Year 1 Thoughts on Elden Ring's Ash of War System

[@thephysicsgamer123]

I think the best Ash of War skills are the ones that aren't just spells but put in a slightly different spot (although I think that's pretty cool too) and had some kind of unique function. The best illustration I can think of is the Spinning Slash on the Twinblades - it works as an attack that has damage and poise damage akin to a heavy attack, but comes out as fast as a light attack; as well as having a full 360 AoE. It's a fairly small thing, but it completely changed the way I played in a lot of cases - sometimes I would deliberately maneuver myself into a crowd to maximize my damage, for example; it also net me my first Black Knife Assassin kill, as it had just enough poise damage and speed to allow me to consistently get safe damage on her. I can think of a handful of others, but I didn't play around with the system all that much

[@randomSPOOKYgirl3po]

I havent finished the game yet and im doing dex main with dragon communion incantations and cold uchigatana plus rivers of blood with arcane as a secondary stat, so i havent fully explored the system that being said and with this as my first fromsoft game, I feel like the whole damage calculation system is way too complex for me to have fully grasped on first go, and most of my build decisions were informed largely by reddit, but ashes of war/affinities were one of the first things i started thinking about seriously. with my dex/arc katana build most ashes are pretty useless to me but I appreciate that lightning scales with dex so i can use a the lightning bolt as needed with a secondary weapon. I read somewhere that the dragon communion seal has something weird about it's arcane scaling that makes it different but without knowing specifics i've found it works pretty well in my build, that plus rivers of blood make arcane quite useful for me while faith remains very low for me because i only need 15 for dragon communion incants. at first I didn't use the ash skill because I hadn't felt out the combat system generally, but once I used sword dance to close distance with bloody finger okina it clicked for me and a lot of enemies i assumed were supposed to be really hard got pretty manageable. the gist i get is that the game wants to funnel you into being specialized for either spells or melee and there's not as much overlap as there ought to be

[@CH4R10T_TV]

Something you may find useful if you're new is the scaling ratings of different weapons and catalysts, denoted by a letter underneath each of the five damage stats. It should be towards the bottom of the page; looking at this under your sacred seals will show you that the Dragon Communion Seal scales primarily with Arcane and secondarily with Faith. Naturally its passive boosts the dragon communion incantations. Anyway, these letter ratings aren't indicative of damage output necessarily, just scaling, but they are useful for noting which stats work with which staffs/seals.

[@randomSPOOKYgirl3po]

okay one year on and im playing a dex/int spellsword with the estoc and it's overall been a way easier time, past me what were you smoking? there's plenty of overlap there

[@kylegonewild]

I think the main problem with approaching something like Demon's Souls or DS2 is that there are fairly important mechanics that are completely unexplained to the player in any meaningful way, that may or may not play a crucial role in your experience. If you're brand new to these games and this style of patient, opportunistic gameplay then something like the World Tendency system in Demon's Souls is going to ruin your experience as you die a bunch early on learning the game only to discover that the punishment for those deaths is not only the 50% HP reduction for any death, but the world being filled with significantly tougher enemies inserted all over that only go away if you manage to bring your tendency back up to neutral. People also will have zero idea that certain item spawns are tied to that tendency, for example the Dragon Bone Smasher can only be obtained on pure white tendency in a gimmick boss' room after killing what many new players consider the most aggressive and/or toughest boss. DS2 had the problem of the poise mechanic being tied to an actual stat people never invest in unless they know that's what it does, and the game doesn't make it clear your propensity to stagger is directly tied to that stat. I only started playing Elden Ring a couple months ago but the game clearly lays out petty much everything you need to know to complete your first playthrough without being blindsided by mechanics. You can bumble through Elden Ring without ever using or paying attention to an Ash of War and succeed just fine in PvE with enough time and levels. There's certainly some things being hid behind the scenes, like your poise value on your character sheet not actually being the amount of poise damage you can take before staggering, it's actually 10x your real poise stat, but Elden Ring was definitely designed with more transparency and flexibility in mind.

[@RevolutionaryLoser]

I don't know if FROM Soft pvp doesn't work in Europe but I try and pretend it doesn't exist. Even when I'm winning it doesn't feel gratifying. I'm more interested in how the mechanics work in PvE.