Healing is a staple of any soulslike. From the very beginning, Demon’s Souls introduced healing items to the genre to fight off the dangers of the world. The healing items were consumable, however, forcing the player to either get good enough to use fewer healing items or find spots to farm the various levels of healing items to have a stash.
Dark Souls ditched the types of consumable grass and instead introduced the Estus Flask - the healing item that comes with several healing charges which auto-refill when you rest at a bonfire or die.
Apart from Bloodborne, which had Blood Vials (controversial), Estus Flasks or similar have become a mainstay of the genre. But which of these are better for the game and which do you prefer?
Estus Flasks come with limited charges, but they refill automatically, so you don’t have to farm healing items and can just focus on the boss fight that’s giving you trouble. Consumable healing usually comes in larger quantities (20 Blood Vials plus a couple extra if you use specific runes), so you have more healing at your disposal in a boss fight, hence you can be more aggressive and reckless, but you run the risk of running out of healing at some point, so you might have to farm them at some point.
Thoughts?
the grass system was something I enjoyed a lot in DeS. expensive yes, but I liked being able to heal different amounts and it puts some good pressure on performance when you run out of the good stuff and you gotta make do with whatever you have. The game is not super hard so I never felt the need to farm, otherwise it would probably be terrible.
Consumable heals are a tiny annoyance in bloodborne when staring a new run, but not significant, if I could edit the game I would change other stuff first, like weapon durability or fast travel, etc.
Estus is maybe too comfy in DS 1/ 3 but really appreciated in Elden Ring and others of similar difficulty
I’ll be playing more Enotria, I didn’t progress much this week. Only to the 4th major boss I think. This area is probably my favourite so far.
Also restarted DS3, I was planning to rush it but I wanna keep progressing some character quests so I’ll have to do a bunch of side stuff again
So I’ll be bouncing between the two.