How the Recluse's Affinity Residues work in Elden Ring Nightreign
This BigFriendly.Guide for Elden Ring Nightreign guide will teach you how the Recluse's affinity residue works and what kinds of powerful spells you can create with it.
Affinity and affinity residue are both parts of a mechanic in Elden Ring Nightreign that is exclusive to the Recluse.
The Recluse is the only magic-focused, which immediately makes her the choice if that's your playstyle in Elden Ring or other Souls games. The Recluse is also one of the two ranged characters in Nightreign, which makes her extremely useful in a co-op focused game like this, as she can resurrect allies or deal damage at a much safer distance than other characters.
However, the Recluse also has a bit of an odd (and unique) mechanic, which is central to her kit, called "affinity residue." Learning how to use affinity residue to your advantage and mix it together to create a powerful Magic Cocktail spell is critical if you want to master this character.
In this BigFriendly.Guide for Elden Ring Nightreign guide, I'm going to teach you how affinity residue works and what kinds of powerful spells you can create with it.
What is affinity residue works in Elden Ring Nightreign
Think of affinity residue as lingering elemental essence in Elden Ring Nightreign. Whenever you or an ally deal elemental — or affinity — damage, a trace of it lingers, and the Recluse is able to take advantage of that in two different ways.
First, the Recluse can recall affinity residue from enemies or allies to refill her FP. Second, every three affinity residue she recalls forms a new spell made of up those elements, creating an avenue for massive damage or helpful passive effects.
How to use affinity residue in nightreign
When you attack an enemy with magic as the Recluse, you'll notice a swirling circle appear around the target's lock-on indicator. You'll also see this indicator on your allies as you're running around the world. These circles are indicate affinity residue and are different colors depending on the different elemental damage types.
When you hit the Magic Cocktail button — the Recluse's Character Skill that refills her FP — it refills one of the pips on the Character Skill icon along the bottom of the screen.. Once you've filled all three pips, your next use of Magic Cocktail — which doesn't require the target to have been hit by an affinity recently — will unleash your mixed spell (which we'll talk more about below).
Every hit of elemental (including Magic) damage causes some affinity residue to attach to an enemy. That means that you can weave Magic Cocktail between every spell you sling to constantly get a little FP back while also charging up your next mixed spell.
This isn't always great to spam on beefy targets, though, as the baseline spells both use the same element. Instead, treat Magic Cocktail as a way to get FP only when you need it, and try to save your Magic Cocktail slots for more diverse element types if your FP bar is already full. That's because the Magic Cocktail spell you trigger gets more powerful as you mix damage types.
How to make different spells with Magic Cocktail
There are four elemental affinities that leave affinity residue on targets in Elden Ring Nightreign:
- Fire
- Magic
- Lightning
- Holy
Combining three elements together with your Magic Cocktail ability — whether they're all different, two are the same with one outlier, or they all three match — will create a new kind of spell.
If you match all three of the same element together, you'll create a Magic Cocktail: Single spell, which is typically pretty weak, as it's relatively easy to do. The little magic orb you can launch at enemies by using the base starting weapon of the Recluse is the Pure Magic spell combo, and isn't terribly impressive.
The Magic Cocktail: Double spells start to get quite a bit more potent. You can create these by combining two different elements. If you have two Magic and one Fire affinity, for example, you'll cast the Magic/Fire spell, which creates a flaming ball that tracks down enemies. Similarly, Magic/Lightning comes from having (at least) one of each of those affinities, and causes you to summon a magical blade that you can use to slice enemies. For these spells, it doesn't actually matter which affinity you have more of in your Magic Cocktail bank — two magic and one fire or two fire and one magic will cast the same spell.
The most powerful Magic Cocktails are the Magic Cocktail: Mixed ones. You can create these spells by collecting three different affinities in your Magic Cocktail bank — the order that you get them in doesn't matter, by the way. These things have very powerful effects, like the cold storm that deals damage around you and makes you invulnerable for a short period of time, which you can get by combining Magic + Lightning + Holy.
You can find a full list of every spell and its description in the Visual Codex back at the Roundtable Hold under the Handbook section.
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