Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree currently has a 'Mixed' status on Steam, with many of the negative reviews complaining that the bosses are too hard [also game's PC performance]
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree currently has a 'Mixed' status on Steam, with many of the negative reviews complaining that the bosses are too hard [also game's PC performance]
Some of them are also down on the game's PC performance, which is fair.
My only issue is that since the DLC was released I can no longer play online on linux. It says "Inappropriate behavior detected" no matter what. Didn't even buy the DLC.
Is your proton set to experimental? because mine is working on arch. If it is, try verifying files, or if that doesn't work, back up your saves and nuke the prefix.
No, it's set to whatever the default is. I'll try what you suggest, thanks!
Fromsoft is just checking up on you. Have you been acting differently since the dlc came out?
I've been spontaneously singing a lot
To add to what everyone else said, it's a known issue. Easy Anti-Cheat isn't working properly on Linux unless you own the DLC. It's working fine on my end since I own it.
Didn't even buy the DLC.
That's the issue, game works fine with the DLC and fails without the DLC.
At least when playing offline you can use er-patcher to play it without framerate limit, chromatic aberration and in ultrawide. https://github.com/gurrgur/er-patcher
This was patched in experimental 2 days ago. I downloaded update as soon as it was live and I have almost finished the DLC.
I thought souls- like fans love tough bosses. Enjoy it then. I think they should git gud. /s
For full disclosure, I suck at souls-like and I beat Elden Ring by cheating(completely offline). I have been called Mentally removed for wanting an easy mode. I don’t like souls like fans, not all, just some of the more hardcore ones.
I play them offline because no way am I playing with that mostly asshole fanbase
If you're playing solo you can't be invaded.
I've been playing video games my whole life and I've never been able to "git gud" at any game. I'm not going to put a significant amount of time and effort getting good at a game to figure out if I even like it
Getting good is what the games are about. There is no post-"git gud" phase of playing their games.
I love souls games but I love them for the lore. there's just so. much. god. damn. lore in those games. I will spend hours, days, even months just picking up every item I can to read the description and get a tiny little nugget of lore. Sure I love the boss fights and I really love this DLC because I felt the base game was too easy. I mean when you've played all the previous Souls games Elden Ring is by far the easiest one, so this DLC makes me feel like i'm playing Dark Souls again.
All that being said I agree with you, I think there should be an easy mode or what I would call a "explore mode" where you can just go around and easily fight things while building the story for yourself.
I don't do difficult games cause of physical issues. I tried Elden Ring and was very impressed, but ultimately it was unplayable for me even trying to go easy.
What do you recommend cheat wise? I'm running on Linux and I really don't care about online.
There is a mod called Easy Mode mod that you can use.
Agreed. I'm glad there's so many difficulty sliders built into this game: big variety of guns, NPC summons, spirit summons.
Honestly, it was not enough. With Easy Mode mod, I could actually explore the game world and immerse myself more than I would ever have. One of my favourite moments is when I was fighting Dragonkin boss in front a giant throne occupied by a massive skeleton in first underground city. It was amazing. I could never experience it without that mod. I am too easily frustrated.
You really need to be zealously masochistic and self-flagellant to enjoy that kind of shit. I don't know how people do it.
Some people like developing an artistic skill. This is that. Fuck up on the piano? Start that part over and get it right this time. Fuck up in elden ring? Start that part over and get it right this time. Both have acceptable amounts of variation that lead to success. Elden ring is in fact easier, because things can change that aren't solely your skill level (stats/gear). There's a lot of reasons the souls series and similar games are conducive to speedrunning, this loop of self-improvement is a major one.
When I read comments like yours, they come across as saying "practicing anything is stupid and I do not see the benefit". It's easy: practicing anything is fun and you only get to see the benefit after you fail, then succeed. If there's some mental disconnect you have where you can't envision success for yourself, or you think succeeding won't be fun, it certainly isn't the fault of the game or the community.
Once you've played enough, the fact that it's hard makes it better. I remember the first time I played dark souls, (dark souls III) I beat the 2nd boss months after the first try (i didn't play continuously for those months obviously). I was just unable to beat it. I looked at the wiki for builds, for that specific boss starts and so on.
Once I beat it, though, I kinda knew how to play, and the fact that the bosses were hard made it better, since now I got a big dopamine hit after I finally killed them after tens of tries.
Now, most games I play I beat them on the first try. Not because I'm good, but because the games are easy. I watch other people play and they kill them first try too. I don't get that same sense of "oh this is a boss, it's gonna be hard but fun." Instead I think "oh no, I was having fun oneshotting everyone and now here comes the bullet sponge".
Have you tried being zealously masochistic and self-flagellant? Gitting gud is another option.
But really though there's something endearing about a game being ruthlessly difficult with no easy mode slider. I'm normally the type of guy to crank everything down to easy to have a relaxing time, but when I'm in the mood for it Souls games scratch that itch juuuuust right.
Look, I personally consider myself a "hardcore" fan, but I don't have a problem with legitimate criticisms. Things like the need for optimizations, bug fixes, etc. The criticisms of the DLC by other so-called "hardcore" fans, are not legitimate. The problem is, these people are straight fucking morons that can't bother to learn the game in the first place. They think they can just run to the bosses with their over-leveled, NG+17 character and expect to use the same methods they used for the base game and beat it the first day it's out. IT IS NOT THE SAME. The DLC is like playing a "sequel" that let's you load your character and equipment from the previous game so you can look cool, but your still starting from essentially zero. You HAVE to level up the new stuff to get back to where you were power-wise, which means you HAVE to explore, and you HAVE to change up how you approach things. You cannot just rush through the bosses to see the ending. You HAVE to play the game to be able to play the game, and the pissy babies can't fucking grasp that.
The real problem with the "community" is that a huge, huge amount of its members are shitty, asshole children with shitty, asshole parents that buy them these games, which they shouldn't be playing in the first place. The other big part of the community are the shitty neckbeards that are still children mentally.
All that said, if you genuinely suck at a game, that game isn't for you. That's why I quit playing Balatro. Not everyone is good at everything they try to do- like how my birth-giver was a home ec major (yes, that was actually a thing), but she can't cook for shit. She can fuck up Kraft Dinner. But damn can she sew, and craft, and all the rest. (She's still a narcissistic sociopath, so she can fuck right off.) So if you like the game, but can't play it, maybe just watch a streamer or something so you can still enjoy it. Hell, my wife was so into Elden Ring just from watching me play that I bought it for her so she could play it. She tried. She really, really tried. But she just couldn't do it. So we got a refund and she still loves watching me play so she can get to experience it. Not everything is, or needs to be, for everyone.
I’m working my way through it now. They’re not really much different from the main game. The problem is the bosses in the main game were also pretty frustrating. A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances. Damage values that will kill you in a few hits even with high health and armor. Attacks that start and execute so fast that anything with a cast time gets punished.
Outside bosses we have the enemies behind half the corners, we have platforming sections in a game that doesn’t really support that, etc.
I’ve always like their games in spite of a lot of the flaws. The level design, world building, atmosphere, weird writing, etc all are still great and what draws me to the games. In what in what other games can you see: bald scam man, onion man, sunny d man, “dip head in wax”, rolling lightning goats, doot doot boat ghost, etc?
But it feels like in terms of gameplay design it’s kind of stagnated. A lot of the same design patterns for difficulty plus the pressure to keep making the game feel hard to people who have played all their games before has led to them stretching their design about as much as they can. In my first play through of Elden Ring for the first time I gave up trying to play my usual Ooga booga strength build in favor of that stupid comet azure magic combo to just anihate the bosses rather than deal with their bullshit. And in previous games I happily smashed my face against things like Nameless King or Madam Butterfly and Dancer well before I was supposed to fight then.
I think at this point I just want to see FROM do some different things. Sekiro was a nice mix-up on the basic formula and while it wasn’t really my cup of tea, Armored Core 6 felt like a breath of fresh air. The mainline souls style games feel like they’re trying to keep linking the fire over and over.
Let's not forget how blatantly the bosses read your inputs. FROM bosses have always done this, but it's never been so obvious; it kinda breaks the "tough but fair" illusion.
My take is that since players have gotten so powerful, bosses had to adapt...but the only ways to make them stronger have upset the balance between "tough" and "fair". Hit boxes for attacks have gotten larger, which hurts readability; attacks that you used to be able to dodge now land, even though it didn't look like it. Bosses hit harder, combo their attacks, and they can even cancel into different combos now.
All of this happened because bosses are balanced around Spirit Ashes and the new insane weapon arts. It's harder than ever to SL1 the game, because if you don't have a good Ash summon or a crazy weapon art or didn't grind for upgrade materials, main quest bosses are stupidly hard. If you did do all of those things, they're almost trivial.
It's weird. The bosses used to be the highlight of Soulsborne games, and now they're the worst part because they're just not fun anymore. Dragonlord Placidusax is my favorite fight, and it's not even close. I either trivialize my way through the rest, or just wanted them to be over. The satisfaction of fighting a worthy opponent is gone, because it's almost always just unfair for the player, or unfair for the boss.
Yeah that's basically how I felt. It was binary. The game was unfairly and frustratingly hard when I was trying to play fair and take the game on its terms. And then when I went to cheese everything it was so trivial that it felt empty. Sometimes I think about going back to the game to try to get the "real" experience, but then I remember the frustration and just can't bring myself to do it.
Although part of my reluctance to replay the game has less to do with boss difficulty and more to do with the repetitiveness of the open world. Without the sense of exploration and discovery you get on the first playthrough, the world becomes a checklist of places you need to go to grab stuff for your build with little desire to go replay the other content because so much of it is copy pasted filler. Even going through the DLC now, with it being smaller in scope than the full game, but still pretty huge, I'm already seeing a lot of repeat content.
As much as I appreciate the attempt at putting a twist on the formula, I think the open world was a net negative for the game. The flaws in the reward systems of the previous games were exacerbated by the structure which led you to explore all the boring repetitive stuff on a first play-through because you don't know if the thing you need might be in catacomb #20 and then on subsequent playthroughs you just skip vast parts of the game which aren't relevant to you.
It also just doesn't seem like they have the content output necessary to fill an open world with content that is of a comparable level of novelty and quality to what we'd come to expect from their level design. There's a good dark souls game in Elden Ring, it's just that it's spaced out and everything in between is padding.
The funny thing is, despite all of that, Elden Ring is still one of the top 3 open world games alongside the 2 Zelda titles. But I think that says as much about the state of the industry and genre as much as it does about the skill of FROM's and Nintendo's designers.
Level ADP
A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances.
That's also my main critique with Elden Ring. There's so many spin to win enemies in the game that will just keep attacking for 10 seconds straight, it gets old so quickly.
I miss the slow and methodical attacks from DS1 and to some extent DS3. DS3 was already a lot quicker than DS1 but most attacks were really well choreographed so I didn't really mind. When an enemy pulled their sword back in DS3 you knew they were about to attack. In Elden Ring they will hold that sword back and hold and hold and hold and then after you rolled 3 times they hit you. It's almost impossible to read an attack on the first try, which feels really unsatisfying.
Not to say I don't like Elden Ring, I do. But out of all From games it's one of the weaker entries.
Those aren't flaws. That's their whole design, and it's good.
I mean, to some extent yes. The hostile, uncaring world complemented by challenging gameplay that doesn't hold your hand is an important part of the design. I just think they went too far in Elden Ring to the point where it stops being a challenge I can feel good about overcoming. But that's not really what I meant as far as the flaws with the games.
Setting aside difficulty, their games are filled with flaws, both minor and major. Some they've learned from over the years, some they haven't, and some which they've gone backwards. I could get into a whole discussion about them, but it's a testament to the rest of the design that I can acknowledge all of these and look past them to enjoy what was done right. Just a few off the top of my head:
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The stats are obtuse and frequently either broken or useless. Resistance from DS 1, Poise from DS 3, armor in basically any game, etc. This makes engaging with the RPG elements feel kind of pointless and why in a lot of the games I played basically naked.
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The stat requirements and the need for upgrade materials makes it so that most items you find will be useless to you. They alone don't really contribute to the desire to explore. I do end up exploring around in these games, but it's in spite of the rewards rather than because of them.
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Demon Souls made you go back to a hub through a load screen to level. Dark Souls 1 fixed this. Then every game after that until Sekiro has gone back to forcing you to go through a load screen to level.
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The games are really inconsistent with their use of bonfires and shortcuts. I think to this day Dark Souls 1 has the best level design of the series. The lack of fast travel for the first half really makes you engage with the levels and makes you appreciate the shortcuts you find and eventually the fast travel once you have it. Since then all of the games have gone bananas with the bonfires/sites/etc with fast travel right from the start. There were some absolutely absurd places in DS3 where there was another bonfire within sight of the first. Then you have areas with absolutely no bonfires and shortcuts all the way through, or none at all. In Elden Ring sometimes you get sites of grace or stakes of Marika right outside the boss door and sometimes there just isn't one anywhere close.
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Consumables feel pretty useless since they're non-renewable. If you use them and still can't kill the boss before they run out, you're now just gonna have to beat the boss without them, so you might as well not have bothered. Elden Ring kind of helped this with crafting, but honestly I haven't used it much because I just am trained not to think about consumables in these games at this point.
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Some weapons/spells end up being completely useless. Some feel like they were designed for a different game. I don't know how they imagined people would make use of them. And iirc bows and spells have been a joke until like DS3, and even then from what I've heard people say bows are still pretty crap.
I think what's interesting about these games is that they're unpolished. That's not to say I wouldn't want these problems fixed with better design, but I think I prefer what we have to the usual AAA design where everything rough gets sanded down until the whole game is bland and appeals to nobody equally.
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Personally I have complicated feelings about this DLC.
The world design is a 10/10 for me but the rest...
For a start the Open World feels a bit unrewarding. I don't really have a problem with the abundance of empty space but the rewards you get for exploration feel a bit weak to me. I would have liked a few more weapons in chests and other places instead of Smithing Stone 8 #1241. Case in point: They added 8 new weapon categories but from what I can see barely one of these new categories has more than a single regular weapon in it. Definitely a missed opportunity.
As for the combat it's fine outside of the bosses. The enemies hit like a truck but once you figure out the gimmicks it's quite manageable. The bosses however are some of the worst in the entire game. I'm not an outstanding player, I'm not even good. But me being bad is not quite the problem I have with these. The problem I have with these bosses is that they are frustrating. For example the first Dancing Lion Boss has such an arsenal and length of combos that, when coupled with its flowing moveset, I cannot find a reliable gap to exploit. I think I found one only for the boss to switch up the Combo the 3rd time around (not HP related changes) and kill me anyway. Add to that the camera being absolute garbage and it feels like I'm fighting a duo boss. The cooldowns between their combos also are annoyingly uncertain, sometimes you have a gap to heal after a combo and sometimes they start the next combo almost immediately. Now mind you there might be gaps I don't see but if the only people who can even find the gaps are the top 20% of players then negative reviews will be inevitable.
What makes this entire thing worse is that as soon as you employ spirit summons the entire charade is exposed. The only reason these bosses are "hard" is because they hit you in a relentless torrent of combos. The moment there is any other target to take the heat off of you the difficulty plummets into the core of the planet. Oh and also their pathfinding is absolutely shot, I've had multiple cases where Bosses (and regular enemies) got stuck path finding towards me because I was standing on a little pebble or behind a pillar. I think mages are also completely fucked because almost every boss I've stumbled upon was in permanent distance closing mode. No or extremely rare walk phases where a mage could fire off a few spells but instead just constant pressure.
I think the Bosses can't even be easily rebalanced because the problem is not that they are too tanky or deal too much damage, they are imo just terribly designed to where they are too hard when in a 1v1 and too easy in a 2+v1 due to their move-/attacksets. If they rebalance anything maybe the frequency between combos could be tuned a bit but I really don't think that's going to change much about how people perceive these bosses.
None of the bosses have been easier for me with more then one person, and I've beaten 3 so far.
They probably didn't want to highlight how vast portions of the base game's overworld had no content whatsoever and seemed unfinished, so they're pretending it is part of the auteur schtick.
For the lion boss I can consistently get him to half or 1/4 health alone. But when I use the gold summon sign we can hardly take it to 3/4 health before I'm out of heals.
Uh oh
People need to stop being bitches
The article title seems to oversimplify things a little with the "too hard" bit. I read a couple dozen negative reviews, and most cite poor performance, copy-paste boss design, too much hp and/or too little player damage, and unfair mechanics. Sure, those last two aspects could be seen as "too hard", but they read like there's a difficulty spike from the base game. Whether this is a case of players needing to adapt or whether there's an actual issue here, I don't know, but seems there's more to this than just a case of players complaining about a hard game being hard.
That's video game journalism in a nutshell right there. They'll always do anything they can to downplay legitimate criticisms from consumers. They're common tactic is to reduce everything to absurdity so that people just read the headlines won't look further. They truly are the lowest form of Journalism. Absolutely lowest.
The level designs are pretty top notch and feel much closer to the dangerous mazelike web of shortcuts and ambushes that worked for the Dark Souls series.
The base game spread content across dozens of small short dungeons. The DLC appears to feature fewer but longer dungeons, which I am inclined to agree with as 'a good thing'.
Please note this article is 100% BS. The DLC currently has a Mostly Positive rating on Steam with 87% of the people leaving a positive review.
The people complaining are mostly about stuff like crashes, bad net code and poor fps. This is not a dlc thing, but a base game thing. The pc port simply has some issues, for most people it's totally fine. For others it's unplayable. With the amount of different systems out there, there is always going to be a group of people with issues. I feel like this is a very vocal minority though.
Check again, sitting at mixed reviews at 63% positive.
It's typical click bait from a once, long ago, enjoyable magazine about PC games. Now PCG just outputs game guides and incessantly complains about AI.
There's actually two listings for the DLC which is confusing but one is mostly positive and the other is mixed.
Check listings under publisher: Fromsoftware Inc
The base dlc is mixed reviews and there are plenty of reviews stating how hard bosses hit and how the scaling seems pointless, so no, the article is not BS.
if at this point in your life you're still buying From Software games and STILL complaining about bad net code then I don't know what to tell you...that's on you my friend (not you OP the people posting reviews complaining) I mean god damn if you've played ANY Japanese developed game with online play for the past 20 some odd years and you're complaining about bad net code...again that's on you. I don't think I've ever played a Japanese developed game that had good net code, it's just something they've never been able to figure out for whatever reason. Even in fighting games it generally is and always has been garbage.
People absolutely should be mentioning in their reviews of a product that it has bad netcode, or any other positives or negatives they think are worth mentioning. People use reviews to inform their purchases of products. Victim blaming people for certain developers' inability to produce robust netcode is wild.
I'm at the end of Journey 3 level 200 with a character that I am using for the DLC. The only thing left for me is Melania in the main game, but I'm not rushing it because she's the only boss that really whooped my ass in the main game the first 3 times I fought her. The DLC bosses are giving me that Melania rush, again. When I beat one, I feel like I fucking WON that fight. Hell, I think 80% of the fights I've had so far I haven't even been able to summon my spirit buddies, which has admittedly been a crutch in the main game. I love it. It's a fucking challenge.
I'm almost done with the DLC and most bosses are in-line with the last few bosses in the main game. I never felt like it was overly unfair, that said I did notice stuttering every now and then, but nothing major. Wish that got fixed.
I beat the first major boss: Dancing Lion from trailers. I'm not good at these games. Took me a dozen+ tries. I used the NPC summon because they tend to have story elements.
NPC doesn't do much damage and dies quickly in phase 2. It helps but not that much.
So far it's not that hard. Biggest hurdle is even with +24 weapons I cannot do sufficient damage to the wickermen or new dragons. I assume it's the leveling items? But their moves aren't hard, it just feels like chip damage.
The wicker men it's kinda like the golems in the base game, the real damage comes when you stagger them the 3rd time and the fall over, chunk them for like 60% of their health on the crit.
Ah I see. At least with golems it feels like you can still do damage at the glowing bits. I'll just keep hammering :)
I haven't played it yet myself, but based on the pre-release info I've read, I am assuming it's the separate progression system the DLC uses.
The normal strength of weapons in the rest of the game doesn't matter as much, there's a different way of powering up exclusive to the DLC content. So anyone who was buffed up like a god before the DLC is not that far ahead of someone jumping in early during their first playthrough.
I loved Elden Ring, I don't play many games these days but it really hooked me. But also it really needs to get over itself and add difficulty options.
I do think the difficulty is part of the fun but I almost didn't finish it because it was so all over the place, toward the end it just got grindy, bosses just turned into long roll fests until you got your one chance per minute to knock off 2% of its health bar. They feel more like endurance matches that test your patience more than skill.
Sometimes I'm dying a lot and having fun because the challenge is good, but sometimes it's just tedious and I want to move on to the next area. I would love to be able to drop the difficulty for a bit just for those spots, hell make it an in game item called cry baby bottle for losers and wimps for all I care.
It has difficulty options. Where the previous FromSoft games would just lock you in a closet with a boss, whilst flicking you in the balls and laughing at you "Git gud son", Elden Ring has a lot of stuff to make things more manageable. For example there is summons, in the form of NPC (often with interesting quest lines to get them), other players via online and your personal spirit summons. The game is also completely open. So when you get stuck on a boss, you can just leave and go do something else. Explore the world, go level up, go find weapons, armor and other items to help you. Overleveling is not hard and the world is huge and a lot of fun to explore. The game also almost never locks content behind a boss. You can do a lot in the game without beating any of the hard bosses. If with all that the game is still to hard, then maybe the game isn't for you. Hard games have a place in the world imho. And if you just want to enjoy the world for the fun of it, I would suggest one of the mods out there to make the game as easy as you want it to be.
Sure Elden Ring is a tough game to get the hang of, but it isn't hard at all and provides plenty of difficulty adjustments. There's also a lot of people that adjust the difficulty in the other direction. For example people that do RL1 runs or limit themselves to a certain kind of weapon. I think it's cool the game has so many options to enjoy it.
It has difficulty options but it's if you use summons, heavy shields and similar stuff. Bosses can become really easy that way if you want to. You could also go for a solo playthrough with no shield for more difficulty.
Elden Ring is both the easiest and hardest Fromsoft game in recent times because of how many really strong things are in it for the player to use. But if you play melee only, the bosses are harder than the old games.
I'm not amazing at these games, particularly the faster ones, but I'm pretty good to the point I tend to play thematic builds or and actively eshew OP stuff because it's funnier to kill a dragon with a dagger than a big sword.
I think elden ring is almost flawless until after leyndell. Going from one of the best levels they've ever made, filled with thoughtful design to bats that 2 hit your 60 vigur build in the flat, empty snowfields is... A decision.
It's basically tradition that the bottom falls out of these games in the last bits. I think elden ring is just too big, even the levels with great design like elphale end up becoming tedious slog fests because there's just nowhere for them to take it. Hey look it's those basic soldiers, but they're umm golden now and they hit like a truck and umm explode and uhhh 8 Royal revenants. Hmm game design!
The broken scaling of everything means that a lot of the boss fights end up either you wombo combo them, they wombo combo you, or it's a tedious scratch and run away event. There's no epic genichiro or owl level toe to toe lightning duels. Even malania, a boss with absolutely stunning design, becomes dying to waterfowl dance in one/two hit/s over and over till you learn to dodge it or just snap and pull out the blasphemous greatsword and chain pancake her to death.
I'm replaying the base game (waiting on a sale for the dlc) and I couldn't agree more. I was fighting a bell bearing hunter and they have massive combos they can mix up in the middle and do more hits and when you get the timing PERFECTLY you go do 1 charge attack and you get punished because they already started another combo,you get 1 hit and that's it.
People answering you talk about summons but for these guys you can't even summon your ashes, for some stupid reason the devs decided to limit that feature.
Before anyone tells me to git gud, I already beat the entire game before including a bugged Melania that healed even on missed attacks (she was bugged for some time). I can beat anything in the game but like you said, it's mega boring and slow.
Skill issue
Kids these days don't know what it's like to play Nintendo Hard games... at least you have an HP bar in this one... imagine dying in one hit from any attack.
Imagine dropping into a room in Jetset Willy and falling to your death, then respawning and falling over and over til all your lives are gone.
There are plenty of one shots in the dlc and stunlock combo equivalents. It’s not even that it’s that much more difficult it’s just tedious and unfun.
Git gud
You don't even need to get good most of the time if you just spend more time learning the game by playing it's mostly a knowledge check. Fully upgraded weapon (way more important than leveling dmg stats passed min req), npc and PC summons, get vigor up in the 40-50 range, mark your map and come back later, etc. You could play it like a fighting game training against bosses to learn their moves or just go somewhere else to grind levels or equipment to come back later for an easier fight.
Its all about that bark now. You need the bark. Get the bark. Be gud with the bark.