Underneath my yellow skin

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Shadow of the Erdtree, a review, part nine

Yes, I’m back with another post about Shadow of the Erdtree, the DLC for Elden Ring (FromSoft). At the end of the last post, I was talking about summoning in the DLC the second time through (human summons) because I did it a few times in the second half of the DLC the second time I played through it.

*SPOILER WARNING*

I have to say, I took very vicious satisfaction in killing the Blackgaol Knight on my second try in NG+. This is the first field boss I fought in the DLC, and with 38 Vigor, he was really fucking hard for me to fight. He has poise for days and his weapon skill is a slice of light that never ends up where I think it will.

Side note: this is one of my issues with the bosses in general in the DLC. It happened in the base game as well, but moreso in the DLC. The bosses had combos for days and were really hard to stagger. I was able to mitigate that with my second character, but my first character was not poise-forward, shall we say.

The Blackgaol Knight made me question whether I was ready for the DLC or not. One thing that constantly frustrates me about the DLCs for the From games is how they turn it up to a hundo every time. I know I’m in the minority when I say that thde DLCs are not my favorite part of any From game because everyone else loves them so much.

I died to the BGK over and over again. I went at him for an hour and was getting increasingly frustrated. I had to do all sorts of shenanigans in order to beat him, including dumping 20 points into Vigor. In cantrast, I one-shot him in my second playthrough and two-shot him in NG+. I wonder if FromSoft nerfed him because he was so fucknig hard the first time around. Then again, I waited a bit before tackling him in my second playthrough, and I’m full scadded up for my NG+ playthrough. That means that I was buffed as much as I was going to be to take on this dude. And it went so much better.

This, of course, is to be expected. I am better than I was before, and I knew what I was doing (kind of). On the other hand, he was harder, stronger, and buffed up himself. I expected it to be a dozen or so tries–maybe more. But, I got him in two, and it wasn’t even that close. Blasphemous Blade Ash of War for the win! Which is what I did the first time around as well. That particular Ash of War got nerfed, but it’s still pretty OP.


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