Back in April, FromSoftware released Elden Ring update 1.04 which made quite a few extensive changes. It adjusted the tutorial, making it more obvious for newcomers; buffed Colossal weapons, increasing their attack speed and lowering their recovery time; nerfed the Cerulean Hidden Tear, making it last shorter; added new phases to Patches’ quest; and more.
However, it seems there were two major nerfs to various Elden Ring bosses that were not listed on the patch notes and have gone largely undiscovered by the community. In short, key changes were made to some, but not all, of the Elden Ring boss fights that feature more than one boss.
This change was highlighted by YouTuber Illusory Wall (and first reported by VG247) and deals with the AI of multiple-boss fights. As detailed by Illusory Wall, the chances are twofold. The first is that the boss not engaging the player becomes less aggressive, and as seen around the 10:55 mark below, this results in at least one of the bosses hanging back more. Secondly, the number of Elden Ring bosses that can be considered “primary” attackers is reduced, meaning that multiple bosses should not attack at once.
This applies to multiple group boss fights in Elden Ring, but not all of them. It seems the notorious Valiant Gargoyle Duo was unchanged, while a few of the bosses only received one of the two nerfs such as the Erdtree Avatar duo and the Crucible Knights duo. However, even receiving one of these nerfs is enough to change the momentum and difficulty of the Elden Ring boss fight.
Notably, Illusory Wall does not mention the Godskin Duo or show them in the video, seemingly implying they may not be changed either (like the Valiant Gargoyles). It could be that this change was only applied to group boss fights where the bosses were a certain kind of boss, and not one of the bigger boss fights. Either way, it’s nothing something players will discover unless they play through it multiple times.
The open-world Souls game’s popularity is still going strong, but it should be noted that Elden Ring’s concurrent player counts—which are not as important with a single-player game as they are in a multiplayer game—have dropped significantly. Still, despite this, there are many Elden Ring players making their way through New Game Plus or starting new characters, so it’ll be interesting to see if players figure out exactly which boss fights were nerfed and which weren’t.
Elden Ring is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Source: Illusory Wall (via VG247)