New Elden Ring patch will make those early DLC hours a lot easier

A lot of people have been having trouble with Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, due to both general FromSoftware game difficulty and changes made to the leveling system once you get to the DLC area. A tiny patch issued Wednesday aims to help with that.

Calibration Update 1.12.2 tweaks two things regarding the Scadutree Blessing, a DLC-exclusive blessing that allows you to deal and take more damage as you upgrade it. The patch increases attack and damage negation for the first half of the upgrade tree, with the second half being “more gradual.” It also increased the blessing’s final level, so players who max it out will benefit more.

The Scadutree Blessing, according to a post from publisher Bandai Namco, is one of the key things players are missing with Shadow of the Erdtree. To use the blessing, you have to collect Scadutree Fragments, which are scattered throughout the Land of Shadow. The base game featured a more standard leveling system, while the DLC is focused more on attack power as a way to balance players at different skill levels.

FromSoftware and Bandai Namco issuing a patch seemingly in response to player feedback to make the game less difficult seems almost like a joke. However, while the point of Elden Ring‘s level design is to have you be defeated by bosses, forcing you to go back out into the world and explore, the patch should remove some of the frustration in those earlier hours — as long as you remember to use Scadutree Blessing and upgrade it, of course.

In smaller news, Calibration Update 1.12.2 notes that a bug where ray tracing being automatically on is contributing to some of the frame rate issues PC players have been experiencing. You can disable it by going into the game’s Graphics Settings and setting ray tracing to off.