Elden Ring's Bugged Shield Spell is Overpowered

Elden Ring's shield spell is overpowered during PvP right now due to a glitch.

With FromSoftware's latest patch for Elden Ring, it appears that players have found a new way to one-shot opponents with the simple shield skill. The shield sends invisible blades at opponents for insane amounts of damage.

Here's everything you need to know about the new exploitable PvP build.

Elden Ring's Bugged Shield Spell is Overpowered

The Carian Retaliation, specifically the Ash of War variant of the spell, is a skill that lets gamers parry spells to gain a few blades to fire at enemies. After applying Carian Retaliation to a shield, folks are granted three daggers which appear behind their shoulders after they parry an enemy spell. Due to the bug, players can actually parry their own spells to activate the skill or other consumables to trigger it.

Not only does the damage of the skill scale based on the shield's upgrade level, it's dealing a lot more damage than it's intended to. It's an easy setup for an attack that some have reported to instantly kill enemies at 50 vigor or below. On top of that, Carian Retaliation's magical blades don't visibly launch forward on the opponent's screen. This means that there is no reliable way to dodge them without a visual indicator for when they should roll out of the way. Furthermore, if the exploiter uses the spell before they invade gamers, the dagger projectiles will be completely invisible.

It's not impossible to dodge the attack by rolling or using a technique such as Bloodhound Step, but countering the ability is extremely difficult. For the most part, it's likely that FromSoftware will patch this glitch out quite soon.