The First Boss: Pieta Fight
Created a crusader just to have a comparison and your starting class matters definitely. I didn’t level the crusader at all and I’ve beaten her second attempt.
First Phase:
Take your two-hander two-handed and try to hit her with a fully charged heavy attack. If you hit, you’ll cancel her attack and “stagger” her for a moment.
Wait about 1-2 seconds to regenerate some stamina, then follow up with the next heavy attack. If you get the timing right, you can stun-lock her until she starts the second phase.
Second Phase:
Second phase was a bit more tricky for me, but here what worked in the end for me.
She flew to the other end of the room to summon the two other “angels”, I ran past her (i.e. behind) and started to whack her.
The adds attacked towards the center and she herself only fumbled around, waiting for the adds to finish, so I could just knocking her down, again heavy attack after heavy attack.
Note:
While I wouldn’t consider her unbeatable, it’s a rather movement/wide swings intensive fight, including adds, something I didn’t expect for the very first boss in this game (or a game like this in general).
And I think that’s what’s throwing off most people. You’d typically a bulky, not too fast, heavy swings fight. Not a – if I may use an Elden Ring analogy – a buffed up Crucible Knight.
Honestly she’s really not a difficult boss, the best this to do it to just parry her basic sword swings and stab in between till you get a critical attack opportunity. The parry window in this game seems incredibly generous in my short time playing so far, and you’re more rewarded for being aggressive and attacking more frequently which will also replenish the white part of your health bar that gets reduced as you parry.
Also I imagine picking the advanced class when you may be inexperienced with the souls genre already is putting yourself at a significant disadvantage and just asking to get frustrated.
My primary issue with the launch so far is that it’s just another case of a modern game built with the “latest and greatest” technology, hyped to look awesome and beautiful, but just ends up launching completely un-optimised…
I’m managing okay on a 3060Ti, but there’s still a lot of noticeable issues with the graphics, lighting, textures, frame drops, etc. I mean what happened to the game industry and being able to launch a game successfully?
Managed to beat her after multiple tries and while not going to umbral realm, each try when I ended up in Umbral Realm without healing items, I just went back to main menu and continue, so I don’t lose souls, and then use siphoning to get souls from a nearby npc infight, didn’t manage to get a level from it that way, but still nice extra bonus while trying to beat her, also run through the place to get some loot, ammunition that you can sell later, and maybe even armor or weapons.
Using condemned starting “class”, lvl 11, STR10/AGI10/END11/VIT10/RAD13/INF10 (mistake going for radiance to see how much do I need to see what happens in the lore description, do I get more lore and/or more benefits)
Basically summon the npc, and then use the first shield you find to parry stuff, while sometimes attacking, mostly just rely on parry, then dodge, and very little attacking on your part for the first phase, on the second phase more dodging and attacking, but very little amount of parrying, but if you can do it. Compared to any other soulslike easiest parry timing, but don’t go willy nilly attacking, you can’t parry otherwise.
The npc is on it’s own basically useless, can only take maybe 5% of her health before dying, with parrying in the first phase he sticks around till 75% of her health gone, the rest is up to you not getting hit.