[DS3] Champion's Ashes mod (Part 1)

Channel:

DistractionCrab

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Published on February 21, 2021 8:10:18 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQDNA7GuJL8

Game:

Dark Souls III (2016)

Duration: 4:28:04

7,082 views

113

See below for Abyss Watchers rant.

It's been been suggested to play Champion's Ashes for quite a while now. Based on what I read, I didn't expect too much from it, but it's honestly rather nice. For the first 4.5 hours, I give it a good 90/100. However, I did have some issues with the NPC's and the Abyss Watchers fight (see below for my suggestions on improving it). It's probably the first time I've been seriously salty at something, but I found it rather frustrating and rather... bad... compared to the other good parts of the mod. However, this is only part one, so there's plenty more to explore and find out!

I'm aware of some of the mechanics after reading the wiki, so I have some of those to try out, though most of them seem more geared towards PvP, so I do plan to try that out if I can get some online play in. For example, I'm aware of feints, so the Abyss Watchers' feint is known to me now, but at the time it just looked like their moveset was bugged.

Mod page: https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls3/mods/488

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Abyss Watchers Rant:

So in short, the issue with the fight is that it simply forces me into doing exactly one thing, and doesn't reward skill or technical knowledge. It generally makes the second phase rather boring. From my understanding they want to remove the cheesiness from bosses which is fine.

For what's wrong: The tracking on the aerial attack. Because it's easy to punish they make it have excessively good tracking. This prevent back-stab fishing, and making it a "cheesable" fight. However, this doesn't really succeed as all I did was just wait for one attack and did dodge+r1, so it just ended up in the same situation but in a more forced manner rather than being something rewarded of game knowledge.

To make this fight be more amenable to dealing with this, add a Yhorm-style shockwave to the aerial slam, and make it be required to dodge to get a backstab from this. Consider the timing to have something similar to the thrust attack in p2 in vanilla; It can be punished with a backstab, but is incredible tight, and this now prevents it from being the meta strat, but rewards skill and timing.

There are a couple other things, like the camera being unlocked, and the boss zipping around the arena, which are problematic. To prevent the slide-attack from being punished, put an explosion at the end of their slide to push us away from it, so we have to dodge into and make it tight.

There's also the issue with the slide happening when I'm right next to the boss, it may be a bug, but it's not a huge deal really. The slide now has much better tracking, so it makes it a very awkward attack to deal with in general, but it fits with the theme: Make nothing punishable on the boss. Which I disagree with how to go about it.

I have a whole rant about hard vs difficult vs challenge that ties into this, but YT description has too little space, but this fight was turned from a fairly challenging fight (if easy because they have low health), to something that's just kind of boring. It's possible there's stuff that I'm missing about their intent, but the boss zipping around the arena wasn't exactly communicative.

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