But most Elden Ring players’ greatest challenge when exploring the Haligtree will likely be gravity because, as its name suggests, Miquella’s Haligtree tasks players with traversing the twisting branches of a huge tree along with the narrow pathways of a city named Elphael, which was built as a brace for this tree.
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When the player first arrives at Miquella’s Haligtree they will find themselves high in the tree’s branches, and continuing through the area will lead the player further down towards its base. However, Elden Ring’s improved traversal systems and reduced fall damage does little to help speed up this long journey downward. Except, that is, if the player can pull of a difficult trick that has been shared by a Reddit user named Yeahborris, and which can lets players skip past a large portion of the upper Haligtree.
As with many areas in FromSoftware’s games, the Haligtree in Elden Ring is designed around its verticality, and the player is able to unlock various elevators as shortcuts once they have passed through difficult sections. The player is also able to look down and see the rest of the area that they are working towards. Ordinarily, these areas would be inaccessible for the player to reach simply by falling, but the Reddit user makes use of an animation glitch in order to drop safely to a lower point in Miquella’s Haligtree, before activating the shortcut elevator which brings them right back up to where they were.
This glitch is activated by parrying and then performing a critical attack on an enemy in such a way that the player character’s attack animation causes them to step backwards off the platform. If the player lands on the lower platform before this attack animation ends it will negate the fall damage that would usually have killed the player. Using a set animation to negate fall damage is a strategy that has also been seen in Red Dead Redemption 2.
This particular skip may be difficult to pull off for most players, especially those making their way through Miquella’s Haligtree for the first time, but once a player has the timing and positioning down for this skip, it could become a useful trick for 100% speed runners of Elden Ring.
Elden Ring is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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