Nightreign - Duchess Guide - Skills, Equipment, Scalings, Relics & More

Here's a quick look at Relic Effects that work well with Duchess:

• Partial HP Restoration upon Post-Damage Attacks
• Ultimate Art Gauge +3
• Intelligence Up
• Old Pocketwatch
• Blessed Iron Coin
• Dark Night of The Baron
• Attack power permanently increased for each evergaol prisoner defeated
• Stonesword Key in possession on start of expedition (bought from the Collector’s Signboard)
• [Duchess] Become difficult to spot and silence footsteps after landing critical from behind
  Improved Critical Hits
• Character Skill Cooldown Reduction +2 (bought from the Collector’s Signboard)
• Improved Stance-Breaking when Two-Handing
• Improved Initial Standard Attack
• Poise +3 (bought from the Collector’s Signboard)

Passive: Magnificent Pose

"Attack and dodge optimally, dodging repeatedly when necessary."

Duchess’s passive ability allows her to chain dodges together, providing higher mobility and invincibility frames, making her a hard to hit target in the heat of the combat, if executed correctly. This ability replaces standard dodge roll with a swift quickstep with enhanced speed and extended invincibility frames (i-frames), which can be performed twice in a quick succession.

Character Skill: Restage

"Stage reprisal of recent occurrences to damage nearby foes."

This ability allows Duchess to re-apply all damage and status effect instances dealt to a targeted enemy over the last few second, including damage from allies. Restage has the potential to be the highest damaging ability in the game, especially in team play with coordinated attacks, providing devastating burst damage. It is best used after dealing huge chunks of damage, especially after applying burst-damage status effects, such as Blood Loss or Frostbite.

This ability can be used at any time, even during animations or while taking hits, but cannot be activated while Duchess is downed.

Ultimate Art: Finale

"Obscure self and surrounding allies to hide from foes."

Duchess's Ultimate Art gives cover to herself and her allies in an invisibility cloak for approximately 10 seconds. This allows the team to orchestrate ambushes, escape lost battles, or open up combat with non-boss enemies by backstabbing them, dealing devastating critical damage in the process, and allowing for free charged heavy attack follow up. While this ability doesn't sound like much in terms of damage, it opens a lot of offensive, defensive and utility capabilities, such as reviving downed allies.

Ultimate Arts in Elden Ring: Nightreign have a long cooldown, but this cooldown can be shortened by killing enemies, rewarding aggressive playstyles.

Starting Equipment

Duchess starts each run in Limveld with Duchess' Dagger and Magic Dagger Ash of War. Additionally, she has 3x Shield Grease for additional protection.

While not the best starting gear compared to other Nightfarers, Duchess gets access to the Magic Dagger Ash of War. This can inflict a lot of damage upon enemies with a series of rapid slashes, additionally enhancing her Dagger with magic damage, similar to Scholar's Armament spell.

Relics

As with any other class, Duchess gains access to 3 relic slots - GREEN, GREEN, and GREEN. Different relics can be slotted in these sockets in Roundtable Hold, after you obtain them. This will allow Guardian to receive powerful passive bonuses, which will make future runs in Limveld noticeably easier.

Note that the relic sockets for your Nightfarer can be changed by purchasing certain items from a Merchant.

In Elden Ring: Nightreign, you can spend your runes at the Site of Grace to level up your character. Leveling up increases Hit Points, Focus Points (Mana), and Stamina. While not explicitly shown in the game, it also increases hidden attributes, such as Strength, Dexterity, Faith or Intelligence.

Attributes Scaling

Duchess in particular has good scaling in Intelligence and Dexterity, allowing her to utilize Dexterity-based weapons with Frost or Magic infusion to their fullest potential.

Credit to Zullie the Witch for finding the stats for each attribute.

Hit Points, Focus Points and Stamina Growth

Duchess has significantly lower HP pool, compared to someone like Wylder, Guardain or Raider, which makes her rather squishy, so it is advisable to exercise caution in combat and avoid getting hit, taking full advantage of her passive ability Magnificent Pose. Out of all Nightfarers, Duchess has the second lowest scaling, comparable to that of Ironeye. Below, you can find a table showcasing Duchess' HP, FP and Stamina growth per level.

As with every other character in Elden Ring: Nightreign, Duchess comes with her own strengths and weaknesses.

Her core strengths are:

• Duchess's passive skill allows you to chain dodges in rapid succession, making her high skill cap character that can perfect dodges for flawless defense, due to the enhanced speed of the dodges and higher i-frames, as opposed to traditional dodge rolls.
• Her character skill allows her to re-apply all damage dealt recently, even status effect procs, making her an ideal pick for maximizing single-target damage in your game.
• Duchess's access to invisibility can allow for some interesting gameplay and strategies. Namely, the team could coordinate and orchestrate ambushes or avoid certain defeat.
• Having higher Arcane growth per level, she can take full advantage of Occult Infusion weapons, increasing the frequency of status ailments procs, such as Blood Loss, Poison, or Scralet Rot.
• Duchess's mobility in combat allows her to quickly reposition herself around enemies, opening possibilities for devastating critical hits with backstabs.

Her weaknesses are:

• Duchess starts the game out with a dagger, which arguably is the worst weapon type in the game.
• While her ultimate does allow you to make big hits or potential backstabs, this will not always be the case on some Nightreign bosses that can’t be backstabbed, leaving this ultimate without offensive capabilities.
• She lacks raw defenses and survivability, making it hard to absorb heavy hits from enemies in case of Duchess failing a dodge.
• Likely doesn't have high build diversity.

Duchess is a character that is mostly focused on rapid chain attacks and applying potent and highly damaging status effects, such as Blood Loss, Frostbite, Scarlet Rot or Poison. Her builds usually incorporate weapons are best paired with this playstyle, allowing for quick multiple hits on the enemy, while leaving enough room to dodge out of harm's way.

While her preferred weapon type is Daggers, there are many more weapon types in Elden Ring: Nightreign that will provide much higher offensive capabilities. We recommend to build Duchess around the following weapon types:

• Curved Swords
• Thrusting Swords
• Katanas
• Twinblades
• Claws

These weapon types usually offer armaments with innate Hemorrhage, Frostbite, Poison or Scarlet Rot buildup, while their speed, especially if powerstanced, allows for rapid affliction of harmful status effects, significantly boosting Duchess' DPS and burst capabilities.

For weapon Infusions, again, stick to Occult, Poison, Rot , Frost or Maigc with latter two being highly preferable to due Duchess' high scaling in Intelligence.

When it comes to weapon passives, Duchess should stick to something like Improved Chain Attack Finishers (+20%), Improved Attack Power When Wielding Two (+13%), which will allow her to further optimize damage output and burst capabilities.

For dormant powers, Duchess seeks the ones that compliment her kit and high damage output. Notable dormant powers are:

• Improved Dodging
• Lightning upon Dodging
• Improved Physical Attack power

In Nightreign, Remembrance Quests provide story quests for each Nightfarer, allowing you to unlock class-exclusive rewards like skins, Relics, and Relic color configurations.

Below, you'll find the Duchess's quest rewards:

How to Get All Duchess Remembrance Quest Rewards

Chapter 3

• How to get Golden Dew

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

• How to get Crown Medal

Chapter 8

• How to get Blessed Iron Coin