It's become increasingly apparent over the last few weeks that someone at FromSoftware carefully observed all the strategies players were employing before the Forsaken Hollows DLC dropped, and they were taking notes. The new map and bosses are a big middle finger to people who got comfortable with the old meta.
Many Nightreign players, including myself, got used to running similar setups for boosting damage output as much as possible without having to waste too much time in a run. The shrinking, battle royale-style circle doesn't give you a lot of time to dawdle, so the meta revolved around a specific relic that gives you attack power for defeating summonable bosses around the map via evergaols—which is far easier than searching for bosses and hoping to find good random rewards.
Here's the thing: The new map in the DLC features zero evergaols. The relic that lots of players have relied on to easily route through the map is unusable if you want to do the new stuff. You have to actually explore again and figure out an efficient route every time you drop in, which is made even tougher by how labyrinthine the layout is.
The reason I think this was an intentional move is because FromSoft also included some smaller changes that basically make up for this, one of which just came out earlier this week.
Defeating one of the new bosses, The Balancers, gives you a relic that can boost the damage of the special skills on weapons by a significant amount (about 20%). Defeating the enhanced version of that boss, which just debuted this week, gives you an almost identical relic that can stack with the other one. There isn't a single combo of relics in the game that matches the 40% damage boost you can get by equipping both of them before a run.
This is absolutely insane from r/Nightreign
The new relic is so good that YouTuber Youwy, who does all the math to determine the best builds, calls it broken in his latest video. Players have already identified some of the best weapons to use it with, like the Halo Scythe that lets you fling out holy discs in quick succession. Executor players in particular benefit the most from the relics because they naturally find katanas, and one of the best weapons skills comes on a katana.
Considering the DLC also adds the only character in the game who benefits from picking up consumable items off the ground—items everyone previously ignored—it feels like FromSoft specifically added stuff to shake things up and break players out of their habits. And it seems OK with adding something super powerful as long as it encourages you to engage with a part of the game you wouldn't normally care as much about.
For a game that was never promised regular live service updates and is an experimental multiplayer spin-off from a developer that primarily works on singleplayer RPGs, the DLC has been surprisingly successful at keeping the game fresh no matter how many hours you've already sunk into it. FromSoft has also suggested that more updates are coming. They might not be full-on DLC, but hopefully it's more stuff like this that gets everyone working together to find out the next best way to survive the night.
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