Elden Ring Patch 1.04.01 Fixes Malenia’s Multiplayer Healing Glitch

Malenia, Blade of Miquella, has long been one of Elden Ring’s most punishing encounters, but a particular Version 1.04.01 patch from FromSoftware addressed a glitch that made her feel less like a fair challenge and more like a closed loop of punishment. In multiplayer sessions, the boss could regenerate health even when her sword met nothing but air, a bug that turned an already brutal fight into a marathon with no finish line. Players hosting a summons against Malenia were effectively watching her refill her health bar on whiffed swings, as if the fight had quietly shifted from difficult to absurd.

Why Malenia Was Already a Nightmare

Even without glitches, Malenia is a boss that seems engineered to test patience. Her Waterfowl Dance is a slashing sequence that reads like a saxophone solo played at double speed: every note is lethal, and missing a dodge by a hair can erase a health bar in seconds. Once her second phase begins, she adds scarlet rot to her strikes and introduces Scarlet Aeonia, a large area-of-effect bloom that punishes anyone caught inside its mist. She also heals whenever she lands a hit. That part is intentional, and it is one of her signature pressures. But the multiplayer bug was a different beast entirely—it made her heal even when attacks missed, like a bellows that kept pumping air into a forge long after the fire had gone out.

For many players, Malenia became a rite of passage. One famous helper, Let Me Solo Her, reportedly lost to her 242 times before becoming a folk hero for carrying hosts through the fight. That kind of dedication is impressive, but most players do not have hundreds of attempts to spend studying one boss. The unintended multiplayer healing made an already elite challenge feel borderline unreachable for casual and mid-level players alike.

What the Patch Actually Fixed

Version 1.04.01 was a relatively small update compared with the previous Elden Ring patch, which had addressed the bizarre 50-hit wall bug and several other issues. This new patch focused on a few targeted problems, including Malenia’s oxygen-vampire behavior during co-op. The key change was that she no longer healed when swinging at empty space during multiplayer encounters. The issue only appeared when another player was summoned into the battle, which is why some solo players never noticed it. Thanks to the fix, Malenia’s self-healing returned to its intended behavior: punish mistakes, not whiffed attacks.

The patch also corrected a few other problems. Some bosses were dying at unintended times, and the Elden Beast fight was not working properly under certain conditions. The Cerulean Hidden Tear had its effect duration accidentally decreased in a prior update, and Version 1.04.01 restored it to the intended length. These were smaller fixes, but they mattered for consistency.

A Small Mercy for Regular Players

Malenia’s reputation as one of FromSoftware’s hardest bosses remains intact, and beating her is still a badge of honor. Some players have defeated her at level 1 without taking a single hit, a feat that sounds less like practice and more like memorizing the choreography of a hurricane. But for everyone else, the removal of the multiplayer healing bug was a small mercy. It meant that a summoned player could finally help without inadvertently turning Malenia into an even more efficient self-repairing machine.

For hosts who just wanted to clear the Haligtree and move on, the patch restored a sense that the fight was winnable. Malenia still demands precision, timing, and a healthy respect for her scarlet rot, but she no longer punished players for mistakes they did not make. In a game full of harsh but fair lessons, that is exactly the kind of correction players needed. The bug was not a deliberate balance choice, and knowing that made the fix feel less like a nerf and more like the removal of an unwanted splinter from an otherwise demanding boss fight.