How to Beat Every Nightlord in Elden Ring Nightreign

There are ten Nightlords in Elden Ring Nightreign: the eight that ship with the base game, ending with Heolstor, the Nightlord, and the two day-three bosses that The Forsaken Hollows added on 4 December 2025. Each one caps a named expedition, and each has a damage type that the community wikis document as its weak point — Holy, Poison, Fire, Lightning or Madness buildup. Decide which Nightlord you are hunting, read its weakness, then choose your Nightfarer and your run priorities around it. That one decision does more for a clear than anything you pick up in Limveld.

This guide lists all ten, the expedition each belongs to and what each is documented as being weak to. It is also honest about where the record thins out. FromSoftware has never published a damage-type chart for Nightreign, so every weakness below is wiki-maintained rather than official, and two entries carry a flag: one because the sources disagree, one because only a single source exists.

Is it Nightlord or Night Lord in Elden Ring Nightreign?

One word: Nightlord. That is the spelling used by the Nightreign wiki, by Wikipedia and by IGDB's own description of the game, which frames the goal as hunting down and destroying the powerful Nightlords. The two-word form turns up constantly in search boxes and video titles, so both will find you results, but Nightlord is the form the documentation uses and the one worth typing when you are chasing a specific boss page.

How many Nightlords are in Elden Ring Nightreign?

Eight in the base game. The run of expeditions goes Gladius, Adel, Gnoster, Maris, Libra, Fulghor and Caligo, and then Heolstor, the Nightlord, closes the campaign out.

The Forsaken Hollows, the paid expansion released on 4 December 2025, added two more. Bandai Namco's own announcement calls them third day bosses rather than Nightlords; the community wikis file them under Nightlords, which is why the total quoted almost everywhere is ten. We follow the wikis' count here and flag the difference where it matters, because the label is not one the publisher has actually used.

Every Nightlord and their weakness

The table below is the short version of this guide. Expedition names are the ones the game uses when you pick a target, and the weakness column is drawn from Fextralife's Nightlord pages and cross-checked against dbltap's weakness guide wherever the two overlap.

Two rows deserve the footnote they carry. Libra is the one genuine disagreement in the set: Fextralife's page leads with Madness buildup, while the corroborating chart files Libra under Holy. Both are in the table because both are documented, and if you are building for Libra it is worth carrying an answer to either. Traitorous Straghess has no documented elemental weakness at all — not a confirmed immunity, simply nothing anyone has published. There is also no resistance column here, deliberately: weaknesses are well covered by the wikis, resistance values are not.

How do Nightlord weaknesses actually work?

An expedition gives you three in-game days to arrive at the Nightlord holding something that hurts it. That is the entire preparation loop. The weakness is not a tiebreaker you consult once the arena loads — it is the thing that decides which camps you clear, which merchants you stop at and which weapon you commit your first upgrade to on day one.

In practice it comes down to three decisions. Pick a Nightfarer whose kit can actually deliver the damage type, because a Holy-weak target is a very different ask for Recluse than for Ironeye. Prioritise weapons and affinities that carry it while the map is still large. And do not burn day two chasing a field boss for a drop you cannot use, because the Night closes the playable area on a fixed schedule whether or not your build has come together. Our beginner guide covers that clock in more detail, and the Nightfarer tier list covers who is consistent enough to bring into it.

Gladius, Adel and Gnoster — the first three expeditions

These are the three most players clear in their first week, and they are also the cleanest demonstration of how the system works, because each asks for a different damage type.

• Gladius, Beast of Night caps the Tricephalos expedition and is documented as weak to Holy.
• Adel, Baron of Night caps Gaping Jaw and is weak to Poison — the one Nightlord where a status build is the headline answer rather than a bonus.
• Gnoster, Wisdom of Night caps Sentient Pest and is weak to Fire.

Taken together they are a good argument for not settling on one damage profile too early. If you have spent your first ten runs building Holy because Gladius folded to it, Adel will make the limits of that plan obvious inside a minute.

Maris, Libra, Fulghor and Caligo — the mid expeditions

The middle of the roster is where the weaknesses start repeating, and where the one documented disagreement sits.

• Maris, Fathom of Night caps the Augur expedition and is weak to Lightning.
• Libra, Creature of Night caps Equilibrious Beast and is the contested entry: Holy in one chart, Madness buildup in the other.
• Fulghor, Champion of Nightglow caps Darkdrift Knight and is the second Lightning target on the list.
• Caligo, Miasma of Night caps Fissure in the Fog and, like Gnoster, is weak to Fire.

That leaves Lightning and Fire covering two expeditions each, which is the closest thing Nightreign has to a generalist damage profile. If you want one affinity that stays useful across the largest number of targets, those two are where your upgrade materials go.

Heolstor, the Nightlord — the final boss

Heolstor, the Nightlord caps the Night Aspect expedition and is the end of the base game's campaign. He fights across two phases, and the documented weakness changes between them: Holy in phase one, Lightning in phase two.

He is the only Nightlord who asks you to carry two answers into the same arena, and that is worth planning on day one rather than improvising halfway through. A trio that has deliberately split its damage types — one player on Holy, one on Lightning, one on whatever the run handed them — has a far smoother phase transition than three players who all committed to the same affinity and then watch it stop working.

The Forsaken Hollows Nightlords: Straghess and Harmonia

The Forsaken Hollows launched on 4 December 2025 for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam. Alongside the Scholar and the Undertaker it added two new day-three bosses, a set of new field bosses and one new Shifting Earth, The Great Hollow.

Traitorous Straghess caps the Dreglord expedition. Weapon-Bequeathed Harmonia caps Balancers and is reported to be vulnerable to sleep buildup — that comes from a single source, so treat it as a lead worth testing rather than a settled fact. Straghess has no documented weakness at all, which makes it the one fight here you should enter expecting to learn a moveset rather than counter an element.

Play ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN The Forsaken Hollows — Launch Trailer

What are Everdark Sovereigns?

Everdark Sovereigns are harder variants of the existing Nightlords, released in rotation across the summer of 2025. They are not new bosses so much as reworked versions of ones you already know, layered over familiar arenas — which means the weakness knowledge you built in the base expeditions still transfers.

The rotation ran from 19 June to 20 August 2025, and it is a fair summary of how Nightreign has been supported since launch: free, additive difficulty rather than a paid drip. For the full picture of everything that has landed since May 2025, the complete Nightreign guide has the timeline, and the Nightreign hub collects everything we have written about the game in one place.