Elden Ring: Nightreign – Why The Forsaken Hollows DLC Turns Two New Nightfarers Into the Stars of the Show
A harsher endgame sandbox
The Forsaken Hollows is a sizeable DLC for Elden Ring: Nightreign that targets players already comfortable with the base game’s cooperative “days of survival” loop. It adds a new region on the edge of Limveld, where the land itself shifts over time through the Mutating Lands system, altering routes, sightlines, and enemy setups as runs progress. On top of harder bosses and denser encounters, the expansion’s most important additions are two new Nightfarers, Undertaker and Scholar, who are explicitly designed to push the game’s class fantasy and team roles much further than the launch roster.
The Forsaken Hollows as design space
From a design perspective, The Forsaken Hollows feels like a stress test of Nightreign’s core ideas: the shifting terrain forces players to re‑evaluate “safe” routes, and bosses arriving on Day 3 lean heavily on environmental pressure rather than pure stat checks. This context matters because Undertaker and Scholar are built to answer that extra pressure: one by brute-forcing space in the front line, the other by turning information and items into tempo, which naturally encourages coordinated team play instead of four soloists sharing a lobby.
Who is Undertaker?
Undertaker is a Strength/Faith bruiser armed with a one-handed hammer, trading graceful movement for raw stagger and presence in close range. Her basic strings are slightly slower but carry strong forward momentum, while her charged heavy attack hits with near-colossal impact, shredding poise and opening elites and bosses for team punish windows.
The core of her identity is Trance, a signature skill that temporarily boosts toughness, movement speed, and combo damage while also upgrading her dodge into a faster, more aggressive step. When her ultimate gauge is full, Trance gains an extra layer: a lethal-dodge effect that lets her slip through what would normally be killing blows, effectively rewarding players who stay in the pocket instead of backing away after every exchange.
Undertaker’s moves and ultimate
Undertaker’s moveset is tuned to stay glued to priority targets: long-reaching running attacks, heavy swings that catch side dodges, and combo routes that let her chain pressure once Trance is active. Relic and build guides push her toward self-sustain and snowballing—health on hit, damage ramp after using skills or ultimates—so that every successful engage extends her window of dominance rather than forcing a reset.
Her ultimate art doubles down on this fantasy by turning her into a kind of living battering ram, propelling her across a stretch of terrain while knocking aside smaller foes and heavily staggering larger ones. Practically, it serves both as an engage and a rescue tool: you can crash through a packed lane to reach a downed ally in the Mutating Lands or cut off a boss that is threatening a squishier teammate.
Who is Scholar?
Scholar sits at the opposite end of the spectrum: an Arcane-focused support Nightfarer who weaponizes knowledge, items, and debuffs. His base weapon is a thrusting sword that offers precise pokes and safe spacing, but his real value lies in how he alters the use of consumables and how he manipulates enemy information for the whole party.
One of his defining mechanics is Bagcraft, a passive framework that lets him carry more items and gradually enhance them through repeated use. Things like throwing pots, perfumes, and situational consumables—often ignored or underused on other Nightfarers—become a central pillar of his gameplay, allowing a good Scholar to stack crowd control, elemental debuffs, and utility across the battlefield.
Scholar’s moves and ultimate
Scholar’s signature skill, frequently described as Analyze, allows him to “scan” enemies over time, marking them and unlocking benefits as the scan persists. Once an enemy has been analyzed for long enough, they become more vulnerable, effectively exposing weaknesses that translate into increased damage and easier stagger for the whole team.
His ultimate takes the support idea a step further by linking multiple enemies and allies together through a mystical tether. Damage dealt to a marked target can spill over to other linked enemies, and healing can propagate through the same link to stabilize teammates, turning Scholar into a tempo engine that smooths out the DLC’s harsher spikes of damage, especially in co‑op runs with less coordinated players.
How the two Nightfarers reshape co‑op
On paper, Undertaker and Scholar cover classic MMO archetypes—aggressive frontline bruiser and cerebral support—but The Forsaken Hollows pushes those roles into more reactive territory because of the changing terrain and boss aggression. Undertaker’s ability to hold space and punish openings scales directly with how well Scholar keeps enemies debuffed and the team supplied with empowered consumables, making their synergy immediately obvious in high-pressure days.
In practice, this duo nudges Nightreign’s meta away from purely selfish builds and toward lineups that think in terms of tempo and coverage: who opens space, who controls aggro, who manipulates the map, and who converts that into kills before the Mutating Lands roll into a worse configuration. For players already invested in Nightreign’s systems, The Forsaken Hollows is less just “more content” and more a refinement pass on what this game wants to be: a co‑op soulslike where roles, information, and coordination matter as much as raw mechanical execution.
