Elden Ring Nightreign continues to Everdark-ify its Nightlord boss fights. After Adel and Fulghor, the next Everdark super-boss is Gnoster, better known as the two-for-one bug battle beatdown where a magic moth and massive scorpion combine their powers to become annoying as all get-out.
"Dark whispers echoes from the Night's wings," FromSoftware says in a new tweet. "Let the flames of redemption burn away its somber influence." The new boss will arrive on Thursday, July 3 at 3am CEST, or tomorrow, July 2 at 6pm PST / 9pm EST.
I shudder to think what Everdark Gnoster is cooking up. In my mind, Gnoster is an Armored Core boss that snuck into an Elden Ring game. It's fast, punishes melee, and fills the screen with projectiles – which can be really fun to fight when you're in a mech, but, it turns out, less fun when you're a dude with a sword. It just feels kind of uninteractive, with a lot of downtime between moments where you can deal meaningful damage.
This is already one of my least-favorite bosses not just in Nightreign but in the entire FromSoftware roster, and I don't seem to be the only one. It's not awful, but it's not FromSoft's best work. What will the buffed version add? Even more magic lasers? A third bug?
The first Everdark boss, Adel, set a high bar for these variant fights. You can reasonably argue that the boss's base form is on the lower end of difficulty for Nightreign, but the Everdark version added tons of new attacks that could easily send you straight back to the hub.
Everdark Fulghor, surprisingly, wasn't that bad. Fulghor is generally regarded as one of the harder fights at baseline, but his Everdark version didn't change the fight all that much, and even his most lethal attacks could reasonably be weathered or blocked. I definitely had more success with Fulghor than Adel, and some players were shocked or even disappointed with how easy he was.
This begs the question, where will Gnoster fall? Surprisingly tame, or curb-stompingly hard? It's an annoying fight as-is, and since Everdark bosses basically start in their second phase – the point where the Gnoster light show truly begins – before transitioning to a new third one, there's no telling what we'll have to deal with.
The silver lining for me is that Gnoster is weak to fire, a pretty common damage type among Nightreign's arsenal. Better still, my recent Everdark adventures have given me a potent lineup of fire relics for my main man Wylder. The bad news is I'm still just a dude with a sword, so this is probably going to hurt.
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