Everyone’s on edge the moment that long HP bar appears and Elden Ring Nightreign’s choir rises into a crescendo. Even with a group of three people, boss fights are meant to be challenging in a Souls game. Yet few enemy encounters fill the community with as much dread as the Bell Bearing Hunter. It’s gotten so bad, the whole thing has become a running joke for fans who have had one too many wipes against the fearsome foe.
In the base Elden Ring game, the Bell Bearing Hunter is an optional field boss who only appears at night time at sites of grace that are typically near shacks. Once defeated, the red hunter drops Bell Bearings, which the player can trade at the Roundtable Hold in order to gain access to a wider set of items at the shop. The fight can be difficult, especially at first, when you don’t expect to be hit with a surprise boss battle. Overall, though, few would call the Bell Bearing Hunter one of Elden Ring’s more memorable encounters.
Not so in Nightreign. The Bell Bearing Hunter makes a return in FromSoftware’s Fortnite experiment, and he can appear either as an end-of-night boss or as a field boss at the bottom of the map’s main castle. Though he doesn’t carry any bearings for the player, once defeated, he grants a large set of runes alongside a choice between three weapons or power-ups.
Well, that’s if you can kill him. Realistically, you probably won’t. For whatever reason, FromSoftware has made the Bell Bearing Hunter abnormally hard in Nightreign. He is one of the few bosses where you can be over-leveled for everything throughout the rest of the map, but he’ll still delete most of your health with a single swing of his giant sword. More often than not, poor players going up against him will find themselves repeatedly crawling on the ground waiting to die. Then, when you try and run back to regain your lost level, he’ll probably kill you against before you can collect the runes — after all, you’re a little weaker now than you were the first time around.
You can easily get trapped into a nightmare where stubborn teammates will just keep running into the hunter’s orbit in the hopes they’ll eventually chip away at him, only to lose the entire day making no progress. It’s the sort of thing where I wish I had any way to signal to my teammates that they should run away when they’re charging forward at him at a mere level 4, unaware of the pain he’s about to dole out.
I’m not alone in feeling this way, judging from what Nightreign players are sharing on social media. In one popular clip on Reddit, one player shared a video where they go up against the demon at level 8, only to be knocked down with one hit. For context, the max level you can hit in Nightreign is 15, but most people are around level 10-12 by the time they get to the third day and face that expedition’s final boss. Level 8, in other words, is a fairly high level — and it makes no difference for the Bell Bearing Hunter. Naturally, people are wondering if he should be nerfed.
Here’s another clip that’s emblematic of any encounter with the nemesis, where players take turns reviving each other until their luck runs out:
The fight might suck, but at least the memes are good. Better to laugh than cry, right?
“bro be acting like darth vader in a hallway,” one user wrote on the Fextralife wiki. “dude harder than 60% of the nightlords bruh,” another opined.
Not all hope is lost if you come across the hunter, though. One player has discovered he’s possible to cheese by blocking the Bell Bearer’s path while he menacingly walks toward a different teammate, thereby allowing everyone else to damage him with ranged weapons or spells. A less savory but no less viable method could be to take advantage of Nightreign’s duplication glitch before it inevitably gets patched out, as it allows you to make copies of powerful gear.
You could also play it fair and square. I’ve managed to kill the Bell Bearing Hunter on a few runs, but those are vastly eclipsed by the number of times he’s killed my team. Apparently, the crimson-colored fighter has zero weaknesses and seemingly limitless poise, which makes it difficult to break his stance. Melee characters, parrying players, and tanks say they have a slightly easier time with him, as his main attack — the giant sword — is swung in a way that leaves a slight gap between him and the weapon. The closer you are to him, the better.
With patience, you can defeat the Bell Bearing Hunter. Some people have even managed to solo him. The question is whether or not he’s worth the hassle. Some players say they run away not because they don’t think they could pull it off, but because their time might be better spent defeating easier bosses, like Miranda Blooms or the Demi-Human Queen. But if you want to farm some aura and brag to your friends, go ahead take him on — just don’t be surprised when the Bell Bearing Hunter ends your expedition early.