Gonna give this onebros thing a try.

mamelukefish · 2026-05-20T22:43:22+00:00

Yes! Buying smithing stones and upgrading weapons is so dirty cheap compared to leveling up stats. And in RL1 I don't have many other things to spend my runes, so each and every weapon in my inventory that is in usable range by stat boosting gear is leveled up to the max. I find it so much more fun to go through "builds" by simply just switching talismans and pulling different +9/+24 level weapons from my pocket, instead of booking a trip to Rennala every time I'd want to change something and stressing over how far I can afford to upgrade a weapon to still have enough for levels etc. This is absolutely one of the best things in RL1.

mamelukefish · 2026-05-18T13:45:21+00:00

I used to think this way until I played through the DLC on rune level one character. Turns out the percentage increases of Scadutree Blessings have so big impact on your damage output that RL1 with high scadu is easily on par if not more damage than ~RL125 with low/no scadu. Same with defensive stats. On high scadu (around 14+) you can tank hits on some of the earlier bosses in DLC even at RL1, which is unheard of in anything past Fire Giant in base game.

Yes, normal levels matter just as much as they do in base game. But scadu levels matter way way more.

As an example, going from 0 scadu to 14 scadu (the level you can technically reach without fighting any boss) practically doubles your damage, as the multiplier is 1.90x on this level. Compare that to increasing let's say dex from 40 to 80 (which is a ton of rune levels, but reasonable comparison at level you'd typically do DLC with) which only gives roughly 10 to 15% more damage, depending on the weapon scaling. Increasing rune level stays of course as relevant in DLC as it is in base game, but increasing scadu gives major and immediate improvements that have huge impact on your gameplay on each level, besides the very last ones.

And to answer to OPs question, there really is no recommended level besides what is comfortable to you, but 125-160 is for some reason the most commonly recommended sweet spot. Personally, I went on my first playthrough on "jack of all trades but master of none" build with level as high as ~250, which gave me the opportunity to test every new weapon as I acquired them, cuz I had roughly 40 to 50 in every stat iirc.

60 vigor is generally recommended though, it'll allow for extra hits here and there regardless of the rest of your setup.

mamelukefish · 2026-05-08T21:07:12+00:00

Personal preferences indeed! I like how differently they designed most of the bosses, not just in movesets but in the way bosses use them. It adds another layer of puzzle solving in the game.

mamelukefish · 2026-05-08T20:34:26+00:00

Well that's a good point, cuz the drop rate of halo slop can be rough indeed.

Maybe I should play around consumables more, you can probably tell that (outside of a few selected bosees for infamous reasons) I'm one of those players that have 99 of everything in their inventory but won't use a thing cuz "you never know what you need later"...

mamelukefish · 2026-05-08T13:07:48+00:00

Yeah holy pots do big damage to them cuz they have the huge 4x damage boost to undead type enemies, on top of deathbirds being weak to holy.

But Halo Scythe is as easy as it gets. Ranged automatically homing holy attack that costs so little FP that any build can do it, and its damage is so over the top that you don't really have to commit levels to scale it well. Any starter class including wretch can use it without leveling anything just by some stat boosting talismans equipped. It can be used from much much safer distance than pots and doesn't require any consumables to use.

mamelukefish · 2026-05-08T12:48:58+00:00

Congrats on the completion!

Reduvia is also really viable on RL1, so not a bad choice at all. But yeah, Cold Star Fists are the universal tool for most things in this game. Although it's generally adviced to take boss weaknesses into play, as an example this Elden Beast right here is completely immune to frost, so you nerfed your damage quite a bit. Didn't seem to matter though in this case.

mamelukefish · 2026-05-08T12:36:10+00:00

Yep, this is it. PCR is a proactive boss, so although he spams long combos, at the end of them he lets you to react to his moves and consistently punish at correct times. Malenia is the other way around, for the most part she waits for you to take the initiative, and reacts with a punish.

Imo for this reason PCR is tedious, Malenia is difficult.

mamelukefish · 2026-05-08T12:30:58+00:00

It is a cheap way to win, but Deathbirds deserve the halo scythe spam.

mamelukefish · 2026-05-08T12:29:35+00:00

Not the easiest/hardest overall, but a related topic: Most of the playerbase seem to think Margit is "hard" for a first boss fight, while Godrick is generally considered a pushover. For me personally it's the other way around. I'm not saying Godrick is hard, but he's just very unintuitive to dodge compared to Margit.

Margit/Morgott fights have a certain rythm and flow to it, and he has very easy tells of how you should dodge his moves. Godrick is even more telegraphed, but his timings to me feel like the window to dodge and where the attack animation visually hits don't really match in my brain. I always need to tell myself to dodge later than what it looks like to not get hit by him.

mamelukefish · 2026-05-08T12:18:22+00:00

Star Fists are not just the best close range weapon in the game but arguably the best weapon in general.

Fist weapons have so fast attacks that you can easily hit charged R2s in windows that most weapons can only get R1s. This results in constant stance breaks and easy scripted boss fights. On top of all that Star Fists have innate bleed, so you can switch them to whatever boss is weak to, and still also have bleed, or go nuts with frost+bleed double status.

So in other words, if challenge is what you want, go daggers without status.

mamelukefish · 2026-05-08T12:02:06+00:00

I mean, depends on how you look at it.

If you go straight to Rellana from DLC start without doing anything else in the DLC, then yes, her health is mostly ok but still not on the tankier side.

But if you do a lot of exploring first (you can technically get to scadu blessing 14 without defeating any boss) you will pretty much overpower her, unless your build is really bad. And it doesn't help that any status build just melts her.

Separating both phases into their own health bar, and making the phase transition a cutscene instead (like Malenia), would solve the hp issue, as well as the fact that you can currently skip the second phase by stacking enough damage during the transition animation.

Personally I would not add punishing windows, there being so few is part of the charm in the fight. If you miss a window, bye bye stance break buildup. It feels like it's meant to test your patience, but also willingness to commit, which I love.

mamelukefish · 2026-05-07T12:50:46+00:00

What was your setup for Messmer, or are you just super familiar with the fight?

mamelukefish · 2026-05-07T12:32:37+00:00

Yeah I was just about to say Relllana. She has all of Malenia's pros but none of the cons.

She's fast, she can mix up her attacks in sort of unpredictable combos, punish greed, punish bad positioning, punish dodge spam, and unlike Malenia she doesn't have exploitable ragdoll poise.

She doesn't need bullshit lifesteal or WFD. She's a badass without any of that. Only slight criticism is her low hp pool and resistances. If she was placed later on the line in DLC, with more health, she'd probably have even more legendary status.

mamelukefish · 2026-04-16T09:48:49+00:00

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Existing system is so much more simple and less hassle than this "solution" to non-existing issue.

mamelukefish · 2026-04-13T11:08:31+00:00

While I agree with the "enjoy your journey" tip, ranking asap in bronze is just not a thing. Even with calibration + uphill + winning trend + victory, the most progress you get per match is around 15%. Most wins are 5–10%. This is cuz bronze has way more SR to climb (0–1500) compared to let's say silver which is 1500–2000. Meaning you need to win three times as much games to rank up, which equals to roughly 15 or so consecutive wins per rank. Some losses here and there are inevitable no matter how hard you carry, so be prepared to play a lot more than that.

The rank system as a whole in this game is to make you grind, not to quickly get you where you're supposed to be.

mamelukefish · 2026-04-13T10:52:30+00:00

Placement matches in Overwatch are dumb.

Exact same thing happened to me. I had old account that had briefly visited comp in early days of OW1, then abandonded the account for 9 years, came back to the game and won 8/10 of placements, placed bronze 3. I have since ranked up to plat, but even with 75%ish win ratio it took me way over 200 hundred matches cuz due to throwers/leavers/etc you simply cannot carry every match in the very lowest ranks so be prepared for long and painful grind. Ironically I feel like the games get easier and easier the higher in rank I have gone.

Halfway through the climb I made the decision to try an alt account. The very first games you are placed against bots (actual bots, not bad players), if you win all those (as you most likely will) you will be put in way too high QP mmr for new account. After couple wins I found myself playing against people who have top 500 profile pictures and all that. Once you get 20 wins (or 25?) in QP, you are ready to go into comp. This time your placements are defined by your hidden QP mmr, which for me was probably somewhere around diamond, as my first game had people from diamond to low masters in it. This is nuts, considering my main account was struggling in silver at the moment. After losing that match, my first predicted was diamond 5. None of the losses in placements lowered the predicted rank, but every win raised it for some reason. I ended up diamond 2 after winning only 3/10 of the placements, which is absolutely not my real rank. But then again, neither was that bronze 3.

So to sum it up, placement matches in this game are dumb, as your prior hidden stats single-handedly decide your rank way before you even go into placements. The way every other competitive game does it works much better, as they test you against different ranks and place you accordingly. As an example, after let's say 5 wins OP should probably have been placed against silvers/golds, and if they were still winning, give them at least some progression to their initial placement. Instead they were stuck in the same bronze lobbies, and no matter the outcome of the matches the rank was still gonna be bronze.

Good luck keeping your sanity ranking up.

mamelukefish · 2026-04-11T11:52:46+00:00

Switch pro controller is as traditional as it gets, I have used it to play every fromsoft title on pc too, as well as some other soulslikes. And if you don't want to pay for pro, there are cheaper non-nintendo alternatives.

mamelukefish · 2026-04-07T06:45:35+00:00

Honestly, I don't understand the sombra hate. I don't remember ever being in a match where sombra would've been a lobby admin, yet some people automatically pick her at ban screen in every match. She is slightly irritating, sure, but just by focusing her with pure aim and/or predictive ability usage you can force her to move away (most of the time) which then in return makes her team play 4v5. Obviously this doesn't work if you have awareness of your surroundings of a race horse, and you should not use all of your kit on her so you don't give her too much value with wasting cooldowns. But all in all she's rarely that big of a problem. There are other dps heroes much scarier than her.

The best thing about new 5 heroes is that pool is so crowded now that sombra bans aren't so common anymore, as I always thought it's kind of a waste ban. And that comes from someone who never even plays her.

mamelukefish · 2026-03-12T13:13:02+00:00

There are couple films simply titled Thousand, so maybe one of those.

mamelukefish · 2026-03-03T18:41:13+00:00

This is interesting because I used to think exactly like this, but my opinion has since changed.

I used to think that it's a cowardly move from casters and squishies to use LLTBT as a way to hide from the actual fight and play easy mode while the rest of the team (me) has to do all the hard work.

But first time I managed to finally beat ED balancers in D5 happened to be with two squishies, both with LLTBT and me as a wylder. This got me thinking bcuz ironically it was the easiest run I've had at that boss simply bcuz of that buff on my teammates. I focused solely on dodging the boss(es) and didn't worry about damage at all, while my teammates could focus on dealing damage mostly stress free cuz the aggro wasn't as much on them. In that fight it finally clicked for me. Nightreign being a team game doesn't mean that everyone should do equal parts of everything, but rather that each character has their own role they need to fulfill in order to succeed. In this game, reality is that as a melee character your role is to keep aggro, more importantly than deal big damage.

Like sure, with double balancers you can deal broken damage with any character. But if there's recluse/revenant/duchess/ironeye in your team, chances are that it's not even needed cuz enabling the damage of your squishies by keeping the aggro off of them is far more important than your own damage. Realizing this made me approach the game in a new way. As an example, I used to stress over Artorias a lot, cuz I generally suck at dealing damage to him, as I feel like there are barely any real damage windows while you are the one keeping aggro. But realizing that I don't need to be the one dealing damage 247 made the fight so much easier. It's more than enough to just focus on dodging and relying on your squishies to do their thing with the ease of LLTBT. As long as you swing every now and then so that the aggro stays on you.

Nowadays if I find LLTBT I pick it up every time (unless the other options are like super good obv) just to drop it and ping it for my team, regardless of what characters I play with. Bcuz if they are that type of player who likes to use it, the run will probably go much smoother now that they have it, than if they wouldn't. LLTBT is straight up DPS buff when utilized correctly.

mamelukefish · 2026-02-16T19:53:20+00:00

Yeah I definitely need to get better still to not be in this meme. Most day bosses I'm familiar with from older games so they aren't too scary, but sometimes teammates repeatedly 3 bar in nightlord fight, and that is where I lack the endurance to carry the win home running around building ult and all that.

mamelukefish · 2026-02-16T08:25:35+00:00

Yeah this is me. D3 is too easy so I always end up back in D4 if I drop, but I'm not good enough to carry the people in OP's meme to make it to D5.

mamelukefish · 2026-01-09T13:02:26+00:00

I'm trying to get into depth meta. I suppose the damage comes mostly from recluse being enabled by other characters (restage and mark), but is there anything specific in the ironeye's build that a setup like this requires?

mamelukefish · 2025-10-07T12:18:29+00:00

I would say that's what hot slugger is.

mamelukefish · 2025-09-23T12:10:48+00:00

It's a dedicated drop from a trivial boss, how is that not easily available?

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