How Pontiff Sulyvahn Changed Everything: a Boss Analysis 

For some reason YT only notifies me about one comment when there’s a bunch that come in at around the same time. If I haven’t responded-assuming you’re not being a dick-it’s because I haven’t seen it, and I’ll do my best to get to it. I LOVE you guys, and your engagement has blown me away and means so much to me. I literally had two subscribers in February. Thank you so much!!!

It’s so badass the way that his swords ignite when you approach each other.

Pontiff walled me so hard on my first playthrough, i went on to vent to my friends how absolutely garbage this fight and how unfair his ability to combo is. I did not realize when I fought him at first, I was still in the habit that a lot of newbies are in which is, when theres a threat, you want to get out and roll away from it. Now Pontiff, like some bosses in Elden Ring will do it afterwards, rewards good positioning (i.e. dodging into his attack, strafing them, staying close and strafing to his sides when hes in his turn around animation, low-profiling them) and extremly punishes roll-spamming away from him with longer combos, harder to react attacks and less openings. After adopting this different approach, he became my favourite boss in the base game. Basically everything you said in this video. Very good analysis.

I truly think this fight is a work of art. And I completely agree with you in your analysis of Pontiff’s place on the souls series. This fight took me 57 attempts but at the end, I felt as though I had truly mastered the fight in a way never before seen in any other souls boss up to that point except for Artorias and the Bell Gargoyles (and certainly none this difficult). The feeling of mastery that different timings and a lack of spam-rolling entail is what has made this fight so rewarding.

parrying pontiff is the most satisfying parrying series ever change my mind, even cheesing gundyr using parries isn't so satisfying

2:37 for me. I pretty much had little trouble up till this boss and I didn't learn the dodge timing or parry. I tried fighting Pontiff and after so many tries just called both the summons on him. It made the fight overly complicated but I was able to get behind him and land hits on him finally overcoming this challenge. To this date I have managed to overcome other bosses but there are some I always enjoy more with summons. Pontiff being one of them since it is holding me from enjoying the area I like the most plus FAP ring.

I have learned a new word - vituperative. Appreciate it.

This is a great analysis! I've just been playing Armored Core VI and I must say that this archetype seems to have been carried forth into the Ibis Series CEL 240 fight too. Especially with that signature undodgeable crossed sword attack in the middle of a combo with uneven timing.

The part about telling people to just parry is so true. I think it becomes so natural with long time players you forget where you started. I have hundreds if not thousands of hours across these games but my friend had never played them. He got stuck on Pontiff and asked me for advice, I told him to just parry and he said if I could do that I wouldn’t be asking you for help lol

The way I get openings on pontiff is I circle to his back and when he’s turning around it’s a guaranteed opening. Pontiff is basically an ER boss but worse as he’s not as mechanically complex as ER bosses,I can say the same thing about Gundyrr, and dancer as they have a lot of position based combo branch points, but not nearly as many as any of the ER main game bosses, and Margit himself is more complex than every DS3 boss. Parrying him lowers the complexity of the fight a lot and at that point just play Sekiro lol.

2:08 Part of the spam rolling thing isn't just saying you can spam roll to dodge, but that rolling itself is less of a commitment than the previous games. DS3 has less downtime between consecutive rolls than the first two games, and also takes the least stamina. Put these two together and not only do people roll to dodge, but also spam roll to cover short distances since it's a similar time (and stamina consumption) to walking/sprinting over and gives some extra i-frames. In that sense it makes some fights a bit easier and require a little less thought, though it's not all that impactful.

He's one of my favvvv bosses for the lore and visuals beyond the fight!!! I agree he's tough to learn but soo worth it!! I'd be curious how you fit the Orphan of Kos into the delayed boss attacks evolution!! I actually played all of Dark Souls and Elden Ring before Bloodborne, so I had a better idea of delayed attacks so I was able to understand how Orphan worked, since Bloodborne's bosses are otherwise just fast and don't really have the same variety of move sets. Really good video tho, Sulyvahn is a fav for sure!!

he's the first boss that made me give up. I got good and now it's a piece of cake

Loved to see the respect for pontiff , the only boss that made me nearly quit the game

I love Pontiff Sulyvahn, I’m probably one of the biggest lore nerds when it comes to him but even I remember when I first started how I was utterly decimated by him. I remember that I thought how this guy was extremely unfair and that second phase made it impossible Then, after thousands of hours, I play against him with a terrible sword without parry or parry using only my fists because he became my favorite boss and I wanted to make the fight last as long as possible

I had to learn to parry to beat him

On my first playthrough I hadn't figured out what burning bone shards did, and I didnt dare try it in case I ruined my game. Pontiff was the boss that made me finally google for help, and they adviced to have upgraded the estus as far as you can before the boss... man, I felt dumb. But the boss got a lot easier

I started with DS3 and Pontiff was the greatest wall of them all to me. Nothing in any souls game since has been the same.

Bro got the GoW 2018 camera lol.

On the surface, yes, parrying is easy. Attacks that can be parried have a consistent timing to them. If you memorize and practice this, you can theoretically perfectly parry every parry-able attack. In my experience (I have not studied the technical details behind this) it's usually just as the enemy begins their attack. Now for reality. Dark Souls III is not exactly consistent with what kinds of attacks can be parried. It does not make intuitive sense to new players that you can parry a weapon twice your size. Different shields/weapon skills have different parry windows, and the game only explains this through a few vague item descriptions and animations. On top of this, it is always risky to parry an attack. If your timing is off, you will either take partial damage but complete the parry, or you will completely whiff and take significant damage. And, like nearly all actions, it consumes stamina. Why take this risk when there are safer options to respond to an attack? Dodging provides invincibility frames with a pretty decent margin for error. You always gain distance, allowing you to reposition yourself, potentially opening the opportunity for a backstab. You can use high poise and a shield to tank attacks, allowing you to safely trade blows. This is not to say that these options are risk free. Turtling against a lot of late game enemies and bosses is a good way to fully drain your stamina and get comboed. Panic rolling is probably the number one way players die in any Souls like. TLDR: It's a lot harder to "git gud" at parrying then Dark Souls veterans sometimes make it seem. It is not worth the risk to a casual player.

his fight is the best fight in the game in opinion, while he only took me 3 tries.. I don't even know how I won, because in the first try, he no hit me... I was playing great sword +6 with no shield (I had pyro hand +6 but I only used it for a fire buff before the fight) his move set was very cool and he had my blood bumping the whole fight, while I did win by pure luck (I accidentally hit the clone the second he spawned with a charged heavy shaving off a big chunk of health, then I hit him twice after to kill the clone, then just hit and run till he died. I was the best I have ever been in this fight, I dodged everything, and he made me so much better after

There's a dark side to this idea of learning the moveset. It can make people fearful and reactive, biting on every feint and waiting for their perfect opening. When instead From wants us to play a more proactive game, corralling the boss into a controlled, consistent fight where we can take the lead. Hitless runners don't learn movesets, they learn strategies. For an extreme example, a lot of players don't know that Gael can teleport, and that's good- they shouldn't know that, since he only does it when you run away.

I died more to Wolnir than Pontiff

My first time fighting pontif wasn't bad at all. I had played Elden Ring, Sekiro, and Bloodborne first so I had already pretty much mastered the parry. I think starting with Elden Ring made a huge difference for DS3 in general.

For a small channel I think this video is EXTREMELY good and it's pretty fascinating how you kept the video interesting for the entire duration even if there isn't a lot to say about the topic. I never really thought about the fight in this way. The only cons of the video is the meh voice sound quality and pretty shit game sound quality in the background. I get that you might not want to buy a better mic and that's completely fine, and the voice sound is still pretty good, but the background sound is full of noise and is very unclear.

What about the preceding games' bosses? Watching this he looks like a mixture of Manus, Fume Knight and Gael. I felt I barely scraped by this fight after about 7-8 tries by careful staircase positioning and panic rolling in the second phase.

it might be five years ago and i have speedrun the game countless times, but damn i remember my first time against him and how i decided he was the moment to learn parrying. i allways used to parry him until i realized i had just understood his moveset to the point of not needing it during my second sl1 run. he is a BEAST and in my opinion the true roadblock of darksouls 3 even though most my friends gave out at dancer which i find easier than pontiff. though to your point, yeah i dont think its hyperbola at all. him and namless shaped eldenring though i belive eldenring at times took it too far. it is funny though, many people get too overpowerd by the end and breeze through soul of cinder and dont learn a fifth of his moves before killing him. during my sl1 runs i both dread and cant wait for soul of cinder as he is by far the hardest boss of the game excluding the dlc. namless king is as hard as gundy in comparison. the amount of moves he has that are both lightning quick and drag out forever on top of a massive movesett is just crazy. on my third run through eldenring now and the same thing has happend. the last boss of eldenring is by my experience leagues above the others in difficulty. i love taking my time and a couple hours to truly learn all the bosses moves and radagon is testing my limits just like soul of cinder once did. you have a no hit on soul of cinder so i find it funny that you dont bring him up. great video and hope to see more, this was recomended to me from my homepage.

Would be a top tier boss if phase 2 wasn't so broken and if he was designed with colossal weapons on mind like ER bosses.

I think Pontiff and Margit both have a very similar design intention. That being to get behind them. Pontiff's flame swipes are generously angled so much so that, as you note, some of them can just we strafed under. Additionally the purple sword has one specific jab that is so fast and the telegraph so short that I think its unreactable -especially if you're looking at it lengthwise. You wont even see it move. Buuuuut if you're constantly in motion and ducking under his armpit it'll whiff you. Similar to Margit's dagger it seems to be telling the player "hey dont just stand there in front of me". Everything in Margit's moveset seems to want you to get behind him. If you dodge left around him you will almost always trigger the leap away. If you dodge right into the dagger swipes you'll end up behind him. Also like Malenia's prosthesis attack. Something interesting about Margit is similar to how input reading in ER is actually the game reading your animation the same is true with his dagger attack. He wont use his dagger attack if you're behind him because he literally cant see you. He WILL use his combo extension but delayed if you're out of range and then enter back in range within its window. Its no wonder people were frustrated trying to anticipate when the dagger attacks would happen and when they wouldn't. For them it would appear random Even his super delayed staff slam insentivizes strafing around because of its weak tracking. Although there's the weird quirk if you strafe to far around him and to the left the attack will snap all the way around and hit you. The staff and hammer swipe has you doing the same thing hugging his right and dodging behind him. And then there's Lothric and Lorian who more explicitly encourage you to get behind them so you can hit (idk which is which the femboy 😂). Also, Ive never really been able to pin them down but a flowchart of Pontiff's moveset would be really enlightening but idk if such a think exists to see how his moves chain together when amd underwhat circumstances. There are easy ones like his swipe whem you're directly behind him

Idk what it was, maybe because I used a summon, I used the sellswords, or because DS3 was my last souls game and I learned from the others and was used to it. But Pontiff wasn’t hard at all, I beat him in two tires. During my whole DS3 playthru all of the bosses that were supposedly “the hardest in the series” were not hard at all. Nameless, Abyss Watchers, even Gael was pretty easy. The only two that gave me trouble was The Demon Princes and Lothric and Lorien and those are the duo bosses, hm 🤔 I’m going to go back eventually and play through the whole game again because I need to re fight those bosses. Idk why they were so easy. (I didn’t use summons for every boss btw)

On my first playthrough pontiff wasn't that hard, I struggled with Aldrich more. On my second playthrough pontiff was one of the hardest fights.

Any Lies of P content in the future?

I disagree, 90% of all souls bosses could easily be brute forced through. In ds3 there only 3 bosses where roll direction and roll timings are actually matters - Midir, Gael and Nameless King. Pontiff has weak stats compare to other bosses, all of his attacks are blockable by using average medium shield with 55-ish stability. Besides that, his 7 hit combos and many other attacks quite often doesnt reach character. ( 2:17 ) this could be dodged by running, ( 2:20 ) this one you dont even need to roll, ( 2:25 ) this one also by running e.t.c. Pontiff is just really flashy and his copy gaving people a panic attack and thats it, real difficulty at that fight is camera and constant lock on/off. And my favorite one - the cheese! Forget about the roll button existance, just by spamming perseverance on Mace/Vordt hammers and mashing light attacks you can beat base game easily.

I don't want to be rude and I generally like your content but you are simply incorrect about Pontiff. His individual moves really don't deal much damage and you can very easily hit trade him down. As evidenced by this clip... ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BVK35QkV3u4.htmlsi=ma4NvrpjsctHUEom I hadn't played DS3 in years and couldn't remember Pontiff's moveset (I have a squirrel brain and if i don't play a game for awhile I forget) yet I'm able to trade him down at SL1 melee only in a couple tries. I think this is what people mean when they say DS3 isn't really all that difficult. Personally, I think a boss like Dancer is much better at being an anti dodge spam boss and on this same run I hitless her because I had to actually learn the fight to win, unlike Pontiff. The point in me mentioning this is that I don't think that most players actually learned much from Pontiff. He has literally all the traits of an ER boss. He has combo branching, delayed attacks, high aggression, input reading a strong emphasis on positioning etc. However he is generally very highly regarded among the community while people complain about these very same things in ER. In fact I've had players offer Pontiff as an example of a great boss while attempting to criticize bosses in ER with the same design choices. To me the only distinction is that you can very easy hit trade Pontiff down while many ER fights will require specific builds and/or summons to achieve the same result. Overall, I think your analysis is correct that the seeds of later games boss philosophy can be traced back here but I just don't many players really learned much from this boss.

I don't really understand why this guy gets singled out. Just parry him bro. It's like Gwyn. It's a complete nightmare unless you just parry him. The parry windows on this boss are enormous.. and I'm not a big fan of parry (at all), but this boss was clearly designed for it.

This boss sucks idc what anyone else says I just feel like im spam rolling most of the time