Malenia, Blade of Miquella [1 Hit, Deathless] RL1+0 Zwei Only - Elden Ring Challenge Run

Описание: 1 Dumb hit, not bad. I think the bell curve of Malenia is noobs hate her, then you get consistent wins and like her, then you challenge runner and hate her again.

Stop b***hing about Waterfowl Run-Around dodge and learn to sprinting jump you cretins:
   • Stop Complaining About Waterfowl Dance     / prettyspoopyharebatchest-g8b0ckwmd4rzueai  

Thanks Dad: https://imgur.com/a/zaUWERa
See what the Godfather of modern souls has to say about colossals:    • Elden Ring Invader Uses Big Weapons  

Streamed live on twitch:   / lupineos  
Come hang with the gang.

Check out the After Dark (Souls) Side Channel: ‪@NotLoopine‬

The Challenge Run in it's entirety:    • Margit RL1+0 Zwei Only - Elden Ring Challe...  

OK so some BS I noticed while fighting Malenia: Her poise/posture immunity mechanic is inconsistent in the sense that her immunity frames from one attack can sometimes linger and overlap with the startup of another attack that has this, causing you to attack and she just tanks it and does her attack on you. This might explain why she also stands still or does a full recovery animation but takes seemingly no hit-stun/stagger.

Phase 1 is awful. Her aggro is just broken and she just will stand there unless you cross one of two aggro rings. She won't even aggro you if you hit her sometimes. This coupled with the fact that she can instantly enter a hyperarmor attack makes punishing her neutral very unsafe and drags out the fight to 3 times longer than it should be. Phase 2 she actually makes way more sense as she is so aggressive she will just start another attack once one ends, so you just have to know the recovery of attacks, rather than trying to walk up to her face with a reaction roll ready to see if she is going to waterfowl out of edgewalk animation. Phase 2 also has her jumping into the air which is easily punished with a roll and then fully charged R2 so way more big punish opportunities.

Her kit is pretty boring, like if you take out waterfowl she has the most bland moveset ever. Dodging waterfowl dance is the most fun you'll have with Malenia. Besides that, the idea to have a boss that can access any move at any time to make custom combos sounds like a great idea. In execution it's more like she endlessly strings meh, singular attacks in a not so engaging way and you have to more or less account for a ton of options for any given situation to the point where it limits your openings.

Her tracking is jank. She will just attack facing away from you or even dash in a circle right at you and dead angle attacks while turning them at you, which is completely f**Ked to dodge when she should just have dedicated attacks for when players are behind her. in Phase 2 with her wings, if she starts an attack facing away from you you cannot see what attack she is doing on attacks that have ~ 0.5 second reaction time. You can still tell tho with how her body moves but it can be tough, you have to be really sharp.

The terrain hard messes with her moves, making some attacks impossible to dodge at times. This isn't really a unique problem to her but she already has inconsistent attack patterns and frame data. 1 year later I now am more inclined to agree with Swagopagos in that her posture/poise/stagger immunity or hyperarmor mechanic is a patchwork solution for the problem that she was likely way too vulnerable to posture breaks.

Her combo flowcharts hard punish rolling at her in a lot of cases.

Thematically she is a miss as the goddess of rot in her mechanics. Aside from walking into the easily punishable pink explosions, standing in scarlet aeonia for some reason, or blocking an entire Waterfowl Dance, she will kill you 20 times over before she will ever rot you. I think it would have been interesting if she had a few more low damage moves that apply multihit or lots of rot buildup as getting rotted is an extremely bad situation vs a boss like Malenia anyways as you really have to know her kit very well to know when you can heal or use an item. This would be problematic with her erratic AI in phase 1 but phase 2 has alot more consistent windows for this.

tl;dr She is fun to beat to death and dodge waterfowl but she is hellish to hitless.

This is from my infamous "Suck it Anderson" Elden Ring challenge run. I always nickname runs so they aren't such a mouthful, but basically it's a Zweihander only, RL1+0 build. The point of this run is for me to have fun mastering the bosses while showing that anyone with two eyeballs and a heartbeat can learn the bosses, and to show that colossal weapons are better now than they have ever been. The posture system is a better incentive to playing aggressive than the rally system ever was tbh.

Timestamps:
0:00 Hell
3:51 The Hit in Question
8:08 Phase 2
12:49 We Both Go Sicko Mode


#eldenring #challengerun #hitless