Is Elden Ring Still Worth Playing In 2025?

In Realm of Shadow in Elden Ring DLC, you will meet Freyja who carries a Greatsword with her. After you complete the quest she gives you, you can get her Greatsword called Freyja’s Greatsword, and you can also create an optimal build for it. The skill of Freyja’s Greatsword is Spinning Slash, but if you want better Redmane Skills, you can change it. In this guide, we will show you how to get this powerful Greatsword and what kind of build you should build around it. This way, its maximum effectiveness can be brought into play. How To Get Freyja’s Greatsword? As I just said, Freyja’s Greatsword is related to Redmane Freyja, and there are currently two ways to get it. The first is to let Redmane Freyja get Freyja’s letter. In return, she will give you Golden Lion Shield. From this location, head to Enir-Ilim, where you will fight Leda and her allies with Freyja. After the battle, you can loot this powerful weapon from Leda’s corpse. Second, if you don’t want to spend time completing her questline, you can continue to complete other quests or battles in the DLC, as you will still fight Leda and her allies in the later games. After the battle, you cannot loot anything from her corpse except Elden Ring Runes. You need to return to the seventh floor warehouse in Shadow Keep, where Freyja and Freyja’s Greatsword are waiting for you. Best Talismans Unlike Talismans required for other weapons, in this build, you need to focus only on the offensive power of Freyja’s Greatsword itself. Among the many Talismans, Shard of Alexander is to increase the damage of Ash of War Savage Lion’s Claw of this weapon by 15%. Claw Talisman is also very useful when you use Greatsword to jump attack, because it increases your mobility. In addition, Two-Handed Sword Talisman is also very necessary, because it increases your attack power by 15% when you use Freyja’s Greatsword with both hands. For these Talismans, you can choose one or two to equip. If you have to choose one or two, my suggestion is to choose Claw Talisman and Two-Handed Sword Talisman. These Talismans are located far away from each other. For example, Shard of Alexander is obtained after you complete Iron Fist in Alexander’s questline, Two-Handed Sword Talisman is found in a treasure chest in Temple Town Ruins, Claw Talisman is found on top of a watchtower in Stormveil Castle, and Two-Headed Turtle Talisman is in a treasure chest near Rivermouth Cave. So you can spend some time and Elden Ring Runes to find these Talismans before building Freyja’s Greatsword build, because they will be useful not only in this build but also in other builds. Best Armor Although you can get a Freyja’s Armor from Freyja, it has no passive effect to increase the effect of Redmane Skills or the damage of the weapon itself, so it is useless. The best choice is Rakshasa Set, because each piece of armor in it increases your damage by 2%. But it should be noted here that it also increases the damage you take by the same percentage. Increasing the damage to the enemy is more valuable than the negative effects you take, because those negative effects can be reduced by Talismans and Crystal Tears. Best Attribute Data Allocation For attribute data allocation, Vigor and Strength are both essential. And since Freyja’s Greatsword only scales in Strength, you only need to invest a little in this attribute. Intelligence and Arcane can be ignored because these two attributes are not suitable for this build. Faith cannot be too much, because you only need a moderate amount of Faith to use Golden Vow. For Mind and Endurance, you can maintain a balance between the two, and whether you prefer one to the other depends on how often you use Ash of War Savage Lion’s Claw. If you have already chosen the data for each attribute, you can’t Respec in Realm of Shadow, so you must reflect. But there is a way to modify it. You need to go to Raya Lucaria Academy and defeat Queen of Full Moon Rennala in exchange for Larval Tear. You can use this Larval Tear to help you Respec, but still be aware that this Elden Ring Item is limited. The following is the distribution information of each attribute, for reference only. Vigor: 60 Mind: 40 Endurance: 30 Strength: 85 Dexterity: 20 Intelligence: 9 Faith: 25 Arcane: 10 Best Wondrous Flask Of Physick There are a lot of Crystal Tears options in Wondrous Flask DLC that are perfect for Freyja’s Greatsword builds. For example, Greenburst Crystal Tear can help you increase the speed of Endurance recovery - 15 points per second for 3 minutes, which is very important for this build because using Ash of War and charged heavy attacks in combat will consume a lot of Endurance. Similarly, Crystal Tear and Two-Headed Turtle Talisma can also achieve this effect. If you want to reduce the damage, you take a little or even cancel it, you can choose Opaline Hardtear, because it can cancel 15% of all damage types for 3 minutes after you use it. Or if you want your Poise to be a little stronger, you can also equip Leaden Hardtear. Best Incantations Because Freyja’s Greatsword only increases the damage of Redmane Skills, and does not increase the damage of any Sorceries or Incantations, you can equip some Incantations when you are facing some spell damage that you cannot resist. In addition, the armor provided by Freyja does not have any passive effects. The best Incantations are Supportive Incantations, because they can protect you in some regular battles. Or you can choose to stack Golden Vow and Flame, Grant me Strength, which will increase your damage and gain some damage offset in a short time. The above are some of the options you should choose for the build of Freyja’s Greatsword. If you encounter better build items in the game, you can come to iGMeet Discord to communicate with other players and learn from other players.

Bonny Gaol is one of the optional mini-dungeons you’ll encounter when you begin your Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree journey. It’s tucked away in the secluded area of ​​Scadu Altus and is a tough nut to crack. However, just like the other gaols, Bonny Gaol is still a dungeon worth exploring because there’s some really nice loot and amazing rewards waiting to be collected at the end of the quest. One of the great loot you can find at Bonny Gaol is Night Armor Set, which is the same set of armor worn by Jolan, the main NPC in DLC. In this guide, let’s take a look at Bonny Gaol location, a full walkthrough for completing the dungeon, including where to get Armor of Night Set, Shield of Night, Hefty Cracked Pot, Curseblade Meera Spirit Ashes, and Stalwart Horn Charm +2. Getting To Bonny Gaol First, we’ll cover how to get to Bonny Gaol, starting at Moorth Ruins Site of Grace in Scadu Altus. From there, we’ll move a short distance east and a little south to find a ramshackle entrance to the ruins below. We’ll have to be careful when entering the ruins, as it’s possible to die from fall damage. Note that there’s still some value in the insignificant items in the ruins, so feel free to explore. Not only can you enrich your build with these items, but you can also trade them with other players for additional Elden Ring Runes, killing two birds with one stone. Once we get close to the bottom of the ruins, there should be a tunnel leading southeast, out of the ruins, to Bonny Village Site of Grace. Bonny Gaol isn’t far away. To get there, head south from Bonny Village Site of Grace and cross the wooden bridge. Be careful, there are Spider Scorpions on the way to Gaol, but there aren’t actually any in Gaol. How To Complete Bonny Gaol? This dungeon is relatively short, but it does require a little backtracking and trickery. Hefty Cracked Pot Going down the main path, we’ll first drop two hanging jars to reach a secluded area. As we head to the southeast room, be careful of the jumping Jar Innards. New enemies added to Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. These weird creatures are contained in giant jars. Keep an eye out, you’ll also find a Hefty Cracked Pot here. The enemies here are annoying, though, so we should deal with them first before going to the sigil to the west and standing on it. It should glow and summon the hanging jars to come down. But if it doesn’t work the first time, jump on it and these jars will take us back to the top floor, and from there we can follow the path to the west. Stalwart Horn Charm +2 Behind the door that needs to be opened, there is a chute that we can jump down. Once down, we’ll move east and go through the tunnel system. At this point, keep an eye out for the annoying corpse oozes on the ceiling. At the end of this path, there is a ladder that we can climb to get Stalwart Horn Charm +2. Armor Of Night Set & Shield Of Night We will then retrace the previous route back to the tunnel system. This time, we will move a short distance west and then turn south. We can run along this path the rest of the way out of the tunnel system. Continuing forward, we can pick up Lost Ashes of War on the way, but nothing else of note. Once we exit a large cave, we will go west, down a staircase and through a door. After going through another door that needs to be opened again, we will jump onto the hanging pot to the north, but be sure to stay on it as it descends. If it doesn’t start to rise on its own, jump on it. It should lead us to a higher area where Armor of Night Set can be found. We will then also need to keep an eye out for Jar Innards that swoop in as we follow the southern passage to get Shield of Night. Curseblade Meera Spirit Ashes Next, we need to enter the cave again and go down the slope to the west room where there is an enemy sitting on a chair. We then jump down the cave and land in a river of blood. Go west towards a tunnel full of slime enemies. Then turn south to another tunnel and jump down at the end. Continue running east past Living Jars and then drop down to another area full of hanging jars. Go north past the enemies and eventually reach a platform full of black shadow enemies. Go west until a jar elevator appears and take it to the bridge full of enemies below. Once you defeat or ignore them, you will drop down to the lower platform. Going west, we can find a fogged gate. Behind it is Curseblade Labirith boss fight from Elden Ring. It moves the same as the one seen when the player enters Land of Shadow, except that Curseblade Labirith will release black shadows and become invisible. Therefore, it is recommended that you try to stay in the corner and lure the boss to come to you and show up. Once you defeat it, you will get its Curseblade Meera Spirit Ashes as a reward. The above is the complete route to complete Bonny Gaol dungeon. Although this is just an optional dungeon and will not have a big impact on your major story, the rewards you can get from completing it are definitely worth your effort! Come and try it out!

With the release of Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree, Sorceries and magic have returned in force, and players have discovered that there are a ton of spells and staffs to use. Each staff has something that sets them apart, and each has a different purpose. Some staffs enhance certain spells, while others have incredible scaling. For example, some staffs can cause bleed damage and scarlet rot effects on enemies. Choosing the right staff in the game can make your quest or combat much easier. Glintstone Staff Glintstone Staff is a great starting Prisoner staff, as it only requires regular smithing stones to upgrade this Elden Ring Items, and Intelligence is something you need to focus on. While the Glintstone Staff doesn’t have any skills or associated buffs, it’s a great all-around choice for players who are just getting started with Prisoner in Elden Ring. This magic root is used by Prisoner by default, but can also be picked up by Noble Sorcerer enemies in Caria Manor later in the game. Astrologer’s Staff Among the first class staffs, Astrologer’s Staff is arguably the best for players who want to build a pure magic build early on. Its Intelligence stat is higher than Glintstone Staff overall, and it improves more with each upgrade. Glintstone Staff is more suitable for flexible builds, while Astrologer’s Staff is more suitable for full magic builds. If you’ve been looking for a handy staff, you can’t miss Astrologer’s Staff. It can be used to maximize your efficiency for a large part of your introductory period, and its high Intelligence stat can make you feel accomplished when fighting against early monsters. Demi-Human Queen’s Staff This staff will probably be the first major upgrade for most sorcerers in Elden Ring. Demi-Human Queen’s Staff can be obtained by defeating a small boss in Demi-Human Forest Ruins. However, it is not without its shortcomings. Its expansion is weak, so you can still use Astrologer’s Staff mentioned above in the early game. When your other attributes are a bit higher, you can use it to add a little magic to your build. Crystal Staff In Academy Crystal Cave, you can find the staff behind the fake wall in front of the boss’s door. If you still can’t see it, you can try to go a little further to the right room. Although it only provides a 10% increase in Crystalian Sorceries, this increase can often mean a completely different result - life or death? Unlike Rotten Crystal Staff, the basic Crystal Staff will not cause any accumulation when used as a melee weapon. But it can’t help but look beautiful - the whole body looks like a sapphire. But it is not a beautiful waste at all, and it can make exploration easier for you with eight Strength and a staggering forty-eight Intelligence. Gelmir Glintstone Staff Like other aspects of Elden Ring, it allows players to build their own characters specifically to showcase their desired fighting style. Among high-level players, most focus on Faith and Intelligence. For mages who want to replicate the high-level player path, Gelmir Glintstone Staff will be their most powerful weapon, as it increases the effectiveness of lava-centric spells by 15%. To get it, you need money to go to Volcano Manor to find Man-Serpent Sorcerer, and you also need to fight it in the throne room. After succeeding, you will find Gelmir Glintstone Staff on the ground. Staff Of Loss Many Elden Ring players will consider what is more effective? Is it a powerful attack that the enemy can see and avoid? Or a smaller damage that is unpredictable? Staff Of Loss can solve your second half of the problem, both casting spells that make the enemy unpredictable and creating a lot of damage. Elden Ring has two specific Invisibility Sorceries, namely Night Shard and Night Comet. So in a sense, Staff Of Loss is closely related to both spells. Staff Of Loss can be found on a corpse located in Town of Sorcery, Sellia. This staff increases the effectiveness of both spells by 30%, but in the dual-wielding New Game+ build this can be increased to 60%! Carian Glintstone Staff In the game, staff wielders are often seen as more passive combatants, as they seem to only be willing to face enemies from a comfortable distance and are unwilling to engage in close combat. But Carian Glintstone Staff completely breaks tradition by adding 15% power to the Carian sword sorceries, allowing you to cast Void Blade on any enemy that stands in your way. If you know Carian Study Hall’s Liurnia of Lakes, then finding Carian Glintstone Staff is very simple. It is on a corpse in the second elevator. Carian Regal Scepter For casual players who don’t want to specialize in a particular type of spell, but just want a staff that can do everything, Carian Regal Scepter is perfect for them. To get it, you need to first give Remembrance of Full Moon Queen to Enia in Roundtable Hold. After you complete this quest, you need to go to Rennala at the top of Raya Lucaria Academy inside of the library to get this Elden Ring Item. Carian Regal Scepter relies mainly on Somber Smithing Stones to upgrade, which means its attributes are also unique. So you have to be unique to use it - Intelligence must be 69 or higher. How many of these staffs have you obtained now? Have you used them to their maximum effect? ​​I hope you have fun playing Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree!

Recently, a lot of Elden Ring fans were invited to Paris for a preview of Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. How can you preview an expansion for what is already one of the largest and most flexible games ever? When what players like and dislike is largely dependent on specific choices in terms of builds, an expansion as massive as Shadow of the Erdtree, coming two years after Elden Ring, only makes things more complicated and impossible to describe with any degree of generality. Here, we’ll analyze some reports of players’ preview experiences and discuss some of the weapon arts, environments, bosses and difficulty that will be added to the expansion! Before Entering First, I have to say that it feels almost impossible to effectively preview Shadow of the Erdtree. I’d wager that a large portion of even its most devoted fanbase has yet to personally experience everything that Lands Between has to offer. For example, the parts of the game that people have experienced, which areas they enjoyed, and what problems they may have had in the base game all depend on countless personal choices made in terms of highly specific builds. Now, with Shadow of the Erdtree coming on June 21, 2024, we’ve suddenly expanded that initial dilemma: more zones, tougher bosses, more gear to experiment with, and more variables by which your own experience will subtly change. As a result, you might feel that your personal experience is harder to convey to an audience with any real generalizability. New Content Available For Preview Anyway, let’s take a look at what’s available in Shadow of the Erdtree preview event. We have three classes to choose from: Warrior, Knight, and Sorcerer, and each class is set to level 150. The team says this is just an arbitrary number they settled on for the preview, and that you can access the class after defeating Radahn and Mohg, with different stats prioritized differently for different classes. We have access to two large, separate areas of the huge new world that Erdtree offers: Castle Ensis and Belurat Castle Settlement, and have three hours to do and see what we can. However, this simplified campaign structure does nothing to prepare players for what’s coming. Add to that the inherent weirdness of any preview, you’re in a strange place, aware that you’re being watched. The biggest difficulty is how to begin to convey what actually happened in that narrow preview window. So this preview won’t be a completely comprehensive analysis of everything in the expansion, just an accurate recollection of what players experienced and were impressed by. Still, there’s so much to dig into here! DLC Is Difficult I think one of the first things you notice when jumping into a DLC is that it’s going to be hard for most players. Almost every player in Early Access booted up Elden Ring in the first few days, either to get to DLC access points or just to brush up on the control mechanics. If you haven’t already, I recommend doing so to regain muscle memory of Elden Ring’s unique and sometimes unforgiving pace. It’s also worth stocking up on some Elden Ring Runes and consumables in advance. As we wandered across this vast new plane, it was hard not to be struck by the scenery before us. Ephemeral Graves dotted the landscape, stretching as far as you could see, and the light from the cracks in Erdtree illuminated it. A far cry from the alluring golden glow of the original game, a dreamlike, beautiful, and intimidating picture. But be careful, because just when you’re enjoying all this, an enemy suddenly appears from nowhere and knocks us down with a single fierce attack. Players need to bravely fight this new opponent, but there are dangers all around, and some people were killed before they even reached the two custom areas we were allowed to explore. In short, from the beginning, Shadow of the Erdtree is an experience that requires constant vigilance. The already occasionally unbearable brutality of its base game is increased tenfold, and this brutality has not really weakened in the three-hour preview. Ordinary enemies will increase their own strength and attack you in groups, and the most insignificant enemies will usually punish you quickly because you underestimated them. Seriously, although you can enter DLC after defeating the two must-kill bosses, if you haven’t raised the vigor level to a reasonable level, you’re dying here. Even though Warrior class I’ve been using for most of this has been upgraded to level 55, the highest of all the available builds, it’s still tough. And since we’re heading into the full version of New Game+, things will inevitably get more challenging. New Weapon And Skill Selection Tougher than any of the enemies, however, is the choice paralysis I felt for a while during the preview. While most spells are obviously limited to Sorcerer, there are a number of new weapons for any build to try, including a variety of Axes, Spears and Swords, as well as a host of weapons that are becoming popular favorites in the form of new Martial Art skills. If used correctly, they can quickly wear down an enemy’s stance. Beyond that, the new combat options, such as the wealth of new weapon arts, make me feel like any of them could become a new favorite if we had more time to practice. But unfortunately, we had to look at the class requirements of the available content as much as possible before I could thoroughly master all of this stuff. Given the challenges of the above content, this strategy requires honing in on the builds that work for the time being. For me, that would come in the form of Backhand Blade, as this weapon seems to be the most satisfying choice between damage output, range, and reach, and its associated weapon art, Blind Spot, further enhances this ability. Plenty Of Areas To Explore If you only have three hours to see what’s on offer in DLC, efficiency is important, as the two areas we were allowed into look at least as densely populated as some of the larger castle areas in the base game. Castle Ensis, for example, seems to be the more difficult of the two castles, and it reminded me of Raya Lucaria Academy, with its emphasis on Sorcerers and Magic. The more densely populated Belurat Castle reminded me of the decay and decay of Leyndell. You’ll be carefully examining every visible nook and cranny before moving on, as you can guarantee there’s something waiting to pounce on you compared to the base game. Why The New Expansion Is Worth The Wait? If there’s anything exciting about this preview, it’s not necessarily any single design element, enemy, or gear, but the fact that in a few weeks we’ll suddenly have all new Elden Ring to decipher, a whole new world full of secrets waiting to be uncovered. FromSoftware really seems to have used the two years since the base game’s release to make this happen. While players have three hours to explore two enormous areas of this world, they definitely haven’t seen everything these two areas have to offer. By the end of the preview, you’ll realize that these two areas are just a tiny dot on the much larger map of this expansion. There’s so much more that you can’t even imagine, which is incredibly exciting. What do you think of this new expansion? Are there any other things you’ve discovered that were surprising? Anyway, let’s look forward to Shadow of the Erdtree in a few weeks!