Some FromSoft boss battles make you tear your hair out, but every so often, you’ll get a big enemy who goes down on your first try, no sweat. In Elden Ring Nightreign, Sentient Pest is a cool idea for a boss fight — it’s a parasitic moth that controls a bulky scorpion — but it’s definitely one of the easiest encounters. That is, until Nightreign’s latest weekly update, which introduces a tougher “Everdark Sovereign” version of the Nightlord. Now, what was easily one of Nightreign’s least intimidating baddies has been hulked up and turned into the game’s most memorable encounter.
In some ways, the base game did Gnoster dirty. When the snowy insect shows up as a random encounter during an expedition, you’ll be wailing away at him, and he will just … stand there. Sure, you have to find him first — and the swarm that he sends out, which can eat multiple levels off your character, is probably Nightreign’s most annoying mechanic. But since the so-called Wisdom of the Night drops a power that grants your character an astounding number of runes, knowledgeable players will straight up cheer when the pest shows up.
The full Sentient Pest boss fight isn’t all that much better. For one, he’s weak to fire — the most common elemental affinity — and if you focus entirely on the flying mastermind, the whole thing is over quickly. However, things are much different on the Everdark version.
[Warning: The rest of this article contains spoilers for the Everdark Sentient Pest boss fight in Elden Ring Nightreign]
The first portion of the Everdark Sovereign Sentient Pest fight goes down the same way. When I initially tried it, my team quickly deleted the boss’s health. In total hubris and ignorance, I thought I was done, and I started celebrating, only to notice the boss’s body wasn’t evaporating into dust. Uh, what?
That’s when the game threw in a third guy, an aurora-like spirit that will burst from the body of the moth. Another health bar then shows up, introducing the real puppet master behind it all: Animus, Ascendant Light. Animus will then go ahead and revive both the insect and the scorpion, and all three will proceed to hunt your team down.
If that weren’t enough, once you get to this part of the fight, you can’t just kill the boss normally. If you defeat either animated husk, Animus can revive them again. Their health bars will only be a fourth of the full gauge, but it’s moot when they can be brought to life at will. Though I haven’t beaten it yet, you’re supposed to use the brief period where the bodies are dead to attack Animus, as the spectral assailant pauses to power them up again. You can try and hit Animus before then, but it quickly possesses the scorpion. Both the scorpion and the moth also come back with a souped-up moveset. All three are still weak to fire, though!
Based on conversations I’ve seen online, players still consider this fight easy; some are even arguing that the new version of the fight is simpler than its initial iteration. For my money, though, it’s really just that over a month after the game’s release, players have gotten much better at the game. The current Evergaol meta, which is only possible with a Relic from the Everdark update, allows your Nightfarers to become more powerful with every jail you beat — and it has a compounding effect. Where before I often struggled to go above level 11, with an Evergaol build I regularly hit 15 by the time I get to the Nightlord of the expedition.
Image: FromSoftware/Bandai Namco
Despite this designation, though, many have walked away impressed with the new version of the Sentient Pest. There’s the surprise factor, but also a bit of a spectacle as Animus flies around, hitting you with orbital lasers as a grandiose soundtrack booms in the background. “Fucking awesome,” reads one post on Reddit about the Everdark skirmish. “Incredible fight,” declares another.
Should you defeat the new Nightlord, you’ll unlock a Relic that may be of particular interest to Revenant and Recluse mains: it increases your maximum FP, restores FP on successive attacks, and raises FP permanently for every Sorcerer’s Rise you release.
As a small bonus, another thing the new update brings to the table is that the game will now tell you what type of weapon something is when you look at it, so you can stop picking up the wrong thing all the time. Not bad!
