Playing through the dlc I was wondering are spirit ashes the easy mode or are the bosses actually balanced around them? I had an issue with elden ring bosses being so hyper aggressive in fights with attack chains that last 3 months giving you a window for like 5 seconds to attack which as a strength user seemingly was impossible to do anything without a not strength build. Taking any boss head on feels like a challenge run in an older fromsoft games some elden ring bosses gave me more shit than sekiro.
But when I summon the fight actually kinda feels balanced around it. The attack chain agro being taken away momentarily so you can deliver some damage then playing a kind of hot potato until the fight ends.
Usually easy modes in fromsoft games are a limited resource, humanity for summoning players that also puts you at risk of invasion or finite use healing items to use when you run out of flasks (not ds2) the concept was to make the game easier there needed to be a risk nothing was given for free.
Now that's what's strange about spirit summons, they're practically free. Outside of a little fp/hp cost there is no risk and no drawback to summoning them. Which makes me wonder if the game was intentionally balanced around players using them for every boss fight.
Thoughts?
A strength build in elden ring is kind of hardmode in its own right. You get some really strong options for some bosses, but you're still generally stuck with slow melee weapons that you basically have to already know a fight very well to use. I went into it the first time with an ultra-greatsword build and did mostly fine up until reaching some of the later bosses, while my second playthrough I went arcane with dual whips and just rolled everything without trouble.
It definitely feels like it. The game actively pushes it in your face and says "here use this," they're a frequent reward for clearing dungeons, and there's even some quest content that requires you to use them to make things happen. They're not mandatory, but they seem like the expected choice. Especially since there's the tradeoff that they make bosses more erratic and rarely do all that much on their own - they're a force amplifier when used right, but it's easy for them to make a fight harder and then die without contributing.
The game gives you two hoslow petal whips in one run for a reason. Occult bleed whips feels so good right up until the bosses stop bleeding.
Yeah. Then for the ones that don't, you just use the dragon communion seal to cast stone of gurranq until they die.
Or at least that was the go-to when I played through. I'm going to start a fresh playthrough on the current patch, as soon as I can manage to kill the damn grafted scion in the tutorial again. I did it on what went on to become that arcane whip character back then, so I just need to shake the rust off and get back into the swing of the game now.