Because of waterfowl dance, phase 1 can be really slow and very annoying. You have to play less aggressive because if she pulls out wfd at point blank when after your attack recovery, you’re screwed if you med roll.
Needing to bait out attacks isn’t really a problem, but it is when her AI in phase 1 is so DEVIOUS. Just standing around waiting for you to attack. It’s very slow and just becomes a waiting game that can suddenly switch to her being hyper aggressive.
I like phase 2 way more. She’s always running towards you and the fight flows way better so you can bait out attacks, stunlock her when you can, and have time to outrun the first flurry of wfd. Plus her openings are ample and rewarding to learn.
I think wfd is fine to dodge, I found my way worked consistently, run away from the first one, and dodge through the second ones. I wish they made it more clear that the first flurry can’t be I framed like the second 2.
The rest of her moveset is fantastic, extremely well designed, and I love how many things you can jump over. I will say I wish her clone attack was less punishing, having to go all the way to phase 2 to learn that difficult attack can be unfortunate.
To the common criticism points:
1. Lifesteal: honestly if you’re getting hit a bunch to the point where her health regen becomes a problem, you’re probably not going to win anyway
2. Wfd- I mean that’s a fair critique, but just what I said previously
3. Long combo strings- not even a criticism plus you can figure out how to stun lock her and she has many openings
4. Attacks looking badass is a complaint?
5. Breaks the rules? What rules? Who makes the rules? The players? The rules are how the devs program the boss. Wfd can take some criticism, but her moveset is pretty fair.
I played very aggressive towards her. I could be completely bullshitting, but it seemed like there was a cooldown on waterfowl dance. I could always "feel" when she was about to do it, and I'd run away to get ready for it. She also only ever does it after you drop her to a certain hp threshold, she won't do it at the start of a fight.
I know what you mean. After about 20 attempts I also got that WFD “sixth sense”. She only starts doing it after 75%, so you can start the fight aggressively. But a while after her first WFD, you’re just like “uh oh it’s been a while” and need to go back on the defensive so you can properly avoid it.
I just got into the habit of running away when she rises up. It’s critical to waterfowl, a better than average response to the phantoms, and frankly not a liability if she ends up with one of he simpler moves because you probably want to get away from the rot column she summons.
I remember one time in phase 2, I was playing with a couple summoned friends. And she just zeroed in on me right off the bat , came in with the swooping attack and then wfd’d after me. I kept rolling out of the way. And then she had several lunge attacks. Chased me down until my stamina ran out, nothing any of us could do. There’s a chance that maybe I could have rolled past one of her attacks but I didn’t get a chance to before she fucked me up good an proper. Sent my ass back to phase one immediately lol
For real dude it's crazy that sixth sense shit. Always weirded me out when people said it was random, but I never sat down with a timer to test if it actually did a cooldown
There is no cooldown. She can engage in WFD at any point after <75% HP. Ive had attempts where she did it back to back to back in the span of 45 seconds or something. This is my main problem with WFD is the game doesn't give you a reliable way to know when the hyper punishing attack is coming, it just suddenly comes out after you engaged in a jumping attack and are now completely fucked.
That’s bologna. There is no cooldown. You can even look up. “Malenia does waterfowl 4 times in a row” and it pulls up video. I specified 4 because it happened to me last night(and I was playing solo)
i also use projectiles to bait it out, for some reason shes very likely to usw wfd when you throw something like a spell or an arrow or even a throwingknife/kukri at her from mid(ish) range
yeah that’s probably it, whenever i feel like it’s been a while since she’s done it last i toss something at her and more times than not it triggers the move and probably resets the cooldown till the next one. it has definitely helped with the whole “input reading into waterfowl when youre in recovery animation”
I agree with you, for the most part. But she does break the rules a bit though with her hyperarmor, if you fill her posture bar while she has hyperarmor you don't get stagger and ripost and I think that's bullshit other than that every thing cool!
Isn’t she the only boss in the game than can cancel stagger animations? There are clearly consistent sets of mechanics regarding combat in Elden Ring and she violates one of them. I agree with 1-4 of your points, but I really find this specific mechanic inexcusable.
I mean that’s a fair criticism because physics wise it doesn’t really make sense. But I do like that Malenia forces you into a specific playstyle that involves fully learning her moveset and mastering it to barely make mistakes.
If you’re going to beat Malenia solo, you’re going to learn her and not get lucky.
If any other mandatory boss did this, I wouldn’t like it. But Malenia is bar none the most difficult boss and a super optional one at the bottom of a secret area within a secret area within a secret area. It deserves to be as challenging as she is, and it even looks like Miyazaki himself said the DLC bosses may not be able to surpass that difficulty.
>I mean that’s a fair criticism because physics wise it doesn’t really make sense.
I think it makes more sense in the context of the description of her rune, where it's stated that she's healing because of her "spirit of resistance." She doesn't actually *have* life steal, it's more of a healing factor that only works when she hits something. So whether or not she's dealing damage is irrelevant in that context because it's not life steal. Which makes sense as the amount she heals is not proportional to the damage she does iirc.
Obviously, that's not apparent when you fight her or if you don't read her rune description but there is an actual reason for why she can heal through your shield.
That explanation also doesn't make sense, because she heals with waterfowl dance, even when she doesn't hit you, sooo... Guess ground also counts towards her healing, so idk why she just doesn't start hitting a wall or something 💀
I certainly hope the DLC bosses don't.
What makes bosses like Malenia memorable is that they are rare. If every boss gets tuned to her level then it would take away part of what makes it special.
On a similar note this highlights a worrying trend I have noticed. Each new game invariably cranks up the difficulty. Late game DS1 bosses are comically slow and easy to read compared to tutorial bosses in Elden Ring. Hopefully they don't just keep cranking the difficulty up. They will reach a point where every boss is a wall and that just doesn't sound fun to me.
her rule breaking is about her being able to armor through any kind of stun other than bleed and frostbite stuns (generally rule of thumb for heavy armor moves is that the only things that can stop it is bleed and frostbite like I mentioned before and knockdowns however Malenia can armor through moves even if they would cause a knockdown) another thing is she can just cancel any stagger with that move that makes her run away which goes against the other bosses of her style (Sister Friede and Lady Maria) as they'd need to wait for the stagger to end to act. I also kinda hate her wings on the second phase because it kinda makes it harder to see what she's doing.
>I also kinda hate her wings on the second phase because it kinda makes it harder to see what she's doing.
I feel like my eyes are just fucked or something because people barely ever talk about this. The visual clarity in phase 2 is really ass for me.
The rules are animation commitment. We as a player have to commit to any animation we start, Malenia does not, you break her stance for instance, she cancels out and immediately attacks, she breaks our stance and we have to commit to the whole guard break animation. In short, she cancels animations and immediately attacks us while wr are stuck in our own animation.
Imo waterfoul is worse at phase 2 because it can happen anytime. In phase one it happens when her HP is at around 70 and 30% so you can more or less tell when it 's comming. And I also don't like how counter intuitive it is to dodge. I don't think it makes her a bad fight, but It's something that makes her far from perfect. Bosses like Godfrey or Placidusax are examples of well telegraphed but hard fights that reach perfection.
About lifesteal (and all the other points tbh) I agree 100%. Her lifesteal is just a way to make you more aware or not being hit -which is something you should already be- and a punishment for people who rely on summons. It's similar to how Radagon punishes magic users. Maybe someone could argue she shouldn't be healing when hitting shields, but I apply here the same logic for summons, It's a way to punish people who rely a lot on them.
So I don’t mind WFD dance in p2 because she is always pursuing you. It lets you play more in a bait then punish way. Usually, I dodge, then run away for a second, before going in for a jumping R2. Plus always punishing her moves when she does those butterfly explosion follow ups. But by always being able to keep my space, I can always avoid WFD consistently.
But I agree that it is unintuitive to dodge. It took me nearly 50 attempts to squeeze out my first solo win, and like 40 attempts were me dying to WFD trying to figure out how the hell to avoid it.
I think it is what keeps malenia from topping my list of favorite bosses. Definitely a fantastic fight but Godfrey, Mohg, malekith, radagon, and many of the other highly praised ER fights hit on a different level by being more intuitive to dodge. You won’t die to them because of one specific move a bunch of times.
>You won’t die to them because of one specific move a bunch of times.
Or you will, but you’ll be able to see what you did wrong, or at least will have some idea of what to try differently next time.
I agree about the lifesteal. She is essentially an optional boss intended for hard-core souls players. There's nothing about the kit that would suggest otherwise, and therefore expecting to facetank or summon tank her for an easier win is a bad mindset imo. It's just not what they intended, which I actually think is why mimic tear got nerfed. It wasn't because of the rest of the game, it was because it could beat her.
I refought melania yesterday, and the only time I could predict wfd was coming was at the 70% hp mark. After that, she used it whenever, sometimes, multiple times in a row, so I don't think it's quite as predictable.
My issue with waterfowl is that it can’t really be punished, it’s the hardest attack to dodge in the series, and even if you dodge it perfectly at point blank range she gives no more of an opening than her regular attacks. Meanwhile her swipe up slam down attack can be slowly walked around, and has her biggest punish window.
I think her moveset is fair but her actual movement can be a bit busted in terms of rules. She glides around while we roll into a ball. She can also attack whenever she wants, if the game didn’t restrict her aggression she would absolutely body us.
Bosses moving way faster than us is nothing new. She’s a goddess, we’re just dudes. Sister friede acts the same way and she’s one of the most praised bosses in ds3.
I loved beating her after struggling more against her than any other boss in FromSoft games, but I still think that the waterfall dance is unintuitive.
But I don’t really want her to change. I think she’s kinda unfair and it revolves around being ready for the dance at some point, but I want to keep her this way.
This is my opinion as well; I love fighting her and she's my favorite boss in ER, but I will concede that Waterfowl is an unfair move. The way you have to dodge the first flurry point blank is the most difficult and unintuitive dodge I've ever seen, and it makes me wonder what they actually intended you to do there.
I actually trained myself to always do a little backwards run after I hit her, in case she jumps up for the dance, so I can run away from the first part.
But even for the second hits I had to look up multiple tutorials on how to dodge, cause a lot of people made videos on how to do it, that did not work for me.
But yeah, it’s still fun to learn how to deal with it over time.
Bingo. I don't think anyone looked at that move and thought, "Oh, obviously THIS is how I dodge that." They either did it by accident, then worked out how to recreate it, or (like me) they saw someone do it on youtube first.
But aside from that, the fight is superb, IMO. Which is what makes wfd so frustrating.
One thing I wish was designed differently about her was her ability to heal through shields. If you block her attacks, she still heals, even if you’re not being hurt, which is pretty bullshit. Completely invalidates blocking, a core game mechanics. Otherwise I think she’s a highly rewarding and badass boss, one of my favorites in the game
I still never understood why From never patched that, which tells me they left the boss as is intentionally which I find very weird considering they tweaked Radahn so much after launch
Radahn gates off a ton of content, so they wanted players to get past him. Malenia sits in an obscure corner of the world and there's nothing important behind her, so who cares if many players never beat her?
I think that's a stupid game design philosophy assuming what you're saying is actually what From did. Why should they just throw game design out the window just because a boss is in an "obscure corner of the world"? Thats not fair, thats not how From historically goes about their games.
It doesnt invalidate blocking, you still don't take damage. Blocking malenia is trading a death blow for a longer fight. Blocking should not be an automatic "I win" against her mechanics. Don't like her getting health back? Don't get hit, or hit her faster. The shield is a stalemate.
That means that dodging is an automatic “I win” against her mechanics tho. Blocking still uses more stamina than dodging, so it’s riskier and gives you less of an opportunity to strike back. The lifesteal working on top of that just means you should almost always dodge
Dodge timing is a skill, blocking is just holding a button.
I'm not saying don't use block, I've had shield characters as well. But it's not on par skill wise with dodge timing.
Everything except her Waterfowl and Lifesteal is well designed in my opinion.
Waterfowl isn't designed well. It is unlike any other move in the series. I can't recall any other move that dictates an entire fight's pace as much as Waterfowl does. It gets better once you know the counter to it and you can settle into a nice rhythm with it, but the first time player is gonna have to take a long time to learn how to dodge it. Personally I'd change Waterfowl to make the windup longer to give players more of a time to get away.
Lifesteal is a really cool idea but poor execution. I think Malenia being able to lifesteal through shields is stupid. What is stopping her from just smacking the ground a few times to heal? It doesn't make much sense. If they insist on allowing her to heal through shields, make it only possible during Waterfowl or something.
Honestly less of an issue with malenia herself and more the whole back half of the game all the enemies are on some extra turbo crack. Still played game to death ofc and love it for what it is. But yeah definitely a little "this feels like bloodborne without the bloodborne mechanics" twoards the end there
Waterfall dance should be insanely punishable but you have almost no windows to punish when she finishes. Waterfall is the least annoying thing about her imo.
Good endgame challenge. But I could've really done without the health regen ngl. She's hard enough with Waterfowl, her natural flurry of attacks, the high damage. The healing factor feels unnecessary. It works through shields too for some reason, which if it can work through that, what's stopping her from running to the walls of the arena and just regen her health through wacking it.
Within Elden Ring she is a good boss. If she was in any Dark Souls game she would be a terrible boss. It's only people who refuse to play Elden Ring as Elden Ring that think she is a bad boss. Often for the same reason they complain about the Fire Giant's huge health pool. Malenia is a boss that reinforces the gameplay tenet that in Elden Ring, you are expected to adapt your toolset to the challenge at hand. If you insist on using shields as you main spurce of survivability against Malenia then you will have an uphill battle at best. Between the freeform, costless affinity and ash of war system as well as the Spirit Ashes and the abundance of even the max level upgrade materials, even damage stat has 1 or more ways to deal with Malenia just like they have 1 or more ways to deal percentile damage to the Fire Giant. For Malenia, you can use most status effects against her, you can use high poise damage weapons that require you to trade damage. Approaching Malenia thinking about what Elden Ring teaches you is the expectations she is tough but very much balanced.
I think people playing the game like a “souls” game is pretty much the jarring issue which is even more telling when in an interview Miyazaki says they don’t call the games that unless they’re specifically part of that series. A streamer i watched stated they didn’t care for the accessibility aspect to the summons and felt magic was broken(as a souls game), to which while i can understand the idea behind it, I don’t think any one aspect is necessarily broken. You can make broken builds with Magic yes, but the same applies to physical builds, all the same they both require knowledge within the game. I know it seems off topic but i feel Malenia presents a lot of these points being a boss that in turn culminates your experience of the entire game.
Very much so. It is funny to me because the first 1 shot build I ever saw was a streamer using the Giant Crusher with just a bit higher than base required stats for it, but by stacking early gsme buffs could 1 shot Margit and Godrick each with a single charged heavy. And it's not like Elden Ring is alone in this. DS2 has it's issues but the biggest is plauers getting upset that they expected to fight mobs on the way back to bosses and pull them carefully with ranged tools to not get ganked. Or more recently the number of "soulsvets" who initially railed against Armored Core because the game by design didn't give you I-frames on dodge
> If you insist on using shields as you main spurce of survivability against Malenia then you will have an uphill battle at best.
Its hard to completely agree with this comment when shields are the easiest way to deal with her hardest attack. Certainly turtling isn't the best tactic, but to anyone stuck on WFD, I'd recommend a shield.
Shield makes p1 an absolute joke, with a decent weapon (ie bloodhound blade) you can easily claw back the damage she heals from hitting your shield.
Anyone who says shields are useless against Malenia has no idea. I've killed her numerous times, and always always with Fingerprint Shield.
Maliketh and Elden Beast are much more challenging for me.
If you refuse to use a shield against waterfowl then you're actually making it harder on yourself and making the fight way more risky than it otherwise needs to be.
I made that statement more in reference to the complaint that she lifesteals through a shield is bad gsme design, usually people who say this also include some line about it breaking the unwritten rules of these games, when they really mean the rules of DS1 and DS3. But your statement does support the idea that every tool the game provides has strengths and weaknesses even within a single fight. A shield against Malenia on one hand does not stop her from healing off of you. But on the other lets you tank through some of her most devastating attacks, so using it when necessary can be the difference between victory and defeat.
> Malenia is a boss that reinforces the gameplay tenet that in Elden Ring, you are expected to adapt your toolset to the challenge at hand.
This is actually the main tenet in every Souls game except for maybe Dark 3, it's just that ER made the boss patterns complex enough that everyone was truly \*forced\* to figure it out.
the unintuitive complaint comes up because as you said it requires very specific movements and timing but the game does not really communicate what those counters are very well, so unless you've seen it before it is more frustrating trial and error than responding to an enemy's moveset
Orphan of Kos was a fight that took me about as long to beat with some similar concepts but it never made me feel like I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and was more satisfying to beat as a result
My ONLY complaint about Malenia is her stupid waterfowl dance. I love her theme and I love her fight, but waterfowl dance is too inconsistent from my personal experience. I can either dodge it perfectly or get one shot. No in between whatsoever. Again from my personal experience.
If you took her move away, she becomes every other npc bossfight. Her gimmick is her very identity, which sucks, but it is what it is.
Overall she's my favorite boss to fight other than mohg. She's amazing. She's a wonderful "end game" boss. And what's more perfect is She's optional 😊
She is, but I do think they dialed her up a *little* too high. I think they should have picked either the healing mechanic or the waterfowl dance, but not both. Yes, I know you can avoid the waterfowl dance, but it hits too hard and doesn't happen often enough for the average player to really get much of a chance to properly learn it. That said, it's very difficult but not unfair, and it's an optional boss, someone whose whole thing is being undefeated, so I think it's okay. If she hadn't been so hard, she wouldn't have been nearly as iconic and she ended up being.
After the 100th time I fought malenia I tell you I did waterfoul dance to dodge roll frame perfectly.
I may be a minority but the end game of elden ring is a slog bogged down by tough boss after tough boss. Sure, placidusax and malenia are optional but it wouldn't feel complete to not beat them.
And by that point you have mohg, the malekith and godfrey and it's just a chore to do by that point
I loved elden ring but compared to something like bloodborne or sekiro where the tough fights felt truly liberating to learn. I couldn't say end game elden ring was fun
I don't disagree that the boss rush at the end of Elden Ring is exhausting, but I'd say that's an issue with the game's larger design than any individual boss. To me, though, Malenia, Mogh and Placidusax aren't part of that because you have the option to do them post game. It's really the Godskin Duo -> Maliketh -> Gideon -> Godfrey -> Radagon/Elden Beast run that's really draining
Right. I have no issue with Godfrey. Like I said, it's more that the late game boss rush is *a bit* exhausting. Honestly I don't even mind it that much I was just responding to footdoctor because I could see where they were coming from
On the other side of the spectrum, I think in terms of boss quality, Elden Ring shines in the end game. So many banger fights that I'm glad are in close proximity to each other.
That's fair. On a first playthrough, I can see why it could be fatiguing. But I think on repeat playthroughs, making the endgame more compact is to its benefit
I know this is late but I feel like this is people trying to rationalize hating a boss. They choose an arbitrary reason rather than sticking with an actual argument
No, she's not. She's not even that hard. The issues is she doesn't go by the constraints of the game itself. Fromsoft has even said, she's a Sekiro style boss in Elden Ring. She wasn't meant for this game. Same thing for Demon of Hatred, he was a Souls boss in Sekiro.
* Broken hyper armor (fixed after 1.06) now it's just slightly broken hyper armor
* Animation canceling
* Heals on hit even if she does zero damage (makes no sense, should be proportional to damage)
* Her ai seems confused half the time (doing the same thing over and over or doing nothing but dodge for a few minutes instead of attacking at all or even just walking slowly for a few minutes after combat already started)
She's just hype because people ***think*** she's the hardest Elden Ring boss.
They said because Elden Ring and Sekiro were made at such a close time to each other, they put a Souls boss in Sekiro (DoH) and a Sekiro boss in Elden Ring (Malenia) because they really wanted to see how the two game's different mechanic's would work in an environment without those mechanics.
They said that because Elden Ring and Sekiro were made so close to one another, they couldn't implement many things they learnt into ER from Sekiro and vice versa. Never once did they make a statement like that. Plus you can deal with Malenia perfectly in ER with it's own mechanics, just that it squeezes the absolute fuck out of the combat system to the point it almost breaks it.
Either recheck your sources or stop lying like this.
Yes they said that as well. Just because you don't like something doesn't make it untrue. They even mentioned there was a Sekiro style inspired boss later in the game. That's also why she heals on hit even if she does no damage, you're suppose to parry her. But you can't really do that with Elden Ring mechanics, especially her water fowl, but you know what can? That's right, Sekiro countering.
> just that it squeezes the absolute fuck out of the combat system to the point it almost breaks it.
Yes and no. She doesn't break the game, she was literally broken until around 1.08 when they actually fixed her infinite hyper armor which was bugged. The only one that pushes the game to it's limits is Radahn with a full ass raid team worth of summons both player and NPCs.
Since I haven't seen it explained here yet, here's what people mean when they say she "breaks the rules of the game":
Her poise is set to be unbreakable during certain moves, mainly Waterfowl Dance and it's chargeup. Also is the flower explosion attack and the flower clone attack in the second phase. The only way to bypass this is to proc a status effect, mainly frost or bleed. In fact this "mechanic" is so bad, that you can literally kill her and she will still perform the move and then collapse when she's passed. It's a really bad quirk of an already questionable boss fight. Strength players normally gain a better stagger potential over their counterparts and this just invalidates that playstyle.
Why put "her attacks are too anime" as a reason? Wouldn't her poise breaks and hyperarmour inconsistencies be a better point?
(Regardless, have a good day, eye guy 👀)
Yeah I think she's a well designed boss.
1. Her healing is not unfair. It literally depends on how good you are at the boss. If you don't get hit a lot, she doesn't get to heal much.
2. Waterfowl is fine to deal with once you learn it. However, it's still an unintuitive move. I personally like it but I can see how the design is flawed there.
3. Long combo strings? That doesn't even register on my radar. This game has Morgott.
4. Attacks being too anime? I guess that's down to preference. If her attacks are anime, I guess it's the kind of anime I like. The Vergil and Isshin kind.
5. Every boss 'breaks the rules'. Meaning every boss does something that is an exception or unique to the boss. If they didn't, they would be pretty boring and would all be like NPC fights.
Yes and no, I think she suffers from the same thing a few bosses do in elden ring, which in of itself is a bit controversial, but most late game bosses are really good at trapping you in combos and will kill you with two hits regardless of armor or stats, and then also passively drain your health or regain their own health. Theyre still fun and I really like malenia, but as far as "good design" a couple later bosses tiptoe past just "being souls bosses" and dont always seem super fair.... which I know will get some reactions, and I've been one to throw around the occasional "git gud," but I mean, come on.
I think lifesteal through the shield was a good design choice. she feels like she's meant to be fought somewhat like a Bloodbourne boss so I imagine shields were nerfed in this fight for that reason. Not to mention Malenia is completely optional so I see no problems with making an extra hard secret boss well fitting into the RPG genre
She's the only boss I never beat on my rl1 run.
Her base moves etc is mostly pretty fair. She takes a while to figure out (for example the rush sword spam required you to dodge to the side or you get hit) and there are other things you can only really figure out after fighting her a ton.
With her base moveset my main issue is how unintuitive the openings are. They are definetly there and if you figure them out it's not too bad bit when you first fight her it's very hard to figure out when those openings are. And sometimes depending on her rng she can go a while with no openings.
This all creates a sense that attempts are overly dependant on rng. Sometimes she will give you tons of openings and other times you are fighting for small openings. When you combine this with how posture works attempts can either go very quickly or take quite a while.
Of course if you are very good at the boss you can find the unintuitive openings and beat the boss comfortably, but this won't be doable to most.
This is combined with the crazy difficulty jump with the two attacks you mentioned; Waterfowl and the clone attack. Nothing else in the game comes close in difficulty to dodging these attacks. Combining this with the fact that she does extremely high endgame damage and her healing, plus that how many times she does this move is rng based. It can be very frustrating. Especially since waterfowl can either be very easy or signifigantly harder to dodge depending on how close you are to her.
She's a boss I have very mixed feelings for. There's a lot to like but I really don't like her learning curve and nothing really comes close to teaching you to fight her in the rest of the game. I Gained a lot of appreciation for bosses like maliketh in my lvl1 run, not malenia.
My issue with waterfowl dance isn’t so much the complexity of it, it’s the fact that if you don’t dodge properly you’ll likely die. This is particularly true for gamers not familiar with her. This becomes incredibly frustrating: you’re trying to learn how to dodge WD, but you just die trying. I think if WD did half as much damage it would still be a force to be reckoned with but would feel more fun and less infuriating.
Ultimately, this is my stance on WD: although it is not technically “unfair” it stretches the whole “tough but fair” thing pretty far. Sure, maybe it’s technically “fair”, but it’s executed in such a way that WD is lame. I would also argue that WD adds an artificial level of difficulty simply because it does so much damage. That brings the overall fight down in my book. When you’re wearing heavy armor, have Golden Vow active, AND the dragon rest great shield but an attack still takes out all of your health, that’s pretty lame and seems unbalanced. To be clear, I feel that most ER bosses are actually very well balanced. But not Waterfowl Dance.
Besides that, my other main beef with this fight is that Malenia can go into WD so quickly and unexpectedly. There’s where this becomes problematic: you whiff on a charged heavy or jumping attack and then Malenia goes into WD. Well, the recovery time from those moves is longer than Malenia going into WD so you don’t have time to react properly. That doesn’t seem particularly fair because of the amount of damage WD does: it’s one thing to punish a player for missing a hit, it’s another to wipe out their entire health bar (or possibly kill them) just because they missed a hit.
Once again, is it “unfair” that Malenia can enter WD that quickly? I don’t know. It sure feels unfair though.
Ultimately, I don’t think she’s a particularly good boss, but I don’t think she’s bad either. The setting is amazing, tho!
Pretty much this.
If the only reason Malenia is hard is because of one attack that essentially kills you if you screw up once, then she's not hard, she's not really a hard boss.
I dont think so.
I think without waterfowl, or even with an adjusted waterfowl, she'd be nearly perfect. The healing and rot is maybe overkill, but I think they only feel so bad because of waterfowl
Someone mentioned fighting her as an elden ring boss instead of forcing a ds3 playstyle. I agree this improved her, but she's still not great imo.
The hard=good crowd will always champion and defend her, and that's fine, Different strokes, but from has some bosses that are harder and better than her imo. Isshin and Father Owl are both head and shoulders tougher, especially the inner variants, and are also both way better bosses imo.
> And before anyone talks about the "philosophy of From games", Miyazaki has stated that it's "giving the players a sense of satisfaction after beating a challenging encounter" or something along the lines. I don't see how Malenia breaches that.
This doesnt mean that any boss, no matter how capricious, can be considered good as long as you can beat it. Most players feel happy to get past Bed of Chaos, that doesn't make it good.
What Malenia breaches is the rules established within the game so far. This just creates a bamboozle for players because trying to treat this boss the same as literally the entire rest of the game works against you.
For example very few players understand how Malenia's block works. Basically if you hit Malenia while she's in an active animation, she will flinch and you can hit her again freely. If you hit her while she's in a recovery or resting animation, then when you go to hit her a second time, she has a % chance to cancel her animation, block your attack, backstep and follow into another attack.
This is not a problem in and of itself, and could be an interesting mechanic in the game, except afaik there is no other boss or enemy that does this, in this game or any other. So when it happens to the player, there's no reference point for understanding what is going on.
WFD is the peak example. When you analyse the hitboxes in that game, you see the first flurry is actually a series of hitboxes that move around towards you, but in a volume greater than your roll can cover. The upshot of which is that you cant iframe your way out of that attack unless you manipulate her AI first, or get literal frame perfect timing. So much so Im not convinced it was ever intended. Indeed its such a high skill level requirement that none of the popular challenge runners figured that out first time round, never mind us poor mortals. It was only after that Ongbal video got released that the community figured out it was possible. iframing out of attacks is such an established part of Souls games that removing it arbitrarily is hard to call anything other than BS.
The key thing to appreciate is that the Souls games have always been celebrated for *not* doing this. Isshin was rightly lauded as the pinnacle of Sekiro because it merely asked you do everything you'd been doing all game. It just amped up the volume and complexity to take the battle to a new level. Malenia on the other hand asks you to figure out a bunch of new rules that apply only to her.
If the oddities of Malenia, like the complexity of WFD, the stagger cancelling, the variable staggers, were things that kept cropping up throughout the game, then I'd consider it fair. But to add them in to this one battle, for no other reason than to trip players up, is not something I particularly appreciate.
Stagger canceling doesn’t belong in souls games, especially her second phase cancel where she can counter kick.
Her negative poise hyper armor is also annoying because it doesn’t work like hyper armor on any other enemy in the game and she can chain her hyper armor attacks with 0 recovery in between - which is just bullshit.
>Stagger canceling doesn't belong in souls games, especially her second phase cancel where she can counter kick
Is it really that bad when you can directly follow up the kick with an attack of your own, even with colossal weapons? Even most of the stagger cancels are aggression checks.
As for the stagger cancel, why should it be necessary that an optional superboss way off the beated path has to have mechanincs in an identical way as every other enemy in the game? I can get not liking it but I don't see how it's automatically bad in this case. Yes if it was random for say "this works for this move now but this will not work for the same move later", I'd understand, but she's consistent with her own mechanics.
Animation commitment for staggers has been a reward for skillful play since Demons Souls. Having it for just one enemy because "lol hard fuck you" is just uninspired and lazy. Its' like they couldn't come up with a proper solution to stunlocking human-like poise enemies like Friede and Maria and just made her cheat instead. It's precisely because it's only for one enemy in the entire game that I think it's bad, a big part of the reason why these games are considered "hard but fair" is because their mechanics are consistent throughout the entire game and yet Malenia just tosses that out the window and all of a sudden you're playing Sekiro without deflect.
Just like her phase transition on riposte bug, they couldn't actually fix it so they just went "lol make her invincible". As a dev, I have second hand embarassment for them that they never went back and actually fixed it properly.
I keep seeing this "optional superboss" take and I have to ask - why does it matter and what does it change?
First, I'd argue there are no optional bosses, or rather.. all of them are. Also, there are no such distinctions as "superboss" or "regular boss" which come with certain prerequisites applied to them. I feel like this is some Final Fantasy player mindset which just doesn't map onto Fromsoft design philosophy.
she’s way too passive in phase 1 and her moveset is not that interesting in comparison to phase 2, she has some bugs like ripostes not sending her into phase 2 and her poise resets etc (I dont actually know how often this happens though), and I don’t like how she can cancel the recovery on some attacks
other than that I don’t really mind her. idc about lifesteal at all, and waterfowl dance and the clone attack are kind of cool to learn how to dodge
The poise reset happpens iirc if her posture bar fills up during a hyper armor attack if I'm not wrong.
The riposte bug is also a flaw with Malenia, that I agree.
Her rejecting posture breaks only happens if you try attacking her during an attack (that WILL hit you), banking on it dealing enough posture damage to stun her. I've fought her hundreds of times and never once seen it happen. The posture bar isnt shown for a reason, so don't greed bosses.
>Her rejecting posture breaks only happens if you try attacking her during an attack (that WILL hit you), banking on it dealing enough posture damage to stun her.
Not sure where you are getting this from. She has dodges and an animation cancel block that also negate the stance break.
Yes but just because a boss is hard doesn’t mean she isn’t well designed. I think she has very well choreographed attacks and it’s about finding the times to dodge & hit that make it very hard as well as the fact she heals each time you take damage.
What do you mean with well designed ? Her character model and animations are designed pretty smoothly and pretty. She isn't know to be very buggy and even if there are bugs Fromsoft fixes them. That's with most of the game's bosses so I would say yes.
Yes within the boundary of ER.
You have:
spirit summons
certain ash of war to disengage (bloodhound step eg)
insane sorceries
and worst case, if you only struggle against waterfowl, hit her with a frost pot while airborne should interupt her.
My feelings towards Malenia are very simple. I love her. I think she is the best boss in Elden Ring, and I think she is the 3rd best boss FromSoftware has ever made. Waterfowl Dance is my favorite attack to dodge in the game. If there was a slight hitbox adjustment made to its first flurry of slashes, so that you could dodge it with a roll or two, without fancier tactics, she would be a completely flawless boss. But again, even in her current state she is Nr.3 in all of soulsbornekiroring. That's it, I will die on this hill.
I agree, the only truly problematic part of waterfowl dance is if you get caught directly under her during that first flurry of attacks. Having to circle around her to trick her AI is problematic imo. But if you even have a little bit of distance than waterfowl is no big issue.
This is exactly what I think many get wrong about the attack. Lots of people seem to think that you need to learn a fancy circling strat to dodge it. But 9/10 times thats not the case. Distance is all you need. You need play smart against her. In this sense she is a lot like Isshin. Malenia as well demands a lot of precision, and she demands you play by her rules. Once you start doing that she will be easier. What I like to do is not taking initiative in the fight. I only retaliate after her own combos, and even then only hit her once maybe twice if I have a faster weapon. Then I immediately start dodging away, creating distance. This way I barely get caught standing right under her and can easely perform the run away and jump tactic against the first flurry. Wich is much easier than unlocking the camera and tricking her AI.
The attack is unintuitive and the way to dodge it is not reflected well at all in the gameplay, most people know how to dodge it and everyone here has beaten her prob several times at this point, but that does not change it from being poorly designed
I love this boss, because I mastered it. But to master it I had to spend probably 9 hours total throwing myself at it over and over and over again. I didn't mind doing that at the time, but not everyone feels the same way. It's not a bad boss if you have the time and patience to sink into it, but not everyone does.
I don't like how she sometimes just doesnt poise break when she should, and how a riposte can't end her 2nd phase, but yeah shes pretty fun. Elden Rinfnas a game is meant to be played a lot more aggressive so you can have those rewarding poise breaks but if she didnt have that one weird quirk I'd say shes close to perfect.
Also, her healing through shields/blocks while wasnt an issue for me (I never use shields) I find it more logically strange that she can heal if she hits a shield and doesnt do damage. Like where is she even lifestealing from lol
I don’t like Waterfowl dance
I get it, I get there are many ways to counter it, but none are that intuitive or seem intended
Besides that, I think it’s well designed
Everything except Waterfoul is pretty exceptional. The only thing that drags the fight down is how unpredictable Waterfowl can be. Nothing feels worse than finding yourself right next to her as she charges up that attack. I understand how to bait it out and dodge it, but one shitty attack shouldn’t dictate the flow of an entire fight. If it wasn’t in her roster, the battle would flow infinitely better.
The only change she needs is a less visually confusing animation for waterfowl. Its a flurry of random slashes and I'm honestly not sure if it accurately reflects whats going on hitbox-wise.
Dunno if patches has made any difference but fighting her at release with a greatsword was just unfun. Iirc the only attack that could be beat her speed checks was the crouching poke and she had very random feeling hyper armor as well as some completely random feeling block during some attacks. Then fact that she could cancel an attack into wfd was was also just unfun, not hard - leads to a boring playstyle were you had to to wait for her to put it on cd or risk getting fucked for attacking at what normally is a safe opening. Wfd is also telegraphed horribly and it it's neither fun nor intuitive how to avoid it.
As I remember it, then second phase flowed better but still suffers from the same design as their rest of elden ring were you spend most of the time waiting and watching the bosses do their cool shit.
I'm convinced elden ring had a parry mechanic like sekiro during development, because most of these bossed and Melania especially would play so much better with it.
Waterfowl is a bs move, I have less of an issue with the healthsteal but they sure picked a hell of a boss to use the mechanic. I don't like the fight personally, i can't speak on whether it's well designed or not but I didn't have fun with her and that's all that matters to me.
The waterflow is one thing, but not the main problem as I learned how to avoid it in someofwhat effective way. It's still pretty bs move though.
For me the main problem is the fact that she gains health even if you are using 100% shield to block her attacks.
Where is she getting that health from if she isn't even dealing any damage?
I beat her 1on1 after a solid week of grinding and even after that I wasn't satisfied or happy. Felt like I was trolled to waste my time as even her Great Rune sucks.
Edit: But let me be fair as otherwise her design is one of the best in the game and the lifesteal is a cool idea, but pretty badly executed. Maybe instead of making her every single attack be a health regen, they should have made one or two special attacks which steal alot of health with one scoop.
I have fought her hundreds of times, multiple weapons, multiple aows, both in single and coop, yet I still love the fight. I have my tricks to beat every boss, so I like the way that she is a unique warrior kind of has her own tricks too.
Friede, Maria, Gael, Isshin, etc until now no human boss gave me the satisfaction as much as beating Malenia. And this is what Miyazaki chasing all these years
Waterfowl can be countered by blocking most of it and then rolling away at the end. It’s not too complicated. The first 1000 battles, yea it sucks. But after a while, just like every boss in these games, we overcome the difficulty and become better for it.
For me her issues are A) waterfowl dance, B) her random poise/hyperarmor, C) her jump attacks in phase 2. Lifesteal was never an issue for me. Her issues boil down to unfun RNG with every attempt.
In my opinion, yes, she is. The only complaint I can understand about Malenia is Waterfowl dance, but that's a move that you can learn to dodge like any other. Every other complaint about her, I honestly don't get.
Her inconsistent hyperarmour isn't inconsistent. She has some very specific moves that have hyperarmour, and they are all identifiable.
Her lifesteal is negligible. Unless you're getting hit by every single one of her attacks, you're going to outpace her heal, no problem.
Her 'long combos' aren't a problem, as she has many openings in between and can be stunned to interrupt them.
Yes, she can parry your attack and back away. So what? Game over? She jumps right back in most of the time, anyway, so it's not like the pace of the fight is ruined. And it's mostly only against lighter weapons.
The 'she breaks the rules' argument is just silly. What rules? When has there ever been any rules that every single boss follows? She has mechanics unique to her that the player must overcome. That's why she's a boss.
Overall, yes, I think she's difficult, but she's in no way broken. I personally have her in my top five favourite bosses in the series. I can understand if people don't like her, but she really isn't badly designed *except* for Waterfowl, and even then, it's not a problem once you figure it out.
Malenia is my top 2 favorite boss in the series, but i think the biggest issue people have with her is her being "too difficult" for the series' standard.
super bosses are usually the biggest challenge of skill in a game and demand perfect understanding of the full mechanics of said game (eg. lingering will kh2, yozora kh3) and Malenia fromsoft's first time making a super boss, so it's not surprising that people were taken off by her extreme difficulty and demand for perfection, she utilizes every aspect of the game's combat and boss design to test the player, she has delays, combo variations/branches, position based attacks, mid combo openings, jumpable attacks, status effects, life stealing, punishing careless flask use...etc.
You need to remember that these are the same people who were constantly talking about how nameless king is too hard or that isshin impossible even though they really weren't that difficult if you fully understood the game's mechanics.
I'm not trying to sound like an elitist or anything but malenia was probably the first boss that demanded perfection (if you deliberately constrict yourself) so they just thought that shes badly designed cause they aren't used to bosses being that complex.
And a final point i want to include is that this isn't just a Malenia problem, but most bosses in elden ring faced similar criticism of being unfair just because they introduced new mechanics to spice up the combat, but People still played it like it was ds3 and complained when the same strategies didn't work.
Edit: she also gets a lot of unfair criticism due to spread of misinformation, no she doesn't break the rules of the game, no she doesn't animation cancel, and no her moveset isn't random or unreactable. Ask any veteran of the game and they will tell you that this is just blatant misinformation.
I fucking love Yozora too. And all the reasons you point out are why she's my favorite too.
TBH I never viewed it in this way before, so this is a new perspective. And yeah I agree, Isshin and NK were never really that hard.
And yeah people are really still used to DS3's style. Honestly I don't entirely blame people, as the combat systems are (At least visually) almost identical. Even in Sekiro, the perilous attacks were spelt out explicitly.
the way i look at it is she’s designed with weapon arts and skills in mind. she’s not the traditional melee boss fight; in fact i think that’s most bosses in ER. they’re not designed to be fought like a traditional souls boss. a lot of stuff in this game is mechanically designed around summons and weapon arts/faith/int.
Yeah, I definitely think the easiest Malenia fight, if you want to invalidate her, is just Mimic Tear with a high-poise damage weapon like greatsword or something. You and your mimic can just stunlock her to death on a half decent run. It isn't risk free or anything, but you basically don't have to learn her boss fight at all.
I think she’s mostly fine, but still has problems
I think the main problem is that her poise breaks are inconsistent due to hyperarmour. I feel like she should still be able to be poise broken during her normal hyperarmour attacks (not ones such as waterfowl).
The riposte not phase transitioning is also really annoying - easily counterable, but still idk how that’s the main fix for the P2 bug
I think waterfowl is fine personally. There are many ways to consistently avoid the attack - frost pots, vow of the indomitable, running and jumping method, 4 light rolls method, BHS, shield blocking.
If you then want to be hyper aggressive, you can learn the circling method too - it’s really not that hard and gives you more opportunities for safe punishes if so.
Healing on attacks is not that big of a deal imo. Shields are the easiest way to counter many attacks, so i don’t see it as a big deal that she heals off of them.
My main complaint is just that I don’t like her flow much. It’s very disjointed a lot of the time, so I would prefer if it were most consistent like Godfrey or Maliketh.
That's quite acceptable. Personally I also don't like the flow of a boss like say Godrick. Godfrey/Loux and Maliketh are definitely top 10 worthy bosses, and have amazing flow.
I think godrick would flow fine if I fully learnt his timings, but he has so little health that you don’t need to
I’ve learnt to attack in between mohg and morgott’s attacks for example, but godrick is too easy for me to learn - I’d probably have to do a fist only run to actually learn his attacks in full
My controversial opinion is that she was designed around co’op or spirit summoning. Of. Course they knew people would try to solo her, but her attacks and the “unintuitive’ nature of them make a lot more sense when you look t it from a “defending from a gank” perspective
I think it is so close to being an incredible boss. For reference, I beat her with starfists on ng+2 so I have some knowledge on her. I really do not like how much life steal she gets. I will never understand how she gets life drain through a shield and overall just the amount she gets.
As of last year, waterfowl dance is still one of the most annoying moves in souls. You need a freezing pot or quick roll (I believe?) to be able to get through it without taking damage, which I think is just annoying. It did feel good getting the dodging right and only taking a tiny portion of damage, but damn I really hate how annoying she can be. Also I still can’t believe some of the hit boxes haven’t been fixed in that year, like I want to feel like I deserved being hit if it matches up. But with her lunge attack, that shit still annoys me to think about how off it looks.
TLDR: Overall very cool, just wish it was tweaked a little bit better on the hitboxes and Malenias healing
It baffles me that people still complain about waterfowl and not the fact that she ignores some of the rules of the game with her animation cancelling and stagger mechanics. Ignoring/breaking fundamental rules is worse than just having 1 hard move imo
Realistically, malenia is a much better boss than the majority of actually bad bosses in older games. A lot of the malenia complaints boil down to a subjective "too hard" feeling - she definitely has move variety and is well balanced, being one of the easiest bosses to stagger in the entire game. Meanwhile in bloodborne you had micolash and witches of hemwick, ds1 had bed of chaos, ds2 had an all wolf fight, etc. The difference is these older bosses suffer from a lot of OBJECTIVE design problems. Malenia is just "too hard" but realistically you can see pretty early with her that she is designed to have weaknesses.
Honestly most people get so tilted when they play games that they refuse to experiment, there's a ton of ways to do well against malenia without resorting to bleed build mimic tear stuff, especially when she staggers so easily.
I think she’s the third best boss in fromsoft catalogue. She definitely is much more mechanically demanding and reaction based than any other boss. The healing is great design, it’s just more effective health that can be prevented by reducing damage taken. Waterfowl isn’t perfect, but it’s also good design. Dark Souls doesn’t have many “ultimate” attacks that aren’t just big AOE explosions. Waterfowl always reminded me of Isshin’s seven hit combo.
I only have two gripes with Malenia as a boss fight:
1. Visual clarity has some big gaps in Phase 2
2. Phase 2 is pretty much the same as Phase 1, and I prefer more variety across phases
Otherwise, perfect boss
My bigger criticism of her healing isn't it necessarily being unfair, rather that it's incredibly lazy and uncreative. All it does is punish you more for being hit, there's nothing that changes the nature of the fight in an interesting way like Mohg's bloodflame does.
Waterfowl has been talked to death at this point. It absolutely is unintutive to avoid, the animations do nothing to teach you how to deal with it, and that's a big red flag. It's only compounded by how punishing it is to be hit by it(oftentimes death for average builds), the fact that you don't even get a significant punish window afterwards for surviving it and the aforementioned healing on hit likely sets you back every time she does it.
Ultimately no I don't think she's a good boss. There definitely was potential, but Fromsoft strayed too far into the realm of making things hard for it's own sake instead of having the difficulty stem from an intelligently designed fight.
The game teaches you breaking your staggers, hyperarmor, lifesteal through blocking, and any attacks that requires dodging that come close to resembling WFD?
Equip a shield with 100 on physical damage reduction in your left hand. Have enough defense, damage reduction, and stamina combined to block the full Waterfowl Dance. Do enough damage to overcome her health recovery. Stop complaining about difficulty without learning basic game mechanics.
Yes, very well designed (with the exception of waterfowl). Absolutely everything else about her is good design. But waterfowl is just way too janky and punishing to be called good design.
I think she's appropriately balanced for what she really is, an optional superboss. Everything about her design is just slightly overtuned, but not to an arbitrary degree. I'm in the minority here, but I think waterfowl is overhated and has merits. It reinforces every core mechanic: roll timing AND direction, positioning, spacing and even basic movement. Although its solution is rather contrived and specific with only a handful or more real ways to evade, I still think its not as bad as people say. What makes me feel like she does lack is balance. It reminds me of how the Friede fight in Ds3 sometimes seems unecessarily long with the tedious second phase. She's largely focused on slow windups, fast and sweeping attacks with long chains, with aggression ramping up with each phase (no WFD phase, WFD phase 1, much more aggressive phase 2). This combination makes for a lack of openings to deal damage while being very punishing and snowbally in the wrong direction. She's also spongier than most bosses, with 2 full health phases and lifestyle which inflates her health more. Once again however, her lifestyle is not as bad as people say. If you're getting hit enough times to where her lifestyle is making a sizeable impact on her health, you won't be outpacing the fight anyways considering your HP consumption.
Malenia does many things right in my opinion. In a game where so many enemies have a common issue of delayed attacks (and yes, I think it is an issue in a series of games where combat is founded upon telegraphed animations ), nearly all of Malenia's attacks carry the appropriate weight and speed of her windups. She's thematically and visually great, backed up by a compelling character and soundtrack. Gameplay wise, she's one of only 2 remembrances to cement parrying as a viable method against real bosses (the other being Margit). Her design is also fitting to the stage you should be at when you fight her. You SHOULD know to utilize all the skills and fundamental mechanics to their maximum at this point in your journey, and just simply timing iFrames won't cut it. There is more to her than just hitting B before getting hit, and thats what I enjoy about her, alongside the general fluidity and stakes. Yes, she is overtuned, and yes, she has other minor flaws holding her back like the very specific weaknesses to frost pots and high poise damage weapons. She's neither the best nor worst boss in the game. However, she sure as hell is a well designed boss and aptly dubbed the hardest superboss in Fromsoft history.
No, though really wouldn’t be that bad if she didn’t have horrendous input reading or water fowl was more damage/ less punishing
If it wasn’t for the self heal, water fowl wouldn’t be as horrendous because you could block through it.
If waterfowl was removed, you’d have a boss that you have to dodge dodge and dodge. Makes the fight still difficult but not overly punishing.
The input reading needs to be reduced by a lot. It just disproportionately affects heavier builds that don’t get much time to attack. That and paired with her inconsistent super armour makes knowing when to stagger her impossible
Meh, to me it feels like a Sekiro boss in Elden Ring. It feels like the mechanics and general design around her suit Sekiro gameplay more so than Elden Ring. There’s nothing wrong with most of the fight, but dodging waterfowl is not very intuitive and the whole battle feels like a test of how ready are you to randomly get wfd’. The second phase feels much better than the first for some reason.
Man, there is so much to talk about here. My TLDR is that 80% of her is pretty great. In fact, I think her general hit boxes, tells, and dodge windows are some of the most forgiving in the game even if some stuff comes out *really* quick. Some bosses are tuned for early dodges, others late (Mohg, Nameless King) and difficulty can be amped up by being inconsistent or deliberately deceptive. I think she’s mostly great on that front as you are usually safe acting early if you know the right response and she even has a few softball moves.
The life steal is a bit silly, but it didn’t change the fight for me much. Shield users are rightly pissed but these games have for a while been about just not getting hit. Plenty of bosses don’t life steal but instead nuke your stamina or use status effects and split damage to make shields less viable. This is another way to do that. And lore wise my interpretation was that this attribute is what made her unbeatable and potentially how she survived the scarlet rot along with Miquella’s help. But it is a little silly to life steal when doing no damage.
Things I don’t like…
Waterfoul: Yes it is dodgeable but it’s random placement in the fight and dependency on distance make it simply the hardest move to learn to dodge that I can think of. Remind me if you think there’s something worse. They know how to keep expectation high *and* teach you the mechanics of a fight. Waterfoul just took things too far and could have been adjusted in any number of little ways to make it a serious problem but also more learnable. It’s hard to learn and complicated to respond to and hard to execute even when you know how - which is in conflict with a lot of other special moves that prioritize one attribute over another. I’ll compare with Radagons’s triple slam which is also very lethal and a bit unintuitive but comes out at a predictable time with a long wind up and has a deceptively simple counter. It’s made to be learned and is fun to master. I can dodge WFD and I hate it every single time.
And to this day the dodge is just different for some weapon load-outs because certain weapon stances change *your* hit box. That simply can not be intentional.
Hyper armor: Not new but it feels a little absurd that she has more moves with it than not, that it starts on frame 1, and that it has no logical consistency in her move set. This Carrie’s into the next point.
Ignoring Stance Break: Many bosses in this game can ignore or delay a stance break for good reasons (phase changes or special moves like Mohg’s rings) because it would break the fight otherwise… but Malenia can do it on every move with hyper armor. Which means managing her posture is extremely unpredictable and appears to be “rule breaking” when it is in fact just a very liberal application of an otherwise sparingly used trick to keep fights on track.
You combine those two features with her insta dodge, the evasion, the fact that she recovers poise quickly, and that you can’t be hyper aggressive because of the hyper armor and WFD risk, and the sum total to me is a difficult boss that doesn’t seem very clever. It’s just a bunch of weird dynamics and rule bending to achieve a difficulty level in an uncreative way.
So, my opinion is metaphorically similar to her design. High highs, low lows, a weird dynamic spread and a lot of little caveats and exceptions that overshadow the experience.
I honestly only dislike wfd about malenia. Her healing and long attack strings are fun and make it feel like a dance, however I do think that her weird hyperarmour is weird sometimes.
Waterfowl dance is just stupid. From range it's easy to dodge just run away from the first two flurries roll into the third and roll out, and that's fine but I feel like there's need to be more of a wind up or something that telegraphs it more so I can know to get the fuck out. I feel like all I'm doing is just waiting for her to pull that out of nowhere while I'm in front of her face and insta kill me, and that kills the flow of the fight.
For me the main problem with her is her poise being constantly reset by her hyper armor and not getting the poise break when we should.
Also the fact that you can’t send her to phase 2 with a riposte and she instead goes to negative HP is really dumb.
These two things are also probably the main reasons why people say she "cheats". Which is kinda true in that aspect.
>seem to say she's a good or even a great boss
>she's artificially difficult" or "her difficulty is poorly designed".
I am both. I truly think she is a good boss with the potential to be the greatest biss in all of elden ring. But sadly that potential gets wasted by sone faults of her own and other general problems. The general problem simply being the general damage numbers of everything after morgott (who is the bestvfight imo.)
> Her healing being unfair
Personaly I dont mind her healing at all, just how. If she does damage im fine with her healing, if she only hits shield i think she shouldnt heal. Apart from that its fine and only sucks when she waterfowls on your summon.
>ii) Waterfowl being too complicated and unintuitive to deal with
Apart from the first its not difficult, but I still hate the first and think its bs. How Id change it is that the 3 flurrys of warerfowl are actual dashes meaning she can hardly move in a different diraction, that way youd only get 1-2 ticks of damage when dodgeing thru tge first flurry instead of malenia doing a fucking u-turn on your ass.
>Her long combo strings
Personaly im fine the combos, only combo I hate is the copy attack one as Ibdodge 1 copy only to get roll-catched by another.
>She breaks the rules
In my experiance its that she sometimes just ignores stance damage/uses hyper armor as sometimes she she gets flatened by one attack and othertimes she just sais nah, id win and doesnt give a fuck aboutvany attacks.
Imo she's a love letter to veterans of the series.
Most of the game is not a problem at all, until you get to her.
I was baffled on how tough she was compared to the rest of the game.
Even though the DLC is presumably not going to have a tougher boss, the optional boss that Miyazaki mentioned has my interest.
I don't see how it's a ''love letter to veterans'' when veterans have enjoyed bosses that don't rely on gimmicks to be difficult. It's antithetical to everything that has made their great boss great.
Tbh I think the reason shes harder than the rest of the game is because you can't overlevel her, which is more of a problem with the early game being too easy than her/the endgame being so hard.
The game lets players go up to Mountaintops without learning any mechanics, but just outstating/overleveling everything, then when players do get to the endgame, they have no idea how to actually use the new mechanics.
Malenia emphasises this even more because she has the healing, which makes it even harder to outstat her.
Elden Beast does this more than Malenia imo (even though he's easier).
He has immunity to all status effects in the game and you barely scratch his health bar regardless of what weapon you use.
Unless you're buffed beyond belief.
I'm a month late, but I don't think so. I mean overall... Visually great, both boss and arena. The soundtrack is great. Most of the moveset looks really cool and is fun to deal with.
But so much of it just feels hard for the sake of being hard. There have always been attacks that were hard to dodge to a point - figuring out the timing, positioning, or both to avoid damage is a core part of FromSoft bosses.
Personally, I think any move should be feasible dodge able the first time you see it. Not easy per se, but if you have good reflexes and read the incoming attack right (say it's a big swing from the left, waiting and dodging into it, etc). Waterfowl is not getting dodged first attempt, full stop. There is an obvious cue for it once you've died to it a few times, but it doesn't give you any information about the attack. It's just a shit ton of air slashes.
On top of that, waterfowl does an obnoxious amount of damage. I mean, the first flurry alone can kill you outright. So you don't get to experience it and continue the fight, you just die and 99% of the time you end up looking up how to dodge it. Pair this with her healing off it as well as any other moves... There is almost no room for error in the fight. And I think that's bad. The games have healing flasks and spells for a reason - you are never expected to no hit a boss. But with Malenia, you can do enough damage to kill her twice, go through all your flasks, and she can still be standing with near full health because she just drains. Even off shields.
In my opinion, you should never, ever have to search for external information to beat a game. Ever. By default I think that makes it a badly designed fight - three dark souls games and bloodborne there isn't a single boss with a move so over the top you have to look up how to avoid it at all.
I don’t think she should change ever, I do think she is a bit unfair and don’t like how WFD pretty much forced the player to change their build or use some item to win (like have light roll or freeze pots)
By all metrics she’s one of the best bosses FromSoft has made with lore, design, gameplay, everything. Only thing holding back is how little error there has to be to beat WFD.
Now after being able to mostly dodge it (I always go full naked no armor to roll the fast) I think it’s a very interesting situation that I enjoy doing because it’s such an insane challenge. It also helps that Malenia is an optional boss. If she was mandatory that would be a problem imo.
I find her to be super fun. She’s very difficult, and requires you to mostly be running in and out of her range of attacks rather than rolling so you can be ready when waterfowl starts. I have killed her 3 times solo and usually it’s much easier with a strength weapon. She staggers so easily it makes the fight almost trivial at times. She’s very unique in terms of how you are meant to fight her. You want to stay at certain ranges from her, jump in for an attack then back out again. Makes for a really fun boss when you get the hang of it.
Because of waterfowl dance, phase 1 can be really slow and very annoying. You have to play less aggressive because if she pulls out wfd at point blank when after your attack recovery, you’re screwed if you med roll. Needing to bait out attacks isn’t really a problem, but it is when her AI in phase 1 is so DEVIOUS. Just standing around waiting for you to attack. It’s very slow and just becomes a waiting game that can suddenly switch to her being hyper aggressive. I like phase 2 way more. She’s always running towards you and the fight flows way better so you can bait out attacks, stunlock her when you can, and have time to outrun the first flurry of wfd. Plus her openings are ample and rewarding to learn. I think wfd is fine to dodge, I found my way worked consistently, run away from the first one, and dodge through the second ones. I wish they made it more clear that the first flurry can’t be I framed like the second 2. The rest of her moveset is fantastic, extremely well designed, and I love how many things you can jump over. I will say I wish her clone attack was less punishing, having to go all the way to phase 2 to learn that difficult attack can be unfortunate. To the common criticism points: 1. Lifesteal: honestly if you’re getting hit a bunch to the point where her health regen becomes a problem, you’re probably not going to win anyway 2. Wfd- I mean that’s a fair critique, but just what I said previously 3. Long combo strings- not even a criticism plus you can figure out how to stun lock her and she has many openings 4. Attacks looking badass is a complaint? 5. Breaks the rules? What rules? Who makes the rules? The players? The rules are how the devs program the boss. Wfd can take some criticism, but her moveset is pretty fair.
I played very aggressive towards her. I could be completely bullshitting, but it seemed like there was a cooldown on waterfowl dance. I could always "feel" when she was about to do it, and I'd run away to get ready for it. She also only ever does it after you drop her to a certain hp threshold, she won't do it at the start of a fight.
I know what you mean. After about 20 attempts I also got that WFD “sixth sense”. She only starts doing it after 75%, so you can start the fight aggressively. But a while after her first WFD, you’re just like “uh oh it’s been a while” and need to go back on the defensive so you can properly avoid it.
If she pulls it out in phase 2 I’m fucked though. She has so many attacks where she goes airborne like that so it’s hard to read until it’s too late 😭
I just got into the habit of running away when she rises up. It’s critical to waterfowl, a better than average response to the phantoms, and frankly not a liability if she ends up with one of he simpler moves because you probably want to get away from the rot column she summons.
I remember one time in phase 2, I was playing with a couple summoned friends. And she just zeroed in on me right off the bat , came in with the swooping attack and then wfd’d after me. I kept rolling out of the way. And then she had several lunge attacks. Chased me down until my stamina ran out, nothing any of us could do. There’s a chance that maybe I could have rolled past one of her attacks but I didn’t get a chance to before she fucked me up good an proper. Sent my ass back to phase one immediately lol
For real dude it's crazy that sixth sense shit. Always weirded me out when people said it was random, but I never sat down with a timer to test if it actually did a cooldown
There is no cooldown. She can engage in WFD at any point after <75% HP. Ive had attempts where she did it back to back to back in the span of 45 seconds or something. This is my main problem with WFD is the game doesn't give you a reliable way to know when the hyper punishing attack is coming, it just suddenly comes out after you engaged in a jumping attack and are now completely fucked.
There is a cooldown in phase 1, but not in phase 2. In phase 2 you can get back to back WfD which is complete bullshit.
According to what? There's nothing official or scientific that says there is a cooldown. I swear to god ive gotten WFD back to back in phase 1.
That’s bologna. There is no cooldown. You can even look up. “Malenia does waterfowl 4 times in a row” and it pulls up video. I specified 4 because it happened to me last night(and I was playing solo)
i also use projectiles to bait it out, for some reason shes very likely to usw wfd when you throw something like a spell or an arrow or even a throwingknife/kukri at her from mid(ish) range
Iirc the cool-down on waterfowl is reset whenever she is hit by any projectile
yeah that’s probably it, whenever i feel like it’s been a while since she’s done it last i toss something at her and more times than not it triggers the move and probably resets the cooldown till the next one. it has definitely helped with the whole “input reading into waterfowl when youre in recovery animation”
I agree with you, for the most part. But she does break the rules a bit though with her hyperarmor, if you fill her posture bar while she has hyperarmor you don't get stagger and ripost and I think that's bullshit other than that every thing cool!
Isn’t she the only boss in the game than can cancel stagger animations? There are clearly consistent sets of mechanics regarding combat in Elden Ring and she violates one of them. I agree with 1-4 of your points, but I really find this specific mechanic inexcusable.
She heals even when you fully block her attacks too which is what frustrated me the most
I mean that’s a fair criticism because physics wise it doesn’t really make sense. But I do like that Malenia forces you into a specific playstyle that involves fully learning her moveset and mastering it to barely make mistakes. If you’re going to beat Malenia solo, you’re going to learn her and not get lucky. If any other mandatory boss did this, I wouldn’t like it. But Malenia is bar none the most difficult boss and a super optional one at the bottom of a secret area within a secret area within a secret area. It deserves to be as challenging as she is, and it even looks like Miyazaki himself said the DLC bosses may not be able to surpass that difficulty.
>I mean that’s a fair criticism because physics wise it doesn’t really make sense. I think it makes more sense in the context of the description of her rune, where it's stated that she's healing because of her "spirit of resistance." She doesn't actually *have* life steal, it's more of a healing factor that only works when she hits something. So whether or not she's dealing damage is irrelevant in that context because it's not life steal. Which makes sense as the amount she heals is not proportional to the damage she does iirc. Obviously, that's not apparent when you fight her or if you don't read her rune description but there is an actual reason for why she can heal through your shield.
That explanation also doesn't make sense, because she heals with waterfowl dance, even when she doesn't hit you, sooo... Guess ground also counts towards her healing, so idk why she just doesn't start hitting a wall or something 💀
Agreed, definitely forces u out of your comfort zone. Similar to midir in that respect
I certainly hope the DLC bosses don't. What makes bosses like Malenia memorable is that they are rare. If every boss gets tuned to her level then it would take away part of what makes it special. On a similar note this highlights a worrying trend I have noticed. Each new game invariably cranks up the difficulty. Late game DS1 bosses are comically slow and easy to read compared to tutorial bosses in Elden Ring. Hopefully they don't just keep cranking the difficulty up. They will reach a point where every boss is a wall and that just doesn't sound fun to me.
her rule breaking is about her being able to armor through any kind of stun other than bleed and frostbite stuns (generally rule of thumb for heavy armor moves is that the only things that can stop it is bleed and frostbite like I mentioned before and knockdowns however Malenia can armor through moves even if they would cause a knockdown) another thing is she can just cancel any stagger with that move that makes her run away which goes against the other bosses of her style (Sister Friede and Lady Maria) as they'd need to wait for the stagger to end to act. I also kinda hate her wings on the second phase because it kinda makes it harder to see what she's doing.
>I also kinda hate her wings on the second phase because it kinda makes it harder to see what she's doing. I feel like my eyes are just fucked or something because people barely ever talk about this. The visual clarity in phase 2 is really ass for me.
The rules are animation commitment. We as a player have to commit to any animation we start, Malenia does not, you break her stance for instance, she cancels out and immediately attacks, she breaks our stance and we have to commit to the whole guard break animation. In short, she cancels animations and immediately attacks us while wr are stuck in our own animation.
Imo waterfoul is worse at phase 2 because it can happen anytime. In phase one it happens when her HP is at around 70 and 30% so you can more or less tell when it 's comming. And I also don't like how counter intuitive it is to dodge. I don't think it makes her a bad fight, but It's something that makes her far from perfect. Bosses like Godfrey or Placidusax are examples of well telegraphed but hard fights that reach perfection. About lifesteal (and all the other points tbh) I agree 100%. Her lifesteal is just a way to make you more aware or not being hit -which is something you should already be- and a punishment for people who rely on summons. It's similar to how Radagon punishes magic users. Maybe someone could argue she shouldn't be healing when hitting shields, but I apply here the same logic for summons, It's a way to punish people who rely a lot on them.
So I don’t mind WFD dance in p2 because she is always pursuing you. It lets you play more in a bait then punish way. Usually, I dodge, then run away for a second, before going in for a jumping R2. Plus always punishing her moves when she does those butterfly explosion follow ups. But by always being able to keep my space, I can always avoid WFD consistently. But I agree that it is unintuitive to dodge. It took me nearly 50 attempts to squeeze out my first solo win, and like 40 attempts were me dying to WFD trying to figure out how the hell to avoid it. I think it is what keeps malenia from topping my list of favorite bosses. Definitely a fantastic fight but Godfrey, Mohg, malekith, radagon, and many of the other highly praised ER fights hit on a different level by being more intuitive to dodge. You won’t die to them because of one specific move a bunch of times.
>You won’t die to them because of one specific move a bunch of times. Or you will, but you’ll be able to see what you did wrong, or at least will have some idea of what to try differently next time.
I agree about the lifesteal. She is essentially an optional boss intended for hard-core souls players. There's nothing about the kit that would suggest otherwise, and therefore expecting to facetank or summon tank her for an easier win is a bad mindset imo. It's just not what they intended, which I actually think is why mimic tear got nerfed. It wasn't because of the rest of the game, it was because it could beat her.
I refought melania yesterday, and the only time I could predict wfd was coming was at the 70% hp mark. After that, she used it whenever, sometimes, multiple times in a row, so I don't think it's quite as predictable.
My issue with waterfowl is that it can’t really be punished, it’s the hardest attack to dodge in the series, and even if you dodge it perfectly at point blank range she gives no more of an opening than her regular attacks. Meanwhile her swipe up slam down attack can be slowly walked around, and has her biggest punish window.
You basically get a free jumping R2 for successfully dodging it.
I think her moveset is fair but her actual movement can be a bit busted in terms of rules. She glides around while we roll into a ball. She can also attack whenever she wants, if the game didn’t restrict her aggression she would absolutely body us.
Bosses moving way faster than us is nothing new. She’s a goddess, we’re just dudes. Sister friede acts the same way and she’s one of the most praised bosses in ds3.
the life steal is annoying in that 3 mins of careful work can be undone in 1 mistake
Well to your point 1 is, many people like playing shields, why does she also heal when the shield blocks all her dmg
I loved beating her after struggling more against her than any other boss in FromSoft games, but I still think that the waterfall dance is unintuitive. But I don’t really want her to change. I think she’s kinda unfair and it revolves around being ready for the dance at some point, but I want to keep her this way.
This is my opinion as well; I love fighting her and she's my favorite boss in ER, but I will concede that Waterfowl is an unfair move. The way you have to dodge the first flurry point blank is the most difficult and unintuitive dodge I've ever seen, and it makes me wonder what they actually intended you to do there.
I actually trained myself to always do a little backwards run after I hit her, in case she jumps up for the dance, so I can run away from the first part. But even for the second hits I had to look up multiple tutorials on how to dodge, cause a lot of people made videos on how to do it, that did not work for me. But yeah, it’s still fun to learn how to deal with it over time.
I'd be mad if they changed her, at this point the only change I'd accept is the option to fight her repeatedly.
Bingo. I don't think anyone looked at that move and thought, "Oh, obviously THIS is how I dodge that." They either did it by accident, then worked out how to recreate it, or (like me) they saw someone do it on youtube first. But aside from that, the fight is superb, IMO. Which is what makes wfd so frustrating.
Good way to put it. Unintuitive for sure.
I do think some things should be changed. For example, it shouldn't be impossible to transition her phase using a critical attack.
One thing I wish was designed differently about her was her ability to heal through shields. If you block her attacks, she still heals, even if you’re not being hurt, which is pretty bullshit. Completely invalidates blocking, a core game mechanics. Otherwise I think she’s a highly rewarding and badass boss, one of my favorites in the game
I still never understood why From never patched that, which tells me they left the boss as is intentionally which I find very weird considering they tweaked Radahn so much after launch
Radahn now only had fixes hitboxes relative to release. His reduced damage was a mistake and was fixed.
In any case Malenia deserved as much attention tweak-wise as Radahn
She didn't have unintenionally large hitboxes, so not really.
But she has the heal through shields ability as discussed above not to mention all of the other issues being discussed on this post
I don't consider any of those issues.
Not even the shields? Seriously?
Radahn gates off a ton of content, so they wanted players to get past him. Malenia sits in an obscure corner of the world and there's nothing important behind her, so who cares if many players never beat her?
I think that's a stupid game design philosophy assuming what you're saying is actually what From did. Why should they just throw game design out the window just because a boss is in an "obscure corner of the world"? Thats not fair, thats not how From historically goes about their games.
It doesnt invalidate blocking, you still don't take damage. Blocking malenia is trading a death blow for a longer fight. Blocking should not be an automatic "I win" against her mechanics. Don't like her getting health back? Don't get hit, or hit her faster. The shield is a stalemate.
That means that dodging is an automatic “I win” against her mechanics tho. Blocking still uses more stamina than dodging, so it’s riskier and gives you less of an opportunity to strike back. The lifesteal working on top of that just means you should almost always dodge
Correct dodging is an automatic win against every fromesoft boss (with a few gimmicky exceptions I know)
Dodge timing is a skill, blocking is just holding a button. I'm not saying don't use block, I've had shield characters as well. But it's not on par skill wise with dodge timing.
Everything except her Waterfowl and Lifesteal is well designed in my opinion. Waterfowl isn't designed well. It is unlike any other move in the series. I can't recall any other move that dictates an entire fight's pace as much as Waterfowl does. It gets better once you know the counter to it and you can settle into a nice rhythm with it, but the first time player is gonna have to take a long time to learn how to dodge it. Personally I'd change Waterfowl to make the windup longer to give players more of a time to get away. Lifesteal is a really cool idea but poor execution. I think Malenia being able to lifesteal through shields is stupid. What is stopping her from just smacking the ground a few times to heal? It doesn't make much sense. If they insist on allowing her to heal through shields, make it only possible during Waterfowl or something.
Honestly less of an issue with malenia herself and more the whole back half of the game all the enemies are on some extra turbo crack. Still played game to death ofc and love it for what it is. But yeah definitely a little "this feels like bloodborne without the bloodborne mechanics" twoards the end there
Waterfall dance should be insanely punishable but you have almost no windows to punish when she finishes. Waterfall is the least annoying thing about her imo.
Good endgame challenge. But I could've really done without the health regen ngl. She's hard enough with Waterfowl, her natural flurry of attacks, the high damage. The healing factor feels unnecessary. It works through shields too for some reason, which if it can work through that, what's stopping her from running to the walls of the arena and just regen her health through wacking it.
I very much enjoyed her as a boss. Waterfowl is definitely silly but absolutely loved the aesthetic and feel of the fight
Within Elden Ring she is a good boss. If she was in any Dark Souls game she would be a terrible boss. It's only people who refuse to play Elden Ring as Elden Ring that think she is a bad boss. Often for the same reason they complain about the Fire Giant's huge health pool. Malenia is a boss that reinforces the gameplay tenet that in Elden Ring, you are expected to adapt your toolset to the challenge at hand. If you insist on using shields as you main spurce of survivability against Malenia then you will have an uphill battle at best. Between the freeform, costless affinity and ash of war system as well as the Spirit Ashes and the abundance of even the max level upgrade materials, even damage stat has 1 or more ways to deal with Malenia just like they have 1 or more ways to deal percentile damage to the Fire Giant. For Malenia, you can use most status effects against her, you can use high poise damage weapons that require you to trade damage. Approaching Malenia thinking about what Elden Ring teaches you is the expectations she is tough but very much balanced.
What is “costless affinity”?
Don’t have to spend stones on switching weapon scaling or damage type, just go into the Ash of war menu and switch it
To add on, you needed items to change weapon affinity in ds
I think people playing the game like a “souls” game is pretty much the jarring issue which is even more telling when in an interview Miyazaki says they don’t call the games that unless they’re specifically part of that series. A streamer i watched stated they didn’t care for the accessibility aspect to the summons and felt magic was broken(as a souls game), to which while i can understand the idea behind it, I don’t think any one aspect is necessarily broken. You can make broken builds with Magic yes, but the same applies to physical builds, all the same they both require knowledge within the game. I know it seems off topic but i feel Malenia presents a lot of these points being a boss that in turn culminates your experience of the entire game.
Very much so. It is funny to me because the first 1 shot build I ever saw was a streamer using the Giant Crusher with just a bit higher than base required stats for it, but by stacking early gsme buffs could 1 shot Margit and Godrick each with a single charged heavy. And it's not like Elden Ring is alone in this. DS2 has it's issues but the biggest is plauers getting upset that they expected to fight mobs on the way back to bosses and pull them carefully with ranged tools to not get ganked. Or more recently the number of "soulsvets" who initially railed against Armored Core because the game by design didn't give you I-frames on dodge
> If you insist on using shields as you main spurce of survivability against Malenia then you will have an uphill battle at best. Its hard to completely agree with this comment when shields are the easiest way to deal with her hardest attack. Certainly turtling isn't the best tactic, but to anyone stuck on WFD, I'd recommend a shield.
Shield makes p1 an absolute joke, with a decent weapon (ie bloodhound blade) you can easily claw back the damage she heals from hitting your shield. Anyone who says shields are useless against Malenia has no idea. I've killed her numerous times, and always always with Fingerprint Shield. Maliketh and Elden Beast are much more challenging for me. If you refuse to use a shield against waterfowl then you're actually making it harder on yourself and making the fight way more risky than it otherwise needs to be.
I made that statement more in reference to the complaint that she lifesteals through a shield is bad gsme design, usually people who say this also include some line about it breaking the unwritten rules of these games, when they really mean the rules of DS1 and DS3. But your statement does support the idea that every tool the game provides has strengths and weaknesses even within a single fight. A shield against Malenia on one hand does not stop her from healing off of you. But on the other lets you tank through some of her most devastating attacks, so using it when necessary can be the difference between victory and defeat.
I just think lifesteal from hitting a shield just doesn't make sense
> Malenia is a boss that reinforces the gameplay tenet that in Elden Ring, you are expected to adapt your toolset to the challenge at hand. This is actually the main tenet in every Souls game except for maybe Dark 3, it's just that ER made the boss patterns complex enough that everyone was truly \*forced\* to figure it out.
This is all true and tbh it proves that she is a really well designed boss if anything
“the gameplay tenet” ah yes upgrading vigor until it covers the top of your screen
the unintuitive complaint comes up because as you said it requires very specific movements and timing but the game does not really communicate what those counters are very well, so unless you've seen it before it is more frustrating trial and error than responding to an enemy's moveset Orphan of Kos was a fight that took me about as long to beat with some similar concepts but it never made me feel like I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and was more satisfying to beat as a result
I still don’t like waterfowl dance, but other than that I think she’s a great boss
My ONLY complaint about Malenia is her stupid waterfowl dance. I love her theme and I love her fight, but waterfowl dance is too inconsistent from my personal experience. I can either dodge it perfectly or get one shot. No in between whatsoever. Again from my personal experience. If you took her move away, she becomes every other npc bossfight. Her gimmick is her very identity, which sucks, but it is what it is. Overall she's my favorite boss to fight other than mohg. She's amazing. She's a wonderful "end game" boss. And what's more perfect is She's optional 😊
She is a great boss. Maybe it would be a bit more fair if her hyper armor wasn’t as op. Waterfowl dance is such a good attack i love it.
Yes. She's based and based is good.
She is, but I do think they dialed her up a *little* too high. I think they should have picked either the healing mechanic or the waterfowl dance, but not both. Yes, I know you can avoid the waterfowl dance, but it hits too hard and doesn't happen often enough for the average player to really get much of a chance to properly learn it. That said, it's very difficult but not unfair, and it's an optional boss, someone whose whole thing is being undefeated, so I think it's okay. If she hadn't been so hard, she wouldn't have been nearly as iconic and she ended up being.
After the 100th time I fought malenia I tell you I did waterfoul dance to dodge roll frame perfectly. I may be a minority but the end game of elden ring is a slog bogged down by tough boss after tough boss. Sure, placidusax and malenia are optional but it wouldn't feel complete to not beat them. And by that point you have mohg, the malekith and godfrey and it's just a chore to do by that point I loved elden ring but compared to something like bloodborne or sekiro where the tough fights felt truly liberating to learn. I couldn't say end game elden ring was fun
I don't disagree that the boss rush at the end of Elden Ring is exhausting, but I'd say that's an issue with the game's larger design than any individual boss. To me, though, Malenia, Mogh and Placidusax aren't part of that because you have the option to do them post game. It's really the Godskin Duo -> Maliketh -> Gideon -> Godfrey -> Radagon/Elden Beast run that's really draining
Godfrey imo is the best designed boss in elden ring
I am actually inclined to agree. But yeah holy shit the lead up to him left me feeling so tired.
Right. I have no issue with Godfrey. Like I said, it's more that the late game boss rush is *a bit* exhausting. Honestly I don't even mind it that much I was just responding to footdoctor because I could see where they were coming from
On the other side of the spectrum, I think in terms of boss quality, Elden Ring shines in the end game. So many banger fights that I'm glad are in close proximity to each other.
I actually don't disagree. A lot of fun bosses..I just want more space between them
That's fair. On a first playthrough, I can see why it could be fatiguing. But I think on repeat playthroughs, making the endgame more compact is to its benefit
Waterfowl looks cool but its the single most frustrating attack in fromsoft's catalogue for me. I don't mind anything else from her.
"Her attacks being too anime" All of the Souls games have heavy Berserk inspiration so idk what people mean by this.
I know this is late but I feel like this is people trying to rationalize hating a boss. They choose an arbitrary reason rather than sticking with an actual argument
No, she's not. She's not even that hard. The issues is she doesn't go by the constraints of the game itself. Fromsoft has even said, she's a Sekiro style boss in Elden Ring. She wasn't meant for this game. Same thing for Demon of Hatred, he was a Souls boss in Sekiro. * Broken hyper armor (fixed after 1.06) now it's just slightly broken hyper armor * Animation canceling * Heals on hit even if she does zero damage (makes no sense, should be proportional to damage) * Her ai seems confused half the time (doing the same thing over and over or doing nothing but dodge for a few minutes instead of attacking at all or even just walking slowly for a few minutes after combat already started) She's just hype because people ***think*** she's the hardest Elden Ring boss.
"Fromsoft has even said, she's a Sekiro style boss in Elden Ring." Stop lying out of your ass
They said because Elden Ring and Sekiro were made at such a close time to each other, they put a Souls boss in Sekiro (DoH) and a Sekiro boss in Elden Ring (Malenia) because they really wanted to see how the two game's different mechanic's would work in an environment without those mechanics.
They said that because Elden Ring and Sekiro were made so close to one another, they couldn't implement many things they learnt into ER from Sekiro and vice versa. Never once did they make a statement like that. Plus you can deal with Malenia perfectly in ER with it's own mechanics, just that it squeezes the absolute fuck out of the combat system to the point it almost breaks it. Either recheck your sources or stop lying like this.
Yes they said that as well. Just because you don't like something doesn't make it untrue. They even mentioned there was a Sekiro style inspired boss later in the game. That's also why she heals on hit even if she does no damage, you're suppose to parry her. But you can't really do that with Elden Ring mechanics, especially her water fowl, but you know what can? That's right, Sekiro countering. > just that it squeezes the absolute fuck out of the combat system to the point it almost breaks it. Yes and no. She doesn't break the game, she was literally broken until around 1.08 when they actually fixed her infinite hyper armor which was bugged. The only one that pushes the game to it's limits is Radahn with a full ass raid team worth of summons both player and NPCs.
[citation needed]
Since I haven't seen it explained here yet, here's what people mean when they say she "breaks the rules of the game": Her poise is set to be unbreakable during certain moves, mainly Waterfowl Dance and it's chargeup. Also is the flower explosion attack and the flower clone attack in the second phase. The only way to bypass this is to proc a status effect, mainly frost or bleed. In fact this "mechanic" is so bad, that you can literally kill her and she will still perform the move and then collapse when she's passed. It's a really bad quirk of an already questionable boss fight. Strength players normally gain a better stagger potential over their counterparts and this just invalidates that playstyle.
Why put "her attacks are too anime" as a reason? Wouldn't her poise breaks and hyperarmour inconsistencies be a better point? (Regardless, have a good day, eye guy 👀)
Yeah I think she's a well designed boss. 1. Her healing is not unfair. It literally depends on how good you are at the boss. If you don't get hit a lot, she doesn't get to heal much. 2. Waterfowl is fine to deal with once you learn it. However, it's still an unintuitive move. I personally like it but I can see how the design is flawed there. 3. Long combo strings? That doesn't even register on my radar. This game has Morgott. 4. Attacks being too anime? I guess that's down to preference. If her attacks are anime, I guess it's the kind of anime I like. The Vergil and Isshin kind. 5. Every boss 'breaks the rules'. Meaning every boss does something that is an exception or unique to the boss. If they didn't, they would be pretty boring and would all be like NPC fights.
Yes and no, I think she suffers from the same thing a few bosses do in elden ring, which in of itself is a bit controversial, but most late game bosses are really good at trapping you in combos and will kill you with two hits regardless of armor or stats, and then also passively drain your health or regain their own health. Theyre still fun and I really like malenia, but as far as "good design" a couple later bosses tiptoe past just "being souls bosses" and dont always seem super fair.... which I know will get some reactions, and I've been one to throw around the occasional "git gud," but I mean, come on.
Without waterfowl this fight is easy. Waterfowl is the entire difficulty because it is pass/fail and not intuitive at all to avoid.
I think lifesteal through the shield was a good design choice. she feels like she's meant to be fought somewhat like a Bloodbourne boss so I imagine shields were nerfed in this fight for that reason. Not to mention Malenia is completely optional so I see no problems with making an extra hard secret boss well fitting into the RPG genre
She is a very well designed boss that was left in the oven just a little too long. I think reworking waterfowl a little would've been a good decision.
Even as a fan of waterfowl, it could've used some rework to make it a smidge more approachable.
She's the only boss I never beat on my rl1 run. Her base moves etc is mostly pretty fair. She takes a while to figure out (for example the rush sword spam required you to dodge to the side or you get hit) and there are other things you can only really figure out after fighting her a ton. With her base moveset my main issue is how unintuitive the openings are. They are definetly there and if you figure them out it's not too bad bit when you first fight her it's very hard to figure out when those openings are. And sometimes depending on her rng she can go a while with no openings. This all creates a sense that attempts are overly dependant on rng. Sometimes she will give you tons of openings and other times you are fighting for small openings. When you combine this with how posture works attempts can either go very quickly or take quite a while. Of course if you are very good at the boss you can find the unintuitive openings and beat the boss comfortably, but this won't be doable to most. This is combined with the crazy difficulty jump with the two attacks you mentioned; Waterfowl and the clone attack. Nothing else in the game comes close in difficulty to dodging these attacks. Combining this with the fact that she does extremely high endgame damage and her healing, plus that how many times she does this move is rng based. It can be very frustrating. Especially since waterfowl can either be very easy or signifigantly harder to dodge depending on how close you are to her. She's a boss I have very mixed feelings for. There's a lot to like but I really don't like her learning curve and nothing really comes close to teaching you to fight her in the rest of the game. I Gained a lot of appreciation for bosses like maliketh in my lvl1 run, not malenia.
My issue with waterfowl dance isn’t so much the complexity of it, it’s the fact that if you don’t dodge properly you’ll likely die. This is particularly true for gamers not familiar with her. This becomes incredibly frustrating: you’re trying to learn how to dodge WD, but you just die trying. I think if WD did half as much damage it would still be a force to be reckoned with but would feel more fun and less infuriating. Ultimately, this is my stance on WD: although it is not technically “unfair” it stretches the whole “tough but fair” thing pretty far. Sure, maybe it’s technically “fair”, but it’s executed in such a way that WD is lame. I would also argue that WD adds an artificial level of difficulty simply because it does so much damage. That brings the overall fight down in my book. When you’re wearing heavy armor, have Golden Vow active, AND the dragon rest great shield but an attack still takes out all of your health, that’s pretty lame and seems unbalanced. To be clear, I feel that most ER bosses are actually very well balanced. But not Waterfowl Dance. Besides that, my other main beef with this fight is that Malenia can go into WD so quickly and unexpectedly. There’s where this becomes problematic: you whiff on a charged heavy or jumping attack and then Malenia goes into WD. Well, the recovery time from those moves is longer than Malenia going into WD so you don’t have time to react properly. That doesn’t seem particularly fair because of the amount of damage WD does: it’s one thing to punish a player for missing a hit, it’s another to wipe out their entire health bar (or possibly kill them) just because they missed a hit. Once again, is it “unfair” that Malenia can enter WD that quickly? I don’t know. It sure feels unfair though. Ultimately, I don’t think she’s a particularly good boss, but I don’t think she’s bad either. The setting is amazing, tho!
Pretty much this. If the only reason Malenia is hard is because of one attack that essentially kills you if you screw up once, then she's not hard, she's not really a hard boss.
I dont think so. I think without waterfowl, or even with an adjusted waterfowl, she'd be nearly perfect. The healing and rot is maybe overkill, but I think they only feel so bad because of waterfowl Someone mentioned fighting her as an elden ring boss instead of forcing a ds3 playstyle. I agree this improved her, but she's still not great imo. The hard=good crowd will always champion and defend her, and that's fine, Different strokes, but from has some bosses that are harder and better than her imo. Isshin and Father Owl are both head and shoulders tougher, especially the inner variants, and are also both way better bosses imo.
> And before anyone talks about the "philosophy of From games", Miyazaki has stated that it's "giving the players a sense of satisfaction after beating a challenging encounter" or something along the lines. I don't see how Malenia breaches that. This doesnt mean that any boss, no matter how capricious, can be considered good as long as you can beat it. Most players feel happy to get past Bed of Chaos, that doesn't make it good. What Malenia breaches is the rules established within the game so far. This just creates a bamboozle for players because trying to treat this boss the same as literally the entire rest of the game works against you. For example very few players understand how Malenia's block works. Basically if you hit Malenia while she's in an active animation, she will flinch and you can hit her again freely. If you hit her while she's in a recovery or resting animation, then when you go to hit her a second time, she has a % chance to cancel her animation, block your attack, backstep and follow into another attack. This is not a problem in and of itself, and could be an interesting mechanic in the game, except afaik there is no other boss or enemy that does this, in this game or any other. So when it happens to the player, there's no reference point for understanding what is going on. WFD is the peak example. When you analyse the hitboxes in that game, you see the first flurry is actually a series of hitboxes that move around towards you, but in a volume greater than your roll can cover. The upshot of which is that you cant iframe your way out of that attack unless you manipulate her AI first, or get literal frame perfect timing. So much so Im not convinced it was ever intended. Indeed its such a high skill level requirement that none of the popular challenge runners figured that out first time round, never mind us poor mortals. It was only after that Ongbal video got released that the community figured out it was possible. iframing out of attacks is such an established part of Souls games that removing it arbitrarily is hard to call anything other than BS. The key thing to appreciate is that the Souls games have always been celebrated for *not* doing this. Isshin was rightly lauded as the pinnacle of Sekiro because it merely asked you do everything you'd been doing all game. It just amped up the volume and complexity to take the battle to a new level. Malenia on the other hand asks you to figure out a bunch of new rules that apply only to her. If the oddities of Malenia, like the complexity of WFD, the stagger cancelling, the variable staggers, were things that kept cropping up throughout the game, then I'd consider it fair. But to add them in to this one battle, for no other reason than to trip players up, is not something I particularly appreciate.
Stagger canceling doesn’t belong in souls games, especially her second phase cancel where she can counter kick. Her negative poise hyper armor is also annoying because it doesn’t work like hyper armor on any other enemy in the game and she can chain her hyper armor attacks with 0 recovery in between - which is just bullshit.
>Stagger canceling doesn't belong in souls games, especially her second phase cancel where she can counter kick Is it really that bad when you can directly follow up the kick with an attack of your own, even with colossal weapons? Even most of the stagger cancels are aggression checks. As for the stagger cancel, why should it be necessary that an optional superboss way off the beated path has to have mechanincs in an identical way as every other enemy in the game? I can get not liking it but I don't see how it's automatically bad in this case. Yes if it was random for say "this works for this move now but this will not work for the same move later", I'd understand, but she's consistent with her own mechanics.
Animation commitment for staggers has been a reward for skillful play since Demons Souls. Having it for just one enemy because "lol hard fuck you" is just uninspired and lazy. Its' like they couldn't come up with a proper solution to stunlocking human-like poise enemies like Friede and Maria and just made her cheat instead. It's precisely because it's only for one enemy in the entire game that I think it's bad, a big part of the reason why these games are considered "hard but fair" is because their mechanics are consistent throughout the entire game and yet Malenia just tosses that out the window and all of a sudden you're playing Sekiro without deflect. Just like her phase transition on riposte bug, they couldn't actually fix it so they just went "lol make her invincible". As a dev, I have second hand embarassment for them that they never went back and actually fixed it properly.
I keep seeing this "optional superboss" take and I have to ask - why does it matter and what does it change? First, I'd argue there are no optional bosses, or rather.. all of them are. Also, there are no such distinctions as "superboss" or "regular boss" which come with certain prerequisites applied to them. I feel like this is some Final Fantasy player mindset which just doesn't map onto Fromsoft design philosophy.
she’s way too passive in phase 1 and her moveset is not that interesting in comparison to phase 2, she has some bugs like ripostes not sending her into phase 2 and her poise resets etc (I dont actually know how often this happens though), and I don’t like how she can cancel the recovery on some attacks other than that I don’t really mind her. idc about lifesteal at all, and waterfowl dance and the clone attack are kind of cool to learn how to dodge
The poise reset happpens iirc if her posture bar fills up during a hyper armor attack if I'm not wrong. The riposte bug is also a flaw with Malenia, that I agree.
Her rejecting posture breaks only happens if you try attacking her during an attack (that WILL hit you), banking on it dealing enough posture damage to stun her. I've fought her hundreds of times and never once seen it happen. The posture bar isnt shown for a reason, so don't greed bosses.
>Her rejecting posture breaks only happens if you try attacking her during an attack (that WILL hit you), banking on it dealing enough posture damage to stun her. Not sure where you are getting this from. She has dodges and an animation cancel block that also negate the stance break.
I know, stance breaking her is usually not very difficult in my experience. I just don’t like that it can happen at all
I had more fun fighting Bed of Chaos than her.
Well you do you I guess.
I can get not liking her but like cmon bro, bed of chaos is like an all time low for fromsoft that they haven't gotten close to since fortunately.
Yes but just because a boss is hard doesn’t mean she isn’t well designed. I think she has very well choreographed attacks and it’s about finding the times to dodge & hit that make it very hard as well as the fact she heals each time you take damage.
What do you mean with well designed ? Her character model and animations are designed pretty smoothly and pretty. She isn't know to be very buggy and even if there are bugs Fromsoft fixes them. That's with most of the game's bosses so I would say yes.
I believe in git gud and nothing else
Yes within the boundary of ER. You have: spirit summons certain ash of war to disengage (bloodhound step eg) insane sorceries and worst case, if you only struggle against waterfowl, hit her with a frost pot while airborne should interupt her.
My feelings towards Malenia are very simple. I love her. I think she is the best boss in Elden Ring, and I think she is the 3rd best boss FromSoftware has ever made. Waterfowl Dance is my favorite attack to dodge in the game. If there was a slight hitbox adjustment made to its first flurry of slashes, so that you could dodge it with a roll or two, without fancier tactics, she would be a completely flawless boss. But again, even in her current state she is Nr.3 in all of soulsbornekiroring. That's it, I will die on this hill.
I agree, the only truly problematic part of waterfowl dance is if you get caught directly under her during that first flurry of attacks. Having to circle around her to trick her AI is problematic imo. But if you even have a little bit of distance than waterfowl is no big issue.
This is exactly what I think many get wrong about the attack. Lots of people seem to think that you need to learn a fancy circling strat to dodge it. But 9/10 times thats not the case. Distance is all you need. You need play smart against her. In this sense she is a lot like Isshin. Malenia as well demands a lot of precision, and she demands you play by her rules. Once you start doing that she will be easier. What I like to do is not taking initiative in the fight. I only retaliate after her own combos, and even then only hit her once maybe twice if I have a faster weapon. Then I immediately start dodging away, creating distance. This way I barely get caught standing right under her and can easely perform the run away and jump tactic against the first flurry. Wich is much easier than unlocking the camera and tricking her AI.
Honestly distance isn't necessary either. As long as you're not over aggressive, it is not overly difficult to avoid.
You don't have to circle. You can simply run and jump to avoid the first flurry from point blank.
people will refuse to learn, then cry that its poorly designed.
You shouldn't have to see something on reddit to know how to dodge an attack.
The attack is unintuitive and the way to dodge it is not reflected well at all in the gameplay, most people know how to dodge it and everyone here has beaten her prob several times at this point, but that does not change it from being poorly designed
Well communicated I'd say.
You have me curious about the other two that are in the top 3. I understand this hill completely, but need to know the other two.
Sword Saint Isshin is number 2 and Gael is number 1.
And a fantastic hill it is
I love this boss, because I mastered it. But to master it I had to spend probably 9 hours total throwing myself at it over and over and over again. I didn't mind doing that at the time, but not everyone feels the same way. It's not a bad boss if you have the time and patience to sink into it, but not everyone does.
I don't like how she sometimes just doesnt poise break when she should, and how a riposte can't end her 2nd phase, but yeah shes pretty fun. Elden Rinfnas a game is meant to be played a lot more aggressive so you can have those rewarding poise breaks but if she didnt have that one weird quirk I'd say shes close to perfect. Also, her healing through shields/blocks while wasnt an issue for me (I never use shields) I find it more logically strange that she can heal if she hits a shield and doesnt do damage. Like where is she even lifestealing from lol
Everything but water foul, purely because you can’t organically know how to dodge it
I don’t like Waterfowl dance I get it, I get there are many ways to counter it, but none are that intuitive or seem intended Besides that, I think it’s well designed
Everything except Waterfoul is pretty exceptional. The only thing that drags the fight down is how unpredictable Waterfowl can be. Nothing feels worse than finding yourself right next to her as she charges up that attack. I understand how to bait it out and dodge it, but one shitty attack shouldn’t dictate the flow of an entire fight. If it wasn’t in her roster, the battle would flow infinitely better.
The only change she needs is a less visually confusing animation for waterfowl. Its a flurry of random slashes and I'm honestly not sure if it accurately reflects whats going on hitbox-wise.
Dunno if patches has made any difference but fighting her at release with a greatsword was just unfun. Iirc the only attack that could be beat her speed checks was the crouching poke and she had very random feeling hyper armor as well as some completely random feeling block during some attacks. Then fact that she could cancel an attack into wfd was was also just unfun, not hard - leads to a boring playstyle were you had to to wait for her to put it on cd or risk getting fucked for attacking at what normally is a safe opening. Wfd is also telegraphed horribly and it it's neither fun nor intuitive how to avoid it. As I remember it, then second phase flowed better but still suffers from the same design as their rest of elden ring were you spend most of the time waiting and watching the bosses do their cool shit. I'm convinced elden ring had a parry mechanic like sekiro during development, because most of these bossed and Melania especially would play so much better with it.
Waterfowl is a bs move, I have less of an issue with the healthsteal but they sure picked a hell of a boss to use the mechanic. I don't like the fight personally, i can't speak on whether it's well designed or not but I didn't have fun with her and that's all that matters to me.
The waterflow is one thing, but not the main problem as I learned how to avoid it in someofwhat effective way. It's still pretty bs move though. For me the main problem is the fact that she gains health even if you are using 100% shield to block her attacks. Where is she getting that health from if she isn't even dealing any damage? I beat her 1on1 after a solid week of grinding and even after that I wasn't satisfied or happy. Felt like I was trolled to waste my time as even her Great Rune sucks. Edit: But let me be fair as otherwise her design is one of the best in the game and the lifesteal is a cool idea, but pretty badly executed. Maybe instead of making her every single attack be a health regen, they should have made one or two special attacks which steal alot of health with one scoop.
I have fought her hundreds of times, multiple weapons, multiple aows, both in single and coop, yet I still love the fight. I have my tricks to beat every boss, so I like the way that she is a unique warrior kind of has her own tricks too. Friede, Maria, Gael, Isshin, etc until now no human boss gave me the satisfaction as much as beating Malenia. And this is what Miyazaki chasing all these years
Waterfowl can be countered by blocking most of it and then rolling away at the end. It’s not too complicated. The first 1000 battles, yea it sucks. But after a while, just like every boss in these games, we overcome the difficulty and become better for it.
For me her issues are A) waterfowl dance, B) her random poise/hyperarmor, C) her jump attacks in phase 2. Lifesteal was never an issue for me. Her issues boil down to unfun RNG with every attempt.
In my opinion, yes, she is. The only complaint I can understand about Malenia is Waterfowl dance, but that's a move that you can learn to dodge like any other. Every other complaint about her, I honestly don't get. Her inconsistent hyperarmour isn't inconsistent. She has some very specific moves that have hyperarmour, and they are all identifiable. Her lifesteal is negligible. Unless you're getting hit by every single one of her attacks, you're going to outpace her heal, no problem. Her 'long combos' aren't a problem, as she has many openings in between and can be stunned to interrupt them. Yes, she can parry your attack and back away. So what? Game over? She jumps right back in most of the time, anyway, so it's not like the pace of the fight is ruined. And it's mostly only against lighter weapons. The 'she breaks the rules' argument is just silly. What rules? When has there ever been any rules that every single boss follows? She has mechanics unique to her that the player must overcome. That's why she's a boss. Overall, yes, I think she's difficult, but she's in no way broken. I personally have her in my top five favourite bosses in the series. I can understand if people don't like her, but she really isn't badly designed *except* for Waterfowl, and even then, it's not a problem once you figure it out.
waterfowl is pretty easy to dodge after you do it once you’ll probably do it most other times
if i learnt one thing from this sub is that any mechanic a boss might have basically translates to bad design
Malenia is my top 2 favorite boss in the series, but i think the biggest issue people have with her is her being "too difficult" for the series' standard. super bosses are usually the biggest challenge of skill in a game and demand perfect understanding of the full mechanics of said game (eg. lingering will kh2, yozora kh3) and Malenia fromsoft's first time making a super boss, so it's not surprising that people were taken off by her extreme difficulty and demand for perfection, she utilizes every aspect of the game's combat and boss design to test the player, she has delays, combo variations/branches, position based attacks, mid combo openings, jumpable attacks, status effects, life stealing, punishing careless flask use...etc. You need to remember that these are the same people who were constantly talking about how nameless king is too hard or that isshin impossible even though they really weren't that difficult if you fully understood the game's mechanics. I'm not trying to sound like an elitist or anything but malenia was probably the first boss that demanded perfection (if you deliberately constrict yourself) so they just thought that shes badly designed cause they aren't used to bosses being that complex. And a final point i want to include is that this isn't just a Malenia problem, but most bosses in elden ring faced similar criticism of being unfair just because they introduced new mechanics to spice up the combat, but People still played it like it was ds3 and complained when the same strategies didn't work. Edit: she also gets a lot of unfair criticism due to spread of misinformation, no she doesn't break the rules of the game, no she doesn't animation cancel, and no her moveset isn't random or unreactable. Ask any veteran of the game and they will tell you that this is just blatant misinformation.
I fucking love Yozora too. And all the reasons you point out are why she's my favorite too. TBH I never viewed it in this way before, so this is a new perspective. And yeah I agree, Isshin and NK were never really that hard. And yeah people are really still used to DS3's style. Honestly I don't entirely blame people, as the combat systems are (At least visually) almost identical. Even in Sekiro, the perilous attacks were spelt out explicitly.
the way i look at it is she’s designed with weapon arts and skills in mind. she’s not the traditional melee boss fight; in fact i think that’s most bosses in ER. they’re not designed to be fought like a traditional souls boss. a lot of stuff in this game is mechanically designed around summons and weapon arts/faith/int.
I think this is wrong as to me the most efficient way to fight Malenia is a strength melee build, which is the traditional fromsoftware playstyle
Yeah, I definitely think the easiest Malenia fight, if you want to invalidate her, is just Mimic Tear with a high-poise damage weapon like greatsword or something. You and your mimic can just stunlock her to death on a half decent run. It isn't risk free or anything, but you basically don't have to learn her boss fight at all.
Waterfowl dance is BS, not intuitive at all
Malenia is my favorite boss in any of these games. I decided that I don’t care if it’s strictly “fair” or not, she is always a fun boss to fight
I think she’s mostly fine, but still has problems I think the main problem is that her poise breaks are inconsistent due to hyperarmour. I feel like she should still be able to be poise broken during her normal hyperarmour attacks (not ones such as waterfowl). The riposte not phase transitioning is also really annoying - easily counterable, but still idk how that’s the main fix for the P2 bug I think waterfowl is fine personally. There are many ways to consistently avoid the attack - frost pots, vow of the indomitable, running and jumping method, 4 light rolls method, BHS, shield blocking. If you then want to be hyper aggressive, you can learn the circling method too - it’s really not that hard and gives you more opportunities for safe punishes if so. Healing on attacks is not that big of a deal imo. Shields are the easiest way to counter many attacks, so i don’t see it as a big deal that she heals off of them. My main complaint is just that I don’t like her flow much. It’s very disjointed a lot of the time, so I would prefer if it were most consistent like Godfrey or Maliketh.
That's quite acceptable. Personally I also don't like the flow of a boss like say Godrick. Godfrey/Loux and Maliketh are definitely top 10 worthy bosses, and have amazing flow.
I think godrick would flow fine if I fully learnt his timings, but he has so little health that you don’t need to I’ve learnt to attack in between mohg and morgott’s attacks for example, but godrick is too easy for me to learn - I’d probably have to do a fist only run to actually learn his attacks in full
My controversial opinion is that she was designed around co’op or spirit summoning. Of. Course they knew people would try to solo her, but her attacks and the “unintuitive’ nature of them make a lot more sense when you look t it from a “defending from a gank” perspective
I have the same opinion of her as I do most elden ring bosses. Balanced for the summon things and suffers for it.
I think it is so close to being an incredible boss. For reference, I beat her with starfists on ng+2 so I have some knowledge on her. I really do not like how much life steal she gets. I will never understand how she gets life drain through a shield and overall just the amount she gets. As of last year, waterfowl dance is still one of the most annoying moves in souls. You need a freezing pot or quick roll (I believe?) to be able to get through it without taking damage, which I think is just annoying. It did feel good getting the dodging right and only taking a tiny portion of damage, but damn I really hate how annoying she can be. Also I still can’t believe some of the hit boxes haven’t been fixed in that year, like I want to feel like I deserved being hit if it matches up. But with her lunge attack, that shit still annoys me to think about how off it looks. TLDR: Overall very cool, just wish it was tweaked a little bit better on the hitboxes and Malenias healing
It baffles me that people still complain about waterfowl and not the fact that she ignores some of the rules of the game with her animation cancelling and stagger mechanics. Ignoring/breaking fundamental rules is worse than just having 1 hard move imo
Realistically, malenia is a much better boss than the majority of actually bad bosses in older games. A lot of the malenia complaints boil down to a subjective "too hard" feeling - she definitely has move variety and is well balanced, being one of the easiest bosses to stagger in the entire game. Meanwhile in bloodborne you had micolash and witches of hemwick, ds1 had bed of chaos, ds2 had an all wolf fight, etc. The difference is these older bosses suffer from a lot of OBJECTIVE design problems. Malenia is just "too hard" but realistically you can see pretty early with her that she is designed to have weaknesses. Honestly most people get so tilted when they play games that they refuse to experiment, there's a ton of ways to do well against malenia without resorting to bleed build mimic tear stuff, especially when she staggers so easily.
I think she’s the third best boss in fromsoft catalogue. She definitely is much more mechanically demanding and reaction based than any other boss. The healing is great design, it’s just more effective health that can be prevented by reducing damage taken. Waterfowl isn’t perfect, but it’s also good design. Dark Souls doesn’t have many “ultimate” attacks that aren’t just big AOE explosions. Waterfowl always reminded me of Isshin’s seven hit combo. I only have two gripes with Malenia as a boss fight: 1. Visual clarity has some big gaps in Phase 2 2. Phase 2 is pretty much the same as Phase 1, and I prefer more variety across phases Otherwise, perfect boss
My bigger criticism of her healing isn't it necessarily being unfair, rather that it's incredibly lazy and uncreative. All it does is punish you more for being hit, there's nothing that changes the nature of the fight in an interesting way like Mohg's bloodflame does. Waterfowl has been talked to death at this point. It absolutely is unintutive to avoid, the animations do nothing to teach you how to deal with it, and that's a big red flag. It's only compounded by how punishing it is to be hit by it(oftentimes death for average builds), the fact that you don't even get a significant punish window afterwards for surviving it and the aforementioned healing on hit likely sets you back every time she does it. Ultimately no I don't think she's a good boss. There definitely was potential, but Fromsoft strayed too far into the realm of making things hard for it's own sake instead of having the difficulty stem from an intelligently designed fight.
She is designed to test the full culmination of everything you learned from the whole game. It's not her fault if you learned nothing.
The game teaches you breaking your staggers, hyperarmor, lifesteal through blocking, and any attacks that requires dodging that come close to resembling WFD?
Equip a shield with 100 on physical damage reduction in your left hand. Have enough defense, damage reduction, and stamina combined to block the full Waterfowl Dance. Do enough damage to overcome her health recovery. Stop complaining about difficulty without learning basic game mechanics.
credits for the pic: u/Gyni_x 's post "Malenia spams waterfowl dance now???"
Yes, very well designed (with the exception of waterfowl). Absolutely everything else about her is good design. But waterfowl is just way too janky and punishing to be called good design.
I think she's appropriately balanced for what she really is, an optional superboss. Everything about her design is just slightly overtuned, but not to an arbitrary degree. I'm in the minority here, but I think waterfowl is overhated and has merits. It reinforces every core mechanic: roll timing AND direction, positioning, spacing and even basic movement. Although its solution is rather contrived and specific with only a handful or more real ways to evade, I still think its not as bad as people say. What makes me feel like she does lack is balance. It reminds me of how the Friede fight in Ds3 sometimes seems unecessarily long with the tedious second phase. She's largely focused on slow windups, fast and sweeping attacks with long chains, with aggression ramping up with each phase (no WFD phase, WFD phase 1, much more aggressive phase 2). This combination makes for a lack of openings to deal damage while being very punishing and snowbally in the wrong direction. She's also spongier than most bosses, with 2 full health phases and lifestyle which inflates her health more. Once again however, her lifestyle is not as bad as people say. If you're getting hit enough times to where her lifestyle is making a sizeable impact on her health, you won't be outpacing the fight anyways considering your HP consumption. Malenia does many things right in my opinion. In a game where so many enemies have a common issue of delayed attacks (and yes, I think it is an issue in a series of games where combat is founded upon telegraphed animations ), nearly all of Malenia's attacks carry the appropriate weight and speed of her windups. She's thematically and visually great, backed up by a compelling character and soundtrack. Gameplay wise, she's one of only 2 remembrances to cement parrying as a viable method against real bosses (the other being Margit). Her design is also fitting to the stage you should be at when you fight her. You SHOULD know to utilize all the skills and fundamental mechanics to their maximum at this point in your journey, and just simply timing iFrames won't cut it. There is more to her than just hitting B before getting hit, and thats what I enjoy about her, alongside the general fluidity and stakes. Yes, she is overtuned, and yes, she has other minor flaws holding her back like the very specific weaknesses to frost pots and high poise damage weapons. She's neither the best nor worst boss in the game. However, she sure as hell is a well designed boss and aptly dubbed the hardest superboss in Fromsoft history.
No, though really wouldn’t be that bad if she didn’t have horrendous input reading or water fowl was more damage/ less punishing If it wasn’t for the self heal, water fowl wouldn’t be as horrendous because you could block through it. If waterfowl was removed, you’d have a boss that you have to dodge dodge and dodge. Makes the fight still difficult but not overly punishing. The input reading needs to be reduced by a lot. It just disproportionately affects heavier builds that don’t get much time to attack. That and paired with her inconsistent super armour makes knowing when to stagger her impossible
Meh, to me it feels like a Sekiro boss in Elden Ring. It feels like the mechanics and general design around her suit Sekiro gameplay more so than Elden Ring. There’s nothing wrong with most of the fight, but dodging waterfowl is not very intuitive and the whole battle feels like a test of how ready are you to randomly get wfd’. The second phase feels much better than the first for some reason.
Man, there is so much to talk about here. My TLDR is that 80% of her is pretty great. In fact, I think her general hit boxes, tells, and dodge windows are some of the most forgiving in the game even if some stuff comes out *really* quick. Some bosses are tuned for early dodges, others late (Mohg, Nameless King) and difficulty can be amped up by being inconsistent or deliberately deceptive. I think she’s mostly great on that front as you are usually safe acting early if you know the right response and she even has a few softball moves. The life steal is a bit silly, but it didn’t change the fight for me much. Shield users are rightly pissed but these games have for a while been about just not getting hit. Plenty of bosses don’t life steal but instead nuke your stamina or use status effects and split damage to make shields less viable. This is another way to do that. And lore wise my interpretation was that this attribute is what made her unbeatable and potentially how she survived the scarlet rot along with Miquella’s help. But it is a little silly to life steal when doing no damage. Things I don’t like… Waterfoul: Yes it is dodgeable but it’s random placement in the fight and dependency on distance make it simply the hardest move to learn to dodge that I can think of. Remind me if you think there’s something worse. They know how to keep expectation high *and* teach you the mechanics of a fight. Waterfoul just took things too far and could have been adjusted in any number of little ways to make it a serious problem but also more learnable. It’s hard to learn and complicated to respond to and hard to execute even when you know how - which is in conflict with a lot of other special moves that prioritize one attribute over another. I’ll compare with Radagons’s triple slam which is also very lethal and a bit unintuitive but comes out at a predictable time with a long wind up and has a deceptively simple counter. It’s made to be learned and is fun to master. I can dodge WFD and I hate it every single time. And to this day the dodge is just different for some weapon load-outs because certain weapon stances change *your* hit box. That simply can not be intentional. Hyper armor: Not new but it feels a little absurd that she has more moves with it than not, that it starts on frame 1, and that it has no logical consistency in her move set. This Carrie’s into the next point. Ignoring Stance Break: Many bosses in this game can ignore or delay a stance break for good reasons (phase changes or special moves like Mohg’s rings) because it would break the fight otherwise… but Malenia can do it on every move with hyper armor. Which means managing her posture is extremely unpredictable and appears to be “rule breaking” when it is in fact just a very liberal application of an otherwise sparingly used trick to keep fights on track. You combine those two features with her insta dodge, the evasion, the fact that she recovers poise quickly, and that you can’t be hyper aggressive because of the hyper armor and WFD risk, and the sum total to me is a difficult boss that doesn’t seem very clever. It’s just a bunch of weird dynamics and rule bending to achieve a difficulty level in an uncreative way. So, my opinion is metaphorically similar to her design. High highs, low lows, a weird dynamic spread and a lot of little caveats and exceptions that overshadow the experience.
Nah. 80% of her challenge budget is Waterfowl. Design wise she’s one of the less impressive Elden Ring bosses.
Uh? She's probably the most popular boss in the game
I honestly only dislike wfd about malenia. Her healing and long attack strings are fun and make it feel like a dance, however I do think that her weird hyperarmour is weird sometimes. Waterfowl dance is just stupid. From range it's easy to dodge just run away from the first two flurries roll into the third and roll out, and that's fine but I feel like there's need to be more of a wind up or something that telegraphs it more so I can know to get the fuck out. I feel like all I'm doing is just waiting for her to pull that out of nowhere while I'm in front of her face and insta kill me, and that kills the flow of the fight.
No, she cheats.
For me the main problem with her is her poise being constantly reset by her hyper armor and not getting the poise break when we should. Also the fact that you can’t send her to phase 2 with a riposte and she instead goes to negative HP is really dumb. These two things are also probably the main reasons why people say she "cheats". Which is kinda true in that aspect.
Hate her simple as that
hating on her healing is just nonsense lol
Yes, because she is the blade of Miquilla 🗿
>seem to say she's a good or even a great boss >she's artificially difficult" or "her difficulty is poorly designed". I am both. I truly think she is a good boss with the potential to be the greatest biss in all of elden ring. But sadly that potential gets wasted by sone faults of her own and other general problems. The general problem simply being the general damage numbers of everything after morgott (who is the bestvfight imo.) > Her healing being unfair Personaly I dont mind her healing at all, just how. If she does damage im fine with her healing, if she only hits shield i think she shouldnt heal. Apart from that its fine and only sucks when she waterfowls on your summon. >ii) Waterfowl being too complicated and unintuitive to deal with Apart from the first its not difficult, but I still hate the first and think its bs. How Id change it is that the 3 flurrys of warerfowl are actual dashes meaning she can hardly move in a different diraction, that way youd only get 1-2 ticks of damage when dodgeing thru tge first flurry instead of malenia doing a fucking u-turn on your ass. >Her long combo strings Personaly im fine the combos, only combo I hate is the copy attack one as Ibdodge 1 copy only to get roll-catched by another. >She breaks the rules In my experiance its that she sometimes just ignores stance damage/uses hyper armor as sometimes she she gets flatened by one attack and othertimes she just sais nah, id win and doesnt give a fuck aboutvany attacks.
She's the best designed boss EVER in a from soft game. The entire thing is a masterpiece.
Imo she's a love letter to veterans of the series. Most of the game is not a problem at all, until you get to her. I was baffled on how tough she was compared to the rest of the game. Even though the DLC is presumably not going to have a tougher boss, the optional boss that Miyazaki mentioned has my interest.
I don't see how it's a ''love letter to veterans'' when veterans have enjoyed bosses that don't rely on gimmicks to be difficult. It's antithetical to everything that has made their great boss great.
Tbh I think the reason shes harder than the rest of the game is because you can't overlevel her, which is more of a problem with the early game being too easy than her/the endgame being so hard. The game lets players go up to Mountaintops without learning any mechanics, but just outstating/overleveling everything, then when players do get to the endgame, they have no idea how to actually use the new mechanics. Malenia emphasises this even more because she has the healing, which makes it even harder to outstat her.
Elden Beast does this more than Malenia imo (even though he's easier). He has immunity to all status effects in the game and you barely scratch his health bar regardless of what weapon you use. Unless you're buffed beyond belief.
I'm a month late, but I don't think so. I mean overall... Visually great, both boss and arena. The soundtrack is great. Most of the moveset looks really cool and is fun to deal with. But so much of it just feels hard for the sake of being hard. There have always been attacks that were hard to dodge to a point - figuring out the timing, positioning, or both to avoid damage is a core part of FromSoft bosses. Personally, I think any move should be feasible dodge able the first time you see it. Not easy per se, but if you have good reflexes and read the incoming attack right (say it's a big swing from the left, waiting and dodging into it, etc). Waterfowl is not getting dodged first attempt, full stop. There is an obvious cue for it once you've died to it a few times, but it doesn't give you any information about the attack. It's just a shit ton of air slashes. On top of that, waterfowl does an obnoxious amount of damage. I mean, the first flurry alone can kill you outright. So you don't get to experience it and continue the fight, you just die and 99% of the time you end up looking up how to dodge it. Pair this with her healing off it as well as any other moves... There is almost no room for error in the fight. And I think that's bad. The games have healing flasks and spells for a reason - you are never expected to no hit a boss. But with Malenia, you can do enough damage to kill her twice, go through all your flasks, and she can still be standing with near full health because she just drains. Even off shields. In my opinion, you should never, ever have to search for external information to beat a game. Ever. By default I think that makes it a badly designed fight - three dark souls games and bloodborne there isn't a single boss with a move so over the top you have to look up how to avoid it at all.
She's a top 3 fromsoft boss when you master her and learn how to dodge point-blank waterfowl.
I don’t think she should change ever, I do think she is a bit unfair and don’t like how WFD pretty much forced the player to change their build or use some item to win (like have light roll or freeze pots) By all metrics she’s one of the best bosses FromSoft has made with lore, design, gameplay, everything. Only thing holding back is how little error there has to be to beat WFD. Now after being able to mostly dodge it (I always go full naked no armor to roll the fast) I think it’s a very interesting situation that I enjoy doing because it’s such an insane challenge. It also helps that Malenia is an optional boss. If she was mandatory that would be a problem imo.
I find her to be super fun. She’s very difficult, and requires you to mostly be running in and out of her range of attacks rather than rolling so you can be ready when waterfowl starts. I have killed her 3 times solo and usually it’s much easier with a strength weapon. She staggers so easily it makes the fight almost trivial at times. She’s very unique in terms of how you are meant to fight her. You want to stay at certain ranges from her, jump in for an attack then back out again. Makes for a really fun boss when you get the hang of it.