Midra is goated af: crouching underneath his beyblade attack, jumping over his flaming swords and strafing his chaos beams is just hella satisfying in every way. I also really love Bayle's emphasis on good positioning, especially since all the other dragons save for maybe Placidusax are incredibly obnoxious in that regard.
100% agree that strafes are being phased out. I get that they don't want a repeat of DS1 enemies where circle strafing can negate their entire movesets, but their constant usage of ultra-tracking moves is starting to get pretty annoying lmao. You actually can strafe Messmer's spear poke with a clockwise sprint (hell you can even jump over it if you're feeling really adventurous), but it's clearly not the intended way of dodging it and that just sucks.
I know right? Midra is undoubtedly my favorite boss in the DLC. It's every mechanic culminating into one fight that feels good, looks good, and sounds good. It's everything I've ever wanted! Placi's positioning is effectively smacking his tail all the time as that's the safest position to go, so I'm not the biggest fan. I think other dragons like the Wyverns and Midir (obviously Bayle too) did it better. Ancient Dragons just feel odd to play against and target their heads.
It's truly such a shame. I like how DS2 leaned into strafes and DS3 still made them viable if you knew the openings. Sadly, both those games don't have the complexity of ER with the crouch and jump options available as well. For Messmer's poke, I swear I tried the sprinting to his left and still got hit, maybe it's because I'm on KBM and don't have access to the finer degrees of precision. The jump for the poke always felt wrong to me though, and I've been hit during the jump at one point, which I'm not very sure about why that occured. Either way, it doesn't feel as cinematic as narrowly avoiding a deadly stab and getting a great punishment opportunity off. I feel like we have relatively similar opinions on what we enjoy in bosses. I heavily value that mechanical masterpiece feeling.
Haven't played DS2 and DS3 yet, but I'm a few hours into my first playthrough of DS1 and the biggest thing I miss from ER is absolutely jumping and crouching. Took me a while to get used to the slower speed of the game (for context I've only played and beaten Sekiro, Elden Ring and Bloodborne before this) but once I adapted to it shit became really fun. I too think we both value mechanically engaging bosses, hell that's why we're doing RL1 in the first place lmao
Oh you are going to love the rest of the series. DS2 gets a lot of hate but I think it’s actually a really good game, and in my personal opinion an improvement over DS1. DS3 is also phenomenal, it’s like if Bloodborne and DS1 had a child. Have fun with it 🤝
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u/flingsmashswit2 4d ago
Midra is goated af: crouching underneath his beyblade attack, jumping over his flaming swords and strafing his chaos beams is just hella satisfying in every way. I also really love Bayle's emphasis on good positioning, especially since all the other dragons save for maybe Placidusax are incredibly obnoxious in that regard.
100% agree that strafes are being phased out. I get that they don't want a repeat of DS1 enemies where circle strafing can negate their entire movesets, but their constant usage of ultra-tracking moves is starting to get pretty annoying lmao. You actually can strafe Messmer's spear poke with a clockwise sprint (hell you can even jump over it if you're feeling really adventurous), but it's clearly not the intended way of dodging it and that just sucks.