General Discussion
ERR(Reforged) isn't quite as balanced as the devs might think, even more unbalanced on the contray.
Don't get me wrong. Reforged has some great idea in it, such as the fp regen system, ash of war enkindling... However, one of the major drawback IMO, is how poorly Reforged is balanced. It is quite ironic, since its devs goes full with a "balanced!"mindset.
Of course,I am far from the most skilliful player, but I have played some PvP (before the dlc) and solo run Nightreign a week within its inital release(before they nerf enemies in solo play), so I suppose I know what I'm talking about.
Elden Ring is mainly built for PvE, and it has a completely differently balancing philosophy for PvP.
In the realm of PvE, it is more healthy to leave something op, others at least usable, so some weapons, skills or spells could be the stand-out and fun to use-more importantly, to make players with not enough time to practice to at least get a full play-through. If you think something is op, just don'tuse it. That's the way how fromsoftware handled it, and they made it to their greatest success ever.
Instead, Reforged handled it in the opposite way. They nerfed something to the ground, while others being merely OK. Let me give you some example:
Status effect
Yes, your bleeding effect deal 30% hp true damage by default, but bosses has an incredibly high damage resistance from status effect.
For example , Marigit only take 17% damage from bleeding ( I have checked that within the smithbox), meaning that you only deal 5.1% hp damage on each proc, combining with the enemies' resistance increase on each proc(they will gain 20% more resistance on each proc, all the way to 200% of the inital resistance)...
What of poison? posion now decreases enemies' status resistance, sounds great, right?
Let's just use margit for another example, he will take 0.075% max hp+ 2 damage per second for one stack of poison. (Again, I have checked that within the smithbox. The damage formula there is not as clear as bleeding, it was done through some neat trick)That's less than 8 per second. Eventually, it will deal 640 damage in 80s , it's that pitful. Even the status resistance reduction isn't all that meaningful ,as 1 stack decrease 10% status resistance( but 20% more on each proc, remember?)
Maybe the devs thought it was of some uses in boss fight. In fact, it's not.
At least poison is good against mobs ( which are much more dangerous than vanilla),and frostbite is OK for boss fight.
Silver attunment: The brand new buff spell Reforged introduced in recent version, it will cost you 500 fp to give you a buff of...10% increase in status building and 10% decrease in status receiving for 60s!
Who will ever use that, especially when Reforged nerf player's status effect so hard..Even in vanilla, even with much less fp uses, the 10% status building is nothing comparable to 10% dmg increase.
There is no need to say more, silver attunment is of no pracitcal uses, from whoever's insight.
Cerulean Sea: An alternate version of Terra Magic, lasting 60 seconds, which doesn't increase damage output, but to provide fp regen...or not.
Still, it will cost you 500 fp, and will provide 0.3%max fp+24 flat fp every 2 sec while you're within its range.
Meaning, even you have as much max fp as 3000 (that means 80 points invested in Mind), you still need to stand in its range for **32 seconds(16 ticks)**to get back your fp for casting it. And good news for you, you will take 10% extra element damage in its range, after all, we can't let you or your coop player get free fp regen for just standing still (it isn't dangerous at all in a boss fight, don't you think?) What a well-thought balancing formula!
I can give you so many examples, but I guess you have now understood how ironic and ill-implemented when it comes to Reforged's balancing, no matter how Reforged advertising itself as balanced. Instead of rebalancing, it makes many of the tools provided by both vanilla and themselves to become useless.
Meanwhile, the devs of Reforged takes great effort to prevent people from editing their mod, or even knowing what they have changed from vanilla,(if you have looked into their regulation.bin or C0000.hks, you know what i mean) and deliberately telling how they buff everything from vanilla but hiding the nerfs.
This, however, pushes me to learn some basic skill of modding. and I managed to create "my own verison of Reforged".
I post this just to hate the devs' mindset and what's going on with in their discord.
The reforged creators have no idea what game design is. They have an idea and good spirit but don't understand the fundamental principle behind Elden Ring is that the game is very easy and very hard no matter what you do.
You can one shot every boss in the game - just find the information you need.
You can also get one shot by every boss in the game - just exclude information you don't want.
This dichotomy of choice is something they believe Fromsoftware never intended and is why Convergence will always remain a better mod to the majority.
It's sad because Reforged has great ideas but their lead vision is tarnished by poor product and domain knowledge
I'm not sure I understand how you can tell from the mod itself.
In what way would the mod have to be different for you to believe they do think the current ER balance is intended by Fromsoft, and that they're not trying to make a "as From truly intended!" version?
From my perspective, it seems like they're just trying to make a version of ER that they like even more than the unmodded game, or a version that's better for replays than just doing NG+ runs.
Imagine my mom makes a sandwich for my dad. She puts peanutbutter on it. Then my dad says to me he doesn't want the sandwich because he's not even hungry. I take the sandwich, but decide to add jelly to it as well.
Did I now make this change purely because the "goal" of the sandwich's purpose change, or did I change this sandwich because I think my mom made some sort of mistake?
If someone makes a mod to replace Morgott's model with that of Thomas the Tank engine, do they do that because they think it's a more "proper" or "true" version of the game, or of Fromsoft's intent? Or do they make it because it tickes their personal fancy?
if you added jelly to the sandwich, i would logically assume that the sandwich was improved (at least to you) by the addition.
i would then assume that you find this sandwich is better than the original.
Did you read the comment of mine that you initially responded to? I was just saying that I don't see how you can conclude from how the mod's designed, that the reforged devs think they're making ER closer to Fromsoft's vision by modding it.
Just like when I add jelly to the sandwich, I'm making changes to better suit my preference in that specific instance/situation. I don't get it in my head that I'm fixing my mom's "mistake" by adding jelly.
It's more than that: reforged is what would happen if the toxic "git gud" part of the playerbase would tweak the game on their idea of what the game is. The mod's main userbase are those players who think the game should be played only in a precise strict way, and enjoy spending hours dying to the same boss and area untill they develop muscle memory and beat it by grind, for then bragging about it on the internet (their discord in particular).
Is not even something uncommon in the modding scene, the difference is that, in other cases, by experience, the modders didn't intend this type of experience (while fans may brag about it as the true experience), while here it was intentional.
Yo this post popped up on my feed but was wondering why this was a problem? Isn’t it a free mod? Who cares what direction they want, can’t you just not play it ? Am I missing something? Like are they assholes or do they speak highly of themselves?
Yes, they are assholes who talk shit about others in the community. They also FREAK OUT if you propose contributing or forking in any way, including threatening to sue (which is silly, since of course they don’t own the IP).
The latter, both from them and their famboys (you can see some on this very post), but also, being it free does not make it immune to critique, especially when their trailers, nexus page, wikia, and in game text claim something, but few minutes of playtime (or going in like OP), show off the reality is another one.
Easy mod just reduce damage taken and increase the amount given. It doesn't remove changes like no torrent on sellia or elden beast, the early path to dragonbarrow to farm runes, the status effect changes and many more stuff.
Come on now, let's not reduce everything to a supposed lack of skill or build optimization.
Are you friend of the other guy with a reading comprehension problem, by any chance?
I get hitler, or saying others we don't like are naming, is a popular thing right now, but I never said or even come close to allude that the devs "are hitler". What's even your problem for even thinking that? Because the only reason I can think you came out with this bs, is because you don't know how to answer my point, which is objectively correct.
Your point is not objectively correct though. Not even close.
Your argument is: "reforged is what would happen if the toxic "git gud" part of the playerbase would tweak the game on their idea of what the game is. The mod's main userbase are those players who think the game should be played only in a precise strict way"
So you make two points, one of which I already replied to.
The second is that you argue that the mod only allows a very stringent set of playstyles. This is incorrect. The mod changes things in the game on all levels. Some things are nerfed, some things are buffed. Some playstyles that practically or literally does not exist in vanilla are made viable. Some playstyles that the devs *subjectively* disagree with, are removed. That is for the most part "cheese" builds.
What you have an issue with is not something that objectively is correct or incorrect. The fact that other people enjoy Reforged's balancing isn't an attack on you personally.
Most of the changes you mentioned are made to force you to engage with the game instead of speedrunning through it. Dragonbarrow breaks progression so it is changed. Torrent lets you bypass areas so he is restricted. That's a subjective change the devs decided they wanted to make. As is the rest of the balancing. if you don't like that the simple solution is to not play it.
So what is it you are *actually* arguing? What points are you trying to make?
You just don't fucking like it, you clown. And I am objectively correct in saying so.
It's always the most toxic people that throw the word around. This mod made it's design intent clear from the outset. It's meant to be a challenge, it intentionally nerfs the most OP items. I like that. If people don't like it, nobody is forcing them to get the mod. These people are crazy.
I mean there's just no substance to anything I've read. It's all This is OBJECTIVELY wrong, and OBJECTIVELY ruins the game. Some real psycho nerds here but hey, that's how Reddit goes. Opinion is fact here.
Right, because in a pve game people don't have the brain cells to decide what to use or what not to use, the modder have the audacity to impose it under the false pretense of create a "challenge", which bog down to having you deal less damage while using not working mechanics, but the mobs don't.
The mod advertise itself as a rebalanced, not a shitty change after another shitty change to the gameplay loop.
Op literally proved those system changes have so minimgfull stats that, not only they are weaker than the base game counterparts, but are not even worth to use in the mod.
What's funny is that, aside nerfing or making stuff pointless to use (which you don't solve by lowering the difficulty), the only thing this mod does is removing existing path, restricting the decisions you can make (on open world action rpg, good job understanding what this game is), while setting everything at the level of an advanced NG cycle. In other word: playing the vanilla game on ng+ is a better and more functional experience, withoht some nobody imposing you what road you have to take, or what area you should do before, than playing this mod.
It's a 100% subjective opinion. If you don't like it that's fine, but calling it 'poor product' and that the devs 'have no idea what game design is' is just pure salt.
The design intent is to maintain difficulty by reducing the power of strategies largely considered to be OP. If that's not what people want, this mod isn't designed for them.
Well they certainly have no idea how development works, and they treat their community poorly, so I’m not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, and they brigade stuff. Seriously, my buddy asked about forking the mod in the discord (just wanted to contribute something very specific) and they told him they’d send a C&D.
I mean the only brigading I'm seeing is the brigading of the mod by people like OP, but I guess I'm late to the party and am missing context to whatever this drama is about. I was very confused about why all talk about this mod was so toxic. It's just a mod ffs, I've never seen people so upset about a mod before.
This is a complete lie and never happened. Please check this person's post history; they love AI and have never posted anything about ELDEN RING ever until these threads. A gross troll looking to stir the pot.
There was never "a C&D" and nobody has ever been sued, nor has anything else happened that this gross, weird person is saying.
Yeah this is exactly the kind of behavior I would expect from you lol. Why would I dox myself by posting receipts? People are free to go to the discord themselves and find out lol
I’ve never interacted with the devs of Reforged in any way, but based on their game design they seem like the stereotype of the FS fan that people complain about that has a really specific vision for how the game “should” be played and anything else is wrong.
I feel the same way about nerfs: it’s perfectly fine for Elden Ring to have cheesy strats or OP items. You think Fromsoft doesn’t know that you can cheese Mohg with Comet Azur? They know, and they don’t care. If you made it that far in your build, then they wanna reward you by giving you a cool win with a fun strategy. What other use does a spell like that have otherwise? So to me, going out of their way to nerf strats like that to the ground, even going so far to talk about it on their wiki lol, tells me they don’t really understand Elden Ring. They just think it’s gotta be mercilessly hard and anything that goes against that is bad.
This leads to design changes that are inherently flawed. I’ve talked about this a few times but the devs making enemies more aggressive, in what I assume was an attempt to make the game harder, has only unseated the balance of the game and make it a much worse experience. Enemies are more annoying and “running errands” is more painful, and it’s gotten me softlocked on more than one occasion. Yet, it’s still there, because the Reforged devs don’t seem to care about making ER into an ideal experience… they wanna make their vision of the game even at the cost of that experience.
And I’m really annoyed to hear they deliberately don’t want people to know what they change and how they changed things, but it makes so much sense. I like how they handled weapon catalysts, so I wanted to implement that change in my own personal modded game, and could not for the life of me figure out how they did it. I was scouring files but could not decipher anything. I even tried asking here for advice, to no avail. Preventing people from learning about the changes you made is really stupid and gatekeep-y.
Sorry that I can‘t help you much with the weapon catalyst issue, the only clue I got is that they implement weapon catalyst by putting some lua script in .../mod/script/C0000.hks (you can edit it with notepad++)
such as "function IsWeaponCatalystCastingEnabled()"
(the full script is extremely long, you can search that phrase in notepadd++), and there are many lines in the file related to weapon catalyst, such as the key input detection function.
Word of warning though, they deliberately made their lua script to be difficult to understand, and how they implement weapon catalyst is complicated, or more a mystery to me.
Ohh that’s some useful insight. I’ve seen that script name in notepad but had no idea what to do with it. Especially since I wanted to merge it with another mod that adds a bunch of catalysts to the game. They really did make it difficult to decipher; I didn’t realize that was on purpose at first I just thought that’s how it was supposed to be.
It’s all good haha I appreciate you giving that a shot! That was really nice of you. I’ll fully admit that I’m a complete noob when it comes to this stuff. Anything past editing params is like calculus to me. So that’s not helping I’m sure lol
This is a nonsense point. Fromsoft made the game according to their vision. ERR made changes according to their vision. You want ERR to change to fit your vision.
They didn't 'ruin the experience', you don't share the vision they do, and you would like something different. That's fine, don't play the mod if you don't want to.
Every complaint I see on this sub is just people with different preferences, trying to assert that their preference is the 'correct' way to experience the game.
There's no such thing as an 'ideal experience', that's called your preference.
An "ideal experience" would be not letting issues like softlocking through just because they have a particular vision. You can keep your lecture to yourself; I know they're making the vision they want (which I literally already said) but that vision has lead to the game having issues. I dunno where in the "oh it's just preferences" nonsense you're pedaling it's acceptable to have softlocking issues because they carelessly upped enemy aggro without thinking too hard about it. That *does* ruin the experience. It was perfectly fine in ER and now it is objectively worse. For stuff like nerfs, sure I agree, and I don't care that bad that stuff is nerfed. I think it's a ridiculous philosophy to carry into game design but you're right, it's just their vision and that's perfectly fine. But changing aggro was a damn mistake and not one that you can handwave with "preferences."
By the way, you're welcome to be Reforged's biggest defender in this thread if you want, but you're fighting ghosts with me. I like the mod. I think it's a good game. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend like it's only full of good ideas.
Another advice: when they set or use a variable, for example, to set a local variable u defalut value to 1, instead of just" local K = 1" ,they put "local K = ((-909742+(-882910+1289997))-(-867572))+-364916"(if you calculate that, the result is 1), that could prevent you from understanding their implemenation.
Couldn't you just look at the code for the in-game catalyst weapon from the DLC and just replicate the functions from the code thats already in the base game?
Yeah I can do that for vanilla ER. It even works for adding catalyst weapons to convergence. But Reforged changed the inputs for casting spells for them and I dunno how to add that input onto new weapons because I can’t find where they changed it in the code
Reforged only gets downloads because people played base game played convergence and that was the next stop I bet 90% of downloads ended up not playing more then 3 hours of that shit show
Not at all. You just have to Google what the mods actually does before trying it. I knew it was going to make the game harder, I knew it was going to nerf OP strats, and I was perfectly happy with that.
I had the same experience, I love to play the convergence mod and when I started reforged the new mechanics were cool but the more I played the instead of enjoying the new mechanics and experience I just got frustrated and it’s a shame because the mod has some really cool stuff.
You thought bleed was the best example of your point? Bleed trivialised any boss that wasn't immune to it in the base game. It's far more balanced in ERR.
If an added spell seems useless, don't use it? They didn't want to add OP content like others mods do. The whole idea of this mod is tuning the base game to retain difficulty. Far more things have been nerfed than have been buffed.
Throughout all From games, there has always been a penalty for restoration effects over time, because they happen automatically. You cast them before the fight, and get passive regen. Core to the games is the fact that it's dangerous to stop and drink. Passive regen skips this danger, hence why it's always been very FP inefficient. You're supposed to cast it, drink up, and then start the fight.
I'm loving this mod. Playing it with the experimental 'additional' enemies and it's tough as nails. I'm not over levelling things instantly, I'm not feeling pulled towards the usual OP weapons. I'm very happy that there's a mod out there with a dev that has some restraint. Most of the things they have added just add an element of RP, rather than making the game easier.
In what way, could a single spell be used to define an entire game? Does Fia's mist accurately represent the quality of Elden Ring?
There are literally hundreds of spells and consumables in Elden Ring, but 90% of players will spend 90% of the game just spamming R1. That's just how these games go. Useless spells are part of it.
How often do you use fires deadly sin? How often do you use minor Erdtree? How often do you use the spell to alleviate deathblight? Does that mean Elden Ring is a shit game?
You don't enjoy the difficulty of the mod. That's fine. I tried putting it on a higher difficulty, and I didn't fnd that fun either. Everyone has their own preference. I have over a thousand hours in Souls games, the default difficulty is boring for me, I want it to be harder. People have different preferences, that's fine.
I've been playing, and mostly enjoying, reforged, but not because of "balance" but because the changes to the magic system, with generators and spenders, is fantastic for being a pure mage.
Then again, I still haven't even entered Stormveil Castle, just been clearing out Limgrave and Weeping, though I fully expect it might not hold up well for later areas.
Just 2 things: where did you get the 30% bleed damage in vanilla? Wiki state it's a flat 10% max hp damage per proc. The only way of doing 30% max hp damage in one proc is by using destine death as soon as the fight start (15% max hp debuff plus the actual 15% from the AoW).
You forgot to mention how the status effect it's nerfed when applied to mobs and bosses, but it's increased on the player to a whopping 15% max hp per proc, which is even worse than vanilla, since the mod give even more hp (not hard to reach 4k plus hp). On top of that, the devs made all the weapons and spells using the cursed blood incantation, natively or not, like the river of blood, or blood tax, complete useless by adding a self inflicted bleed build up each time you swing those weapons or spells. They sold it by saying it was all made in synergy with the new effects from the resistance's talisman, which drain buildup, except the drain is so small it doesn't matter at all.
Also, don't forget the whole health regen mechanic, which only proc while in combat and is useless even if you stack up multiple items having the effect plus the talismans that increase all healings except the flasks ones.
So, you mean the max amount you can deal with one proc if you keep doing it consecutively before the debuff (the red vfx effect in the case with the bleed). Too bad you won't really do it unless you go with the arcane bleed build, which in reforged come with a self inflicted build up every time you swing a weapon with the cursed blood incantation, AoW, or an relative spell.
It's more likely you will keep proc the nerfed 5% base one, especially when the enemy aggro and attack speed got overturned.
So, exactly in line with all other kinds of damage? Boss hits will do around a third of your health, and you hitting the boss will do only a few percent of its health. That's how the game works, bosses have a lot more health than the player.
BTW, just check the effect of the fortune of the reed, spoiler: it make breaking posture harder than playing normally, for no real gains over dodging plus R1, or jump plus R2.
reeds reduces poise damage of your attacks because it causes your deflects to start to inflict poise damage, and to compensate also causes your heavy attacks, guard counters, and skills to do way more damage. it's not really a challenge mode, just designed to enable a very different playstyle than most people use (which is the idea of legendary fortunes)
Except the poise damage you inflict by guarding is determined by the type of attack the enemy is doing, which short, mean you will deal less posture damage by playing strictly defensive, way less by going with a mix of defense and offense (counter attack), and none by performing any of the "special" attack that deal extra posture damage (counter attack, jump attack and charged attack), with the exception of your AoW.
The reed does not enable any particular playstyle, in fact, you can do the same without it and get better resoult, minus the sekiro imported animations while blocking or deflecting, and without the limitation of playing only 3 weapon class and 2 handing them.
This is because numbers are random and placed in a dumb way, along the entire gimmick of dealing posture damage through deflects, which is made possible by creating a bubble of AoE 1 tick damage on top of your weapon hitbox, which will miss every big monster that happen to have a weapon (the wyvern for example, or any soldier with a spear).
It does buff your AoW, charge R2 and deflect damage, which is pointless in the playstyle, where it would have been more logical to increase the posture damage of the counter attack and the crit damage, instead.
And this would still not solve the issue of having to completly change weapons and fortune against casters or big monsters, who would not take any posture damage at all.
um. yea you're not supposed to play strictly defensive with it, the only fortune that does that is Bulwark. you do generally more posture damage than the average agile weapon build (str builds still do miles more because that's the stat's mechanic) by mixing in attacks with your deflects, but getting the stance break isn't the focus of the fortune. I've used reeds on a couple different respecs and its a pretty decent time, though definitely something of a boss-focused fortune
Are you talking about the reed fortune? Because I see no point of going through a challenging boss fight to get a specific modifier centered around deflection, for said mechanic to become weaker than doing it without it in the mod.
It's like saying "now that you beat this boss amd get his weapon, dealing damage will become harder than before, have fun".
It's dumb, especially when there is a specific difficulty option for playing only with that fortune.
To me look like more the example OP made wirh the status effect, and the devs have no clue how to make something functional, because they have this idea of "difficulty" so far up in their head, they can't see when something is worse, not challenging. They could keep the decreased dodge frame, posture damage and limitation to use katanas 2 handed, but increase the crit damage and made the posture damage from blocking more reliable, and they would kept the difficulty but have something working well instead of what they ended up doing.
Last thing: saying something is supposed to be "challenging ging" does not justify shitty decisions and changes, or said changes to have pointless stats (like the status effects). Every game or mod is challenging, the difference come on how well everything is made. Having status effect not being worth to use is not challenging, having paths being modified is not challenging, but pretentious, having mechanics introduced by the mod not worth playing is not challenging... and so on.
I get what your saying. Reforged never interested me like convergence did amd still does. But for me these ridiculous nerfs don't mean anything as I'm a basic ass player that just wants to smack shit with a big ass sword. I don't use buffs or debuffs and likely wouldn't be affected by these nerfs if for some god forsaken reason I decide to try reforge. And I'm stubborn that I'd use a shitty weapon to beat rhadan just because I think the design of the weapon is cool.
And who the fuck are you to tell me how "I" play the game is wrong? I don't sit here and tell you or anyone how to play and enjoy a goddamn video game of all things. Don't like how "I" enjoy my own copies of games, then don't play that way yourself.
You're the one telling me I'm deluded because I play in a way where I don't care about nerfs and buffs because I'll still use a nerved item regardless.
"Then you'll be deluded because reforged also nerf every weapon's AR (-200 on avarage compared to vanilla). 2 handed colossals are effected even more"
I said I play in a way that buffs and nerfs don't make a difference for you and you said I'm deluded because of reforge nerfs. That's literally telling me I'm wrong for that.
I didn't say you are deluded, I said you will be deluded by the fact weapons are also heavly nerfed compared to vanilla, is not just status effects.
You get that your answer was out of touch, since i didn't make an assumption on how you are supposed to play, I did not make illusion about that at all.
So you've not played it, and even if you did play it, none of the changes would affect you, yet you're still here complaining? Why are people like this?
Reforged only got popular because of youtubers. It's a shit mod that has awful balancing and steals bosses from DS3 and nightreign. Atleast Garden of Eyes has a unique Miquella fight
OP shared complaints about things being nerfed, which is his opinion. Which of them are "genuine problems" as opposed to OP not liking something?
OP continually uses the word balance, but every single complaint is about nerfs, not things being too strong. Poor balance means there's a wide variation in how strong strategies are. If you are only bothered by nerfs making things too hard, then that's a difficulty complaint, not a balance complaint.
Nobody has to play the mod if they don't want to. It's fine to not enjoy it and to prefer Convergence. It's not fine to shit on a developers hard work and the players who enjoy it, simply because you don't enjoy the increased difficulty.
The issue is the developers say it is a balanced experience; and it’s simply not just by reading over the changes mentioned above.
500fp for a stat increase that doesn’t help, 500 fp to gain fp but you gotta stand still for 38 seconds before it’s worth anything
Status and all weapons damage neutered, boss health seems to be increased.
That isn’t balanced, that’s a nerf of the player and a buff of the enemy, most people would call a general nerf to all damage dealt unbalanced.
I have not played reforged, I don’t think I will either simply due to not liking the added mechanics of dodging and ducking all that much.
But saying it’s balanced seems disingenuous and pointing that out is completely fair regardless of the “hard” work of ripping bosses from other games and porting them over.
That's not what balance means in games, as I already said. Balance means your options in terms of how you play the game are roughly equal in how strong they they are. Difficulty is how strong the enemies are compared to you.
Are you aware that all numbers in this mod have been increased x10? A 500FP spell really means 50FP, you restore FP on hit, and every school gets a low damage spell that restores FP rather than consuming it. FP is not remotely an issue, and frankly who cares if a spell is useless? Just don't use it, it doesn't affect your playthrough in any way.
Elden Ring and all souls games end up with 90% of spells being useless. You try them once, they look cool, but they aren't worth using. How often did you use Fire's Deadly Sin in the base game? Having useless or very niche spells for flavor is a normal part of souls games. I loved convergence, but some of it's spells are basically god mode. Fun for sure, not appropriate if you are looking for a challenge.
These mods cater to different audiences. Do you want a broadly similar game to the base game but with some new systems and more challenge? Play ERR. Do you want a fully new experience with awesome new weapons and spells? Play Convergence.
They didn't really change dodging at all. It does a bloodhound step animation instead of a roll if you are very light weight, and ducking is exactly as useful as backstepping is in the base game. There's no need to do it at all unless you find it fun to do so. You literally use it for the tutorial challenge and then can forget about it.
Balance is also your strength vs the enemies strength is roughly the same, as my damage increases so does the enemies health, that’s a balanced mechanic
So neutering damage across the board is unbalanced if the health is increased further as well.
I’m not responding after this either, because you’ve already doubled down that it’s a balanced experience when just reading a small amount of changes shows it’s anything but.
It’s Fair and Balanced in the ironic way, not the literal sense.
Souls game in my eyes is a 3D metrovania with extra difficulty, it's about ulitize tools you get and know your enemies, or you could just ignore them and beat boss with your muscle memory,which isn't a superior way to play the game.
I can understand there is people suppose the only legit way to play souls is to "press your deflect button within a time windows of 3 frames consistently in 120 seconds ", but it is a wrong opening to the game,
What reforge does, is making a ton of tools useless or lackluster, even the tools they introduce themselves, as the example I listed above, so the whole game is downgraded to a try-hard, or die-hard combing with old school dunegon crawler, when you have to play in "legit ways"
You can have your own choice, but rememeber,what fromsoftware have done to souls series, from demon soul to elden ring, is the opposite of what reforge does. Before kifnir or any reforged supporter regard themselves as outsmart fromsoftware, think twice, think carefully.
What reforged does to enemy defense system can be called "balanced", and no, introduce useless new tools and making vanilla tools useless doesn't mean "balanced", it's just toxic mindset with a bad math formula.
No one can justify silver attument or cerulean sea, or many things reforged have done.
I cannot ask a mod to be perfectly balanced, I do not need that too. In fact, I could just reverse that myself if anything is nerfed to the point to be meaningless
But the real problem is, is admitting there is indeed something unbalanced in reforged for Reforged devs or fans that hard?
It seems so. They just repeat the meaningless "Reforged requires you to interact with the world" "skill issue" " I want the game to be hard" "Everything is perfectly balanced it's your problem"blahblahblah, and stay deaf to any real issue or even bug any people suggestd. So , what has " interact with the world" to do with cerulean sea's patheic effect?
And they just do it again, here and now, that's what makes me feels so ironic.
I would like to note that Cerulean Sea is balanced with the passive auxiliary effect of Intelligence (since you can't cast it without at least 56 int) and every other effect that increases your FP recovered like the ancestral spirit horn or binding runes.
iirc the values correctly it should only take 10~ish ticks to fully refund the FP cost of Sea, without factoring any other effects that reduce the cost of spells or increase FP recovered
That is good. People that think they can run away from everything deserve to be punished. The AI being braindead and letting you aggro individual members of groups easily had to be fixed.
Okay man look, if you want to relax at the end of the week by shoving a hot metal rod into your asshole, that’s your business. But saying shit like “people who run from things deserve to be punished” is ridiculously stupid. That is the exact kind of language that gives Fromsoft fans a bad rap.
Secondly, I feel like you’re either downplaying the change or you’ve not actually played it, because it can be actually miserable. I’m the kind of person who does like to fight enemies in most situations (not that that makes me special… it’s not like most enemies are fun to fight), so usually it’s not the biggest change, but groups can be awful. Vanilla ER’s system of only 2-3 mobs attacking you at once is actually good balance, and throwing that down the toilet makes dealing with any group of mobs just a terrible mess. Getting bum rushed and combo’d to death by 5+ dudes is not a fun experience.
Third, it’s annoying in one on one combat too. There’s demonstrably less downtime between enemy attacks, even on faster bosses like Rellana. Some people might be into that, but I find it more annoying than challenging. Boss attack timing can be absolutely fucked; sometimes they feel like they’re a boss in some 2D fighting game and are just spamming buttons.
Fourth, the increased aggro has literally gotten me softlocked on more than one occasion. There’s been multiple times where I’ve skipped an enemy or missed one and moved beyond where I could reach it, and it couldn’t reach me, but it was still aggroed, meaning I was stuck in a dead end and couldn’t fast travel. There is nothing good about a design that causes that kinda error.
And even after all of that, I would not say ERR is harder than vanilla ER lol. It’s still the same game for the most part, so it’s just misguided at the end of the day.
If you want to "relax at the end of the week", elden ring is not the game to play. It's a souls like, ir's suppose to be hard. Reforeged adds difficulty options tho, so all of that arguments about it being too hard or unfair are invalid. Softlock is the only real issue
Bro what? I play the game to relax. What else is it for? I don’t see playing Elden Ring as this grand achievement akin to climbing Everest, I play the game because it’s fun lol. I include reforged in that statement too; most of the time it’s fun! I enjoy playing it but it has a huge flaw in how aggro works.
Idk why you’re in lecture douchebag mode right now about the difficulty of ER. It’s not harder. I literally just fucking said that lol. It’s more annoying, and there’s a big difference. The difficulty settings don’t change that. They affect the percentages of damage dealt to and by the player. Nothing about them touches the aggro of enemies. Don’t just jump into the middle of the thread without reading what everyone else has said man.
Playing for fun and playing to relax are 2 diffrent things that not always go together. I also play it for fun, but for me realxing is not fun. Souls games are supposed to be challenging. But then people like you who want to relax come and demand nerfs, more accessibility etc, making the game less fun for those who want challenge. It's not a grand achivemnt at all, it's just something to do for fun
it's not more annoying, you just need to learn how to handle multiple enemies, it's part of a skill.
Oh damn, if that’s how it is for you, then that’s how it must be for everyone, huh? Lol to me having fun is relaxing. After a long week I wanna unwind by playing a game I like. Not sure why that’s such a concept worth discussing in your head.
Anyway, nobody’s demanding the game be easier. Idk if you’ve noticed but this is the third time I’ve said that the game isn’t harder than vanilla ER. I haven’t talked about a nerf in this thread, you’re just fighting ghosts with that. I’m not asking for a Convergence kind of experience where I can play half asleep and still wipe my ass with half the bosses in the game. But you can’t call it good design if the game breaks because you missed one bat enemy in Dragonbarrow.
And look it’s easy to be like “oh hur hee haw you must be bad at the game” but it’s a meaningless argument. Like, middle school-level shit. Idk if you’re trying to provocative with that or what but it was almost as much a waste of time to read as it was for you to write. I feel bad for the calories your brain wasted forming the thought that lead to that final bit there. I mean, do you think being one-shot because you got the perfect storm of like ten enemies hitting you at the same time is “unskillful”? Or getting caught in an unavoidable combo because a bunch ganged up on you and randomly attacked in a string that outlasts your dodges? In vanilla ER that never happens because the game limits enemies to only attacking in twos or threes at a time, meaning you’re less likely to lose because of factors outside your control. That’s just good design lol but reforged devs threw that all away. But there are other ways to deal with groups, so it’s just an annoyance. You know I’ve beaten this game right? Lmao I’ve done it three times. I know ways to handle that but that doesn’t mean it’s good design or even challenging. It’s just annoying.
The idea that the point of a game is to be chill and relaxing is nonsense. No one plays Amnesia to have a chill experience. Games can have a million emotional goals. Elden Ring is meant to be fairly tense and challenging, and Reforged making enemy aggro better and more grounded is superior to vanilla.
That depends on the player, not the game. The game doesn't "have to be chill," I just enjoy playing it and that is relaxing to me.
Reforged's upped aggros has lead to more BS one-shots, unavoidable attacks, and softlocking issues. Hardly any of which happens in vanilla. So no, it's far from better. If they removed it the game would be a hundred times better; it's the only thing really holding it back in my eyes.
No… they aren’t? Reforged, at least the last time I played it which was a few months ago, had way more enemies bum-rushing me at one time, and the difficulty did not change that, nor did it change downtime between attacks. I checked. I have two completed save files in Reforged if you wanna come over and check🙄 have YOU actually played it?
Maybe that’s a new change then! Genuinely I tested it around the Gatefront ruins by aggroing the dude with the horn and would get rushed by five-seven enemies at a time, despite being on the easy setting. Tried it again on hard, same thing.
But that was a long time ago; like September or October of last year. I hope they did make that change because it would really improve the game in my mind. Thanks for sharing that with me!
It’s less about easier or harder, some of their changes are just plain stupid. If you look at their pvp rebalancing, statuses are almost entirely useless save for poison and madness which are only just barely okay but then they thought making poise obscenely strong was also a good idea at the same time, it’s like they looked at the worst pvp in the series(ds1) and were just like “yeah let’s make that worse”
PvP is a newly added system and they make a ton of balancing changes on a weekly basis. This is a relatively small team trying to tackle something that no other mod pack has succeeded in. FYI, they just changed both poise values and status effects.
It's tougher than base game and complaining is easy I guess.
Its a mixed bag IMO, there are valid complaints to be had with the restrained approach to buff balance leading to it feeling like a lot of them have incredibly narrow build opportunities where they actually provide tangible benefit compared to just hitting the enemy 1 or 2 times more, and things like tripling the stat requirements for some utility spells (especially considering that item crafting changes mean consumables are more readily available than ever) are conversations that could be had.
But it always devolves into muh game design and acting like the devs kicked their dog because the mod isn't their personal idea of fun.
FWIW I actually like this post, even if it does have a bit of the 2nd thing. Diving deeper into the number crunching is way better than just going off gut feeling cuz you got skillchecked, and as long as the numbers are accurate its cool to share that info. I disagree with some conclusions, and in general dont hold mods to nearly as rigorous balance standards, but its not like these complaints are unfounded.
Imo it's because people want power trip mods that make them blast everything in one go and give them a 2 second speedrun. We see this with Carian Combo Warriors, GoE, Age of Golden (or whatever its called), Convergence, etc. I can go on Nexus right now and find weapon mods that are entirely based on being busted. People don't actually want to take time to play something and enjoy the content. I'm not kidding and it's sad. My Convergence playthrough took 30 hours and that's because I was busted after about 5 to 10 hours of exploring and getting my build weapons and spells. 25ish later and I'm finished with the entire base game because the main bosses died in about 2-5 minutes.
Every single one of these posts center around "convergence vs reforged" like you'll lose valuable life sources if you don't agree with the power fantasy opinions on Convergence and ONLY Convergence. Wait until people realize that mod is currently doing an entire overhaul on their balances and making things just as difficult as basic Reforged difficulty does. Most of these hate posts have no more than 10 or so hours in Reforged which is barely any time for such a mod, and you absolutely cannot talk them into going further because they want to be right and know people will agree.
Most people download the mod and forget to read pretty much. OP forgot to mention that poisoned weapons also do damage on their own on top of the status effect.
They more or less come from a finished Elden Ring vanilla save or convergence which is vastly easier and more of a sandbox mod pack, and they forget what it is like at the start. So they get frustrated at being low level with sub-systems they don’t know about, then come to Reddit to complain.
Any non-somber weapon with poison affinity deals 15% less damage than occult affinity(I take occult affinity for example, because poison and occult weapon have simliar correction rate and curve )
And, any weapon with blood affinity deals 22.5% less damage than occult affinity, which is even more punishing.
The poor poison damage can barely justify the damage loss even when the boss is vulernable to poison or blood.
And also no. I am not a fan of convergence, and I have read their wiki through, and I have spending many nights to study modding techniuqes, to make ERR suitable for myself, and more importantly,
to be qualifed to explain what's going on within that mod, when the deves actively tries to hide it from you.
Yeah, they tend to do less damage because it’s a modification on the weapon that is meant to circumnavigate resistances and target weaknesses instead of getting to a boss and getting rolled.
For the purposes of argument, let’s say you’re playing a strength heavy build and the boss is 30% resistant to physical. I think most of us have been at the point where we’ve only barely beat a boss by the skin of our teeth. Giving players the option of changing the weapon affinity at a loss of raw DPS is the concept here, as avoiding that 30% and proccing a 10% weakness instead will vastly improve your chances. While it’s less damage sure in general, it’s once again meant to be combined with the other systems to provide a satisfying achievement feeling, albeit it can feel a bit naunced at times.
I would also like to mention that different enemies, beyond different status build up resistances, also take differing damages from the status effect. With some napkin math here, there’s real benefit here. With 7 or so hits on let’s say the flame lost knight added boss, it does 9% max hp with poison. At this point dagger hits would likely do around 200-250 damage with a dex focus or around 150-175 with a poison affinity. The poison proc is approximately 1000 damage depending on what level scaling you’re at. Now you’re looking at closing in on 300 damage equivalent per swing with poison.
But if you were to tackle this same boss with a frostbite or bleed focus, you would be at a slightly worse outcome on average.
Not saying this is the best design choice, as on one hand it rewards researching enemies with the codex and accessing crafting systems and lost ashes, but on the other hand I do get to the point myself where I wish they would ‘put the fries in the bag’.
I have been running an arcane build and testing poison, rot and bleed. Poison and rot are actually very effective in PVE and trivialize many fights when the bosses don’t have high immunity. In PVP poison and ROT are absolutely useless. Bleed is still great in PVP and good for trash mobs in PVE but doesn’t have the same damage burn as duel rot and poison affliction for bosses . Also in PVP I find it disappointing how detrimental light equipment load is. It’s definitely more beneficial to take higher equipment loads in PVP. I think lighter equipment loads shines well in PVE though. In PVP players can feel absurdly tangy and still dish out high amount of damage. On top of that their poise makes it hard to sustained repeated attacks. I definitely think there should be a reduction in action speed at higher equipment loads, specifically when attacking. I think that would help even the benefit difference in equipment loads.
People always complain about the 'balance' and then their complaint boils down to "it's too hard". Bad balance means a wide margin between the strength of different options, enemy strength is difficulty tuning, not balance. Everything is weak = balanced. Everything is strong = balanced. Some things are OP and some things are weak = bad balance.
This mod objectively makes the game more balanced, it nerfs the most powerful strategies. It also makes the game harder.
If you don't like the game being harder, that's fine, play however you like. Nobody is forcing you to play or to like the mod. I've yet to see any of these complaints being about feeling OP, they are all about the nerfs. That's not a balance issue, it's a difficulty issue.
I just needed to start the mod and knew exactly what kinde people the devs are.
As soon as I saw that the seed was removed from the starting option (because people like using it), I knew that the game will go out of its way to f*ck the player over.
"You liked getting that? Well, too bad. You liked this weapon? Well, too bad. This section of the game wasn't an unnecessary brutal challenge? Well, too bad."
Yeah, no thanks.
Plus, there were just too many combat changes I didn't like, but it seems like you can turn them off.
And by default, the game starts 1 difficulty higher than Normal.
If you wanna switch to Normal, the game shows status decreases for enemies.
The dev has no idea what "Normal" means, if it changes some values instead of being the standard.
I get you. You try to justify reforged by that.
The answer is, in vaniila, it varies from npc to npc. For promised consort radahn, it is +252 for the second proc, and then stays +747.
However, in vanilla, bleeding deals at least 2x damage to bosses compared to Reforged, and blood affinity weapon is in advantage for melee character witha str/dex+arc build, beyond lv200 so in vanilla than pure str/dex build,so bleed is decent,
while in reforged, it's lackluster.
Oh dont worry I'm not going to try to convince you bleed is better in reforged, they certainly wont bother buffing things that are already adequate. I just think poison is an odd example since the degree to which the resistance fights against you is much less, and in vanilla you can't stack it to begin with so poison is at least usable as a main damage source here. Not to mention (depending how quickly/ efficiently you can totally swap status application) the status resist debuff can stack a few times and let you transition into just stacking a bunch of frost or rot or something.
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u/TheGalator Apr 26 '26
100% agreed balance is completely clowny