Elden Ring Wants You to Play Differently 

The "you're playing it wrong" is a quote from a reddit post I cover in this video. I know you're not playing it at all. Neither am I.

The “I was getting my ass kicked so bad I had to experiment with other strategies” is what I love about fromsoft games

So heavy attacks actually break bosses poise, opening up for a critical. Good.

I’m usually against the “your doing it wrong and this is why your not having fun” thing but in this case I think it’s true. One example is thinking you can run through a souls game like any other game. Sometimes you need to take a step back and realize why specific stuff is done.

I'm glad that they finally make blocking, heavy attack, and jump attack useful. Plus the shield counter feels like a really good mechanic for someone that is more attuned to sekiro parry system than dark souls parry system.

Margitt is absolutely supposed to be your first wall, your first test. Both mechanically, thematically, and narratively. Your waifu even says that she wanted to see if you can handle the journey

Melee combat is brutal in Eldenring: delayed attacks, every mob/boss has aoes, hard to break poise. Mage was so much smoother

What's funny is that as someone who's not a Souls player, I've been playing like this from launch and it was super intuitive to play like this. I have no muscle memory from the other games or anything like that, so that might've helped.

Why after 200+ hours do I watch this..

Yeah, after watching this video I say with conviction that this game is not dark souls 4

I "accidentally" learned that R2 attacks staggered Margit because my R1 with a long sword dealt 32 DMG and a charged R2 dealt 105 so I chose to use RE attacks. Needless to say, I was staggering Margit every 3-4 R2's depending on the frequency. Though I died like 20+ times even with that knowledge, Rogier, and that jellyfish summon.

Ok, I've been thinking about this and after having finished Dark Souls 1 again after 2 years without playing it, now with this new "Elden Ring mentality" I'm starting to suspect that this approach to combat of mixing rolls and blocks might have been the intended way from the very beginning.

Fun fact: You can charge many spells too. They do more damage (about 10% I believe) and can stagger more too I think.

I’ve never been big into guides or following anyone else’s builds so I’ve always just found a big ass heavy sword and find my opportunity to do my stupid strong but slow swings, playing Elden ring has been very rewarding in that sense because I can pretty quickly stagger bosses for a critical if I can find the right window. In past games my very dummy straightforward play style has worked, but it feels this time I’m actually rewarded for my glass canon play style. I think it’s cool that this game has broadened what they player can do and there are entire incredible well developed systems that the player can ignore (i.e. magic, shield mechanics, etc) if they so choose. Giving the players the option on how they play, and how hard the game is for them is super fulfilling as a player and it starts to feel like nearly every play style is catered to.

From what I can see the "rules" for avoiding damage are as follows:

Quite a lot of the larger bosses in Bloodborne had something similar to this mechanic too, where if you hit them with heavy attacks (usually in a specific body part, but not always) they would stagger and become vulnerable to a visceral attack or at least be weakened in some other way (such as Darkbeast losing his lightning).

What I don't get is that people seem to forget that the system already existed in Dark Souls 3. The main difference is that Elden Ring gives you a jump which means it's easier to do R2 instead of R1 while also increasing posture damage.

It feels a bit similar to the purpose of the health regen system in Bloodbourne, incentivizing aggression more than the Souls games. A no shield str/end build in Souls was always my go to but now it's especially viable as getting that extra hit quickly can cause a stagger.

If this remains a mechanic in the full game, im really excited for it. Its felt like heavy attacks have lacked much purpose outside of knocking down small enemies

I started with the warrior class and was dual wielding the scimitars for the entire first run of the demo. I played as if I was playing ds3 with the twin blades, primarily using L1 for attacking. Marget was very tough for me, he was relentless and had very few safe openings. It took me a while to beat him because I was playing as if it was ds3, I didn’t even jump the whole time, not because I didn’t want to, I just completely forgot I could.