How can such perfect game have such glaring flaws? *Spoilers*
I am aware this game is in early access, and I am just venting a bit here. I am not one to look things up for a game if I am stuck. I tend to try and figure it out but 2 things have really put me in a position where I had to start seeking some guidance.
Firstly, in ANY action-adventure game, if given a choice, I always play with the biggest, heaviest, most powerful 2 handed weapon I can find. If it is a hammer, even more points. I was excited to see the wide variety of builds and weapons on offer here, and jumped headfirst into the shroud. Before long, I was finding silver and gold chests like no one's business, and to my surprise, the developers sure do LOVE the mage builds. I was banking 2 stacks of runesjust from deconstructing the plethora of staves and wands I had found. I was lucky once, and found a two-handed, Epic-rated mace that rocked a return on my HP from damage dealt. It was awesome.
That was at level 20, and 20 levels later, I had more stacks of runes due to the sheer amount of wands I had amassed. I was finding common or uncommon level two handed weapons every once and a while. I then learned i could reroll the gold chests and started attempting to do this in the Summits area where I had found two relativly closely. My day turned into flying down, looting the chests, fast-traveling back to Peaceful Acres and setting a timer for 30 minutes. It took me a GOOD long while to find anything worth a damn and in all of that time grinding these chests, I found 2 viable options, neither of which was good enough to replace the mace because I had come to rely on that HP return.
This just wasn't fun and I wonder if there isn't some sort of balancing issue that the devs are going to work out. I sure hope so, but at least this problem is solved with some grinding.
Now the second issue had me almost quit playing the game and I know others HAD to have had issues simiilar to mine. I am in my late 30s, full-time job, and a blended family of kiddos. I barely have enough time for them, let alone friends. I play this game on my Legion Go S Z1 in my down time, in the school pick-up line, etc. It took me a LONG time to figure out where to go after lighting the Bale Fires in the summits, but I eventually found the right cave to go into. I pull up to the to and see this awesome ass volcano with a big ass dragon baby bathing in it. I ride the currents across the chasm, and immediately get to analyzing how I am going to conquer this. The dragon takes flight and begins throwing shit at me from the sky. I have put a few points in dex so that I could get the Desert Stomach perk, but I barely crack 40 hp off him every time I fling an arrow up at his ass. Before long the dude comes down into his tub and that is when I begin waiting for the arbitrary section of the fight where he wades over to the edge so I can dodge his hammer fist and hit his knuckles. I tank a couple of fireballs raining down on my head before he rears back and bellows hellfire right into my beautiful red-headed face. I am stun-locked to hell, and die pretty much instantly.
Well shit.
This time, I read the sign that I was too awestruck to read before, and pick up the stun arrows, arrows I had never crafted because I could just parry to raise the stun bar. I literally ignore them because I don't have time to change things up now. This game has been beautifully developed, and there is no way in hell the devs decided to program a boss that only has one way to be taken out. I inevitably die again, and this time, I decide to do what I always do when I can't beat something: I decide to think outside the paradigm and take him on from afar. I fling myself to the mountain peak on the left and use what little arrows I did have to start chipping away at him. I wanted to see how long it would take, but regardless of that time, I would craft a whole large backpack full of arrows to get this fuckers head. About 5 minutes in, I am about 10% through that massive life bar, and he circles back around to the far side of the crater, and his fucking life bar just blinks back to full. I was livid.
I took a break and thought about it and decided all I could do was shoot him, then attempt to parry the damn fireballs back at him. I suck at parrying, and a big reason for this is that I don't get the right feedback/timing for the mechanic. In most games with parry, when the enemy is about to hit you, you parry. In Enshrouded, it seems like the timer is all over the place. So I decided to try, and with a bit of trial and error, I am finally able to knock one of these bastards back at the fucker and put a tiny tick of stun on him. There wasn't any time to celebrate, though, because while I was looking to see how much stun I had done, he blasted my ass in the face with the stream of fire. I decided to go finally craft some stun arrows.
After whipping up 4 stacks of stun arrows (overkill maybe, but I wasn't going to test it) I go back and begin the grind of hitting him, dodging the fire and failing. I fling myself back onto one of the peaks and start to ding him enough that I feel comfortable going to the crater to continue the assault. It was hard to hit him for me, but I finally got the bar filled up. He was on the opposite side of the crater from where I was, but color me fucking shocked when he flew back first out of the sky, defying all possible physics, to land directly on my head, shooting me off into the crater where I couldn't recover. No matter how hard I smashed that 'A' button, my glider would not engage, and I was forced to watch that short red-headed badass sink to her death. I just stared at the screen, trying to muster up the strength and resolve to respawn.
I didn't know what to do. I had been at this for over an hour and had hardly made any progress, but I am insane, so I was just gonna go right back in dry again and run it one more time. As I look over the ravine, though, I see something I haven't seen before. This time, the dragon is in the position he normally takes in the crater, but he is on the outside of it, closest to me on the dock. He was just sitting there, facing the crater from the outside, like he was stuck. I fly over him and land on the crater, and to my surprise, he doesn't move at all. I pull out a stun arrow and begin to shoot when I remember the terrible pathing of his falling animation and what it did to me on the previous attempt. So I switch things up to some steel arrows I had. I begin firing on his head with all the ire I had developed in the past hours. I did this for so long before finally, without moving an inch, the bastard falls INTO THE LAVA (I was hoping with the shitty pathing for the stun he would magically die wherever he was supposed to, but alas, he didn't and fell right into the lava where he lay dead, covered by a red shroud). I was so upset. It took me dying 8 times before I was able to land directly on his back, loot all, and get out by riding the air current by jumping off the rocky crag right next to where he fell. I had 11 seconds, but it felt like I had 2.
This is more of a vent sesh than anything. I was floored that after 150 hours of time in this world, I came across a boss that was seemingly designed as a roadblock for progression unless you played a certain way or with certain people. If I had had even ONE more person, we could have divided and conquered, and maybe this is a strategy by the devs to get more people to play (you can't do it, tell your friend who would never play the game, "Hey, i need help with this can you play the game? I will gear you up.") and by doing that, they experience the game and like it. It's a conspiracy I know, but man it was heartbreaking when I realized my build was in no way going to do well with this boss.
Sure, I could have practiced for hours and had a flawless run of parrying his fireballs, but the spike in difficulty at that point is extreme. This is a testament to how superb this game is that these couple of things were all that really hindered my amazing praise of it. That being said, it was absolutely enough for me to caveat my friends who asked me how it was. There is no end to the high praise for this game, though, and I hope the devs really tweak this in October for 1.0. And with how insane the juxtaposition between how the game was on release and how it is here in August of 2026, I am more than confident that they will change this. As I have said, however, I don't really read much about games while I am currently playing them so maybe there is an obvious way to take his ass out that I missed, but I just really wanted to talk about my experience, as I don't have any gaming friends.
EDIT: TL;DR: I am a 2 handed hammer user that only finds wands and staffs and is still using a Mace I found 20 Levels ago. There seems to be an issue finding 2 hand blunt melee weapons. And the Dragon boss? Well it is awful and it really took a toll on me as a solo melee player and I just KNOW they will fix this in the full release.
Thanks for reading.