Jump Attack Elden Ring Pc
Aura Chupka
As a veteran Souls-liker, I've just internalized the series' more baffling quirks. It can be easy to forget how truly weird and surprising some basic elements of these games are. One feature that can be a sticking point for some first-time players is the messaging system.
Players can choose from a selection of templates and words to create little notes that show up on the ground in other gamers' worlds. The original intent seems to have been fostering cooperation, an in-game form of playground hint sharing and speculation. Messaging's real, time-honored function, however, is as a means to shitpost.
Over the years, players have uncovered countless ways to mislead, misdirect, and crack wise with FromSoft's limited templates. My favorite has always been the messages of encouragement people left for environmental storytelling skeletons in Dark Souls 2: "Don't give up, skeleton!" and variations thereof proliferated throughout Drangleic.
For the uninitiated who are still jumping off cliffs and slashing walls at the behest of strangers in Elden Ring, I've compiled some of the most common spoofs, goofs, and genuinely helpful messages I've seen.
You almost never want to try jumping. If you see a message like this before a precipitous drop, it's gonna be a joke at your expense. You're going to fall to your death and somebody out there is gonna be laughing at you, figuratively speaking.
One helpful clue that you're not at one of the rare locations where there is something hidden below a ledge is a massive pile of bloodstains nearby (that means players have died here recently). The message has timed out in the following screenshot, but you can see the bloodstains left by a host of credulous fools.
The Souls series has a proud tradition of mimics: monsters masquerading as treasure chests who often have the ability to one hit kill you if you try to open them unawares. A single weapon strike will typically reveal a mimic and let you fight it like a normal enemy. I haven't encountered any yet in Elden Ring, but keep an eye out for messages and bloodstains before chests.
Much like inscrutable old NES RPGs, the Souls series has long featured secret paths disguised as normal sections of walls, able to be opened up with a swing of your weapon or a press of the action button. You just need to know where to look.
I'm still only a few hours into Elden Ring, but I've yet to find one secret door for all the messages pointing them out. It's been a tradition among players for years to place false notices of hidden paths before suspicious-looking, but ultimately normal sections of walls, but Elden Ring players have really kicked it into overdrive.
Thankfully, Elden Ring has fully done away with the weapon degradation of prior games. The only cost of checking a flagged wall is a small amount of time and maybe a bit of dignity. As time goes on, you'll probably develop more of a capacity for telling which hints pass the sniff test without checking.
I've always found you can trust warnings about difficult enemies. This one in particular clued me into an upcoming boss fight. Shout out to the guy right next to him who's just built different. "Weak foe ahead" indeed.
Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch.
The jump attack is an extremely potent offensive tool in Elden Ring, and there are a couple of ways to strengthen it. One option for improving jump attacks is to equip the Raptor's Black Feathers, a light-medium chest piece that may remind players of a certain hunter from Bloodborne. For those fans that would like to add Elden Ring's Raptor's Black Feathers to their inventories, details on exactly where it comes from can be found in this guide.
Players that are looking for the Raptor's Black Feathers should set their sights on the Sage's Cave on the west side of the Altus Plateau. To reach the Sage's Cave, fans can start at the Grand Lift of Dectus on the Altus Plateau side, head north through the Lux Ruins, ride down and to the west to the Abandoned Coffin, and then travel north through the pool of water. This route is shown on the map below, and fans should prepare to break a number of illusory walls and fight some of Elden Ring's skeletons upon arrival.
The first illusory wall in the Sage's Cave is at the end of the corridor that extends to the northeast from the location's Site of Grace. After passing through that wall, players should turn to their right and enter the shallow water that is front of them. Fans should then take another right, just before the edge of the cliff, and break the Elden Ring illusory wall that is in the small nook on the west side of the room.
There are two chests a short distance beyond this second illusory wall, and players should take a moment to loot a Lost Ashes of War and some of Elden Ring's Rejuvenating Boluses from them. Players can then continue following the path that travels southward to reach a room with a campfire and a burning brazier. There is a passage just next to that brazier, and fans should follow it until they reach a chamber with a waterfall.
After entering the waterfall chamber, fans should turn to their left and jump across a small gap to reach another stone path. This path terminates at a wall that is illusory, and a chest containing the Raptor's Black Feathers is just beyond it. There is also a chest containing a Skeletal Mask in this room, and Elden Ring players may want to grab that helmet before they leave the Sage's Cave and test out the approximately 10% jump attack damage increase that is granted by the Raptor's Black Feathers.
The Claw Talisman, when equipped, will increase the damage of your jump attacks. This can make quite the difference during fights, especially during the early-game, if jumping attacks are one of your go-to attacks.
Whatever you might think is currently undermining the difficulty of Elden Ring, it's clearly doing a terrible job of it. Does magic make the game too easy? Evidently not; patch 1.04 just buffed the pants off dozens of spells. Maybe it's colossal weapons with their high stagger and long reach? Nope, they got buffed too, and in a way that makes their jump attacks less oppressive. Are spirit summons too powerful? Not in FromSoftware's eyes; they basically haven't touched the things since bringing the Mimic more in line with other spirits.
Elden Ring players are getting stronger every patch, and every round of balance changes reinforces the sentiment that, unlike some outspoken melee purists, FromSoftware wants players to use everything in the game. Nothing makes Elden Ring too easy. Not spirits, not multiplayer, and certainly not magic. Players are welcome to limit their own options for the sake of personal challenges, but the people who made the Lands Between are practically shoveling tools at us, and it's turning Elden Ring into the most dynamic game in the increasingly broad Souls series.
All of FromSoftware's action RPGs have been patched to some extent, usually to buff weapons and spells between infrequent nerfs to the few standout nails that really do need to be hammered down. But Elden Ring is on another level already. The bigger games get and the more stuff you put in them, the harder it becomes to balance everything, and Elden Ring's vast world came with an equally vast armory. It's been fascinating to watch the game evolve as players discover and exploit optimal strategies, and as FromSoftware steers players in response.
Elden Ring's patch notes are like the rings on a tree. You can see FromSoftware's thinking and extrapolate what the studio likely would have drawn from player behavior. For example, the first big batch of balance changes improved the damage and reduced the FP cost of tons of spells, immediately pouring cold water on the persistent narrative that magic is some sort of overpowered insta-win button. In fact, magic was a bit restrictive. High FP costs constrained spell choices and made magic super reliant on Mind and mana flasks, which could hamstring some spell-heavy builds in the early to mid-game. This patch also made shields and many craftable consumables more effective. Even with guard counters, many shields weren't competing with the power of dual-wielding, and lots of players were likely ignoring crafted items (I still am, admittedly), so they got a boost.
At the same time, this patch reaffirmed that FromSoftware doesn't want everyone to use one Ash of War or a single weapon for everything. It didn't make this wonderfully flexible weapon art and infusion system just to have a few things suck all the oxygen out of the room. In this case, that was the Hoarfrost Stomp and the Sword of Night and Flame, which caught two of the biggest early nerfs in the game. Both of these are still very powerful, but they aren't totally boxing out competing gear the way they used to.
The most recent update is even more interesting, starting with the way it handled colossal weapons. Because these weapons are so ungainly, Strength builds started to revolve almost exclusively around special attacks and jumping attacks. Special attack effectiveness would depend on your weapon or Ash of War, but jumping attacks were universally overpowered. They hit as hard as strong attacks but didn't have any windup, plus you could roll out of them more quickly. They were just a better, safer option.
This feels like a pretty elegant way to go about balancing what is for most people a primarily single-player, PvE-focused game. Unless something is truly best in class to the point that it obviates all other choices or utterly trivializes all challenge, it's often better, and always more fun, to see buffs instead of nerfs in games like this. And even when it has nerfed outlier spells and weapons, FromSoftware has never totally gutted anything in Elden Ring, plus the game's few nerfs have been paired with buffs that presented more things to try.
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