Caution! In Elden Ring, the actually harmless arcs are absolutely OP due to a glitch
Ranged weapons like bows and crossbows hardly play a role in Elden Ring. They are neither among the strongest nor among the most practical weapons. However, players have discovered a glitch that makes these weapons overly powerful.
What’s the problem with the arches? The weapon category has a bad reputation with most players in Elden Ring. Especially in the endgame, hardly anyone really uses bows, at most to cause status effects from a distance.
You can see that quite well in our weapon tier list, because hardly any ranged weapon has a B rating, and you will look in vain for S tier weapons in these categories.
A notice: We don’t want to give you a guide to this glitch, so we won’t describe exactly how it works.
But since it’s pretty easy to find and PvP players in particular should be warned, we’ve linked a video here that shows quite impressively why this is such a violent glitch:
Glitch makes ranged weapons really powerful in both PvE and PvP
What is this glitch? Without giving any instructions: It is based on a bugged game damage calculation, in combination with the thick hand cannon.
In the video linked above you can see how powerful this glitch is. It’s less than 12 seconds long and shows a player taking out 3 PvP enemies at once with just one shot from his crossbow.
He asks developer FromSoftware to fix this error because it is “gamebreaking”, i.e. it could destroy the game.
The video is from April 16th and thus appeared before the release of patch 1.04 and the hotfix patch 1.04.1. So the developers don’t seem to have this glitch on their screens yet, or they seem to be working on a solution.
However, such glitches are nothing new for FromSoftware games, as fans vividly remember.
Elden Ring has “almost all the glitches from previous games”
What are the players saying? Most find this style of play rather interesting, precisely because bows and crossbows don’t play much of a role otherwise.
For example, MikyKalamary writes under a YouTube video to the glitch:
I love that Elden Ring has almost all of the bugs from the past games: the boss cheese glitch from Dark Souls 2, the wrong warp from Dark Souls Remastered, and the ammo swap glitch from Dark Souls 3. Just amazing.
As Alex Lindstrom puts it, “The lesson of the story: You really need to step up the ranged weapons, […]”
Other players wonder if you could get banned for using the glitch. There is no clear question for this answer, but you can at least estimate how high the risk is based on the earlier games.
It should be pretty low with glitches like this, because it uses regular game mechanics without major intervention in the game itself.
It is more likely that it will be fixed with the next patch. It could also be that this takes longer. At least that way you have an understanding that you should be careful with players with a hand cannon in online mode.
Other glitches even lead to world records: Elden Ring is played through in under 7 minutes thanks to the zip-line glitch – “All right, I’m done with it”
Reference-mein-mmo.de