Oh my god I think I just realized some hilarious Patches nonsense… will explain what I mean based on how I've followed his, uh, for lack of a better term, quest line, so far.
- To follow Patches from the beginning…
>!
After the shenanigans with the ||warp chest|| in ||Murkwater Cave,|| Patches will move to a little patch of land jutting out of the ||non-poisonous swamp|| in ||Liurna of the Lakes||. He's really happy to see you again!
- A curious tale he will tell you when he is at ||Liurna of the Lakes…||
>!
Patches will tell you about iron virgins, the creepy horrifying mechanical torture machines that can capture people inside of them. Specifically, he'll tell you that there is an abandoned iron virgin that can be found below the giant water wheel of the Academy of Raya Lucaria. He also says that this iron virgin is unique, in that if it captures you, it will actually whisk you away to the foot of the Erdtree, which, for someone like the player character, would probably save a lot of time! All you have to do is intentionally allow yourself to be violently forced into the inside of a horrible torture machine.
- Was Patches Lying
>!
It depends on what you consider lying. This particular iron virgin WILL capture you into its torture chamber, and it WILL whisk you away to a distant locale. However, unless the Erdtree is actually a horrible underground torture dungeon, unfortunately, you‘re not at the foot of the Erdtree but a horrible underground torture dungeon! Oh no!! Who could have predicted this terrifying turn of events?? If you can progress through this little mini-dungeon and beat the boss ||which is two iron virgins,|| you figure out that you’re not at the foot of the Erdtree, but in the underbelly of ||Volcano Manor.||
- I didn't run into Patches for a while after that…
>!
…but when I did, it was when I started to look around in Volcano Manor. Turns out Patches will join Volcano Manor. In fact, he'll even tell you that he has, as if you would wonder or find it unlikely for him to do so.
||It took me a bit to connect the dots here, but I think I realize how someone like Patches would both know about the iron virgin as well as have ended up in Volcano Manor.||
well i‘m way behind everyone at this point. playing when i can. i’m finally into stormveil castle. some neat moments like || when you walk into the extremely dark room and the door closes behind you and you hear someone snicker…i was scared!! || souls continues to be undefeated at environmental storytelling: || the extremely weak guys who are supposed to be guards but some of the time don't even bother to get up when you walk in the room, or they sort of halfheartedly struggle to their feat and basically let you kill them. stuff like that really gets me ||
i basically wanted to go into this game blind at launch to develop my own opinions about it and that's been going great so far. i'm sure this isn't anything someone smarter hasn't already observed but it really does have like half the soul of an NES game. hilarious conceptually dumb enemies, || like a giant bird of prey with blades tied to its legs, that also carries an explosive barrel. or absurd enemy placements, like the giant just standing on a stone arch 50 feet off the ground, waiting to ambush you on the approach to stormveil castle. how did he get up there lol ||
i bought the cairn greatsword ashes of war...does anyone use the active abilities on these? it's a big lift for me to unequip my shield in the middle of the fight to allow me to trigger it using L2, and it has a huge windup. would it really do much more damage than a fully charged R2? maybe its utility is in a semi-ranged attack that would break an enemy's guard
i started leaving purposefully misleading messages because those seem to be the ones with the most upvotes but then i realized i'm mainly inflicting these on my iC brethren. sorry. im trying to remove it
also if you don't auto-upvote donkeymilk messages........ get out of this thread
@“tapevulture”#p62682 i bought the cairn greatsword ashes of war…does anyone use the active abilities on these? it’s a big lift for me to unequip my shield in the middle of the fight to allow me to trigger it using L2, and it has a huge windup. would it really do much more damage than a fully charged R2? maybe its utility is in a semi-ranged attack that would break an enemy’s guard
They are of varying utility but I find even the ones that are just some kind of strong attack to be at least worth the FP. The most basic ultra greatsword kinda move, the Stomp Swing, might not do too much more damage than a charged R2, but it's much faster, as well as seemed to cause interrupting knockback to enemies even more reliably than the charged R2.
Worth mentioning, if you have a shield in your left hand and a weapon in your right, your L2 will activate the Ashes of War skill on your shield. However, if your shield doesn't have a Skill, it will default to the skill on your weapon in your other hand.
Also worth mentioning that Ashes of War can be swapped on and off of weapons freely, they aren't consumed in the process and the weapon retains its upgrade level. If you're concerned about how Ashes of War force a certain Scaling/Property type on to the weapon, there's also a way to address that.
@“Gaagaagiins”#p62685 Worth mentioning, if you have a shield in your left hand and a weapon in your right, your L2 will activate the Ashes of War skill on your shield. However, if your shield doesn’t have a Skill, it will default to the skill on your weapon in your other hand.
Also just in case you bought that Ashes of War from someone else, that's one reason why No Skill is even an option, so you can remove undesired Shield skills.
@“tapevulture”#p62682 it’s a big lift for me to unequip my shield in the middle of the fight to allow me to trigger it using L2
FYI you will eventually unlock an ash of war which removes any skill on the shield, allowing you to use the L2 attack of the right hand while using a shield on the left hand. **[edit]** ☝️What @"Gaagaagiins"#429 says above
Another option for you until then is to switch back and forth the two handed combat stance (△＋R1) to access the L2 attack faster than by switching your left handed weapon.
While applying ashes of war is very beneficial and frankly one of them is downright broken (the >!frosbite stomp!<) until the very last bosses of the game, do note that some of the more advanced weapons and shields do not allow applying a different ash of war than their standard one.
If you haven‘t found the Ashes of War: No Skill yet, you’re comfortably past the point where you can access it.
Hints:
||It's from a vendor who is next to one of the sites of grace in Limgrave.||
||That's central Limgrave, and it's in a shack.||
Precise Location: ||It's sold by Knight Bernahl in the Warmaster's Shack, in north central Stormhill. Along the road between Stormgate and Stormveil Castle, the road diverges east. Along that road there is a patch of woods where the road continues east through it but also diverges north. Warmaster's Shack is south of those woods.||
Spoilers for a pretty early boss that I just looped back around to last night that‘s just outside of limgrave: >!I finally went back to beat the boss in the mining tunnels connecting caelid and northeast limgrave. The first time I fought this thing was hilarious. Squint and hesitate while trying to see what the boss is, oh damn some kind of dragon, ring ring cmon wolfpack OH GOD HE IS BARFING LAVA EVSRYWHERE wolfpack immediately all dies. I die. Finally remembered to go get this thing now, tried using my storm hawk ash summon because I figured flying over the lava would help, but no the summon still died quick. The boss itself wasn’t very hard though didn't really need to summon in the first place. And yay a new special katana… that everyone complains is overpowered apparently. !<
@“thebryanjzx90”#p62699 Spoilers for a pretty early boss that I just looped back around to last night that’s just outside of limgrave: I finally went back to beat the boss in the
Me, I think 80 hours in: You went to beat the boss in the _what??_
@“tapevulture”#p62682 There are some very good ashes of war abilities, despite many feeling useless. Royal Knight's Resolve is extremely good with high damage weapons. Hoarfrost Stomp seemed good. Shield Crash is hilarious and really good with the right setup.
I always upvote the group messages, those heals can be very big.
@"thebryanjzx90"#p62699 ||Is it Moonveil? If so that's the one I had found and didn't want to use, cause I wanted to finish the last bit of the game with the Uchigatana. I tried it out for a bit afterwards. That thing is broken for sure. It does the same damage from a light year away as in melee range. I haven't tested many weapons, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's just the best weapon in the game.||
@“Herb”#p62718 yup that's the one. Was looking to replace another katana because it felt too good and a little cheesy and I guess I ended up with one that was even stronger.
That's a dumb reaction to have, oh no my weapon is good and the hard game might not be as hard as it should be. But I can't shake that feeling, along with summoning via ashes.
@“tapevulture”#p62682 absurd enemy placements, like the giant just standing on a stone arch 50 feet off the ground, waiting to ambush you on the approach to stormveil castle. how did he get up there lol
environmental storytelling has an answer for that question too!
@“Syzygy”#p62724 I was going to share this anecdote anyway, but I check every new item after I finish combat (and there’s a “new item” pop-up and in/out of combat music to suggest doing this)
I really, really, really, really, really, really, really wish there was a way to sort out items per time of acquisition or to display the history of pop-ups because sometimes it’s extremely difficult to find what I just acquired twenty seconds ago while I was being aggressed by another mob.
I am apparently at the end of the game just as I reached 155h55m55s. Unfortunately I am level ~~155~~ 141.
@“thebryanjzx90”#p62752 I've always thought of that as being the actual difficulty settings in most JRPGs. If you want easy mode use all the cheesy tactics and items. If you want more challenge restrict yourself from using that stuff or play under-leveled - or both. For me, the game felt like it had already lost too much challenge when I stumbled across the summon, ||Mimic Tear||, so I refrained from using that katana.
I am one of the people that thoroughly dislikes adhoc, always-on invasions. The method of play they enforce and the unique kinds of stressors they add are antithetical to how I personally want to spend my time. The whole invasion process is largely a one-sided enjoyment affair, based around fuelling griefing.
I learned to just jump off a huge balcony in the nexus as soon as I killed a boss in Demon's Souls just to make sure I was never in human form after being invaded on a runback to try and reach my bloodstain and being attacked by an invader with the scraping spear. Great, now I have _no souls_, and also _no gear and no way to fix it_. That isn't *fun*, that is just some grifter getting their kicks out of ruining someone else's day. No thank you.
"_But it's better now, there hasn't been a scraping spear since Demon's Souls anyway_" you may claim. I do not care. PVP builds are different to PVE builds. I'm a slow player, and while others are on their second, third, or higher run-throughs of a game and know all the details and where to run early and sequence break to find The Cool Shit I'm still wandering around and exploring and learning. In comes an invader with a focused PVP-only build that kills you _instantly_ and you never had a chance to begin with. Again, this is not _fun_. This is only fuelling the enjoyment of the grifter. I want no part of this.
Making invasion opt-in solves this problem. If you enjoy the invasion part of the game, if you think it adds a meaningful challenge and sense of tension to your game -- go for it! Leave me out of it. I want to be able to put my controller down while I sit on a cliff face looking over a ravine while I go and deal with something I have cooking on the stove, or answer a phone call, or go to the bathroom, or whatever it is I may want/need to do; and I do not want to return to my game finding I have been assassinated by an invader. I _love_ the tension of losing souls/runes on a runback, but I want my mistakes and failings to be my own.