I'm sorry but I just cannot buy the argument that SotE boss fights don't have overtuning or design problems when the people making those arguments are telling people to use fucking horse iframes to avoid attacks

I think there's just a fundamental disconnect between what some of the design ethos on display is trying to do and what the 100+ hours of pre-DLC game were doing, and I think looking at Armored Core is interesting here because:

• Elden Ring is an action RPG; it's about expressing a version of what your character could be, and mastering that. For example, if you invest in-game resources in Intelligence, you also invest time and attention into knowing the sorcery system. You're kind of picking your lane.
• Armored Core is an action-tactics puzzlebox. You're supposed to use the right tool for the right job, changing your loadout from mission to mission to defeat what you're facing at every step. Levels, enemies, and bosses are all allowed to prescribe that you fight them with specific tools.

If the boss design in SotE is more prescriptive and "AC-like", that's kind of a grinding swerve that throws off some random segment of players. That's kind of what SotE is; it's a funnel that narrows down to a smaller and smaller subset of Elden Ring players, as far as who it's actually for.

The other overarching problem with a lot of the SotE boss design (which was already somewhat present with Malenia) is that it actually doesn't support the sense of 'overcoming struggle' for the boss to have manifestly unfair attack patterns. Because of the way boss AI works in this game.

In the conventional overcoming-struggle model, you come away from the fight going "whew I finally figured out how to manage all those elements and execute well enough and win."

In some of the SotE fights, you think "well it sure was lucky that the boss only did its unfair attack one time rather than three times".

The comparison to Mohg's Nihil attack is salient here, because that attack is something that's looming over the whole fight; Mohg is literally counting down to it. It happens exactly once over the course of the fight. You can race to DPS Mohg down before he can get it off; you can tank it; or you can give up a Flask tear to disable it. But very importantly, it's consistent.

With Waterfowl Dance and other 'manifestly unfair' attacks, you are sort of rolling the dice. Rellana's Twin Moons attack, for example: my experience was that she'd do between zero and two of those over the course of a fight; unsurprisingly, I won on an attempt where her AI didn't trigger it at all. Getting lucky isn't struggling.

Ultimately, if players are coming to the conclusion that they shouldn't bother engaging with the boss' behavior and patterns and instead that they should find ways around learning them at all... why are the boss patterns so elaborate? Is it just empty spectacle?

Honestly what I found tiresome about SotE bossfights wasn't even the unfair or hard to avoid attacks, or the fights that were too hard. It was just... the sense of playing D&D with a DM that didn't want to let player characters get the spotlight. The problem with attack chains being comically long isn't necessarily that it's too hard or impossible to avoid, it's that it has a shitty rhythm. It's like every bad dad rock song where the guy who wrote the song gets a gigantic solo, it's like watching an over-the-hill actor chew scenery, it's like being trapped in a conversation with someone who won't stop talking. You're sitting there pressing the dodge button thinking "okay, when will it be my turn to do something?"

There's a traffic light near my house that periodically just like...doesn't turn green. Like on off hours it seemingly just doesn't feel like it: the rest of the traffic cycle will happen, it gets to the part where it would turn green, and it just...declines to do so. Have fun wasting a cycle realizing it's doing the stupid thing again and then having to turn around, moron.

This is how most of my Malenia runs felt and how half the SotE bosses feel, except there's very little recourse. I beat Malenia solo because she decided not to Waterfowl point blank on me with no windup that time, not because I did anything particularly clever.

It mostly comes down to "I hope it turns green this time, I guess".