Elden Ring Dissected #1 - Fall Damage Explained 

Not sure if documented, I was able to deathcam on the rim of *SPOILER* *SPOILER* *SPOILER* the rim of the forge of the giants, tried to fall into it from the side bc it looked as if you can land in it. Torrent died immediately but I lived.

I discovered the Impaler's Catacombs bug the hard way in the first week of release. I went there and wasn't sure how to open the boss door and saw some bloodstains in the pit so I assumed that there was more of the level down there since there were other dungeons where there were some odd drops you could make. I dropped, got the deathcam glitch and lost 35k runes. Felt pretty silly when that happened.

Speaking of wikis... Which one are you using? I remember that wikidot was pretty much the best for other souls games most of the time, but well there isn't one for ER

@@nackskott12 if you dropped there, collected the runes and then killed yourself in less than 10 seconds then you should have been able to recover it I did save my runes this way once when I landed on a lethal height using the spring

@@Archimedes.5000 Ah yeah so I used to use and prefer wikidot but it hasn't been maintained, so I'll be switching to Fextralife for Elden Ring.

so did I considering the description vs actual effect wouldn't hold up in court.

Thats....hardly "superb storytelling." Thats basic game design, which fromsoft only barely understands most of the time lol

@@flashbackfrank8781 lol really? Fromsoft don't understand game design? How many games have you published? Let alone games with meta-critic scores like that of Elden Ring?

​@@HungryHungryShoggoth It's literly Basic story telling. You don't have to design games to know that. There are many game with many examples of story telling by just looking at the scene.

@@HungryHungryShoggoth not to burst your high and mighty score bubble but meta critics and all that IGN score crap doesn't mean shit to anybody. Those companies are paid to give good scores and promote games accordingly.

Agreed, while the Dark Souls once approach being potentially more punishing, it DOES make a lot more sense and FEELS somewhat more natural. I mean... there's a huge difference betwen taking excessive damage and potentially dying due to a fall because you have not enough hitpoints to be GUARANTEED TO DIE. When the actual difference is only 4 meters, which seems utterly redicilous if you ask me. Especially when considering that people in RL have fallen from much greater heights and survived. But well... it IS a game afterall.

It feels like they painted themselves into a corner. If they were to increase the distance it takes to kill, it would almost certainly break many areas of the game.

My thoughts exactly

I'm pretty sure they changed it to encourage more movement and exploration

weirdest thing is, if they just made the falling damage linear between 0% and 100% (or at least continuous), I don't even think we would've had this issue at all.

I thought the same but my theory is From actively does not want you traveling that way and deliberately makes these drops at the death level.

It did make the items feel obsolete. I can’t think kf anything game breaking after beating the game that would greatly reward a player getting to fall let’s say max another 4 meters, other then saving a lot of time. I personally liked it when we could gauge a fall better.

@@arthurdurham stop trying to restrict players like that then. who cares if it breaks progression or allows players to do certain things early if they know what they're doing? unless it literally bugs the game out, it shouldn't matter. give me freedom!

@@arthurdurham In many places that doesn't seem true though. For instance, the cliff outside Morne tunnel in limgrave. To leave that area, you have to drop down, (or fast travel to get out,) but you'll die on the east side of the cliff, but not on the west. Besides, for most cliffs, jumping would just save you a few hunderd meters of running down a tapering edge.

@@malum9478 It's really not as simple as that. You have to consider where your player is and isn't allowed to go in game design and level design, and having hard limits on this in your design is good. Building a level design for an area with the expectation that the player can't ever fall 20 metres means you have some consistency in where and how you want to guide the player. It allows you to set things up so players have to progress through area A to find an item that you've already shown them, which is relevant to what you see in area A, and maybe hint a connection between areas A and B. Or they can get to a place that they recognise as something they saw below or in the distance somewhere. You use things like this to control a player's experience somewhat, and you want to be able to use puzzles and skill checks (read: challenging fights or obstacles) so the player can progress and accomplish things as they do. Like you don't want to have your dungeons set up in a way where the player can accidentally miss significant parts of it, because that feels lazy and unsatisfying. It's also important to the design language of the game (how the player "reads" the level and interprets locations, paths, platforms and the like). It means you can put things where the player can see but are clearly not intended to get to in this way. Pickups act as bait for a player, to tell them yes, you can go here, and you should, but they have to think about how to get there, be it another route, a hidden left turn somewhere, or accessible from a different area entirely like that one item you can see from that one Church of Marika. If you enable players to have greater and greater survivable falls, it means you have to start putting in more solid walls, more obstacles that break up the player's vision and also make it harder for them to get a good mental grasp of the area they're in and how they're intended to navigate it. These are the things From do really well. I love playing fast, agile rogue-style characters so I do wish the cat talisman had a better effect, but at the same time you have to appreciate that adding an option to allow people to survive designed-in lethal falls might break some of your design and cause frustrations when players get where they're not supposed to be, especially when it's so easy to get down and so hard to get back up (this is why the Borderlands games often use winding maps where the start point is a huge drop from the end point, and have no fall damage). I can think of a couple times I've taken a drop and ended up at a point that was the wrong side of a Stonesword Key wall and been unable to get through, you want to design so the player cannot end up stuck in weird situations like that or traverse a dungeon backwards by mistake or something. But you also don't want to take something like that and make it necessary for progression in certain areas (admittedly they have done this with certain gestures in the past, and carry weight not being a feature means you can just have this stuff wherever you go just in case).

Talisman makes it even worse, you dont receive damage if you barely survived a fall and you end not knowing that was a lethal fall

best ring

​@@abrahamrangel2326 yes

Yes Coupled with the fact that the cat ring, jester's tights and Fall Control stack, amd combined with the reduced fall damage from low equip load, you can do incredible things, like skipping chunks of Brume Tower and Sactum City

If you level vigor enough and get naked, you can do it without cat ring.

The fact that torrent dies and you don't, based on where both of your feet are, is something I was wondering about too.

It still doesn't make sense that Torrents double jump can't be used to save you from fall damage, I get it wouldn't be balanced, but it still looks ridiculous when you can halt your momentum, flutter forward gently and then instantly die upon touching the ground.

Ngl only 4m between taking no fall damage and dying is kinda bs

@@TheAstrobiologistOW Don't fall 20m I guess lol

@@sasaki999pro When you use Torrent's double jump at a fatal range, it should kill you, imo. You stop falling, but your momentum doesn't just disappear. Just imagine using the double jump, and then going splat from the forces involved xD

You can test cliffs by throwing rainbow stones. If they shatter with a loud noise, the fall is guaranteed fatal. If they land with the normal sound, it's fine. (Minus like 1 or 2 wonky kill planes.) Same thing applied to prism stones in dark souls but it's much more useful here.

@@Dynamo33 its not a band-aid solution, its how the item is meant to be used

@@Dynamo33 I think I have died to fall damage maybe twice in over 150 hours of play. Minus the glitch with torrent mentioned in the video, there's nothing seriously wrong with elden ring fall damage. It could stand to be more intuitive by having a wider range where you take damage scaling up higher before death, which would also make the fall damage reduction/negation items matter more. But it's not really a big deal regardless.

@@Dynamo33 "most people would never think to just throw the stones down a cliff for no reason" The rainbow stone's description TELLS YOU that you can drop them to gauge the lethality of a fall, so that's on them for not paying attention or experimenting with their tools. "Have you seen a mechanic like this in any other game, EVER?" Nope! Fromsoft games having strange, unique little interactions like this is part of what makes them interesting, so I hope they keep doing stuff like that-stuff that rewards players for using a variety of things in unusual ways, and for being patient in how they explore their surroundings.

Funny to think that increasing the damage scaling above 50% max would be more intuitive. It would convey a stronger sense of the danger to the player. I'm used to drops really wiping out my health in these games... not "nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, lightly injured, dead"

I was thinking the same. I was stuck for a while, wondering whether I should just take the leap

Same logic as in DS3, no fall damage on that specific platform you fall on.

I spent more than a few runs trying to land on the elevator pole because it was higher up, but kept sliding off and dying. Then I missed and landed on the platform and was fine.

Damn I never knew that. I just landed on the pole and slid off the left and thought I was being clever 😂

SPOILERS BELOW Same with the floor in the Sewers of Leyndell that lead to the Three Fingers.

They should instead decrease the distance where falling starts damaging you, but have it so that damage is only really an issue at 16 meters, like it is now.

@@xethaios just what I wanted to say.. A mix between what the actual distance before taking damage is and the distance before taking damage from the previous titles would be perfect I believe

@@xethaios yeah losing like 10-50% hp from 5-15m (10% per 2m), and then 60%-100%hp from 16-20+m (10%per 1m). Now those fall dmg items make sense, and also fall dmg feels more consistent AND we dont break the game as @Genesis Osuna suggested lol

Cat ring told my I could fall from any height. I died.

@@-Cheif hehe, you forgot to read the description. (the long one I mean, on PC you have to click on R when viewing the item or something like that)

hmm thats smart! just to be sure im understanding the method correctly, you would drop the stones first to judge how long they fall to guess the height?

@@mayalelugas880 It's a binary thing. You drop a rainbow stone off a ledge. If it shatters, the fall will kill you. If it doesn't, you are safe to walk off there (jumping will add height, though)

Then how you get pass the invisible path for the magic slab in crystal cave? I also use rainbow stone in this game to guide me on the invisible path (there are quite a few of them. And in this game it is better because you can craft and carry like hundred of them at once

@@KKKuma You can see the crystal flakes break on the invisible paths in dark souls 1 crystal cave, if that's what your referring too.

@@mayalelugas880 pretty much, yeah

I'm confused when I fell a 40 meter fall I didn't lose 1 % of my health is this a bug?

@@Just-Vitamin lol

But in the souls games, wasn't dying to fall damage also based on how much hp was leveled up? I feel like he glossed over that at the beginning

@@sins0P DS1 and DS3 were % based, so always same height would be lethal, in DS2 i believe damage was a flat value dependant on the height

​@@Spike2276 In DS2 they also pumped the fall damage up and the common theory is because they created the drop in Majula used the higher fall damage to compensate that players could approach it early

Heck If they just made a slow, consistent animation the player does while in freefall, that pretty consistently hard kills at a certain point, it could at least make eyeballing a particular drop something easier to have experience with

I disagree that this has to do with their lack of experience of creating open world games, and more to do with the game's engine.

@@carl8790not sure what you’re getting at, at all. How does the game engine force them to have a ridiculously small damage window with a very unintuitive death wall at 50% damage. If they just bumped it to 25m before death I don’t see how it’d break anything. At minimum just include a section in the tutorial that teaches people how their weird fall damage works. I’m not gonna say it’s their lack of experience that caused this but it coulda been done better

@@monhi64 I'm saying this because imo, their in-house game engine wasn't fully developed to do these large open world areas, with the player leaping of such high places. From all the weird bugs and glitches that the game had in the initial weeks of release. Highly recommend checking out Zullie the Witch's video on Torrent. I do admit that some blame should be on inexperience, since this is fromsoft truly open world game that uses the demon souls/dark souls formula, but it shouldn't be seen as the sole consequence. It's a bit of both inexperience and 1st party engine shenanigans. I also agree with you that fromsoftware should have given the player a heads up on the rules of fall damage in ER.

@@monhi64 cuz their game engine wasn't designed to do that in the first place? It's why ER had all that weird bugs and glitches that were present in other Fromsoft IPs. I do agree though that fromsoft should've give players the heads up on how the fall damage works with Torrent in ER.

Deadass. I was even able to jump everything after landing on the side of a mountain in caelid and i still died after doing the small drop after it

I think just that means that you’re not suppose to go there from jumping down so it’s just insta death no matter what. That’s been in other souls games

Sounds more like a deatgplain for not being allowed somewhere

Oh wow... Glad I explored that area 2 days ago!

yeah that one is really confusing, why the heck did they add a kill plane in a drop-down puzzle section

I would assume this is a bug or is unintentional. No way a kill-plane should be there with the number of items/weapons so close.

@@BigDBrian they likely didnt play test everything given you can pour 150 hours into a single playthrough.

@@alexyguadalupe3456 consider that this kill plane was ADDED this patch. It was not there before the recent update.

That hard cap of 20m is probably there for when they're designing levels, to prevent the amount of unintended shortcuts.

Soft cottons description is reduction in fall damage and sound. Maybe craft those, but it hasn't really been an issue for me.

@@SocietyKilledTheUnicorn Reducing the damage doesn't matter when a fall of over a certain distance will always kill you. It mattered more in previous games when it took less of a fall to take damage, but in this one there's a very narrow window where you take damage without it being an instant kill.

@@LazyMaybe after 2 deaths max you know the distance. It's not a big deal.

Yeah especially because it seems like there is a very, very thin line between taking absolutely no fall damage and immediately dying and in both scenarios you do not benefit from the cat talisman

Ah yes so much more room in DS3, the game where a 10 meter fall takes 50% of your health.

Break all the bones in your ankles, shins, and lower back. *Drinks estus flask*

@@naoiwatani8402 at least it tells the player properly the scale for the distance they can fall. There's far less verticality in that game and no jumping. But having a fucking 4 meter damage window is the stupidest thing possible. No one can properly measure that shit or have to learn outside of the game to understand. It should make sense within the game. And telling your player "you almost died!" by having half their health remaining is abysmally ridiculous.

they didn't give any more leeway at all, they just made it so you take more damage on falls. in elden ring, a near-fatal fall is 50% health. in ds3, it's 90%. this means it's easier to see what falls were dangerous. he talked about this extensively in the video.

If it did, you might as well not have any fall damage on Torrent. Cause you could literally survive any fall. Pretty obvious why it doesn't work like that.

​@@EllaKarhu except there are parts where the game decides this fall will kill you take away your control and zoom out the camera

@xolotltolox7626 That's for out of bounds areas. Putting killboxes randomly around the world would be insane. You want to just die out of nowhere cause a fall was arbitrarily decided to be lethal? You realise how frustrating that would be, right?

@@EllaKarhu Nope, it also happens if a fall is high enough like in limgrave from the grace near Fingerhunter Yura it happens if you were to fall down to the beach which is a walkable area

@xolotltolox7626 Oh, right. Forgot about that. Ok fine, you couldn't survive _every_ fall, but it would still let you survive falls you shouldn't.

Just shows how absolutely shit fall damage feels in this game in comparison. In other games you could pretty easily after time judge falls to be lethal or not based on how much hp you lost but due to the narrow window for taking any damage and the reduced damage over all it feels inconsistent even with all this info to show otherwise. It FEELS wrong so it is a bad system.

@@ShiningDarknes Naw, after watching this it feels fine. You can disagree, but it isn't a problem once you know how it works.

@@Miriam_J_ No it is still a problem. Knowing how something works doesn't change the feel of the mechanic.

@@Miriam_J_ I don’t really care about the fall damage arguments since I never take big falls, but if you need to watch a 30 min video to understand one of the most basic mechanics, it’s not designed very well

@@Miriam_J_ Knowing how a mechanic works doesn't all of the sudden make it good. By this logic there is no such thing as a bad mechanic since all you have to do is understand it then it won't be bad.

Woo, got it before this

This has been fixed with the 1.03.2 patch

Most exploitable spots are in places where you can't even summon him, I'd say. Honestly, if it had just given you 5 extra metres of survivable fall height, that'd be enough for most places where you'd actually think to try it.

I think the deal is they just wanted traversing the world to be kinda a puzzle too, using elevation to dictate where you can progress

@@thinkublu yes but a puzzle where you constantly feel confused as to what you can do and what the points of failure are isn't a great one. i really like from software games but i really think the way they did a lot of the fall damage alterations in this game weren't handled great, and now its kinda too late to change them.

@@Wolf99555 I agree completely

And even if there are exploits, unless it's PvP breaking, who cares? Whose feelings are you hurting, the NPC's?

Totally. By removing fall damage from 5m onward they didn't make it easier on the player, but harder. Fall damage was the only way that a player could get a feel for the impact at different heights to learn what they can actually survive. I'm 100 hours in and I've seen fall damage twice, there's no chance to learn at that frequency.

If they didn't do that in a vertical game like this it would've been really annoying to get fall damage all the time

@@finnfinity9711 maybe what they should have done is make the lower bound 10 or so meters and the upper bound something like 25, or keep it as is but the important part is that the player needs to have a feel for when they can and cannnot survive, so i think they should have more fall damage, so that a 19m fall just barely doesnt kill you so you say "ah, so this height was just shy of killing me"

Exactly right. It helps nothing and no one to base it on such weird breakpoints, and 16 meters/52 feet is a pretty massive fall to be the point that you START to take damage. Making it so Torrent has no effect on fall damage/death distance is also incredibly counterintuitive. There's no reason to be so strict with fall damage up until the fall death breakpoint, so the devs still have complete control over how far down you can go and anything meant to be unreachable can be comfortably outside of it. Everything in between should be highly responsive to player stats. There's no reason for it not to be. Fall damage doesnt need to be based on a percentage of health bc player health will always fall within a predictable range based on the Vigor stat & ingame items. Early game characters with 10-12 vigor should have less ability to survive falls bc they have less health. Demigod slaying berserkers with a huge health pool should be able to survive larger falls just like they can survive more direct hits from a 50 ft long stone halberd. If you have such high dexterity as to be a catlike acrobat then you should take less health damage and be able to virtually eliminate it by the time you reach the last soft cap. Your carry weight should actually matter, increasing fall damage based on your equipment load. Torrent should also factor in, taking health damage first as a cushion. It could be a much more dynamic & responsive system, instead it's lol you died, shoulda tried it from 19.99 meters.

Yeah, they really ought to have just foregone the cat talisman with Elden Ring. It only makes this problem worse by signaling to the player that falls can be mitigated somehow. There's still very easily craftable consumables to take its place, and of course the good old assassin spells.

Realistically it and the other “fall damage reduction” items should have given 1-3 meter increase to max fall distance.

@@ShiningDarknes given how minor the difference between damage and death is in fall distance, that seems pretty fair. now if only it was a real thing XD

I want to see him uncovered too

@@freddiekay Beat me to it!

I'd like to see him make a video about the illusory walls. Supposedly you need to hit them repeatedly in order to break them.

@@boyishdude1234 That's just not true. I've found quite a few in the game and have never needed to hit them more than once.

@@theworstcatholic7247 Then explain that clip in circulation on Twitter right now where someone broken an illusory wall by smacking it repeatedly for a few minutes? It's probably just a bug, but it's not something that I'm making up all the same.

Cat ring in DS3 was **essential** for invading. The amount of HP you can save in high intensity moments just from having the ring on is a literal life saver.

@@zeallust8542 it also was a really good thing for maneuvering in general.

"the game didn't classify the branch as ground" I think this is what's happening, had multiple similar deaths when falling onto branches.

If you somehow stay up for about 3 seconds the fall damage will reset and you might not die

Methinks the lady doth protest too much

I had the exact same thing happen to me.and I knew that shit wasn't over twenty meters. The roots by the minor Erdtree in Caelid are deceptive

@@ssgoko88 What?

Thank you so much, I highly appreciate it! It might be kind of a long watch if you haven't played Dark Souls 1 yet (and maybe too spoiler-y if you plan on going back to it), but not too long ago I made a video all about the system for breaking objects in that game. Though I haven't yet scratched the surface of objects in Elden Ring, I'm highly confident that a lot of what I talked about in that video is going to apply. The tl;dr is that I suspect the variance in the number of required attacks is going to come down to the duration of time your weapon makes contact with the wall. There's something kind of glitchy in Dark Souls 1 where something like active frames (maybe?) are being counted. It didn't work that way in Demon's Souls, so it broke with Dark Souls 1 and wasn't fixed for Bloodborne or Dark Souls 3! This wasn't exactly a problem because high HP objects aren't a common thing, almost everything in DS1 really only has 1 HP if it's breakable, only a separate value for a defense rating is invoked to see if certain attacks can overcome that defense, but apart from that it's kind of all-or-nothing. There's no extra HP to "drain" over multiple attacks. Now for this wall in Elden Ring, it does have incredibly high HP so now that does have to be drained. But because of how it's drained kinda glitchily since DS1 and onwards, I predict that slowing your attack animation dramatically with cheat engine will result in being able to break it with a single attack. Just... maybe over the course of like 30 seconds or something silly. I'll give that a try this coming week! And if certain weapons can't do it all, then their object attack values are likely beneath the illusory wall's defense rating, meaning no HP drains.

@@illusorywall Woah. I can't believe you took all that time to type that up. I ready it all and it was so cool, I'm definitely going to look up that video you recommended though. I'm sure it will be getting a like from me here soon haha. Even if it is all the same, I would still love a new video on it! :)

Yeah, having some sort of ohcrap mechanic for platforming would have reduced a lot of frustration. Particularly on branches, which are irregular and "slippy".

Bro we can’t even touch water that goes above the knee, and in sekiro you have boss fights down there

@@armandoguerra7658 Sekiro is basically Fromsoft going "But like what if... Gravity and water weren't bullshit in one of our games?"

Use prism stones! Drop one off a ledge and if it breaks, its a lethal fall

@@SmittyWerbenJag3rmanJenson Most of the players are the one trying to leap across gaps so doing that doesn't help

@@midgard9057 Minor spoiler, but prism stone arrows exist to deal with gaps, though they require a cookbook that I'm not sure if you can purchase or have to find

@@SmittyWerbenJag3rmanJenson i was just about to say that. It's such an underused feature that it's actually painful. ESPECIALLY IN A GAME WITH THIS MUCH VERTICALLY, LET ALONE DARK SOULS.

@@dominiccasts Still won't help since it's doesn't correctly measure depth. I have about a good 80% of cookbooks along with the those arrows.

I've had an instance where I dropped maybe 5m onto a rock, it sloped me off *to the side* for maybe 3m, and killed me as soon as I touched grass. Total vertical fall distance was maybe 7m total, total lateral plus vertical wasn't even 10m, falling time was at most four seconds. This happened to me in Limgrave fairly early on. Similar glitches have killed me a couple times elsewhere in the world. As is typical, I said my "Thanks Miyazaki" and moved on with my life. Fall damage is absolutely consistent *when it works*, but hey, what would a FromSoft game be without bugs? I always forget to hit the Share button to record these goofball moments. Best part? I was slamming my face into Flying Dragon Greyll for a while, figuring out the best way to take him down, when he got himself stuck falling off a tree, and died to the falling death timer. Free dragon heart!

I've had the same problem a few times

This ^ 100%

Why should you be able to fall any further?

@@unifyedunicorn8876 Only because it feels weird that you can fall more than three times as far as DS1 without taking any damage, but you die at the exact same distance.

from a player perspective, as mentioned in the video, judging height in a video game by 4 meters is difficult. Often heights that are borderline are where loot is and players are hesitant to fall because seemingly similar heights have killed them.

There was probably a time that you did take damage on those lower heights but it probably felt bad for exploration constantly taking damage in the overworld. Personally I am okay with the current system. It only means I have to use prism stones.

This is something that I was expecting them to patch, but I'm not longer sure.

@@trielt1 It might come later, patch 1.03 didn't fix everything its gonna be an ongoing thing

wouldnt mind them changing it from like 8-20m instead of 16-20m, those items are essentially worthless in pve and pvp unless theyre stopping some annoying amount of chip damage, but I think it'll also cause some strange inconsistencies with torrent (along with his double jump.) I don't expect them to change it because it might end up somehow even more unintuitive

This feels like the kind of thing they went back and forward on a lot. My gut instinct is also to just increase the fall damage window but I'm sure they did it his way because taking chip damage constantly was in their opinion more annoying than the occasional death to a miss judged drop. I defintley think the damage range should be widened though... should do anywhere between 1% and 100% damage in that fall damage window! The fact you can be an inch away from death and only lose 50% HP I think is a huge intuition killer.

@@boozebeard9501 Agreed. If the issue is that there are too many high falls, they can either make the death range larger (i.e. you die at 30m instead of 20, but take damage from 16m onwards), or let players rely on soft cotton. It's craftable and cheap, and there aren't many uses for it as it is.

You didn't/ done have to pass directly through the Seaside Ruins one, though. You can stay pretty far from it the entire time and still get the safe landing buff, which is part of the problem with others being a lot more finicky about passing directly through them. I believe they've widened some of them in 1.03, though, and I'll be doing some more testing to make sure that's correct. :)

@@illusorywall At least in this video you can clearly see the tornado effect appearing before you double jump out of it, and the tornado effect stays until you land. It's probably hard to tell you were right above the spirit spring because it's so far down. For the spirit spring where you demonstrate dying you can see that you were never right above the spirit spring.

@@illusorywall The one that really aggravated me is the spring near the northeastern minor erdtree in caelid. I once fell to my death there literally only 1 meter next to it because I didn't jump when riding of the cliff.

@@Naryoril Right, but I've done other testing where I don't jump back out of it-- I stay far away from it the whole time, and I'm still granted a safe landing there. So while it's definitely on me for not choosing the best clip, I can still say with confidence that me jumping in and back out isn't what made that safe. The area that granted a safe landing buff WAS much wider there. I'll go over all of this in a follow-up video!

@@illusorywall the particle effects of the spirit springs are independent of the scripted hitbox for applying the tornado buff, so it's not really surprising that two different springs have different areas of effect; there is no "safe landing" zone. you do not have to _land_ in any specific spot. there is only "applies tornado buff" zones that extend incredibly high up, way past the particle effects. the buff seems to cancel fall damage entirely until the next time you register a "land" similarly to the "initial-position-of-fall" checks. the variance in hitboxes probably isn't exactly "with intentions", just map designers throwing it in 'good enough' brushes for the surroundings. in the 22:22 clip it is 100% you jumping in and back out though, you can see the wind around torrent

Once I literally teleported from the top of a cliff face to the bottom just by walking into the wall

There is also a death plane placed on a previously survivable jump near the Beastial Sanctum. As of 1.03, having that plane locks you out of a talisman. I hope it gets fixed soon.

Every fall actually drains stamina in some amount, but you typically don't notice because stamina only drains at all when you're in combat. It's not that your stamina impacts fall damage, it's just that in the majority of cases where you'd fall your stamina depletion is turned off because you're out of combat.

@@HeavenlyHavoc Oh that's right. Stamina only drains in combat. That makes so much sense why every one seems to notice it in that very ramp part.

@@verdanthyborian2322 Noticed it on many occasions while running around while enemies are aggroed, tho yeah, i couldn't expect people who always kill everything to not notice it

@@crysosisback7115 yep. I'm one of those guys that kill every thing except the chariot ramps because I got tired of killing those guys over and over so that's the only place I noticed stamina drain from falls.

Same. I was so annoyed when I went off a cliff with torrent and was insta killed on landing

Oh, it negates fall *damage*, just not fall *death*. Ambiguous wording is a killer.

Tbf it does say in its description that it doesn't negate lethal falls.

It was this way in all previous games so i had no reason to believe it otherwise.

@@darq7000 atleast it's useful in Dark Souls 3, especially in finding the host during invasions

Thanks, and glad you're enjoying it! Just be careful with later videos in this series for now, they'll start showing more game areas and enemies. :)

I think this is true, but I've died while INSIDE a Spiritspring because my horse clipped a rock on the drop off so there's definitely something fishy besides just touching it because I was inside the whole way down.

I want to support this because this also my experience, that where you land is not important but you have to get in contact with the spiritsprings itself during the fall and have the windy animation around Torrent.

There is definitely the same inconsistency with that getting applied as well. With the one on the coast there (I think, maybe another one, doesn't matter), as well as one on the lake edge of Liurnia (near the crystal tunnel), I've made risky jumps that never cross over the actual spring, but still get that effect once I get close. That Caelid one on the other hand, just seems out to kill you.... just like the rest of Caelid, really.

That would be cool, but if you're curious I can give you the short answer. Fall damage in DS1 and DS3 is percentage based. Fall damage in DS2, however, is fixed numbers. It still increases with your equipment weight, as you would expect, but that doesn't change how it functions. The falls height + equip burden increases the damage in specific numbers regardless of your health. This creates the rather odd situation where leveling up your health enables you to survive longer falls and the same falls while carrying greater burdens. As you may already be aware of, this is pretty much only useful to know in 2 places: The drop down the pit in Majula and the drop down to the accursed flame-salamanders in the Forest of Fallen Giants.

@@lordflashheart3741 you can also survive that fall with the salamanders if you land the fall attack on one of them

@@cameony That works no matter your Hp?

@@lordflashheart3741 yes

@@zZwingli Cool shit, I did not remember that. Does require some precision though. But not as much as if you try to use the parry exploit to go down the pit in Majula :p

If im thinking of the same place you mentioned, that happened to me too. I threw a rainbow stone, saw it go through the floor and thought "Aha, an illusory floor, wont trick me game". Turns out that "trap" was actually where I wanted to go the whole time. It left me a little frustrated.

Yeah I wish they would keep things consistent, or at least have some other way of indicating that this particular fall is different from others.

@@MissPoplarLeaf like they could put a school of magic symbol to indicate a near by illusion

@@kaewierdoni4640 they’ve never done that in any of the souls games lol you just had to know or see messages or get lucky

The caverns under the lake where the big skelley boy sits on the big chair. Behind is a kill box area.

Very true, plus how unintuitive it is. It goes against both normal and heaviky ingrained player instincts.

Hard agree, that would feel very nice and intuitive

You say this but I think there have been several times where I have done mid air double jumps with Torrent despite not jumping off the cliff.

This is incorrect, but a lot of players seem to be noticing it so I'm not saying you've had some failed double jumps, I just think it's likely to be something unrelated. You absolutely can double jump when simply walking off of a ledge. Jumping off vs. walking off seems to have no effect on when you lose the double jump, it appears to be consistent and it's likely height-based. Try double-jumping after walking off an edge again, it works just fine! EDIT: We found the culprit, various weapon classes simply don't let you double jumping after walking off of ledges and it's likely just a bug.

@@illusorywall Its certainly possible that I'm wrong, probably even likely. I've never done explicit testing. But what I can tell you is I've noticed this pretty consistently and I don't recall having ever been able to double jump without jumping in the first place. I'm playing right now, in fact, and just repeatedly running off the ledge directly in front of the First Step grace point, unable to jump while falling. The drop is maybe 6-7 meters? Certainly not far enough to be height based.

Just looked it up out of curiosity. Theres a reddit post about this exact issue. It's related to the weapon you have equipped. I just switched to the rapier from the Bloodhounds Fang and I'm now able to jump after walking off a ledge. Weird tech, lol.

@HolderofSanity @illusory wall For even more memes: When Torrent is in standard movement you can press walk to instantly cause Torrent to start walking. Only sometimes it won't happen. Sometimes Torrent will just ignore the walk command and continue moving normally. And you need to stop pressing any movement keys and reinitiate movement to make Torrent walk. Oh and also sometimes when you spawn at a Site of Grace Torrent won't spawn at full hp, meaning he will randomly get oneshot by the first attack. His health isn't reset after the previous life. Actually Illusory maybe all of Torrent's bugs will be a good subject for a video?