Hi, everyone. I have a message for you, from one Elden Ring: Nightreign player to another: please stop beelining chapels at the start of each game to collect flask charges.
I'm not the only one saying this! Fellow Nightfarers in the community have been sharing this PSA over the last few days to express frustration at what's becoming an annoyingly common habit when queuing with random players in Nightreign.
Essentially, what's happening is this: in Nightreign, every map is riddled with a handful of small churches or chapels that contain a free upgrade to your healing flask, adding an extra charge. This is genuinely great! It's good to go after these! However, as players have gotten more comfortable with the gain and learned about this guaranteed, free reward, more and more people have developed a weird habit of beelining directly from chapel to chapel while doing literally nothing else, skipping camps of monsters and other rewards in favor of sprinting for five minutes, getting a charge, sprinting for five more minutes, repeat until it's nighttime.
Why is this bad? Well, largely because collecting flasks is all well and good, but it's not helpful to be able to repeatedly heal yourself if you're getting one-shot by Wormface. Good Nightreign play is a balancing act: you have a limited amount of time before night falls and the big boss arrives, so you need to spend it wisely by fighting increasingly difficult monsters, raiding camps, collecting better weapons and items, and leveling yourself up. If you're not at least level five or six by the time the first night falls, the boss is just going to smash your face in with one shot — the extra flask won't help you.
Therefore, an ideal strategy is to spend as little time running across the map as possible, and instead try to flow easily from place to place in close proximity to one another, grabbing flask charges where it makes sense in between raiding camps and fighting sub-bosses. And yet, in spite of this, every three or four times I queue, I end up with someone who keeps aggressively dropping map pins on chapel after chapel and running off on their own when we don't agree with the plan to spend half the game in a footrace across the map for a flask charge. Bud, I'm playing Recluse! I don't have any HP to heal in the first place!
So yes. It's good to go to church and get right with our lord Marika. But it's also okay to have other, non-religious hobbies, like beating the snot out of this Abductor Virgin in the courtyard so we can get the map at the top of the tower and I can grab a new staff off the rack next to it. Thank you for your consideration on this matter.
We’ve got plenty of Nightreign tips and tricks to help you take down all the eight Nightlord Bosses, and if you’re wondering how to unlock the two locked Nightfarer Classes, check out How to Unlock the Revenant and How to Unlock the Duchess, plus How to Change Characters.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
