Shadow Of The Erdtree Has A Fatal Flaw

CORRECTION 1: The difference between blessing levels 12 and 20 is actually 10% more damage, not 20%. Point still stands though. CORRECTION 2: The blessing does carry over to NG+ so I was wrong about that, sorry.

Yeah the whole scooby doo fragment system sucks. They should not have done what they did with the scaling. Who the F cares if the munchkins speed thru the DLC? 99.99999% of players will still find it extremely challenging.

If The Old Hunters didn't need any goofy extra leveling system, idk why SotE needed one

The main reason I hated making a new character in base game was the mandatory run in the beginning to get all the flask upgrades and to start all those tedious npc questlines. This scadu system is just that but multiplied. I had 3 characters ready for the dlc, but after beating it once, I don't feel like doing it again.

Personally I never rly had to look up a guide for the fragments. I feel like they’re pretty spread out in places that you’re likely to find in a normal play through, assuming you don’t just bum rush the all the main bosses without exploring the world a bit. I never felt like I was being forced to find them so I could progress because nothing was really impossible to do without them. I fought Rellana with maybe two or three blessing levels and it took hours but I still beat her, and I was happy that it was hard. I didn’t want the DLC, which like you said is basically endgame content, to be a cake walk. You say that you’d enjoy the blessing system in a vacuum if it were in its own game, and in my opinion, the DLC feels like its own game. It’s like Elden Ring 1.5 with how big it is. It’s surprising to me that you’re so opposed to progression in something that could be considered a separate game in its own right

Remember in DS1 if you beat Artorius and save Sif in the dlc before fighting Sif in the base game you get a special cut scene where Sif recognizes you. And if I remember right you can get unique dialog with Princess Dusk after beating Manus. So Fromsoft have connected dlc lore with base game lore. Shame they didn't do it with SotET. Especially with how important Miquella is.

My opinion is that they should have tied the fragments to progression rather than exploration. Give us 10 or so fragments that you find by killing bosses or minibosses. If I have to look up that I have to kill random looking NPCs with pots on their head, it's not good game design. And I, like many players, like to play multiple characters instead of just respeccing whenever I want to play something different. This means that I am not only forced to "explore" by the game the first time, but the second, third, fourth time as well. Not to mention that if you are stuck on a boss because the game is way too challenging, especially with the amount of bullshit some of the bosses throw at you, and you realize you are being filtered by the fragments, what's going to happen is not that you go out and enjoy exploring, you are going to be frustrated by what feels like a chore.

The way I saw this fake problem and solution they made.... Every Souls DLC they released has always been harder than the base game, but they never resorted to making the new content so inflated that a new power up was needed to be created. Why did they feel the need to inflate the difficulty sooooo much here?

I just beat Radahn last night. Hidden behind a great shield. Knight claws sending the odd scratch. Rot pots and mimic tear. The boss bullshit was ridiculous. The guy never stops swinging. I felt relieved to have completed it rather than a the sense of accomplishment I felt in previous fromsoft titles. And that was at shado-cheese fragment level 20! The most stunningly brilliant, boring game I’ve played. 10/10 moments littered with 2/10 moments. Hippo hit boxes vs an epic Relanna fight, then empty fields with copy and paste Dragons where the best option is to tickle their toes. It is still better than 99% of games, but I can’t see myself going through all that again. Some of the bosses felt like I had attended a firework display. When tf should I attack? I refuse to go and fight the other dancing lion. Fuck that! We need a completely reworked mechanics system to fight this spin to win pricks. This is a 10 year old fighting system with slight increases to speed and invincibility frames BUT the bosses are x100 faster, stronger, exhibit delayed attacks…I don’t know man, something needs to change.

When i bought the game, i die so many times on the first boss that i lost the count on how many times i died, but i never give up, not even once, i was not a Souls player, elden ring was my first From Software game. After that i bought Bloodborne and sekiro, i'm really a fan now, and when the dlc came out i bought it after 1 week. On the bass game i'm NG+3, and when I go to the dlc, and die with literally TWO HITS it felt so much frustrating, getting throw way all that adventure, make a powerful character, explore the imense world and learn the game, fighting the insane difficult bosses it was amazing. But on the dlc all that progress that i have made it was like someone give me a punch on the stomach and with a bat in the balls, it was for nothing

Regarding the reward for progression: I would recommend going into NG+ if you want to feel powerful after playing through the game. The early parts of NG+ are extremely easy due to your high character level and fully upgraded gear. The end game isn't the part that is designed to reward progression. It's designed to challenge you at all times. The early game is the easy mode in a NG+ cycle.

Yeah i did not like having to collect those, is very boring and just feels like a chore so i just got them all so i dont have to worry about them anymore

My only problem with the Scadutree Blessing system is that there isn't an overabundance of Scadutree fragments. Imagine if you couldn't max out the number of your flasks just because you missed a single Golden Seed in the base game's gargantuan open world. It would suck wouldn't it?

The Scadutree blessings were presented as a buff, but they're obviously a debuff that players spend their entire playthrough trying to remove. Exploration was a great part of Elden Ring's base game, but FORCING players to explore just to have a decent chance of surviving boss fights is essentially FromSoft admitting that they failed to put enough interesting enemies and bosses into the game to make you WANT to explore it yourself. Just take a look around, the DLC is full of empty spaces, reused field bosses from the base game and furnace golems, one of the most tedious enemies to fight in the entire game. Once you've maxed out your Scadutree blessings, why would you ever want to revisit any of those fights and locations?

the fact that before i enter the DLC i already possess all the necessary bell bearings for all smithing stones, the loot is super dissapointing especially when the majority of the weapon is kinda lacking in power

One of the most important points of an open world exploration game is to keep up the player's motivation to explore. Nobody wants to explore a huge map just for the sake of it. There has to be a proper reward for this, be it either finding new and 'useful' loot or finding new bosses and enemies. And the best reward you can give to the player would be finding a boss who both drops loot 'and' opens up a new path on the map to explore. This gives one some sense of progression that is severely lacking in the many optional side content in the base game and in SotE. When I defeated, e.g., one more dragon with the very same moveset etc. as any of the other dragons that can be found I do not see how I do make any progress in the game. Because my reward is only a couple of runes which I do not need anyway (because I am already level 150 when entering the DLC). From this perspective it does make sense to add some new mechanic in the DLC to give the player back some sense of progression, even when already having a high level character. However, as you noted in the video, it perhaps keeps up the motivation only one time, in your first playthrough. In the second and all subsequent playthroughs (with a new character) I have to do this all over again. I.e., scanning the whole map for the fragments most of which are a pickup and not protected by a boss. This leads to a highly unbalanced time ratio of where you have long and boring horse riding segments compared to the time where you actually play the game (enemy encounters). Actually, very similar to the beginning of the base game where I need about 1-2 hours to collect Estus flask upgrades and smithing stones before I can start to play the game. I therefore also think that one way to fix the Scadutree blessing system would have been to make them only drop by bosses (dungeon and open world bosses fewer and remebrance bosses more of them). Then they would have combined exploration with (actual) gameplay and this would have been one hundred times better than how it is done now. But I would also not regret it if the blessing upgrade would not exist at all and so I would know that each boss in the DLC is already on a proper difficulty level. Now I do not know this at all, because I could fight against the Dancing Lion on level blessing 0 or on level 12, which is a huge difference already. Which Scadutree level is the proper one for which boss?

The blessing does count over to new game plus

huh... i never thought of trying to collect all of the scadu item. I mostly explore just to find more bosses and new enemy. AND!!! that was fatal flaw for me in the dlc, imo there is too many reused enemy and also so many empty place especially the coast and midra outdoor area. At least, area near main story are packed, but for no reason when exploring other side of the map most of it is empty with few reused enemy and the loot aint rewarding...

I skipped the whole DLC because of the blessing system as well. Gone are the days when you could simply cheat your way to just enjoy a video game. Now game developers just want to waste more of your time and limit your options. Basically trapping you in a video game.

I agree with you. The blessing system forces players to explore more, but most of the map is full of low- or medium-level smithing stones, which is a LARGE DISCOURAGEMENT for exploring. Besides, I think more Scadu tree fragments should be placed at distinctive locations, not in random mobs out of nowhere that are hard to notice, and the number of fragments should be redundant so that it's ok to miss some of them. I have two characters reaching the end of the DLC and none of them maximize the blessing level. I beat every remembrance boss and hippo, but I still stuck at blessing level 16 at most.