Balancers – also known as Weapon-Bequeathed Harmonia – are a Nightlord-tier boss in the Forsaken Hollows DLC. You are not fighting one entity; you are dealing with seven valkyries in white armor, servants of the heavens who “restore balance” by swinging a collection of heroic weapons. Lore-wise they are meant to be heavenly arbiters; in gameplay terms, they are a coordinated execution squad.
The Balancers appear as the Nightlord of their own expedition. Taking them down is not just a difficulty check, it is a progression gate: you need them dead to move on to Dreglord and deeper Forsaken Hollows content.
How to Unlock the Balancers Expedition
You cannot just queue up Balancers from the start of the DLC. There is a clear, multi-step unlock path:
Unlock Scholar and Undertaker.
Behind the Small Jar Merchant there is a chapel that eventually opens as the DLC story advances. Entering this chapel is how you obtain the two new Nightfarers: Scholar and Undertaker. This is non-negotiable; you need that chapel open before anything else happens with Balancers.
Defeat two Nightlords.
After picking up Scholar and Undertaker, you must kill two Nightlords. Tricephalos is the usual first recommendation, and then you can choose whichever Nightlord you are most comfortable with as your second.
Return to the chapel for the second ray of light.
Once you have Scholar, Undertaker, and two Nightlord kills, go back to the chapel. You will receive a second ray of light, which simultaneously unlocks the Great Hollows Shifting Earth event and the Balancers expedition.
From that point on, Balancers shows up as a selectable Nightlord expedition.
Recommended Level and General Setup
The tuning for Balancers is designed around players who are not under-geared tourists anymore but still early in the Forsaken Hollows loop.
- A good baseline is Level 14 if you want the fight to feel fair but not trivial.
- Going in lower is possible if you know the moves and really lean on Sleep and team coordination, but it will punish mistakes much harder.
More important than raw level is whether your party is actually built for this fight’s mechanics.
The Key Weakness: Sleep
Balancers have a very clear and abusable weakness: they are highly vulnerable to Sleep.
If you lean into this, the encounter changes from “seven angels mauling you at once” to “short damage windows you create on demand”.
A few practical ways to exploit it:
- Use any weapon with innate Sleep buildup (for example, a Sleep-infused bow or melee weapon if available to you).
- Carry Sleep Pots and actually use them; throwing them into clustered valkyries is one of the easiest ways to force Sleep procs.
- Once a Balancer falls asleep, do not waste that window: go for critical hits and tight strings of high-damage attacks while they are completely helpless.
Sleep is especially important later in the fight when one specific Balancer becomes the main threat. You want to be ready to snap that one out of the air and shut down her more dangerous patterns.
Why Scholar Is Almost Mandatory
You can technically walk into Balancers without Scholar, but the fight is very clearly tuned around having him on your team.
Scholar brings two things that are absurdly good here:
- Communion (Ultimate Art):
This ability threads multiple enemies together so they share damage. In a fight where you are dealing with seven bodies on the field, Communion means every hit on your chosen focus target bleeds into the others. Perfect for Phase 1 when all seven are active. - Analyze (Character Skill):
Analyze lets Scholar place debuffs on enemies and buffs on allies in an area, which is a huge damage and safety multiplier for everyone else. The catch is that he is vulnerable while channeling, so you only want him using it in moments where the Balancers are recovering, repositioning, or distracted by your frontline.
If you only adjust one thing in your normal team setup for this expedition, make it “bring Scholar and protect him while he works”.
How the Fight Actually Plays
The mechanics shift, but the core rule never changes: control the group, identify priority targets, and keep Sleep pressure rolling.
Seven Valkyries, Pure Chaos on Paper
The opener is the most visually overwhelming part of the fight: all seven Balancers are active at once. They use spears, close-range thrusts, sweeps, and area-of-effect swings. The important thing to realize is that their attacks are very clearly telegraphed.
A few behavior notes:
- They like to stack up and punish players who stand still.
- Spear glints or drawn-back motions are your reliable tells that a thrust or swing is coming.
- Their AoEs have obvious wind-ups, long enough that you have time to roll if you are paying attention.
The best way to play this phase is to reduce how many are threatening you at once rather than trying to “tank the storm”.
If you are solo, kite and peel them away from each other, taking advantage of long animations to isolate one and hit it hard. In a group, deliberately spread out so they do not all path to the same person. This forces their AI to fan out and reduces the likelihood that someone gets erased by overlapping attacks.
Whenever Communion is up, have Scholar thread as many valkyries as possible. Then focus your damage on one target; you will see the other health bars move along with it, speeding Phase 1 up considerably.
Sleep is already useful here, but you do not need to obsess over it yet. Your priority is learning their basic tells and keeping the chaos manageable.
The Pink-Winged Balancer Appears
Once you have defeated the initial seven, they all revive, but with one critical change: one of them now has pink wings.
That pink-winged Balancer is the real boss from this point forward.
She has:
- Stronger attacks
- Additional moves
- The ability to “fix” on one Nightfarer and chase them specifically
The remaining six revert to their Phase 1 kits, which means they are dangerous but predictable. The encounter from here is about controlling the adds while killing the primary threat quickly.
This is where you shift your Sleep strategy into high gear. Any Sleep-based weapon or consumable should be aimed primarily at the pink-winged valkyrie. Putting her to Sleep gives you short, controlled burst windows to carve through her health before she brings out the nastier patterns.
Continue using Scholar’s Communion whenever possible to keep group damage flowing, but your actual targeting priority is simple: pink wings first, then clean up the rest.
Same Target, Higher Stakes
This does not reinvent the fight so much as turn the dial up.
The pink-winged Balancer returns with:
- Amplified damage
- More aggressive patterns
- The capacity to lead a synchronized attack with the others
The most dangerous thing she brings here is a coordinated AoE sequence:
- You will see the pink-winged Balancer take to the air.
- The six other valkyries vanish.
- This combination is the tell for a synchronized area-wide attack.
When you see that, your job is very simple: get to the edge of the arena and stay there until the sequence resolves. Hanging around the center or waiting “to see what happens” is how you get deleted.
Beyond that, your plan is basically Phase 2 with higher stakes. Burn the pink-winged Balancer down as quickly and safely as possible, continue leaning on Sleep to create windows, and keep using Communion to make sure your damage on her does not completely ignore the remaining six.
Once she falls, the others revert to being closer to Phase 1 threats again, and the fight rapidly loses teeth.
Extra Tips Before and After the Fight
Before you step into this fight, it is worth doing a quick checklist:
- Make sure your Forsaken Hollows DLC access is fully set up and you have followed the steps to unlock the chapel, Scholar, Undertaker, and two Nightlords.
- Check that at least one party member is responsible for Sleep pots and another for a Sleep weapon if possible. Stacking the effect from two different sources is very comfortable here.
- If you are playing Scholar yourself, commit mentally to playing safer than usual; your job is to survive long enough to keep Communion and Analyze rolling.
Once you win, you are not done with Forsaken Hollows; you have just cleared the gate. Balancers must be defeated before you can tackle Dreglord (Traitorous Straghess), the second new Nightlord. The difficulty spikes again there, so this is a good time to adjust builds, spend your rewards, and rethink relic setups.
Rewards
Your standout reward for finishing this expedition is the relic “The Will of the Balancers”.
This relic comes with three very strong, very general-purpose effects:
- Increased melee attack power
- Increased skill (Art) attack power
- Continuous FP recovery
These three together make it useful on almost any build. Melee and skill damage boosts are obvious wins for physical and hybrid characters, while the constant FP regeneration quietly changes how often you can weave Arts or spells into your rotations.