Elden Ring Nightreign’s New Balancer Relics Are Beautifully Broken
Elden Ring Nightreign’s Forsaken Hollows DLC replaces evergaol farming with stacked Balancer relics, delivering a powerful 40% weapon skill boost.
As of 2026, Elden Ring Nightreign’s Forsaken Hollows DLC has turned the old comfort zone into a museum exhibit with the velvet rope pulled across it. Players who spent months optimizing the evergaol relic route—the reliable trick of summoning bosses around the map for attack power—have discovered that the new map contains zero evergaols. The battle-royale circle still breathes down their necks, but the old shortcut has been snapped like a dry twig. FromSoftware clearly watched the meta, took notes, and then built a labyrinth specifically to make those notes obsolete.
That could have felt punitive. Instead, the studio slipped in a new reward that is less a bandage and more a second engine bolted onto the same frame. Defeating the new boss, The Balancers, grants a relic that boosts weapon skill damage by roughly 20%. The enhanced version of that boss, which arrived in the current update cycle, drops an almost identical relic—and the two stack. Together, they push weapon skill damage up by about 40%, a number that makes most other relic combinations look like a rowboat trying to keep pace with a hydrofoil.
The community reaction has been immediate. YouTuber Youwy, who is known for running the math on Nightreign builds, calls the relic broken in his latest breakdown. That is not idle hype. A flat 40% boost to weapon skills changes the calculus for several playstyles, and players are already circling the Halo Scythe as a prime candidate. Its holy discs can be flung out in quick succession, turning the relic from a niche curiosity into a pressure hose for bosses. Executor players may be the biggest winners, since their kit naturally leans toward katanas, and one of the best weapon skills in the game happens to live on a katana. The result is a build space that suddenly feels less like a spreadsheet and more like a fireworks display with the safety rails removed.
| Relic | Source | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Base Balancer relic | The Balancers | About 20% weapon skill damage |
| Enhanced Balancer relic | Enhanced Balancers | About 20% weapon skill damage; stacks with the base relic |
| Combined setup | Both relics equipped | About 40% total weapon skill damage |
What makes this design choice interesting is the timing. The Forsaken Hollows map is deliberately disorienting—a knot of paths and verticality that punishes autopilot. Without evergaols, players cannot simply stamp the same route onto every run. They have to explore, improvise, and actually read the terrain. In that context, a stacked 40% weapon skill boost is not just a power fantasy; it is a reward for engaging with the new content rather than trying to drag the old meta into it. FromSoftware has essentially replaced a familiar crutch with a pair of running shoes.
The DLC also adds the only character in Nightreign who benefits from picking up consumable items from the ground—items that most players previously treated as scenery. That detail fits the same philosophy. The studio is nudging players out of their habits, and it seems comfortable with adding something genuinely powerful as long as it encourages engagement with a part of the game that used to be easy to ignore. The Balancer relics are not subtle. They are a neon sign pointing toward weapon skills, stacking, and the new boss loop. But subtlety was never the point. The point is that the new meta has teeth.
There is a broader success story here, too. Nightreign was never promised a steady live-service cadence, and it is an experimental multiplayer spin-off from a developer best known for single-player RPGs. Yet the Forsaken Hollows DLC has managed to keep the game fresh for players who have already sunk hundreds of hours into it. FromSoftware has hinted that more updates are on the way. They may not be full expansions, but if they continue to shake up the routine this effectively, the community will keep coming back to solve the next puzzle.
For now, the takeaway is simple: the enhanced Balancer relic is not just strong. It is the kind of strong that makes players reorganize their entire loadout, test new weapons, and argue over the best stack. In a game about surviving the night, that is exactly the kind of beautiful trouble worth chasing. 🗡️✨