Healing is a staple of any soulslike. From the very beginning, Demon’s Souls introduced healing items to the genre to fight off the dangers of the world. The healing items were consumable, however, forcing the player to either get good enough to use fewer healing items or find spots to farm the various levels of healing items to have a stash.
Dark Souls ditched the types of consumable grass and instead introduced the Estus Flask - the healing item that comes with several healing charges which auto-refill when you rest at a bonfire or die.
Apart from Bloodborne, which had Blood Vials (controversial), Estus Flasks or similar have become a mainstay of the genre. But which of these are better for the game and which do you prefer?
Estus Flasks come with limited charges, but they refill automatically, so you don’t have to farm healing items and can just focus on the boss fight that’s giving you trouble. Consumable healing usually comes in larger quantities (20 Blood Vials plus a couple extra if you use specific runes), so you have more healing at your disposal in a boss fight, hence you can be more aggressive and reckless, but you run the risk of running out of healing at some point, so you might have to farm them at some point.
Thoughts?
Hah, pretty much opposite me then. The elemental system and the mask lines were the unique gimmicks of the game so I went all in on those. I grabbed a stamina node from the Assassin tree I think and barely any from the Bruiser, the rest went left and top of the tree. The Battlemage talent where using a mask line has a chance to instantly change another is super fun to use.
I didn’t really register it, but yeah now that you mentioned it I guess there aren’t any female enemies in Quinta huh. Let’s chalk it up to budget I guess.
It is nice though that there are no chainmail bikinis or other needlessly oversexualized stuff like that on the women characters, I agree with that. But yeah some warrior women in service of Veltha wouldn’t have been out of place.
It was a mixed bag I guess. It felt tough at times for sure. Funny enough some of the regular enemies were worse for me than bosses in terms of parrying. Lumberjack overhead axe smash and the spear wielding fishermen in Falesia Magna would get me all the time 😅 The halberd automaton too with the delayed attack. Eventually I learned which enemies I’d parry and which I would avoid trying to. I wasn’t above using the laser staff in the second half of the game either if I was struggling with an enemy or boss. Since it scaled with status power it did a ton of damage with my build, and I could be safer and keep distance more. Same with some mask lines. I also used consumables a lot against bosses when appropriate.
It felt good when it did click though. I really liked the sound effect for the parry, very nice and clangy. And most of the time for bosses I would get there eventually. Spaventa for example was one where I got dialed in on the parries and it felt really good. Was probably my favourite boss in the game.
I’ll say that the mask lines are pretty cool, I’m using them but more as a complement, much like the arm in sekiro or lies of P. But yeah I really need to diversify my play style XD.
There are some really useful ones. The harpoon I think it was that you get pretty early has great stagger that you can fire from range to interrupt enemies and the giant overhead hammer smash (forget the name) has some hyper armor and deals like a million posture damage. I had a lot of fun playing around with them. There are some with like 0 startup frames too that you can just throw out for some extra DPS.