Best Nightfarer Class Tier List in Elden Ring Nightreign

There is no official Nightfarer tier list. FromSoftware has never published a class ranking for Elden Ring Nightreign, so every ordering in circulation — this one included — is opinion, and the honest version of the question is not "who is best" but "who do experienced players currently rate, and why".

What follows is built on two things. The first is the most legible public ranking we could find: a Depth 5 breakdown posted to r/Nightreign on 18 September 2026 by a player with more than 1,870 hours and at least 100 games on every character (r/Nightreign). The second is the official patch 1.03.2 notes from 15 January 2026, which is documentation rather than opinion and is the last balance pass to have moved anything (Bandai Namco).

Is there an official Nightfarer tier list?

No, and it is worth being blunt about what that means. FromSoftware has never released win rates, pick rates or any internal ranking for Nightreign's classes, and no outlet has published a dataset either. Every tier list you have read — ours, the wikis', the video ones — is somebody reasoning from their own play.

That does not make it worthless. A ranking from a player with a hundred games on every Nightfarer at the hardest Depth is real evidence about what is consistent and what is fragile. It is just evidence of a different kind than a patch note, and we have kept the two separated below so you can see which is which.

Nightfarer tier list for Depth 5 trios

The table below reproduces one high-hour player's Depth 5 ranking, published on 18 September 2026. It is a considered opinion from someone with 100-plus games on every character, not a measurement, and the same thread contains reasoned disagreement — several commenters place Revenant in S tier.

The poster attaches two caveats of his own, and they change the table more than any of the rows do. Raider is S tier at Depth 3 and below. And Revenant and Guardian both rise to S in a coordinated premade, because their weaknesses are coordination problems rather than damage problems.

Why Ironeye and Wylder top most lists

Neither is the flashiest class, and that is the point. What the Depth 5 ranking keeps circling back to is consistency: Ironeye's damage is ranged, repeatable and unusually independent of which weapon passives a run happens to hand you, which makes him the one Nightfarer whose floor does not collapse in a bad drop sequence (r/Nightreign).

Wylder earns his place on utility rather than numbers. Mobility, a ranged revive that costs nothing, a passive that buys back a death and a fire effect on his Ultimate that speeds up revives all add up to a kit that fixes other people's mistakes. In a trio with strangers, that is worth more than a higher damage ceiling.

This is also why both names dominate advice aimed at newcomers. Our beginner guide uses the same two as its default recommendations, for the same reason: they lose the fewest runs to circumstances outside your control.

Which Nightfarers depend on in-run luck?

Raider and Undertaker, most of all. Both are described in the same ranking as characters who live and die by the weapon passives a run hands them: with the right drops they are among the strongest melee options in the game, and without them they spend day three doing chip damage.

Recluse is a milder version of the same problem. Her damage ceiling is genuinely high, but the builds that reach it are locked behind in-run drops, and the cocktail mechanic that fuels them is slow to operate when three players and a boss are all moving at once. Revenant inverts it — better starting spells, far less durability.

This is the honest reason tier lists disagree with each other so often. A character whose ceiling depends on RNG will look S tier to the player who got the drops and B tier to the player who did not, and both of them are describing something real.

How did patch 1.03.2 change the rankings?

This is the part of the page that is not opinion. Patch 1.03.2 landed on 15 January 2026 and was the largest balance pass of the year; every row below comes from the official notes (Bandai Namco).

Two things are worth reading out of that table. Four melee kits were strengthened in a single pass, which narrowed the gap between the top of the list and the middle of it. And the bow-relic nerf points directly at the class that sits at the top of most rankings — Ironeye is still there, but the patch moved the ground under him rather than leaving it alone.

Which Nightfarer is best for solo play?

We do not know, and we would rather say so than guess. Every detailed ranking we could find — including the one above — is written for trios, and the metric it optimises for is how much a character contributes to a squad that includes two strangers.

Solo is also the mode critics rated lowest. The consensus across published reviews is that Nightreign is excellent in a trio and punishing alone, which is a design observation before it is a class one (OpenCritic). If you play solo, the trio ranking is still the best starting point available, but treat the top four as a hypothesis rather than an answer.

Are the DLC Nightfarers stronger than the base eight?

There is no consensus, and the two DLC classes pull in opposite directions. Undertaker sits in A tier in the Depth 5 ranking on the strength of his melee ceiling, held back by low HP and stamina. Scholar sits at the bottom of the same list for carry potential, while being praised for what he does for everyone else.

Scholar in particular has been argued over since he shipped — the subreddit ran threads asking whether he is underpowered and whether he is the worst Nightfarer in the game within weeks of the December 2025 release (r/Nightreign). The fairest summary is that he is a support class in a game whose hardest content rewards players who can finish fights themselves.

Which Nightfarer should you actually pick?

If you are new, take Ironeye or Wylder and leave the argument alone for ten runs. If you are deep into Depth 5 with a regular squad, the ranking above is a reasonable map, with the caveat that a premade lifts Guardian and Revenant considerably. If you are chasing a ceiling rather than a floor, Executor rewards the practice more than anything else in the roster.

And whatever you choose, the class matters less than the preparation. The single largest swing in an expedition is going into day three with the right damage type for the boss you are about to fight, which is a decision you make before you queue — our guide to beating every Nightlord lists the weakness for each one. For where the game stands overall, start from the full Nightreign explainer; for whether it is worth your money in the first place, we put a number on it in our review.