Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's celebratory DLC bosses and nerfs are so brutal that players are having to retool their months-old endgame builds

After a nearly clean sweep at The Game Awards, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is enjoying a renewed sense of vigor. It helps that Sandfall Interactive already planned to celebrate the record-breaking occasion with a new update, which provides as many fixes and tweaks as it does new content. Among the new stuff are a couple of boss encounters that are, evidently, ruffling many players' feathers.

Hardcore Expedition 33 players are no strangers to the game's many superbosses. They're practically littered all over the world map inviting unsuspecting players to stumble into their dungeons or gravitational pull only to whoop them. By the game's end though, players are given more than enough tools in the way of pictos – passive abilities that can be stacked or used in particularly synergistic combos that also modify character stats – to easily deal frankly ridiculous amounts of damage in single blows.

Over time, many of these very players found builds built upon this foundation that essentially cracked the game wide open again and trivialized most of these encounters. With Expedition 33's celebratory DLC though, Sandfall Interactive has seemingly crafted a challenge befitting of the very high-end of players.

Spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 follow.

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The DLC adds an entirely new area known as Verso's Drafts that features a couple of new boss fights, but the ones that really seem to be challenging players seem to be found in the Endless Tower. This locale appears in the base game as a sort of arena that players can keep coming back to for increasingly difficult challenges and a chance to grind levels.

Now it features four additional superbosses, all variants of existing bosses in the game, and they seem to be stumping even the best players. In particular, a multi-phase fight against a boss named Duolliste is breaking a lot of wills, leaving at least one player "screaming." Of course, that could also have something to do with the under-the-hood fixes that Sandfall has also deployed with this new update.

While the DLC has added new abilities to be found and equipped, presumably ones that should help with these new challenges, Sandfall Interactive has taken this opportunity to nerf existing overpowered builds by nixing invisible damage buffs that many would grant, and which could be stacked.

Soon after the release of the patch, some started to realize that their overpowered builds, which were capable of doing up to 11 million points of damage, were suddenly yielding much smaller numbers.

But as one user on the game's subreddit pointed out, it also seems like the setups that players had been manipulating for months are no longer as viable as they once were, writing, "So far it seems like 90% of Verso's setups are essentially dead, but the rest of the crew is somewhat untouched." In response, other players chimed in, echoing the sentiment that some of the new superbosses would definitely necessitate new setups.

While the damage doesn't seem catastrophic, and some builds seem to still be doing numbers, it's fun to see Sandfall toy with the game's audience like this. Even if it isn't a total reset, forcing even the most skilled players to have to scurry and invent new workarounds and strategies is part of the fun of building atop an existing game and community via DLC like this. To the credit of Expedition 33 players, folks don't seem overly bothered by the challenge either, and actually appear eager at the chance to once again try and break the game sans any hidden buffs.

In other, sweeter news, Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi shouts out Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 after its director said the JRPG icon "inspired me to become a game dev"