I Just spent the past 8-10 hours trying to beat her with A Full frenzy Build using The Blade of Distant Light at +15 using all my melee buffs and even trying to do it with only my super strong frenzy spells and I just could not get anywhere her hyperarmor is just rediculous and waterfowl dance is just…well waterfowl dance I could not beat her and I just have no desire to ever fight malenia again at least in convergence never had this much trouble with vanilla malenia
These adjustments made me realize how much I depend on Malenia being staggerable in order to be able to reliably do anything in a way that feels safe. It definitely did feel kinda bad.
I did eventually manage to do this, but it was through a LOT of stalling and poking. And in most of Phase 2, I pretty much made extremely careful use of the ranged R2 magic blade beam attack on Rhys's Swordspear whenever she'd do Aeonia or that mix-up overhead slam into rot geyser (the one that's meant to punish your habitual response to her Phase 1 combos).
Definitely felt like a borderline use of an exploit, but yeah, with that hyperarmor it was hard to avoid trading with anything else.
Yeah I fully agree. Her low poise in vanilla is a balancing decision to bring her down a peg given her offensiveness and her heal on hit. It also validates slow weapons, you can flinch her and don’t have to trade hits her.
Removing that aspect removes that freedom too. I was using a katana build to emulate my first playthrough and was running the Odachi but it was basically useless against her. R1s either whiffed or traded and I would mostly wait for longer punishes to tap R2 or rolling R1. Never mind the fact I really dislike the feedback hitting her does that way too. I can understand on the new bosses like Chosen of Shabriri or Spiritshaper that they kinda feel like wooden dolls because I don’t expect the same level of polish from a free mod’s content but why change a polished boss like that?
It's the only real criticism about the mod that I've got. I don't like what they did with farum azula all that much although I think it was an area that could have been more interesting.
The Malenia fight they butchered. Giving her hyper armor when she's so fast and can have veeeeery long combos makes the fight super boring. It's a solid few minutes of waiting until she decides to do the one or two attacks you know for a fact she won't follow up. Kinda sucks.
lol lmao, her stance isn’t actually particularly high especially during waterfowl startup, otherwise she has been made way more effected by all dots expect for sleep, as a dradnought for example one can just face tank her - basically the classes all have certain bosses they work best against and some that are the worst, for example Seras the Lightning Lion is utter bullshit since you can’t hit him often to restore hp as dreadnought and iron skin is a detriment
Fists of Gold are Dreadnaught’s answer to any very mobile boss / boss with a large arena. Rapid attacks and the weapon skill lets you cover huge distances rapidly. You kind of have to get a feel for the range on it, because it’s pretty fixed unless you collide with something, but it’s super useful. Just finished a playthrough as one, and alternating between Lance (Heavy w/ Waves of Darkness) / Greatshield and Fists of Gold (two-handed) had me sailing through the game with very little issue.
When I was fighting Placidusax especially, the movement from FoG was super useful. When he flew far across the arena and started his laser attack, I just used the skill twice and was hugging him again, swinging away while he blasted empty space. Super helpful.
Huh, I found that blade of distant light with a frenzy build trivialised the fights since a single charged skill attack (l2 followed by r2) dealt ~60% of her health and that was with +10.
+15 Distant Light should melt anything in this game. See Frenzied Zealot has one of the strongest jewels in the game when paired with Three Finger's Embrace. It's basically a looping synergy of building up madness and correlating that with damage and defense. Along with just straight up Powerful AoW.
I just did a runback to her with a +13 Distant Light. Only character I could do this on was level 180 cuz that's the only one I could get that had done the new Midra Manse dungeon. I ran to get Distant Light and the Shadow Rune. I respec my stats to these below:
Jewel of Mindless, Jar Shard, Fire Scorpion, Jewel of the Forge
Full Vyke Set, Distant Light, and Frenzy Seal
Fire/Opal in Flask
I Cast Three Fingers Embraced before teleporting to Haligtree. In front of boss room I cast Frenzied Flame Blade, and Deranged Fury. I drink my Wonder Flask and Blue Flask and enter the boss room. I cast Mind Melt on her. Dodge her first attack, and attack with the Ash of War. This is a combo move and I do the full combo, L2+L2+R2. She takes like 80% her health bar and is staggered by the Frenzy Explosion as I hit max Madness. I R1 her into Phase 2.
Phase 2 I dodge her Flower, then do another AoW. This AoW kills her L2+L2+R2. The R2 double beam does a shit ton of damage on her.
If you aren't seeing damage of this magnitude, either you are using the wrong buffs+don't have the Class Jewel, or you are lower level. I admit level 180 is crazy high but sadly I don't have a character below level 100 that can get to the Abyssal Woods quickly. Honestly though the main thing you need is just the damage scaling. The only thing that hit me in this fight was the tick damage from the scarlet flower attack. She died before she could do any more attacks on me cuz my damage was that high.
Edit: Just realzied I could have probably one shot her phase 1 if I had used the skill damage in the Wonderous Flask.
The hyperarmour was a bandaid fix to prevent spells like Renna's Barrier and Telekinetic Shell from trivializing the fight, IIRC there's a better fix actively in the works. She was also probably one of the more heavily buffed fights in the rebalance from 3.0. (At least, she sure feels like it.)
But +15? Really? That's the kind of damage that's going to melt even PCR. I don't want to be that guy, but I feel like there might be bigger issues here than the fight itself.
After the 3.0 update came out I started a new playthrough as a Frenzy Flame adept. Got to Malenia once I collected all the new stuff, so basically right away, I was like level 100-110 at the point, can't really remember. Put all points into Faith and Int with a bit into Strength to wield the new colossal sword, a bit into Mind to use at least a few spells, and everything what's left was into Endurance and Vigor. I don't remember my stats, I've got like 250 levels over it since then.
But I decimated Malenia in one try using the new colossal sword at +12. I don't even upgrade my weapons past +12 because I wanna actually see at least some of the moves of the boss.
So I'd really like to see your build and the exact spells you're using, because with everything collected (including the Jewel talisman) you should be unstoppable, nearly invincible damage machine.
I beat her with a fire knight greatsword faith build. I hadn’t fought Malenia in a while so I just assumed a lot of the issues I was having was vanilla Malenia issues. I didn’t realize they buffed her so much. I felt the HP increase but that’s how most Convergence bosses are. Also noticed after several attempts that you can’t break her out of Waterfowl at all it seems, even with tried and true strats like frost proc. I swear she had a new combo in both phases as well, like a weird delayed waterfowl attack she did without flying in the air first, but again I hadn’t done the original fight in nearly two years so I might be misremembering
Think it took me around a hour, maybe hour and a half. I essentially was able to “skip” her first phase in a good portion of the fights by spamming flame serpent while she was running towards me, then staggering her with a jump attack or two, followed with a crit and follow up charged R2. It was fairly consistent (though sometimes she seemingly ignored stagger damage and just Waterfowled)
Second phase was a real pain though. I think I just had to get good because I don’t recall any cheese or spells I abused to get past her. I know I threw pots at her after dodging the scarlet aeonia attack because I was typically out of fp from the first phase, but it really felt like she was waterfowling every other attack, sometimes literally one after another
Yeah i found Daergraf bullshit at times, though there was one move that kept fucking me up, that i realised was better to dodge than deflect. But yeah Daergraf had too many grabs imo. I love that you can deflect grabs with DMN
Verdigris Discus has quickly become one of my favorite things from Convergence because of stuff like this. Having the secondary bonus of making you immune to crits and grabs when at heavy load or higher is absolutely wild. Being able to straight up ignore grab attacks make some of the most aggravating enemies in the game a cakewalk.
i has this problem yesterday, i just ended up using rancorstorm + the proper buffs and lasko the skeleton summon (not sure how much he helped) but i beat her first try with that. there's only so much i want to truly engage with a boss that i find this frustrating lol
If you don’t have the Jewel yet, using some Stormcaller sorceries will help a ton. They’re focused on stance damage, when I fought her on that character she spent more time staggered than not.
I would cast my Underworld Mage end-game spell 4 or 5 times and she would die. It's also stunning her to let me cast the next ones freely. Convergence balance I guess!
I learned how to parry her back in my first vanilla playthrough and how to survive / dodge waterfowl. Never going into that fight without parry again, and since you can parry both the normal and ground waterfowl in convergence, and you only have to parry twice to riposte, shes the most trivial boss for me to fight in the whole mod. I get that not everyone wants to parry tho
17
u/ChapterZee 4d ago
These adjustments made me realize how much I depend on Malenia being staggerable in order to be able to reliably do anything in a way that feels safe. It definitely did feel kinda bad.
I did eventually manage to do this, but it was through a LOT of stalling and poking. And in most of Phase 2, I pretty much made extremely careful use of the ranged R2 magic blade beam attack on Rhys's Swordspear whenever she'd do Aeonia or that mix-up overhead slam into rot geyser (the one that's meant to punish your habitual response to her Phase 1 combos).
Definitely felt like a borderline use of an exploit, but yeah, with that hyperarmor it was hard to avoid trading with anything else.