Aava, the King's Pet

Heavy petting?

    Here we are, ladies and gents: the final DLC for Dark Souls II, and the final few posts about the game I'll make. I think 40+ separate posts about one game is probably enough. Also, I just need to really get past this game. Not in an I'm-obsessing-over-an-old-girlfriend-and-I-need-to-get-past-her way, but more as an actual physical blockade that needs to be pushed through. What is Dark Souls II and its wonderful DLCs blocking, you might (but probably not) ask? Well, my goddamn backlog, of course! It's STILL AT 95 games! While that looms large over me like some sort of space-age, evolution-quickening monolith, I continue to just sit here and play this game which I have over 150 hours on on one character. This is all rambling at this point, but what I'm trying to say is this: I feebly tried to fight and kill a giant tiger. Here are my exploits!

    The final chapter of DLC, "Crown of the Ivory King", will, of course, have its own post, once I successfully finish it. Hopefully it will take less time than the Iron King chapter did. At any rate, this is the first boss I encountered in this DLC. Her name is Aava, and she's the King's pet (obviously). I don't know for certain that Aava is a female, but I've seen her referenced as such online, so what the hell, I'll go with it. This battle can be fought about two minutes into the DLC, but that would be a hilariously fatal thing to do. As always, I tried to keep myself from reading about the DLC before I jumped into it. And, as always, I DID read a little about it before I jumped in. I did know that, after the first bonfire, you can go left or right, and I remember reading (in more than one spot), do not go left! Aava is found there, but if you try to fight her without a specific item, you can't kill her. I didn't know why I couldn't fight her, or even what I needed to fight her with, so when I started the DLC, I didn't go left, and instead went right. Going right brings you through the first main area of the DLC. Eventually, I came upon a very ornate-looking corpse that was shining (even from a great distance I could see it). This corpse had an item called Eye of the Priestess. The description of it said something along the lines of being able to see things that which are normally unseen. I put two and two together, and wouldn't you know, it equaled four! Apparently, you need this item to fight Aava. Now, if you've put two and two together, you'll probably come to the conclusion that you can't fight Aava without this item because she is invisible! Ha, what a fun fight that would be. I'm sure someone will (or already has) beat Aava without the Eye of the Priestess. At any rate, you grab the eye, warp back to the first bonfire, and you're ready to fight another super annoying fucking DLC boss.

The calm during the storm

    Once you go down that left path, you'll soon meet a fog gate. On the way from the bonfire to the boss, there are two NPC summons (Masterless Glencour and old, venerable Steelheart Ellie). Don't worry, I'll get to them a little later (...sigh...). When you walk through the fog gate, you are in a long, slightly doglegged (I'd like to thank various Tiger Woods golf games for that versatile phrase) area. It's completely opened, and lined on either side with humongous statues. Once you walk about three-fourths of the way down, you'll see a large structure with a door, and a ledge above it.
    Walk a little closer and you'll see the boss, perched up on that ledge. This is Aava, a large white icy tiger. I really appreciate the fact that Aava is a monster boss, instead of a humanoid knight. There were not enough monster bosses in these DLCs, which was one of the most disappointing aspects of them. Besides Sinh, Aava, and the optional boss(es) of this DLC, all the other boss fights are either straight up humans/knights (Fume Knight, Sir Alonne, Burnt Ivory King, the Cave bosses) or demonic humanoids (blue Smelter and Elana). Just a bit of an aside rant, but it's kind of boring after awhile fighting the same sorts of enemies. At any rate, Aava is a pretty unique boss in the annals of Souls history. It's just a big tiger, but it looks awesome. Case in point:

She's a roaring good time!

    Aava doesn't have a huge array of attacks, and most are decently telegraphed. Despite this, I had a very difficult time fighting her. First of all, if you're close to her front or back, she can swipe her claws (VERY quickly, without warning) and hit you for big damage. I often found myself at her hind legs, hacking away, only for her to whip around with her claws and deal major damage to me. This was the attack that really had me reeling. Otherwise, she likes to jump around a lot. She will occasionally jump away from you, only to hop back and try to bite you. This attack is devastating, and unless you have full health, can kill you quickly. She'll also jump at you with claws. All the jumping attacks are pretty easy to dodge, in that you can just roll back, or even better, roll forward. This will set up for an attack or two as well. Aava has some magic attacks also. If you stay too close to her for too long, she'll pause and cause an outward explosion from her body. This one hurts quite a bit, and at first it always caught me off guard. Eventually though, you can see her rear up for it, and this gives you just enough time to roll back a few times to escape its radius (it's a pretty big radius). If you stay far away from her, she'll use a homing crystal mass-like spell, that shoots out five (I believe) soul masses, and they can track you. This isn't very difficult to dodge though. Usually, if I ran towards her as the masses form around her, I would arrive at her side, and the masses would miss me. Even if they don't, if the first does hit you, the other four will miss. And just one doesn't do huge damage. Finally, she will do an attack that makes icy spikes jut up from the ground all around her. I heard it described like the flame pillars, but except ice (obvi!). This one hurts like hell as well, but it's easy enough to run away from. Good time to heal as well.
    This was a very aggravating battle for me (what else is new?). At first, after a half-dozen-or-so attempts, I was thinking that it actually might not be a difficult battle. Of course, after another fifteen failed attempts or so, I was changing my song about that. I found it so tough because of all her close melee attacks. They are quick and tough to see coming (well, they were for me at least. Maybe I need glasses?). My general strategy was to go in, buff with flame weapon (you have plenty of space at the beginning area to buff/heal or anything like that, since the boss doesn't appear until you walk further down), and try to stay close and hack away. Of course, with her jumping all around, it was tough to stay close. But even if I did, I still paid the price anyway. I've bemoaned the fact before, but by this time, real Dark Souls II fatigue/burnout was setting in. That's not the full excuse for why I had such a tough time with this fight (an impatience at learning Aava's pattern being the main reason), but it's part of it.

When you get knocked down, you gotta get up again!

    So, in a similar fashion to almost every other boss across all three chapters of this DLC, I had to summon help. I just used the two NPC summons. Sure, they do horrible damage (with the three of us, I could do close to 400 damage, while they were whittling away with 80 damage at a time. WHY are these NPC summons so goddamn weak and pathetic?), but they provide an invaluable help: they draw large amounts of aggro. Those two could beat up (and get beat up. Seriously, why can't they roll out of the way?) on Aava if I needed a breather to heal or re-buff my sword. She generally would focus on them, and allow me free swings. It still took a few tries with my two idiotic companions, but we managed to pull through.
    I don't think there is a lot more I can add to this. The positives of the battle are that it's a monster, and not a knight. She looks great, and the little trick to actually being able to fight her is pretty cool. I found it exceptionally difficult, however, to consistently roll from her quick melee swipes. That's the most frustrating: the inconsistency of my own timing. I think a large problem is how slow my damn sword is. I really should downgrade to something fast. I will lose power (400 base power plus 226 dexterity bonus = pretty decent!), but in the end it'll probably be for the best. With Aava down, I have only TWO more Dark Souls II posts to write about: the overview of the Ivory King DLC, and the final boss of the DLC. There is an optional, "co-op" area to explore, and an optional boss to kill (much like Cave of the Dead and Iron Passage), but I am not doing those at this present time. Perhaps, someday in the future, after I've been away from the game for a few weeks, I'll try again. But it is just not worth the EXTREME aggravation to get through one of the toughest areas in all of Dark Souls II, only to fight a very lazy, annoying boss fight. I'll get into more detail in the Ivory King post. So, until then, he's one more picture of a big kitty-kat, and my final death stats:

Roar?

Times I died: 24
Difficulty: 9/10
Rating: 6/10