Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree brings a change to weapon upgrades that is so good I want FromSoftware to fix it in the base game immediately

Creating a new character just before the release of Elden Ring: The Shadow of the Erdtree and then, immediately finishing the DLC in New Game+ and now New Game++ with my main character at level 250, I felt like a peasant promoted to the rank of king. The reason couldn't be simpler: my main character has all the forgestone bell bearings unlocked, meaning I can snap my fingers and acquire mountains of upgrade materials for any weapon, normal or unique. This allowed me to easily test out dozens of weapons in the DLC, to the point where I started switching between multiple spears, katanas, and swords just for the fun of it. That's life.

Usually whenever I start a race in Elden Ring I have a hard time upgrading even a single weapon, and it always ends up being unique and using darkstones, because regular forgestones have a lower economy than they did in the 1930s. You only need 10 darkstones to max out a unique weapon, but for standard weapons, you need a total of 97 forgestones, or 12 for each of the eight classes, plus a dragonstone to top it all off. Repeat: 97! Nine-seven! What the hell are you doing, FromSoftware? Most of Elden Ring's loot drops barely manage to produce one, maybe two forgestones at a time. Here, kid, buy yourself something nice, says director Hidetaka Miyazaki, tossing a lone rock in my direction as I stare at the mortgage-sized stone debt on my new giant sword. What am I going to do with a rock, Miyazaki? See how many times I can make it jump across the surface of the rotting lake?

New Stone Baron in Town

It always felt to me like an ill-fitting holdover from the Dark Souls days, where you found a good sword and committed to it for the entire game, putting a ring on it in the form of a rare ember and a specific flavor of titanite. Elden Ring is a massive game designed for non-linear progression and filled with hundreds of cool weapons and Ashes of War, but the upgrade materials are so prohibitive that you can't experiment much until you've pretty much finished the game and unlocked an unlimited supply of stones. There's a reason most people stick with dark-type weapons until much later, if they ever come back to the game. exclusively use dark weapons on new characters for this exact reason.