Elden Ring - 25 Advanced Gameplay Tips
Elden Ring Quick Tips If you head directly north from the starting location, you'll find the war master shack who sells ashes of war. Pick up the no-skill skill that makes sense and put that ability on your shield. That will replace the parry button with your weapon's main active ability instead. Now you can use those big, flashy attacks while still having a shield ready to go in your off hand.
The weapon you're rocking might have a really good dodge attack. Dodging takes time, costs extra stamina, and you have to move to do this attack, but if you light attack while crouching instead, that is a shortcut to your weapon's dodge attack. If you quickly press crouch and then attack, this is a pretty effective mechanic you can use during a fight, and you avoid spending that extra stamina dodging.
You can also use this out of a sprint in place of your sprinting attack. Pretty sweet you might have thought that holy damage is required to actually kill off the skeletons that continually reanimate. Not true in the Elder Ring, you need to hit them once when they're in their downed reanimating animation.
No more skeletons. However, skeletons, the spirit ones you can summon, also have this reanimating property. These spirits will keep getting back up over and over with full health as long as they don't get destroyed while they're reanimating. This can make a huge difference during boss fights and is one of my favorite spirit types.
You likely know about these annoying, flame-spewing traps. Well, just throw on a bow and simply shoot them. They will retract, letting you easily pass on through. Why didn't I think of this sooner? Many weapons let you hit multiple times on horseback if you hold down the heavy attack button. Some hit twice, but some continually hit a few extra times.
Also, you can hold the use button and press r1 to swap to your offhand on horseback. If it's a shield holding heavy attack, it actually blocks during the first half of that animation. If you don't hold down the button for the entire animation, you can avoid the attack. Out of it, this lets you travel on horseback while still being able to block forward-facing damage.
If you have the no skill ash award on your offhand, I also recommend only having one weapon in your right hand equipment slot. Then if you hit the D-pad right, you're unarmed and your active ability will change to a kick. If it's a tanky, shielded enemy, this kick will easily break its stance, letting you get in a critical strike after your foot hates shields or loves shields.
I don't know, if for whatever reason you have a heavy equipment load, you're going to be slow rolling. This is pretty ineffective during combat. However, you can still freely jump with a heavy equipment load, which should replace your dodge in these situations. Now you can be chunky and still be somewhat agile.
That flame-spewing tower you now know how to quickly neutralize can also be used to your advantage. Instead of trying to attack the thing and then trying to jump on it in the heat of a battle to get to a higher vantage point, you can actually just run directly into it and then jump. Since your jump has a slight impact value to it, it'll activate the trap at the same time, then you can safely sit on top of it and wait for pursuing enemies to stroll right on into that fire free kill.
The time of day actually affects more than just the lighting. It also affects some enemy spawns. On this early bridge, the normal mounted soldier will be replaced by this much tougher dark knight. For example, be careful where the sun doesn't shine. Once you find a great rune by taking down a major boss, just equipping it does not grant its effects.
You need to find and consume a rune arc item first. After you pop one of those, you will get your great rune effects, which will last until you die. Ideally, that will happen less with these powerful effects active. There are three primary attacks that are exceptionally good at staggering enemies.
Jumping heavy attacks are one of the quickest high stagger hits. There's also the held down heavy charge attack, which is a risky button flicks strong stagger if it lands. Then if you hit a heavy attack after blocking a hit, the guard counter is also super good at staggering. If you regularly mix those into your combos, you'll take down most enemies much faster with all those critical strikes.
If you're trying to quickly chart a new uncharted area, look out for this little symbol on your map. If you head over there, you'll find a monolith that will reveal the area. You're no longer lost. Maybe instead of needing to have a torch taking up your offhand slot to light up those dark areas, a lantern can be attached to you instead to free up both of your hands.
There are a few places you can buy one, but if you head to this vendor northwest of the main starting location, you can get one pretty quickly. There are some nasty water sources out there that will negatively affect you on foot, but for a horse it's completely immune to that junk. I must be nice.
Keep a lookout for enemies who have shimmering yellow eyes. That means they will drop around quadruple the runes compared to their non-glowy-eyed counterparts. You're going to need those runes. If you're thinking of farming these goodie baskets, though, you don't get anything from subsequent kills.
The big air gusts you can use on your horse to travel upwards also give a buff in the area around them, negating any fall damage, so you can use those the opposite way to shortcut downwards as well. Now to close this out, some extra stuff for those who may never have played any of the Soulsborne games.
Avoid rolling through status-inflicting waters because it will adhere to your armor, building up the effect even after you leave it. This is why we invented soap. Some enemies will do unblockable grapple attacks that can outright kill you if you do nothing about it. However, if you're stuck in one of those animations, quickly press random face buttons or the right and left bumpers as fast as you can, which will pop you out of those attacks early.
Eldren ring pro tip: mash buttons. You can hold down on the D-pad to quickly snap to the first item in the rotation on the bottom bar, which is likely going to be your healing flask. If you find yourself in movement and pairing areas like lava, if you have no better counter to it, you can always just throw on the quick step ash of war onto any weapon in your inventory, throw that on and use quick step to navigate through these areas a little faster.
When choosing which armor pieces to wear, there's more to consider than just the base listed stats. The switch display button lets you see its full description, which sometimes shows hidden properties of the gear. The raptor's black feathers, for example, will strengthen your jump attacks, and you already know how good those are.
