Nightreign players have figured out a way to guarantee you'll be at max level when fighting a Nightlord, but unfortunately it's super boring

A bird man character from Elden Ring reads a book in a library — (Image credit: Tyler C. / FromSoftware)

I've got a few dozen Elden Ring Nightreign expeditions on the books, and it shouldn't surprise anyone when I say they haven't all been successes. Many of those failures have come agonizingly close to victory, where my team's Nightlord target survived by only a sliver of health—a sliver it probably wouldn't have had if we'd entered the arena with one or two more levels.

Luckily, Nightreign players on Reddit have found a method for ensuring you're always at max level when you face off with your run's final boss. Unfortunately, it's—well—pretty boring.

Nightreign Pro Tip: Guaranteed level 15 every game and anyone can do it! from r/Nightreign

If you open your map, you'll see why. Once the Day 2 boss dies, all the Sites of Grace on the map become active. That means, if you intentionally avoid ascending to boss fight heaven, you and your team can run around the map farming enemies, providing enough runes to hit max level.

Now, there is a complication. The battle royale-style circle of hellish, lethal fire is still locked around where you fought the Day 2 boss, so you will be taking tick damage while you're running around grinding out levels. Thankfully, it's not much of an issue: Just kill enemies until you run out of flasks and die, and then you can simply run back from the nearest Grace, pick your runes back up, and carry on—collecting your runes after death gives you enough to reclaim your lost level, after all.

The real problem is that this is extremely tedious. It's easy to imagine a nightmare world in which, very soon, randoms online will get irritated if you aren't joining them to grind out a few more levels in the hellfire.

It's hard to say how likely it is that FromSoft will patch this. On one hand, it's against the spirit of Nightreign's whole deal—why have the time pressure of the battle royale circle if you can just ignore it at the end? On the other, doing it is kinda miserable. Time will tell.

If you're willing to top off your levels with this method, you might want to do it sooner than later. But I'd recommend saving it for when you're playing with a full party—for all our sakes.

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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