It's become increasingly apparent over the last few weeks that someone at FromSoftware carefully observed all the strategies players were employing before the Forsaken Hollows DLC dropped, and they were taking notes. The new map and bosses are a big middle finger to people who got comfortable with the old meta.
Many Nightreign players, including myself, got used to running similar setups for boosting damage output as much as possible without having to waste too much time in a run. The shrinking, battle royale-style circle doesn't give you a lot of time to dawdle, so the meta revolved around a specific relic that gives you attack power for defeating summonable bosses around the map via evergaols—which is far easier than searching for bosses and hoping to find good random rewards.
