Elden Ring Nightreign Tier List & Character Review

Elden Ring Nightreign Best Characters

S Tier

• Ironeye

The Ironeye is king due to his high damage marking skill.

Aggressively playing it to reach as close as possible to a 100% mark uptime and never stop shooting arrows is the way to maximize its damage.

The very moment your mark pops is the time to reapply it, plan accordingly. (+1 skill use is mandatory, as a high damage team can pop the mark very fast).

For bow setup it’s pretty easy, put a status buildup (poison) in your left hand and a damage boosted bow in your right hand (like +X magic damage).

Apply poison with L1 then do damage with R1, while you have the mark on the boss, of course.

Priority: Mark > Apply Poison > Standard Attack

[Deep of Night update added a relic that adds poison to the mark skill AND extra damage on poisoned targets, reinforcing the poison playstyle.]

Do not stack multiple Ironeyes, there can only be 1 mark at a time. The first Ironeye is S tier and mandatory, the second one is F tier. The class relies on his teammates’ damage to maximize its own mark damage.

A Tier

• Recluse

The Recluse has 1 issue preventing her for reaching S Tier: it’s the most annoying class to revive teammates with.

Most of sorcery spells are going to work fine, spamming a fast one with casting speed increase is usually the best thing to do.

The great glinstone shard and its ice variation are great for this. Your left hand weapon should ideally be a melee weapon (colossal has highest rez per hit).

Make sure to buy 2 starlight shards at 1200 each from the merchant, you’ll get 2 more for 6000 each at the end merchant.

Recluse’s skill is situational, building up the right combination to use at the right moment is great, just don’t focus on this or you will have low damage.

Priority: 1 Rennala Moon (def down) > Terra buff (from gem) > Spam magic

Recluse is the best one to rapidly and consistently pop Ironeye’s mark, especially if you get Stars of Ruin.

• Executor

The Executor can parry pretty much everything, not a S Tier because melee characters on high mobility bosses are not exactly the best thing.

Its ultimate is a very strong cleaner, using it in a camp or zombies and spamming roar is a very quick rune generator.

Your main weapons should be bleed/frost and poison/rot, you will spend a lot of time in your skill stance only to switch to your normal weapon during a damaging/knockdown phase.

The Executor has a S in arcane scaling, which means an easy time to buildup any status, the more weapons you have the better.

Since you are melee, make sure to have a (status) bow on you and switch to it every time the boss moves away.

Priority: Parry > Parry skill > Status buildup > Cursed sword attacks

• Wylder

The Wylder has a strong ultimate to knockdown bosses, combined with some ultimate recharge speed, you can get a lot of ults in.

Having a bow as a secondary weapon on Wylder is even more important than on Executor, it is extremely fast to get your ult back if you do constant damage.

Close gap with your skill or shoot arrows, you have no excuses to run around like an NPC.

Your main weapon should be what the boss weakness is, your skill will apply some fire damage to it also (greatswords only).

Priority: Timed ultimate > Standard attacks

B Tier

• Duchess

The Duchess has both DEX and INT scaling, making a staff in left hand quite useful.

As a secondary staff weapon: carrion swords, especially a full charged piercer, works great on her (you can use the skill to repeat part of the damage).

Your main weapons should have frost/bleed, for example 2 daggers that you will be power-stancing (dual wielding).

The skill is very good at repeating the frost and bleed proc damage, giving it some very high burst potential.

Duchess’ ultimate is a safe teammate revive option, it doesn’t do damage, B Tier it is.

Priority: Skill on double status proc > Skill on status proc > Skill after critical hit > Status buildup attacks

Duchess is the second best at popping Ironeye’s mark.

• Raider

The Raider starts with a colossal weapon and should be power-stancing 2 of them in order to jump attack grounded teammates.

Raider’s skill is very useful at preventing damage and staggering bosses when charged. Its ultimate is not that good, the totem is just there to make everyone lose their target lock-on…

Priority: Fully charged attacks >= Jump attacks (your role is to do big stagger damage to get fast knockdowns)

C Tier

• Guardian

The Guardian is very tanky due to the shield stance. The question here is “do we need a tanky character with low damage?”. No, we don’t.

Bosses move to much for the aoe skill, the ultimate is a strong revive option (with healing if you use that gem) but that’s it.

If a quick press on the skill would be a gap-closer it could be B Tier (like a spinning dash that pierces).

A combination of “while walking” and “on guard counter” can greatly boost its damage but you don’t always get those options.

Your main weapon should just be the boss weakness, add a little rot dagger to be useful.

Priority: Keep aggro > Apply Rot > Guard counter (and please use the gem that draws attention while guarding, you have 1 job)

D Tier

• Revenant

The Revenant is scaling on Faith, which means incantations. The main issue is how weak most of them are, the stronger ones (dragon) being very inconvenient.

Not playing incantation and going for weapon skills or sorcery spells is just better, but other classes are better at that.

Revenant’s initial weapon is on par with colossal weapons when reviving your teammates, get it to purple (and apply some status on it via gems).

Sebastian’s aoe scream is useful to not let the purple bar refill and Revenant’s ultimate is an aoe rez (or immunity if used on people alive).

Priority: Revive teammates > Status buildup.

Elden Ring Nightreign Tips

Map layouts and events can greatly affect your ending runes. It’s not uncommon for me to end at level 15 with over 200k extra unused runes.

How to Easily get Level 15 in Nightreign

You can make a difference in a game that looks like it will end at level 12 or 13.

While your 2 ogre teammates are only running in and killing a boss, you will be killing mobs in that zone while making your way to the boss.

An aoe like hoarfrost stomp is recommended, you need to kill things fast, in one hit and move on (Executor’s ultimate is my favorite thing to destroy a whole camp with).

Your 2 teammates, by killing the boss will give, lets say, 15k runes to the team. You, by quickly clearing a dozen mobs in that zone, will provide the same or more runes.

How to get Stonesword Keys in Nightreign

Stonesword keys are used to open evergoals, some gems have an attack up per evergoal boss defeated, this is a very important part of the game.

Forts and Great Churches special chests have a high chance to contain 1 key, sometimes 0, sometimes 2.

Forts: the chest at the end on top or the first floor chest; sometimes random loot from a white soul on the ground or normal chests.

Great Churches: either on the floor level or you’ll have to climb up.

You can really maximize your damage by doing all evergoals if you have that gem (you can buy a yellow one with the purple boss currency: Sovereign Sigils).

How to Not Die in Nightreign

Try Dodge.

While you can dodge everything sometimes you just get hit. Here are some defensive passive items that you should be using (don’t use more than 2):

• Slot 1: Damage negation at full HP

This prevents one-shots and has an easy conditional active effect. Make sure to take a +% flask healing to always be max HP.

• Slot 2: Taking damage boosts damage negation

Adel can grab you, but not kill you.

• Slot 2: Damage negation while X (magic/attacks/charging)

Adel can grab you, and kill you.

Some games you just don’t get anything good damage wise, so I would recommend you to pick up whatever defensive items you get to fill in the gaps.

One time, my Ironeye was more tanky than the Guardian (still doing big damage because Ironeye).

Trusting your teammates to revive you? Or really good at dodging? Go for 0 defensive items and melt down bosses.