Speedrunners react to latest Elden Ring update
Official leaderboards open later this month.
The latest update to Elden Ring makes a number of significant changes, but speedrunners in particular will see a big impact.
Through balancing of sorceries and abilities, a couple of abilities widely used in speedrunning have been nerfed, which will force speedrunners to reconsider their strategies.
Soon after the update was released, Distortion2 - responsible for the first sub-half hour time - tweeted "Rip Elden Ring Speedruns".
LilAggy, who posted the first speedrun time of two and a half hours, told Eurogamer "the latest patch has definitely changed things for the speedrun quite a bit".
"With Hoarfrost Stomp and Sword of Night & Flame getting heavily nerfed and Royal Knight's Resolve getting bug-fixed, speedruns on the current patch currently have no way of competing with the times in the previous patch.
"On the bright side, pretty much all of the glitches we have been using to skip through the game are still working, so it's really just a matter of figuring out what the best thing to defeat the bosses with is now. "
Although LilAggy hasn't been researching any new strategies yet, he believes that builds around bleed and frost damage will remain effective as they do percent-based damage rather than scaling with weapons and attributes. That's why the Hoarfrost Stomp in particular has proven so effective.
LilAggy says that patch updates commonly have an impact on the speedrunning community.
"Generally speedrunners will just stick to running on the older patch of the game, or at least split the competition into 'old patch' vs. 'current patch' categories," he says. "As of right now we're unsure of how the Elden Ring speedrunning community is going to handle it, I've seen a lot of support for both staying on the old patch and for rolling with the new one."
He also notes that official speedrun leaderboards are yet to be launched, so at present the community is still determining the rules of Elden Ring speedruns and there's no "official" world record. That's set to change on 25th March when leaderboards open.
LilAggy isn't just about speedrunning - he recently finished Dark Souls using nothing but poop. Yes, you read that correctly.