Elden Ring Update Makes Shadow of the Erdtree DLC Easier

If you’re like many an Elden Ring player and have felt that the Shadow of the Erdtree update was hard – perhaps too hard, depending on who you ask – the latest update the game’s gotten has some good news for you. It’s made the DLC easier to a degree by refining the scaling of the new blessings granted by Scadutree Fragments and Revered Spirit Ashes in the Shadow of the Erdtree‘s Realm of Shadow. Of course, that means that players will actually have to seek out these upgrades like they were supposed to in the first place in order to take advantage of the update.

The scaling of these blessings made up the majority of the brief patch notes for Elden Ring Update 1.12.2 which released this week. Another issue addressed really wasn’t a fix at all and was rather acknowledging that some players were experiencing unstable framerates because their games were automatically turning on ray tracing which was causing issues at times. If you’re experiencing framerate problems in Elden Ring, you should verify that your raytracing settings are turned off to see if that helps.

That said, below are the Shadow Realm Blessing changes applied in this latest update:

Elden Ring Update 1.12.2

• 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 Shadow Realm Blessings granted by the Scadutree Fragments enhance players’ damage dealt as well as their damage negation while the Revered Spirit Ashes buff the damage and damage negation of summoned spirits as well as your spectral steed, Torrent. Scadutree blessings can go up to level 20 while the Revered Spirit Ash blessing goes to 10. So according to these patch notes, players should find the Scadutree blessings noticeably more impactful in levels 1-10 of the Shadow Realm Blessing. Levels 11-20 will still grant more resistances and damages than before, but not to the degree that the first levels will.

The point is, it’s a buff through and through, so players who’ve been struggling now have some help to look forward to. But again, you’ll have to actually be collecting these resources through exploration and optional boss battles. These systems are integral to overcoming the difficulty of Shadow of the Erdtree and are the prime reason why players with optimized builds are saying that they’re doing either no damage or are getting one-shot by enemies, so if you’re holding out on collecting these through some self-imposed challenge or because you think you don’t need them, you’re in for a rough time.