Elden Ring Patch Has Players Exploiting One Specific Kind Of Weapon
Elden Ring installed a new patch meant to fix the game, but it has led to players exploiting thrusting and poking weapons for maximum effect.
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According to Kotaku, the new Elden Ring patch is especially kind to players who prefer any type of thrusting or poking weapon, giving rise to a whole new slew of builds revolving around thrusting weapons. There are endure pokers, shield pokers, resolve pokers, bull goat pokers, etc. The reason behind that stems from the update itself, which brought various different boosts to all PVP-build weapons. However, thrusting weapons got a speed boost for their Impaling Thrust skill, which now has increased movement speed, increased attack power, and lower global cooldown.
The combination of these new metrics means that Impaling Thrust now performs faster and stronger and has reduced timing between being able to perform any other skill or mechanics, like rolling. This equals more damage over time in PVP battles. However, people are flocking to “poking” build since they’re easier to master now. However, the recent Elden Ring patch was generally generous to every build, and there’s actually no need to switch things up as long as you’ve mastered the build you’re playing.
A patch can make or break the game, as was the case with Cyberpunk 2077. However, when it comes to Elden Ring, the most recent patch, which was meant to rebalance the in-game combat mechanics, completely broke the game. And this isn’t the first time this is happening; previous patches made some bosses more manageable while unintentionally making others unbeatable, prompting even the most legendary players to break out a sweat while playing.
For those that are unfamiliar, the gaming sphere has a concept referred to as “META” — an acronym that stands for “most effective tactical approach.” As gaming releases evolve through patches and updates, certain classes rise above the others, and gamers tend to stick to those classes as they’re considered META, just like “pokes” are becoming in Elden Ring. In fact, there are gamers who refuse to play cooperative games with players who play non-META classes.
But in most cases, this doesn’t matter since it was proven, time and time again, that playstyle and class mastery often prevail over META builds. This happens due to an in-depth understanding of how in-game classes work. This example only serves to reaffirm our previous statement that pursuing a META build in any game, including Elden Ring, isn’t necessarily the best approach. It just yields the best results with the least amount of effort.
Still, there are certain poke builds that require careful tactics during confrontations, like Endure, which mitigates damage taken, and boosts poise, are quite powerful. So much so that they’re exceptionally tedious to go up against. Just tedious, not impossible. In fact, gamers now tend to dodge income attacks while waiting for the opponents’ Endure effects to wear off before even trying to land a strike on the enemies using Endure. It’s quite possible that a future Elden Ring patch is going to subdue Endure-pokers.
Elden Ring was released in February this year and has remained among the top-played games during the course of eight months, which makes it a serious Game of the Year contender. Its developer, FromSoftware, announced a DLC for the game, as well as their engagement in creating an entirely new title.
