Elden Ring - Shadow of the Erdtree Expansion Announced

[Anne Summers]

2 minutes ago, Davros sock drawer said:

Random is just one of those words that people don’t know the meaning of anymore. Like “literally”. 

It's literally so random that you just said that. 

[Anne Summers]

6 minutes ago, Majora said:

 

Your theory is incorrect 😀

 

I actually have no clue about the lift but the island across the way from the castle has nothing to do with it.

Can you give me a pointer on how to get to that island?

[NexivRed]

14 minutes ago, Doctor Shark said:

Bloody hellfire…I know this. I have been saying this. My entire point was that the fight isn’t random in the slightest and if you practice and pay attention you can see that, which can lead to people being able to beat it naked at level one if they’re so inclined. It might seem random when you first go in in the same way trying to read French might seem random if you’ve never done it before but you keep practicing and you see patterns, pick up on things, and you get there, eventually. I said the fight is teaching you how to fight bosses. I’m not saying it’s easy (in fact I said the opposite), I’m not saying anyone can or should do it at level 1 naked, but that the fight is not random, you just have to pay attention, not panic, not roll around randomly to avoid things but roll with purpose when you need to, not rush in mid combo thinking it’s safe and then moaning he’s random when he keeps whacking you, trying to block combos you know you can’t block and getting hurt and so on so forth. 

I know it’s a fact. But a lot of us will never see the patterns. There are so many variables that to try and run tests to pick up the patterns can take ages. Sometimes be impossible. Therefore for some of us, there will never be readable patterns in the time we’re alive. Being a certain distance away can trigger things for example. 
 

I know what you’re saying. I’m used to going into a boss fight knowing exactly what it does, when it does it, and how you counter it. That’s just how you raided in WoW. So the people whom you’re answering aren’t disagreeing with you. Both things are correct at the same time. He has patterns of attack, but is seemingly randomly deploying them to someone who can never know the patterns purely from the encounters. 
 

I wasn’t trying to say you were wrong or didn’t have a point. Just that someone saying his attacks seeming random can be correct as well due to the fact they’ll never see the patterns. 
 

Obviously phases are different as they will happen regardless. But from my experience, there were attacks Margit only performed when I forced him or allowed him to perform them. 

[Thor]

Who is the NPC that people keep thinking is Sean Bean? I haven't heard anyone who sounds like him.

[Fitzcarraldo]

1 minute ago, Thor said:

Who is the NPC that people keep thinking is Sean Bean? I haven't heard anyone who sounds like him.

If it's who I'm thinking of, he's at The Roundtable. In a room you may not have access to yet.

[Sexton Hardcastle]

I thought that was Chris Finch. Top librarian & a bloody good sales rep.

[Parappa]

4 minutes ago, Thor said:

Who is the NPC that people keep thinking is Sean Bean? I haven't heard anyone who sounds like him.

I think there are more than one. 

[Hawklord]

25 minutes ago, Jamie John said:

 

I did that bit last night. The route is pretty well hidden. I left a message to try to tell others which way to go.

 

The only other place in Stormveil I haven't yet been to is

  Hide contents

down the tower with the big lift in the middle, where you encounter the first banished knight (apart from the one in the cell where the door gets locked behind you, anyway). There's no way to summon the lift without getting in it from the bottom, and I can't get down there. I *think*, however, that this is the underground route to the island with the manor/mini castle on it that you can see off the coast the entire time you're climbing up the Stormveil ramparts; you probably have to find a way to get to the castle first and then get on the lift from the bottom and it brings you up, back to near where the point of grace is. Unless there's another route into the castle without going via the ramparts.

 

 

I forgot about there and yeah it could be

 

16 minutes ago, Majora said:

 

Your theory is incorrect 😀

 

I actually have no clue about the lift but the island across the way from the castle has nothing to do with it.

Ah, ok lol

[deerokus]

I think they all sound like Sean Bean.

[Hexx]

3 hours ago, Majora said:

Any magic users understand this situation with the staffs?

 

I found the meteorite staff early on which seems to be a bit of a beast. It only needed 18 INT and has S magic scaling. The sorcery scaling stat is something daft like 158 at the moment.

 

I've since found two other staffs which have way higher intelligence requirements but seem worse? I think one needs 28 INT but only has B magic scaling and the sorcery scaling is about 60. The other staff I found right at the end of an optional path in the second dungeon. It needs 52 INT(!) but again only has B magic scaling and sorcery scaling of about 60. The only notable thing about the latter staff is that it supposedly speeds up spell casting but I have a talisman for that anyway.

 

I'm not really understanding why this 18 INT staff is so much better than the others. The only thing I can think of is that you can't upgrade that staff whereas you can with the others. But if it already has S magic scaling does that even matter? I'd have to upgrade these other two staffs LOADS to potentially get the same damage output. 

 

Just to further this - at 48 Int my Meteor staff is about 220. 

I've just blown everything upgrading the Demi-Queen's staff (which I was using until I found the Meteor - scary to think you could in theory run to the Meteor at the start of the game) to +13. It's now A scaling and at 206. A few more levels/scaling improvements and it'll overtake it. That's not even considering some of the more powerful late game staffs.

 

(You should also look at staffs details. Some have powers beyond simple Sorc Scaling. E.g. Meteor boosts gravity spells, some increase spell speed or damage and increase FP costs. So "best" might be more tricky that what has the highest damage number)

[Captain Kelsten]

33 minutes ago, Thor said:

Who is the NPC that people keep thinking is Sean Bean? I haven't heard anyone who sounds like him.

One of the guys in the hub. He doesn’t sound like Sean Bean other than having a gruff Yorkshire accent. 
 

I’ve been marvelling at all the Welsh accents on display and then the randomly Brummie Roderika. 

[Uzi]

I was somewhere where I shouldn't have been, came across a dragon that I did fuck all damage too with my spells. Rode my horse away dragon followed me until i hid behind a rock near a cliff and a tree. Dragon ended up stuck on the tree so I went above hit its wing a few times and it insta died hahahaha. 80k souls for nothing. Got me six free level ups.

[Alan Stock]

So I had the whole evening yesterday to play Elden Ring and decided to finish exploring the Weeping Peninsula. It took all night just to rinse it all, and that's not including the evening I spent there the night before!

 

Spoilers for the whole area:

Spoiler

The previous night I had cleared Mourne Castle and the area within its outer walls, so I started off by going over the fallen ruin which acts as a bridge above the ravine where the caravan has been decimated. Over that side I found a curious area with lanky chaps casting gravity spells, the ground pockmarked with holes with golden material inside. Are they mining it? Very curious...

 

Uphill was a little sealed building, where I need to find 3 wise animals. I didn't find one all night (with maybe 1 exception), so hopefully I didn't miss one and they are elsewhere! Along the cliffside downhill, I found a dungeon, the Impalers Catacombs, so went to clear that out. Its full of the bigger stone imps which are a pain in the arse. I realised though that this was an ideal time to try out all the new weapons I had, so during exploration and the boss I tried out new swords like the Claymore, Falcons Talon and so on. The Claymore now has a jumping somersault attack! Later on there's a nasty floor trap, but the room looked so suspicious I immediately ran out of it to bait any surprises, which saved my life. Under the floor trap you can drop down to a flooded basement, filled with zombies. But these zombies are bastards, they charge at you and hug you to death. Even worse, they constantly respawn, and are everywhere. On realising this, I ran around scooping up items, dodging groups of them before finding the ladder out. 

 

The boss of this dungeon was a right bitch. Just another stone cat, but it's like the Limgrave dungeon stone cat on steroids, with 3 heads, plunging sword attacks and a fire attack. But what makes the fight a nightmare is that it has 4 big imp bodyguards. I had decided not to use summons/spirits on Weeping Penisula bosses for the challenge, which turned out to make this battle horrible - having 4 imps chase you around, dodging your attacks, whilst also being borne down on by the boss was very painful. The imps could take quite a few hits as well. It took many deaths and experiments to find the best weapon for the job, in the end the tactic was to charge in and critical hit an imp whilst they were waiting up, then run around the arena and try to focus the imps that were separated, kill the imps and then be free to focus on the boss. This took a long time to pull off, I did make it to the boss part a few times but got smooshed mainly due to running out of resources from the imp part. Finally though, I was victorious, my reward being Demi-Human spirit ashes. 

 

Back over the ruin 'bridge' and uphill, I discovered a village infested with Frenzy (Bloodborne nightmares resurface!), thank god it works differently in this game! I cleared the village and for the rat-infested church behind, I placed myself atop a rocky outcrop above and used my crossbow to snipe most of them. I got a jumpscare when the fat rat knocked me off my perch from behind, after being shot he'd made it all the way around up the hill! Bastard! I survived down below by the skin of my teeth. I picked up a Frenzy spell at some point, but looks like its for NPC/PVP encounters only as it only affects Tarnished. Across a chasm I could hear the faint noise of singing, and having read something earlier in the thread about harpies I whipped out the telescope and sure enough on the cliff was a winged beast. You won't fool me! 
 

Next I found some demi-humans getting sniped by ballista from a stone tower near a pond. I climbed up to deliver justice for the demi-humans, but they were still cowering beneath their shields when I came back down, so I put them out of their misery, what a benevolent chap I am! I headed down into the forest below, where I got ambushed by demi-humans (they pop up from the ground in smoke, pretty cool!). Nearby in the woods were some demi-human ruins, so I summoned my new ashes to have some civil war. The demi-human ashes seem great, there's a good mix of mobs including a tanky one and a fast one. At the back of the ruins was a church with a huge demi-human, a mage who we took down with ease, who turned out to be a queen. A sneakily hidden basement held a reward as well (I won't remember all the rewards because I did so much exploring!).

 

Returning to the upper levels of the area, I crossed the rope wooden bridge over a chasm and snuck around some weird mage types with branches growing out of their heads. A path led me uphill to a Marika church, where I got another flask booster. I won't be using any items like this though until I'm in harder zones. Following the road downhill through the plains, I finally saw my first walking masuelum. Sadly I'd already been spoiled on them from the loading screens, but it was still cool to see. What was curious though was the headless soldiers around the area. I cleared out another church nearby and some ruins which had some horrible 4 armed insectoid warriors, and a big ball thing which unleashed barrages of falling purple magic. In the basement was a girl pinned to the wall and clearly being tortured, she looks like maybe from one of the mage institutes, but didn't have anything to say besides her lament. Curious as to the lore here, maybe I will come back to her later.

 

Investigating the walking mauselum, I quickly discovered I could knock off the white skulls from around its feet, which eventually caused it to lower down (almost flattening me!). Inside I was able to duplicate Godricks soul, I only have done him so far. The missing head of the corpse within implies the headless soldiers are guarding the mauselum. I carried on downhill to the beach, strewn with debris and broken boats, and in really cool imagery, hordes of zombies silhouetted against the sky. I spent some time taking out the biggest mob of them, using fire bombs and eventually just good old stabbing to wipe out about 30 (getting few unwanted hugs in the process!). Not much else to find on the beach, except a merchant who sells some nice stuff, who curiously has a face covering, which I'm sure is significant, maybe we'll have more to do with him later.

 

Up from the beach I raced through an ambush on Torrent by soldiers, through a gap in between two fallen ruins. They paid the price. I dismounted as further uphill I saw a ballista tower, so sneaked my way up, avoiding a mounted knight and guardsmen. Up the tower I removed the ballista man, and found a trapped chest. I already knew what the ominous smoke meant, so stayed well away. This is going on my to-do list for later. From up here I had a great sniper perch (tm) so shot all the soldiers and the knight without taking a scratch.

 

With most of the peninsula now explored including a few dungeons I'd unlocked and would return to later, the last area to check was around the 'small' Erdtree. It certainly is pretty up here. I took out the perimeter mages before facing the Erdtree avatar. He looked intimidating but it turned out to be a simple mounted battle (no summons needed), where I only got hit once or twice for being greedy. Strangely, not much else here. The destroyed living pots are interesting. So far I've only met some in Stormvale, and Alexander the pot who buggered off to join a festival of combat elsewhere. I wonder if the pots are created by the Erdtrees, or were worshipping it or something. Up in this area I found the cliff path to the harpy, who turned out not to be too bad.

 

With everything (hopefully) explored, I now took on the 3 dungeons I'd discovered, as well as one in Limgrave I'd discovered the previous night. Once again I didn't use any summons for the challenge. A few dungeons were skelly infested tombs. One was poison caves, where my cure poison spell came in handy, and the boss was just one of those big flowers, easy peasy. One boss was a cool shadow wraith who took a few tries to beat. Another was a ninja who just kept backing away but went down easily, and had some interesting lore about killing one of the demi-gods. One of the dungeons had a classic falling floor into a rat ambush (I avoided it the first time and promptly forgot when I came back later!). The boss here was a bastard, a giant bear. I died a lot and was doing crap damage to him, until I realised two things. One, if you roll under his arms you can stay under most of his attacks, and two, my fire click spell did ok damage. It still took a bunch of attempts, and took some diligent roll timings and self restraint in attack timings, but got there in the end. Definitely the hardest one, in fact I'd say he was harder for me than the Castle Mourne boss.

 

Lastly was the mines. Really cool sound design in here, great atmosphere. More pygmies to deal with, and miner guys. I tried out my torch attacks here and sure enough the miners are very weak to fire, so that helped a lot. Got a bunch of weapon stones, which was nice. Unfortunately I was lured by the big doors and for some reason didn't think it would be the boss, so 8k runes almost went down the drain as I reached him with zero resources and died immediately. Thankfully I beat the boss on the second attempt, an axe-wielding pygmy guy who wasn't too bad once you got the timings down, and retrieved my runes. Rather than levelling up anything and getting too strong with all the runes I'd been collecting this session, I'd been spending them all on vendor goods - so now I have all the miracles, and cleared out most of the items from the 2 vendors on the peninsula.

 

The last tasks of the night were some mop-up stuff. I returned to Castle Mourne to see what the commander's reaction would be to his daughter's death. He wasn't there. He turned out to be at her corpse, vowing revenge. The cleaver looks like one of the pygmy ones, so I'm not sure where he could go. In fact, the whole lore of this area isn't coming together just yet. I have tidbits but many gaps to fill in, which will hopefully come from new discoveries. Rhetorical questions: Who or what caused the infection/madness that transformed the peninsula people? It's not frenzy, I think, as the frenzied lot have yellow eyes. Who are the frenzy group and where does that originate?

 

I got new ashes from one of the dungeons, the spirit of a headless hero, which has more tasty lore on the headless, their connection to the mausoleum and resurrection of demi-gods. Looking forward to learning more about that. There's also been some lore about these assassin types and killing one of the demi-gods, so maybe they are connected. Another lore tidbit I got is about the Tarnished arriving on the shores of the lands by a leader. It made me think about all the boats and wreckage on the beaches I've found so far, and the zombies on the peninsula beaches. I wonder if this was from the Tarnished arriving en-masse, or maybe a failed exodus by another group? Anyway, it's very early days for lore, but I'm enjoying piecing it together and puzzling over it.

 

Finally, there was one place I wanted to get to but couldn't figure out how. On the south edge of Limgrave is a smaller beach, but it's cut off from the longer beach by a waterfall. From the Weeping Peninsula cliffs I could see a figure down there and a fire, so I knew there was some way to get there. After some exploration along the south cliffs of Limgrave, near the dragon lake, I finally found a safe drop-down route with Torrent. It might be possible to use the air vent on the other beach to get here as well. On this beach there isn't much. The figure turned out to be a gravity attack humanoid similar to the guys I'd found in the pockmarked area. He dropped a gravity attack weapon ash (I've still not used any ashes as I use the charging stabs so much with my straight sword/rapier). There was also a little cave leading to an overlook of the tutorial cave, where there was a talisman to find. So finally I had found that item I had spotted but never found a route to!

 

So that's the Weeping Penisula done. Overall good fun with some awesome views. I have to say its a bit of a slog going through a big area so methodically like that, so in future I think I'll stick to my previous scattershot approach and mix things up a bit more. Still, its pretty cool that the whole penisula seems largely optional and took me two nights to get through! My highlights would be Castle Morne and its boss, the walking mauseluem, the zombie beach and the minor Erdtree. Now I think it's time to return to the flooded forest up north and either beat the mini-boss at the ruins, or have an explore off the main road. Can't wait!

 

Oh yeah, also at the Roundtable I found the sorcerer guy I'd met in Stormveil Castle, sneakily hidden on the balcony. He gave me a nice +8 sword as a reward, though I'm a few dex points off using it. Will definitely be aiming for that though.

 

[Girth Certificate]

3 minutes ago, Uzi said:

I was somewhere where I shouldn't have been, came across a dragon that I did fuck all damage too with my spells. Rode my horse away dragon followed me until i hid behind a rock near a cliff and a tree. Dragon ended up stuck on the tree so I went above hit its wing a few times and it insta died hahahaha. 80k souls for nothing. Got me six free level ups.

 

a giant crab killed the dragon for me. I lol'd then it killed me as well

[kempstar]

Its probably sacrilege to say this, but I am getting a bit bored of the open world stuff, and just want to play the “proper” dungeons.

 

Can someone point me in the right direction? Ive done the first two main bosses. Where should I be going next for the third main story area/boss?

[Hexx]

4 minutes ago, Alan Stock said:

So I had the whole evening yesterday to play Elden Ring and decided to finish exploring the Weeping Peninsula. It took all night just to rinse it all, and that's not including the evening I spent there the night before!

 

 

  Hide contents

 

Uphill was a little sealed building, where I need to find 3 wise animals. I didn't find one all night (with maybe 1 exception), so hopefully I didn't miss one and they are elsewhere! A

 

 

Spoiler

For those types of puzzles the animals are nearby

 

They are

 

Spoiler

Glowing ghost Turtles

 

They can be found

 

Spoiler

IIRC theres one in the bushes near the clue, one back down the hill slight and one INVISIBLE in the pond to the side (look for messages to help find right spot in pond)

 

 

 

[Goemon]

4 hours ago, Ste Pickford said:

A few more additions to my journal.  Only very early stuff so not spoilery or anything.
 

 

This needs to be put into print when it’s finished. Here’s a suggested title

 

‘Elden Ring: Diary of a Madman’s Knowledge’

[Alan Stock]

4 hours ago, Ste Pickford said:

A few more additions to my journal.  Only very early stuff so not spoilery or anything.
 

 

 

Had a proper look at these just now. Love it! I know it will be hard to keep up, but if you do this for at least some of game it will incredible. One thing I found really funny was your comment about the mask immediately covering up your character's face you spent 45 mins making. I had exactly the same. Last night I spent 20 mins at the mirror tweaking my guy's appearance, but the reality is that when you go from the awesome looking character creation screen and into the world, it looks like a piece of shit in-game! My guy looks like a complete doofus although I did manage to fix his protruding lower lip after a ton of messing around with chin, lip, and facial structure options. Still, I find it annoying that Demons Souls remake had a 'hide helmet' setting, but this doesn't. All my best helmets are hoods or just have eye-slits, making my bloke's ugly mug invisible anyway!

[Kevvy Metal]

I think it’s safe to say that this game is the Dark Souls of open-world games!

[Davros sock drawer]

11 minutes ago, Alan Stock said:

So I had the whole evening yesterday to play Elden Ring and decided to finish exploring the Weeping Peninsula. It took all night just to rinse it all, and that's not including the evening I spent there the night before!

 

Spoilers for the whole area:

  Hide contents

The previous night I had cleared Mourne Castle and the area within its outer walls, so I started off by going over the fallen ruin which acts as a bridge above the ravine where the caravan has been decimated. Over that side I found a curious area with lanky chaps casting gravity spells, the ground pockmarked with holes with golden material inside. Are they mining it? Very curious...

 

Uphill was a little sealed building, where I need to find 3 wise animals. I didn't find one all night (with maybe 1 exception), so hopefully I didn't miss one and they are elsewhere! Along the cliffside downhill, I found a dungeon, the Impalers Catacombs, so went to clear that out. Its full of the bigger stone imps which are a pain in the arse. I realised though that this was an ideal time to try out all the new weapons I had, so during exploration and the boss I tried out new swords like the Claymore, Falcons Talon and so on. The Claymore now has a jumping somersault attack! Later on there's a nasty floor trap, but the room looked so suspicious I immediately ran out of it to bait any surprises, which saved my life. Under the floor trap you can drop down to a flooded basement, filled with zombies. But these zombies are bastards, they charge at you and hug you to death. Even worse, they constantly respawn, and are everywhere. On realising this, I ran around scooping up items, dodging groups of them before finding the ladder out. 

 

The boss of this dungeon was a right bitch. Just another stone cat, but it's like the Limgrave dungeon stone cat on steroids, with 3 heads, plunging sword attacks and a fire attack. But what makes the fight a nightmare is that it has 4 big imp bodyguards. I had decided not to use summons/spirits on Weeping Penisula bosses for the challenge, which turned out to make this battle horrible - having 4 imps chase you around, dodging your attacks, whilst also being borne down on by the boss was very painful. The imps could take quite a few hits as well. It took many deaths and experiments to find the best weapon for the job, in the end the tactic was to charge in and critical hit an imp whilst they were waiting up, then run around the arena and try to focus the imps that were separated, kill the imps and then be free to focus on the boss. This took a long time to pull off, I did make it to the boss part a few times but got smooshed mainly due to running out of resources from the imp part. Finally though, I was victorious, my reward being Demi-Human spirit ashes. 

 

Back over the ruin 'bridge' and uphill, I discovered a village infested with Frenzy (Bloodborne nightmares resurface!), thank god it works differently in this game! I cleared the village and for the rat-infested church behind, I placed myself atop a rocky outcrop above and used my crossbow to snipe most of them. I got a jumpscare when the fat rat knocked me off my perch from behind, after being shot he'd made it all the way around up the hill! Bastard! I survived down below by the skin of my teeth. I picked up a Frenzy spell at some point, but looks like its for NPC/PVP encounters only as it only affects Tarnished. Across a chasm I could hear the faint noise of singing, and having read something earlier in the thread about harpies I whipped out the telescope and sure enough on the cliff was a winged beast. You won't fool me! 
 

Next I found some demi-humans getting sniped by ballista from a stone tower near a pond. I climbed up to deliver justice for the demi-humans, but they were still cowering beneath their shields when I came back down, so I put them out of their misery, what a benevolent chap I am! I headed down into the forest below, where I got ambushed by demi-humans (they pop up from the ground in smoke, pretty cool!). Nearby in the woods were some demi-human ruins, so I summoned my new ashes to have some civil war. The demi-human ashes seem great, there's a good mix of mobs including a tanky one and a fast one. At the back of the ruins was a church with a huge demi-human, a mage who we took down with ease, who turned out to be a queen. A sneakily hidden basement held a reward as well (I won't remember all the rewards because I did so much exploring!).

 

Returning to the upper levels of the area, I crossed the rope wooden bridge over a chasm and snuck around some weird mage types with branches growing out of their heads. A path led me uphill to a Marika church, where I got another flask booster. I won't be using any items like this though until I'm in harder zones. Following the road downhill through the plains, I finally saw my first walking masuelum. Sadly I'd already been spoiled on them from the loading screens, but it was still cool to see. What was curious though was the headless soldiers around the area. I cleared out another church nearby and some ruins which had some horrible 4 armed insectoid warriors, and a big ball thing which unleashed barrages of falling purple magic. In the basement was a girl pinned to the wall and clearly being tortured, she looks like maybe from one of the mage institutes, but didn't have anything to say besides her lament. Curious as to the lore here, maybe I will come back to her later.

 

Investigating the walking mauselum, I quickly discovered I could knock off the white skulls from around its feet, which eventually caused it to lower down (almost flattening me!). Inside I was able to duplicate Godricks soul, I only have done him so far. The missing head of the corpse within implies the headless soldiers are guarding the mauselum. I carried on downhill to the beach, strewn with debris and broken boats, and in really cool imagery, hordes of zombies silhouetted against the sky. I spent some time taking out the biggest mob of them, using fire bombs and eventually just good old stabbing to wipe out about 30 (getting few unwanted hugs in the process!). Not much else to find on the beach, except a merchant who sells some nice stuff, who curiously has a face covering, which I'm sure is significant, maybe we'll have more to do with him later.

 

Up from the beach I raced through an ambush on Torrent by soldiers, through a gap in between two fallen ruins. They paid the price. I dismounted as further uphill I saw a ballista tower, so sneaked my way up, avoiding a mounted knight and guardsmen. Up the tower I removed the ballista man, and found a trapped chest. I already knew what the ominous smoke meant, so stayed well away. This is going on my to-do list for later. From up here I had a great sniper perch (tm) so shot all the soldiers and the knight without taking a scratch.

 

With most of the peninsula now explored including a few dungeons I'd unlocked and would return to later, the last area to check was around the 'small' Erdtree. It certainly is pretty up here. I took out the perimeter mages before facing the Erdtree avatar. He looked intimidating but it turned out to be a simple mounted battle (no summons needed), where I only got hit once or twice for being greedy. Strangely, not much else here. The destroyed living pots are interesting. So far I've only met some in Stormvale, and Alexander the pot who buggered off to join a festival of combat elsewhere. I wonder if the pots are created by the Erdtrees, or were worshipping it or something. Up in this area I found the cliff path to the harpy, who turned out not to be too bad.

 

With everything (hopefully) explored, I now took on the 3 dungeons I'd discovered, as well as one in Limgrave I'd discovered the previous night. Once again I didn't use any summons for the challenge. A few dungeons were skelly infested tombs. One was poison caves, where my cure poison spell came in handy, and the boss was just one of those big flowers, easy peasy. One boss was a cool shadow wraith who took a few tries to beat. Another was a ninja who just kept backing away but went down easily, and had some interesting lore about killing one of the demi-gods. One of the dungeons had a classic falling floor into a rat ambush (I avoided it the first time and promptly forgot when I came back later!). The boss here was a bastard, a giant bear. I died a lot and was doing crap damage to him, until I realised two things. One, if you roll under his arms you can stay under most of his attacks, and two, my fire click spell did ok damage. It still took a bunch of attempts, and took some diligent roll timings and self restraint in attack timings, but got there in the end. Definitely the hardest one, in fact I'd say he was harder for me than the Castle Mourne boss.

 

Lastly was the mines. Really cool sound design in here, great atmosphere. More pygmies to deal with, and miner guys. I tried out my torch attacks here and sure enough the miners are very weak to fire, so that helped a lot. Got a bunch of weapon stones, which was nice. Unfortunately I was lured by the big doors and for some reason didn't think it would be the boss, so 8k runes almost went down the drain as I reached him with zero resources and died immediately. Thankfully I beat the boss on the second attempt, an axe-wielding pygmy guy who wasn't too bad once you got the timings down, and retrieved my runes. Rather than levelling up anything and getting too strong with all the runes I'd been collecting this session, I'd been spending them all on vendor goods - so now I have all the miracles, and cleared out most of the items from the 2 vendors on the peninsula.

 

The last tasks of the night were some mop-up stuff. I returned to Castle Mourne to see what the commander's reaction would be to his daughter's death. He wasn't there. He turned out to be at her corpse, vowing revenge. The cleaver looks like one of the pygmy ones, so I'm not sure where he could go. In fact, the whole lore of this area isn't coming together just yet. I have tidbits but many gaps to fill in, which will hopefully come from new discoveries. Rhetorical questions: Who or what caused the infection/madness that transformed the peninsula people? It's not frenzy, I think, as the frenzied lot have yellow eyes. Who are the frenzy group and where does that originate?

 

I got new ashes from one of the dungeons, the spirit of a headless hero, which has more tasty lore on the headless, their connection to the mausoleum and resurrection of demi-gods. Looking forward to learning more about that. There's also been some lore about these assassin types and killing one of the demi-gods, so maybe they are connected. Another lore tidbit I got is about the Tarnished arriving on the shores of the lands by a leader. It made me think about all the boats and wreckage on the beaches I've found so far, and the zombies on the peninsula beaches. I wonder if this was from the Tarnished arriving en-masse, or maybe a failed exodus by another group? Anyway, it's very early days for lore, but I'm enjoying piecing it together and puzzling over it.

 

Finally, there was one place I wanted to get to but couldn't figure out how. On the south edge of Limgrave is a smaller beach, but it's cut off from the longer beach by a waterfall. From the Weeping Peninsula cliffs I could see a figure down there and a fire, so I knew there was some way to get there. After some exploration along the south cliffs of Limgrave, near the dragon lake, I finally found a safe drop-down route with Torrent. It might be possible to use the air vent on the other beach to get here as well. On this beach there isn't much. The figure turned out to be a gravity attack humanoid similar to the guys I'd found in the pockmarked area. He dropped a gravity attack weapon ash (I've still not used any ashes as I use the charging stabs so much with my straight sword/rapier). There was also a little cave leading to an overlook of the tutorial cave, where there was a talisman to find. So finally I had found that item I had spotted but never found a route to!

 

So that's the Weeping Penisula done. Overall good fun with some awesome views. I have to say its a bit of a slog going through a big area so methodically like that, so in future I think I'll stick to my previous scattershot approach and mix things up a bit more. Still, its pretty cool that the whole penisula seems largely optional and took me two nights to get through! My highlights would be Castle Morne and its boss, the walking mauseluem, the zombie beach and the minor Erdtree. Now I think it's time to return to the flooded forest up north and either beat the mini-boss at the ruins, or have an explore off the main road. Can't wait!

 

Oh yeah, also at the Roundtable I found the sorcerer guy I'd met in Stormveil Castle, sneakily hidden on the balcony. He gave me a nice +8 sword as a reward, though I'm a few dex points off using it. Will definitely be aiming for that though.

 

Great write up. I’ve been doing pretty much the same as you, just missed a couple of things you did, and you’ve missed a couple of things I did! 
 

Spoiler

I went through the chest. And there’s also an Evergaol Boss fight.

 

[Alan Stock]

Oh, another mystery regarding the blacksmith:

Spoiler

He's clearly suffering the same affliction as the 'pygmies' in the Weeping Peninsula, in fact he looks exactly like some of the pygmy bosses. I wonder if he will reveal more of what this affliction is? It looks like it could be sea related, with the barnacle-like growths on their bodies.

 

[Alan Stock]

1 minute ago, Davros sock drawer said:

Great write up. I’ve been doing pretty much the same as you, just missed a couple of things you did, and you’ve missed a couple of things I did! 
 

  Hide contents

I went through the chest. And there’s also an Evergaol Boss fight.

 

 

Spoiler

Doh, I guess I will have to go back at some point and have a mooch! As for the chest, I'm in two minds about it. Although I liked being taken to a new and scary area the last time (the chest in the dragon lake), it also kind of spoiled the surprise to come. I did find the Evergaol but didn't attempt it. I only tried the one on the Stormveil plains so far, and he kicked my arse. I've since found one or two more but skipped them for now. Are any of them doable at this level without hours of pain?

 

[Alan Stock]

12 minutes ago, Hexx said:

 

  Hide contents

For those types of puzzles the animals are nearby

 

They are

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Glowing ghost Turtles

 

They can be found

 

  Reveal hidden contents

IIRC theres one in the bushes near the clue, one back down the hill slight and one INVISIBLE in the pond to the side (look for messages to help find right spot in pond)

 

 

 

 

Thanks for the hint, I didn't read the spoiler but I suspect:

Spoiler

The rune bear boss might be one. I will go back and check, and generally have a look around. Don't confirm for me though!

 

[Alan Stock]

1 hour ago, Jamie John said:

 

I did that bit last night. The route is pretty well hidden. I left a message to try to tell others which way to go.

 

The only other place in Stormveil I haven't yet been to is

  Hide contents

down the tower with the big lift in the middle, where you encounter the first banished knight (apart from the one in the cell where the door gets locked behind you, anyway). There's no way to summon the lift without getting in it from the bottom, and I can't get down there. I *think*, however, that this is the underground route to the island with the manor/mini castle on it that you can see off the coast the entire time you're climbing up the Stormveil ramparts; you probably have to find a way to get to the castle first and then get on the lift from the bottom and it brings you up, back to near where the point of grace is. Unless there's another route into the castle without going via the ramparts.

 

 

I had completely forgotten about this and surely you are right. Now I'm very curious about it. I wonder if

Spoiler

If you kill the slug/dragon boss in the basement, that opens up a new route? Though when I panic ran past him, I only found a ladder taking you back up to the main castle.

 

Edit - I read the reply to Jamie John's post. The mystery thickens!

[Davros sock drawer]

19 minutes ago, Alan Stock said:

 

  Hide contents

Doh, I guess I will have to go back at some point and have a mooch! As for the chest, I'm in two minds about it. Although I liked being taken to a new and scary area the last time (the chest in the dragon lake), it also kind of spoiled the surprise to come. I did find the Evergaol but didn't attempt it. I only tried the one on the Stormveil plains so far, and he kicked my arse. I've since found one or two more but skipped them for now. Are any of them doable at this level without hours of pain?

 

I found this one easy, but the Knight in Limgrave absolutely stomped me. 
 

I’m level 33, (still) using a +10 Longsword. Oh, and the Raya Lucaria Soldiers ashes, who seem OP frankly. They killed the boss of the Weeping Peninsula Erdtree dungeon for me! 

[Number 28]

Backstabbing is such a joy in this, purely because the enemies no longer instantly snap into the backstab animation. I can't remember if they already cleared that up in Dark Souls 3, but in this it is particuarly chef's kiss when you backstab somebody who was sitting down.

[Mike S]

My lunchtime was spent in Stormveil Castle.

 

My heart is still literally racing and the adrenaline coursing fifteen minutes after ending the session as the tension and dread was off the scale.

 

An all time great Souls level which I have been carefully creeping around whilst becoming increasingly disorientated, increasingly fearful of losing my growing pile of runes, and increasingly desperate to find the sanctuary and respite of a bonfire, lamp, grace.

 

This actual physical reaction is why I love From games -  I've never played any other series of games that generate such intense stress and, ultimately (hopefully!) relief when the challenges are overcome. As is, after an early few moments of joy (a shortcut!) and killing a tough multi armed screaming monstrosity (which dropped nothing as reward), and the happiness of somehow finding way sneaking up behind a small army, I am now dead a very long and convoluted way from my start point. I fear those are lost runes...

 

The green and pleasant meadows of Limgrave seem like they took place in a different, much happier and more peaceful, and very distant world so great has been the shift in tone from the bright and life filled open world to the constant high pressure, oppressive malice of Stormveil. 

 

Praise the fucking sun!

[Alan Stock]

A similar thing I love is that effect when all the souls come flying out of their body on a crit/death. The visceral attacks on weak points are also really meaty feeling. They totally nailed the combat feedback in this game, everything feels suitably weighty.

[Number 28]

Aye, in case anyone didn't realise already, if you see a bunch of white particle effects fly out of an enemy upon death, that means that they have an item. It's helpful to spot on Torrent drive-bys.

 

I don't think I'm going to be able to crack this Academy boss because my build is a total glass cannon. I was watching the Eurogamer folk do it yesterday and their HP was double mine.

[joemul]

51 minutes ago, Alan Stock said:

So I had the whole evening yesterday to play Elden Ring and decided to finish exploring the Weeping Peninsula. It took all night just to rinse it all, and that's not including the evening I spent there the night before!

 

Spoilers for the whole area:

  Reveal hidden contents

The previous night I had cleared Mourne Castle and the area within its outer walls, so I started off by going over the fallen ruin which acts as a bridge above the ravine where the caravan has been decimated. Over that side I found a curious area with lanky chaps casting gravity spells, the ground pockmarked with holes with golden material inside. Are they mining it? Very curious...

 

Uphill was a little sealed building, where I need to find 3 wise animals. I didn't find one all night (with maybe 1 exception), so hopefully I didn't miss one and they are elsewhere! Along the cliffside downhill, I found a dungeon, the Impalers Catacombs, so went to clear that out. Its full of the bigger stone imps which are a pain in the arse. I realised though that this was an ideal time to try out all the new weapons I had, so during exploration and the boss I tried out new swords like the Claymore, Falcons Talon and so on. The Claymore now has a jumping somersault attack! Later on there's a nasty floor trap, but the room looked so suspicious I immediately ran out of it to bait any surprises, which saved my life. Under the floor trap you can drop down to a flooded basement, filled with zombies. But these zombies are bastards, they charge at you and hug you to death. Even worse, they constantly respawn, and are everywhere. On realising this, I ran around scooping up items, dodging groups of them before finding the ladder out. 

 

The boss of this dungeon was a right bitch. Just another stone cat, but it's like the Limgrave dungeon stone cat on steroids, with 3 heads, plunging sword attacks and a fire attack. But what makes the fight a nightmare is that it has 4 big imp bodyguards. I had decided not to use summons/spirits on Weeping Penisula bosses for the challenge, which turned out to make this battle horrible - having 4 imps chase you around, dodging your attacks, whilst also being borne down on by the boss was very painful. The imps could take quite a few hits as well. It took many deaths and experiments to find the best weapon for the job, in the end the tactic was to charge in and critical hit an imp whilst they were waiting up, then run around the arena and try to focus the imps that were separated, kill the imps and then be free to focus on the boss. This took a long time to pull off, I did make it to the boss part a few times but got smooshed mainly due to running out of resources from the imp part. Finally though, I was victorious, my reward being Demi-Human spirit ashes. 

 

Back over the ruin 'bridge' and uphill, I discovered a village infested with Frenzy (Bloodborne nightmares resurface!), thank god it works differently in this game! I cleared the village and for the rat-infested church behind, I placed myself atop a rocky outcrop above and used my crossbow to snipe most of them. I got a jumpscare when the fat rat knocked me off my perch from behind, after being shot he'd made it all the way around up the hill! Bastard! I survived down below by the skin of my teeth. I picked up a Frenzy spell at some point, but looks like its for NPC/PVP encounters only as it only affects Tarnished. Across a chasm I could hear the faint noise of singing, and having read something earlier in the thread about harpies I whipped out the telescope and sure enough on the cliff was a winged beast. You won't fool me! 
 

Next I found some demi-humans getting sniped by ballista from a stone tower near a pond. I climbed up to deliver justice for the demi-humans, but they were still cowering beneath their shields when I came back down, so I put them out of their misery, what a benevolent chap I am! I headed down into the forest below, where I got ambushed by demi-humans (they pop up from the ground in smoke, pretty cool!). Nearby in the woods were some demi-human ruins, so I summoned my new ashes to have some civil war. The demi-human ashes seem great, there's a good mix of mobs including a tanky one and a fast one. At the back of the ruins was a church with a huge demi-human, a mage who we took down with ease, who turned out to be a queen. A sneakily hidden basement held a reward as well (I won't remember all the rewards because I did so much exploring!).

 

Returning to the upper levels of the area, I crossed the rope wooden bridge over a chasm and snuck around some weird mage types with branches growing out of their heads. A path led me uphill to a Marika church, where I got another flask booster. I won't be using any items like this though until I'm in harder zones. Following the road downhill through the plains, I finally saw my first walking masuelum. Sadly I'd already been spoiled on them from the loading screens, but it was still cool to see. What was curious though was the headless soldiers around the area. I cleared out another church nearby and some ruins which had some horrible 4 armed insectoid warriors, and a big ball thing which unleashed barrages of falling purple magic. In the basement was a girl pinned to the wall and clearly being tortured, she looks like maybe from one of the mage institutes, but didn't have anything to say besides her lament. Curious as to the lore here, maybe I will come back to her later.

 

Investigating the walking mauselum, I quickly discovered I could knock off the white skulls from around its feet, which eventually caused it to lower down (almost flattening me!). Inside I was able to duplicate Godricks soul, I only have done him so far. The missing head of the corpse within implies the headless soldiers are guarding the mauselum. I carried on downhill to the beach, strewn with debris and broken boats, and in really cool imagery, hordes of zombies silhouetted against the sky. I spent some time taking out the biggest mob of them, using fire bombs and eventually just good old stabbing to wipe out about 30 (getting few unwanted hugs in the process!). Not much else to find on the beach, except a merchant who sells some nice stuff, who curiously has a face covering, which I'm sure is significant, maybe we'll have more to do with him later.

 

Up from the beach I raced through an ambush on Torrent by soldiers, through a gap in between two fallen ruins. They paid the price. I dismounted as further uphill I saw a ballista tower, so sneaked my way up, avoiding a mounted knight and guardsmen. Up the tower I removed the ballista man, and found a trapped chest. I already knew what the ominous smoke meant, so stayed well away. This is going on my to-do list for later. From up here I had a great sniper perch (tm) so shot all the soldiers and the knight without taking a scratch.

 

With most of the peninsula now explored including a few dungeons I'd unlocked and would return to later, the last area to check was around the 'small' Erdtree. It certainly is pretty up here. I took out the perimeter mages before facing the Erdtree avatar. He looked intimidating but it turned out to be a simple mounted battle (no summons needed), where I only got hit once or twice for being greedy. Strangely, not much else here. The destroyed living pots are interesting. So far I've only met some in Stormvale, and Alexander the pot who buggered off to join a festival of combat elsewhere. I wonder if the pots are created by the Erdtrees, or were worshipping it or something. Up in this area I found the cliff path to the harpy, who turned out not to be too bad.

 

With everything (hopefully) explored, I now took on the 3 dungeons I'd discovered, as well as one in Limgrave I'd discovered the previous night. Once again I didn't use any summons for the challenge. A few dungeons were skelly infested tombs. One was poison caves, where my cure poison spell came in handy, and the boss was just one of those big flowers, easy peasy. One boss was a cool shadow wraith who took a few tries to beat. Another was a ninja who just kept backing away but went down easily, and had some interesting lore about killing one of the demi-gods. One of the dungeons had a classic falling floor into a rat ambush (I avoided it the first time and promptly forgot when I came back later!). The boss here was a bastard, a giant bear. I died a lot and was doing crap damage to him, until I realised two things. One, if you roll under his arms you can stay under most of his attacks, and two, my fire click spell did ok damage. It still took a bunch of attempts, and took some diligent roll timings and self restraint in attack timings, but got there in the end. Definitely the hardest one, in fact I'd say he was harder for me than the Castle Mourne boss.

 

Lastly was the mines. Really cool sound design in here, great atmosphere. More pygmies to deal with, and miner guys. I tried out my torch attacks here and sure enough the miners are very weak to fire, so that helped a lot. Got a bunch of weapon stones, which was nice. Unfortunately I was lured by the big doors and for some reason didn't think it would be the boss, so 8k runes almost went down the drain as I reached him with zero resources and died immediately. Thankfully I beat the boss on the second attempt, an axe-wielding pygmy guy who wasn't too bad once you got the timings down, and retrieved my runes. Rather than levelling up anything and getting too strong with all the runes I'd been collecting this session, I'd been spending them all on vendor goods - so now I have all the miracles, and cleared out most of the items from the 2 vendors on the peninsula.

 

The last tasks of the night were some mop-up stuff. I returned to Castle Mourne to see what the commander's reaction would be to his daughter's death. He wasn't there. He turned out to be at her corpse, vowing revenge. The cleaver looks like one of the pygmy ones, so I'm not sure where he could go. In fact, the whole lore of this area isn't coming together just yet. I have tidbits but many gaps to fill in, which will hopefully come from new discoveries. Rhetorical questions: Who or what caused the infection/madness that transformed the peninsula people? It's not frenzy, I think, as the frenzied lot have yellow eyes. Who are the frenzy group and where does that originate?

 

I got new ashes from one of the dungeons, the spirit of a headless hero, which has more tasty lore on the headless, their connection to the mausoleum and resurrection of demi-gods. Looking forward to learning more about that. There's also been some lore about these assassin types and killing one of the demi-gods, so maybe they are connected. Another lore tidbit I got is about the Tarnished arriving on the shores of the lands by a leader. It made me think about all the boats and wreckage on the beaches I've found so far, and the zombies on the peninsula beaches. I wonder if this was from the Tarnished arriving en-masse, or maybe a failed exodus by another group? Anyway, it's very early days for lore, but I'm enjoying piecing it together and puzzling over it.

 

Finally, there was one place I wanted to get to but couldn't figure out how. On the south edge of Limgrave is a smaller beach, but it's cut off from the longer beach by a waterfall. From the Weeping Peninsula cliffs I could see a figure down there and a fire, so I knew there was some way to get there. After some exploration along the south cliffs of Limgrave, near the dragon lake, I finally found a safe drop-down route with Torrent. It might be possible to use the air vent on the other beach to get here as well. On this beach there isn't much. The figure turned out to be a gravity attack humanoid similar to the guys I'd found in the pockmarked area. He dropped a gravity attack weapon ash (I've still not used any ashes as I use the charging stabs so much with my straight sword/rapier). There was also a little cave leading to an overlook of the tutorial cave, where there was a talisman to find. So finally I had found that item I had spotted but never found a route to!

 

So that's the Weeping Penisula done. Overall good fun with some awesome views. I have to say its a bit of a slog going through a big area so methodically like that, so in future I think I'll stick to my previous scattershot approach and mix things up a bit more. Still, its pretty cool that the whole penisula seems largely optional and took me two nights to get through! My highlights would be Castle Morne and its boss, the walking mauseluem, the zombie beach and the minor Erdtree. Now I think it's time to return to the flooded forest up north and either beat the mini-boss at the ruins, or have an explore off the main road. Can't wait!

 

Oh yeah, also at the Roundtable I found the sorcerer guy I'd met in Stormveil Castle, sneakily hidden on the balcony. He gave me a nice +8 sword as a reward, though I'm a few dex points off using it. Will definitely be aiming for that though.

 

Re the NPC you found

Spoiler

I killed her as it seemed cruel to leave her there pinned to the wall. Took a few hits so i worry i made a mistake there....