PSA: Every weapon you carry grants you its passive buff in Elden Ring Nightreign
Fat rolling. It's the bane of any Souls player's existence—it's just too slow. By now, I think we've all been conditioned to avoid clogging up our equipment slots with unnecessary junk, but that's not a thing in Elden Ring Nightreign. Despite copying the same UI almost one-to-one from the base game, FromSoftware's quirky multiplayer spinoff makes some drastic changes under the hood and forgets to let you know.
Not only is equipment load no longer a thing—goodbye extra fast and slow dodge rolls, hello sweet, sweet medium—but Nightreign also introduces new loot tiers akin to a battle royale. If you're anything like me, you'd naturally assume that your goal is to just get one or two good weapons for your build, and that everything else you find of a lesser quality, or of a different weapon type, is useless. But that's not the case either:
- Every weapon in Nightreign comes with a passive, displayed at the bottom of the item tooltip. These passives can be anything from improved jump attack power to giving your weapon poison damage or health recovery on hits. They're build-defining, potentially game-winning effects.
- These passives are permanently active and stack in the background, so long as you have them in your inventory. Yeah, that's right, that common bow that you walked past which improved your ranged damage? You should have picked it up, even though you have a better purple one.
- The one exception to this is passives marked with a red hand icon. You'll typically only see this on the Nightreign's legendary weapons, but it means these passives are only active when the weapon in question is currently in your hands—though you could always off-hand it if you want.
The end goal is to fill up all six of your weapon slots with passive buffs that improve your playstyle, even if you only actually use one of them in combat. For example, the best Ironeye build stacks as many items that improve ranged damage as possible, whether that passive is on a sword, seal, or a bow. Duchess benefits greatly from successive hit passives, like damage reduction, or extra damage while wielding two armaments (dual-wielding), and so on.
If you want to know how much of a difference this makes, my first attempt against the final boss was a total blowout. I was Ironeye with zero weapons that boosted my ranged playstyle or inflicted the boss' weakness. That's just the luck of the draw, I guess. Compare this to my third attempt, where I had five weapons that boosted ranged damage by roughly 10-20% each, and, surprise, surprise, I came out the victor.
All of Nightreign's Nightfarers are unique, so puzzle out their playstyle and hopefully RNG will give you the passives you want. You can toggle an overlay on the map to see what weapon types and ailments you can get from each location. For example, camps provide bows, ballistas and jar cannons from bow racks, and these ranged weapons most often have the ranged weapon damage passive. And before you ask, no, there's no way to hide equipment from your quick-slots; you really do need to scroll through all that (albeit passively helpful) junk if you're swapping between gear in combat.