He kept it hidden from basically everybody, at least the inner 'abyssal' serpent part of things. Not sure about how the external snakes play into it- whether he normally hid them, played them off as familiars, etc.
He kept it hidden from basically everybody, at least the inner 'abyssal' serpent part of things. Not sure about how the external snakes play into it- whether he normally hid them, played them off as familiars, etc.
I think it makes sense that a guy would be fine with his boss having a cute pet snake and then take issue with his (presumably uncontrollable or otherwise hazardous) gigantic death snake.
I know if nothing else I'd have strong concerns if I discovered the latter
Is there a reliable way to access the DLC earlier in a NG cycle? I know you have to kill Radahn and Mohg, and you can reach Mohg reasonably early if you do three invasions, but killing Mohg early on is the problem. Is there a good strategy to take him out?
A spirit ash summon that's particularly good against him? A really good early-game build that works against him?
There's no better way to kill Mogh than to blitz him down before he can actually finish the phase transition. The best way to do this is to get him with a riposte right before he's going to start the nihil sequence, then just go ham and kill him. I'm not sure how to do this reliably, though.
One note is that by the mogh fight you should be able to have a +10 special weapon, so you are going into the fight with at least some endgame gear.
Most of the scripted kills make use of Mohg's Shackle, which requires you to beat another Shardbearer besides Radahn and the Draconic Tree Sentinel to get into Leyndell. Here's one that uses Bloodhound's Fang, I'm sure there are some that use Wild Strikes on a bleed weapon.
DTS is a lot more cheeseable than Mohg, there are plenty of guides on how to lure him over to the cliffside and spank his horse so he falls off.
Is there a reliable way to access the DLC earlier in a NG cycle? I know you have to kill Radahn and Mohg, and you can reach Mohg reasonably early if you do three invasions, but killing Mohg early on is the problem. Is there a good strategy to take him out?
A spirit ash summon that's particularly good against him? A really good early-game build that works against him?
Spinning Weapon is on a +8 Halberd you get from the NPC invasion near the Revenger's Shack in Liurnia. Bloodflame Blade is similarly close by to Varre. This attack combination deals multiple hits of the status every second, resulting in the fastest bleed buildup short of those all-the-buff NG+ Scavenger Curved Sword builds you see in the speed running videos.
You can also skip the three invasions if you get up to the Writheblood ruins in Altus and invade Magnus, the Beastclaw guy (you'll need a bloody finger for it).
If you use this combination, Mohg will one-shot you if he hits you, because the bleed buffs him, but if you're trying to get him this early the chances are that he'd be doing that anyways, so don't worry about it.
Is there a reliable way to access the DLC earlier in a NG cycle? I know you have to kill Radahn and Mohg, and you can reach Mohg reasonably early if you do three invasions, but killing Mohg early on is the problem. Is there a good strategy to take him out?
A spirit ash summon that's particularly good against him? A really good early-game build that works against him?
I've never used them and so can't comment with direct knowledge, but I know that there's some videos on YT about scripting the Mohg fight with early-game resources, so if that's your goal, at least poke around and see if any of them look promising.
If you'd rather try it more 'legitimately' (in quotes because I feel like as long as you're enjoying a single-player game you're basically definitionally doing it right), your basic options seem to be:
a) summon another player, as I think there's still a fair amount of experienced players who are happy to help someone access the DLC or
b) get the zweihander (Weeping Peninsula merchant, far west), get it to +12 (the first two bell bearings), put Lion's Claw on it (beat the lion-thing in Fort Gael in Caelid), go spam it at Mohg.
Colossal sword Lion's Claw is hard for him to interrupt and good at breaking Mohg's poise, and has a lot more length than most other alternatives. To two-hand it and medium roll with the Knight armor (for 51 poise), you need Str 13, Dex 11, and about End 17-18 (depending on talismans), so not that big an imposition to get early even if you choose to respec later. You'll need to spam your heals if you can't interrupt his phase transition, and you probably won't successfully interrupt his phase transition, so you might need to up the flasks a bit, too. This strategy is something I've used to beat Mohg a couple times, though at higher levels. It works just fine to bring in whatever blender you like and have access to. Banished Knight Oleg's not a bad choice. Your spirit ash is likely to be only minimally helpful, though, unless you get it ranked up a lot.
This strategy can also be used with some other hard-hitting, poise-breaking weapons you can access early, like a charged heavy-focus spiked caestus (especially with Cragblade), but I like the zweihander's length enough to favor it. You can adjust a few similar thoughts if you really do or don't vibe with some specific weapon or other strategy.
You'll need to spam your heals if you can't interrupt his phase transition, and you probably won't successfully interrupt his phase transition, so you might need to up the flasks a bit, too.
Varre's questline takes you up to Altus already if you're trying to skip the three player invasions, so there's no need to pass up the Purifying Crystal Tear.
The quality of life is worth grabbing that even if it were out of the way, though.
Is there a reliable way to access the DLC earlier in a NG cycle? I know you have to kill Radahn and Mohg, and you can reach Mohg reasonably early if you do three invasions, but killing Mohg early on is the problem. Is there a good strategy to take him out?
A spirit ash summon that's particularly good against him? A really good early-game build that works against him?
Well Bloodhound fang is very reliable to kill him with. And if you allow online you can get invaded at the Lyndell elevator in the roundtable manor area to skip into Lyndell itself to get a plus 9 bloodhound fang for Radahn.
You can always copy the sub 2h speedrun strats I guess, and since you're not trying to blitz the game quite that fast you'll have more room to squeeze in levels of vigor or upgrade your weapon of choice.
Is there a reliable way to access the DLC earlier in a NG cycle? I know you have to kill Radahn and Mohg, and you can reach Mohg reasonably early if you do three invasions, but killing Mohg early on is the problem. Is there a good strategy to take him out?
A spirit ash summon that's particularly good against him? A really good early-game build that works against him?
Mohg is hilariously vulnerable to bleed. I used twin rapiers with bleed (don't remember the exact enhancement level) + mimic tear at just below level 100, and he didn't even manage to finish his countdown. Just stabbed him to death, triggering bleed probably more than once a second at one point.
Mohg is hilariously vulnerable to bleed. I used twin rapiers with bleed (don't remember the exact enhancements) + mimic tear at just below level 100, and he didn't even manage to finish his countdown.
Note he is hilarious in that if he finished the countdown it gets way harder, but killing him prior to finishing it isn't really *that* hard with the right setup.
Except that he didn't need to do that. Marika didn't and Ranni didn't. While we don't know the full details of Marika's ascension, we do know Ranni's, and the only thing she sacrificed was her flesh, and even then, she did so to escape being under the thumb of the Two Fingers, not to become a goddess.
Likewise, Marika did not sacrifice her flesh, her love, her fears or doubts, and still ascended to godhood.
So Miquella's method of attaining godhood did not require sacrificing everything, but he did it anyway. Now, the game did drop a hint that the method for attaining godhood that Miquella used involved ressurrecting a lord who would usher in the new god's arrival, but it doesn't go any farther than that. It would have worked a lot better if we uncovered a note in the Shadow Keep explaining that the method required sacrificing "all earthly emotions", explaining why Miquella sacrificed Saint Trina and his love--he was pursuing godhood and the only way he could figure out how required those sacrifices. But it doesn't, and it doesn't explain how Miquella found out about this obscure ritual from the records of the Shadow Keep from the Haligtree and decided to abandon everything for the sake of that.
Which is ironic, really, because Miquella could have used Ranni's method without sacrificing anything, and he had the candidate for Elden Lord already in Malenia, as well as a perfect opportunity to collect several Great Runes (his own, Malenia's, Godrick's, Rennalla's, Morgott's) to repair the Elden Ring with. The only challenge would have been burning the Erdtree, but I can't see why he couldn't have used his charm on the Fire Giant and had the Fire Giant do it for him. It still would have required getting the Rune of Death from Maliketh, but Malenia would probably be up for the task. But that would be a very different path from the one he chose, and would involve staying away from Radahn, so...
EDIT: Forgot to mention, but the Frenzied Flame ending does not involve the ambition to become Elden Lord at all, it is the ambition to destroy the entire world. Likewise, the Curse ending is driven by the ambition to curse the entire world. And in the Age of Fracture, Order, and Duskborn endings, it's rather left unclear as to what being Elden Lord at that point even means given the absence of Marika and any god to replace her.
Ranni's godhood is fundamentally a different point because she only needed (in her extreme stretch-goal plan for her ending; the way she's arranged and waiting after killing her Fingers at the end of her questline kind of makes me wonder if she was sort of resigned to that being as far as she could go without the Tarnished committing to her) to discard her flesh to discard her destiny as an Empyrean whose fate was forecast by the Fingers. You can debate how successful she was, because in a sense her ending has her still fulfilling the destiny of an Empyrean to "succeed" Marika, but she made it her own and was ruthlessly opposed to even the barest notion that her fate and will would be bound to the Fingers and (their interpretation of) The Greater Will.
Ranni's character arc is about independence and self-determination even to the point of coldness and isolation. She didn't discard anything else of herself because she didn't have ambitions to beat herself into the form of a true God and become something abstract, because that would be against the entire point of her vision. In fact, her collaboration with the Black Knives seems to be her insurance of making someone else die in soul and identity to balance the scales of her getting to keep hers while giving up flesh. Her ultimate ascension simply has her taking control of the existing Elden Ring (possibly not even holding it in her own body; she reassembles the petrified corpse of Marika in her ending and the cutscene doesn't show her doing any other ritual with it) and moving it far from the Earth to leave everything in the metaphorical and possibly literal darkness of life without divine guidance or the Erdtree's illumination and promise of rebirth.
Miquella, conversely, wants a godhood "from scratch" using the Gate of Divinity (implied to be some kind of singularity or forge created from the sacrifice of millions of hornsent and others building Enir Ilim) to burn himself into something he feels can be unconnected to Marika's legacy and embody a unique and age-defining compassion that will completely supplant the Elden Ring and the divine prison it imposes on everyone.
The simple, conclusive answer to your confusion with a literary read of the game is that Miquella sacrificed far more than Ranni--to the extent of tearing out elements of his own personhood, emotions, and an entirely second person born out of his all-encompassing love of others--because he wanted far more from his EMpyrean status, wanting to be a completely novel god to force his vision of compassion and salvation on the world. Ranni left well enough alone and just wants to take ownership of the Elden Ring and hide it from everyone to prevent divinity from taking away their self-determination and independence just as hers was as a Demigod guided by the Fingers.
Now, that's the solid read of the game that's for certain based on textual intent, but let me also get into some more speculative elements that have to be built on assumptions using the evidence and forum-nerd arguments about what the "mechanics" of magic are in this world.
***
I argue that Marika absolutely sacrificed both her flesh and components of her personhood to reach godhood just as Miquella did. While we do not find anything so clear-cut as "Marika's Crosses" telling us where and what she gave up piecemeal, I think the positioning of her origins in the Shaman Village and the remaining mystery of Radagon provide some solid ground to speculate.
I think that the fundamental value Marika wanted to "bake into" creation with her ascension (implied to be from somehow working with and betraying the Hornsent after they scoured her homeland to make Jars) and the Golden Order was "life", to the same degree as Miquella's "love". The Shaman culture seems, to me, to be implied to fit a certain stereotype of matriarchal nature-worship with their village surrounded by a level of lush foliage and peaceful animals unseen elsewhere in the Land of Shadow, which is in contrast to the dominant Hornsent culture which obsessively saw divinity as a spiral of life and death enforcing a ruthless "survival of the fittest" evolutionary ascent to power. Marika, as a Shaman, was also possessed of a special nature: that her flesh could "meld harmoniously" with others.
The Erdtree Marika created with her ascendancy defined life in the Lands Between (the realm of gods, to which all the foreign lands beyond seem in some way bound or deferential to, and it could even be a kind of afterlife with all the statements about "death washing up there" and the like) with a kind of positive-sum harmony in contrast to the Hornsent's crucible; in the early days the Erdtree gave sap that made everyone bodily immortals, and then after the greater involvement of the Greater Will stopped that it still probably facilitated a kind of delayed reincarnation. The Golden Order is itself described by its deepest scholars, the Fundamentalists, as comprising the principles of Regression and Causality, both basically stating that all life is interconnected and pushed towards return and amalgamation together (that this resembles similar values in the Crucible and the Frenzied Flame is a different and even more abstract conversation for what the Greater Will even is).
So, if Miquella had to give up his own sense of love and compassion, in the form of Saint Trina, to make himself ready to pass through the Gate; what did Marika give up to make herself ready to be God of life and order? Do we have an example of a character directly linked to her who embodies the material and bodily, but also yearns for completion and totality?
I think that the solution to the Radagon/Marika puzzle, about what Radagon even was in the first place before he seemingly fused with Marika, is that he is the part of Marika that best resembled her vision of Golden Order but thus had to be cast off before her ascension, just like Saint Trina was for Miquella. This might also explain the Giant connection, as if you overlay the Lands of Shadow map with the inner sea of the Lands Between (supported by all the talk about the Lands of Shadow being a place separated and sealed away from its original place as part of the Lands Between) then the Shaman Village is actually surprisingly close to the Mountaintops in position and elevation (especially if you use as a key that the miniature Erdtree in the Shaman Village should be positioned exactly where the Erdtree interior Site of Grace from the end of the game is).
Radagon was probably originally some internal attribute or persona of Marika's (if you want to get extra weird there might even have been something with the "flesh melding harmoniously" about a separate male body enabling Shamans to do parthenogenesis; Messmer and Melina are implied to be Marika's children from before ascension and marriage to Godfrey, but there is never anything said by or about either having a father and their red hair is the only thing you can tie to Radagon) that was abandoned. However, he still became a crusading hero of the Golden Order in the wars against Caria, before Godfrey's tarnishing caused him to return to Marika and become her body once again (you could say that this was an application of the Law of Regression, as Radagon would increasingly become obsessed with studying Fundamentalism and, based on one of the Echoes of Marika Melina reads to us, truly becoming her).
***
Now, I also want to put together something... unstated but I think clearly implied thing about the nature of the Elden Ring and Godhood, to truly understand what Marika and later Miquella are doing with the Gate of Divinity..
The best way to understand divinity in Elden Ring is that it's a status of being interwoven with the "code" of the universe, implied to all be a steady breakdown/descent from the Greater Will. This "code" seems to take the form of runes, both greater and lesser. The fact that we need a kind of special magical intervention through a maiden or Melina (although this power can be transferred) writes into the rules of the setting that "leveling up" in RPG terms is not just our Tarnished getting better at doing things through skill or training: the Runes we collect as currency are somehow being permanently fused into our being in a way that conveys greater and greater power. The Great Runes held by the demigods are components of the destroyed Elden Ring, and they grant escalations of power to increasingly divine levels. Marika is singular, capital-G God because she was one with the Elden Ring, the complete structure of all the Great Runes combined.
I'm not going to post like ten images showing you how all the Great Runes assemble geometrically into the complete Elden Ring symbol we see everywhere, because I have to use a few anyway to further demonstrate this, but just know that the geometry of the symbol is the actual power: it is not just symbolic of it, the Elden Ring is an actual runic shape from the Greater Will (sent down originally in the form of the Elden Beast) and to be a part of that shape is to be a part of divinity itself.
Now, throughout the game we gather all the Great Runes to be able to make the collection of interlocking circles in the middle; we have almost the complete Elden Ring. The enabling component we also collect are Rune Arcs, which are explicitly stated to be fragments of the arc at the bottom of the Elden Ring, which collects its blessings.
However, the Elden Ring has two arcs, as you can see here, which is in contrast to what we see of an example of a pre-Golden Order Elden Ring in Farum Azula:
This earlier Elden Ring only had one arc, at the top, and it was integrated with the Destined Death that Marika tore out of the Elden Ring and hid away to enable her reign to promise everyone life eternal, an act inherently against the nature of the world.
Note also that the arc at the top of the Farum Azula Elden Ring was quite wide, looking closer to the bottom arc on the Golden Order one in size and angle...
Now, what pose is associated with Marika?
What is Marika reduced to after the Shattering, suffering and trapped inside the Erdtree as all the scattered Great Runes are taken by the Demigods and she seems to be doomed to eternal punishment at the hands of the Elden Beast?
And even after we win the final boss fight and beating Radagon, and by extension her, into a crumbling pulp, how does her shattered body default...
Note how even in this form, dropping to her knees as basically a dead inanimate statue, the circles of the Elden Ring are inside her torso (and the lower arc is roughly associated with her hips which is its whole can of worms about fertility and birth outside of this post), and her arms still try to form an arc above her...
What I'm getting at is simple: we should understand Marika's Godhood as the fact that she literally is a Great Rune and the spine upon which the rest of the Elden Ring is built, with her own arms moved to its pinnacle while the old arc is moved down to be her hips, divorced from the Rune of Death, to be the "pool of her bounty" giving all of her suppliants the blessing of infinite birth and prosperity so long as they submit to her. The Golden Order literally is the image of Marika on the cross as a divine feminine tyrant-martyr, and as long as she is complete (which is in the distant past by the time of the game, because the world is defined instead by fracture and war from the Great Runes being in separate hands) that is the law of the world.
This also makes God a slave of the rules as much as anyone else, which is the fundamental horror that I think dawned on Marika over the millennia and why she initiated the Shattering. The role of Elden Lord is in fact to be Her jailor of a sorts, being someone who's relatively empowered by marriage to God but still has the independent will and temporal/martial power to enforce the Order on others, getting to dictate the comparatively minor details of organizing society at least until you no longer quite fit with where the Order is going as was the case of Godfrey and the Tarnished.
Changing the nature of the world, basically imposing a new idea of God on reality, is then a matter of implanting new Great Runes ("Mending Runes" in the terminology of the game in what I think is just a sop to players understanding these don't give the same mechanical powers as boss rewards) into her body. We get three Mending Runes in the game for variations on the ending where we become the new Elden Lord, and all of them come from pretty horrible processes of mass death and life force being collected into a single person who then dies giving birth to it. Dung Eater collects the spirit of corruption and desecration associated with the Omen Curse into a rune for the Fell Curse (basically a perversion of the old Crucible into something foul and miserable and consciously lingering in filfth); Fia uses the energy she collected as a Deathbed Companion with the soulless body of Godwyn to conceive a Rune that would universalize undeath into the world; and Goldmask turns the despair at seeing the Erdtree burn and destroy Leyndell (implied to be a part of Marika's own plan all along) into a Rune that would make the Golden Order unbreakable even by God in the future.
Now, how did Marika ascend, in the one visual glimpse we got from the Shadow of the Erdtree Trailer?
She ripped something golden and gossamer (I'm partial to the theory that it's what Runes and collecting them from the dead actually look like in the story, but that's just me) out of the dead bodies that made the Gate, and then passed through it in the shape that would become her signature upward-curved crux shape.
I believe that in the "mechanics" of the universe, she used the sacrifice of untold Hornsent in the Gate as a substitute for her own, but she still had to physically and spiritually "die" (be split apart with Radagon getting the fleshly nature, I think) to become a Great Rune, then forged together with the Elden Ring with the help of presumably Metyr and the Fingers.
Miquella mimics this in his journey through the Land of Shadow, culminating when we see him step through the Gate and become a god with Radahn as his Lord. However, we are still able to stop him at this point because he is just one Great Rune intending to return to the Lands Between and replace Marika as the pinnacle of the Elden Ring. Part of me wonders how he can do this when the Sacrifice of the Hornsent at the Gate was already used by Marika thousands of years ago and never had anything spiritually to do with him, but...
Just below the gate is a "Cleansing Chamber", full of ashes as if it was once used as a sacrificial bowl or kiln, where Miquella's remaining most devoted followers all die for him.
I increasingly think that Leda and co.'s deaths are not just them buying time for Miquella to finish his ascension, but actually prerequisites of it. We can't know either way because they both support us catching him "in the act" afterwards no matter how long we took from unsealing Enir-Ilim to getting there, but I think it fits the general thematic thrust of this whole business that Godhood is a horrible, violating prison that actually requires you to sacrifice all the things you're nominally trying to get to it for.
And then what does the Gate of Divinity produce, how does Miquella come out of it and what is materially tied to him to the point that it's said to start fading away after his death?
This hanging circlet symbol, both his crown and the posing of his own body as he drapes himself around his Lord, would have probably become the keystone of Miquella's Elden Ring just at the arc/crux was for Marika's. The worst part is that he would be imprisoned like that forever, just like Marika. He would be like that, a symbol of love without any of his own since Saint Trina is split off and I think he would never countenance Regression like Radagon and Marika did, possibly forever.
***
In conclusion: Miquella did in fact need to use the same methods as Marika to reach Godhood as he envisioned it, and in doing so he commits the same fundamental mistake and sin of trying to become a literal Platonic ideal forced upon the world without even the comfort of that which made him begin the journey in the first place. Ranni's method is completely different because she sees the idea of debasing herself into a literal symbol as antithetical to her values and identity as a person, so she cast away even her personal Great Rune and instead embarked on a long plan of ending the FIngers' hold on her and eventually finding a Lord to help her relocate the whole Elden Ring elsewhere without really touching or changing it.
Finally reached the last boss of the DLC (didn't beat him yet) and I must say, I'm kind of disappointed?
It's just normal Radhan. Where's Mogh's body? Sorry Albrecht, but I'm pretty sure that body is his, I guess we were just wrong during the investigation. He doesn't even have the wings. You do a DLC about not!Griffith and your Femto doesn't have wings.
Kind of a letdown after the awesome that was Messmer and the circular firing squad.
He also has one of Mogh's powers (bloodflame), which he didn't have before. Presumably, Miquella did some remodelling to his brother's body before shoving his other brother's soul in it.
Finally reached the last boss of the DLC (didn't beat him yet) and I must say, I'm kind of disappointed?
It's just normal Radhan. Where's Mogh's body? Sorry Albrecht, but I'm pretty sure that body is his, I guess we were just wrong during the investigation. He doesn't even have the wings. You do a DLC about not!Griffith and your Femto doesn't have wings.
Kind of a letdown after the awesome that was Messmer and the circular firing squad.
Looks rad. Bow backstabs are real now, and the extra movement feels like it'd be very fun with a bow. Also some mobility while aiming. Overall feels very dragon's dogma, which isn't a bad thing ngl, archer is pretty fun in dd2.
I'm still probably going to wait for a sale because I don't think the price asked is acceptable with most assets being reused, but it's getting harder to resist.
