‘Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree’ Patch Buffs Players After Difficulty Complaints

Since Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree launches, many players have complained that it’s too difficult, even for a FromSoft game, and no matter how strong their characters may have been previously, it felt like starting over from scratch being 2-3 shot by enemies.

Now, perhaps surprisingly, FromSoft has issued a new patch that buffs players through its Scadutree Blessings, which will make a significant amount of the game easier. Here are the patch notes:

• The attack and damage negation has been increased for the first half of the maximum amount of Blessing enhancements, and the second half will now be more gradual.
• The attack and damage negation granted by the final level of Blessing enhancements has been slightly increased.

The first one is key, given that for the second one, it’s extremely hard to fully max Blessings as you need to find every single fragment on the map, and it’s a significant change. I reached the final story boss at around Scadutree 14, and you can get to him much earlier. So this means that even the majority of the expansion may now be easier for players, though we don’t know the exact percentages here.

Why would FromSoft do this? While we know it has “Mixed” reviews on Steam, often citing the difficulty, my guess is that it’s data-based.

FromSoft wants an expansion that sells well that people play. I imagine they may have some data showing that a not-insignificant number of players are quitting earlier, or hitting a certain boss they can’t overcome and stopping there.

Even though it is really hammered home that the new difficulty curve heavily relies on Scadutree Fragments to increase your power in the Shadow Realm, I think most players are not getting the message that you need to go out of your way to explore and find more of these to take on tougher content. But now, even if you have fewer than you may have needed before, you will be stronger.

I mean, it’s their game, they can do what they want, but I am a bit surprised to see it. I won’t begrudge anyone saying the game is extremely difficult, it is, but I really do think the main problem is people having the expectation their old characters would still be strong in this expansion, and then not knowing the key ways to make them stronger from here, which is probably 70% reliant on the Scadutree system.

One buff I would like to see? Big boosts to almost every summon in the game. Especially the back half, it feels like every single summon melts to any reasonably hard boss too fast, with the lone exception of Mimic Tear which feels like it has triple the health and does triple the damage of anyone. Yes, even Black Knife Tiche. But nothing about that here, and I believe these changes only apply to Scadutree fragments.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.