The Tarnished Pack was sold as two classes, three Torrent skins and four armor sets. Patch 1.17 adds two things Bandai Namco never advertised: NPC invasion events in Caelid and in Leyndell, plus new weapons scattered across the Lands Between.
That is the pattern of the whole update. The headline is the paid add-on, but the balance section underneath is doing more work than a support patch usually does, and most of it points in two very specific directions.
The Pack Is Bigger Than the Storefront Says
Bandai Namco’s official announcement lists the Tarnished Pack as two new starting classes, three Torrent customization skins and four armor sets, priced at 4.99 $/EUR. The patch notes fill in what the marketing skipped.
You get the Heavy Knight and Idus Knight as selectable classes at character creation. Their equipment is also placed in the world for Pack owners, buyable from certain merchants or findable out in the field, so you do not have to start a new character to wear it. The notes say “equipment” and stop there, without specifying whether that covers the weapons or only the armor.
The added weapons get their own separate bullet, which suggests they are not just the classes’ starting kit under another name. How many there are is not disclosed.
The three Spectral Steed Attires are placed rather than handed over: Tree Sentinel in Stormveil Castle, Silver of Caria in Liurnia, and Funereal Night on the Altus Plateau. Grab any one of them and a steed appearance option appears in your Site of Grace menu.
Then there are the two NPC invasions, one in Caelid and one in Leyndell. The Leyndell event is missable in the classic FromSoftware way. It will not fire once the area has become the Ashen Capital, so on a save with the Erdtree already burned, that one is gone.
Every Shield in This Patch Is a Greatshield
Easy to miss, because Lordsworn’s Shield, Icon Shield and Jellyfish Shield do not sound like greatshields. All three are. Lordsworn’s is even described in-game as lightweight for a greatshield, which is the sort of phrasing that stops people from ever checking the category.
There are 27 greatshields in the game. This patch touches 24 of them. Fourteen get more guard boost and less weight, running from Lordsworn’s Shield up through Ant’s Skull Plate and the Erdtree Greatshield. Nine get the guard boost increase alone, including the Wooden Greatshield, Crucible Hornshield and One-Eyed Shield. The Haligtree Crest Greatshield only sheds weight.
Look at which three they skipped. The base guard boost of the Verdigris Greatshield sits at 82, the Fingerprint Stone Shield at 77 and the Visage Shield at 75 – the highest figures in the class, and those are exactly the three FromSoftware left alone. That is compression rather than power creep. The penalty for using the greatshield that suits your build instead of the one at the top of the tier list just got smaller.
Guard boost governs how much stamina a blocked hit drains, so higher means less of your bar vanishes when something enormous swings at your face. The weight cut is the quieter half. Greatshields have always taxed your equip load, and shaving a unit or two can drop you from heavy rolls back into medium without spending a point in Endurance. If you have never engaged with this stat, our guard boost breakdown covers why it matters more than most people assume.
What this does not do is help parry builds, since parry ashes of war only go on small and medium shields. Which makes the next section a separate story for a separate audience.
This Is, Quietly, a Parry Patch
Parry itself gets improved performance, plus reduced recovery when used with daggers, curved swords or small shields. That last part is the real gift, because the gap between a successful parry and your riposte has always been where sloppy timing gets punished.
Storm Wall gets the strangest change in the patch. It no longer consumes FP at all, and its parry performance improves on top of that. The old cost sat at 3 FP per use, which sounds trivial until you remember every whiffed attempt burned it. Storm Wall is now a free parry that also swats arrows and thrown pots out of the air.
Thops’s Barrier also gets better parry performance. And Carian Retaliation gets a power increase, filed under Sorceries rather than Skills in both language versions, which puts it on the spell rather than the ash of war. That distinction matters. The spell has always been the weaker sibling, since it does not double as a normal parry and only handles a single projectile.
Four parry buffs in one patch is not an accident.
Throwing Weapons Finally Get Paid
Smithscript weapons have always had a lovely gimmick and a miserable payoff. They throw for zero FP and return instantly to your hand, but there is a heavy damage falloff with distance, which meant the “ranged” weapon worked best at melee range. Very funny, not very useful.
The Smithscript Axe, Smithscript Spear and Spear of the Impaler all get cheaper throws with more power behind them, and the Smithscript Greathammer gets the power increase. The Golem Fist, which launches the entire fist forward on a strong attack and both fists when two-handed, gets extended range on it.
The Smithscript Dagger and Rellana’s Twin Blades get increased critical hit power. The dagger is an odd one to buff this way, since every one of its attacks is a throw, but it keeps normal backstabs, ripostes and guard counters, so there is a real crit build hiding in there.
None of this makes throwing builds top tier overnight. It does make them stop feeling like a self-imposed challenge run.
The Carian Sorcery Sword Change Is Bigger Than It Looks
One line, easy to skim past. Intelligence scaling now increases the attack power of all damage types.
The Carian Sorcery Sword is a thrusting sword that splits its output roughly one third physical and two thirds magic, with S-tier Intelligence scaling and a 110 critical rating, and it doubles as a spell catalyst so you never swap to a staff. Before this patch, all that Intelligence investment did nothing for the physical third of its damage. Now it does. For a weapon whose entire identity is dumping points into a single stat, that is a straight upgrade with no downside attached.
Rakshasa Finally Pays Its Bill
The one unambiguous nerf, aimed squarely at the weapon that has ruled great katana PvP.
Rakshasa’s Great Katana grants hyper armor while attacking at the cost of 10 percent of all absorptions, and it has a 777 attack rating one-handed at 16 Strength and 80 Dexterity. The problem was never the trade. It was that trading is exactly what the weapon wants, and it usually wins.
Patch 1.17 increases the delay before you can attack with your right-hand weapon after swinging Rakshasa in your left. Patch 1.14 already applied a version of this to the entire great katana class, so this reads as a targeted follow-up on the one weapon that kept abusing it. In PvP you also now take more damage from other players while attacking, which finally makes the downside bite.
Great katanas as a class get compensation. Two bug fixes land in their favor: critical hits against large enemies no longer underperform, and jumping attacks can no longer be parried.
Sorceries and Incantations Get Their Rough Edges Sanded
Meteorite and Meteorite of Astel both get reduced casting time. The Astel’s version is slow to cast on top of its high Intelligence and FP demands, so trimming the wind-up hits its most annoying flaw directly.
Gravitational Missile stops detonating the moment its projectile clips terrain, which is less a buff than an apology. Founding Rain of Stars gets more power, following an earlier pass in 1.07 that cut its FP cost and tightened its delay.
On the Faith side, O, Flame! gets expanded range, but the two real complaints about it are the slow cast and the inability to chain it, and neither is touched. Rain of Fire and Feather of the Divine Bird both get power increases, and both needed them. Rain of Fire sits at 0.52x incantation scaling uncharged, which is dismal for a Shadow Keep reward.
PvP Gets a Trim
Rugalea’s Roar takes reduced power against other players. That incantation received a substantial buff in an earlier patch, and it has been a menace in invasions ever since, so this is a correction rather than a surprise.
Rotten Breath and Ekzykes’s Decay now lock other players in hit reactions for less time. Both apply 65 scarlet rot buildup per tick, and the free damage window created by that stagger lock was worse than the rot itself. The rot still lands. You just get to move again sooner.
The Loot Change Nobody Can Verify Yet
Certain items in the Realm of Shadow, both field pickups and drops from powerful enemies, have been upgraded to higher-tier rewards. FromSoftware does not say which ones, and anything you have already collected stays exactly as it was. That last clause turns this into a new-run incentive, which lines up neatly with two new starting classes arriving the same day.
Sharpen Your Weapons
Nothing here rebuilds the tier list. Rakshasa loses a trick and keeps its teeth, and the throwing weapons got their second-worst problem fixed rather than their worst. But the greatshield compression and the four parry buffs push the same way: fights slow down, trading stops being automatically correct, and the patient options get cheaper.
What I keep circling back to is the undisclosed part. New weapons somewhere in the Lands Between, count unstated. Upgraded loot in the Realm of Shadow, contents unstated. Two invasions nobody advertised. After a delay this long, that much vagueness is either restraint or a small gift, and we find out which on Friday.
So sharpen your weapons, fellow Tarnished. Roll a Heavy Knight, put a greatshield on your back, and go find out what they hid out there.
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