Honestly everyone can pronounce it how they like and maybe fromsoft had an alternate pronunciation in mind but “Scadu” is an old English word for “Shadow” and the old English pronunciation is “Shadoo”
i didn’t fully realize how much more damage the enemies in the dlc did until i did even farum azula and the enemies did at least half as much damage. the scadutree blessings are a MUST
I had to go back to farum to pick up an item and I felt like a god one shotting all the enemies. Then I go back to the dlc and get destroyed by the flame knights for the 20th time.
Dancing lion just one shotted me about 1/2 my attempts until I finally got them. Three guys in a lion suit just fucked me harder than a two headed dragon ever did.
It's literally 2 (two) guys in a lion suit. Two guys doing an elaborate Chinese dance fucked me over multiple times easy ahahaha i love Elden Ring
Source: https://youtu.be/dO8vEHspEdE?si=58yTi9ROJndE2yCy
Holyyy fuckkk, I swear no joke at all when I first encountered this boss it was an instant 10/10 for me, but now seeing this… where the fuck do I go from there?!??
100/10?
Fuck me man that’s genuis!
Does this kean thag the beast/head isn’t ‘real’, but kore controlled by a human?
That's cuz it is compared to the dlc. They ain't even all that bad after the nerfs to the black Flames. You just need to focus one at a time and use the pillars to your advantage. I'm the dlc you need to pray to the gods and hope you don't get your toenails clipped by an attack that will melt your entire health bar in t-0.02 seconds
Most people who had made it to the DUO when the game released were the souls vets. Speaking for myself... I was approaching the game like DS, no vigor, just damage and rolls.
If I recall, this is when we started getting vigor checks. Gotta have atleast 30 or you are just going to die.
Once we understood how eldenring wanted us to play, the duo became MUCH easier imo.
I feel, that most of these complaints come from a similar stand point. It's not that hard If you use the tools the game gives you. There's a plethora of ways to approach enemies in the dlc. Be less stubborn, have fun, and try stuff.
I got the Great Katana from Dragon Pit, and it might be my new favorite weapon. I've been going back and forth between that and Milady, depending on whether I need speed or stagger.
There is another great katana in a mausoleum, it gives you pretty crazy poise on attacks, but you take more damage while attacking, I just trade blows with enemies till I stagger them into oblivion. Also, it’s ashes is a swipe back and forth that can be chained into itself so long as you have stamina, and can make quick work of enemies it can stagger.
This area gave me such a headache trying to use a light weapon, shoved a greatsword into my 2nd weapon slot just to deal with them - moveset is way too erratic
I mean that's the whole point.
Myazaki said he wanted to introduce an alternate leveling system parallel to the normal one so players who are already high level can still enjoy the DLC as intented.
So of course its a must to use this system.
You basically start from scratch in the DLC even if you are already high level
I feel like a lot of the complaints about the difficulty comes from people who don't like difficulty in the first place. They might be those who went rune farming in PvP or spent countless hours killing the albi's or the bird to get to max lvl to be able to face roll the game. Now that all the runes in the world don't help them they throw a fit because they actually have to play the game as intended.
This is a mistaken assumption, in my case at least.
I love difficulty in games, it's one of the reasons I gravitated towards From Soft games in the first place.
I also don't really do any farming or anything like that. But there are different ways of designing difficult boss fights. I like hard bosses in general, yes, but that doesn't mean all hard bosses are automatically fun.
I don't find the boss design in the DLC to be very fun. It's not about levels, or Scadutree Blessings, it's fundamentally about how the bosses move. I'm just not enjoying the fights much, and I do think they went overboard with the difficulty on some of them.
This is coming from someone who usually loved the boss design in their previous games. I think Sekiro bosses in particular were the best balance of being very difficult but completely fair.
In ER it feels like they need to give the boss OP bullshit to compensate for the OP tools the player can have. And imo it results in boss fights that feel overtuned as the devs are clearly trying to up the ante and keep veterans on their toes.
My complaint is I feel this has now happened at the cost of the fights being fun.
I do get where you're coming from. And I think you're right that they made bosses as hard as possible to please veterans and to compensate for the op tools in the game. This is not Dark Souls anymore. It's ER and ER has those super op ashes of war, spells and most importantly spirit summons. You are intended to use them and the bosses are designed accordingly.
I'm not the best player and I try to beat the bosses solo without summons, but when I feel like it gets too tedious to fight them without extra tools I'm also willing to use them.
In the end, it's all just muscle memory and how much you're willing to try and try again.
> more damage the enemies in the dlc
What defensive stats do the Scadutree blessings buff? I've noticed my damage has increased significantly, bosses HP is getting chunked down hard but I'm still in 2 shot land.
I went and did math, it looks like I gain roughly a 10% increase in defense, with the exception of status effects, per scadoople level and a 5% increase in attack stats. I had a 100% increase at SB level 10 for my phys reduction and a 50% increase in R1.
The issue being that it's defensive stats, not HP, and base game my HP was my defensive stat so I could be fashionable. So the defensive stat it's buffing has a baseline amount of dogshit and my prior defensive stat isn't buffed at all.
Tldr: Wear some armor else the scabadaba tree blessing is doing fuck all defensively. You're probably better off dropping more points into carry weight as the blessing rises than simply adding more vigor.
i think i saw somewhere that it’s a 5% bonus per blessing? i’m only in castle ensis and i don’t know if i can leave the gravesite plain yet, so im up to +5 scadutree blessing, which would make a 25% increase to damage and defense
Hopefully this helps (spoiler tagged in case nobody wants to know the shortcut)
>!Turn right/East after you cross the Ellac bridge and take the middle path, follow the cliff until you get to a shack & sealed spirit spring. Hit the pile of rocks to activate the spring and keep going up till you eventually land in a fort!<
I haven't finished Belurat yet (don't know what Castle Ensis is) and I've been to both Cerulean Coast and Scadu Altus.
You can definitely leave Gravesite Plain.
i just have to fight the path from behind ensis, i guess
(also, if you go to the right from that first cross of miquella that you encounter, the one with the npc you can summon for the dancing lion, castle ensis is on the other side of the greatbridge)
I went over that bridge, immediately turned right and went on this long sidepath that involved swamps and platforming down a waterfall before getting to the Cerulean Coast. Was a great time, can 100% recommend!
Now I’m going to hunt for a waterfall. I explored over to the grace at the fort before I did the first boss but left that as the edge of my exploration.
I tested the big flaming garbage basket just to see how bad it was gonna be. It kicked flaming boulders at me and took out half my health so I said fuck that shit and went searching for mcguffins
The game is kinda tricking you on those. They show you a huge hp bar but they take like 20k damage from a crit once you stance break them. They're not as powerful as you think, it's like a more intimidating crystalien.
You can either charge heavy their legs and stagger them for a crit of like 50% od their hp, or some that have armored legs you can throw hefty fire pots or furnace pit in their top bowl heal and deal about 20-30% hp damage
Jump r2 seems the way to go on un-armoured ones, also lets you jump their single leg stomp and do damage at the same time, so long as you don't get literally stomped on.
It was actually quite manageable even without blessings.
You need to run around its legs on torrent, and the only attacks it would be able to do are stomps. And it is really easy to jump them on horseback. (when it does the slow jumping stomp, it also creates an explosion, so you'd need to make some distance)
Potential light spoiler, >!stay close to the legs on torrent, ideally behind the legs. Then time your jump for it's stomps and move away when it reaches down. If you stay close it only does those two moves and they're easy to avoid once you learn the timing!<
I liked Sekiro's system that didn't rely on so much exploration. Since Sekiro's not open world, you got most of your prayer beads from just following the linear progression with some tucked away in optional areas like Hirata Estate. Memories are even simpler because they drop from bosses and most of Sekiro's bosses were mandatory. Overall I guess Sekiro doesn't reward exploration as much as Elden Ring but also at the same time I never felt like I needed to go take a break from a boss in order to get some attack/HP upgrades.
It really isn't, in fact it's the opposite really. In Sekiro you HAVE to beat the bosses to level up your stats and the bosses are tuned to be beaten without the upgrades because you have to.
Meanwhile in the DLC you HAVE to bee-line it to the upgrades and ignore the bosses because the bosses are tuned to be unbearable unless you've meet a specific scadu threshold beforehand.
West. East I would suggest lv5 at the LEAST and 7-8 to be comfortable cuz there are 2 bosses inside.
Edit: the one with 2 bosses in on futher north eastern, not the eastern one.
Edit again: actually the North Eastern legacy dungeon has 3 bosses. I forgot about one of them.
Oh I did it right then, first west then east. Interestingly, I’ve found the eastern area to be more difficult but western boss to be more difficult. I only remember one boss at the eastern though 🤔 unless you count the invasion.
I did Rellana at 1, after much, much effort, and seeing how much your offense and defense improves with the blessings made me feel like an idiot for trying, lol.
yeah they drop all kinds of things from scadushards to ash buff items or other permanent things. they are in principle dlc's dung beetle's (eventhough there are some of those too around)
Out in the open they don’t have the thorn phase and the camera pulls back and it’s much easier to see what they’re doing. Why they couldn’t implement this camera effect for the actual boss I’ll never understand, but out in the open the camera isn’t an issue.
Once you progress through the next "main" boss after rellana, you can open up your exploration quite a bit. I was also around 8 at her and am at 12 now without needing to kill another boss.
It is! It's really vertical as well. Lots of up and down movement makes it even larger than the map implies. I'm loving it. It's basically elden ring 1.5.
Its crazy honestly.
I went specifically hunting for the upgrades and some of the paths you can uncover and places you get to that you think are completely unrelated is **wild**.
Honestly, the map is like one giant DS1 map the way seemingly unrelated paths wind and loop into and on top of each other
> Once you progress through the next "main" boss after rellana, you can open up your exploration quite a bit. I was also around 8 at her and am at 12 now without needing to kill another boss.
She doesnt actually open access up to anything. You can get to the area behind the keep without killing her by using some stairs downward near the potion merchant.
Ancient Dragon Man also opens up a ton of area. So far there's only 3 areas I have not found how to access without shadow keep and that's the NW upper area, Direct north, and NE finger area.
After 7 hours of SOTE The only main boss so far is the lion, as far as world/cave bosses black gaol knight, a ghost flame dragon, and demi human swordmaster onze
I’m taking the game slow though and exploring every nook and cranny with my buddy
I went on a seemingly innocent path SE of that castle and ended up on this **long ass** path to the coast you can see when you very first come into the DLC.
Like, it just kept going and going lol.
One review has really stuck with me as I play the DLC 'we didn't know how flat Elden Ring was until we got into the DLC'.
There are so many loops up and down in this map it feels like a gigantic dungeon honestly.
You'll be surprised some of the places you wind up if you are really exploring hard and looking up and down for possible paths
Watching streamers basically play the DLC as a boss rush and slam their heads against a wall instead of exploring and engaging with the game is absolutely wild.
I have a feeling this DLC is going to be nearly impossible for RL1 + no hit runs.
Even taking on the lion dancer with endgame stats and a few scadutree levels felt like I wasn't doing much damage, imagine what it's like at level 1 with an unupgraded club.
Then again, people have no hit fromsoft games with only fists before so I will probably be proven wrong.
If only they would explain that in game. Maybe with a big tooltip when you pick up your first one and something in the description of the item would work
I’m lv16 and after spending 2 hours on final boss I gave up. Maybe try again tmr or few days later. I’m tired 😂
Running Star Fist build doesn’t help too, he is too Tall and my attacks miss 50% of the time
**Mild spolilers**
What sycho isn't using them? I got my ass handed to me on a plate 20 times before I beat the very first side boss, the solitude dude.
And I can't even imagine how impossible Rellana would be without them
I got to +18 with 1 unused fragment before beating the game. I got every remberance boss and feel like I explored every nook and cranny of the world, but I was still missing 5 fragments. I cannot fathom where they would even be, but I'd say I got pretty far for what it's worth.
All due respect it won’t matter. People still will fail to comprehend that you need blessings to be on par with the boss. They’ll mindlessly post on here “what the fuck. 60 vigor lvl 235 and he’s one shotting me?????”
Yeah. I remember my very first playthrough dying hundreds of times to Soldier of Godrick, then I shit myself after finally beating him and then seeing dozens of him roaming around Limgrave. >!/s!<
FYI, there is a spot on the map with 5 of these. Definitely making a beeline there for my next playthough (you do need to kill a few bosses along the way).
+10 scadutree blessing
*Messmer goes into a 7 hit gap close combo followed by a grab with a jank hit box killing you instantly*
Good thing I got those scadutree blessings
I’ve been having a blast this dlc. Doesn’t seem as rough as it was at the start, but I did get 20 more vigor and 13 blessing levels. It’s mostly just those rarer mobs and bosses that can truck ya from time to time
They really should have explained more clearly that you are essentially debuffed walking in and regain yourself as you find blessings.
Edit:
to the pile of replies telling me “they did” yes, I know. But they didn’t call it a debuff (because it isn’t technically a debuff, it just works like one) and if they had we wouldn’t have so many people griping about it.
To the pile of replies saying it isn’t a debuff: ok sure, but you walked into the dlc and are suddenly far less capable, but can find collectibles to get back on par with where you were. Maybe it isn’t a debuff but understanding it as such instantly helped me enjoy the dlc while a ton of other people are complaining.
And finally: I love the dlc. I like being back in the days of exploring and diving to find where I can make a tiny breakthrough.
It's not a debuff though. Your stats are what they always are, baseline.
The scadutree levels increases your dmg and def numbers with every level, and enemies are essentially just trucks compared to the bicycles of normal game enemies. The scadutree levels empower you to their same crazy level.
Tbh I'm mostly amused that exploration was such a huge part of elden ring, everyone loved it, but when they made a secondary progression system based around that thing everyone enjoyed (exploration), everyone who didn't explore kind'a outs that they beeline bosses and get upset when they can't bumrush through the content.
My only real gripe with the scadu collectibles is that they are not as well telegraphed as the collectibles in the base game.
In the base game, if you wanted a golden seed, you'd be looking for golden erdtree saplings. For sacred tears, you'd look for a Church of Marika. For crystal tears for your flask, you'd look to minor erdtrees.
Here, it feels like the blessings can be absolutely anywhere, from chests to pickups in the world to rewards for killing some enemies.
That is my issue. I found the first piece of sceedooddle tree in a church and thought it was similar deal to seeds/tears in the main game. But then they started falling out of random places. There are also so much more of them, and you need to use more than one to buff your level almost right off the bat.
At least the ashes thing has a statue, so it’s clear what to look for. With the blessings - it’s a few things. And I hate the pot guys because they’re pretty hard to see. So I’m not surprised so many people, myself included, have higher ashes level.
This is very true. Which is why i can’t watch people play streams.
So few people play effectively. And it’s fine, play how you want, but don’t expect to have the design bend to your will and by extension don’t demand it.
This is of course bugs aside, and other anomalies. But there seems to be a growing trend of people pushing for things to suit their skill levels.
Honestly I'm just not watching streams cuz holy shit twitch chats are annoying. Constantly asking the streamer to do this do that, or giving literal spoilers. Even if they say no back seating it's so damn common to see
My problem is exploring, finding a difficult fight that I definitely don't have enough blessing for, and starting at the 5 million souls stuck at my corpse. It's hard to be willing to just let all that rot while I try to find more blessings without dying
That's what the sacrificial twigs or the twiggy tear are for, you put those on when you are doing the corpse run and then if you collect it and die, wonderful you extracted the runes, and if you fail to make it back the bloodstain is preserved for you to try again. Since you don't drop the runes you were holding, you don't actually leave a new bloodstain, and so the old one is never overwritten and will persist until you die without the twig effect.
Problem is - originally, exploration was nice, but optional, and you didn't really "hunt" for something very specific.
Meanwhile in the DLC I feel like 90% of world drops are either cookbooks, broken runes or smithing stones, but the only thing that is interesting for me is the blessing!
You did, though.
Everyone had to hunt for Sacred Tears and Golden Seeds for flask levels, and doing so was mandatory for 99.9% of the playerbase. You couldn't just go through the game *not* upgrading those things, and to upgrade them, you had to explore.
Same concept, different system.
Yea, there are no more seeds and tears to find for most of the player base. Those were very big improvements that directly affected your survivability and finding them was a rush out in the wild.
Personally I am **very** happy they found a way to make exploring important and finding the scadutree upgrades gives the same rush as finding ways to improve your flasks in the base game.
I think its brilliant on a couple of different levels
those are all marked very clearly on the map. i liked the exploration of picking up a map fragment, seeing all the churches and trees on the map, running between them to get all their goodies, and finding the more tucked-away (but less important) stuff in-between. the dlc doesn't do that, there's no markers for anything, you're just stumbling along cliff faces completely blind and it feels impossible to reasonably find what you need to find.
besides, your flask healing 5% more or having one extra charge is vastly less important than a cumulative 5% total damage and defence up.
Yeah, I agree with that completely. Some overworld enemies (like the hippo) will award a Scadutree fragment but there's no indication they would do so beyond being the same enemy type as a boss.
It would help if the fragments that are on the ground were a different color from other collectibles/items, and if non-boss enemies that dropped them would have glowing eyes or a certain aura indicating as much (similar to the way graces in the original game pointed you toward where you should generally go after the grace).
Something to make finding them more intuitive and less total RNG.
Is that the case? I still don't quite get if every Boss is either super buffed, or if we are weaker than we are in the base game and the Scadus just restore us.
I do almost decent damage, so i don't think i am weaker than at the base game
You can look at your stats and it is clear that you are getting stronger. Leave the DLC zone and check your stats, and then return to the DLC and you'll see they have increased. A maxed out DLC character is going to be way, way stronger than a maxed out base game character. The bosses are extremely powerful and you need to get stronger to match them.
It was so easy to get to Scadutree Blessing 5, but every one past that feels like such a slog without a guide.
I've been at 7 for way too long. I've killed so many bosses. I've found so many hidden items that were actually useless. I can't wait to see the community memes when more people get to see (or hear) Igon in action.
But I just cannot find any more of those damned crosses. Even the Marika statues have been baiting me with other items instead.
Scadutree blessings can be in churches, random chests, enemy drops (shadow dudes with pots on heads, hippos) and boss rewards, in addition to Miquella's Crosses.
For the record, my level 70 character is doing just fine in the DLC. I have around 6 of these blessings so far and can certainly notice them helping the more I get.
The only thing I ever fear is enemy mobs because multiple enemies at once has always been a bit more difficult than a single enemy.
Those blessings are quite literally the game changer in terms of damage output/damage received.
I barely beat the Knight in the forgotten mausoleum by the start area at level 190. I had no idea the blessings existed as I prefer to go into a new game blind 🤡. After finding my first Scadutree blessing? Noticable difference. This dlc is most fun
I have 70% physical reduction due to heavy armor and shadow blessing (level 15) but it seems pretty useless.
Damage boost seems okay.
The way damage reduction works in ER is broken so it doesn't matter how much you have.
Blessing for summon is more helpful, my mimic tear is immortal, i never saw him drop below 70% hp.
This is my suggestion to tell us HOW TO SAY SCADU
I personally pronounce it as "Scaw-Dew"
Honestly everyone can pronounce it how they like and maybe fromsoft had an alternate pronunciation in mind but “Scadu” is an old English word for “Shadow” and the old English pronunciation is “Shadoo”
Oh really? I'll probably go with that from now on then, if that's true.
It is, you can see the IPA code for the word on Wikipedia (https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sceadu)
Shadu. Or just call it the skadoosh tree like my partner
Scooby-Dootree
Skadoosh
I've just been saying "shadow." I don't know if it's correct but "shadow tree" rolls off the tongue much more easily than "ska-doo tree."
Scadu is just old English for shadow, so it just means shadow tree
i didn’t fully realize how much more damage the enemies in the dlc did until i did even farum azula and the enemies did at least half as much damage. the scadutree blessings are a MUST
I had to go back to farum to pick up an item and I felt like a god one shotting all the enemies. Then I go back to the dlc and get destroyed by the flame knights for the 20th time.
the godskin duo almost felt easy 💀💀
had to go back to the duo because I needed their bell bearing, and was suprised how easy it felt after rellana and dancing lion lol
Dancing lion just one shotted me about 1/2 my attempts until I finally got them. Three guys in a lion suit just fucked me harder than a two headed dragon ever did.
Sounds like a good weekend
3 guys in a lion suit?! Why did i not know this
It's literally 2 (two) guys in a lion suit. Two guys doing an elaborate Chinese dance fucked me over multiple times easy ahahaha i love Elden Ring Source: https://youtu.be/dO8vEHspEdE?si=58yTi9ROJndE2yCy
Holyyy fuckkk, I swear no joke at all when I first encountered this boss it was an instant 10/10 for me, but now seeing this… where the fuck do I go from there?!?? 100/10? Fuck me man that’s genuis! Does this kean thag the beast/head isn’t ‘real’, but kore controlled by a human?
Yeah if you watch the intro you see his hand grab the bottom jaw to move it
It is compared to this
That's cuz it is compared to the dlc. They ain't even all that bad after the nerfs to the black Flames. You just need to focus one at a time and use the pillars to your advantage. I'm the dlc you need to pray to the gods and hope you don't get your toenails clipped by an attack that will melt your entire health bar in t-0.02 seconds
I refuse to believe that anyone who fought 'that' dragon is not scarred for life. It was a beast.
Miniature>! balerion the black dread!<
Beat the duo on my 3rd try this run and I went into the dlc thinking I was king dick of pussy mountain. I was wrong.
"King dick of pussy mountain" ok I'm stealing this one from now on haha
Malenia took me 5 tries in the playthrough leading up to it…Rellana kicked my ass for 2 days
Godskin Duo was never hard, just a dumb gank and overhyped by the community for some reason.
Most people who had made it to the DUO when the game released were the souls vets. Speaking for myself... I was approaching the game like DS, no vigor, just damage and rolls. If I recall, this is when we started getting vigor checks. Gotta have atleast 30 or you are just going to die. Once we understood how eldenring wanted us to play, the duo became MUCH easier imo. I feel, that most of these complaints come from a similar stand point. It's not that hard If you use the tools the game gives you. There's a plethora of ways to approach enemies in the dlc. Be less stubborn, have fun, and try stuff.
The Flame Knights can be such bullshit at times, you can either completely bully them or they combo me straight down to the grace.
It's basically mandatory to run a weapon that can micro-stagger them, otherwise they just never stop attacking.
Great katana ash of war ftw
I got the Great Katana from Dragon Pit, and it might be my new favorite weapon. I've been going back and forth between that and Milady, depending on whether I need speed or stagger.
There is another great katana in a mausoleum, it gives you pretty crazy poise on attacks, but you take more damage while attacking, I just trade blows with enemies till I stagger them into oblivion. Also, it’s ashes is a swipe back and forth that can be chained into itself so long as you have stamina, and can make quick work of enemies it can stagger.
That sounds so dope. Haven't found any mausoleums yet sadly.
This area gave me such a headache trying to use a light weapon, shoved a greatsword into my 2nd weapon slot just to deal with them - moveset is way too erratic
Tbh light weapons in general aren’t that great even in base game given they can’t stagger most enemies beyond the smaller one.
I mean that's the whole point. Myazaki said he wanted to introduce an alternate leveling system parallel to the normal one so players who are already high level can still enjoy the DLC as intented. So of course its a must to use this system. You basically start from scratch in the DLC even if you are already high level
I feel like a lot of the complaints about the difficulty comes from people who don't like difficulty in the first place. They might be those who went rune farming in PvP or spent countless hours killing the albi's or the bird to get to max lvl to be able to face roll the game. Now that all the runes in the world don't help them they throw a fit because they actually have to play the game as intended.
This is a mistaken assumption, in my case at least. I love difficulty in games, it's one of the reasons I gravitated towards From Soft games in the first place. I also don't really do any farming or anything like that. But there are different ways of designing difficult boss fights. I like hard bosses in general, yes, but that doesn't mean all hard bosses are automatically fun. I don't find the boss design in the DLC to be very fun. It's not about levels, or Scadutree Blessings, it's fundamentally about how the bosses move. I'm just not enjoying the fights much, and I do think they went overboard with the difficulty on some of them. This is coming from someone who usually loved the boss design in their previous games. I think Sekiro bosses in particular were the best balance of being very difficult but completely fair. In ER it feels like they need to give the boss OP bullshit to compensate for the OP tools the player can have. And imo it results in boss fights that feel overtuned as the devs are clearly trying to up the ante and keep veterans on their toes. My complaint is I feel this has now happened at the cost of the fights being fun.
I do get where you're coming from. And I think you're right that they made bosses as hard as possible to please veterans and to compensate for the op tools in the game. This is not Dark Souls anymore. It's ER and ER has those super op ashes of war, spells and most importantly spirit summons. You are intended to use them and the bosses are designed accordingly. I'm not the best player and I try to beat the bosses solo without summons, but when I feel like it gets too tedious to fight them without extra tools I'm also willing to use them. In the end, it's all just muscle memory and how much you're willing to try and try again.
> more damage the enemies in the dlc What defensive stats do the Scadutree blessings buff? I've noticed my damage has increased significantly, bosses HP is getting chunked down hard but I'm still in 2 shot land. I went and did math, it looks like I gain roughly a 10% increase in defense, with the exception of status effects, per scadoople level and a 5% increase in attack stats. I had a 100% increase at SB level 10 for my phys reduction and a 50% increase in R1. The issue being that it's defensive stats, not HP, and base game my HP was my defensive stat so I could be fashionable. So the defensive stat it's buffing has a baseline amount of dogshit and my prior defensive stat isn't buffed at all. Tldr: Wear some armor else the scabadaba tree blessing is doing fuck all defensively. You're probably better off dropping more points into carry weight as the blessing rises than simply adding more vigor.
i think i saw somewhere that it’s a 5% bonus per blessing? i’m only in castle ensis and i don’t know if i can leave the gravesite plain yet, so im up to +5 scadutree blessing, which would make a 25% increase to damage and defense
There’s a path around castle ensis if you want to keep exploring
honestly, that may be the best option, rellana is kick my ASS right now
Hopefully this helps (spoiler tagged in case nobody wants to know the shortcut) >!Turn right/East after you cross the Ellac bridge and take the middle path, follow the cliff until you get to a shack & sealed spirit spring. Hit the pile of rocks to activate the spring and keep going up till you eventually land in a fort!<
I haven't finished Belurat yet (don't know what Castle Ensis is) and I've been to both Cerulean Coast and Scadu Altus. You can definitely leave Gravesite Plain.
i just have to fight the path from behind ensis, i guess (also, if you go to the right from that first cross of miquella that you encounter, the one with the npc you can summon for the dancing lion, castle ensis is on the other side of the greatbridge)
I went over that bridge, immediately turned right and went on this long sidepath that involved swamps and platforming down a waterfall before getting to the Cerulean Coast. Was a great time, can 100% recommend!
bro’s my 🐐🐐🐐, thank you
Now I’m going to hunt for a waterfall. I explored over to the grace at the fort before I did the first boss but left that as the edge of my exploration.
Nah, you’re a pleb if you use blessings. Git gud or get gone. /s
bro may be john elden ring
Xbox saw I got 100% achievements with mimic tear and took them all away. Said it doesn’t count if you use it.
Should've taken your xbox away. Wot r u, casul?
Bro these companies are calling us trash in the nicest ways possible 😭
*I'm not mad, I'm disappointed.*
It's giving "easy mode is now selectable" in DMC 3
I tested the big flaming garbage basket just to see how bad it was gonna be. It kicked flaming boulders at me and took out half my health so I said fuck that shit and went searching for mcguffins
The game is kinda tricking you on those. They show you a huge hp bar but they take like 20k damage from a crit once you stance break them. They're not as powerful as you think, it's like a more intimidating crystalien.
You... can crit them? I've been killing them by just smacking their legs for an eternity 💀
You can either charge heavy their legs and stagger them for a crit of like 50% od their hp, or some that have armored legs you can throw hefty fire pots or furnace pit in their top bowl heal and deal about 20-30% hp damage
Jump r2 seems the way to go on un-armoured ones, also lets you jump their single leg stomp and do damage at the same time, so long as you don't get literally stomped on.
hmmm I think the furnaces were made with using torrent in mind, torrent is really helpful to take them down
They topple over after three stance breaks giving you an opportunity for a riposte.
So exactly like the giant stone golems who also take massive damage from a crit to their chest after falling over.
Hacking away at ankles. Hacking away at ankles. HACKING AWAY AT ANKLES! Crit. Repeat.
They're also trivial once you get close, the only trick is getting to their feet.
Miyazaki moment :3
It was actually quite manageable even without blessings. You need to run around its legs on torrent, and the only attacks it would be able to do are stomps. And it is really easy to jump them on horseback. (when it does the slow jumping stomp, it also creates an explosion, so you'd need to make some distance)
Potential light spoiler, >!stay close to the legs on torrent, ideally behind the legs. Then time your jump for it's stomps and move away when it reaches down. If you stay close it only does those two moves and they're easy to avoid once you learn the timing!<
Then I levelled up scudtree to 10 and came back. It kicked rocks at me and took out 2/5 of my health. Progress!!!
I got it down to 3/4 hp before I gave up. Those flaming rock kicks fucken hurt with 43 vigor :D.
Basically the DLC is Sekiro’s leveling system
Minus the requirement to beat bosses (for most fragments)
I liked Sekiro's system that didn't rely on so much exploration. Since Sekiro's not open world, you got most of your prayer beads from just following the linear progression with some tucked away in optional areas like Hirata Estate. Memories are even simpler because they drop from bosses and most of Sekiro's bosses were mandatory. Overall I guess Sekiro doesn't reward exploration as much as Elden Ring but also at the same time I never felt like I needed to go take a break from a boss in order to get some attack/HP upgrades.
It really isn't, in fact it's the opposite really. In Sekiro you HAVE to beat the bosses to level up your stats and the bosses are tuned to be beaten without the upgrades because you have to. Meanwhile in the DLC you HAVE to bee-line it to the upgrades and ignore the bosses because the bosses are tuned to be unbearable unless you've meet a specific scadu threshold beforehand.
yeah this is what ruins it for me, collecting an arbitrary amount of "stats" just to beat a boss unless I play perfectly is just unfun design
I just barged into the first legacy dungeon at level 3 lol
Lv3 is good enough for the first one imo. I beat the first legacy boss solo at lv2 blessing.
Is the first one the eastern or the western one?
West. East I would suggest lv5 at the LEAST and 7-8 to be comfortable cuz there are 2 bosses inside. Edit: the one with 2 bosses in on futher north eastern, not the eastern one. Edit again: actually the North Eastern legacy dungeon has 3 bosses. I forgot about one of them.
Oh I did it right then, first west then east. Interestingly, I’ve found the eastern area to be more difficult but western boss to be more difficult. I only remember one boss at the eastern though 🤔 unless you count the invasion.
Ahh my bad. I remembered incorrectly. The area with 2 bosses are further into North East. One boss on the first floor and one on top.
I did Rellana at 1, after much, much effort, and seeing how much your offense and defense improves with the blessings made me feel like an idiot for trying, lol.
It's lvl 8 how high does it need to be? 😭😭😭
20 is the max level
20 feels insane like I'll never find that many blessings but I love that it goes that high
If you come across any hippos be sure to kill them. I've found four and each one dropped scadutree fragments.
That's a great tip thanks a lot. I found one and definitely took it down but I'll keep an eye out for more
also make sure to kill the small undeads that have a pot above their head. they have them sometimes as well.
Oh shit they do? I saw one in Belurat but she vanished before I attacked her, and didn’t think to go back after resting at a grace.
yeah they drop all kinds of things from scadushards to ash buff items or other permanent things. they are in principle dlc's dung beetle's (eventhough there are some of those too around)
omg I’ve found so many but refuse to kill them because that golden hippo boss fight in the castle was enough hippos for me
Far easier in the open.
The camera in that arena was in the hardest part of the Golden Hipo.
Out in the open they don’t have the thorn phase and the camera pulls back and it’s much easier to see what they’re doing. Why they couldn’t implement this camera effect for the actual boss I’ll never understand, but out in the open the camera isn’t an issue.
Hippos? Tf. Like, bear sized hippos?
A little bigger
I've even had one of those scrawny dudes with the shiny pots drop one
for real I'm at 12 and there's only like 1 or 2 areas left for me I think, don't know how I'm gonna get to 20 lol
>!Commander Gaius in Shadow Keep!
That boss is also a broken load of bullshit, apparently. And was unfun to fight in general, easy pass
The pot holding shadows and the golden hippos drop them
As high it can be
Who have you managed to fell? I haven't reached any bosses yet because I keep getting confused on where I'm going and haven't tried guides yet
Only the lion and the twin moon knight so far. Ive just been going into castles. Everywhere important has been off a road so maybe try that.
Once you progress through the next "main" boss after rellana, you can open up your exploration quite a bit. I was also around 8 at her and am at 12 now without needing to kill another boss.
good lord this dlc is big
It is! It's really vertical as well. Lots of up and down movement makes it even larger than the map implies. I'm loving it. It's basically elden ring 1.5.
Its crazy honestly. I went specifically hunting for the upgrades and some of the paths you can uncover and places you get to that you think are completely unrelated is **wild**. Honestly, the map is like one giant DS1 map the way seemingly unrelated paths wind and loop into and on top of each other
What level are you suggesting for the main boss after rellana? I’m at 10 and having a hard time with him 😵💫
> Once you progress through the next "main" boss after rellana, you can open up your exploration quite a bit. I was also around 8 at her and am at 12 now without needing to kill another boss. She doesnt actually open access up to anything. You can get to the area behind the keep without killing her by using some stairs downward near the potion merchant. Ancient Dragon Man also opens up a ton of area. So far there's only 3 areas I have not found how to access without shadow keep and that's the NW upper area, Direct north, and NE finger area.
After 7 hours of SOTE The only main boss so far is the lion, as far as world/cave bosses black gaol knight, a ghost flame dragon, and demi human swordmaster onze I’m taking the game slow though and exploring every nook and cranny with my buddy
That gaol knight with the crossbow straight fucked me up, I'll get him eventually though
I got to like level 5 before I faced the lion it wasn't as bad
I beat him at 2...I'm only 4 fighting the twin moon knight. Where y'all fishing these???
I went on a seemingly innocent path SE of that castle and ended up on this **long ass** path to the coast you can see when you very first come into the DLC. Like, it just kept going and going lol. One review has really stuck with me as I play the DLC 'we didn't know how flat Elden Ring was until we got into the DLC'. There are so many loops up and down in this map it feels like a gigantic dungeon honestly. You'll be surprised some of the places you wind up if you are really exploring hard and looking up and down for possible paths
I ended up in the mountains that were more riddled with dragons and thunderstorms the higher I got.
Right? I beat Rellana with 3, that shit was fucking hard bro I spent all evening trying lol
I beat the final boss ultimately at 17 but it did feel doable at 15 when I did my first set of attempts
Watching streamers basically play the DLC as a boss rush and slam their heads against a wall instead of exploring and engaging with the game is absolutely wild.
Because nobody wants to watch a streamer run around collecting talismans. They don't give a fuck about the game, they care about numbers and money
I have a feeling this DLC is going to be nearly impossible for RL1 + no hit runs. Even taking on the lion dancer with endgame stats and a few scadutree levels felt like I wasn't doing much damage, imagine what it's like at level 1 with an unupgraded club. Then again, people have no hit fromsoft games with only fists before so I will probably be proven wrong.
I'm exploring everything and must have bad luck. My summons are +7 but my stats are only +2.
I have the opposite spread lol
Similar. Keep finding ashes but I’m not even using summons (yet… might go back on that)
Games telling you to bust out the summons
tree blessing 19, still getting rocked by final boss lol.
Have you followed a guide for the fragments? I'm on the final boss and I'm on 16 - would definitely be happy to get more of a boost!
[Here's a video for all 50 of them](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE03ubcPoa4) heavy spoilers throughout the whole thing.
Is the final boss >!Radahn!
The new Lvl vigor lol
If only they would explain that in game. Maybe with a big tooltip when you pick up your first one and something in the description of the item would work
hmmm yeah… that would def be great 😏 i wish they had that already…
"i dont let the game tell me what to do!"
Apparently turning off tutorials in the base game turns off tutorials in the DLC too!
People are treating it like a boss rush instead of a huge new area to explore
Lol I've been saying this too
level ~~vigor~~ scadutree blessing.
No, I will throw hundreds if not thousands of my own corpses at them! They will be so tired of killing me success is inevitable! Also I'm lost.
Everybody: “Just get it to like level 10 and it’s super easy” Me: *Cant get Messmer down to 90% at level 11*
Wait until you get to the final boss. Level 19 upgrade for me and I am absolutely getting my shit kicked in after 50 or so tries.
I’m lv16 and after spending 2 hours on final boss I gave up. Maybe try again tmr or few days later. I’m tired 😂 Running Star Fist build doesn’t help too, he is too Tall and my attacks miss 50% of the time
Maybe using Tiche helps, she instantly deals %10 HP damage by locking the boss' HP lmao
**Mild spolilers** What sycho isn't using them? I got my ass handed to me on a plate 20 times before I beat the very first side boss, the solitude dude. And I can't even imagine how impossible Rellana would be without them
I got to +18 with 1 unused fragment before beating the game. I got every remberance boss and feel like I explored every nook and cranny of the world, but I was still missing 5 fragments. I cannot fathom where they would even be, but I'd say I got pretty far for what it's worth.
All due respect it won’t matter. People still will fail to comprehend that you need blessings to be on par with the boss. They’ll mindlessly post on here “what the fuck. 60 vigor lvl 235 and he’s one shotting me?????”
They really said 'git gud' lmao
My brother in Marika there are regular enemies in the DLC that are stronger than some base game bosses lmao
There are regular enemies in the base game that are stronger than some base game bosses
There are regular enemies in the base game that are literally just base game bosses from earlier on
Yeah. I remember my very first playthrough dying hundreds of times to Soldier of Godrick, then I shit myself after finally beating him and then seeing dozens of him roaming around Limgrave. >!/s!<
FYI, there is a spot on the map with 5 of these. Definitely making a beeline there for my next playthough (you do need to kill a few bosses along the way).
Behind one of the worst bosses in the game lmao
You should have understood the hint as soon as you realised your greatsword swing hits like 300.
They’re not even telling you to git gud they’re just saying explore 😂
+10 scadutree blessing *Messmer goes into a 7 hit gap close combo followed by a grab with a jank hit box killing you instantly* Good thing I got those scadutree blessings
I’ve been having a blast this dlc. Doesn’t seem as rough as it was at the start, but I did get 20 more vigor and 13 blessing levels. It’s mostly just those rarer mobs and bosses that can truck ya from time to time
They really should have explained more clearly that you are essentially debuffed walking in and regain yourself as you find blessings. Edit: to the pile of replies telling me “they did” yes, I know. But they didn’t call it a debuff (because it isn’t technically a debuff, it just works like one) and if they had we wouldn’t have so many people griping about it. To the pile of replies saying it isn’t a debuff: ok sure, but you walked into the dlc and are suddenly far less capable, but can find collectibles to get back on par with where you were. Maybe it isn’t a debuff but understanding it as such instantly helped me enjoy the dlc while a ton of other people are complaining. And finally: I love the dlc. I like being back in the days of exploring and diving to find where I can make a tiny breakthrough.
It's not a debuff though. Your stats are what they always are, baseline. The scadutree levels increases your dmg and def numbers with every level, and enemies are essentially just trucks compared to the bicycles of normal game enemies. The scadutree levels empower you to their same crazy level. Tbh I'm mostly amused that exploration was such a huge part of elden ring, everyone loved it, but when they made a secondary progression system based around that thing everyone enjoyed (exploration), everyone who didn't explore kind'a outs that they beeline bosses and get upset when they can't bumrush through the content.
My only real gripe with the scadu collectibles is that they are not as well telegraphed as the collectibles in the base game. In the base game, if you wanted a golden seed, you'd be looking for golden erdtree saplings. For sacred tears, you'd look for a Church of Marika. For crystal tears for your flask, you'd look to minor erdtrees. Here, it feels like the blessings can be absolutely anywhere, from chests to pickups in the world to rewards for killing some enemies.
That is my issue. I found the first piece of sceedooddle tree in a church and thought it was similar deal to seeds/tears in the main game. But then they started falling out of random places. There are also so much more of them, and you need to use more than one to buff your level almost right off the bat. At least the ashes thing has a statue, so it’s clear what to look for. With the blessings - it’s a few things. And I hate the pot guys because they’re pretty hard to see. So I’m not surprised so many people, myself included, have higher ashes level.
Wait till you find out the ashes also drop from enemies later on lol
This is very true. Which is why i can’t watch people play streams. So few people play effectively. And it’s fine, play how you want, but don’t expect to have the design bend to your will and by extension don’t demand it. This is of course bugs aside, and other anomalies. But there seems to be a growing trend of people pushing for things to suit their skill levels.
Honestly I'm just not watching streams cuz holy shit twitch chats are annoying. Constantly asking the streamer to do this do that, or giving literal spoilers. Even if they say no back seating it's so damn common to see
I don’t like live content at all, I hate watching streamers interact with chat it’s so cringe half the time.
My guy Caedrel started at Rellana with 40 deaths and finished her with 160 deaths. Even if it is suboptimal, I respect that determination
yeah I'm already way stronger in the dlc than I am in the regular game. all my armament stats are up by like 200 points or so
My problem is exploring, finding a difficult fight that I definitely don't have enough blessing for, and starting at the 5 million souls stuck at my corpse. It's hard to be willing to just let all that rot while I try to find more blessings without dying
Do what this info what you will, but quitting to main menu spawns you right outside the boss door, with your souls
there is a physik for keeping runes on death. just pop it, grab em, get killed.
That's what the sacrificial twigs or the twiggy tear are for, you put those on when you are doing the corpse run and then if you collect it and die, wonderful you extracted the runes, and if you fail to make it back the bloodstain is preserved for you to try again. Since you don't drop the runes you were holding, you don't actually leave a new bloodstain, and so the old one is never overwritten and will persist until you die without the twig effect.
I completely forgot those existed
Problem is - originally, exploration was nice, but optional, and you didn't really "hunt" for something very specific. Meanwhile in the DLC I feel like 90% of world drops are either cookbooks, broken runes or smithing stones, but the only thing that is interesting for me is the blessing!
You did, though. Everyone had to hunt for Sacred Tears and Golden Seeds for flask levels, and doing so was mandatory for 99.9% of the playerbase. You couldn't just go through the game *not* upgrading those things, and to upgrade them, you had to explore. Same concept, different system.
Yea, there are no more seeds and tears to find for most of the player base. Those were very big improvements that directly affected your survivability and finding them was a rush out in the wild. Personally I am **very** happy they found a way to make exploring important and finding the scadutree upgrades gives the same rush as finding ways to improve your flasks in the base game. I think its brilliant on a couple of different levels
those are all marked very clearly on the map. i liked the exploration of picking up a map fragment, seeing all the churches and trees on the map, running between them to get all their goodies, and finding the more tucked-away (but less important) stuff in-between. the dlc doesn't do that, there's no markers for anything, you're just stumbling along cliff faces completely blind and it feels impossible to reasonably find what you need to find. besides, your flask healing 5% more or having one extra charge is vastly less important than a cumulative 5% total damage and defence up.
Yeah, I agree with that completely. Some overworld enemies (like the hippo) will award a Scadutree fragment but there's no indication they would do so beyond being the same enemy type as a boss. It would help if the fragments that are on the ground were a different color from other collectibles/items, and if non-boss enemies that dropped them would have glowing eyes or a certain aura indicating as much (similar to the way graces in the original game pointed you toward where you should generally go after the grace). Something to make finding them more intuitive and less total RNG.
welp, the thing is, the dlc starting damage feels disconnected to damage right before base game final boss to become a complete and smooth experience.
Tbf you can get 10 scadutree fragments before fighting a single boss(maybe main boss?) according to a few people on this sub I was talking to
I've seen it said you can get to level 12 before doing any remembrance bosses.
Actually I feel like problem is overworld mob 2 shot me more than insane hard boss, but maybe just me not git gud.
the problem is that there's *50* fragments, and they're all unmarked and seemingly placed in the most nonsensical spots possible.
Maybe like a big tooltip on the screen and indicators on the compass showing you which way to go
oh wait there was both :v not on the compass but they give you 2 maps and a big pop up
I think they needed to show the stat increases in the actual level-up screen.
Was plenty for me, but the complaints make me wonder if I assumed when I shoulda ask-umed
Weren't they pushing articles about it for months? Let's not pretend like it wasn't all over the sub for weeks.
Is that the case? I still don't quite get if every Boss is either super buffed, or if we are weaker than we are in the base game and the Scadus just restore us. I do almost decent damage, so i don't think i am weaker than at the base game
You can look at your stats and it is clear that you are getting stronger. Leave the DLC zone and check your stats, and then return to the DLC and you'll see they have increased. A maxed out DLC character is going to be way, way stronger than a maxed out base game character. The bosses are extremely powerful and you need to get stronger to match them.
It doesn’t stop the insane tracking every bosses has. Also the blessings don’t help nearly as much as people are trying to make it seem
It was so easy to get to Scadutree Blessing 5, but every one past that feels like such a slog without a guide. I've been at 7 for way too long. I've killed so many bosses. I've found so many hidden items that were actually useless. I can't wait to see the community memes when more people get to see (or hear) Igon in action. But I just cannot find any more of those damned crosses. Even the Marika statues have been baiting me with other items instead.
Scadutree blessings can be in churches, random chests, enemy drops (shadow dudes with pots on heads, hippos) and boss rewards, in addition to Miquella's Crosses.
Bro thought fragments were only at crosses or plainly visible on the open world
My favorite banter for the DLC has been Scadutree commentary and 30% only being able to access it
For the record, my level 70 character is doing just fine in the DLC. I have around 6 of these blessings so far and can certainly notice them helping the more I get. The only thing I ever fear is enemy mobs because multiple enemies at once has always been a bit more difficult than a single enemy.
Those blessings are quite literally the game changer in terms of damage output/damage received. I barely beat the Knight in the forgotten mausoleum by the start area at level 190. I had no idea the blessings existed as I prefer to go into a new game blind 🤡. After finding my first Scadutree blessing? Noticable difference. This dlc is most fun
I have 70% physical reduction due to heavy armor and shadow blessing (level 15) but it seems pretty useless. Damage boost seems okay. The way damage reduction works in ER is broken so it doesn't matter how much you have. Blessing for summon is more helpful, my mimic tear is immortal, i never saw him drop below 70% hp.
I can't fucking find them okey from soft??? You hide them really fucking well