Elden Ring Players Want a Secret Boss Nerf Reverted
Elden Ring's 1.03 patch was a pretty extensive one that affected PvP and PvE content alike, but it looks like not everything was documented in the patch notes. Players have discovered that one boss just isn't the same as they were before following the release of that update, and in a change of pace from much of the discussions surrounding FromSoftware's games, some players actually want this nerf reverted to make the boss harder like they were pre-patch.
Spoiler Warning: The rest of this article contains spoilers for optional parts of Elden Ring which some players might not have accessed yet.
The boss in question is Radahn, the towering, dual-wielding, gravity-defying boss who welcomes challengers during an epic festival of combat. Radahn is technically an optional boss since you can go after the other Great Rune holders instead to progress through the game, but he's a boss many people have sought out regardless after hearing about his fight.
However, some people who are now making their way to Radahn haven't found him to be all he was hyped up to be. Perhaps that's due in part to some nerfs datamined whenever the big update went live that showed Radahn had been altered in various ways. Elden Ring modder and dataminer king_bore_haha shared the tweet below recently to show what had changed, though seeing how those changes aren't documented in the patch notes, it's impossible to verify what, precisely, has changed.
Some Radahn changes:
— king bore haha/geeeeeorge (@king_bore_haha) March 17, 2022
- Weapon hitboxes are much smaller (~40%)
- Melee Damage is generally weaker (~8-10%)
- Some projectile/explosion hitbox sizes are smaller, grow more slowly.
- The fucking homing orbs have seemingly been heavily modified (thank god)
- A billion other things
Following that discovery, you've now got Elden Ring players all over social media wondering why Radahn was nerfed. Some argue that he was easy before and didn't need a nerf while others have pointed out that another tough boss deserved the nerfs much more. More still have now realized they're able to tout the fact that they beat pre-nerf Radahn, something that anyone from this point on won't be able to say. A fair number of players have also suggested that these nerfs were perhaps too egregious and were an overreaction to an optional boss.
Radahn's fight certainly felt like one of the more cinematic and FromSoftware-y ones out of all of Elden Ring's brawls, but in a game like this where so much depends on individual builds and how bosses choose to behave in a fight, it's always difficult to compare one person's experience to another's. Even fighting him in New Game+ poses a much different experience compared to the first fight, so fighting him pre-nerf and then post-nerf and saying it felt different isn't really evidence of whether the nerfs were deserved or not either.
Most who fought him can probably agree that the homing meteors did need a nerf or two, but the other changes will likely always be up for debate considering they've come so quickly after the game's release.