I’ve finished the main plot to Elden Ring, and gotten one of the six endings. Now it’s time to go back and get my revenge on all the things I didn’t get to along the way. Oh yeah, Millicent is back!
Non-Elden Ringers won’t know Millicent. Hers is one of the longest quests in the game. It begins with you finding her suffering from the Scarlet Rot and missing an arm. A nearby sorcerer (who might be a bug in disguise, who knows) calls her his daughter, the last of many, and tells of something that can stall the spread of the disease. You then meet her now and again as you help her discover who she really is, and her connection to the demigod Melania.
That’s the theory, anyway. I helped Millicent get a reprieve from her illness and even fought a version of her from another world in the Swamp of Aeonia, but after that — nothing.
Then yesterday, she suddenly appeared again. Was she fixed with a patch?
I could continue her quest now, and if I were going to play New Game+, I would, as her quest gives one of two key talismans for melee builds — the Rotten Winged Talisman or Millicent’s Prosthesis, both of which stack multiplicatively for attack power. Depending on if you help her defeat her sisters, or choose to side with them against her. It’s all tied in with Malenia’s fight — a demigoddess who looks almost exactly like Millicent, even down to the missing arm. SUSPICIOUS.
I spent a little time working on Malenia yesterday, but I decided to put the game aside for awhile. My partner has been itching to start his second playthrough of the game.
But some fights I just had to finish. I’d rushed through Crumbling Farum Azula the first time because the whole place just creeped me out. I couldn’t defeat anything, it seemed. I’ve been back to take on the dragons, beastmen, invaders and all the others since, but one mob always punished me whenever I tried to take him on — the Tree Sentinel in front of Malekith’s arena. I can usually beat these pretty easily if I had a horse or a spirit summons, but without either, he blasts me from ranged if I try to range, or slams me with melee if I’m close.
I tried the Fallingstar Beast Jaw on him, but though it would break his poise, he’d just get up and start whacking me. Colossal weapons are far too slow to respond. So I took the opposite tack and dual wielded fast weapons in a bleed build focused around jump attack combos. This was one of the many builds I’d prepared for the final fight that didn’t work out for some reason or other for me, but here it worked fine. The knight didn’t know what happened to him.
As some omake, here’s Loretta, Knight of the Haligtree, one of just two bosses in the Haligtree area (the other being Malenia), dying to the Fallingstar Beast Jaw, dying as easily to it as Radagon and the Elden Beast did. Would have been nice if Malenia had died so easily… it takes her through her first phase easily enough, but she’s a bit more mobile in her second phase, and usually my summons hasn’t survived long enough to keep her distracted.
I imagine I could finish her — I think she would have died quickly to a dragon’s Glintstone Breath in my previous Faith/Arcane build — but I’ll worry about that before I start my next playthrough, whenever that might be.
