You may not see him in that many matches, but savvy Elden Ring Nightreign players know that the new Scholar class is an absolute monster. The Scholar is becoming even stronger in patch 1.03.1, a hefty update that adds a ton of new content as well as many welcome bug fixes.
Though the Scholar sounds nerdy, the academic uses those book smarts and every item imaginable to make teams unstoppable. The Scholar can do it all. He can debuff enemies by almost 20% while increasing your team’s damage by 20% at the same time, every 12 seconds. He can reverse-revive rings. He can increase your health by 20%, or your FP by the same amount. Depending on the consumable, the Scholar can even boost your basic stats.
This, it turns out, was not the Scholar’s final form. Many of the bugfixes included in Tuesday’s patch either improve or fix his already borderline broken abilities:
- Added a stack count display to the damage negation reduction icon that appears when hitting enemies with level 3 Dart-type items thanks to Scholar’s Bagcraft Skill.
- Scholar’s Ultimate Art Communion will no longer break when transforming using Executor’s Ultimate Art Aspects of the Crucible: Beast.
- Fixed a bug where the damage to linked enemies and healing to allies would not propagate correctly in the event where a Scholar was put into a Near Death state during the activation of his Communion Ultimate Art.
- Fixed a bug in Scholar’s Skill Analyze where the art gauge would not increase from the shockwave triggered on oneself at maximum charge.
- Fixed a bug where the number of targets analyzed by Scholar’s Skill Analyse would reset if any player would perform the open door action to transition to the boss fight within the Spirit Tree shelter.
- Fixed a bug in Scholar’s ability Bagcraft where the damage negation reduction effect’s duration would not extend when hitting enemies with level 3 Dart items.
- Fixed a bug in Scholar’s ability Bagcraft where the damage negation reduction effect would not be applied according to the number of hits when hitting enemies with level 3 Fan Daggers.
- Fixed a bug in Scholar’s ability Bagcraft where the healing effect added to the level 3 Holy Water Pot would not cause damage to the Royal Revenant.
- Fixed a bug where the Crystal Tear count would not display correctly when obtaining a second one from Dormant Powers as Scholar.
There’s plenty in the patch that will be of interest to people who play other classes, too. Those fire dogs that were ruining playthroughs with their infinite teleportation, for example? Their attacks and HP have been weakened, and the wolves will actually go away when they’re supposed to now.
Perhaps the biggest change comes for the subset of fans who both own The Forsaken Hollows DLC and also dabble in the ultra-hard The Deep of Night mode. Deep of Night is a version of Nightreign with stronger enemies that can become progressively more difficult. There’s no limit to how much harder it can get, and the mode will also not tell you what Nightlord it will throw at you at the end of day three.
The Forsaken Hollows, meanwhile, is a nail-biting addition to the game with all sorts of new enemies, bosses, and hilarious ways to die. After the 1.03.1 patch, anyone who owns the DLC will be able to find some of those new targets, landmarks, raids, and Shifting Earth events while in Deep of Night mode. Given how often I’m dying in the basic version of Forsaken Hollows, I dread whatever awaits me in the tryhard mode now.
You can read the full patch notes here.
