Elden Ring - 25 Tricks And Hidden Mechanics
Intro
Hello, fellow tarnished hello, Eldon ringers. This is just going to be a quick article going over some hidden mechanics and tricks I've found so far in Elven Ring. All of this footage will be from the early game, so don't worry about spoilers. The basic threshold for the stuff I'm including in this article is anything that the game doesn't explicitly tell you about, along with just a couple easy-to-miss features, and these things range from very useful to borderline useless but neat, so expect some variety.
Let's do it.
Horse i-frames
First up is one I'm sure a lot of people haven't noticed. You have iframes while mounting your horse. This is surprisingly useful because boss fights on horseback in the overworld will frequently result in you getting thrown off your horse mid-fight with these iframes. Remounting is actually safer than you might think, so feel free to mount up quickly even if there's an attack coming down.
In that same vein, you also get iframes when dismounting from your horse. This is noticeably less useful because when would you actually dismount calmly during a fight? But it's still worth mentioning because it's absolutely a flex and it looks cool and, you know, looking cool is the real endgame of the elden ring, so make sure you're taking notes .
Horse jump pads
Next up are the horse jump pads, or spirit springs. I lost count of how many times I used this feature to get around the world, so definitely keep it in mind, horse combat.
Horse strong attacks
Everyone knows you can attack from horseback. But I've seen quite a few people miss the feature that you can hold a strong attack to create an active hitbox alongside your character while riding, so for example, you can drag a great sword along the ground, or if you want to be extra cool, you can twirl some twin blades.
You can also use this to help combo bigger enemies over and over with larger weapons, and because I know at least one person didn't notice, you can also do all these attacks from the left side of your horse with l1 and l2. This is super useful for fights like the Tree Sentinel, as I believe his attack patterns favor you circling counterclockwise.
Double jump redirection
With left attacks instead of right, You can completely change your direction in midair with the double jump your horse has. This is most useful when you're attempting to carefully work your way down a large cliff with platforms like you see here. Judging from the blood stains, I've seen too many people try to do these sections on foot instead of on their horse.
I understand the instinct to do this, but the horse controls are actually pretty precise, and if you make a mistake, you can save yourself with a double jump. You can also use this double jump redirection technique to reach areas directly underneath you like this, which is very useful for a few secrets.
Horse finisher
One last horse-related tip: if you knock an enemy off their horse, you can do a finisher on them while they're lying on the ground, and by far the coolest way to do this is by parrying the enemy's attack.
Rainbow stones
Rainbow Stones: These are little glowing rocks that you can find and then drop on the ground. The fall will kill you if it lands safely, then feel free to drop them off again. This is possibly more useful in the Elven Ring than in any of the Souls games because of just how many drops down ledges you'll be making across Hitboxes This game has very accurate hitboxes.
Accurate hitboxes
And you can use that to your advantage on certain enemies or bosses by moving your hitbox low to the ground, either with weapon arcs or, if you're cool Okay, this next one is super useful and very easy to miss.
Shield bounce
If you ever notice how sometimes when an enemy attacks your shields they'll bounce off of them, giving you a huge opening to guard counter, but other times they just keep attacking, well, it turns out that this can be influenced by your shield.
Most strong attacks on medium shields will not be deflected, but if you upgrade to a great shield, suddenly a lot more attacks will bounce off. I mean, just look at this. If you rely a lot on guard counters, investing in strength for a great shield will make a massive difference.
D-pad shortcuts
D-pad shortcuts: it can get kind of messy during a fight when you're frantically cycling through your d-pad items to find your healing flask, but did you know you can actually just hold down on the d-pad to instantly switch to whatever's in the first slot, so just put your healing flask in slot 1 and you're set.
I've seen a surprising number of long-time players miss out on this feature.
Glowing eyes
enemies with glowing eyes. Have you noticed them? Every now and then you'll find a normal enemy with glowing orange eyes. It took me a while to figure this out, but they actually drop five times as many runes as normal when you kill them.
I believe any enemy can get these eyes, and it's completely random when it happens.
Grab attacks
Grab attacks Did you know you can actually escape these? This has been a feature since Dark Souls won, but I see people missing out on this constantly. And I know new players definitely don't know, but if you ever get grabbed by an enemy, mash the buttons or triggers on your controller to get out faster.
It's easiest to just alternate the left and right triggers, but the face buttons work too. This won't work for all grabs, but if it's something that does multiple ticks of damage, it'll probably work for item drops.
Item drops
Ever notice how sometimes, when you kill an enemy, white souls will shoot out of them? This is actually there to let you know that the enemy has just dropped an item.
This is especially useful for farming, since you no longer have to wait those few extra seconds for the enemy's body to ragdoll to know if you've got something.
Poison areas tip
Poison, Miyazaki because he loves his swamps and poison areas, this next tip will be more relevant than you think. Make sure you don't roll in poisonous areas.
I know the instinct will be there, especially for soul veterans used to rolling through Blighttown. But this time you'll actually get covered in poison when doing this. So yeah, this makes fighting enemies in these sections a lot tougher since there's a punishment for trying to dodge away.
Enemy stance-break decay
Speaking of poison meters filling up, that's actually a good way of envisioning how the enemy's stance system works in this game.
Basically, you can make any enemy or boss vulnerable to a critical hit follow-up when you break their stance by attacking them enough times. The fastest ways to do this are with charged strong attacks, jump attacks, and guard counters. To test this, I fought the giant in the mines a few times and only used fully charged strong attacks.
