As everyone else drools over the new characters and bosses coming in Elden Ring Nightreign’s DLC, I am ecstatic over a quality-of-life change in the latest patch notes.
Sure, melee characters, like Wylder and Raider, are getting big buffs to related passive effects, but I personally have received a huge buff because you can now rename your relic presets.
Nightreign has given players the ability to save a relic setup for a while now, and it’s incredibly useful to tailor them for different bosses. I have Ironeye set up with a relic that gives his bow poison damage for the bosses weak to that specific element, for instance. Not every boss is weak to poison, however, so it’s a good idea to have a few different presets ready.
There was one problem though: You had no way of sorting your presets by anything other than the date you saved them, for some reason. The new patch fixes this problem and lets you just name them whatever you want. No longer will I have to frantically skim through each preset to figure out which one is for fire damage and which one is for frost. I can just name them “fire” and “frost”. Nightreign is finally playable.
The relic system has been divisive from the start. Most people hate how hard it is to randomly roll one with useful effects. I don’t mind it; I think relics would be far less interesting if you could just make perfect ones. The RNG is part of the fun. But what I didn’t like was how fussy they were to actually use and sort through until FromSoft started fixing those issues. And now, it’s basically perfect.
I’m happy to see that FromSoft agrees and is focusing on making them much easier to work with rather than giving you ways to craft them or something. People who have been digging into the game files since the patch went out claim that relics will roll better stats more often now but that the improvement isn’t substantial. What’s more impactful are the buffs to the weaker passives, like physical attack power up, that effectively raise the floor on “bad” relic rolls.
The patch notes are light on direct balance changes, mostly because the small changes should be enough on their own. It’s very likely that The Forsaken Hollows’ new map could contain tons of new weapons and items that will help out too. We will find out later today when Nightreign’s DLC is released.
