Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree's latest patch buffs your power in its earlier hours, with 'other balance adjustments' to come—also, you may need to turn ray tracing off again

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, despite being critically lauded (fellow PC Gamer writer Tyler Colp gave it a 95 in his Shadow of the Erdtree review, himself) has somehow reignited the age-old Elden Ring difficulty discourse—although more people are on the side of toning things down than they were in 2022, as Steam reviews dropped to «Mixed» last week.

The review score is still «Mixed» at the time of writing, though just barely, with 69% of reviews being positive. One root cause of this Erdtree agony is a mixture of misunderstandings and fair criticisms over the Scadutree Fragments system—a DLC-specific source of power scaling that increases your overall defence and offence after finding specific macguffins, akin to the Sacred Tears and Golden Seeds from the first game.

In short, no matter what your build's like, Erdtree's damage is seriously punishing in its first few hours—and if you're the kind of stubborn soulslike player to keep running to a boss like you're trying to bargain with Dormammu instead of exploring, you're going to be having a bad time. 'Go get Scadutree Fragments' is the new 'level your vigor'.

Well, it looks like FromSoftware's pumping the brakes a little bit. As announced in the DLC's first balance patch, the «attack and damage negation curve scaling of the Shadow Realm Blessings have been revised.»

Your Scadutree Fragments will give you a bigger boost for the first 10 levels, while the buffs you get afterwards will be more gradual. However, «the attack and damage negation granted by the final level of Blessing enhancements has been slightly increased.»

Essentially, this means that players will be rewarded for exploring a moderate amount—however, it'll be less mandatory (though still advised) to push your Shadow Blessing level beyond that. If you do go on a scavenger hunt, though, you'll be handsomely rewarded for getting everything as a capstone.

This seems like a fair compromise, to me. I've got mixed feelings about the system myself (as well