Hello,
I just made several attempts at Darak (the sewers boss) and, despite using a Claymore upgraded thrice, it feels to me like I’m doing very little damage. Damage is about 10 per hit, meaning it takes what feels like 10 minutes to get through his health bar.
I managed to defeat him after a bunch of tries (and after depleting most of my consumables) and…he got into phase 2, with another full health bar. Needless to say, I didn’t beat that phase, having run out of heals.
I’m level 10 and have something like 16 health, 15 stamina, 16 str. Am I underleveled for this boss or is it meant to be that hard?
I’m pretty sure I could beat him eventually, but it feels more tedious than challenging, due to the very drawn-out fight and the need to go refill health items, repair equip, jog to the boss arena etc.
The other boss I could be challenging is the Riven Twins, but I deal very little damage to them as well, so my instinct is that I need better gear/stats before attempting them. Then again, my instinct may be wrong and biased by years of dark souls, where usually bossfights are much quicker than this.
So, am I underleveled or just need to be patient and git gud?
I would say that this is good feedback for the devs, since one of the EA things that needs to be done is to carefully tune the difficulty so it is where they want it to be. We don’t want Diablo easy, but also don’t want Elden Ring tough, I think. Maybe submit it there?
Are you able to consistently parry the boss and follow up with special attacks? At least for the first boss that made me deal much more damage. I haven’t further progressed so far, so lets see how it will be for me.
IDK if it helps but my claymore build so far is 18 health, 20 stam, 18 strenght, I put one point into int to try a starter weapon before i found a claymore(waste) and 22 equip load im level 14 and i beat darek at 12
basically what i did to beat him is run away! and when he charges, id roll at him but aim it so i roll past him, and ussually he’d get winded or stop to take a moment break after that charge and id hit him in his back with a charge up attack and roll away as far as fast as possible while he went beserk and this helps avoid his brutal 4 hit combos or shield slams and gives you time to heal up if needed… repeat until phase two… phase two same thing run away, and then itll jump at you instead of hit you with his very fast mid range tentacle attack where all three strike the same spot or the attack where all three spread out and you want to roll diagonally towards it when the jump happens and charge up an attack into his back after he lands and misses you and roll away while it goes berserk repeat until dead.
I beat him on my 2nd try with dual enchanted daggers. I also had an enchanted bow/knife option to switch to so I could unload on him with fire arrows after a few melee runs. I had 23 stamina and was a fast armor class, so it was relatively easy to dodge around stick him a few times, back off, switch to bow, fire off what I could, get back in, etc. Lobbed a few grenades at him too towards the end.
Crab-stuffed mushrooms and the soup that restores stamina were my healing items. Oiled up my dual blades a few times mid fight as well.
I’ve tried every weapon style in the game so far - dual blades is by far the best for me.
You need a better weapon. I had dual daggers with 3 base damage upgraded+enchnanted (13 dex req) and I couldn’t go through his first HP bar. I bought 10 base damage dual daggers (16str/16dex, 15 damage with upgrade and stats which is literally 5x stronger than my previous daggers) and I obliterated him with a couple of combos easily. I haven’t used STR weapons, so I don’t know what the base damage should be but my assumption is that you need a better weapon (check upgraded town vendors, ask in Discord for a better STR weapon)
Thanks for the answers.
I never tried parrying the boss because honestly I’m not yet confident enough to be consistent with it and every mistake is a big cost of hp, which is especially bad towards the end of the fight. I’ll try practicing it at the start of the fight though, thanks for the advice.
As for getting better weapons, that’s probably the safest option, although I’d need 2 more lvl ups to get to 16 dex. Probably worth it, but I’d like to test the weapon to see if I like it before investing that amount of points. Maybe I can see if there are any other daggers available with lower requirements.
Thanks for the information anyway, I see it’s likely a mix of being underleveled/undergeared and needing to master the combat better!
I found him to be difficult, with the second stage being much much easier. Died probably 12 times and was the same stats as you but Int/Str sword and shield. I’m very good at parrying, and my attempts looked like me burning through 80% of his health very quickly, messing up once and getting wrecked; or just barely getting him past 20%.
Honestly? I thought the difficult was PERFECT. Bosses SHOULD be hard, and when I finally beat him I was so pumped. Claymore is a hard weapon to use IMO and much balancing needs to be done with big weapons and heavy armor.
Combat mastery>weapon/gear>level is how I’ve seen the most to least important rules of success be in this game.
Update: I leveled up to lv 11, which is a pretty big power spike, and learned how to parry the boss.
Suddenly I started dealing considerably more damage and the bossfight was much more doable (took something like 3-4 tries).
I also infused my claymore with Heal Aura which is immensely useful (thanks to the guy in Tips & Tricks who suggested it!), to the point I think it might be actually broken (it heals a huge amount of health even with just 2 focus points, so you can keep healing after every couple of attacks).
It’s still not trivial (you need to time the heals well and not miss too many parries in a row) but definitely much easier than without.
Is your Claymore upgraded? The Claymore is a Lvl 1 / Tier 1 weapon, which is okay if you’ve upgraded it plenty (aim for Tier 2), but otherwise damage output might be low - which for the Claymore will make things very slow!
Possibly obvious - the weapon upgrades are more important to damage than even the strength scaling. If you get it to Tier 2, it should be doing enough damage. If it’s not, 2 Hand weapon damage may need some calibration. I haven’t spent a lot of time with my 2 Hander yet.
I think Level 10 is slightly low (sub-10 is Dangerous for the area per the area prompt), but not very low. There is a power bump at Lvl 11 due to some of the equipment that unlocks.
Have you done any infusions on your Claymore by chance or added any runes? I struggled with the Torn Colossus and Im 100% positive I was underleveled for it, but utilizing those features really changed the game (that and about 30 - 60 minutes of practice )
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