‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33' Patch Slams Maelle Build With 70% Nerf

Forbes

09-05-2025

Expedition 33
Sandfall
Sometimes a build in a game is so broken that even a single player, PvE-only title is going to be forced to act. And now, a promised patch has gone live for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that severely nerfs the game's best build, a Maelle one-shot that can instantly kill anything in the game, even its hardest boss.
And it still may not be enough.
In the patch notes, there are two separate nerfs to this build, centered around one sword and one skill that are key to its use:
Medalum is the sword used in this build because it starts you in Virtuose stance, a 200% damage multiplier at baseline, and Stendhal is the one-shot skill you execute in conjunction with a zillion other buffs.
Expedition 33
Sandfall
The end result of this, at least in my own testing in a 1v1 versus Golgra is that this works out to a 70% nerf of the Maelle build's damage, the sword nerf combining with the Stendhal nerf. My results were:
So that damage is 30% of what it was equating to a 70% nerf. But as I said, depending how this shakes out, it may not be enough.
This is not my maxed build, as with other heroes and buffs I don't have fully active, I think my record is 67 million. The second phase of the hardest boss in the game has him with about 50-60 million health, so 30% of my 67 million would be 20 million, and with damage plummeting after the first hit, I'd have a relatively normal fight on my hands. But every other boss? I think nearly all of them would still fall to that 20 million.
That said, this build has gone insane places with some variants. If you hit a 100 million that's 30 million in damage, so no one shot for that guy. But we have seen versions of this that reach 3-4 billion in damage with the right multipliers. I'm not sure if that's exactly a 30% nerf with those ultra-optimized builds, but to get that down to 50 million from 3 billion, you would need closer to an 85% nerf, not 70%. But I don't think the vast majority of players have what it takes to reach that high as you need an insane amount of buffs and Pictos to get there.
This is warranted, even in a single player RPG. I can understand why Sandfall would not want players to somewhat easily skip the entire endgame with damage this high to be able to one-shot all enemies, even the final boss. And given how hard some of those bosses are, this is now going to be very hard if you can only partially chunk them, especially the final boss of the endgame. But a lot of other bosses and enemies? Yeah, you can still probably obliterate them, even with this nerf. Here's the build.
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