FromComfortable Meta To Total Chaos
Nightreign players had things pretty figured out before the Forsaken Hollows DLC arrived. Runs were fast, routes were optimized and the meta was all about squeezing out as much damage as possible without wasting time in the shrinking battle royale style circle.
The core strategy revolved around a specific relic that increased your attack power by defeating summonable bosses around the map via evergaols. These evergaol bosses were predictable and efficient. Instead of wandering around hoping for good random drops, you could just follow a reliable loop, summon bosses, kill them and stack your damage boosts.
Forsaken Hollows blows that comfort zone apart. The new map does not contain a single evergaol. That one change instantly makes the old go to relic and routing strategy useless if you want to focus on the new content. Instead of running a familiar circuit, you are forced back into actual exploration.
To make things trickier, the new map is labyrinth like. Paths twist, overlap and encourage you to take your time, even while the circle is pushing you inward. Every drop in becomes a puzzle of how to find an efficient route without the old reliable evergaol farming. If you were on autopilot before, the DLC makes sure that is no longer an option.
New Relics And A Broken Damage Combo
The removal of evergaols feels intentional, because FromSoftware did not just take away a strong strategy. They also added new tools that reward different styles of play and keep the power level high for players willing to adapt.
One of the new bosses, The Balancers, is the key to a fresh meta. Defeating this boss earns you a relic that significantly boosts the damage of special weapon skills by around 20 percent. These are the flashy, high impact moves tied to weapons, and with this relic they hit much harder.
FromSoftware then doubled down. An enhanced version of The Balancers was introduced shortly after, and beating this tougher fight gives you a second relic that is almost identical to the first. The important part is that their effects stack.
If you equip both relics before a run, you can reach roughly a 40 percent boost to weapon skill damage. According to players who have crunched the numbers, there is no other relic combination in the game that matches this raw offensive power. It is a huge reward for anyone who is willing to take on the new content and build around weapon skills instead of older, more generic damage setups.
The community has already started to lock in on the best ways to abuse this combo. Popular builds highlight weapons such as the Halo Scythe, which lets you rapidly launch holy discs in quick succession. With a massive boost to skill damage, these projectiles can melt enemies before they get close.
Executor players benefit especially from the new relics. Their class is naturally aligned with katanas, and one of the best skill based weapons in the game is a katana that thrives on these relics. When your class, weapon type and relics all line up, you get the kind of build that feels almost unfair.
Content creators and theorycrafters have already labeled the double relic setup as broken. It is the kind of power spike that completely shifts what is considered optimal, which is exactly what a good meta shakeup should do.
Encouraging New Habits And Long Term Freshness
Forsaken Hollows is not just about raw numbers. FromSoftware is clearly pushing players to engage with parts of Nightreign that many people previously ignored.
A simple example is the new character introduced in the DLC. This is the only character in the game who truly benefits from picking up consumable items off the ground. Before this, most players barely glanced at those items unless they were desperate. Now there is a direct incentive to care about them, plan routes around them and factor them into your build decisions.
When you look at all the changes together, a clear pattern appears:
- The old evergaol centered routing meta is shut down on the new map.
- New relics reward heavy focus on weapon skills instead of generic damage stacking.
- Specific classes and weapons gain fresh value with the new relic combo.
- A new character encourages players to care about overlooked consumables.
The result is a game that feels refreshed without throwing away everything players have already learned. Veterans still have an advantage because they know the core systems, but they no longer get to coast on one solved strategy. Everyone is pushed to experiment, share discoveries and figure out what works best in the new environment.
This is especially impressive for a game that was never pitched as a live service title. Nightreign is an experimental multiplayer spin off from a studio mostly known for single player RPGs. Despite that, the Forsaken Hollows DLC has kept the experience feeling new even for players who have already sunk dozens or hundreds of hours into the game.
FromSoftware has suggested that more updates are coming, even if they are not full expansions. If they follow the same pattern as Forsaken Hollows, players can expect more targeted changes that deliberately disrupt stale strategies, introduce powerful new tools and give the community fresh puzzles to solve. For anyone who enjoys tuning builds and chasing the next big meta, Nightreign’s future looks bright.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/fromsoftware-just-dropped-an-absolutely-busted-item-in-elden-ring-nightreign-that-has-completely-shifted-the-meta-overnight/
