You get a unique relic for beating Elden Ring Nightreign's 'supposed to lose' tutorial boss, but don't worry: There's a buried menu option to fight him again
In grand FromSoftware tradition, Elden Ring Nightreign begins with a fight you're supposed to lose. As is also tradition, it's perfectly possible to gut it out and beat him anyway if you're enough of a toxic Souls tryhard cool guy.
Nightreign's tutorial fight even furnishes you with a one-of-a-kind relic for your troubles. It's nothing to write home about on its own, but could be handy before you're able to build up your collection. And before you feel like you missed out, there's an option to replay the tutorial that's buried in a menu in perfectly obtuse Nightreign fashion.
How to replay Elden Ring Nightreign's tutorial
You can run back Nightreign's tutorial at any time from the Visual Codex in the Roundtable Hold. That's the book on the desk just to the north of the jar merchant in the western hall of the fort. You can also just pull it up and warp there by pressing the select button. Here's the step-by-step:
- Hit Select, go to Visual Codex, select Guide.
- You want the first option under the first heading, and it should be what is highlighted first by default: Basic Rules: Play Tutorial.
- Just press the X button (Square on a PlayStation pad) to start.
How to beat Margit in Elden Ring Nightreign's tutorial
You'll always be a low-level Wylder for this fight, but I was surprised at how many tools FromSoft gives you. I just blew through the tutorial my first time, but if you kill all the enemies and open both chests on the fairly linear path, you'll be able to hit level six, have a pretty decent build, and two guaranteed uses of Wylder's ultimate. Here's a breakdown of all the tips and notes I have:
- The best weapons in the tutorial (they're guaranteed drops) are the Cold Katar and Rogier's Rapier.
- The rapier does good damage and automatically summons Glintblades (those floating magic daggers that auto-target enemies) every few seconds.
- Use the katar to inflict Frostbite on Margit, then swap to the rapier.
- The NPC Duchess you fight with actually does good damage, in addition to serving as a tank.
- You should be close to ulting at the start of the fight, and you get a guaranteed extra use as part of the tutorial partway through the battle.
- Ult Margit once right at the start, but save the second use to revive Duchess if she goes down.
- You can revive once before the tutorial ends, and your souls are outside the boss room—you can run back to the grace and level back up before fighting again.
- Margit will have the amount of HP you left him with, but Duchess will not be there to help you anymore.
Fell Omen Fetish stats and use
Your reward for all that is… fine. Honestly, the Fell Omen Fetish is more interesting than genuinely useful, but it's a pretty good option until you unlock some of the really strong relics by beating Nightlords and Remembrances. It gives you:
- Damage bonus after switching weapons.
- Improved throwing knife damage [utterly useless].
- Vigor +1.
The only one of those that really stands out to me for potential buildcrafting is the weapon swap damage bonus: It's pretty quick and easy to swap the weapon in one of your hands for a quick boost every few seconds. I'm also curious if Executor's character skill where he pulls out the deflect katana counts as a swap for the relic's purposes—that would make it quite good on him, since he's always switching between the cursed blade and his normal weapons.
Really though, I just like this as another sneaky surprise from Nightreign. It's a nice encapsulation of the entire experience of being Nightreigned, in fact: Obtuse frustration, followed by a delightful surprise that just puts a smile on your face.