Latest Elden Ring patch tunes Shadow of the Erdtree’s difficulty, and players are split on whether that’s a good thing

You all know by now the big talking point surrounding the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC for Elden Ring its its difficulty, with many a player finding it far more challenging than they’d like. While this hardly means FromSoftware’s going to introduce an easy mode any time soon, it has put out a calibration update to try and make things more balanced.

This update, as detailed on Bandai Namco’s website, primarily revises the scaling of the Shadow Realm Blessings, which is Shadow of the Erdtree‘s unique leveling system for boosting the attack and defence of your character and spirit summons. This is done by collecting Scadutree Fragments and Revered Spirit Ashes. With this calibration update, the effects of the Shadow Realm Blessings are more effective for the first few levels and then become more gradual, and the attack and damage negation you gain from the final level up (since there’s a limited number of Scadutree Fragments and Revered Spirit Ashes) has been slightly increased.

Glancing through fan reactions on the Elden Ring subreddit, it seems plenty of players have welcomed this patch, since it should make the early portions of Shadow of the Erdtree slightly more manageable, but keep the overall experience as challenging as a FromSoftware game should be. “Buffing the early game [Scadutree Fragments] is nice,” says one fan, “Should make it less brutal but still challenging for people without trivializing the late game.” Another believes the Blessings system is “golden for balance updates,” saying it’s like “A handful of convenient levers they can fiddle with to adjust things globally.”

Once you get past these comments, though, you’ll find some players who vehemently oppose the update, seeing it as nerfing the difficulty. These players argue the DLC was perfectly manageable as it was and have expressed disappointment in FromSoftware for kowtowing to the complaints. Others have argued back, saying you can make Shadow of the Erdtree more challenging for yourself by simply not collecting the Scadutree Fragments and Revered Spirit Ashes since you can’t strengthen your character without them.

The discourse surrounding Shadow of the Erdtree‘s difficulty will likely never go away, especially since the recent patch notes mention more balance changes are on the way. There have also been criticisms lobbied against the DLC’s performance on PC, with even some of the positive user reviews on Steam complaining about frame drops.