Alongside Elden Ring Nightreign’s Dark of Night endless mode, the latest patch has also brought a slew of fixes and updates, including a much-needed change to the holy damage icon (finally!) and a change to how badly the Night’s Tide damage will hit players.
The patch notes read: “Increased the Night’s Tide damage after defeating the second-night boss.” It doesn’t say how much it has increased by, but I can tell you from experience that it’s a lot.
I decided to test out just how lethal the Night Tide is now in one of my Deep of Night expeditions. After the second-day boss my two teammates carried on into the gloop, which sends you to the Nightlord boss arena, but I decided to head over to a close Site of Grace that was located in the Night Tide. It was but steps away from the safe zone, and I didn’t even make it.
My health bar wasn’t as big as it could’ve been, as I was only level 12 at the time and hadn’t picked tons of HP buff effects, but the Night Tide still took a fifth of my health off in a matter of seconds. To make matters worse, on my second trip back into the Night Tide to go get my lost runes, I decided to overshoot and go to a Site of Grace, thinking it would replenish my health and flasks—it did not. So far, all Sites of Grace caught in the Night Tide have been unresponsive. This may just be a bug as I can’t see any mention of a change in the patch notes. But even with the Sites of Grace traversing the Night on the second day is all but impossible now.
It took a few more times to inch my lost runes back to an area where I could safely pick them up. Needless to say, my teammates weren’t happy with how long my idiotic test took. They both even shook their heads at me when I turned up at the Nightlord’s gate.
There is a lesson to be learned in being thankful for what you have in Nightreign. You may have wanted to reach level 15 before facing the Nightlord, and now you’re just level 11 after the second end-of-day boss. Maybe a fight lasted longer than you expected, or you had a Recluse leave the team to visit every Mage Tower on the map.
Some players may endure this and head into the goop ready to face the consequences of their actions, but others are not so accepting. In instances such as this, third-day rune farming can be quite common. I once waited 15 minutes for my two other teammates to try and fail to kill the dragon in the South of Noklateo’s map after we killed the second-day boss. It seemed to be quite a popular strategy for those greedy players who wanted more runes and a chance to get another helpful weapon. But this just won’t be possible any more.
I can’t say I’m particularly sad to break the news. I never liked messing around in the Night Tide after the second day—it always just seemed a bit too high on the ‘fuck around and find out’ chart for me. But it does mean that players are just going to have to bear with the runes they have after the second day is done, or find a ridiculously finicky way around the issue, which I’m sure is also possible, knowing Nightreign players.
