@AdmiralKinyagi tagging you here as thread posting is easier lol.
So when I say “undodgeable”, I mean the attacks happen so quickly that unless you are literally dodging the exact instant you begin to see him move, you will be taking damage. You have to factor in human reaction time, IE just because I see an enemy move doesn’t mean I want to automatically instant-dodge, this is called panic-rolling which is heavily punished in Elden Ring by many bosses and enemies.
Clergymen incentivizes you to panic roll with swipe attacks so fast that you must dodge them instantly otherwise you take damage, again this is a behavior that the rest of the game teaches you not to do.
His projectile attacks home-in on you at ridiculous angles, breaking the sense of the game’s combat being immersive and moreso giving off the sense that Clergymen is just trying to be hard for the sake of being hard, not for the sake of being good or fun. The boulders he throws will change trajectory in midair even though it makes no logical sense for thrown boulders to do that. The rock shard shotgun toss thing will always fly straight at your face regardless of when the Clergymen releases them from his hand, even when it makes zero physical sense for that to happen.
Follow up this nonsense with the fact that the Clergymen never. Stops. Attacking. And you’re left with a boring ugly boss who is constantly spamming nuisance attacks at you without end.
At least with all of the bullshit present with Malenia, she actually stops to dramatically walk around, letting you actually assess the situation and plan accordingly. The Clergymen is literally nonstop aggression, and pretty much all of his attacks are horseshit for a gigachad colossal sword used like myself as most colossal swords are simply too slow to hit him before he can damage you afterwards. Again with Malenia, she will actually stagger much of the time so you can cleanly punish her without her being guaranteed to punish you afterwards.
Maliketh himself, if he were a standalone boss, I’d put him in the B tier for bosses, but Clergymen is a quadruple F- so Maliketh is dragged down as well.
Malenia is bullshit but Maliketh is a new level of awful for Fromsoft. I subscribed to Joseph Anderson solely because he mentioned that Maliketh was so awful he didn’t want to go back and collect footage of him. Obviously experiences in these games vary greatly, but I have come across others online who similarly thought that Maliketh was abysmal.
Idk how you fought Placidusax headon lol. The optimal strategy is to attack his ass and tail given all of the punishing moves he has for you fighting him headon, and the lack of rear punishing moves he has in addition to the fact that his tail takes just as much damage as any other part of his body.
Again Midir incentivizes the player attack his head since he takes extra damage there and leaves several openings where you can attack his head. With Placidusax, there is no incentive to fight him head on, and he struggles to defend his rear, making this the optimal strategy.
And killing a dragon by smacking his ass for 5 minutes is just lame as hell lol.