While the bow has always been a powerful weapon in Elden Ring, generally, it’s meant as a support weapon – something you use to pull aggro, or to weaken an enemy from afar before switching to your main weapon once they get into range, or to cause that one bird to fall to its death and farm its runes over and over again. But when you’re playing as the Ironeye in Nightreign, the bow is the heart and soul of the class, which results in a playstyle that’s very much unlike any of the other eight classes in Nightreign, and one that is probably the closest thing to a support class that Nightreign offers. Check out Ironeye in the exclusive gameplay video below.
The first thing I noticed while playing with the Ironeye is that they are a very squishy class. They can of course use any weapon they pick up, but the main reason why you’ll want to always have a bow handy is mainly so that you can stay out of the fray and not have to worry about taking hits, because it doesn’t take many to put you down, especially early on. Fortunately, your starting bow is pretty solid. It does decent damage and has Mighty Shot as its skill, which lets you attack from super far away, deal extra damage, and deal some extra poise damage as well.
It’s worth mentioning as well that the way bows work has been largely reworked in Nightreign. For one, they fire much faster, and you’re able to move much quicker while shooting at a locked-on enemy. You also thankfully don’t need a supply of arrows anymore. This does mean that you’re stuck with whatever arrow type your weapon comes with, but it’s definitely nice to not have to worry about how many arrows you have left or potentially running out of arrows in a boss fight. As for other neat new touches: There’s a new animation for when you shoot an arrow out of a roll; you’re able to do cool acrobatic stuff like run up walls, leap off, and loose an arrow for style points; you don’t have to go into first-person mode when manually aiming, and move much faster while doing so; the strong attack can fire a spread of three arrows that can hit multiple enemies at once; and yes, you can now backstab or use a visceral attack on a downed enemy with an arrow. Basically, everything that was missing from the bow in order to make it a viable primary weapon in base Elden Ring feels accounted for here in Nightreign.
The Ironeye’s main skill is Marking, which is a very fast dashing dagger attack that goes through enemies and leaves them with a mark that will add extra damage from all sources. It’s got a very short cool down, which means you can basically always have it up on a boss as long as you’re being attentive to when the debuff is active. It’s also a great mobility tool as it lets you pass right through enemies to get out of a bad spot.
Ironeye’s ultimate is Single Shot, which as the name implies, is a single powerful shot. This is basically Mighty Shot on steroids. It takes a bit to charge up, but you’re fully invulnerable during the animation, and once it’s fired, the shot deals big damage and goes through virtually everything straight ahead, making it great at taking out groups of enemies all at once.
What really makes the Ironeye shine on a squad, though, is how good they are at reviving allies from a safe distance. You see, the way ally revival works in Nightreign is that when someone goes down, there is a little partitioned circle that fills up above their character. By attacking your downed ally, you’re able to empty that circle little by little, and when it’s all emptied, they will return to life. Most classes need to get up close and put themselves at significant risk to try and revive an ally, or they must expend mana to cast a ranged spell, or maybe even use their ultimate skill, but the Ironeye can do it safely from a distance and without using any resources. That’s an extremely valuable thing to have, and it can be the difference-maker between a successful and failed run. The downside is that every time an ally faints, another partition is added to the circle, and while Ironeye is great at rezzing allies that have only gone down once or twice, they will struggle to revive an ally that requires all three parts of the circle to be cleared, since they just don’t have that kind of damage output from far away, unless they use their ultimate just for revival.
While they may not be able to dish out the same kind of damage as some of the other classes, the Ironeye’s presence is always felt on a squad. Between their marking ability that makes everyone hit just a little bit harder, to their passive that increases the amount of items that everyone finds, to their mob clearing ult, and to their unique ability to easily and safely revive people from a distance, the Ironeye’s utility is nearly unmatched among the rest of the nightfarers.
Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit
