Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree's latest patch rebalances its divisive scaling system
After players were divided on the new Shadow Realm Blessings system in Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, developer FromSoftware has released a patch that rebalances its benefits.
The details:
Following the DLC's release last week, many criticized its increased difficulty compared to the base game, labeling its bosses as "unfair" as players dealt very little damage to begin with, resulting in lengthy battles. Bandai Namco's immediate response was to inform players about Scadutree fragments, the newly introduced collectible items that provide damage and resistance bonuses, making the game significantly easier.
Originally, using the fragments to level up the Scadutree blessing would result in a flat additive increase of approximately 5% in damage and resistance. However, with calibration update 1.12.2, this has been changed to provide a greater increase for the first half of the enhancements, with the second half consisting of more gradual increases. In theory, this should make the early stages of expansion much more manageable.
Difficulty was not the only major talking point addressed in the patch, as FromSoft also fixed a bug that enabled ray-tracing by default when loading a save, resulting in a significant performance drop for those who did not turn it off every time.
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Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki states that making it easier would "break the game" due to its emphasis on overcoming challenging enemies.