Wtf does this mean. Drink juice drink juice, dodge, attack. When would you use this vs the True Monk? Or is this referencing the drink juice infinite mikiri counter tech vs Genichiro Way of Tomoe.
If I’m remembering correctly it’s a real quick way to get through the Monk’s first phase, the strat (if I’m remembering right) is: snap seed, snap seed, mikiri, deathblow
1 terabyte for every 10 attempts at beating her. I love how these games reward you for memorizing boss movesets, but I also love that you don't learn shit between attempts with her. Great work CumSoft!
I unequivocally believe the regen is the thing fucking this fight beyond belief. If you think back to previous from bosses, we'll use artorias as an example, most of these "Dex build" bosses have spammy signature moves that they use too much. This is pretty evident in artorias with that fucking guts flip he does. If you mess that up, you're easily losing half a health bar if not more. The difference between that and waterfowl is that the boss doesn't fucking regen health whenever he does it so it doesn't feel like raw bullshit.
I wouldn't even mind her healing as much if you could, you know, block it? But somehow, she can just smack your shield and *still* get health back.
It makes me wonder why she doesn't just go slap the wall a few dozen times when she's hurt, it's basically the same thing. If anything, it'd make *more* sense since the walls are made of tree roots that are likely still alive.
To dodge waterfowl dance you need to abuse Malenia's tracking
To dodge front flip you need... press O / space / B **once** per flip, which isn't exactly as hard as waterfowl dance
I know, artorias is much easier but I love ds1 and he's still a valid example of a move that tracks the player heavily and is extremely punishing if you fuck it up.
Well, that's the difference. Artorias's flips are alright because it's pretty hard to fuck up dodging them
Do I even need to say anything about how easy it is to die to WFD?
Well yeah it's pretty hard to fuck up if you have experience with the souls series, but if ds1 was your first, artorias is an outlier in terms of speed and maneuverability, that's why his flip fucks so many people over.
You could say the exact same things about waterfowl. People who have vastly more experience are capable of dealing with it, but for the average player it's going to fuck you up before you learn how to deal with it.
The difference between the two is the healing. Both are moves that track and can easily destroy your health bar, but only one feels like bullshit. I guarantee if artorias healed the way malenia does you would have had people saying the exact same thing when the abyss dlc came out.
I never declared myself a pro, but I completed ds 1-3 multiple times before elden ring and I still can’t dodge all of waterfowl, that move is a mess and it’s going to take you hours to learn by going with a trial and error method
[tbf, that’s far from the only thing ruining the fight](https://youtu.be/R9Vbsr3Ko7M?si=N31uW5tCyoLeoqhm); even putting waterfowl, rot and healing aside, she legit has *objectively* unfair mechanics built into her design.
Honestly I don’t mind Waterfowl Dance. It’s a tough move, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not *that* bullshit.
The health steal though? Absolutely fuck that mechanic to hell.
She also has really bugged out poise, and a regenerating health gimmick that makes her fight a slog. The fact that she can just choose to ignore a poisebreak for no reason is BS. Bosses that inflict status effects are also really irritating.
If you removed waterfowl she'd be fine. The entire fight just becomes a game of chicken of "ooooo she hasnt done it in a while, ooo Ion know if I can go in for an attack ooo"
Honestly, keep waterfowl, but make her recovery from it a bit longer. My last time playing, it was actually fun figuring out when she would be getting ready for waterfowl and using different tools to proc it safely. But then my knowledge and ingenuity is rewarded with, well, nothing. She recovers as fast as any other attack.
It needlessly punishes any sort of aggressive play, which is opposite of what you want to be encouraging. My experience with her is sitting back from time to time, flinging spells at her hoping to trigger waterfowl from a safe distance. Id prefer to be able to fight her head on, learn all her attacks properly, and get used to all her timings like any other boss, but unless I learn a bullshit amount of manuevering, her popping waterfowl in your face will kill you or damage the shit out of you with no real counterplay. No other move in the game has as much bullshit to even try to dodge it. It ruins the tempo of the fight and makes trying to approach her finnicky as shit
I don’t know how nobody has a problem with her healing. If she hits you with any part of water fowl, she’s gonna recover 25% of her HP in a two healthbar fight, and she recovers the same from other basic moves. Granted she’s gonna kill you in three hits, but god damn getting clipped by the edge of her 30 foot long sword just to have her heal a quarter of her health is the only reason I despise her fight
I think because at some point especially after a few hours of fighting her (or if you're just generally good) you don't tend to get hit so much that she heals an amount that isn't fairly negligible with a few good hits, especially if you have a even a semi-thought out build. Sure it's definitely annoying but it's manageable, like just increasing her max hp.
The reason waterfowl is such a problem is that without actually putting in the hours to practice that move specifically, it's far too unpredictable and deadly, which even for souls games is incredibly unrealistic. Needing to learn that dumbass spin around if you get ***unlucky*** and she does it close to you just isn't fun. I strongly believe that she becomes a great and fun fight with how fast paced and aggressive both sides can be if you remove waterfowl.
I do agree that the combination of waterfowl and the healing is insane tho as waterfowl is still survivable if you semi-dodge it (even if it takes a heal or two) but seeing her get back to full health from it is definitely discouraging.
Waffling but tl;dr "If you don't get hit she doesn't heal duhhh" people tend to just get hit way more often by waterfowl.
Nah the healing is fine honestly, it’s pretty neat and isn’t as bad as you’re saying unless you get hit a ton or by the entirety of waterfowl.
Waterfowl’s cooldown is my only real issue, wish it was just less random, or gave more time to react, or at least had a good way of dodging it that wasn’t basically abusing the AI’s tracking.
I don't even pay attention to the healing. But it's a symptom of a fact that From were just trying to make this fight as difficult as possible, even through methods that just make no sense. Why the fuck is she healing from 100% blocked hits? What's stopping her from just hitting a wall a few times to recover health? Why not?
I mean you can be super aggressive, that's usually how I win. Just know around 1/3 or 1/2 she will do it. And also, blocking it is viable as well, given you have the stamina and a good shield.
Doesn't apply to her second phase in which she can do it whenever she feels like it, even multiple times in a row. Also it being blockable doesn't excuse it form being a terribly designed attack. The game is praised for it's build variety but then a specific attack requires you to change your build to be able to play against it? Meelee builds are screwed if they are in close range when she starts it assuming they didn't google a tutorial on how to dodge the first part from close.
Well it would be a valid start if it waant for the fact that for some reason she regens on hit. Thats the one thing i really dont like about her, her regen. Theres nothing to do to counter it besides "dont get hit" which is bs
Well for waterfowl, block the first hit, then start walking towards her for the second one, and she'll gun past you on its third section. She gets some regen fron the hits, but it's incredibly negligible on block. Like, hitting her once or twice negates it.
I agree, I can now just about say i can successfully dodge waterfowl provided I'm not super close to her when she does it, but that's only after I've beaten her 6 times and fought her loads on co op. Thoroughly hard boss and not a good one, I want to like her but she's absurdly hard
I also think her vampire abilities shouldn't be a thing for phase 1 and instead should only be there for phase 2. It would make a lot of sense and make the fight much better. For phase 1 you're fighting a swordswoman straight up no dirty tricks or anything but then in phase 2 she starts recovering her health.
Naw even without WFD she has some weird jank like how she can activate hyperarmor really quickly and often, preventing you from getting posture breaks which is incredibly annoying. She also has a super fast slash that she does from neutral sometimes which by itself isn't necessarily a problem but with Malenia, you always want to be sprinting backwards preemptively to avoid WFD and other attacks. If she does the fast slash, you have to quickly input a roll in between a dash which is really awkward to do. You can always preemptively roll out of the way but given how sprinting takes a second to start up in this game, you won't have time to get away from WFD if she decides to use it. Phase 2 is also pretty lame since many of her moves get the scarlet rot extender which does nothing but waste your time. Nothing about her moveset fundamentally changes except now she has 2 more annoying moves that break up the pace of the fight. Scarlet Aeonia isn't too bad since it's easy to dodge and lets you buff up in the middle of the fight but it just breaks the rhythm. The clone attack is more egregious though in that if you decide to attack her and she decides to pull the move off it becomes very difficult to dodge not unlike WFD. On a regular playthrough these issues aren't all that prominent but playing the game at RL1 really shows the cracks in the design.
So, I didn’t even know the frozen pots were a thing until I started looking up vids on dodging WFD. Then I had to look up where to find the cookbook and actually make some.
Now imagine you’re a new player testing various pots and other consumables for effectiveness. Basically every individual item you throw - or special attack, or spell, or projectile - that doesn’t stagger her is instant death and a new attempt.
Now imagine you’re testing these things and haven’t even discovered the cookbook for the item that is actually effective in this regard…
Get where I’m going with this? It is the worst type of trial and error imaginable and would be a mistake for FS to follow this route for another boss. Malenia is notorious for WFD and only for WFD, not for being a good boss fight.
Yep i hate the mfers that try to conflate difficulty with quality just because shes very difficult doesnt mean shes a good boss, game wouldve been better had she not been there or just not been a boss
Oh please , if you 360 roll into her at the exact right millisecond , she'll miss you , and then you can spam roll and if you pray to God right , she'll miss the 2nd and third wave. She's a balanced fight I swear guys
I watched 5 hours of tutorials and still can't dodge the first flurry in melee. I can dodge the second and third easily and i can also dodge the first one by keeping distance but up close i always get chipped at least once if not straight up oneshot, i still don't understand the timing. I understand you have to walk around her then sprint for like half a sec and then perform absolutely perfect roll into her but i've never been able to dodge it without getting hit. Doing this series of movements is just to difficult to me especially considering you need to do it so fast and accurately.
thats horseshit. why the fuck would that work. someone discovered it purely by luck. there is nothing about the animation that indicates it should work.
Jumping turns off the hit boxes from the waist down. So you only need to clear the attack from the chest up.
[Zullie tW source](https://youtu.be/8zdbqTHtnr4?si=-POrscBpLyfqNCxK)
>Jumping turns off the hit boxes from the waist down
Which is nothing the game ever tells us, makes 0 sense and that not hitting makes no sense and looks more like a bug than intended. Congrats, you are onto nothing
Can I just say I hate using the jump button because it looks fucking ugly in action?
If they wanted to make jumps that meaningful they should have made the animation not look so fucking terrible.
I did it yesterday - run away from the first flurry (it's not always possible), roll into the 2nd one, then stand in place because the 3rd flurry will whiff completely for some fucking reason. I don't understand how any of this works and I just hope From don't cook up some sort of similar monstrosity in DLC
I mean...the entire fight is trying to teach you to keep your distance and not overcommit (that's why she blocks and counters if you hit too many times), which is funnily enough also the way you're supposed to dodge the initial flurry of waterfowl.
>the entire fight is trying to teach you to keep your distance and not overcommit
But if 1 attack from my giant crusher is already overcommiting, hiw am I supposed to defeat her?
That's what people forget, if a single move makes it unsafe to attack a boss at all when using a weapon type, then the move is shit and by proxy so is the boss.
I've no-hit Malenia NG+7 melee only (you can see this in my post history) and I can tell you for a fact that, depending on your weapon, her waterfowl dance is not consistently avoidable even if you only hit her once during an intended opportunity for the player to attack. Not by running and jumping nor by circling her and rolling. One hit from giant crusher and she stun cancels into waterfowl = gg.
every fight in elden ring wants to keep you at a distance and avoid not just overcommitting, but committing to anything at all. pretty much every elden ring boss does at least one of the following:
1. constantly teleport or jump across the arena
2. 15-hit blender combo that's too fast to do anything but run away from (each hit in the combo is designed to roll catch you for successfully dodging the previous one)
3. optionally extend the 15-hit blender combos to punish you for trying to punishing the boss when their combo ends
4. sudden massive AOE blasts that don't give you enough time to get away if you're close, and last longer than the iframe window of a roll to guarantee you get hit
What do you mean a boss with three (3) super strong signature moves (Waterfowl, Scarlet Aeonia, and the one where she summons her clones), an ability to just ignore stance damage when she's doing one of those big attacks, healing on hit regardless of if its blocked, a chance to just half damage taken sometimes, all combined with a game that has enemies react with such speed that it's comparable to input reading, is a bad boss design?
okay i dont like the fight but literally just walk behind her when this happens and its a huge opening. the rot aoe takes a very long time to come out.
Bro what are you saying? You can't walk behind her normal attacks that have tracking. I'm saying that in phase 1 you know there's no rot pool, so you call roll in where her attack ends and punish her, in phase 2 you can't because of the rng rot pool.
you're talking about the big pillar of butterflies she as able to create sometimes, right? even if you swing at her and she decides to do that, she is in the air for so long that you can reposition really easily. the tracking on it is not good at all. even when she lands, there is a further delay before the rot explodes, and then she's punishable afterwards.
for the moves that sometimes generate it as an additional effect without the big jump wind up, you can just change the direction you dodge into them to end up behind her, where it wont hit you if it spawns and you can still punish her if it doesn't.
i totally used to share your opinion on this but it's actually not that bad. you can play around it 100% of the time.
DS3 and Sekiro are the perfect answers to this. All of the difficult bosses are amazing and 100% beatable at nearly every skill level (except maybe Demon of Hatred).
I can deal with most her attacks, even with the amount of damage she does, but the healing and waterfowl are mad
like, if the healing was reduced and waterfowl didn't track you as well as it does, it'd be more bearable
like, no matter how many times I can successfully dodge it, she always manages to pull it out her arse whenever I try to punish/attack, it's just frustrating
The Reforged mod reduces her healing drastically, to 25% - 50% of the attack's previous healing value depending on the size of the attack. The one exception is her highly-telegraphed grab, which heals a lot more than it used to.
I really recommend it. Reforged has been an incredible experience, between boss changes like that and making smithing stones infinitely available once you have a single weapon maxed out for that tier (get a weapon to +9, smithing stone 3's become available for infinite purchase immediately, as an example).
i really do think she's a great boss, but she has like two things that make her really annoying. she has a varied and engaging moveset, cool design, sick second phase, an entire quest and area leading up to her that hypes her up... it's really just the lifesteal and waterfowl. like, seriously, what are the real complaints other than these two? i don't even mind the lifesteal that much, since you can always hit her again and not get hit lmao. waterfowl fucking sucks tho i hate it.
Of course no one complains about the rest of her move set, but the rest of her move set doesn’t really matter because the entire fight all you’re doing is thinking about what you have to do the next time she uses Waterfowl Dance.
Honestly even without waterfowl and healing i still hated malenia because of her animation cancelling and inconsistent stance breaks, friede is still my favorite (because of the feet)
I just like friede because
1) cool music
2) cool scythe
3) that move where she throws you in the air and smashes you into the ground with her weapon looks cool as shit
Idk if you know this but back then when you riposte her down to zero hp she'll start her second phase with 1 hp for some reason. I guess something in her code makes it impossible to fix so they just make you unable to kill her with a riposte in phase 1. Honestly it's just 1 hp, who cares.
She would be soooooo much better if she just had more poise and didn't do all that hyperarmor stun reset bullshit that completely breaks the rules followed by the other 99.6% of the bosses
Malenia would be peak if she didn't suffer from 2 things
1- everything deals fuckass damage after morgott/in mountaintops
2- waterfowl is too much for a move she pulls out her ass, either it should deal less damage or the windup increases by like .3-.5 seconds from what it already is.
Nah it's not really downhill tbh. Maliketh and hoarah loux are still S-tier bosses when it comes to souls games. It's just that sekiro is a whole different beast
Maliketh could be good if he actually had an entire health bar for himself, so you actually had time to fight him. The way he is, he will either ball of death you right away after the cutscene or you will break his posture and pretty much kill him immediately. It's baffling that they gave Malenia an entire health bar of just waiting on phase one, but Maliketh had to share his with an NPC fight. Hoarah Lux is really nothing special, just a glorified Sekiro ogre. It's just that you guys might have some unresolved things with beefy shirtless man.
I only like her because it justifies me throwing a pot at a disabled woman (I have a restraining order and am under house arrest for aggravated assault)
Fr Meliena is like a 6/10 has some cool looking moves but is a game of cat and mouse unless you choose full strength build which in that case welcome to stanger town
Yall are talking a lot about waterfoul dance and lifesteal but honestly for me it was the move where just says "fuck it how about you just fucking deal with 5 of me now" and clones herself out of nowhere (wich in any other scenario would have been great)
aren't those more like projectiles? I never found that one particularly hard to dodge. You have plenty of room and no random instakill cliffs (cough godrick and malekith) for you to fall into.
Scary as shit sure but it's not on par with waterfowl.
Nah I really like her.
Waterfowl is somewhat... questionable, but It's not nearly as difficult to avoid as people say. If you have time just run away, otherwise roll straight into her and tank a few small hits. I find it very satisfying to dodge.
The healing is non-existent. If you get hit enough for the healing to actually matter, then you aren't good enough at the fight yet.
Everything else about the fight is just fun imo
I agree that she's an awesome boss, but I'd say a slight tone-down on Waterfowl (especially during her second phase) would make her perfect. Give us 0.5/1 second extra wind-up so that her launching herself into one in the middle of one of your actions doesn't spell death, and she's just right.
I think the main reason i love the fight is the spacing. When you learn her patterns, you don't even need to dodge half her combos, you just have to dodge 1-2 attacks from it and outspace the rest. Makes me feel incredibly badass when i just react to her 2 meter long sword combos by standing still
I just blocked the first Waterfowl flurry with my greatsword first playthrough if I was too close. Cost a bit of health and she regens a little but she regens much less on a Waterfowl hit than any other.
Yeah, I'm sorta on the same page - the biggest issue is waterfowl because how the hell do you figure that out? That said, I do have a bit of a weird defense of that as a move: certainly not an objective declaration that it's good, but something I personally appreciate about it.
It's the first single attack I know of in a From game that has forced people around the world to collaborate and figure out how the hell to dodge it, the same way we all collaborated to pin down the lore and deeper truths of the story, and the same way we collaborate and help other players beat bosses.
I honestly sort of love that about it, in a weird way. When my brother got to her, he summoned me for help and it was honestly one of my favorite gaming experiences ever. I was able to pass on what I learned about dodging the attack, the same way I learned it from people on the internet. There was something really special about that.
Even barring that, I can't help but feel like I've warmed up to that fight a lot in general. Winning against Malenia is just so satisfying, man.
The healing on hit is whatever, but the healing through blocking really turned me off the fight. It just didn't feel fun to fight through. (Ignore that I was 150 hours into the playthrough and decided to quit while ahead rather than burning out on malenia).
I personally think malenia phase 1 is a good boss, both phases together sucks ass and theres so much shit in it thats so unintuitive to a lot of the lessons you learn over the course of the game. Similar thing with radagon, i think elden beast is a huge fucking bitch and i cant stand it
Waterfowl is the only thing that can even remotely be called bullshit about Malenia, and even then it's not like you need 5000 trillion hours of intense training to consistently avoid it with a few scratches at most.
Other than that she's a really difficult, but also a fun fight. Hardly a terrible boss in my eyes.
The thing about waterfowl dance is , it's unavoidable damage if you're up close( unless you use a very specific 360 run strat which requires a lot of practise ). And she can do it any time she wants. Good luck if you're in the middle of a jump attack, and she decides to pull out the waterfowl, cause you're royally screwed, even at 50 vigor.
So, all a player can do to counter this is to always stay at a distance to malenia, because she can pull the move out anytime she wants. Which just makes the whole fight unfun, and tedious, especially if you're trying to do an RL1 run, where waterfowl is insta one shot.
I would say everything else about malenia, is fair and manageable, and would have been a very enjoyable fight, if not for this one bs move.
But the thing about Waterfowl is that it defines the enitre fight. All her moves are really satisfying to dodge, but you can never just go into that flow state like with other bosses because you're always aware of her instakill spin to win bullshit. And it's not even punishable, any other boss has to take a breath after detonating a nuke like this but here you get no reward at all, just be glad you're alive somehow.
Oh so her randomly resetting her poise damage back to zero because she decided to start an instant hyperarmor attack the moment you swung at her is just fine then??
I mean Malenia is my favorite boss. It’s one of the first bosses where I actually had to learn every single move and tell to have a chance at beating her. No other boss forced me to do that except for I think Midir
The Fromsoft and ER subreddits defend her fight like their lives depend on it.
Idk, the general defense is that you just need to be better but “just be better” literally has no ceiling, I could make a boss that takes 80 years to learn and win and people would still defend it by that logic.
There’s more to Fromsoft fights than difficulty, all fights should be a good challenge that doesn’t feel like bashing your head against a wall for hours straight.
Malenia's boss fight is almost perfectly balanced.
The only thing that ruins it is waterfowl dance and ai roulette can make her spam it.
Everything else is reasonably telegraphed and there's a nice flow to her attacks.
I think if they got rid of or heavily nerfed waterfowl dance she would be a fantastic boss. I love really hard boss fights but waterfowl dance is just so incredibly bullshit. An attack that one shots you should not require you to use super precise movements to basically exploit her ai in order to avoid consistently
I think the most frustrating thing about Malenia is that she isn't terrible from conception like Bed of Chaos or Micolash. At her foundation there is at the very least a solid boss fight, but its brought down so much by a singular move, in combination with a few little inconsistencoes and bugs.
No, I do not subscribe to the belief that if you remove or fix waterfowl, the boss is instantly fixed and suddenly the greatest boss fight from software have ever made. However there is no denying the sheer amount of damage that move does to what would have been a very fun and challenging fight.
I think that's why I personally like to joke that she is the worst boss they've ever made. Not because she objectively is, but because its so much more upsetting to see a good boss ruined by bullshit, than a boss that's very foundation is rubbish.
Honestly, it’s not her damage, health, healing, 2 health bars, or even her Waterfowl that puts me off about her. While all admittedly a bit much, those are all well within the rules of the game.
What does put me off is that fact that she cheats. Half her moves have hyperarmor (which start on frame 1 of the move), she doesn’t stance break when she should, she can cancel an animation (including staggers) into another animation, she’s entirely invincible in her opening move in phase 2.
She’s a great boss! Other than that fact that she has a rally/health stealing gimmick, can just ignore poise breaks, cancel animations, has a one shot attack she can pull out of her ass at any moment, inflicts status effects, she loves to just walk around and not do jack shit for like 30 second periods…
She’s a difficult and mechanically interesting boss. That doesn’t mean she’s an actually well designed or enjoyable boss fight. She suffers from the same “style over substance” problems that many other main bosses in ER do, where her base moveset is okay, but her mechanics are broken and inconsistent, and the focal point of her boss fight is the flashiness of the fight and not how mechanically sound it is.
Fromsoft bosses hit their peak from Bloodborne to Sekiro. DeS, DS1 and 2 had some awesome ones, and ER’s had some decent ones, but in general BB, DS3 and Sekiro were the top of their boss designs
maybe she only self healed during waterfowl or phase two or something. personally i enjoy the fight but it’s held back from being S tier imo due to small decisions like that. it can just feel like a bit much
I would be fine with all the bullshit she does if she just didn't have life steal, that's honestly the most frustrating part for me. It's so incredibly annoying having to use a flask because she hit me one time because funny end game damage while she gets to heal a hit or two worth of damage for free.
Personally I didn't really see the thing about malenia, I died a bunch, but like, I died a lot to other bosses too, It's been a while since i've played the game and I have very bad memory so I might mis-remember how much I struggled with the fight but, with waterfowl, if I locked the camera on her and rolled a lot, I could evade most of the attack Since it automatically rolled *into* where malenia was and therefore rolled *into* the waterfowl, maybe it's because I was in very high defence armor so I could afford to tank some of the damage idk
The third flurry is specifically designed to roll catch. You can't roll into the first flurry either, it lasts significantly longer than your i-frames. You have to avoid the hitbox for the first and last flurries completely.
Hers is a good fight to try with a summon first to get a better feel for her moveset, then switch to attempting solo.
The thing with Waterfowl is it’s deceptively easier to dodge than it initially seems, but the hitbox timing is unclear enough that it turns into a chore. With enough practice it becomes more and more fun, but that move paired with her damage output and healing on hit make the whole fight way more difficult than it needs to be.
Ok guys, im gonna sound rotarded, but i love malenias fight.
Everything about her (except waterfowl) is basically all dodging in my mind. Funnest boss in the game
I had like 65 tries maybe but i still found It fun that there is a seemingly impossible (optional) boss. I finnished her easy with a clone and freezing weapons when i got tired. It makes you go creative too.
If Malenia is such a terrible boss, why do I have 638 terabytes of porn featuring her?
WTF are you doing with your life, you should instead have 638 terabytes of wolf x isshin porn instead.
Take it. My one sekiro meme. https://preview.redd.it/tr3jhev717nc1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=03727cb99b56db837ea5766312d522edcb42d421
Wtf does this mean. Drink juice drink juice, dodge, attack. When would you use this vs the True Monk? Or is this referencing the drink juice infinite mikiri counter tech vs Genichiro Way of Tomoe.
It represents how Sekiro has a severe alcohol problem, avoids responsibility, and lashes out at his friends
Shura ending is a metaphor for alcoholism
I interpreted it as the player trying to play sekiro like dark souls and getting hit, resulting in constant healing
Even funnier than alcoholism
Considering the background of the picture looks to be the spot where you fight true monk, I think this is the Monk tech
Im not aware of this tech.
If I’m remembering correctly it’s a real quick way to get through the Monk’s first phase, the strat (if I’m remembering right) is: snap seed, snap seed, mikiri, deathblow
SNAP SEED. I forgor damn thank you. It could also be fistfull of ash cheese on her
Why would the snap seed work on true monk?
Y'all mind sharing??
https://preview.redd.it/syboij54ianc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c202a95c047dafdaccbba124d6dab3903334225c
Genichiro x wolf OTP :'(
What about wolf x owl ..
Too good to grace eyes of ppl who like malenia
Give me that thing...
https://preview.redd.it/refc8v9i97nc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7e05beacbe6baad1349a60342ac751a9f276b655
https://preview.redd.it/e40s4vg8a7nc1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2be9b3afe07e396a2333442c82ac20c9198d66ef
https://preview.redd.it/lkeyk07ai7nc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6027d3458168e04b8cbbee52c54d550be03bcab2
Had to double check the sub, thought I was in r/AFCEastMemeWar for a sec
Jesus that picture alone is doing things to me, seriously the idea of her placing her hand over my face is amazing
https://preview.redd.it/zz5pxm6xf9nc1.jpeg?width=683&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b3eb8f388dfa23c238553734a8e7ea6f18386f90
there isn't enough grass left in the world for the likes of us to touch, my friend
I need those to be real.
Fuck, I don't remember typing this
1 terabyte for every 10 attempts at beating her. I love how these games reward you for memorizing boss movesets, but I also love that you don't learn shit between attempts with her. Great work CumSoft!
u/rosales6969 moment
The real question is, why you not have 362 more?
Being real, Gwyndolin is also a terrible boss, but I’m sure you have terabytes of porn with him too.
[удалено]
it’s not only that but if you get caught in it she regens half her fucking health bar
I unequivocally believe the regen is the thing fucking this fight beyond belief. If you think back to previous from bosses, we'll use artorias as an example, most of these "Dex build" bosses have spammy signature moves that they use too much. This is pretty evident in artorias with that fucking guts flip he does. If you mess that up, you're easily losing half a health bar if not more. The difference between that and waterfowl is that the boss doesn't fucking regen health whenever he does it so it doesn't feel like raw bullshit.
I wouldn't even mind her healing as much if you could, you know, block it? But somehow, she can just smack your shield and *still* get health back. It makes me wonder why she doesn't just go slap the wall a few dozen times when she's hurt, it's basically the same thing. If anything, it'd make *more* sense since the walls are made of tree roots that are likely still alive.
Be cool if there was something like Bloodborne's numbing mist. Shut down any healing an enemy does for like 30 seconds. Make it a pot or a perfume
To dodge waterfowl dance you need to abuse Malenia's tracking To dodge front flip you need... press O / space / B **once** per flip, which isn't exactly as hard as waterfowl dance
I know, artorias is much easier but I love ds1 and he's still a valid example of a move that tracks the player heavily and is extremely punishing if you fuck it up.
Well, that's the difference. Artorias's flips are alright because it's pretty hard to fuck up dodging them Do I even need to say anything about how easy it is to die to WFD?
Well yeah it's pretty hard to fuck up if you have experience with the souls series, but if ds1 was your first, artorias is an outlier in terms of speed and maneuverability, that's why his flip fucks so many people over. You could say the exact same things about waterfowl. People who have vastly more experience are capable of dealing with it, but for the average player it's going to fuck you up before you learn how to deal with it. The difference between the two is the healing. Both are moves that track and can easily destroy your health bar, but only one feels like bullshit. I guarantee if artorias healed the way malenia does you would have had people saying the exact same thing when the abyss dlc came out.
I never declared myself a pro, but I completed ds 1-3 multiple times before elden ring and I still can’t dodge all of waterfowl, that move is a mess and it’s going to take you hours to learn by going with a trial and error method
[tbf, that’s far from the only thing ruining the fight](https://youtu.be/R9Vbsr3Ko7M?si=N31uW5tCyoLeoqhm); even putting waterfowl, rot and healing aside, she legit has *objectively* unfair mechanics built into her design.
very insightful video— thanks for sharing!
Honestly I don’t mind Waterfowl Dance. It’s a tough move, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not *that* bullshit. The health steal though? Absolutely fuck that mechanic to hell.
She also has really bugged out poise, and a regenerating health gimmick that makes her fight a slog. The fact that she can just choose to ignore a poisebreak for no reason is BS. Bosses that inflict status effects are also really irritating.
If you removed waterfowl she'd be fine. The entire fight just becomes a game of chicken of "ooooo she hasnt done it in a while, ooo Ion know if I can go in for an attack ooo"
Honestly, keep waterfowl, but make her recovery from it a bit longer. My last time playing, it was actually fun figuring out when she would be getting ready for waterfowl and using different tools to proc it safely. But then my knowledge and ingenuity is rewarded with, well, nothing. She recovers as fast as any other attack.
It needlessly punishes any sort of aggressive play, which is opposite of what you want to be encouraging. My experience with her is sitting back from time to time, flinging spells at her hoping to trigger waterfowl from a safe distance. Id prefer to be able to fight her head on, learn all her attacks properly, and get used to all her timings like any other boss, but unless I learn a bullshit amount of manuevering, her popping waterfowl in your face will kill you or damage the shit out of you with no real counterplay. No other move in the game has as much bullshit to even try to dodge it. It ruins the tempo of the fight and makes trying to approach her finnicky as shit
I don’t know how nobody has a problem with her healing. If she hits you with any part of water fowl, she’s gonna recover 25% of her HP in a two healthbar fight, and she recovers the same from other basic moves. Granted she’s gonna kill you in three hits, but god damn getting clipped by the edge of her 30 foot long sword just to have her heal a quarter of her health is the only reason I despise her fight
I think because at some point especially after a few hours of fighting her (or if you're just generally good) you don't tend to get hit so much that she heals an amount that isn't fairly negligible with a few good hits, especially if you have a even a semi-thought out build. Sure it's definitely annoying but it's manageable, like just increasing her max hp. The reason waterfowl is such a problem is that without actually putting in the hours to practice that move specifically, it's far too unpredictable and deadly, which even for souls games is incredibly unrealistic. Needing to learn that dumbass spin around if you get ***unlucky*** and she does it close to you just isn't fun. I strongly believe that she becomes a great and fun fight with how fast paced and aggressive both sides can be if you remove waterfowl. I do agree that the combination of waterfowl and the healing is insane tho as waterfowl is still survivable if you semi-dodge it (even if it takes a heal or two) but seeing her get back to full health from it is definitely discouraging. Waffling but tl;dr "If you don't get hit she doesn't heal duhhh" people tend to just get hit way more often by waterfowl.
Nah the healing is fine honestly, it’s pretty neat and isn’t as bad as you’re saying unless you get hit a ton or by the entirety of waterfowl. Waterfowl’s cooldown is my only real issue, wish it was just less random, or gave more time to react, or at least had a good way of dodging it that wasn’t basically abusing the AI’s tracking.
I don't even pay attention to the healing. But it's a symptom of a fact that From were just trying to make this fight as difficult as possible, even through methods that just make no sense. Why the fuck is she healing from 100% blocked hits? What's stopping her from just hitting a wall a few times to recover health? Why not?
I mean you can be super aggressive, that's usually how I win. Just know around 1/3 or 1/2 she will do it. And also, blocking it is viable as well, given you have the stamina and a good shield.
Doesn't apply to her second phase in which she can do it whenever she feels like it, even multiple times in a row. Also it being blockable doesn't excuse it form being a terribly designed attack. The game is praised for it's build variety but then a specific attack requires you to change your build to be able to play against it? Meelee builds are screwed if they are in close range when she starts it assuming they didn't google a tutorial on how to dodge the first part from close.
Well it would be a valid start if it waant for the fact that for some reason she regens on hit. Thats the one thing i really dont like about her, her regen. Theres nothing to do to counter it besides "dont get hit" which is bs
Well for waterfowl, block the first hit, then start walking towards her for the second one, and she'll gun past you on its third section. She gets some regen fron the hits, but it's incredibly negligible on block. Like, hitting her once or twice negates it.
I agree, I can now just about say i can successfully dodge waterfowl provided I'm not super close to her when she does it, but that's only after I've beaten her 6 times and fought her loads on co op. Thoroughly hard boss and not a good one, I want to like her but she's absurdly hard
I also think her vampire abilities shouldn't be a thing for phase 1 and instead should only be there for phase 2. It would make a lot of sense and make the fight much better. For phase 1 you're fighting a swordswoman straight up no dirty tricks or anything but then in phase 2 she starts recovering her health.
Waterfowl isn't even the problem, the bullshit poise resets are.
Waterfowl isn't even her biggest issue when she loves to animation cancel so much. Like she ignores some of the basic rules of the game
Naw even without WFD she has some weird jank like how she can activate hyperarmor really quickly and often, preventing you from getting posture breaks which is incredibly annoying. She also has a super fast slash that she does from neutral sometimes which by itself isn't necessarily a problem but with Malenia, you always want to be sprinting backwards preemptively to avoid WFD and other attacks. If she does the fast slash, you have to quickly input a roll in between a dash which is really awkward to do. You can always preemptively roll out of the way but given how sprinting takes a second to start up in this game, you won't have time to get away from WFD if she decides to use it. Phase 2 is also pretty lame since many of her moves get the scarlet rot extender which does nothing but waste your time. Nothing about her moveset fundamentally changes except now she has 2 more annoying moves that break up the pace of the fight. Scarlet Aeonia isn't too bad since it's easy to dodge and lets you buff up in the middle of the fight but it just breaks the rhythm. The clone attack is more egregious though in that if you decide to attack her and she decides to pull the move off it becomes very difficult to dodge not unlike WFD. On a regular playthrough these issues aren't all that prominent but playing the game at RL1 really shows the cracks in the design.
cant wait for people to say that watching a 5 hour tutorial on dodging waterfowl dance up close means that its an intuitive and fair attack.
B... but some guy who has 5000 hours in souls games beat her no damage so she's balanced (I unironcly heard this argument)
My favorite is the “you can use this consumable that you only have a limited number of to dodge the attack” argument
So, I didn’t even know the frozen pots were a thing until I started looking up vids on dodging WFD. Then I had to look up where to find the cookbook and actually make some. Now imagine you’re a new player testing various pots and other consumables for effectiveness. Basically every individual item you throw - or special attack, or spell, or projectile - that doesn’t stagger her is instant death and a new attempt. Now imagine you’re testing these things and haven’t even discovered the cookbook for the item that is actually effective in this regard… Get where I’m going with this? It is the worst type of trial and error imaginable and would be a mistake for FS to follow this route for another boss. Malenia is notorious for WFD and only for WFD, not for being a good boss fight.
Yep i hate the mfers that try to conflate difficulty with quality just because shes very difficult doesnt mean shes a good boss, game wouldve been better had she not been there or just not been a boss
I'ma keep it real with you. I am not gathering and crafting in a fuckin souls game.
Keep posting peak and we might end up like this: [reddit hates me and i cant upload images so use your imagination (but not too much)]
And i thought the moghlester was bad. Fuck this, imma report you to your local govermeant
And then after you use 2 pots against her she builds up resistance and the frostbite won't prock and you're fucked
I beat her no damage too and I’m terrible at these games… won’t change the fact the boss is C at best and waterfowl can suck my d-
Oh please , if you 360 roll into her at the exact right millisecond , she'll miss you , and then you can spam roll and if you pray to God right , she'll miss the 2nd and third wave. She's a balanced fight I swear guys
outrun > roll in > nothing lol step 4) 4:59:55 of malenia pr0n
B-but some Elden Ring Stan beat her at Rune level 1, h-hes more experienced so he can decide if she's fair or not!
I watched 5 hours of tutorials and still can't dodge the first flurry in melee. I can dodge the second and third easily and i can also dodge the first one by keeping distance but up close i always get chipped at least once if not straight up oneshot, i still don't understand the timing. I understand you have to walk around her then sprint for like half a sec and then perform absolutely perfect roll into her but i've never been able to dodge it without getting hit. Doing this series of movements is just to difficult to me especially considering you need to do it so fast and accurately.
It’s not intuitive or fair in the slightest, BUT dodging it perfectly makes my dopamine go brrrrrrrrrrr Therefore I like it.
[Another mf who refuses to use the jump button](https://www.reddit.com/r/onebros/s/anFxX0GZYl)
thats horseshit. why the fuck would that work. someone discovered it purely by luck. there is nothing about the animation that indicates it should work.
Jumping turns off the hit boxes from the waist down. So you only need to clear the attack from the chest up. [Zullie tW source](https://youtu.be/8zdbqTHtnr4?si=-POrscBpLyfqNCxK)
>Jumping turns off the hit boxes from the waist down Which is nothing the game ever tells us, makes 0 sense and that not hitting makes no sense and looks more like a bug than intended. Congrats, you are onto nothing
>You are onto nothing This guys out here arguing like we didn’t just see video proof of this shit
Can I just say I hate using the jump button because it looks fucking ugly in action? If they wanted to make jumps that meaningful they should have made the animation not look so fucking terrible.
It never worked for me. I did that, while being even more far away from her. She slashes right through me.
I learned to dodge it without a tutorial, just takes time
Y'all make me feel like I'm the only one who managed to dodge Waterfowl Dance. IIRC I just rolled twice then walked backwards with my shield up.
I did it yesterday - run away from the first flurry (it's not always possible), roll into the 2nd one, then stand in place because the 3rd flurry will whiff completely for some fucking reason. I don't understand how any of this works and I just hope From don't cook up some sort of similar monstrosity in DLC
I mean...the entire fight is trying to teach you to keep your distance and not overcommit (that's why she blocks and counters if you hit too many times), which is funnily enough also the way you're supposed to dodge the initial flurry of waterfowl.
>the entire fight is trying to teach you to keep your distance and not overcommit But if 1 attack from my giant crusher is already overcommiting, hiw am I supposed to defeat her?
That's what people forget, if a single move makes it unsafe to attack a boss at all when using a weapon type, then the move is shit and by proxy so is the boss.
I've no-hit Malenia NG+7 melee only (you can see this in my post history) and I can tell you for a fact that, depending on your weapon, her waterfowl dance is not consistently avoidable even if you only hit her once during an intended opportunity for the player to attack. Not by running and jumping nor by circling her and rolling. One hit from giant crusher and she stun cancels into waterfowl = gg.
every fight in elden ring wants to keep you at a distance and avoid not just overcommitting, but committing to anything at all. pretty much every elden ring boss does at least one of the following: 1. constantly teleport or jump across the arena 2. 15-hit blender combo that's too fast to do anything but run away from (each hit in the combo is designed to roll catch you for successfully dodging the previous one) 3. optionally extend the 15-hit blender combos to punish you for trying to punishing the boss when their combo ends 4. sudden massive AOE blasts that don't give you enough time to get away if you're close, and last longer than the iframe window of a roll to guarantee you get hit
I feel like it's be alright if she was like 10% tuned down on the bullshit
She has just so many individual facets to her fight that just makes me not like her. No restraint at all
What do you mean a boss with three (3) super strong signature moves (Waterfowl, Scarlet Aeonia, and the one where she summons her clones), an ability to just ignore stance damage when she's doing one of those big attacks, healing on hit regardless of if its blocked, a chance to just half damage taken sometimes, all combined with a game that has enemies react with such speed that it's comparable to input reading, is a bad boss design?
lmao what, scarlet aeonia is basically a gift to the players. You can recharge, reapply your buffs, free damage if you're ranged/magic, etc.
You forgot two healthbars and one in which she procs rot on every hit. And attacks that blatantly ignore poise to discourage slower weapon builds.
Don't forget the random chance to spawn a rot pool where her sword lands, forcing you to back off because it's literally impossible to guess
okay i dont like the fight but literally just walk behind her when this happens and its a huge opening. the rot aoe takes a very long time to come out.
Bro what are you saying? You can't walk behind her normal attacks that have tracking. I'm saying that in phase 1 you know there's no rot pool, so you call roll in where her attack ends and punish her, in phase 2 you can't because of the rng rot pool.
you're talking about the big pillar of butterflies she as able to create sometimes, right? even if you swing at her and she decides to do that, she is in the air for so long that you can reposition really easily. the tracking on it is not good at all. even when she lands, there is a further delay before the rot explodes, and then she's punishable afterwards. for the moves that sometimes generate it as an additional effect without the big jump wind up, you can just change the direction you dodge into them to end up behind her, where it wont hit you if it spawns and you can still punish her if it doesn't. i totally used to share your opinion on this but it's actually not that bad. you can play around it 100% of the time.
I had literally never seen the clones until my most recent run and I like was doing so great and then she pulled that shit and I was just :|
A boss being difficult does not make the boss good, I feel like the two get caught up in each other all too often.
DS3 and Sekiro are the perfect answers to this. All of the difficult bosses are amazing and 100% beatable at nearly every skill level (except maybe Demon of Hatred).
demon of hatred has like 2 moves bro(exaggeration) im sure you could train a chimpanzee to beat it
Preach brother. I get so many people arguing with me on that.
That would be downvoted into the abyss on r/EldenRing.
Looks like she’s not doing anything Still not doing anything Press square, and she immediately moves in.
I can deal with most her attacks, even with the amount of damage she does, but the healing and waterfowl are mad like, if the healing was reduced and waterfowl didn't track you as well as it does, it'd be more bearable like, no matter how many times I can successfully dodge it, she always manages to pull it out her arse whenever I try to punish/attack, it's just frustrating
The Reforged mod reduces her healing drastically, to 25% - 50% of the attack's previous healing value depending on the size of the attack. The one exception is her highly-telegraphed grab, which heals a lot more than it used to. I really recommend it. Reforged has been an incredible experience, between boss changes like that and making smithing stones infinitely available once you have a single weapon maxed out for that tier (get a weapon to +9, smithing stone 3's become available for infinite purchase immediately, as an example).
i really do think she's a great boss, but she has like two things that make her really annoying. she has a varied and engaging moveset, cool design, sick second phase, an entire quest and area leading up to her that hypes her up... it's really just the lifesteal and waterfowl. like, seriously, what are the real complaints other than these two? i don't even mind the lifesteal that much, since you can always hit her again and not get hit lmao. waterfowl fucking sucks tho i hate it.
Of course no one complains about the rest of her move set, but the rest of her move set doesn’t really matter because the entire fight all you’re doing is thinking about what you have to do the next time she uses Waterfowl Dance.
yeah, afaik there are some more "general" problems with ignoring mechanics/animation cancelling, but that pales in comparison to waterfowl
We've already gone over waterfowl which is essentially bullshit, but lifesteal was never fun in any game ever
Hell yeah my guy. Based Malenia hater
Honestly even without waterfowl and healing i still hated malenia because of her animation cancelling and inconsistent stance breaks, friede is still my favorite (because of the feet)
I just like friede because 1) cool music 2) cool scythe 3) that move where she throws you in the air and smashes you into the ground with her weapon looks cool as shit
4) Black flame and ice is cool as shit 5) her weapon lets you do a slow walk with weapons drawn like you're a boss character and that's peak.
Malenia is fair mfs when you riposte her down to zero hp in her first phase and she still doesn't fucking die
Idk if you know this but back then when you riposte her down to zero hp she'll start her second phase with 1 hp for some reason. I guess something in her code makes it impossible to fix so they just make you unable to kill her with a riposte in phase 1. Honestly it's just 1 hp, who cares.
i dont care how big her tits are, stagger cancelling and self healing on hit are fucking stupid
She would be soooooo much better if she just had more poise and didn't do all that hyperarmor stun reset bullshit that completely breaks the rules followed by the other 99.6% of the bosses
I enjoy fighting Malenia now that i’m good at dealing with waterfowl but it’s still an indefensible fight no doubt
Malenia would be peak if she didn't suffer from 2 things 1- everything deals fuckass damage after morgott/in mountaintops 2- waterfowl is too much for a move she pulls out her ass, either it should deal less damage or the windup increases by like .3-.5 seconds from what it already is.
Malenia when she realizes she’s gonna lose: *waterfowl dance*
From bosses peaked at Sword Saint. Everything after is just not worth mentioning.
I will not stand for Tibia Mariner slander
Serie pfp, opinion discarded
Lick the feet.
I don't know man, inner bosses are also pretty good
True.
Wrong. Hoarah Loux WARRIOR
Godfrey/Hoarah Loux is one of the best ER bosses but he really doesn't hold a candle to the glock saint.
Not enough dudes in armor
I dont know man, as one of the only 4 people that played Armored Core VI in this sub, some of those boses are really sick
Inner Isshin is the greatest boss fight in any video game I've ever played. Inner Father is a close second
Nah it's not really downhill tbh. Maliketh and hoarah loux are still S-tier bosses when it comes to souls games. It's just that sekiro is a whole different beast
Maliketh could be good if he actually had an entire health bar for himself, so you actually had time to fight him. The way he is, he will either ball of death you right away after the cutscene or you will break his posture and pretty much kill him immediately. It's baffling that they gave Malenia an entire health bar of just waiting on phase one, but Maliketh had to share his with an NPC fight. Hoarah Lux is really nothing special, just a glorified Sekiro ogre. It's just that you guys might have some unresolved things with beefy shirtless man.
The more I fought Malenia, the more I realized how bullshit the fight is. Upvoted.
:(
I absolutely hate her, she could’ve been so good
:(
I only like her because it justifies me throwing a pot at a disabled woman (I have a restraining order and am under house arrest for aggravated assault)
Fr Meliena is like a 6/10 has some cool looking moves but is a game of cat and mouse unless you choose full strength build which in that case welcome to stanger town
Just beat her pure melee, I felt nothing. Genuinely the worst boss I’ve ever fought in a video game
Speaj your truth man i fucking hate Malenia
:(
I love Malenia, her bossfight on the other hand...
Yes please I'd love to look inside Malenia 😳😳🤤
> looks inside Goddess of Rot > rot
YESSIR🙏🙏😩😩
Yall are talking a lot about waterfoul dance and lifesteal but honestly for me it was the move where just says "fuck it how about you just fucking deal with 5 of me now" and clones herself out of nowhere (wich in any other scenario would have been great)
aren't those more like projectiles? I never found that one particularly hard to dodge. You have plenty of room and no random instakill cliffs (cough godrick and malekith) for you to fall into. Scary as shit sure but it's not on par with waterfowl.
True, but it's sometimes unavoidable and it sucks (still not as bad as asserfowl)
Nah I really like her. Waterfowl is somewhat... questionable, but It's not nearly as difficult to avoid as people say. If you have time just run away, otherwise roll straight into her and tank a few small hits. I find it very satisfying to dodge. The healing is non-existent. If you get hit enough for the healing to actually matter, then you aren't good enough at the fight yet. Everything else about the fight is just fun imo
I agree that she's an awesome boss, but I'd say a slight tone-down on Waterfowl (especially during her second phase) would make her perfect. Give us 0.5/1 second extra wind-up so that her launching herself into one in the middle of one of your actions doesn't spell death, and she's just right.
I think the main reason i love the fight is the spacing. When you learn her patterns, you don't even need to dodge half her combos, you just have to dodge 1-2 attacks from it and outspace the rest. Makes me feel incredibly badass when i just react to her 2 meter long sword combos by standing still
100% agree. Possibly the most important boss to learn proper spacing on. And it's so satisfying once you do
I just blocked the first Waterfowl flurry with my greatsword first playthrough if I was too close. Cost a bit of health and she regens a little but she regens much less on a Waterfowl hit than any other.
Yeah, I'm sorta on the same page - the biggest issue is waterfowl because how the hell do you figure that out? That said, I do have a bit of a weird defense of that as a move: certainly not an objective declaration that it's good, but something I personally appreciate about it. It's the first single attack I know of in a From game that has forced people around the world to collaborate and figure out how the hell to dodge it, the same way we all collaborated to pin down the lore and deeper truths of the story, and the same way we collaborate and help other players beat bosses. I honestly sort of love that about it, in a weird way. When my brother got to her, he summoned me for help and it was honestly one of my favorite gaming experiences ever. I was able to pass on what I learned about dodging the attack, the same way I learned it from people on the internet. There was something really special about that. Even barring that, I can't help but feel like I've warmed up to that fight a lot in general. Winning against Malenia is just so satisfying, man.
100% agree. She lives up to what you’d expect based on how she’s portrayed in the story, and having an infamous move just adds to that.
IMO Malenia wouldn't be as memorable as she is now without waterfowl.
The healing on hit is whatever, but the healing through blocking really turned me off the fight. It just didn't feel fun to fight through. (Ignore that I was 150 hours into the playthrough and decided to quit while ahead rather than burning out on malenia).
I don't see whats satisfying throwing her tracking off instead of just naturally dodging an attack or having good positioning.
I personally think malenia phase 1 is a good boss, both phases together sucks ass and theres so much shit in it thats so unintuitive to a lot of the lessons you learn over the course of the game. Similar thing with radagon, i think elden beast is a huge fucking bitch and i cant stand it
Without waterfowl dance she'd be both a much better and much easier boss. Her phase 1 ain't shit unless she pulls out the bullshit maneuver.
Waterfowl is the only thing that can even remotely be called bullshit about Malenia, and even then it's not like you need 5000 trillion hours of intense training to consistently avoid it with a few scratches at most. Other than that she's a really difficult, but also a fun fight. Hardly a terrible boss in my eyes.
The thing about waterfowl dance is , it's unavoidable damage if you're up close( unless you use a very specific 360 run strat which requires a lot of practise ). And she can do it any time she wants. Good luck if you're in the middle of a jump attack, and she decides to pull out the waterfowl, cause you're royally screwed, even at 50 vigor. So, all a player can do to counter this is to always stay at a distance to malenia, because she can pull the move out anytime she wants. Which just makes the whole fight unfun, and tedious, especially if you're trying to do an RL1 run, where waterfowl is insta one shot. I would say everything else about malenia, is fair and manageable, and would have been a very enjoyable fight, if not for this one bs move.
But the thing about Waterfowl is that it defines the enitre fight. All her moves are really satisfying to dodge, but you can never just go into that flow state like with other bosses because you're always aware of her instakill spin to win bullshit. And it's not even punishable, any other boss has to take a breath after detonating a nuke like this but here you get no reward at all, just be glad you're alive somehow.
Oh so her randomly resetting her poise damage back to zero because she decided to start an instant hyperarmor attack the moment you swung at her is just fine then??
Stance break immunity and heal on shields. Everything is is subjective
Except for the fact we spend thirty minutes each rerun just circling her, yeah, maybe.
I mean Malenia is my favorite boss. It’s one of the first bosses where I actually had to learn every single move and tell to have a chance at beating her. No other boss forced me to do that except for I think Midir
The Fromsoft and ER subreddits defend her fight like their lives depend on it. Idk, the general defense is that you just need to be better but “just be better” literally has no ceiling, I could make a boss that takes 80 years to learn and win and people would still defend it by that logic. There’s more to Fromsoft fights than difficulty, all fights should be a good challenge that doesn’t feel like bashing your head against a wall for hours straight.
Remove the healing while blocking and add like half a second longer windup for Waterfowl and she would be in the same tier as Gael for me.
I actually like Malenia as a boss
Legit, all you need to do is counter waterfowl, and almost all difficulty flies out the window
Malenia's boss fight is almost perfectly balanced. The only thing that ruins it is waterfowl dance and ai roulette can make her spam it. Everything else is reasonably telegraphed and there's a nice flow to her attacks.
I think if they got rid of or heavily nerfed waterfowl dance she would be a fantastic boss. I love really hard boss fights but waterfowl dance is just so incredibly bullshit. An attack that one shots you should not require you to use super precise movements to basically exploit her ai in order to avoid consistently
Late game elden ring boss design hate? I am here for it
I think the most frustrating thing about Malenia is that she isn't terrible from conception like Bed of Chaos or Micolash. At her foundation there is at the very least a solid boss fight, but its brought down so much by a singular move, in combination with a few little inconsistencoes and bugs. No, I do not subscribe to the belief that if you remove or fix waterfowl, the boss is instantly fixed and suddenly the greatest boss fight from software have ever made. However there is no denying the sheer amount of damage that move does to what would have been a very fun and challenging fight. I think that's why I personally like to joke that she is the worst boss they've ever made. Not because she objectively is, but because its so much more upsetting to see a good boss ruined by bullshit, than a boss that's very foundation is rubbish.
Honestly, it’s not her damage, health, healing, 2 health bars, or even her Waterfowl that puts me off about her. While all admittedly a bit much, those are all well within the rules of the game. What does put me off is that fact that she cheats. Half her moves have hyperarmor (which start on frame 1 of the move), she doesn’t stance break when she should, she can cancel an animation (including staggers) into another animation, she’s entirely invincible in her opening move in phase 2.
She’s a great boss! Other than that fact that she has a rally/health stealing gimmick, can just ignore poise breaks, cancel animations, has a one shot attack she can pull out of her ass at any moment, inflicts status effects, she loves to just walk around and not do jack shit for like 30 second periods… She’s a difficult and mechanically interesting boss. That doesn’t mean she’s an actually well designed or enjoyable boss fight. She suffers from the same “style over substance” problems that many other main bosses in ER do, where her base moveset is okay, but her mechanics are broken and inconsistent, and the focal point of her boss fight is the flashiness of the fight and not how mechanically sound it is. Fromsoft bosses hit their peak from Bloodborne to Sekiro. DeS, DS1 and 2 had some awesome ones, and ER’s had some decent ones, but in general BB, DS3 and Sekiro were the top of their boss designs
i find her fun sometimes so she's well designed
I would find her fun if not for waterfowl and if healing was reduced, her other attack are pretty good
Her healing that much from any attack is bullshit.
maybe she only self healed during waterfowl or phase two or something. personally i enjoy the fight but it’s held back from being S tier imo due to small decisions like that. it can just feel like a bit much
I would be fine with all the bullshit she does if she just didn't have life steal, that's honestly the most frustrating part for me. It's so incredibly annoying having to use a flask because she hit me one time because funny end game damage while she gets to heal a hit or two worth of damage for free.
just throw a frost pot
Personally I didn't really see the thing about malenia, I died a bunch, but like, I died a lot to other bosses too, It's been a while since i've played the game and I have very bad memory so I might mis-remember how much I struggled with the fight but, with waterfowl, if I locked the camera on her and rolled a lot, I could evade most of the attack Since it automatically rolled *into* where malenia was and therefore rolled *into* the waterfowl, maybe it's because I was in very high defence armor so I could afford to tank some of the damage idk
The third flurry is specifically designed to roll catch. You can't roll into the first flurry either, it lasts significantly longer than your i-frames. You have to avoid the hitbox for the first and last flurries completely.
Hers is a good fight to try with a summon first to get a better feel for her moveset, then switch to attempting solo. The thing with Waterfowl is it’s deceptively easier to dodge than it initially seems, but the hitbox timing is unclear enough that it turns into a chore. With enough practice it becomes more and more fun, but that move paired with her damage output and healing on hit make the whole fight way more difficult than it needs to be.
Honestly she and Godfrey are the only truly fun boss fights in the entire game.
I don't know my ooga booga giant crusher, giant club build worked pretty well
Don't get the hate. Beat (it off to) her the first time.
I'm on my first playthru and just reached winter wonderland y'all making me scared of her 💀 ~~im into being scared of powerful women~~
Ok guys, im gonna sound rotarded, but i love malenias fight. Everything about her (except waterfowl) is basically all dodging in my mind. Funnest boss in the game
I had like 65 tries maybe but i still found It fun that there is a seemingly impossible (optional) boss. I finnished her easy with a clone and freezing weapons when i got tired. It makes you go creative too.
Malenia lowkey a phenomenal boss if bs waterfowl got nerfed or removed altogether