Valheim is brilliant. Although I’m fairly rubbish at building, I’m absolutely enamored with the combat. It’s basic, sure, but it feels great - sending an arrow whizzing towards a galloping deer and watching it send its mark to its maker is thrilling in a way that most games can’t quite capture, and thumping a greyling around with a club feels like hitting a home run in Fenway Park. I know nothing about baseball - did I get that right?
The first boss in Valheim is pretty easy to beat. Eikthyr, the great big antlery lad who presides over the meadows, just sort of stomps about and runs into pillars. He packs a pretty hefty punch, but it’s easy to avoid him, especially if you’re in a group. At one point me and my mates just rinsed and repeated the fight to get more rewards out of it. There was no need to heal or eat or anything - finish a scrap, call him back immediately, and kill him again without breaking a sweat.
I knew the second boss, The Elder, was going to be tougher. I was only playing with one of the lads when we decided to take him on. It was last week and we’d both had a few casual cans. We decided to sort ourselves out with some fancy armor - our other allies weren’t online, so it’s their own fault for missing out on all the resources. We trekked up to The Elder’s spot in full bronze gear with swords and fire arrows to boot. “Go on, summon him,” I said. Ten seconds later I bit the dirt.
The Elder, to put it plainly, is a steaming pile of bullshit. We beat him eventually, but only by building a workbench on a platform surrounded by trees and raining a deluge of arrows down from above. I’m not lying when I say that my friend and I each had a single arrow left when he was on low health. We both connected and he toppled over, a big lumbering Treebeard minus the charisma, but had one of us missed it would have been a pain in the arse. Once it was safe to explore the arena, I noticed there were six tombstones with “Cian” written on them. Six!
I’m not moaning about dying here. I fundamentally think the second boss in Valheim is ridiculous from a design perspective. It’s fine to have a few powerful attacks, but his root shot has aimbot, he spawns a million little tentacle plants that have the range of a giraffe’s neck, and he soaks up damage as if he’s some kind of entish masochist. He’s also in the Black Forest, so I had about a million greydwarfs annoying me while I was trying to fight him. Ended up wasting half my fire arrows on stupid little Gollum demons.
I reckon at least one of these conditions needs to be altered a bit for breathing room. If you’ve got four or five people you can overwhelm The Elder pretty easily and play in such a way that a tankier character with the right diet can aggro him while two people bombard him with fire arrows from a safe distance. But these bosses are supposed to be killable for average players one on one, right? I could probably beat him on my own if I invested enough time into developing the right build, but it would take an enormous amount of time and resources. The game shouldn’t assume you’re able to deal with overpowered attacks that cover the range of the entire arena perfectly when you’re all by your lonesome.
Also his buff is shite. Chopping a tree down in ten swings instead of 11. Whoopdeedoo. So I immediately went back to Eikthyr’s one. Shaking my head.
