The One Strategy to Beat Dreglord, Nightreign’s Boss With No Weaknesses

If you expected the big bad of Elden Ring: Nightreign - The Forsaken Hollows to be a brick wall, good instincts. The final stop is the Dreglord, and it is every inch a FromSoftware closer: mean, messy, and engineered to punish anyone who gets greedy.

What you are walking into

Bandai says The Forsaken Hollows lands Dec. 4 and brings two new Nightfarer archetypes (Scholar and Undertaker) plus two new 3rd day bosses. The Dreglord waits in Limveld, and it is technically one boss with two names: it starts as Traitorous Straghess and later flips to Pure Impulse Straghess. Also, nitty-gritty lore aside, it is the only Nightlord in the game with no listed weaknesses.

"No listed weaknesses."

Translation: it hits like a truck and sprays Scarlet Rot like a mobile swamp, but you can still win if you play it patient and pick your moments.

The fight, phase by phase

• Phase 1: Traitorous Straghess (the fakeout)
  Big corpse giant with a staff, slow on the windups, obvious tells. Early on you are meant to relax into the rhythm: wide arm sweeps, hefty staff slams, and extra-long recovery windows. Roll into its leading arm or get behind it and you will snag clean hits. Watch for a five-hit staff flurry that ends with Straghess kneeling forever in boss-time, which is your cue to unload or build Frostbite. Conserve resources here; this is the easy lap.
• Phase 2: Rot everywhere, plus adds
  At roughly half health, the arena gets carpeted in Scarlet Rot and Straghess starts summoning Putrid Corpses and a roaming flesh mound. The terrain becomes the real enemy: lingering contagion zones force you to hover at mid-range and keep moving. The summons seem harmless until they block your roll path, inflict Rot, or fuse into bigger nuisances. Thin the herd so you do not get pinned between Rot pools and a charging boss. New tricks show up here too: exploding fissures, Rotting Staff Grabs, and big flesh blasts. Interrupting casts with fast Holy weapons can outright cancel some of these.
• Phase 3: Pure Impulse Straghess (the real fight)
  Once you drain the bar again, Straghess sheds the bulk and goes hyper-mobile. Rot is still in play, but speed is the threat now. It will dash out, sprint back in, throw airborne slashes, and sometimes roar before launching chain combos. The safe plan: keep your nerve, dodge toward the boss, and only poke after its strings end. In co-op, the new Undertaker class can be clutch here; repeated staggers can shut down its ugliest chains.
• Phase 4: Flesh pillars and arena-sized explosions
  At about 50% in this final form, towering flesh pillars sprout around the arena. The boss hops between them, then dive-bombs with an explosion that rips across basically everything. It can also vault high and dump a Rot blast that floods the floor. You either time your iframes perfectly or burn an ultimate for invulnerability. Smash the pillars when you can — once they are down, Straghess goes briefly vulnerable. From here it is attrition: repeat the openings you have learned until it finally stays down.

The 'no weakness' weakness

Yes, the game does not list any. But community testing says Frostbite and Holy are doing serious work. Frostbite chips a percentage of HP and applies across both bodies. Holy options — think Marika's Hammer or Maliketh's Blackblade — stagger Traitorous and Pure Impulse flavors faster than most builds. Use that knowledge guilt-free.

Micro-tips that matter

Stay close enough to read the rhythm and punish the long recoveries. Most of the chaos — Rot puddles, explosions, lunges — exists to wreck your spacing and tempt you into bad swings. If you are getting clipped, dial back the aggression, clean up the adds, and reset your angle before you commit.

What you get for surviving

Beating the Dreglord coughs up a nice haul. The headliner is the Night of Dregs relic, which buffs you with a gradual attack power ramp when you are near status effects, pings enemies with Rot retaliation damage, and even trickle-heals you when Rot is nearby. You also earn Murk, new relic unlocks, and you open up post-Dreglord progression. First-time clears add some new outfits and refresh your signboards, too.

Weird little detail I like: the fight tells you 'no weaknesses' and then practically begs you to bring Frostbite and Holy. Classic FromSoft mischief.