Fenrisulfr

@myrmicus:

@yummylee:

I managed to beat the game between when you two made your posts and when I'm making this post. I only managed to beat the Ancient Dragon because it did not use the move I had mentioned earlier. He jumped and did the flame breathe attack, but not in the way that it had performed it before. Despite killing the Ancient Dragon through the use of a couple of different tactics, I will stand beside what I've claimed thus far concerning the boss (and the game in what I've spoken about).

@zevvion:

Yes, I'm quite aware of that rule. Thus my grievance with this boss. It ignores this rule for one of its attacks. A specific attack, but, nonetheless, it occurs. I have danced around this guy in an attempt to bait the basic flame attack, bites, stomps, you name it. It goes fine until the AI decides to end the fight. Then the dragon is up, he spins around and then lets loose. That's always the end of the fight. I can avoid the fire at 90⁰ turns, and even those approaching 135⁰ and beyond a few more degrees. But once it does that U-turn, fight's over. One shot kill. Always. I have yet to see a case of that move happening and someone evading it. Like I state previously: all of the videos I've seen people did not have that exact move done to them. The dragon would either leap to the side or would do a much more shallow turn.

@myrmicus:

I know how to reduce Vendrick's defenses. Thus why I've been trying to take down the dragon. Each of some special souls reduce his defense by half. I've also had zero luck with getting the dragon to not perform his aerial attack move. Every position I go to, he does it. In front, on the side, under, behind. Everywhere. He even performed it at the beginning of a round when I entered. He roared. I stood in front of him. Then he took off and blam. Done.

I also don't understand why you think I'm doing things I'm not. Like getting greedy. I'll hit him once, MAYBE twice, let off, wait for the stamina to come back, then attempt to evade the aerial attack with a full bar of stamina. I've even done it while my character only has a shield and weapon equipped in an attempt to increase my movement speed. Still doesn't work and I'm running out of things to try against this boss. It's that one attack. The rest I can avoid. It's just that one attack where it pulls that U-turn in the air and lets loose.

@yummylee:

No doubt, Bed of Chaos sucked, but once you know what to do, it's doable on the first go around. Knock out the right. Quit. Reload. Run left. Shoot the left. If you have no bow, just run and jump over the small gap. Quit. Reload. Hit the center. Make it fall. Move slightly right and drop down. Mind the beard. Move in for the kill. The thing is with of Bed of Chaos is that you can do it every time without fail. Even when that firestorm-like attack is used, once you evade (or survive) it, it won't use it again for a little while (at least in my experience).

But onto your main point: optional or not, the bosses need to follow the rules set forth by everything else in the game, and to a larger extent the series. While Vendrick isn't hard (note how I solved him after only my second run) I want to drain his defense so I'm not in some long ass fight doing half or quarter damage to him than I should be doing. So he's not the problem. He's a symptom. The Anceient Dragon's AI is the problem. In every match with him I've had, it's been lost by the same move. The dragon leaps up then shoots down. If I'm in front of him, i can't find a position to get away. If I'm behind him, then it's the tail. So if the creature decides to flip around, the fight is over and the move becomes unavoidable. After watching a few video of people tackling this boss, it looks as though it's random. That's a problem. That means that there's an unavoidable insta-kill attack in a game that is constantly beating you over the head while screaming, "LEARN ME!"

I also have far more grievances with the game that go beyond just these two bosses. The dragon was just at the forefront of the article and I figured I would stay at least on topic of relating to it rather than trying to turn this into a personal grievance where everyone gets to learn that, "Fenrisulfr hates Dark Souls." After all, I didn't drop 385 hours (according to Steam) into Dark Souls I because I hated it.

@myrmicus:

I didn't say Vendrick was hard. I only said he'll take a long time to defeat due to how his armor if figured out into the equation. Like I said before, I have him solved. Beating him will just take more time than skill. I also didn't say that the Ancient Dragon is hard. I said that having a random unavoidable that will one shot you destroys what the game had been teaching the player up to that point. I have been trying out different strategies to sue against said boss, but when it comes down to it, that flame blast has such a large area of effect that it becomes almost impossible to avoid unless a specific movement is followed. And even then, there may not be enough time to fully escape the range, even if the strategy has been followed to the T.

I also never said that it was those two reasons alone are what made me call this game a shit sequel. I withheld information that wasn't immediately pertinent to the conversation at hand, therefore didn't express them. My problems with this game go a bit farther than, "Hey, some of these bosses contain some bullshit," since that's already par for the course.

Dark Souls II is by no means the "worst game ever." Sure there's a ton of hyperbole in the article about his extended stay in the Dark Souls universe, but he does make some good points. I'm 33 hours into Dark Souls II, and I have to say, it's a pretty shit sequel.

While the beginning is alright, I have run into this wall of nonsense that is Vendrick and the Ancient Dragon. Like the author, I have been grinding my way to that dragon in an attempt to take it down. While I've only got into the fight with Vendrick a couple of times and have figured him out as some kind of half-assed Artorias. Granted, I'm sure that I can kill Vendrick, I want to get the last soul from the dragon to make the fight faster since I'm doing effectively half, if not less, damage to him. I'm also a bit of a completionist when it comes to Dark Souls. The fight with the Ancient Dragon is where the game completely falls apart.

There is nothing to be learned from this fight. It's a repeat of the fight with the three Guardian Dragons I had on the way to the keep with the exception that this guy is huge. Not only is there nothing to be learned, but the randomness of how the dragon moves and, eventually, leaps into the air to spew fire into the arena in a wide swathe, is one of the few, if not the only, unavoidable death in the game. This is completely against everything that the Dark Souls series has been saying the whole time. "There's always a way out." Not in this fight. There is no way out, simply due to the size of the dragon and the blast radius of the attack. If the dragon decides to jump up and does a 180⁰ spin, you're done. I have yet to see a character move fast enough to evade an attack like that. And it has happened to me every fight. I then look at Youtube videos of people beating the dragon, and they only ever win when the dragon doesn't do the half circle spin in the air and shoot down. This is a problem because this fight boils down to be entirely luck based. And luck, as we all know, isn't a skill that can be learned or refined or adjusted. It's just luck.

And that's why Dark Souls II, while not the worst game ever, is a pretty shit sequel. It's breaking its own rules.

My steam name is Brownie.

I'm located in the Midwest of the US but play on US West and East servers.

I'm available sporadically due to my work schedule.

Though I'm getting the hang of the game, I am still very much a beginner.

I play as a Sniper, Jug, or Zeus as of writing this. I am looking into how to properly play as an Invoker after my housemate showed me how that guy roles.

Full speed ahead, duders!

C'mon. They're basically the same thing.

This whole situation really sucks. But you know what?

Nothing stops the Giant Bombcast.

Lawmakers mainly come from law school? Nooooo... As a person who's going to school for Constitutional Law, let me fill you in on some motives for those who get into this. Outside of a few rotten apples, everyone is in it to do two things: do the right thing and make a ton of money. However, one of the problems that come into play when we, as a society, value those who speak more than those who will listen. The dominance that talking over someone else establishes is attractive and those are the people that get voted into positions because they are perceived as strong and capable, yet their limitations are usually (note: not always) quite clear. The second comes from not knowing what the "right thing" is. Not everything is always apparent. And worse, not everything is popular.

I did go back to it actually. I found it no better. I could tell exactly where things were going to be, when they were going to spawn and what events were going to take place well before they happened.

This game is just boring.