Elden Ring Nightreign’s Monster Hunter Summer Just Got Started

Many Elden Ring Nightreign players, myself included, thought they were finally ready to call it quits on FromSoftware’s multiplayer roguelike boss-raid generator. We defeated the Night Aspect. Maybe we even finished every achievement. It was time to walk away. Then, out of nowhere, the studio dropped its toughest boss yet: the Everdark Sovereign variant of Gaping Jaw. “He just don’t stop chompin,” wrote one fan on Reddit.

Gaping Jaw was one of the Nightlords that caused players trouble around launch last month, in part because his weakness was poison and poison weapons can be hard to come by. He actually ended up being one of the easier boss fights for my squad, thanks in part to multiple ranged weapons forcing him to spit out teammates anytime he gobbled them up and started crunching. The new Everdark Sovereign version, however, takes the encounter to 11 the entire time.

He almost never stops moving, constantly shooting out lightning blasts and ground AOE bursts. At one point he summons a giant whirlwind storm, and players have to use jumping pads to hop over top if they don’t want to immediately get downed. One particularly nasty lightning attack happens in a spherical AOE with barely any lead-up or attack animation to signal that you’ve got less than three seconds to get the hell out of dodge. “I’ve gotten comfortable dodging his attacks at least,” shared one player on the subreddit. “But once people start going down it’s chaos.”

The Everdark Sovereign version of Gaping Jaw, who’s also known as Adel, Baron of the Night, appeared late on Wednesday out of nowhere, with no mention of him in the extremely barebones patch notes this week. The shadow drop caught players completely by surprise and many rushed to go try to defeat the new foe. The reward for doing so is new items in the shop, including more powerful relics, as well as the ability to control which Shifting Earth events are active at anytime. The update’s already been praised as the ideal tune-up to cap off the game’s first few weeks out in the wild.

But taking advantage of these new benefits requires actually defeating this new Gaping Jaw, which has proven to be Nightreign’s toughest challenge yet. In fact, players have been having such poor luck fighting him in teams that they’re opting to take him on alone. “ Team kept getting decimated and I just felt like I could clutch it alone,” wrote one player. “Solo is definitely easier by a mile so my next challenge is getting a team of three to win this often.” Some are tanking as Raider, while others are building up his status ailment meters with Executor. Learning the sound queues for his additional attacks and being prepared to dodge the tornado also go a long way.

Unlike Nightreign’s other boss fights, however, Everdark Sovereigns are on timers, with new ones rotating in each week. More powerful variants of Sentient Pest and Darkdrift Knight are next up, with Tricephalos, Augur, Equilibrious Beast, and Fissure in the Fog coming later in the summer. It all feels very Monster Hunter, just without the tedious but rewarding loot grind. It turns out that Nightreign is FromSoftware’s take on a live-service game after all, and a damn great one so far.

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