Elden Ring Nightreign’s Best Relic Effect Deals Critical Damage to the Game Meta

Players are spoiled for choice when it comes to picking relics for each Nightfarer in Elden Ring Nightreign. Not dissimilar to Bloodborne’s Caryll Runes, relics slot into different colored chalices to provide all sorts of bonuses, from flat stat increases, to changing the fundamental properties of certain weapons. Since the game’s release, many players have been trying out all kinds of relic effect combinations to find success in subsequent runs, but one has recently risen above the rest.

The relic effect, “attack power permanently increased for each evergaol prisoner defeated,” has recently emerged as an incredibly strong meta-contender in Elden Ring Nightreign. After defeating an evergaol boss, the player is rewarded with a 5% damage buff that stacks multiplicatively and lasts for the rest of the run. Given the sheer number of evergaols on the map, a player can gain almost 40% bonus damage on very optimized runs, and because the damage increase applies to all sources, it makes even the toughest boss fights significantly easier. But this simple and effective buff comes with an unseen downside that could badly affect the game’s meta.

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Nightreign is a fast and fairly difficult game, so it is easy to see why an almost-free damage boost like this is so popular. Stonesword Keys are easy to find in Nightreign, available from merchants and special chests, and the evergaols themselves are not the most challenging fights in the game. Additionally, the 5% damage boost is on par with many other relic buffs, as even the best physical damage relics will only reward around 5% extra damage to one damage type. But this is where the problem lies; the relic buff is powerful, and easy to achieve, making other options pale in comparison, as going all-in on a 6% boost to magic damage is nothing compared to a couple of evergaols cleared out.

Stonesword Keys are not guaranteed to drop from chests, but their very high droprate makes them particularly reliable.

Nightreign’s Latest Update Just Made This Relic Effect Even Easier to Acquire

In Elden Ring Nightreign’s newest update, FromSoftware added the Collector Signboard merchant, who sells a Grand Luminous Scene that not only contains not only the attack power-up effect, but gives the player a Stonesword Key at the start of each run, letting them get a head start on clearing evergaols. Available to purchase for Nightreign’s new currency, Sovereign Sigils, any player that can beat a Sovereign boss just once can buy this relic. There are some advantages to making such a powerful relic available to players reliably, as chasing the game’s relic RNG can be very frustrating, so it can be helpful for FromSoftware to provide players easy access to a strong relic.

The evergaol damage boost relic effect is also available on random relics, not just from the Collector Signboard.

However, this ease of access is a double-edged sword. As established, it is by far the best damage-increasing relic effect in Nightreign, and one with some fairly simple conditions, so by selling a curated relic that gives the evergaol damage buff to anyone, Nightreign is incentivizing players to follow a very particular playstyle at the expense of others. Evergaols become the only point of interest worth going after, and this has a big effect on replayability.

How the Signboard Merchant’s Evergaol Relic Is Hurting Replayability

In order to be the most effective, players using this relic need to fight as many evergaol bosses as possible, and that means running between castles to find keys, and evergaols to fight bosses, stopping at churches on the way to increase the number of flasks available. Due to the short window of opportunity during the game’s day/night cycle, there is little reason to deviate from this path of castle, evergaol, castle, etc., meaning that a lot of the more interesting encounters such as field bosses and Shifting Earth events get skipped, as the bonuses they offer simply don’t compete with the damage boost.

While this relic is very popular right now, as more players pick it up, it could become so necessary to finishing runs efficiently that players will only want to do evergaols and nothing else. FromSoftware could mitigate this problem by nerfing its effect, but it might be better to buff other relic effects instead. Some of Nightreign’s best relic effects only give minor boosts to stats, and the damage sponge nature of Nightlord bosses means that players getting extra damage wouldn’t be much of a problem for the meta compared to only relying on evergaols, and players would feel less pressure to follow the single optimized route to success.