PVP has been broken in every souls game at launch, so I'm not super surprised, though this does sound worse. I've only been invaded once, but it was extreme rocket tag. They were using some madness build-up skill, while I was using Greatsword jump attacks, which got them down to a sliver of HP in one hit. Ended up dying when 3/4 of the madness bar filled up at once, probably due to a critical hit.
I just met one of those shield machine guns and it did not seem beatable if the player using it knows what they are doing. Also, giving all types of characters easy access to nearly WOTG level stuff just makes the pvp something I have almost no interest in doing. Maybe I'll roll an early-game twink if the invasion system allows it.
Someone has worked out a bug that causes an fire AOE spell to apply the death status in an unblockable AOE at a very, very fast rate. Just stand near someone using the bug and you're effectively killed immediately. It's a mess.
It's a multiplayer game with a PvP component. That's the upside. It's always been a core part of the series. It's not a single player game and never has been. I recognize that a lot of people don't like it or find it distressing, and I would support an opt-out feature, but it would be an opt-out feature. as in opting out of a core part of the game. PvP wasn't imposed on people, it was there from the start.
Invasions are intended for balancing purposes. In ds1 you can opt out by always being hollowed which meant no summoning coop partners and no red phantoms with epic loot but you can still enjoy messages helping you out.
Ds2 was... Bad in that regard as the more hollowed you were the higher chance of being invaded.
Ds3 if you were emberred you can summon and also get a higher health pool and look rly cool.
And bb and elden ring you can only be invaded if you are already in a coop session and in ER its usually 1 invader against 2 or 3 coop players putting the invader at a disadvantage. The idea is to balance the things that can make the game easier with a risk of it getting harder. And in ER there is a no risk alternative of summoning coop by just using the mimic spirit.
Then most of the games with 1 on 1 invasions were when both players consented to the challenge so I'd say the invasions are fair. And offline mode always exists you just lose player messages.
But the ER builds are hella broken atm but thats pretty normal. Nerfs will definitely happen. Its the nature of having so many different build compositions its hard to balance
To a degree I think you can't really get away from at least using a bit of magic to give you at least more unpredictability, and there seems to be casting tools that let you scale them with a physical stat (only STR so far it seems though). But yeah, status effects are a bit busted right now, able to build up even when you dodge which would be absolutely fine and good if the overall buildup wasn't so massive. Flat bonuses to weapons without factoring in AR seems to not work well for balance when statuses are actually really good now, because then it's all about hard-to-dodge WA's or those that further boost the status effect or throwing it on a very fast hitting weapon that permits them to outdamage much slower, riskier weapons and makes simply trading impossible. Like if I'm being outdamaged by a smaller, faster weapon, I can't really win because my hits are usually going to come from trading or are at least less likely to land than their hits, and theirs lands more.
Maybe the meta is more about building up resistance stats for status effects and having a ton of cures equipped and ready to use whenever your opponent runs out of stamina? If you can just cure the bleed before it takes effect, then that would prolly bring it back down to earth, but at least while progressing through the game those cures are expensive and people tend to respond to doing such as though you drank notEstus in a duel.
As for the stuff that isn't statuses, haven't ran into them much. The force-unlocking seems very obnoxious and prolly does need fixed just because it's more an accessibility/controls issue, these games control fairly poorly without lock-on because your character can't otherwise move in one direction while attacking and defending in another and moving without lock-on leaves you vulnerable to backstabs - while it's possible to create a meta where it's not the most powerful option, it does needlessly complicate the control scheme of the game for the sake of this one item in a way that doesn't really benefit the rest of the game. It seems more like a way to just punish people for not using a mouse and keyboard or a Steam Deck or Steam Controller where you can have that precise camera control while not locked on.
building up resistance stats for status effects
Sadly not. You can't build up enough resistance to make a difference when you're getting hit several times a second by bleed twinblades, or spammed with blood slash attacks that do hundreds of points of damage at great sword ranges, or spammed with madness beams that have very little travel time and deal massive madness buildup.
Yeah it's broken as shit. You didn't even mention the dragon attacks that have huge AOEs that deal damage and status at a very high rate and can be cast for as long as you have mana. And there's a potion that gives unlimited mana for 15 seconds.
I hope they can fix it but unless they can have completely different stats for PvP and PvE I don't know how. It's just getting worse as people find more synergies.
I pirated this game and at first I regretted it because I was worried about missing out on the MP stuff.
The more I read about the unoriginal and unfunny joke spam, the broken pvp, and unhelpful messages the more I'm certain I made the correct choice.
It's not really that bad. In DS3, OP low-level invaders could force you to play single player, since given 100 games, no new player is going to beat a vet with a dragonslayer axe build, and there's no where else you can go.
In Elden Ring, there's OP shit available from the start (dragon spells, blood daggers), and you can always just go somewhere else.
Invaders are at a massive disadvantage if any time they go to engage one player, the other can just make an entire area death, so in practice you can just end any invader you don't feel like fighting.
I think it's just a problem with the whole structure of involuntary PvP to begin with, at least in the Souls series. People rightfully have negative feelings about it when they're the one being invaded just trying to get through the game, and it is a pretty toxic griefing culture. Others have fun... if they're invading, which requires a supply of people who are not going to have fun. Or there's going to be ganking, wherein maybe 2-3 ish people can basically choke out PvP in an area by hogging all the invasions where the invaders can't really win and where the invaders can't go invade someone else.
I liked Darkmoon invasions in DS1 and DS2 because at least I knew I was invading someone who (probably) invaded someone else and so could put up a fight, but like overall it leads to this place where there has to be so many mitigations and protections for the host that things have to be pretty one-sided, one way or the other.
As far as fight clubs and duels in general go, the balance has been noticeably worse than in other games, other than maybe DS2 with its extreme armor values and Soul Memory allowing for a level of imbalance that made it impossible for some people to even damage the other. Most of the other games had issues but Elden Ring at least for now has a lot of very non-interactive rocket tag shit that renders a lot of the game's rebalanced movesets kind of irrelevant. Maybe it's just a matter of players not yet knowing all the counters to this, but it feels like it's just going to result in what always happens with these games where some people make SL20 twink characters with bigoted screen names and invade people who have no hope of having a coherent build that could deal with them.
Like if the game's going to make it so they can only be invaded if they have summons, and additionally summon hunters to come rescue them every minute or so... maybe just rework the structure of invasions entirely. There's prolly a way to have those scummy, creative fights without the elements that motivate stacking so many things in the host's favor in a way that privilege gank squads that've cleared the map and defeat the point. Like it could be possible to structure this so that in order to invade, you have to yourself open yourself up to invasions, and so you're only invading other people who themselves are trying to invade, and so there could be more justification for hosts not having gank squads ready to spam roll into your spawn and instantly kill you with a status effect.
I've been on both sides of invasions where people aren't using meta builds and it's as good as DS PvP has ever been. Lots of rolling around trading hits and trying not to get parried, spamming homing soul mass/glintblade phalanx, and throwing no heal pots.
It's the meta builds that are killing it. It's not just that there are ways to reliably instagib the other player, it's that there are at least ten different ways to do it, and with a little faith and dex you can have three of them ready at the same time. It's easy to have dragon rot breath, madness beams, and dual blood katanas all ready to go, and any one of those shuts down an opposing player reliably unless they get a OHKO on you using another meta build.
I hope they can balance it but it's such a wreck right now I don't know how. Like when my super-un-meta sorcery and bow and twin straight swords build goes up against someone else with a goofy un-optimized build it's fun and we get to run around whacking at each other until someone runs out of pots or stamina or whatever. But the meta is cancer in ten different ways and that just seems like too much to easily fix.
I honestly wish they'd give people a hard opt-out for PvP so they could do their thing in single player and people who like PvP (hi!) could have regular invasions back. And it sucks that multiplayer is limited to 4 slots. They could have gone in the other direction and let us have crazy fights with 8 or 10 or more, but instead we're down to four total from six in the last game. Feels bad.
Yeah, when there isn't rocket tag I'm actually really digging the PvP, there's a lot more to movesets now. Even for weapons with heavies that are just too slow for PvP, crouching now does your rolling R1 without you needing to roll first, so greatswords now have a reliable fast and long range attack they can use to deal with runners and roll spam. Jumping has two different attacks that are both viable. Weapon arts are actually useful now. There's a variety of funky-scaling talismans and catalysts and weaopns that permit builds to always have something they can use to dip into a different playstyle to supplement their main tactic, which gives every build some mixup potential so long they're willing to put at least one non-core stat into the mid-teens.
But none of that really matters if there's rocket tag options. Why try to have an actual back and forth fight where you're trying to remain unpredictable, land parries, fake your opponent out thinking you're gonna go for a roll R1 but instead you went for an R2 that fucked up their timing and caught them out, when you could just grab an instagib build?
And for invasions, literally just have the invasion item you need to invade other people itself open you up to invasions so long you possess it, the only way to be invaded. You can't just put it away, even when you're wandering around doing PvE you can get invaded, but in return you can also invade people trying the same thing. If you got that bloody finger, you're fair game. There's no more need to have gank squads at all, at that point you can just disallow all friendly phantoms except for Hunters (to act as time pressure so invaders aren't just camping near enemies the entire time), if you summon a friendly phantom then the assumption is that you wanna do co-op and that is the only way you can turn off invasions.
Lorewise a Souls game that just assumes this is how invasions work now would be refreshing. Just literally an ethical murder cult, bragging about murdering each other and taking offense to the idea that they'd ever lay a hand on anyone innocent. Rewards are more or less what they are now, nothing you can't reasonably get without the PvP but a fun way to make doing PvP worth your while. Hell, you can even reward people just for being invaded, even if they fucking die! Just a joyous, friendly murder cult where if your murder comrade gets your ass they still leave you a present - maybe even give them an option to "tip" anyone they kill!
9/10 invaders can ended by covering everything in dragonrot.
IMO the current super-aggressive state of PVP is better than DS3's invaders who'd just keep running away into enemies so you never had a 1v1.
I've been having some fun with over-encumbering armor+Bloody Helice, I don't need to roll if I just use the weapon art's i-frames.
IMO the current super-aggressive state of PVP is better than DS3’s invaders who’d just keep running away into enemies so you never had a 1v1.
This is kind of solved by only allowing invasions during coop. Worst case you can have one person deal with the mobs and one person deal with the invader.
