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My first introduction to Soulslike games was Bloodborne. And it was a very short introduction due to me selecting the cane starting weapon and trying to make sense of it for several hours. Cane is an ASS of a starting weapon for someone not familiar with the gameplay. I was very pissed that day. Especially when I complained to a friend and he basically said "Yeah, everyone knows the saw is way better starting weapon, DUH".
Yeah, this kind of game design annoys me (although I'm not entirely sure what to do about it). On the one hand, Souls games show you numeric stats -- in fact, you quite literally select which number to increase when you level up, which is a huge amount of freedom in control over numbers. So it looks like you're supposed to care about numbers. But on the other hand, the numbers often behave counterintuitively, and further, the games often hide numbers from you where the value of the number is the only thing of any relevance: e.g., you get an item that "boots fire damage". Ok, boosts by how much? Is it a 5% boost? A 50% boost? Double? It's like the game wants the player to think this is irrelevant, yet even 2 seconds of thought shows it cannot possibly be irrelevant: whether the item is good or not is entirely determined by how big that damn number is!
The especially silly thing is Souls gameplay in particular would be fine with all of this drastically simplified, or even eliminated. The fun part of Souls is learning boss routines and experimenting with new weapons and skills. You could almost get rid of the numbers entirely and still retain what makes the games fun.
I think it's a credit to the games' balance that ultimately I almost always find the answer is "just big enough to make a noticeable differencr without unbalancing the game". An item that adds fire resistance will add enough resistance that if you were struggling with an enemy that does fire damage it will be noticeably easier, but usually not enough to trivialize anything.
Elden Ring (and other DS games, afaik) isn't balanced, though! That's my point! You can literally kill the bosses in 1 hit with the right setup (modulo scripted phase transitions)!
And this is especially interesting because the buffs at first glance don't seem like they should be that strong. For example, the Fire Scorpion Charm only gives like +12% to fire damage, and it increases your damage taken by 10% as punishment. Compare that with, say, the Flame Staff in FFXII, which gives +50%. The latter feels much stronger, while the former feels like it barely does anything and probably isn't worth using at all as a casual player.
The reason buffs are so overpowered in Elden Ring isn't because they're so strong; it's because there are so many, and they stack multiplicatively (when they stack at all, which they usually don't). This gives them a synergy that has a net effect far more powerful than the sum of its parts, most of which don't feel particularly powerful at all in isolation.
Here's an example setup: put your stat points in strength, choose a heavy weapon (eg, Giant Hammer), set the Royal Knight's Resolve ashes of war (+80% to the next attack), equip the charge attack talisman (+10% charge attack), set your physick to strength tear and charge tear (+15% charge attack), set an aura buff (e.g., Golden Vow, +15% attack), set a body buff (e.g., Bloodboil Aromatic, +30% attack), equip Red Feather Branch talisman (+20% damage when hp low), wave the Commander's Standard (+20% damage). When you multiply all these out, it's an almost 500% boost! That is a ludicrous, game-breaking amount of damage.
There are lots of variations, especially for fire or holy-weak enemies, and you can freely tweak it around for your convenience -- I mean hey, if you do it suboptimally and it takes a whole two hits to knock the boss into the next phase, will it really ruin your day? You can even do a half-decent version of it using only ingredients from Limgrave (greataxe+6/charge talisman/charge physick tear/determination AOW/golden vow AOW/Oath of Vengeance/exalted flesh). It will take 2 hits to knock Margit to phase 2, which I'd say is sufficient to call imba and say it trivializes the boss.
For what it's worth, the reason this is so counterintuitive is that you cannot just stack buffs arbitrarily, despite the fact that it probably sounds like you can from the above. For example, if you try to use Exalted Flesh and Vyke's Dragonbolt at the same time, this will not work, because these two buffs occupy the same internal "slot" (called "body buff"). To me this is highly counterintuitive, as one of these is a consumable item and the other is a spell, and they don't have effects that are remotely similar. In contrast, you can stack Flame, Grant Me Strength and Golden Vow, despite these both being incantations and having almost the same effects. There is, of course, nothing in the game that explains any of this.
Anyway, my point is the degree of trivialization you get by actually knowing the game mechanics is not normal. Contrast Elden Ring with, say, Kingdom Hearts: there is no amount of game knowledge that will allow you to kill Sephiroth in one hit, or even get remotely close. Knowing the game mechanics does not trivialize the game.
It just feels like an excuse for FromSoftware to develop crazy anime-jumping-all-across-the-arena bosses with crazy moves. "Oh no, the player has so many bullshit combinations now, we need to create more bullshit bosses to combat this." And that way we have dlc with bosses dancing all over the floor, goddamn sunflower. The worst part of course is that even with the stakes of Marika you will spend 2 minutes buffing yourself and after a certain point I started to despise this cycle.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the DLC, aesthetically or gameplay-wise, and even the base game's combat often felt "overdeveloped" to me. There were multiple occasions where a boss uses what is obviously a finishing move (e.g., Tree Sentinel raising his weapon and smashing it into the ground) only to PSYCH! ITS NOT ACTUALLY A FINISHER LMAO with some physically-nonsensical follow-up attack to smack you in what obviously "should" have been a punish window. Also, lots of bosses have input reads, where if you try to do anything (in particular use a potion to heal) outside of a designated punish window, they'll immediately intercept your action with a fast attack. I found this extremely crass design.
It feels like FromSoft is annoyed that good players are too good at their games, but the ways in which the developers are trying to raise the difficulty are pretty lame. Though in some sense, I do understand their frustration: Souls games have a skill window that is far smaller than most other games, in the sense that beating them as a casual is quite hard, but learning to play at a near-pro level (in the sense of doing lvl 1 challenges, no-hit challenges, etc.) is surprisingly easy. It really is too difficult to be mediocre at the game, and too easy to be good at the game.
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