit out of luck, you brought an off dagger instead, have fun.
@@UrVidaGameMum I can acknowledge that it's a necessary evil to counter the amount of nonsense in this game - I do it for the same reason - but I still don't like fighting it
i dont think hard swapping would be an issue if the elden ring PVP community didint normalize using cheats to get a ton of items that realistically no one would have. if you look at a UA-camr like steelovsky, sure he has probably the best weapon swaps ive EVER seen and hes certainly a great player, but when i look at his account i see 15 star fists 10 guts greatswords 10 golem great bows 30 golem great arrows. a shield for every situation. everything plus 25. it genuinely starts to become unfair. i dont see anyone swapping as much as people who cheat in their items. people will use 3rd party programs, file manipulation, and dupes and act like theyre not cheating. farm your items like anyone else. resource management is an important skill in these games that i have to have and cheaters dont
The fact that none of the streamers including Jon are talking about cheat engine tells me everything i need to know about the "community".
its fromsofts fault they made you farm items and go ng+ to level up weapons to +25. why not have a merchant for every crafting material/consumable? why not reward people for invasions/duels with +25 stones ds2 style? why not let you duplicate weapons/ashes after you do something like ng+7? this wouldnt be hard to implement, just a small patch with a random npc that gives you stones after like 5 or 10 won invasions and bell bearings with crafting materials
@@Turaloid i agree with you for the most part. blame the game and not the gamer. people are gonna cheat in every game. especially if its competitive. but you're right i wouldn't care if fromsoftware made it possible to do in the game. the unfortunate part is its not. its dam near impossible to get an account like some UA-camrs. it would take hundreds of hours to even try. i dont think that should justify cheating tho and i dont think the community should be so chill about it. especially since Elden Ring has the strongest consumable items in souls game history.
Yeah I really dislike the duping in this game. It feels bad when you do it the right way and farm your life away while others dupe and are able to profit just as much and much more.
Farming is just wasting your life away there's literally no point other than feeling better about yourself or trying to get a moral high ground. At that point just play a different game that respects your time that *doesn't* make you farm your life away to get the best set up you can.
I disagree on hard swapping being an exploit of the weight mechanic or being unintentional. If it was unintended then they wouldn't have limitations on when you can hard swap (you can't during attack animations for example there's even an in game pop up for it) and they just wouldn't let you do it in combat in general instead (like they do with crafting). People swapping for different set ups and ash of wars are just taking the mechanic the furthest it can go and being rewarded for it. On the weight aspect most weapons don't weigh that much in the first place especially compared to armor (which you probably don't want to swap around too much in the first place in most cases). So the weight limit mostly controls how good your armor can be and if you need to use a talisman slot on an equip load tali sacrificing some offense. Also you still need to take weight into account with hard swaps in your set up. I've had multiple occasions where I hard swapped to certain talismans that weigh juuuuust a tad too much and make me heavy roll, because I thought the weight of the tali wouldn't matter since they're all pretty light, but sometimes that's all it takes to push you over the threshold. Also hard swaps don't invalidate soft swaps by any means either, soft swaps are much faster and convenient, so sometimes it's good to make enough space for them anyway.
I honestly want a middle ground between ER and Ds3. I play both regularly and I wish a had a game with ERs expanded moves and no solo hosts but with DS3s general area quality for pvp, covenants, player limits and time to kill
Ds3 was so good. The fact that you knew if you hit someone with an r1, you were getting 2 hits in and you had to figure out how to trap them into a third hit. ER is just flashy garbage.
I do agree that hard swapping can break immersion, but I simple do not see enough viable stools I could fit on a character realistically to deal with the amount of situations I can be put in. Invaders don’t get to choose who they invade
God I wish Sekiro had pvp.
Well, this is about how I feel, though I guess I don't feel too bad about hard swapping. I played a shitton of dark souls 1 pvp, and when I saw they removed the ability to swap mid animation, mid roll, etc, I was pretty happy with where it landed overall, but I really understand the criticism. It feels weird to have a greatsword in your back left pocket that weighs nothing until you take it out.
I think I don't mind the anime level skills/spells so much, if they were more balanced. I think the problem really arises, like you said, when you start getting gankers and 3v1 situations. At that point they're playing a shooting gallery game, and you're playing a bullet hell. At least in dark souls 1 I knew that if somebody was spamming I could avoid it for a while until they were out of casts. In ER I know the guy spamming elden stars in the back behind his two summons isn't gonna stop until I shove a sword down his throat, and its hard to manage that when his buddies are near one shotting me with jumping attacks on their bleed builds.
That, combined with some of the weird things they did with online features, like gratuitous fog walls, blocking off some areas you could jump to and teleporting you back, or not letting you ride torrent during invasions (that might be controversial but if you fall off your horse you know you're gonna get deleted by a guy with a great hammer, risk reward I guess), really seems to stack things heavily against invaders. I'd like to see full flasks for invaders, and a lot of the changes seamless coop added in general. It always sucks when you're playing cat and mouse with a gank squad and you realize there's a big ass fog wall that's just in the middle of this field because fuck you in particular.
Thanks, Jon
Like most here, there are some things I like about Elden Ring and other things I dislike. What I do like is how approachable it is as a game. The skill floor is much lower, and you can really feel that with how they designed a lot of the mechanics. It doesn't mean there is no challenge, just that the bar to entry is much lower than the previous titles. I sometimes go back to the older Souls games to see where they differ, and between Demon's Souls and DsR, there is a bigger emphasis on startegy. Knowledge is arguably the most important thing in the early souls titles. You had to know what your build was going to look like before you even got past character creation. You had to take into consideration how you were going to get your equipment as early as possible, what route was most effective, etc. Elden Ring made that knowledge gap more approachable by giving access to very powerful tools in the form of ashes of war and with the right know how you can become super overpowered without ever needing to go further than weeping peninsula. Elden Ring still has knowledge checks, it just gave you more options thanks to having an open world. That being said, I agree with you on disliking the open world, weapon swapping, and rewarding those who mindlessly mash. The open world becomes a sheer drag after a while, and it only gets more tedious on NG+ or when making new characters. And I do severely wish that weapon swapping wasn't such a highly needed skill in this game but it often is since it provides quick access to many "get off me" tools or pressure tools to finish off opponents but making such a loadout requires duping that while easy for PC can be quite tedious for those on console. And while I was super happy about ashes of war being a thing as the weapon art system of Ds3 was one of my favorite concepts, I really feel like they overtuned it to the point that theres little skill expression within the system. I don't even like half of the ashes anyways. Most of the time I just use the ones that provide a weapon buff or some other kind of utility because I like actually using my weapons and not just constantly pressing L2. Elden Ring to me is far more engaging and rewarding to me when I dont just monkey mash my L2 button and instead purposefully think about my next attack or whether or not I can make a trade. Much like you though, I hope From takes certain concepts and does better with them in future titles. The last thing I want to see is the death of PvP in a series of games that only ever tried to make fantasy style PvP that felt fun.
elden ring hardswaps is a must not like ds3 or ds2 where you only needed to hardswap to counter small amount of weapon or glitch like rkss cancels or spear running attack.
I’ve been obviating skill with stealth and trickery, host trick mirror, highwayman armor, concealing veil, mimic veil, light bows, using traps, etc. it takes a lot of patience though.
Something that sometimes works is leaving rainbow stones in a little trail to a trap like a cliff that you hand ballista them off of
Some people are just incapable of winning without crutches. I had a friend who was trying to beat the dlc and despite using impenetrable thorns with a level 400 character on new game he couldn't do it alone without summons. Everytime he would lose with summons in the arena he would blame the summons instead of his own lack of skill. I tried to tell him to learn the bosses move set and stop blaming his inability to win on the game being unbeatable. In the end I beat radhan for him as a summon because he essentially quit the game due to how much trouble he was having. He never learned any of the bosses attack patterns, and he's never going to play Fromsoftware games the way they're intended to be played, it is what it is.
from software trying to hard to appeal to the casuls. they clearly can't handle why bother trying to appeal to them? they tryna get more money? sure they got their money but would they stay and play? or even bought older games? absolutely not. most ELDEN RINGERS refused to play older souls games. they're afraid of old souls
6:00 Guy giving divine advice while literally L2ing into an R1 spam, this is what Michael Zaki did to our game lol, RIP souls combat, You will be sorely missed.....
Good video dude you'll soon surpass me keep going
To put it bluntly, mage gameplay (INT) is actually the lowest skill playstyle, no contest. Other builds using projectile weapons, bows, crossbows, Smithscript weapons, none of em have tracking, mages is just press button an the game plays it for you. Its a shame tbh
I think hard swapping is a problem too. I had the feeling that all veteran Dark Souls players were okay with it, and I am glad that this was not true.
It reduces the understanding of "skill" to instant "build optimization" for convenience, along with surprise weapon and ashes of war changes that make no sense.
You take away from a combatant the ability to "know his/her enemy." If you cannot know your enemy, you cannot fight it.
Being able to carry six different weapons is already enough to make a diverse, combined, and coherent build.
Due to the ability to hard swap, most players, even the best of them, completely ignore the ability to (soft) swap, which feels more natural, faster, and more comprehensible.
There were a few suggestions to make hard swapping an out-of-combat mechanic or one with an animation.
I agree with both suggestions.
I think it should be done with a specific item that can be equipped. It should also have a "reasonable" animation, even for a fantasy game.
Otherwise, it makes no sense that the longest animation in the game is "drinking" a flask, while changing your entire gear and weapons happens instantly.
in DARK SOULS 3 hardswapping is not rly needed most of the time you only swaps because you can't counter something like say RKSS Cancel with another normal Straight Sword like Gotthard or Lothric Sword. you had to counter it with a curved sword specifically a scimi or ghru.
or you use ledo or gundyr swap because it was kinda effective but against a experienced player it won't work you'll be punished.
i have always felt that balancing from both pvp and pve in any game should be balanced around skill expression, in short the easier something is to do the weaker it should be. with the easiest weapon/combat style etc in the game being the absolute weakest. and the easier it is the greater that margine should be.
Red boi was so bad he decided to go against
Skill is the only thing that matters.
3v1 encounters being the norm make the question of skill in this context feel kind of misplaced. I think it can't be understated how much the 3v1 thing stirs the cauldron in all the wrong ways due to the numbers advantage being that oppresive. Worth also remembering, most people do not participate in any sort of online Elden Ring conversations. It's only a minority that does. Easy to prove too, if you see Elden Rings sales numbers, and then look at the number of people who participate in any online dialogue about it. In the context of skill, what the bulk of the 25+ milion people feel about it may be quite different to discussions online. Heck, even the few that do engage in this talk are divided on quite a number of matters. Including what is considered skill or skillful.
They took my fav glitches away so skill is all i have left.
I just need to get gud like chase the bro
Liked the video, but I dont have many comments on this, yes skill matters but if you want to win you want to make things as Easy to you as possible, in the case of a person beign invaded, the simple way is to kill fast, and get rid of the issue, thats all.
Very insightful! I take back what I said before 😉😂
MY BROTHER
L2 spam, Jump attack spam and crotch poking spam are what I don't like most about Elden ring. I have counters for them without stooping to my opponents level but I can just feel its these lame tactics that are simply giving people hope to win. How utterly boring and sad. Oh well...
elden ring should or shouldnt be a lot of things, but at the end of the day the community likes cheating, ganking, and weird gay brother marriage lore so what does it matter lmao?
Yo! Is negative emotions Jon!
yes, but you're using a Two handed Milady
I thought this was strugglerva
not thst you asked, just throwing some feedback, the background music is annoying
I do not understand half of this rant complain about flashy spells and moon etc when they are so fucking trash that it can never hit anyone who even knows 30% of what souls PVP is all about.
The strongest and most meta builds in the game are melee builds + poises. All that matters is how fast an attack comes out, hyper armor, poise damage and range.
Even in the majority of tier lists, not a single spell makes it to either B or A, freaking catch flame and slicer are at C tier. By using int or Faith stats you are gimping yourself from a sweaty meta lord stand point
yes
Not in this. Theres no chain stabs and parry swap in a gank is too risky. So really just turn brain off and hit button.
Just play Seamless bro
the game is too piss easy. just made a monster build kill everyone in few clicks got bored quits the game.
DARK SOULS 3 already has the system correctly with how r1 spam still punishable. and all you learned in DS3 matters, spacing, weapon knowledge but this only true to ds2 and ds3.
ELDEN RING ain't go t no spacing with how the latency is more fucked up than DS3. and people in arena resorting to poke stick woth rot grease to delete a player in high lat fight because they don't know how to fight in high latency and resorting to cheesing.
ELDEN RING has lowest skill ceiling there's no reason to git gud there. i already wiped out countless ELDEN RINGERS Since release and it was boring. DS3 and DS2 mid level and meta level invasion with wex dust offers me more challenges than ELDEN RING ever get me.
Souls pvp will never be balanced or good
ds3 is the closest one to be good if the glitches is fixed and PK is nerfed
Can't call someone skilled who uses glitchs like chainsaw an hacked charecters that are encouraged by certain youtubers then cry about it when it's used against them when they encourage chainsaw an hacked charecters to win invasions or duels an call thenlm self's skilled. Why not cover players that used an uses those
Chainsaw is necessary to beat afk farmers
@CobraCommander117 no it's not. Theirs ways to deal with players that afk farm an it didn't require using glitchs.
@@crimson1953 Such as?
@TheMuslimMan1337 just disconnect they get zero runes they lose. Doing anything to win even if their cheating is a cowards way out. Host that's afk farming is just as a coward as those using chainsaw when people could. Hardly did I ever see host afk farming.alqaya in invasions when the invader was losing he or she get desperate an use chainsaw. Seen it in arena an figgt.clubs.
@crimson1953 if you disconnect as an invader they get runes back, do you even play invasions? And no one smart who play invasions calls hacked characters skilled
Emotional. You have skill ?
What happened to all that “respect” that you claimed to have? Strange seeing you act like this. Looks like you do this often on this channel.
@@Emil-e6w am asking him a question? Where is the disrespect.
He plays like average player and I believe he would agree with me.
I like his takes on some matters.
@@Am_Kosmos Guess i took your comment the wrong way, it sounded like you were hating on the guy. My bad
@@Emil-e6w I have some major disagreements on what he is saying. I’ll be sure to critique him later.
@@Am_Kosmos critique him later hmm sounds like you have new video idea then
learn and adapt or just play offline if it’s too much to handle
Skill issue to be crying about it just get good