If FromSoftware doesn't make changes to Elden Ring Nightreign's new terror on the block, the Everdark Sovereign version of Libra the madness demon, I'm going to have to buy a hat just so I can threaten to eat it in a hyperbolic wager.
Plenty of people have beaten Everdark Libra, of course, and some even claim to love the fight, though I wonder if that's the Madness buildup talking. But a huge chunk of the Nightreign community is clearly either struggling with this boss or straight-up not having a good time, and I've seen some of the best players in the Souls community beat the boss and then immediately call it bad.
In the weeks I've put into playing and covering Nightreign, tracking videos and various social media posts, I've never seen a boss so polarizing or so punishing. FromSoftware only just made the Everdark Augur fight a smidge easier, and it was already exponentially easier than Everdark Libra, so I've never been more sure that balance changes are coming.
The main gimmick with Everdark Libra, compared to his base version, is his ability to summon copies of your party's Nightfarers with preset loadouts of gear. These hostile NPC summons will pile up if you don't kill them, eventually smothering you with sheer numbers if you just try to greed out boss damage. But if you spend the whole time fighting summons, you'll lose the battle of attrition. The point of a boss fight is to kill the boss. So, a balance is key, but finding that balance can feel like finding hay in a needle stack.
It is sacred and unquestionable law in Soulslikes that bosses that have friends, whether that's multiple bosses in an arena or bosses that summon crap, are BS. Please see the case of The People vs Smough and Ornstein, circa 2011. Players can summon crap all we want, but as soon as bosses do it a single time, all bets are off and the 'bad design' critiques are on. So, imagine the peoples' response when a boss does it, I don't know, 12 times.
Playing solo, I would generally agree with the community sentiment that Everdark Libra is annoying but manageable. In my last solo attempt, I had to chew through four summons. Adding in another player in a duo run consequently doubles the summons, but the difficulty balancing for duos is forgiving enough that it still feels reasonably doable, albeit slightly more annoying.
It's in trio play, the main mode of Nightreign, that the Everdark Libra fight really goes to hell. And if FromSoftware is going to make changes, and I'd bet my best relic that it will, it's probably going to start here.
The more goons Libra calls in, the higher your odds of getting wombo-comboed by two or more at once based on unpredictable aggro mechanics. More summons also means higher odds of facing one that has a particularly strong and disruptive loadout, like a Rain of Arrows-spamming archer. Combined with the enemy HP scaling of trios, this turns the fight into a slugfest that can feel unwinnable.
Unless everyone on your team is a Capital-G Gamer, Everdark Libra is a nightmare, and even with a good team rocking good builds, it's grueling. On top of that, the summon mechanic can actively and disproportionately punish you for picking certain Nightfarers. Guardian, widely regarded as one of the weakest characters in the game, is even weaker in a fight where picking him means the boss can summon unstoppable walls who take several times longer to kill than most summons.
Even if you can miraculously coordinate a way to kite the summons and split boss DPS – and good luck doing that with random players – between the trio scaling, the summon spam, and skewed team dynamics that push the best characters in the game even harder, I reckon Everdark Libra must be ringing some alarm bells at FromSoftware HQ. I can't imagine what the clear rate looks like compared to other bosses, but I'd bet it's low, and I can already hear the swish and crack of the nerf bat.
From our own Ali Jones: Elden Ring Nightreign finally let me get revenge against two bosses that nearly ruined my original Elden Ring playthrough, and victory has never felt sweeter
