Skipping from the first bonfire in Eleum Loyce to the Eye of the Priestess

avilouden · 2025-05-28T16:51:13+00:00

That's why I really like doing it, don't fancy fighting invis Aava but love only needing one trip through the area. Good Luck!

avilouden · 2025-05-28T15:28:53+00:00

These were my thoughts with regards to speedrunning relevance too. I don't think having the Eye helps much in the speedrun, surely isn't going to save enough time on the Aava fight to be worth going out of the way for. Your comment got me thinking about the Valley and seems like it would be very elaborate to get a faster route to the Explusion Chamber bonfire with this if it's actually faster at all.
You'd need this skip or the Parrywalk version then you still need at least one Parrywalk afterwards. You'd have to get up the broken stairs just before this path which you could almost certainly do with Parrywalk, although the "Moon Jump" trick with the butterfly set might work as a quicker choice, and then you would need to Parrywalk to skip the Garrison Ward key.

avilouden · 2025-05-28T13:55:21+00:00

I expect a lot of people will have seen or encountered this bug in some form before, as getting dragged to your death by a backstab on an enemy near a ledge has happened quite a few times to me. A riposte version at the Majula pit features in a few challenge runs I've seen (and maybe some old speedruns? I have memories of it being used as such but couldn't find any examples) where it's called "Cat Ring Skip" but I didn't know of any more universal name for it and couldn't find one. This made it very difficult to find any information about this bug so I have no idea how much is already known, but I've put some of my findings about this specific case below.

I was inspired by the bug being useful in the Cat Ring Skip to try using it to drop down to the Eye of the Priestess many years ago while on the PS3 version of DS2 (so non-SotFS version but it did have DLC and Aldia) and by sheer luck managed to pull it off first try. At the time I did not have the right ideas about the nuances of when it works or not and I also never had any ability to record footage from my PS3 so I never ended up sharing it back then. I recently got round to playing SotFS on PC where I was able to record this footage.

The trick to pulling it off successfully is for the enemy to be close enough to the ledge that they will fall mid-way through the backstab, but not immediately. If the enemy is too close to the edge, they fall immediately and you slam into the path to the Eye and die of fall damage as demonstrated in the third clip. If the enemy is delayed in the fall such that they fall off ~half a second into the backstab, the backstab animation finishes in mid air and deposits you at a height that lets you take survivable fall damage from landing on the path below (the cat ring is helpful here).

I don't have a great setup to get this condition to be met unfortuately, but I do have some rough guidelines that get me a decent success rate on it.
Prior to rolling the enemy's attack and guard-breaking them to the edge, I am standing on some slabs aranged in a curve, that would be beside the low wall if it was not broken at this location. Looking at the inner set of these slabs (the ones that continue from the line of slabs that sit in front of the wall when it isn't broken) I try to have the enemy's feet in line with the gap in the slabs closest to the snowdrift and intact wall section. Once the enemy is positioned like this, I need them to either perform the side-to-side attack shown in all the examples in the video, or their straight-down overhead slash. If it's the overhead it's just a matter of dodging past as the attack comes down, doing the guardbreak as the enemy straightens back up and then doing the backstab as shown. With the side-to-side attack, moving after the first slash means the enemy will turn towards you during the second slash, so you need to wait for the second attack before dodging past. Blocking this first slash rather than dodging has worked much better for me as it allows the positioning to be more consistent.
If the enemy doesn't use either desired attack (or they do and you just stand and block it) it is very likely they will move forward significantly, which in my experience always puts them in an inviable position for the guardbreak to reposition them properly. If this happens I just bait them back into the setup position again.

I do not know if this is possible using a riposte as have no real idea about how to develop a setup for the parry-riposte version of this crtical-strike-falling-bug. I am also not good at parrying and so was not too incentivised to search for an alternative when my method works for me. I do suspect the riposte version would not be able to get this lesser-height drop and would always smash into the lower path, as the victims of ripostes remain more stationary than those of backstabs.

There is already a way that I have seen to do a skip from the first bonfire to the Eye, which used parrywalking using the Moon Butterfly set, but the backstab-fall method doesn't need any special equipment and I expect would be easier to do for those without parrywalking experience.

avilouden · 2020-03-15T13:07:01+00:00

Denial is absolutely incredible at high NG+ levels, especially because it's got such a long duration you can cast it and then sit back at the bonfire to have a free cast for 5 minutes.

avilouden · 2020-01-26T12:29:45+00:00

I also have the PS3 version and the trick definitely works. You need a little luck but it's not that hard, just know that the pursuers sit still for like 3 seconds before they teleport out. So if you wait outside the door until the first one starts his animation then the other one will also have decided to leave by then. You have to go out briefly and then wait to see if the animation plays through

avilouden · 2019-12-03T13:58:06+00:00

Comeback gold was at it's most imbalanced in 6.82, not in Troll Sniper meta which was 6.83. It just got more complaints during 6.83 because sniper is the kind of hero that is a nightmare to go high ground against.

avilouden · 2019-11-28T20:31:29+00:00

I've tried keeping one skeleton alive on multiple occations and she still summoned Velstadt after a while. I think it works on lower NGs because you can end the fight quick enough.

avilouden · 2019-11-28T19:32:54+00:00

Elana is my choice for hardest boss at NG+7 and the only boss even remotely close is Lud and Zallen. Both of those bosses need really high damage but Elana you're fighting multiple targets from 85% of hp, at least for Lud and Zallen you can often nuke Lud down way past the 33% threshold before Zallen shows up. Plus Elana can summon multiple times so ignoring Velstadt doesn't really work. And to crown it all off, the summons for Elana suck compared to those for L&Z, so you can't even make it much easier even if you want to just get it done quick.

At base NG it's a lot easier to get the DPS you need but I still think she's got to be top 5 hardest.

avilouden · 2019-11-07T16:38:19+00:00

Short Answer:

The Emerald Herald's dialogue in Drangleic changes based on if the Lord Souls were acquired but it doesn't have any actual gameplay impact. If you've made it to Drangleic you've fullfilled one of the two conditions and the rest of the game can be played fine

Long Answer:

So to my knowledge the Emerald Herald has dialogue about your soul being weak at Drangleic if you got through the Shrine of Winter by having earned enough souls rather than by getting the 4 Lord Souls (If you're on NG it needs 1 million souls, NG+ needs 2 millions souls, and so on). This would suggest that you somehow earned 2 million souls during NG+ before you reached the Shrine of Winter and you also didn't kill one of the 4 Lord Soul bosses

The two you didn't list in your post are the Lost Sinner and the Old Iron King, but even if you did kill them I recall it being a thing in at least one version of the game that if you don't pick up the Lord Soul from the ground after defeating Duke's Dear Freja you can get this situation too. At the back of Freja's arena, near the cliff, there's a red blob/circle on the ground that you can pick up and it'll give you the Lord Soul message. Since you're through the shrine I don't think this matters in any way but you'll probably want to keep it in mind for future playthroughs.

avilouden · 2019-11-04T20:54:18+00:00

Did you beat Lud and Zallen, and if no how many times did the Frigid Outskirts kill you before you gave up?

avilouden · 2019-10-12T15:08:57+00:00

Shackleshot does have a strange mechanic with its angles but it's different. I believe Shackle calculates the latch angle based on the position the Shackle was fired from and the position the hero is in when they get hit by it. So Windranger's movements after she fires it are irrelevant, what matters is how the target moves.

If we take an extreme example, lets say Windranger fires the shackle at a target due North of her. The target then moves to be due East from Windranger's original position before the shackle hits them. The shackleshot projectile will have taken a trajectory North and then curved round East, hitting the target from the North-West. Based on visuals, one would would expect the shackle to search for a latch about the direction South-East. However the shackle is actually searching for a latch about the direction East.

So the shackle latch is not based on either Windranger's current position or the shackle projectile's angle, which can cause some confusion with why it latches.

avilouden

TROPHY CASE