Hoo boy, so... that most recent patch! I feel a bit exhausted exploring poise, though I don't really mind the videos being a little outdated for the time being, since understanding the underlying systems is more important than any specific numbers involved. Nonetheless I'll think about making yet another poise video much later on, perhaps a sort of "where poise wound up" sort of discussion when the game is more settled in its lifespan. But what are the biggest and most important changes you've noticed? Anything that impacts your PvE or PvP experience in an interesting way? Let me know!
One question: that spreadsheet and the calculator you linked in the description, are they still being updated? if something about the exact hyperarmor values changed (which I really hope it did) would one be able to find them there?
what got changed? did greatswords get fixed and no longer decrease poise? i started playing on this patch and idk how much of this info is still accurate (as i'm rolling with greatswords and pretty high poise)
Hey I’m pretty late to this thread but I figure it’s my best shot at getting a response, though it isn’t related to PvP poise. At 15:22 you show a spreadsheet of what appears to be a very large list of all npc poise values, their recovery time multipliers, etc. As far as I can tell this spreadsheet is not available through the links in the description and I was wondering if you could provide me a link to it? I’d really like to have access to all that data to look through for my self and have a quick reference for all enemy poise values. Thanks and great video!
“Doesn’t poise recovery scale with maximum poise?” “Yep.” “As an enemy with 65 poise, it takes 5 seconds to recover, and at 15 poise it’s more like 1.15 seconds.” “That’s right.” “And as we’ve disclosed, despite *my* poise being listed as 65, it’s more around 6.5. Even if I can’t recover poise instantly, it would make sense to at least have a few seconds of remaining out of direct engagement for my poise meter to regenerate.” “That makes sense to me.” “So give me back my poise.” “It takes half a minute.”
poise for pve enemies is more like stance hp, whenever you break it, you're able to deal a lot of damage to them via ripost or hitting their weak spot, whilst in pvp poise works as a stagger hp, whenever someone breaks it, you just flinch for half a second. And also there's toughness, which has i think 4 or 5 levels and enemies usually have a set value, for example crystallians have i think toughness 2 until you break their poise, which makes most small and medium sized weapons deflect from them and some great weapons deflect if you're 1 handing. Also sometimes it's used for enemies without the deflecting, so that they just don't stagger whenever you hit them. And players toughness value also works the same way as crystallian and can be modified either with some spells, items or just using different classes of shields.
DS1 poise was perfect but for some reason FromSoft has to keep changing it. It had a nice spread of options from being very light to super heavy, and it felt good fair. At the very least humanoid enemies should have the same poise system as the player. Currently it feels way too unfair. Better than DS3 at least, I guess.
@@girla9480 amen, i have theroy why: souls influencer. they hate the fact you could poise through hits in pvp and i bet in beta testing they shouted loud enough.
@@maikbaumann1250 i depise with all my energy what they did after dark souls 1. Poise was fine, makes no sense removing it. Using heavy armor is expected to make you stronger and much harder to get stunned, etc. Since DS2 armor now is useless and is like clothing with plate aesthetic. Very bad game design. All running meta ninja souls build gets boring fast. DS1 pvp was the best and the peak of the series popularity with sl100 and sl125 builds all over youtube, the only drawback was it was too easy to backstab. Soul memory killed pvp in the sequels.
DS2 at least had some nice ideas, like poise scaling with strength or heavy armour, but instead of fixing that system they just went in a horrible direction. Honestly I think this applies to most systems, but poise especially, they could have given us DS1 poise design with Bloodborne style backstabs and it would have fixed almost all PvP problems but nooo, we need to have a bunch of mutant systems where all of them are failing in different ways. If this is 'working as intended' then I no longer care about Fromsoft's intentions.
The only reason I can think of for the Bull-Goat talisman's description is that "poise damage" isn't something ever mentioned in the rest of the game, so it may be confusing to a player who's unaware that poise is a bar that drains. But that could be easily gotten around by just saying "makes you more resilient against stagger" or something...
@@jooot_6850 I honestly think some of the reasons it is so difficult to understand are (a) we were never really meant to understand it except in some general intuitive way and (b) I'm convinced they change the poise/hyperarmor model all the way through development, and keep making tweaks to improve the gameplay. I think for example passive poise was added in for PVP relatively late in development.
Another question, since the description says “raises poise” why not just literally raise the characters poise 25% instead of nerfing incoming damage. It would slightly change the mechanic but I don’t see how it’d be game breaking. All I can think of is it changing the timing of poise regen slightly so maybe that’d be slightly worse? Or better it’s still hard to wrap my head around this
The Lazuli Glintstone Sword and Carian Knight's Sword both have a special property of blocking while charging a heavy attack, so maybe that has something to do with the poise breaking part of that attack being less impressive as you're theoretically taking less of a risk. For the greatsword outliers, it may be due to having a movement component. Seeing them alongside the Celebrant's and Iron cleavers in the list of weapons where guard counters beat charged attacks for poise damage suggests this to me, anyway. So, overall, charged attacks that have additional functionality seem to get slightly shortchanged on stunning power.
If you look further, you can also see that the fully charged R2 of both mentioned Axes have lower Damage MV then other Axes but the Guard Counter Damage MV is the same as other Axes. This support this thesis. Also a interesting with the Alabaster Lord's Greatsword, both uncharged R2 have higher poise damage, but the first fully charged does not.
@@darq7000 I'm not confident in venturing a guess for the design intent of the Alabaster Lord's Sword. If every gravity themed weapon had boosted poise damage, I would assume the idea is that gravity magic is subtly enhancing the impact, giving the weapon more effective mass and your character less so you're being slapped around more easily, but as it's just this one weapon and it misses out specifically for the first charged attack it ends up seeming to me that there must have been an oversight somewhere in there.
Negative poise with those weapons seems like a bug or some kind of bizarre oversight that will hopefully be patched. From has a good track record of patching the weird errors illusory wall finds so I am hopeful that this will be too.
@@ethanwashington6789 They do just need to touch up poise, in general. Poise breakpoints for weapons really need to be spread out, and armor poise should be more linear too. They really could just have hyper armor be a flat added value - it's kind of silly to make it so unnecessarily convoluted. As the video showed, in PvE having lots of poise often doesn't even matter.
5:47 About poise I-frames during recovery animations, another weird thing about the Golems is that their poise invincibility ends as soon as they START standing back up, not when they get back on their feet. Once they hit the ground you can keep them chain-stunned indefinitely without giving them a chance to attack.
Ah so the Golems actually do have poise invincibility frames while standing back up-- IF you miss the critical attack. That seems to the determining factor for most enemies, whether or not you land the critical drastically affects whether or not you can drain poise again soon after. When you do land the critical, you can drain their poise soon after, while they're still trying to stand back up. So yeah there's huge stunlock potential, made a lot easier if you position yourself to get those criticals in. edit: Because this comment has more visibility, I'd like to add a response here to some other questions about the Golems-- I did completely forget about how some of them have their legs protected. They also have 120 poise, and in that case it drains normally. So this applies to the 2nd archer closer to the Great Jar in Caelid, and also the one you drop down to in Caelid near Fort Faroth (and also probably some more I'm forgetting). They're harder to take down because of the difference in their legs.
@@illusorywall I don't even play souls games but I appreciate and enjoy the amount of information you give that in turn really allows people to 'see behind the curtain' so to speak, which is really interesting to me. Thanks for all the great content.
Yep. I've used this quite a few times to kind of two shot them. Two charged heavy attacks with my moonlight greatsword. Then critical them and then rush back to break their ankles again. Only somewhat dangerous part is getting close
Honestly I would have been mad if Mr Starscourge wasn’t the highest poise enemy in the game. Man is literally the size of a damn building, is covered in heavy armor, and controls gravity.
@@highlightermarca-texto3281 Radahn is meant to be ganged up on by you plus a bunch of NPC summons at once - far more than are available for any other fight in the game. So it's necessary for him to not just get stunlocked.
I still think the "most F'ed up Poise award" should go to Malenia. With the Crstillians you at least expect them to have weird poise mechanics behind them. Melania just feels way more random due to the iFrame shit.
@@jooot_6850 Its the manta ray spongebob meme. "This number means I broke your poise right?" Yeah sounds right to me. "So you should be open to a critical. "waterfowl dance time"
Oh, and one particularly cursed consequence of the hyperarmor system not covered in the video: performing moves with hyperarmor can reset your passive poise to some extent, but the amount recovered decreases the more hyperarmor a move has. Moves with very poor hyperarmor will refill passive poise almost completely, and moves with very high hyperarmor will refill comparatively little. 🙃
You don't even need a bar on screen.. The sound design could let you hear when your close. If the hit noise gets slightly deeper as the bar is decreasing
Also, there's an issue where the active hyper armor frames is a lot shorter in ER than DS3. Trading in PvE and PvP, even with light armor, with an UGS was possible. Now with medium armor and a colossal greatsword, a rat can stagger you out of your attack even if you've gotten past the initial wind up animation. As seen in the poise data, only when your swing would actually make contact is there hyper armor, and during recovery it goes away. This reduced frame window makes it impossible to tank most hits in PvP and PvE during trades since ER attacks are much faster than previous titles. I don't think the problem with slow weps is their speed and recovery, but their hyper armor frames need to be extended. It feels less reliable and clunkier than DaS3, when DaS3 hyper armor system was perfect (after the patch ofc).
Absolutely agree: there has never been a gameplay mechanic I’ve enjoyed more than balancing your carry weight and therefore your roll speed, and your poise score. You could have like enough armor to take a broadsword hit from a night in Anor Londo, and respond with 3 swings of your own. You could run around and dominate, one of the best feelings I ever had a video game. Those were the good old days Lol
Malenia doesn't actually have poise I-frames on most of her hyper armor attacks but rather ignores the stance breaks that should happen when she reaches 0 poise. This also allows her to get into negative poise which makes it start regenerating immidiately. That makes stance breaking her much less consistent than other 80 poise enemies.
Malenia in general is just a mess, both in numbers and in animation data. I wonder how her development went and when (not if) the big "oh, shit!" -moment came to cobble it into the fight we know now.
@@ka3ak Illusory wall's points never contradict these ones and they aren't really controversial at all, what with being known and accepted since year one of the game. What are you on about?
@@qwormuli77 You want to appear smart in this video, but you have no evidence. The author of the video showed everything and you just write your guesses. You haven't done anything.
@@ka3ak There are videos that showcase what I'm talking about. I'd link one but it seems like a comment that had a link to a video was automatically deleted so you have to search yourself
Plus how it is floating making it avoid some attacks from the get go. So many little pros that make jelly good. But it does fall off and sucks by the end.
Makes the weapon class basically irrelevant. No HA and it‘s not like their moveset makes them shine. They‘re pretty slow and do LESS poise damage than Halberds.
@@SahnigReingeloetet Hyper Armor from normals uses your Armor's Poise as a baseline, remember. If your Armor Poise is high enough and/or you're wearing the Bullgoat Talisman, the reduced hyper armor still breaks important thresholds very convincingly. To the point where the HA gained from 2-handed normal swings refreshes your passive poise enough to tank through a hit from light weapons every single time you swing. If you go all in and wear the full Bull Goat Set with the Talisman as well, it'll let you do the same against every weapon type that isn't a Great Hammer or Colossal Sword/Weapon. And yeah, like the other poster said, every Greatsword in the game does more poise damage than every Halberd. Halberds also get a larger Hyper Armor penalty than Greatswords do, so they don't provide as much as Greatswords. (On the opposite end, Colossals provide the most Hyper Armor, for obvious reasons.)
@@GreebusBleeb hi there. Indeed, it shows a ki gauge. But, it is not really a "poise gauge" in the first meaning. Sekiro would be closer to that Nioh's ki gauge works like stamina. Once it is emptied by repeated attacks, or attacked with no ki left, humans (including the player), are winded, and thus, open to critical damage or grapple. Basically, poise gauge equals ki gauge. Yokai, the bigger ones, on the other hand have high poise. Also, their attacks dont use up their ki, and they dont recover ki automatically. Some specific attacks can stagger them for a second. But more importantly, once their ki gauge is emptied, they are : - stunned, open for a "grapple" dealing high damage (only in Nioh 1) - in Nioh 2 : staggerable with each attacks, until they recover their ki after some time. Or, if their "second" ki gauge is emptied too, open for a grapple. (This second ki gauge is hard to explain in short terms, i'll spare you that) I tried to keep it short, i hope it helps
i never noticed until getting a close look in this video, but the crystalians visually show cracks in their face and body after the first poise break, so it is telegraphed to the player that it is in a way a very literal poise "break" which is pretty neat. it's been so long since i played im sot sure if i ever consciously put together why sometimes they were wimps and sometimes they were completely solid, but now that makes a lot of sense and makes them kind of an interesting sort of fight where the win condition essentially becomes depleting that invisible poise meter
Something else that I didn’t realize until my second playthrough is that once you break their poise for the first time, they also become much more susceptible to damage types other than strike. First playthrough I was strength build and so I just bonked the crap out of them which does a lot of damage no matter what. But my second playthrough was a bow only run, and initially I thought the crystallians would be hell since bows already have shit damage. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I actually did decent damage after breaking their poise for the first time.
No duh. I don’t know how this isn’t immediately obvious, there’s a sound cue too along with the visual. So many people summon me and don’t try anything other than 1h attacks with a non strike weapon against the crystalians. I don’t understand how people don’t instantly see what’s going on,
1/2 way through this and I already know I'm going to be re-watching this video quite a few times. My god. What an awesome detailed education in poise. THE poise needed to tank through the data and make this happen, MIND BLOWN. Great work man. In b4 1 millions subs.
Never thought I would be able to sit through a 47 minute and 30 second long video about a game mechanic but the fact that I did is a testament to how much I enjoy your content.
Wow I was joking earlier about how you made something Limit Breaker could not. But this is honestly a far more amazing video than I expected it to be. It's a legitimate must watch for PVE and PVP players that want to understand the ins and outs of poise.
Another certified banger from illusorywall. Thank you for the huge info drop! HOWEVER, I have this sneaking suspicion that poise in Elden Ring might get a rework in a patch later down the line, similar to what happened to DS3's active poise (from its release to post-DLC updates). The fact that the medium-sized weapons (greatsword, curved gs's, etc) give you NEGATIVE poise tell me that there is more fleshing out that needs to be done. Furthermore, especially in the PvP sphere, there are too many low poise setups in the game while full bull-goats is too far on the other side of poise spectrum. We shall see what happens. Maybe...
Hey, it's Jim! Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if it got completely reworked, I don't think you should be able to tank great weapon attacks with just passive poise.
5:22 i noticed this through the magic glintblade. When i charged up fully, I'd do noce damge, but nevwr stagger. But if i hit em with enough small bursts, that body going down lol
ALL HAIL THE GREAT SNAIL! Glad to see it makes an appearance and holds it's own spit, while gaining another useless title "The almost tanky enough to poise any strike" The idea of having lower poise enemies recover faster makes sense. Adds gameplay depth...if only there was anything hinting at this ingame.
@@jamesnesran2348 yes, but many people running great clubs used stone ring to be sure it would stagger havel beasts (DS2), dont remember exact numbers but 130 was breaking point to not get out of animation when hit by great club unless it was power attack.
I love the way you edit your videos! It's always a joy to see the stuff you post. And it's so informative! This is def going to change the way I choose different weapons, spells, etc when i play. (Also the part with the spiritcaller snail made me smile very big)
Dude, YES! I've been wanting some detailed mechanical breakdowns of a Fromsoft game. These help so much to understand the game on a more base level than the game itself would never explain. Keep it up!
He later showed us the jumping attack of the misbegotten, which did 75 from the note that popped up. This *might* be what you're looking for, as the values for the spreadsheet were truncated.
infuriating how much From has nerfed armor over time in these games, and the gigantic effect that's had on replay value. every character might as well just be the weapon they use. not to mention the removal of the ability to upgrade armor, and actually spend your resources on defense, giving you a reason to focus on one or two weapons and pump the rest of your upgrade stones into other gear. another reason to grind for meaningful upgrades gone, instead you just constantly sidegrade to other weapons for no reason other than boredom, or because that feels like what you're meant to do.
Weapons offer massively different playstyles, they are essentially character classes. Armour is one character class on its own, as the effects it grants are mostly meaningless beyond the ability to tank hits. And it doesnt even do that anymore. Best you can get is 4k odd hp with 70% physical damage reduction, that means late game bosses kill you in 10-15 hits, if you spec everything into defense.
And not just poise, defence was also very powerful in dark souls 1 when stacked, because it had increasing returns (with 500 DEF anything with less than 400 AR would get it's damage gutted). Then we got dark souls 2 where phys defence was borderline useless (-12 damage per 100 defence when everything does 800+) and elemental defences could make you immune. Then they switched to absorption where heavy armor gets extreme diminishing returns. At least they raised the weight threshold for rolling, so every build can wear what inconsequential armor it wanted. It's a shame to see heavy armors become fashion accessories.
I didn't see you talk about the giant land octopuses in the video, but I've been killing them by stunlocking them with charged R2s for like forever, and I have no idea why it works on them specifically. You can go straight from the riposte animation (or the critical attack or w/e) into a charged attack and it posture breaks again instantly, provided you don't go through their actual s. I assume the riposte stagger is missing the poise s letting you chain it forever.
Ah so the Giant Octopus does have some poise i-frames, but that's a bigger issue only when you miss the critical. When you do land a critical (which it's very hard not to with them), there's still a brief i-frame window (full i-frames, not just for poise), but that doesn't last long either and charging up an attack likely misses it. Some charged attacks are fast enough to get screwed up by the i-frames if you do them as fast as possible, but just waiting a little bit avoids that problem. What's really going on with the Octopus is that despite having 65 poise, it's face/beak is another weak body part that takes double poise damage, just like the Golems' legs. So anything that does greater than 32.5 poise damage with a single charged attack will stun them in one hit, creating an easy stunlock situation. At the lowest end this allows even most "medium" sized weapons the ability to do this (Straight Swords, Axes, Katanas, Spears, etc), when two-handed, as their 2-handed charged attacks do 33 poise damage.
If you're using a bladed weapon, you can cut their front tentacles off with a big hit, which stuns them. I don't think any other enemies have this unique mechanic.
Give them two good charged smacks on the beak and they're stun locked. Also, farm them and the babies if you want a funny land octopus helmet. It gives you the bodies they have as a head, good stuff.
@@illusorywall it makes sense the beak is a weak point, i hit a land octopus for 10k damage with the one eyed shield at one time, i wondered what the hell happened but it must have been a "headshot"
Great video, tons of good info here. I just have one nitpick, which is the naming of these different systems. To distinguish them, I'd say there are three systems here: 1) Poise: used exclusively by the player and player-like enemies. This is the stat seen on the status screen which governs resistance to small staggers. 2) Stance: used exclusively by non-player enemies. Depleting an enemy's stance meter causes a big stagger and often allows a riposte attack. 3) Impact: used by ALL entities (both players and enemies). This is the system that categorizes attacks into different levels of stagger and determines a character's vulnerability to different types of stagger. It's the system that gets modified by the Leaden Hardtear and similar effects, and it's what governs the Crystalians' stagger behavior. It overrides player Poise and it is the biggest reason why PvE stagger prevention feels so inconsistent. We need more people talking about the Impact system, it's the biggest change from previous titles and has the biggest *ahem* impact on the average player's experience.
I knew incoming poise damage was borked in ER, but it's virtually useless. ie. With a significant Endurance investment to med-roll with heavy armour, you can tank one light attack every thirty seconds. This combined with the speed of enemy attacks, and groups of enemies and spellcasters, means that you'll stagger almost as much as when wearing no armour. Thank you for the in-depth analysis. The detailed information on breaking enemies poise was very insightful. I thought you might have highlighted jumping attacks, as I anecdotally found them really useful for breaking poise, particularly when 2-handing. Great stuff either way. We're lucky to have this kind of quality production.
Don't forget about poise being refilled when you attack with hyper armor. If your gear's poise is high enough to the point where your refilled passive poise is enough to tank one light attack, then you can tank though light attacks constantly, instead of every thirty seconds. So long as you attack at least one time before you take another hit.
Yeah, there are other ways to get close to 40 poise damage with an attack, but none of them that you can spam as quickly or catch evasive PvE enemies with as easily. It's not nearly as strong in PvP, though, which I think is the only reason it hasn't been nerfed.
Been playing through the game again, and Flame of the Redmanes is so much better then most other arts. Interrupting near everything in the game in two casts. with only a few bosses needing a third. Second, it's fire, which has extra effects vs many enemies, and few enemies resist fire. Finally, surprising range and spread allowing you to clear rooms with that wave of fire. In addition to giving crowd clearing power to weapons that lack crowd managing moves. Lance + FotR = perfect weapon.
Half a year after Dark Souls 3 came out poise discussions still consisted of people throwing their papers in the air and yelling "It's turned off!". Good to see that things are less convoluted in the Lands Between. Heh.
More or less yeah. It's not exactly half a year, but it's not an exaggeration to say that the first few months consisted of people not knowing if it was even enabled and people who thought they had figured it out, but came to the wrong conclusion. For reference, Dark Souls 3 launched 24th of March 2016 in Japan & 12th of April 2016 worldwide. It wasn't until 1st of August that same year someone pretty much nailed poise on the DS3 subreddit. Possibly was discovered a bit earlier than that? It was the first time poise was really solved from my memory. Don't mind me, just reminiscing as well. Feels like it was such a long time ago.
@@Razhork Well, it was changed in a patch, right? Because before, there was only hyper armor, the poise value did nothing. After the patch, it linked your hyper armor's functionality to your poise. Honestly, it seems like it was a nerf to poise, but was outweighed by the fact they made hyper armor frames more generous.
@@Razhork I'm pretty sure I remember neglecting armor completely and trading UGS attacks in early DS3... I mean, it was kind of a meme that you didn't need to bother with poise armor in order to trade hits with hyper armor weapons.
@@monsieurdorgat6864 it was only becuase people didn't understand how poise worked in DS3 (which means only during middle frames of your attack animation). So, belief was formed it doesn't work at all. After it was explained and more people started to use it (as well to use right amount of poise from armor) community finally moved on..
Another note on pve stance breaking: the stance broken state of being parried and being out of poise are calculated separately. Meaning that you can parry an enemy and the full charge heavy them for a large chunk of poise damage or even put them back into stagger immediately.
Just because it wasn't explicitly stated in the video, the amount of time before an enemy begins to regenerate poise is equal to the total amount of time it would take for their poise to regenerate from 0. Since poise regenerates by 13 points per second, just divide the enemy's max poise by 13 to calculate how much time you are allowed between each hit. 65 poise / 13 = 5 seconds before poise begins to regenerate.
Why can't _our_ poise work like that? ~5 seconds to regenerate 61 poise sounds much more reasonable than 30 seconds regardless of your poise level. Builds with more poise would need to wait longer to fully replenish and builds with less poise would need less time to fully regenerate.
14:23 OHHH it's the dang Battletoads pause beat!! It took me a minute. I was like "Toejam and Earl? Nah, I KNOW it's a pause song..." Anyway, really informative video. Thanks for sharing!
Oh shit, someday we might literally just play as Sekiro in Elden Ring. We already have someone who could likely port/create the custom animations for a mod like that (the guy who made ds3's blades of ashina mod.)
i saw something like that in some vids, and it didnt look like postproduction, so ig this is already a thing, should check nexus mods if you're interested
Hug blessing flickers because it is coded as 2 (well 3) buffs, one that applies the base effect and also ticks the second buff (so that it gets applied properly with other temporary buffs or poise changes that arent in the same buff category), with the other being the actual damage reduction buff, which means for a tick of the game engine thinks the buff is getting replaced thus recalculated and shown in UI. And fun fact, they went from having both the poise DR and effectively full hyperarmor (reduction to all but flatten and knockup) in initial release of ER to just having a stagger level reduction for the weakest effects in i think it was patch 0.3.
OK, now I understand why I do not really see a difference with a higher poise. I am new to Souls type games and this video really helped explain what I was seeing. Thank you!
Yeah, anything that drains poise at all is totally valid for resetting the poise timer. The daggers only do 1 poise damage (fan daggers 2.5 if all hit), but if it helps prevent an enemy from having their poise refill, then it can be completely worth it. I could see that helping particularly for enemies like dragons and the Fire Giant, who often get enough distance to have their poise refill. Great question about blocking hits with a shield, completely slipped my mind. It doesn't reset the timer, blocking hits prevents poise damage and allows the timer to keep ticking. Even taking chip damage or something like bleed triggering through a blocked hit doesn't drain any poise nor reset the timer either (even true for blocking with weapons), nor do attacks that knock your shield away when running out of stamina.
@@illusorywall I'm surprised you didn't mention Malneia's hyper armor attacks bypassing her stance break and refilling her poise meter. It's a unique mechanic intended or otherwise, and the only other enemy I know of that can do this are the Briar Knights when they spawn in and you rush down their bar before they are fully ready.
@@illusorywall since you mentioned bleed, i noticed that it (and frost?) stuns you regardless if you have full bullgoat, does it deal a very high poise damage or does it ignore it completely?
@@BoxyBrown717 There are quite a few enemies that have this. Though it's usually applied to their phase change (i.e Godrick cutting his hand off, Mohg's Tres, Duo, Unus and Nihil, Morgott's cough, etc.), and iirc a different video which delved into all instances of this mechanic- there were some other obscure attacks from bosses that also granted them this "infinite hyper armor". But you would be right in saying that Malenia has a shit ton of attacks with this for seemingly no reason.
@@Vlad-yy3le I think that is just a mechanic tied to the proc of the status ailments rather than interacting poise, but I am curious for an answer as well. I assume if they interacted with poise they would guarantee a stance break everytime they proc in pve but not sure.
@@JohnDoe-pu5gk 🤣🤣Try watching Oroboro and tell me there's no skill, lol. That man could beat literally anyone else in pvp because his skill play in insane.
Would love if FromSoft added a 'poise bar' officially. Sekiro without the stance bar woulda been hell, and I think alot of frustrations people have with certain tanky enemies in Elden Ring comes from not knowing you can get a punish from a stance break.
About the Lazuli and Glintstone knight Sword's charged attack. An unique quirk about their charged attack is that during the build up you are actually blocking (and so can't be staggered as long as you have enough stamina). Perhaps the lesser poise damage is a trade off/balancing to that.
Thank you! I'm using Otis_Inf for freecam and occasional sequenced camera movements. It's not available for free yet (it's available through his patreon), but some simpler free cam stuff can be done with cheat engine too (for that I'm using the hexington table).
something interesting is that some types of moves can instantly break poise regardless. a notable example would be flying enemies are able to be anchored by gravity-related spells and skills like Gravitas, which is great for handling things like the armored stormhawks and sirens (though it only works while they're actively flying)
oh, something i'd be curious to know is if margit and godrick have some kind of crazy high headshot poise multiplier, or if it is just the normal 2x and i'm just underestimating how strong that is. i've co-oped those dudes a LOT and it tends to seem like the runs where we actually get one or more criticals off are the ones where we're constantly trying to land jumping attacks on the head. honestly thinking about it, it probably is just the 2x combined with having multiple players all going for high poise damage attacks, but ive just had such wild variability in those fights that it -feels- like there must be something weird going on there even if there actually isn't
If you're talking about hitting them in the head with a melee weapon, then it's not that. Headshot multiplier only applies to ranged attacks like bows and such, UNLESS a specific enemy has a weak point on their head , like trolls (also take increased poise damage)
Great video, I’m curious how dual wielding and the jumping L1 attack affect poise, could two great clubs one-shot a stronger enemy’s poise than just one?
The motion value spreadsheet mentioned in the video covers all these scenarios. The Great Club has a 240 (2.4x) MV for 1H Jumping R1, 264 MV for 2H Jumping R1, and 240+240 MV for Paired Jumping L1. (I assume the second MV is for your off-hand weapon, but I'm not 100% certain if that uses your off-hand base value or not... it's almost never relevant for poise, though.) So the answer is that a Paired Jumping L1 is clearly better than a 2H Jumping R1, and also slightly better than a 2H Jumping R2 (440 MV).
you can find the poise motion values for dual wield attacks in the spreadsheet as well. colossal weapons all get 240 + 240 on jumping L1, so two great clubs (base poise of 7) will do 33.6 poise damage (16.8 x2); less than a charged R2, but easier to land in succession?
Does the poise dmg of a charged r2 scale linearly depending on how long you hold r2 or does it jump from uncharged poise dmg to the full charge dmg right at the end?
Hoo boy, so... that most recent patch! I feel a bit exhausted exploring poise, though I don't really mind the videos being a little outdated for the time being, since understanding the underlying systems is more important than any specific numbers involved. Nonetheless I'll think about making yet another poise video much later on, perhaps a sort of "where poise wound up" sort of discussion when the game is more settled in its lifespan. But what are the biggest and most important changes you've noticed? Anything that impacts your PvE or PvP experience in an interesting way? Let me know!
One question: that spreadsheet and the calculator you linked in the description, are they still being updated? if something about the exact hyperarmor values changed (which I really hope it did) would one be able to find them there?
I felt so bad for you when the new patch came out 💀
I think a "where it ended up" would be a good idea. I'm curious to see how it stacks up.
what got changed? did greatswords get fixed and no longer decrease poise? i started playing on this patch and idk how much of this info is still accurate (as i'm rolling with greatswords and pretty high poise)
Hey I’m pretty late to this thread but I figure it’s my best shot at getting a response, though it isn’t related to PvP poise. At 15:22 you show a spreadsheet of what appears to be a very large list of all npc poise values, their recovery time multipliers, etc. As far as I can tell this spreadsheet is not available through the links in the description and I was wondering if you could provide me a link to it? I’d really like to have access to all that data to look through for my self and have a quick reference for all enemy poise values. Thanks and great video!
“Doesn’t poise recovery scale with maximum poise?”
“Yep.”
“As an enemy with 65 poise, it takes 5 seconds to recover, and at 15 poise it’s more like 1.15 seconds.”
“That’s right.”
“And as we’ve disclosed, despite *my* poise being listed as 65, it’s more around 6.5. Even if I can’t recover poise instantly, it would make sense to at least have a few seconds of remaining out of direct engagement for my poise meter to regenerate.”
“That makes sense to me.”
“So give me back my poise.”
“It takes half a minute.”
1 hit, 30 seconds
poise for pve enemies is more like stance hp, whenever you break it, you're able to deal a lot of damage to them via ripost or hitting their weak spot, whilst in pvp poise works as a stagger hp, whenever someone breaks it, you just flinch for half a second. And also there's toughness, which has i think 4 or 5 levels and enemies usually have a set value, for example crystallians have i think toughness 2 until you break their poise, which makes most small and medium sized weapons deflect from them and some great weapons deflect if you're 1 handing. Also sometimes it's used for enemies without the deflecting, so that they just don't stagger whenever you hit them. And players toughness value also works the same way as crystallian and can be modified either with some spells, items or just using different classes of shields.
"DS1 poise is too good, Miyazaki-senpai, do we increase the recovery-time or nerf the poise values?"
"Yes."
"how much?"
"Yes"
DS1 poise was perfect but for some reason FromSoft has to keep changing it. It had a nice spread of options from being very light to super heavy, and it felt good fair. At the very least humanoid enemies should have the same poise system as the player. Currently it feels way too unfair. Better than DS3 at least, I guess.
@@girla9480 amen, i have theroy why: souls influencer. they hate the fact you could poise through hits in pvp and i bet in beta testing they shouted loud enough.
@@maikbaumann1250 i depise with all my energy what they did after dark souls 1. Poise was fine, makes no sense removing it. Using heavy armor is expected to make you stronger and much harder to get stunned, etc.
Since DS2 armor now is useless and is like clothing with plate aesthetic. Very bad game design. All running meta ninja souls build gets boring fast.
DS1 pvp was the best and the peak of the series popularity with sl100 and sl125 builds all over youtube, the only drawback was it was too easy to backstab. Soul memory killed pvp in the sequels.
DS2 at least had some nice ideas, like poise scaling with strength or heavy armour, but instead of fixing that system they just went in a horrible direction. Honestly I think this applies to most systems, but poise especially, they could have given us DS1 poise design with Bloodborne style backstabs and it would have fixed almost all PvP problems but nooo, we need to have a bunch of mutant systems where all of them are failing in different ways. If this is 'working as intended' then I no longer care about Fromsoft's intentions.
The only reason I can think of for the Bull-Goat talisman's description is that "poise damage" isn't something ever mentioned in the rest of the game, so it may be confusing to a player who's unaware that poise is a bar that drains. But that could be easily gotten around by just saying "makes you more resilient against stagger" or something...
Miyazaki using the infinite powers of the universe to make poise an indecipherable mess for the past 7 games in a row
@@jooot_6850 I honestly think some of the reasons it is so difficult to understand are (a) we were never really meant to understand it except in some general intuitive way and (b) I'm convinced they change the poise/hyperarmor model all the way through development, and keep making tweaks to improve the gameplay.
I think for example passive poise was added in for PVP relatively late in development.
or maybe they could just actualy increase you poise like its ment to?
it actually boosts poise. by roughly 33%. that's why it's labeled as it is.
Another question, since the description says “raises poise” why not just literally raise the characters poise 25% instead of nerfing incoming damage. It would slightly change the mechanic but I don’t see how it’d be game breaking. All I can think of is it changing the timing of poise regen slightly so maybe that’d be slightly worse? Or better it’s still hard to wrap my head around this
The Lazuli Glintstone Sword and Carian Knight's Sword both have a special property of blocking while charging a heavy attack, so maybe that has something to do with the poise breaking part of that attack being less impressive as you're theoretically taking less of a risk. For the greatsword outliers, it may be due to having a movement component. Seeing them alongside the Celebrant's and Iron cleavers in the list of weapons where guard counters beat charged attacks for poise damage suggests this to me, anyway. So, overall, charged attacks that have additional functionality seem to get slightly shortchanged on stunning power.
If you look further, you can also see that the fully charged R2 of both mentioned Axes have lower Damage MV then other Axes but the Guard Counter Damage MV is the same as other Axes. This support this thesis.
Also a interesting with the Alabaster Lord's Greatsword, both uncharged R2 have higher poise damage, but the first fully charged does not.
@@darq7000 I'm not confident in venturing a guess for the design intent of the Alabaster Lord's Sword. If every gravity themed weapon had boosted poise damage, I would assume the idea is that gravity magic is subtly enhancing the impact, giving the weapon more effective mass and your character less so you're being slapped around more easily, but as it's just this one weapon and it misses out specifically for the first charged attack it ends up seeming to me that there must have been an oversight somewhere in there.
NGL, that negative poise on Greatswords had my jaw on the floor.
Great vid, dude! Immensely helpful!
It's so damn weird! Thanks again for help with PvP footage! ❤
Negative poise with those weapons seems like a bug or some kind of bizarre oversight that will hopefully be patched. From has a good track record of patching the weird errors illusory wall finds so I am hopeful that this will be too.
@@KissyKaede i doubt it this time, they might have to rewrite their whole hyper-armor algorithm JUST to fix this issue
@@ethanwashington6789 They do just need to touch up poise, in general.
Poise breakpoints for weapons really need to be spread out, and armor poise should be more linear too.
They really could just have hyper armor be a flat added value - it's kind of silly to make it so unnecessarily convoluted. As the video showed, in PvE having lots of poise often doesn't even matter.
Hyperarmor was a jank from past 2 games. No reason to not keep DS1 style poise strength anymore yet From fucked up there big time.
5:47 About poise I-frames during recovery animations, another weird thing about the Golems is that their poise invincibility ends as soon as they START standing back up, not when they get back on their feet. Once they hit the ground you can keep them chain-stunned indefinitely without giving them a chance to attack.
Ah so the Golems actually do have poise invincibility frames while standing back up-- IF you miss the critical attack. That seems to the determining factor for most enemies, whether or not you land the critical drastically affects whether or not you can drain poise again soon after. When you do land the critical, you can drain their poise soon after, while they're still trying to stand back up. So yeah there's huge stunlock potential, made a lot easier if you position yourself to get those criticals in.
edit: Because this comment has more visibility, I'd like to add a response here to some other questions about the Golems-- I did completely forget about how some of them have their legs protected. They also have 120 poise, and in that case it drains normally. So this applies to the 2nd archer closer to the Great Jar in Caelid, and also the one you drop down to in Caelid near Fort Faroth (and also probably some more I'm forgetting). They're harder to take down because of the difference in their legs.
@@illusorywall I don't even play souls games but I appreciate and enjoy the amount of information you give that in turn really allows people to 'see behind the curtain' so to speak, which is really interesting to me. Thanks for all the great content.
Yep. I've used this quite a few times to kind of two shot them. Two charged heavy attacks with my moonlight greatsword. Then critical them and then rush back to break their ankles again. Only somewhat dangerous part is getting close
Honestly I would have been mad if Mr Starscourge wasn’t the highest poise enemy in the game. Man is literally the size of a damn building, is covered in heavy armor, and controls gravity.
yeah, but funy space blob
Hey didn't excepted you here, love your videos man !
I see you on NL videos all the time... stop following me
But what about the Fire Giant though?
@@highlightermarca-texto3281 Radahn is meant to be ganged up on by you plus a bunch of NPC summons at once - far more than are available for any other fight in the game. So it's necessary for him to not just get stunlocked.
I still think the "most F'ed up Poise award" should go to Malenia. With the Crstillians you at least expect them to have weird poise mechanics behind them. Melania just feels way more random due to the iFrame shit.
Fair alternative! She goes way too hard with those s.
Buncha bullshit man.
“I just broke your poise.”
“No you didn’t”
“But that doesn’t make any sense! I have a Stonebarbed Greatclub.”
“I don’t care”
@@jooot_6850 Its the manta ray spongebob meme. "This number means I broke your poise right?" Yeah sounds right to me. "So you should be open to a critical. "waterfowl dance time"
@@jooot_6850 pov: tag
She can also randomly ignore blade of gold's/flame of the fell god's (normally) guaranteed knockdown, even while slow walking :(
Oh, and one particularly cursed consequence of the hyperarmor system not covered in the video: performing moves with hyperarmor can reset your passive poise to some extent, but the amount recovered decreases the more hyperarmor a move has. Moves with very poor hyperarmor will refill passive poise almost completely, and moves with very high hyperarmor will refill comparatively little. 🙃
Having a poise meter be showed as you're fighting enemies in pve sounds like a cool idea really, like what they did in Sekiro.
You don't even need a bar on screen..
The sound design could let you hear when your close.
If the hit noise gets slightly deeper as the bar is decreasing
@@Guitar-Dog I totally agree, a bar would be too much
@@23Butanedione deaf players moment
@@23Butanedione and before u say anything, i do actually have a deaf friend that loves fromsoft games lol
@@souldmenaces6999 He must have a hard time fighting duo bosses if he can't hear what's behind him
Also, there's an issue where the active hyper armor frames is a lot shorter in ER than DS3. Trading in PvE and PvP, even with light armor, with an UGS was possible. Now with medium armor and a colossal greatsword, a rat can stagger you out of your attack even if you've gotten past the initial wind up animation. As seen in the poise data, only when your swing would actually make contact is there hyper armor, and during recovery it goes away. This reduced frame window makes it impossible to tank most hits in PvP and PvE during trades since ER attacks are much faster than previous titles. I don't think the problem with slow weps is their speed and recovery, but their hyper armor frames need to be extended. It feels less reliable and clunkier than DaS3, when DaS3 hyper armor system was perfect (after the patch ofc).
Agreed. Compared to older souls titles elden ring has the worst “poise mechanics”
I thought Dark souls 3 would be the absolute low point for poise but Miyazaki seems determined to moonwalk every forward design step
I miss DS1 poise. I loved wearing Smough’s armor, equipping Smough’s Hammer and the Wolf Ring, and just marching around like I owned the place.
The only true way of playing dark souls is naked with no shield.
@@cako666false. P O I S E B O I S E 4 L Y F E
Absolutely agree: there has never been a gameplay mechanic I’ve enjoyed more than balancing your carry weight and therefore your roll speed, and your poise score. You could have like enough armor to take a broadsword hit from a night in Anor Londo, and respond with 3 swings of your own. You could run around and dominate, one of the best feelings I ever had a video game. Those were the good old days Lol
@@Brian-458 there is a reason they went away from ds1 poise.
For me, its havel's armor, but I otherwise agree with the sentiment completely
Another education time with illusory wall , I've been waiting for this
Same
Malenia doesn't actually have poise I-frames on most of her hyper armor attacks but rather ignores the stance breaks that should happen when she reaches 0 poise. This also allows her to get into negative poise which makes it start regenerating immidiately. That makes stance breaking her much less consistent than other 80 poise enemies.
Malenia in general is just a mess, both in numbers and in animation data. I wonder how her development went and when (not if) the big "oh, shit!" -moment came to cobble it into the fight we know now.
That's your opinion! The man gave all the evidence and you didn’t. Don't embarrass yourself!
@@ka3ak Illusory wall's points never contradict these ones and they aren't really controversial at all, what with being known and accepted since year one of the game. What are you on about?
@@qwormuli77 You want to appear smart in this video, but you have no evidence. The author of the video showed everything and you just write your guesses. You haven't done anything.
@@ka3ak There are videos that showcase what I'm talking about. I'd link one but it seems like a comment that had a link to a video was automatically deleted so you have to search yourself
The spirit caller snail dancing to the Battletoads pause theme is a mood and I'm here for it.
11:35 that giant’s chain is REALLY excited about poise
I'm glad it randomly bounced like that while recording footage and decided to leave it in. Very strange! 😅
Is that a giant iron chain bugging out due to strange game physics interactions, or are you just happy to see me 😉
This explains why summoning jelly makes every boss easy. Jelly helped keep that bar up.
Plus how it is floating making it avoid some attacks from the get go. So many little pros that make jelly good. But it does fall off and sucks by the end.
@@SirCanuckelhead idk. Finished with Jelly by my side and never looked back.
@@richardcheese4680 so sigma. god bless and godspeed
Ppl whose first Soulsborne is ER:
For the amount of greatswords there are in this game, they have been "nerfed" so hard compared to DS3. That negative hyperarmor blew my mind.
Makes the weapon class basically irrelevant. No HA and it‘s not like their moveset makes them shine. They‘re pretty slow and do LESS poise damage than Halberds.
@@SahnigReingeloetet they still work with the +60 poise breakpoint, so it's not a complete killer. It just adds to their terrible speed and damage
@@SahnigReingeloetet That's false Greatswords deal more poise damage than Halberds across the board
They still are pretty great, they are quite fast for the amount of damage they do
@@SahnigReingeloetet Hyper Armor from normals uses your Armor's Poise as a baseline, remember. If your Armor Poise is high enough and/or you're wearing the Bullgoat Talisman, the reduced hyper armor still breaks important thresholds very convincingly. To the point where the HA gained from 2-handed normal swings refreshes your passive poise enough to tank through a hit from light weapons every single time you swing. If you go all in and wear the full Bull Goat Set with the Talisman as well, it'll let you do the same against every weapon type that isn't a Great Hammer or Colossal Sword/Weapon.
And yeah, like the other poster said, every Greatsword in the game does more poise damage than every Halberd. Halberds also get a larger Hyper Armor penalty than Greatswords do, so they don't provide as much as Greatswords. (On the opposite end, Colossals provide the most Hyper Armor, for obvious reasons.)
I liked that little poise meter on enemies, it would be cool as a mod, it would add a more tactical RPG feel to the game
If the animation language wasn't so good I might use it but it's still a neat idea
Pretty sure nioh shows a poise meter for enemies? I could be wrong
@@GreebusBleeb i have not played
@@GreebusBleeb in truth, I've heard good things
@@GreebusBleeb hi there. Indeed, it shows a ki gauge. But, it is not really a "poise gauge" in the first meaning. Sekiro would be closer to that
Nioh's ki gauge works like stamina. Once it is emptied by repeated attacks, or attacked with no ki left, humans (including the player), are winded, and thus, open to critical damage or grapple. Basically, poise gauge equals ki gauge.
Yokai, the bigger ones, on the other hand have high poise. Also, their attacks dont use up their ki, and they dont recover ki automatically. Some specific attacks can stagger them for a second. But more importantly, once their ki gauge is emptied, they are :
- stunned, open for a "grapple" dealing high damage (only in Nioh 1)
- in Nioh 2 : staggerable with each attacks, until they recover their ki after some time. Or, if their "second" ki gauge is emptied too, open for a grapple. (This second ki gauge is hard to explain in short terms, i'll spare you that)
I tried to keep it short, i hope it helps
Finally, after almost 6 months someone properly explained and broke down active poise. It was about time!
i never noticed until getting a close look in this video, but the crystalians visually show cracks in their face and body after the first poise break, so it is telegraphed to the player that it is in a way a very literal poise "break" which is pretty neat. it's been so long since i played im sot sure if i ever consciously put together why sometimes they were wimps and sometimes they were completely solid, but now that makes a lot of sense and makes them kind of an interesting sort of fight where the win condition essentially becomes depleting that invisible poise meter
Something else that I didn’t realize until my second playthrough is that once you break their poise for the first time, they also become much more susceptible to damage types other than strike. First playthrough I was strength build and so I just bonked the crap out of them which does a lot of damage no matter what. But my second playthrough was a bow only run, and initially I thought the crystallians would be hell since bows already have shit damage. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I actually did decent damage after breaking their poise for the first time.
No duh. I don’t know how this isn’t immediately obvious, there’s a sound cue too along with the visual.
So many people summon me and don’t try anything other than 1h attacks with a non strike weapon against the crystalians. I don’t understand how people don’t instantly see what’s going on,
@@BLK_MN Man if only everyone in the world was as cool as you
1/2 way through this and I already know I'm going to be re-watching this video quite a few times. My god. What an awesome detailed education in poise. THE poise needed to tank through the data and make this happen, MIND BLOWN. Great work man.
In b4 1 millions subs.
Cringe af, come back when your 18 your absolute child
Never thought I would be able to sit through a 47 minute and 30 second long video about a game mechanic but the fact that I did is a testament to how much I enjoy your content.
Wow I was joking earlier about how you made something Limit Breaker could not. But this is honestly a far more amazing video than I expected it to be.
It's a legitimate must watch for PVE and PVP players that want to understand the ins and outs of poise.
The meters you added in the start were SO helpful for visualizing what does and doesn't interact with poise, thank you so much
Another certified banger from illusorywall. Thank you for the huge info drop!
HOWEVER, I have this sneaking suspicion that poise in Elden Ring might get a rework in a patch later down the line, similar to what happened to DS3's active poise (from its release to post-DLC updates). The fact that the medium-sized weapons (greatsword, curved gs's, etc) give you NEGATIVE poise tell me that there is more fleshing out that needs to be done. Furthermore, especially in the PvP sphere, there are too many low poise setups in the game while full bull-goats is too far on the other side of poise spectrum. We shall see what happens. Maybe...
Hey, it's Jim!
Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if it got completely reworked, I don't think you should be able to tank great weapon attacks with just passive poise.
5:22 i noticed this through the magic glintblade. When i charged up fully, I'd do noce damge, but nevwr stagger. But if i hit em with enough small bursts, that body going down lol
ALL HAIL THE GREAT SNAIL! Glad to see it makes an appearance and holds it's own spit, while gaining another useless title "The almost tanky enough to poise any strike"
The idea of having lower poise enemies recover faster makes sense. Adds gameplay depth...if only there was anything hinting at this ingame.
Something I'd be interested in: With max poise, the blessing and the talisman: What kind of attacks can your character withstand?
At roughly 158 poise, fourth straight sword hit staggers, second halberd staggers. To give an idea.
@@AoifeForrester I remember how in DS1 and DS2 having 158 poise would allow you to tank great club to the face.
@@ExtremeMan10 it still would no? 2 handed great club is like 120 poise dmg right?
@@jamesnesran2348 yes, but many people running great clubs used stone ring to be sure it would stagger havel beasts (DS2), dont remember exact numbers but 130 was breaking point to not get out of animation when hit by great club unless it was power attack.
I love the way you edit your videos! It's always a joy to see the stuff you post. And it's so informative! This is def going to change the way I choose different weapons, spells, etc when i play. (Also the part with the spiritcaller snail made me smile very big)
I greatly appreciate the Battletoads pause music snail.
I, too, love numbers. This video has the most numbers.
I have been waiting for someone much smarter then me to make a spreadsheet like this for so long. Thank you!
So... Many... Numbers!! Huge props to all the math nerds in the community that make all this digestible for the rest of us!
Dude, YES! I've been wanting some detailed mechanical breakdowns of a Fromsoft game. These help so much to understand the game on a more base level than the game itself would never explain. Keep it up!
Oh bby, the perfect video to watch during lunch
Love the video! Didn't realize just how convoluted the poise mechanic is in this game
Come now, you can't just NOT tell us what that one single outlier attack is that does 70 (or 7) poise damage to us!
He later showed us the jumping attack of the misbegotten, which did 75 from the note that popped up. This *might* be what you're looking for, as the values for the spreadsheet were truncated.
@@DRida64 The 7.5 was a demonstration of the Bull-Goat's Talisman. That attack does 10.0 normally.
@@Thesaurus_Rex yeah, i remembered that after commenting. Good point!
It turns out it's an unused attack from the Kaiden Sellswords! So it's not even "real", apparently. 😅
You're one of my favorite content creators, I love every time I see a notification from a new video of yours
A 50 minute video on poise. It's impressive...yet terrifying
22:35 As of patch 1.06, Glintstone Pebble sadly does only 3 poise damage (and has a lower damage level too)
Great video btw. Thank you!
infuriating how much From has nerfed armor over time in these games, and the gigantic effect that's had on replay value. every character might as well just be the weapon they use.
not to mention the removal of the ability to upgrade armor, and actually spend your resources on defense, giving you a reason to focus on one or two weapons and pump the rest of your upgrade stones into other gear. another reason to grind for meaningful upgrades gone, instead you just constantly sidegrade to other weapons for no reason other than boredom, or because that feels like what you're meant to do.
This
Yes, there are benefits in having multiple sets of armor. But there’s also benefits in having multiple weapons.
Weapons offer massively different playstyles, they are essentially character classes. Armour is one character class on its own, as the effects it grants are mostly meaningless beyond the ability to tank hits.
And it doesnt even do that anymore.
Best you can get is 4k odd hp with 70% physical damage reduction, that means late game bosses kill you in 10-15 hits, if you spec everything into defense.
And not just poise, defence was also very powerful in dark souls 1 when stacked, because it had increasing returns (with 500 DEF anything with less than 400 AR would get it's damage gutted). Then we got dark souls 2 where phys defence was borderline useless (-12 damage per 100 defence when everything does 800+) and elemental defences could make you immune. Then they switched to absorption where heavy armor gets extreme diminishing returns. At least they raised the weight threshold for rolling, so every build can wear what inconsequential armor it wanted. It's a shame to see heavy armors become fashion accessories.
armor is still extremely good and important what are you all on about
Damn this explains so much of the inconsistency I saw with the game that had me confused. That's a sub from me, keep up the good work.
I didn't see you talk about the giant land octopuses in the video, but I've been killing them by stunlocking them with charged R2s for like forever, and I have no idea why it works on them specifically. You can go straight from the riposte animation (or the critical attack or w/e) into a charged attack and it posture breaks again instantly, provided you don't go through their actual s. I assume the riposte stagger is missing the poise s letting you chain it forever.
Ah so the Giant Octopus does have some poise i-frames, but that's a bigger issue only when you miss the critical. When you do land a critical (which it's very hard not to with them), there's still a brief i-frame window (full i-frames, not just for poise), but that doesn't last long either and charging up an attack likely misses it. Some charged attacks are fast enough to get screwed up by the i-frames if you do them as fast as possible, but just waiting a little bit avoids that problem.
What's really going on with the Octopus is that despite having 65 poise, it's face/beak is another weak body part that takes double poise damage, just like the Golems' legs. So anything that does greater than 32.5 poise damage with a single charged attack will stun them in one hit, creating an easy stunlock situation. At the lowest end this allows even most "medium" sized weapons the ability to do this (Straight Swords, Axes, Katanas, Spears, etc), when two-handed, as their 2-handed charged attacks do 33 poise damage.
If you're using a bladed weapon, you can cut their front tentacles off with a big hit, which stuns them. I don't think any other enemies have this unique mechanic.
Give them two good charged smacks on the beak and they're stun locked. Also, farm them and the babies if you want a funny land octopus helmet. It gives you the bodies they have as a head, good stuff.
@@7ambris You can "cut" them off with blunt weapons too.
@@illusorywall it makes sense the beak is a weak point, i hit a land octopus for 10k damage with the one eyed shield at one time, i wondered what the hell happened but it must have been a "headshot"
Great video, tons of good info here. I just have one nitpick, which is the naming of these different systems. To distinguish them, I'd say there are three systems here:
1) Poise: used exclusively by the player and player-like enemies. This is the stat seen on the status screen which governs resistance to small staggers.
2) Stance: used exclusively by non-player enemies. Depleting an enemy's stance meter causes a big stagger and often allows a riposte attack.
3) Impact: used by ALL entities (both players and enemies). This is the system that categorizes attacks into different levels of stagger and determines a character's vulnerability to different types of stagger. It's the system that gets modified by the Leaden Hardtear and similar effects, and it's what governs the Crystalians' stagger behavior. It overrides player Poise and it is the biggest reason why PvE stagger prevention feels so inconsistent.
We need more people talking about the Impact system, it's the biggest change from previous titles and has the biggest *ahem* impact on the average player's experience.
YES YES YES, A 45 MIN DISCUSSION ON POISE.
consider my day made.
I knew incoming poise damage was borked in ER, but it's virtually useless.
ie. With a significant Endurance investment to med-roll with heavy armour, you can tank one light attack every thirty seconds.
This combined with the speed of enemy attacks, and groups of enemies and spellcasters, means that you'll stagger almost as much as when wearing no armour.
Thank you for the in-depth analysis. The detailed information on breaking enemies poise was very insightful.
I thought you might have highlighted jumping attacks, as I anecdotally found them really useful for breaking poise, particularly when 2-handing.
Great stuff either way. We're lucky to have this kind of quality production.
Don't forget about poise being refilled when you attack with hyper armor. If your gear's poise is high enough to the point where your refilled passive poise is enough to tank one light attack, then you can tank though light attacks constantly, instead of every thirty seconds. So long as you attack at least one time before you take another hit.
Very informative, thank you!
Reddit
Hey, its jarbro :D
More great content from illusory wall!
20:36 demonetized D:
Just kidding, another great informative video. And further solidifies Flame of the Redmanes as my personal crutch in ER.
I didn't use it much before making this video, but I think that's gonna change. edit: And thank you!
Same, it staggers most bosses in 2-3 casts with a giant range.
Yeah, there are other ways to get close to 40 poise damage with an attack, but none of them that you can spam as quickly or catch evasive PvE enemies with as easily. It's not nearly as strong in PvP, though, which I think is the only reason it hasn't been nerfed.
Been playing through the game again, and Flame of the Redmanes is so much better then most other arts.
Interrupting near everything in the game in two casts. with only a few bosses needing a third.
Second, it's fire, which has extra effects vs many enemies, and few enemies resist fire.
Finally, surprising range and spread allowing you to clear rooms with that wave of fire.
In addition to giving crowd clearing power to weapons that lack crowd managing moves.
Lance + FotR = perfect weapon.
Came for the in depth breakdown of poise mechanics, stayed for the Look Around You reference. Thanks Patrick. Thpatrick.
Love these videos! You have some amazing content, thank you for sharing
Dude, this is such a good, well-made video, I can't even. The game should have direct links to these dissections.
Half a year after Dark Souls 3 came out poise discussions still consisted of people throwing their papers in the air and yelling "It's turned off!".
Good to see that things are less convoluted in the Lands Between.
Heh.
More or less yeah. It's not exactly half a year, but it's not an exaggeration to say that the first few months consisted of people not knowing if it was even enabled and people who thought they had figured it out, but came to the wrong conclusion.
For reference, Dark Souls 3 launched 24th of March 2016 in Japan & 12th of April 2016 worldwide.
It wasn't until 1st of August that same year someone pretty much nailed poise on the DS3 subreddit. Possibly was discovered a bit earlier than that? It was the first time poise was really solved from my memory.
Don't mind me, just reminiscing as well. Feels like it was such a long time ago.
@@Razhork Well, it was changed in a patch, right? Because before, there was only hyper armor, the poise value did nothing.
After the patch, it linked your hyper armor's functionality to your poise. Honestly, it seems like it was a nerf to poise, but was outweighed by the fact they made hyper armor frames more generous.
@@monsieurdorgat6864 It was never patched in. Poise had worked like that from the very release of Ds3.
@@Razhork I'm pretty sure I remember neglecting armor completely and trading UGS attacks in early DS3... I mean, it was kind of a meme that you didn't need to bother with poise armor in order to trade hits with hyper armor weapons.
@@monsieurdorgat6864 it was only becuase people didn't understand how poise worked in DS3 (which means only during middle frames of your attack animation). So, belief was formed it doesn't work at all. After it was explained and more people started to use it (as well to use right amount of poise from armor) community finally moved on..
Wow, this is so exhaustive. What a well made and presented video, thanks a lot!
Another note on pve stance breaking: the stance broken state of being parried and being out of poise are calculated separately. Meaning that you can parry an enemy and the full charge heavy them for a large chunk of poise damage or even put them back into stagger immediately.
I love poise. I put it in my class project.
So glad i learned about it and its not some "heavy attacks stagger" simplicity.
Just because it wasn't explicitly stated in the video, the amount of time before an enemy begins to regenerate poise is equal to the total amount of time it would take for their poise to regenerate from 0. Since poise regenerates by 13 points per second, just divide the enemy's max poise by 13 to calculate how much time you are allowed between each hit. 65 poise / 13 = 5 seconds before poise begins to regenerate.
Why can't _our_ poise work like that? ~5 seconds to regenerate 61 poise sounds much more reasonable than 30 seconds regardless of your poise level. Builds with more poise would need to wait longer to fully replenish and builds with less poise would need less time to fully regenerate.
14:23 OHHH it's the dang Battletoads pause beat!! It took me a minute. I was like "Toejam and Earl? Nah, I KNOW it's a pause song..." Anyway, really informative video. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you, I was scrolling for like 10 minutes trying to figure out what music that was. It was driving me insane.
@@Batcraver69 No problem buddy!
oooh, i wonder if being able to see these values means people can mod in a posture bar like in sekiro
Oh shit, someday we might literally just play as Sekiro in Elden Ring. We already have someone who could likely port/create the custom animations for a mod like that (the guy who made ds3's blades of ashina mod.)
@@ethanwashington6789 Then Malenia can finally be fun to fight
i saw something like that in some vids, and it didnt look like postproduction, so ig this is already a thing, should check nexus mods if you're interested
I have been waiting for this so long thank you!!!!! So excited to watch
Square Off was buffed massively early on, as in 1.0 it seems to deal barely half the Posture Damage.
clear, well spoken, no bullshit and informative. thank you
Hug blessing flickers because it is coded as 2 (well 3) buffs, one that applies the base effect and also ticks the second buff (so that it gets applied properly with other temporary buffs or poise changes that arent in the same buff category), with the other being the actual damage reduction buff, which means for a tick of the game engine thinks the buff is getting replaced thus recalculated and shown in UI.
And fun fact, they went from having both the poise DR and effectively full hyperarmor (reduction to all but flatten and knockup) in initial release of ER to just having a stagger level reduction for the weakest effects in i think it was patch 0.3.
OK, now I understand why I do not really see a difference with a higher poise. I am new to Souls type games and this video really helped explain what I was seeing. Thank you!
22:17 I'm pretty sure the reason they do less poise damage is due to the charge portion also doubling as a block.
I can't thank you enough for helping me getting through this night. Thank you.
can i keep an enemy from recovering their poise by using items like throwing daggers?
does blocking with a shield reset the 30sec timer?
Yeah, anything that drains poise at all is totally valid for resetting the poise timer. The daggers only do 1 poise damage (fan daggers 2.5 if all hit), but if it helps prevent an enemy from having their poise refill, then it can be completely worth it. I could see that helping particularly for enemies like dragons and the Fire Giant, who often get enough distance to have their poise refill.
Great question about blocking hits with a shield, completely slipped my mind. It doesn't reset the timer, blocking hits prevents poise damage and allows the timer to keep ticking. Even taking chip damage or something like bleed triggering through a blocked hit doesn't drain any poise nor reset the timer either (even true for blocking with weapons), nor do attacks that knock your shield away when running out of stamina.
@@illusorywall I'm surprised you didn't mention Malneia's hyper armor attacks bypassing her stance break and refilling her poise meter. It's a unique mechanic intended or otherwise, and the only other enemy I know of that can do this are the Briar Knights when they spawn in and you rush down their bar before they are fully ready.
@@illusorywall since you mentioned bleed, i noticed that it (and frost?) stuns you regardless if you have full bullgoat, does it deal a very high poise damage or does it ignore it completely?
@@BoxyBrown717 There are quite a few enemies that have this. Though it's usually applied to their phase change (i.e Godrick cutting his hand off, Mohg's Tres, Duo, Unus and Nihil, Morgott's cough, etc.), and iirc a different video which delved into all instances of this mechanic- there were some other obscure attacks from bosses that also granted them this "infinite hyper armor". But you would be right in saying that Malenia has a shit ton of attacks with this for seemingly no reason.
@@Vlad-yy3le I think that is just a mechanic tied to the proc of the status ailments rather than interacting poise, but I am curious for an answer as well. I assume if they interacted with poise they would guarantee a stance break everytime they proc in pve but not sure.
I was trying to find guides on this 2 days ago, thanks illusionary wall
I wish I knew that those crystallians didn't regenerate poise, had a oddly hard time when I first met them. Also that stealth increases poise damage
great video, thank you!
(and thank you for linking the resources, very thoughtful!)
The invisible snail section was unreasonably funny for me
I'm literally in the middle of a playthrough using the Great and Large Club exclusively so this video came out at the perfect time.
This in-depth poise knowledge is gunna effect high level (skill) dueling for sure.
There's no such thing as skill in this game.
@@JohnDoe-pu5gk sure
@@JohnDoe-pu5gk 🤣🤣Try watching Oroboro and tell me there's no skill, lol. That man could beat literally anyone else in pvp because his skill play in insane.
Loved the editing on this one!
Would love if FromSoft added a 'poise bar' officially. Sekiro without the stance bar woulda been hell, and I think alot of frustrations people have with certain tanky enemies in Elden Ring comes from not knowing you can get a punish from a stance break.
About the Lazuli and Glintstone knight Sword's charged attack.
An unique quirk about their charged attack is that during the build up you are actually blocking (and so can't be staggered as long as you have enough stamina).
Perhaps the lesser poise damage is a trade off/balancing to that.
Oh boy, now you gotta make a new poise video now that they changed everything in the new update.
The spirit caller snake gags caught me off guard and made me laugh. Nice one.
Did I miss It or jumping attacks were not covered? Does an heavy jump attack have the same poise damage of a charged attack?
It's weaker than charged attacks.
Also i really recomend you to look at the weapon poise damage spreadsheet, it's amazingly helpful
Elden Ring/DS3 etc. Poise: Weak
DS1: Standing here, I realise, you are just like me trying to create history 🗿
I loved the way you explained it in detail, it was a big doubt that I had especially the pvp part.
what program do you use for the cinematics?
Thank you! I'm using Otis_Inf for freecam and occasional sequenced camera movements. It's not available for free yet (it's available through his patreon), but some simpler free cam stuff can be done with cheat engine too (for that I'm using the hexington table).
@@illusorywall Wtf cheat engine can mess with the camera? wow i did not know this.
something interesting is that some types of moves can instantly break poise regardless. a notable example would be flying enemies are able to be anchored by gravity-related spells and skills like Gravitas, which is great for handling things like the armored stormhawks and sirens (though it only works while they're actively flying)
Limit Breaker = Useless Data
Illusionary Wall = Useful Data
(Love them both)
I like the editing in this vid, good job :)
Negative hyper armour is the anti giant dad set up
Great video man. I know this took a lot of time and effort. Thanks 🙏
oh, something i'd be curious to know is if margit and godrick have some kind of crazy high headshot poise multiplier, or if it is just the normal 2x and i'm just underestimating how strong that is. i've co-oped those dudes a LOT and it tends to seem like the runs where we actually get one or more criticals off are the ones where we're constantly trying to land jumping attacks on the head. honestly thinking about it, it probably is just the 2x combined with having multiple players all going for high poise damage attacks, but ive just had such wild variability in those fights that it -feels- like there must be something weird going on there even if there actually isn't
If you're talking about hitting them in the head with a melee weapon, then it's not that. Headshot multiplier only applies to ranged attacks like bows and such, UNLESS a specific enemy has a weak point on their head , like trolls (also take increased poise damage)
Jumping just is very effective for how fast you can spam it, with the trade off of all the stamina used.
The guide I never new I wanted.
14:23 Is that Battletoads pause music?
yup! 😄
OK the Mohg joke caught me completely off-guard and made me spit out my coffee
I was curious how gravity spells effected the poise of flying enemies, they seem to guarantee a knockdown. Maybe they have a special modifier
Thank you very much for this video! It helped me a lot in understanding game mechanics
The Mohg/Moog thing got me
another amazing video, illusory wall.
Great video, I’m curious how dual wielding and the jumping L1 attack affect poise, could two great clubs one-shot a stronger enemy’s poise than just one?
The motion value spreadsheet mentioned in the video covers all these scenarios. The Great Club has a 240 (2.4x) MV for 1H Jumping R1, 264 MV for 2H Jumping R1, and 240+240 MV for Paired Jumping L1. (I assume the second MV is for your off-hand weapon, but I'm not 100% certain if that uses your off-hand base value or not... it's almost never relevant for poise, though.) So the answer is that a Paired Jumping L1 is clearly better than a 2H Jumping R1, and also slightly better than a 2H Jumping R2 (440 MV).
you can find the poise motion values for dual wield attacks in the spreadsheet as well. colossal weapons all get 240 + 240 on jumping L1, so two great clubs (base poise of 7) will do 33.6 poise damage (16.8 x2); less than a charged R2, but easier to land in succession?
Thanks for your content! I needed this kind of info!
Does the poise dmg of a charged r2 scale linearly depending on how long you hold r2 or does it jump from uncharged poise dmg to the full charge dmg right at the end?
Great question.
There are only two levels, charged or uncharged r2. There is no inbetween in terms of damage, attack speed, etc.
Finally someone made the moog mohg joke i've been waiting for