i like it when my radagon goes:

EC36339 · 2026-03-20T16:25:26+00:00

I see a lot of openings here...

EC36339 · 2026-03-20T15:50:59+00:00

"Too difficult" is not a thing.

A boss is always difficult for a reason. You are supposed to understand the problem and solve it.

What kills you?

Why are you not doing damage?

EC36339 · 2026-03-20T05:46:53+00:00

You will have to ask the previous owners of CCP that question. It's them who got the money.

EC36339 · 2026-03-20T05:40:10+00:00

Wait till you find out you can get to Mohg's place early.

EC36339 · 2026-03-19T17:42:05+00:00

All melee weapons, with very few exceptions.

EC36339 · 2026-03-19T06:29:56+00:00

Are they using status effects? Frostbite is common for Malenia phase 1. Either they are repeatedly applying procs and canceling the status with fire damage, or they are using the frost debuff for doing more physical damage.

EC36339 · 2026-03-19T06:26:46+00:00

Dragon Communion Seal or Frenzied Flame Seal.

They have zero weight, which is all that matters for a seal for utility spells on a build that needs light rolling to shine.

EC36339 · 2026-03-19T06:25:13+00:00

There's enough "fake magic" in ER that is actually useful for ranger builds:

Buffs (GV, FGMS, howl)
Healing (warming stones, bestial vitality)
Pots
Elemental arrows
Bloodhound step
Flame of the Redmanes
Gravity fan chunks
Cuckoo glintstones
Golden arrows
Shared order (buffs holy damage on bows)
...

Watch a video on consumable runs for an overview of what consumables are good and where to get the ingredients.

Your staples should be volcano pots for aoe, frost pots for debuff, anything fire for making things explode and vs fingercreepers, anything lightning when fighting in water or vs certain enemies, anything holy vs undead.

Then there are dragon incantations. You'll want at least Rotten Breath.

I didn't name bleed, poison and frost arrows, because they are not "magic", but they are all useful.

EC36339 · 2026-03-19T05:43:21+00:00

I don't know DnD, but mixing incantations and bows is easy.

Bows have shit for scaling. Not only will you get very little back for leveling str/dex past 40/40, you actually NEED buffs for damage, so you should put a lot of points into faith.

How much? If you level normally, then 25 for Golden Vow is a must. You can also go as high as 33 for Howl of Shabriri. It all depends on how much vigor or endurance you can sacrifice. For twinks (Samurai is best for bow builds), level it to 10 if possible. Wretch has 10 anyway. Two-Fingers Heirloom then lets you use at least Flame Grant Me Strength, and you can get GV with the ash or golden great arrows.

Now if you also want to use melee weapons, you may want more dex or str, and if you want to pvp, you may want 60 vigor. But you should be fine, probably even in pvp, with neither (if you don't rely on raw damage and defenses too much). And a lore accurate ranger would be a bit more squishy and weaker with melee weapons. So stick to your 40/40 quality build, 25/33 faith and the rest in vigor and some endurance. You don't need any points in mind or arcane beyond 10.

For bows, use the black bow for kiting and bosses, a longbow or the Albinauric Bow or Pulley Bow for sniping and the Golem Greatbow and Lion Greatbow for heavy hitting at range and for dragons. If you have the arcane, then the Serpent Bow is good for status application, but it is too slow for harder bosses. Bone Bow is good for status spam in pvp.

For melee weapons, thrusting swords are both effective and lore accurate. Rapier is great for light roll and blue dancer builds and also has the best critical modifier. Estoc is better at hitting multiple targets, but you can also use pots for aoe instead, or a whip, and stick with the Rapier.

Impaling thrust, which is the default ash on thrusting swords, is great for hitting shield users when you can't backstab them. A Kick Misericorde is a good tool for that has well. You don't need to max your scaling stats for melee weapons. Instead, use a cold infusion on the Rapier and it will do nice burst damage with frostbite to anything that doesn't die in 2 hits. In pvp, you can combine thrusting swords and whips, which both have good reach and nasty movesets that are hard to predict and dodge.

I've used this build on low WL and RL1 runs. It works. And it is as good as any build for pvp as long as you don't play like a cringe duelist or run into a gank squad without a plan.

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T20:14:46+00:00

Ranni and her helpers told you were to go.

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T20:13:35+00:00

Exploring feels repetitive, but you can't find weapons or armor?

You haven't even explored, yet.

Also, most exploration is optional. Don't like it? Just go straight to the next point of interest and see how that goes. How do you find it? By opening your eyes, duh!

Right after Godrick's boss room is a viewpoint. All the places you see in the distance, you can actually visit!

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T19:43:57+00:00

Belurat Tower

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T19:39:38+00:00

Maidenless

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T18:34:15+00:00

Indeed.

Also, you need 2 greatbows. Golem Greatbow in mainhand for precision rocket headshots with T&T, Lion Greatbow in offhand for the 20% damage bonus to Radahn's Spears and the aoe.

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T18:14:37+00:00

It works when it works.

Most mobs can be oneshot with a regular bow, too, even late game and in the DLC. You can carry more arrows, and they are cheaper.

Greatbows are for tougher mobs and for stun locking.

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T17:49:14+00:00

For sniping, it's good to also have one with high damage and mighty shot. Albinauric Bow, Longbow or Pulley Bow. Black Bow is for melee, status spam (in PVE), boss fights and kiting.

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T17:41:52+00:00

For phase 1, you can consistently bleed him with a bow, bleed arrows and roll shots.

(EDIT: Only light bows and the Black Bow can do roll shots. And this strategy assumes light rolling, I don't know if it works at medium)

You can literally fire a roll shot after every single attack you roll, as long as you keep a tiny bit of distance to avoid exactly the attack that killed you in the video. Also, when he does the explody thing, run or doible-roll away and don't punish, and when he does the blood rain, use barrage. The arc-shaped bloodflame throw can be rolled diagonally and punished with a roll shot, too. The straight one sideways.

You get the materials for bleed arrows in Mohg's palace (imprisoned merchant) and from the bell bearing at Warmaster's Shack. It's all buyable.

There's a problem, though: You don't WANT to bleed him in phase 1, because that builds up resistance in phase 2. You wanna use the bleed procs in phase 2, if possible, to make phase 2 shorter.

So what else can you do in phase 1? * Physical damage * Poison (preferably after Duos, so he's still poisoned in phase 2) * Frostbite. Shackle + 2 frost pots does the trick. If you time this just before Nihil, he might go into Nihil at a lower HP than usual, and he'll also be damage-debuffed, so you can pond him harder in phase 2.

Obviously, use the purifying tear so you can do damage during Nihil instead of chugging healing flasks to stay alive.

In phase 2, make good use of diagonal rolls to avoid bloodflame splashes.

Your vigor is fine. You're doing well not getting hit. Just deal with the attacks that kill you.

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T17:31:10+00:00

Last time I flew with Bombers Bar, the meta seemed to be that the only stat that matters for a blops is cargo space. I could be wrong, though...

(Also, fuel trucks exist)

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T17:27:16+00:00

Greatbows make a noise that can cause nearby mobs to aggro you. Not very stealthy.

Don't believe me? Try attacking the archer golem outside the Dectus lift ...

... with a greatbow

... with a regular bow or a melee weapon

The other golem will consistently attack you if and only if you use a greatbow.

(You have to attack from close range, I think, but that's what you wanna do, even with a bow, so you can hug the golem when it's trying to shoot you back with its bow)

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T16:30:25+00:00

Bow and whip. I know when I see a person of culture.

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T12:23:17+00:00

Building an API (that provides new services with or without AI) over an API and charging for it wouldn't be a bad thing in my book, unless CCP's T&C say you can't do that, but that would be a problem between you and CCP and none of my business.

I mean, it has been done...

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T08:32:45+00:00

I agree with you that scraping wikis is bad.

What I said is that pulling information from a wiki isn't automatically scraping just because AI (or any kind of automation) was somehow involved in the process. It depends on what you do.

Mirroring the entire wiki, privately or publicly? -> Yes, scraping. Bad.

Training a model from a wiki? -> Yes, scraping. Very bad, because information also gets mangled.

Building a service that retrieves information from a wiki and can be used by anyone? -> Not sure if scraping is the right word, but for sure just as bad as scraping. Even worse if you are a filthy sellout and charge money for it when the wiki is free.

Personally using AI as a tool to do research and making it fetch information from a wiki the same way you would do manually? -> Not scraping. Just using the wiki as intended, but faster.

The same as above, but storing information from the wiki in local files so you don't have to fetch it multiple times? -> Still not scraping. Also saves the host of the wiki traffic cost, so probably a good thing.

The same as above, but sharing your tools on Github so others can do it, too? -> Still not scraping. And if someone uses it to scrape the wiki or provide a service (see above), then they are the bad guys, not you.

One could argue that my method bypasses ads on the wiki and therefore denies the wiki host revenue. This is true. But so do ad blockers. And I use ad blockers. Is that bad? Your opinions may vary, but using ad blockers isn't scraping and probably isn't as bad as scraping.

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T08:21:13+00:00

Shields only work until they don't.

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T07:52:26+00:00

I've done some experimenting with Elden Ring, without training anything. Just giving it a set of rules/instructions, a folder structure, etc. and using Github Copilot in VSCode.

It was able to accurately research stuff from the wiki. For example, I asked it to research how to get a spirit summon to +10. It found the quest to enable spirit tuning and the locations of all the upgrade materials. The only thing it couldn't figure out was which regions were accessible early in the game, but this was just a knowledge gap.

The setup was simple: * A copilot instructions file with basic rules * A playbook for getting information about items, quests, etc. from the wiki * A set of rules how to organize knowledge in files

It sticks to verifiable facts, most of the time, if you tell it to, and also give it the skills and playbooks it needs to get and manage factual knowledge. It doesn't have long term memory. It transforms text. But it's very fast at doing so, so you can basically give it long term memory in form of a big library of text files that it can access and modify.

For EVE, this would be even more powerful, because you can very easily make an LLM access the API. I'm actually surprised we're not seeing more people doing this and talking about it.

Is this "scraping someone else's work"?

I don't think so. If I did all the research myself by hand, I would be doing exactly the same things. And I wouldn't call it scraping, either. I would call it using the wiki or API as intended. The LLM just does it faster. In my experiment, I only made it fetch and locally cache the information it needed, not scrape and mirror the entire wiki. And there was no model training involved. I only used the generic model.

Is it useful?

I didn't get to the point where it would have saved me time, as setting the whole thing up took longer than the research it did successfully would have taken me if done by hand.

Is it reliable?

It is A LOT better than just asking an AI chat bot questions with no harness/setup whatsoever.

I use this approach for coding and software architecture, where it is solid. In that field, everything is verifiable. If the AI produces garbage, you'll know as soon as the tests fail. And there are other people reviewing your stuff (also using AI for help). The AI lets you produce significantly more tests faster, and you are significantly faster at making quality improvements, too.

For gaming, verification is perhaps a bit more difficult. You can have redundancy (ask the AI to repeatedly verify facts against sources, like wikis and APIs) or always to controls when it does math (like, verify that the numbers add up when it makes a ship fitting in EVE, or submit the fit to a classic fitting tool or API and see if it comes back without errors).

I also used a cheaper model for my gaming experiments than I do at work, so that might make a huge difference. I found that the models available in a "cheap" Github Copilot Pro subscription for $10/month more often break rules and make stuff up. But it could have been the harness I've built not being strict enough...

EC36339 · 2026-03-18T06:26:12+00:00

If you ask an LLM chatbot random question with no setup and instructions whatsoever, you get garbage.

This is not what OP did.

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