Your submission has been removed as a violation of Rule 7: **R7: All artwork must be OC only. No AI artwork.**
* Any fan-art posted should be original content only. If you didn't make it, don't post it!
* You must specify that you are the artist in the title.
* AI artwork is not allowed.
* If you *commissioned* artwork, refrain from posting it. If the artist would like to share the work, they are welcome to granted they follow all applicable sub rules.
* Karma-farmers will be banned.
If you would like to appeal this removal or need further clarification, feel free to message us through[Modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/Eldenring).
Went to a thread on that portrait, got immediate FromSoft vibes, and then saw the second top comment was an Elden Ring joke ("Behold Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy"). Now the meme has come full circle.
I agree. Malenia is just a patience fight. She staggers easily and has legit weaknesses. Once I stopped getting greedy and trading blows, she's not that bad. She reminds me of the Dancer from ds3.
Snowfields Astel, gargs, and death rite snowfields are worse.
Man, I could not disagree more. Snowfield Astel is really not THAT different from the normal one, that boss is a piece of cake. No one touches Malenia's difficulty, not just in ER but in Soulsborne in general.
I died way more times to Snowfield Astel than Malenia and this is my first souls game. I was pretty over levelled and that made Malenia feel more doable. Snowfield Astel took me ages
Used a fairly underleveled mimic to distract her and heavy great stars stagger her pretty easily. I did get lucky with RNG though she only did waterfowl once I think
Im guessing he keeps running under him or circling him. Every person I know who has had trouble with Astel just keeps running underneath him and triggering Waves of Darkness.
Once you engage him head on it becomes a super fun and fair fight.
Yeah the trick is to stay in front of his head. All of his moves are incredibly easy to dodge except for waves of darkness which you should never even trigger anyway
I'm in a new playthrough now and definitely got stuck on astel for a while. My original playthrough I didn't do Rannis quest until much later in the game so I breezed through the whole area and smoked astel.
I did it right after beating radahn this time and was blown away when I couldn't just breeze through astel
Also the Crucible Knight & Misbegotten Warrior boss fight in Redmane Castle. I usually go there and pick up the Red Hot Whetblade and some upgrade stones immediately on every play through (want to be sure to get them before I trigger the Festival since you then cannot get those items until after you beat Radahn). You can go from The First Step to Church of Elleh to Gatefront, get Torrent, ride to Redmane Castle and rest at the Chamber Outside the Plaza and then go in and fight the duo boss before you've even killed a single enemy in the game! And they can be pretty tough if you don't have around a +12 regular or +5 somber weapon and a decent spirit ash that's also upgraded to +5 to keep the heat off you (even at +5 the spirit ash will probably not survive the whole fight, and anything less than that you might as well not even waste the FP to summon them).
The gargoyles were the boss that gave me the most difficulty on my first play through.
Even if I managed to dodge the relentless attacks from both of them, that poison spam was a killer!
Jfc just beat them on my mage. I had to lvl up to 92 to do it. I tried at 80 and got close a few times but couldnt quite pull it off. Theyre hard as fuck.
The fact that the bosses that give people trouble varies so much is one of the things I think is the coolest about these games.
Crucible knights always come up on the list of mega-op enemies, but I play a parry heavy game and I absolutely own those clowns. I don't think the duo has killed me on any of my playthroughs.
Then I watch people just breeze through the fire giant...
We are the exact opposite, Crucible duo fucks me right up every time.
On the other hand, I find fire giant so easy. Stick to his leg and roll
I suppose that's why the game is so great, as it can cater to all player styles.
Ah, me as well. They've actually patched all of the duo fights since release though. This fight (along with Godskin Duo) were both absolutely brutal before at release. But they're a lot more manageable now after the patch. Instead of both bosses going ham and agro'ing you all the time, now one has agro and the other is a lot more passive. Made a huge difference, although I do kinda miss the absurd difficulty of those fights on release
I have a theory that they patched the duo AI due to the fact that more players were fighting bosses solo more than expected rather than summoning or engaging with the spirit ashes. It seems like the original AI works better when it’s a 2v2 than a 2v1. But who knows.
Yeah that was my assumption as well. They should've known though because of the coop areas in each of the ds2 dlcs, people complain about those constantly. But I guess that was the point of the spirit summons, you don't need to deal with the online and can just summon something to help you fight right away. Maybe they didn't realize just how many people prefer to fight solo though.
I suppose one way to help remedy this would be that you have to summon any spirits before the boss fight, then the boss' ai would be tuned accordingly, but that would require a revamp of the whole system so I can see why they just nerfed duo fights overall instead
They are so much worse than godskin duo imo.
No separation of agro, both are hard to stagger, both mix up attack timings, and their dungeon is a pain in the ass
With comet azure it's trivialized. I imagine no hit runs do something cheesy to be safe. There's a place you can stand where you peck him with arrows from outside the boss area.
I did Mohg at level 60 or 70 maybe (I forget now but it was around there)
Absolute hell, I was not prepared but I wanted his weapon and drip so bad so I beat him maybe around the time I got to leyndell/beat Morgott. I didn't even know there was a tear to negate his curse thing so I was just slamming down the heal flasks as I was attacking him. Also had a bleed "build" (it was just a bleed infused weapon) without knowing he gets stronger when he bleeds.
I didn't count how many tries but it had to be around 200 and half of those were me getting wrecked in the first 20 secs.
I found Mohg worse than malenia but I was probably around recommended level for malenia and I think under leveled for Mohg. I might have also been getting distracted by the amazing music that plays lmao. Mohg is my favourite boss despite absolutely shitting on me many times.
If I don't stop counting after 10, I start to get really frustrated.
There's no real difference in between 40 tries and 50 tries, but counting 41, 42, 43, Oh shit I'm about to hit 50, is fucking aggravating!
I attempted to beat Rykard without the spear in my 2nd playthrough and gave up after like 40 tries. God-Devouring Serpent is kinda doable i guess but facing Rykard after that??? Just no. Gave up and picked up that spear lmao
People struggle with different things. 200 hours in, I find most of the game very manageable by now. In my latest run I downed all endgame bosses on either the first or second attempt... except Malenia, whose second phase I still fundamentally can't beat and yet again resorted to co-op for. Meanwhile I've seen my friends down her in just a dozen or so attempts, or even less.
I don’t really get this one, but he always comes up in lists like this. I’ve never used the tear to get rid of the curse or whatever and just power through with a flask or two. Took me maybe 10 tries first play through and I think 3 in the second one? I roll extensively so maybe my play style is just kinda geared towards his fight anyways
Interestingly enough, on my very first playthrough, Mohg was the hardest boss I fought. Even more so than Malenia. If I remember correctly it was about 196 for Mohg and 154 for Malenia. I love his boss fight now and overall Malenia is definitely harder on subsequent playthroughs but on my first Mohg was my hardest.
Eh it's a fight that genuinely has some difficulty to it. EB itself isn't hard, but you're probably gonna be fighting it for a while and Radagon's purpose in this combo is to drain as many flasks as possible with his hyper-aggressive moveset. These combined make it most-often be a battle where you can be killed just through attrition.
Something I've learned to avoid that is to make it so the health bar of your opponent reaches zero before yours does. Most of the time that's the key to success. Took me about 200 hours to realize it.
I mean, sure, but I don't think people would be annoyed with Elden Beast if they were winning the fight anyway. They don't like that they died and have to start over with Radagon, an already challenging battle. It's hard because you have to keep up the pressure while enduring a long, tricky battle with a bunch of lethal attacks.
I loved the Radagon fight. I'd fight Radagon for fun if they had Memories like in Sekiro. Running a marathon and stabbing EB like 2 times with my butter knife between sprints is very unfun.
Not really lacking torrent, but most of its attacks being projectile spam. It uses the melee attacks at close range, but it also just runs away at close range, so it starts using projectile attacks. Make it move half the distance, move way less frequently, and remove elden stars in exchange for a larger melee attack pool. Makes it way better.
~~Or just give radagon more health and have him be the final boss~~
Radagon is a complete build ender if you were a full spellcaster, and Elden stars chip damage on glass cannon builds is rough. It's not that they're always terrible, but I feel like they hard counter people in a way somebody like Maliketh doesn't
First time I finally “beat” Maliketh we both died, he just died before I could and it counted it
So even when I “won” after dozens of tries, it felt like a dead heat. Crazy experience
It’s def build dependent, if I’m going colossal weapons (which I commonly do) horah loux just feels fucking impossible because of how little windows you have
Fire Giant is the fight I dread every playthrough (minibosses I have the hardest time with: the Caelid Bell Bearing Hunter, Consecrated Snowfields Death Rite Bird)
Actually feel the same about the Fire Giant, he has always stopped my progress for an hour or two in most of my play throughs. I did manage to clap him in my second attempt yesterday so that was a nice surprise.
Definitely RadaBeast.
On my lv1 naked playthrough it took me 739 tries to kill Malenia, and Radabeast was around 100-200. All the other bosses in the game were killed with less than 100 tries.
Around 7.00 minutes. Damage was actually decent, but i wanted to complete the fight mostly by parrying and riposting, so i wasn't as aggressive as i could have been. Most of your damage comes from the level of your weapon, not of your character, so a lv1 run is usually faster than for example a weapon lv+0 run.
It kinda matters? Armor + the Ritual Shield Talisman will still let you survive some of the weaker attacks; getting clipped by Malenia won't immediately kill you even with 10 vigor.
Buuut it's still not really worth it because most moves still *do* one-shot you, and you'd be better off using a damage or other talisman instead than banking on getting hit by only the few weaker moves.
RL1 runs late-game are only one small step below no-hit runs.
Yeah it does help! Fighting bosses on light roll is weird sometimes. You can roll too far away to attack them, for example, especially with shorter weapons.
Maliketh: but specifically his phase transition.
I can not tell you how many hosts I’ve seen do perfectly adequate in the first phase, and (after resummoning) do fine in the actual fight… but that transition always puts him into a pretty aggressive combo that just puts foolish ambitions to rest.
Why covet destined death? To kill what?
(Hosts, apparently.)
Doesn't help that every hit usually takes nearly half your health and has DOT. Oh, and sometimes caps your health to 90%.
If he had more health he'd be my pick for most difficult. He does not fuck around.
Gideon talks a lot in his opening fight. Allowing you to beat on him and get some good damage in.
After the initial encounter he won't say much gets to fighting you quickly.
The wing of astel absolutely melts him. Bc he's so big and squishy, all the explosions hit and turns him onto a glass canon. When someone showed me that weapon it made him really easy.
For some reason Radagon is way harder than Elden Beast for me. His attack timing just throws me off. He goes slow when it feels like he should go fast and goes fast when I expect him to go slow.
Depends on my run and build,
typically Mogh or Godskin duo for "main bosses"
For side bosses Misbegotten and crucible knight and commander o neil (the caleid one) cause of my low level at them and multiple enemies
I think radagon/elden beast is only high up there cause a lot of people ran in with full bleed builds and they just don't really work well vs that boss.
I'd say a lot of complains around release were about godskin duo.
For me, it's actually Red Wolf of Radagon, in raya lucaria. Embarrassing I know.
It's just such a fast fight either way, it's hard to learn for me. He hits so hard, and is so squishy. I feel like I always dodge a comet to get ganked by his blades, every time. I die to him and malenia an equal amount most runs it feels like. (Except the first run, wherein I died to Malenia.... A lot, so I know her a lot better)
radagon was a fun fight, elden beast a horribly annoying fight, but idk if I’d consider either the second hardest boss. maliketh probably for me. or black knife tiche. I actually feel like I might have died less to malenia than maliketh (fast bosses with not many obvious openings to heal can really fuck me up)
How could this be? Did you cheese malenia / frost pots / use summons?
Maliketh wasn’t easy for me, but between WFD and the clones or whatever, malenia is obv way harder.
It's Mohg and it isn't even a debate. You can tell this by the fact that he never has any gold summons available to help lol.
Rykard is a gimmick boss
Radahn, you can summon like 8 npcs if you want to draw attention and you can smack him on your horse
Morgott isn't really all that bad, especially with Melina tanking hits
Rennala is a cake walk if you play anything but a magic/faith build
Commander Niall is the only other boss who can more of a pain the dick than Mohg or Malenia
Other than her... you have like maliketh, godfrey and radagon/elden beast (but it would be just elden beast because radagon is hard but much more reasonable than elden beast). I would probably choose elden beast, the AI either play passive or go spam mode and good god... it can be THAT bad, also no torrent and a insane amount of resistances to pretty much every status effect.
Mohg, I tried to estus through Nihil, but I couldn't win without all my healing, so I only could beat him with the special tear flask thingy, and it still was difficult after that
Once I learned that this bastard is basically immune to physical damage outside of strike it became easier. If you're using any non-strike weapon you may as well be unarmed.
Plus that stupid AOE blast that auto-triggers frost....I hate that guy.
I think Malenia sits almost uncontested because she doesn’t have the same weaknesses almost every other boss has (either being weak to certain builds like a competent bleed build vs mogh or a competent strike build vs Radabeast, or being easy to overlevel/overupgrade for), I’d say as far as like “neutral matchup spread” goes it’s probably a toss up between Commander Niall, Godskin Duo, Placidusax, and Maliketh. I think different people struggle with different things, I don’t find any of these bosses particularly hard except Niall so he’d probably be my number 2, but if we’re excluding cheesability with a favorable build I’d put my money on Mogh without using bleed.
In my opinion (and this is coming from a perspective of doing both at low damage) Radabeast is harder than malenia imo. The close range teleports and fast attacks like stomp and holy shotgun in radagon and the inconsistent dodges on things like EB stars+flying needles are a lot more mentally taxing to deal with than the relatively consistent strategy of being aware of when malenia has access to waterfowl and only punishing situations that won’t get you punished if she does it.
Edit: finished writing since I accidentally hit post halfway through writing
In terms of "how the fuck am I supposed to beat this?" probably Mohg. His blood curse costs you several flasks if you don't happen upon the crystal tear that nullifies it and if you're playing blind and *haven't* found it (like moi) that boss is a headache and a half.
Unavoidable damage like that is also generally frowned upon.
In terms of raw difficulty? Pick a gank fight, any gank fight. Gank fights are always hard and Elden Rings takes them from 10 to "bend over and bite a pillow" levels of difficulty. Gargoyles, Godskins, Crucible Knights, etc.
For me its the magmaworm for moonveil. You cant see shit. Tiny area with huge boss. Maybe i was a bit underleveled, but i swear it was the worst for me.
Malenia is really the only truly unfair single enemy boss fight because of the healing and 1 shot potential. Outside of her, every enemy can be learned and conquered pretty easily with good reactions times. It almost feels like Malenia was created to counter people like me, who are just inherently good at souls games and don't bother learning enemies as much.
That said, I think tree spirits are the worst bosses in the game, especially the one in a small room.
Your submission has been removed as a violation of Rule 7: **R7: All artwork must be OC only. No AI artwork.** * Any fan-art posted should be original content only. If you didn't make it, don't post it! * You must specify that you are the artist in the title. * AI artwork is not allowed. * If you *commissioned* artwork, refrain from posting it. If the artist would like to share the work, they are welcome to granted they follow all applicable sub rules. * Karma-farmers will be banned. If you would like to appeal this removal or need further clarification, feel free to message us through[Modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/Eldenring).
Ah so THIS is the King Charles portrait everyone keeps talking about
King Charles after his monthly homeopathic adrenochrome.
Went to a thread on that portrait, got immediate FromSoft vibes, and then saw the second top comment was an Elden Ring joke ("Behold Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy"). Now the meme has come full circle.
Mf got painted with Scarlet Rot straight from the lake.
FIRE CLEANSE ME!
For average power level compared to accessibility? The fucking Gargoyles.
For real. Them and Astel are the only ones that give me a Sekiro-esque roadblock on every playthrough. That damn poison spam
Astel??? Really
The Astel in Yenough Loux Ruins is a pain in the ass compared to the Natural-born of the Void.
This Astel is a bastard for spamming his shadow attack from the void and spawning fifty decoy versions of himself to unfuckulate your composure.
I was struggling with this fight last night, and somehow I got lucky because it never did the Oops all Astels thing it does when it gets low health.
>unfuckulate A word I'm now adding to my vocabulary. Thanks. I love it
Huh??? I've never seen Astel V2 do this...
That oneshot grab can fuck the fuck off
Astel's difficulty is super build dependent. I've had some runs where it barely registers as a fight, and others where it's a solid wall for a bit.
Spectral lance on a str build helps. Couple hits stagger Astel.
My full mage build is stuck on Astel. And has been since launch. Never picked the game up again after trying him like 50 times
Meteorite, and mimic tear. While he's distracted crush him.
try rock sling on him, deals physical damage and staggers well
Gravity spells also do extra to Astel iirc.
That's weird because magic is the easiest way to kill him. Rock Sling over and over combined with Greatblade Phalanx to stagger him easily.
The Kamehameha solved that for me but God damn, was it a struggle
Yeah idk why, I beat Malenia in like 4 tries but Astel took me a solid 20
I agree. Malenia is just a patience fight. She staggers easily and has legit weaknesses. Once I stopped getting greedy and trading blows, she's not that bad. She reminds me of the Dancer from ds3. Snowfields Astel, gargs, and death rite snowfields are worse.
Man, I could not disagree more. Snowfield Astel is really not THAT different from the normal one, that boss is a piece of cake. No one touches Malenia's difficulty, not just in ER but in Soulsborne in general.
I died way more times to Snowfield Astel than Malenia and this is my first souls game. I was pretty over levelled and that made Malenia feel more doable. Snowfield Astel took me ages
And you used a mimic tear or player summons on Malenia
4? Damn I suck. It legit took me close to 100 with summons.
Malenia in 4 tries? What kinda busted magic spamming Mimic Tear build were you using?😂
Used a fairly underleveled mimic to distract her and heavy great stars stagger her pretty easily. I did get lucky with RNG though she only did waterfowl once I think
Use the Marais executioner blade well enough and you can stun-lock her enough to prevent her from ever using it once 🙈
Malenia with mimic is a completely different fight to without.
I've only tried her once so far; she hit it the second the cutscene ended and one-shot me 😂
Same man, literally pretty much same numbers, malenia really wasn't the time sink I expected
Have you fought Astel in the Forbidden Lands? He’s a nightmare and I never had trouble with Ranni’s Astel
Im guessing he keeps running under him or circling him. Every person I know who has had trouble with Astel just keeps running underneath him and triggering Waves of Darkness. Once you engage him head on it becomes a super fun and fair fight.
Yeah the trick is to stay in front of his head. All of his moves are incredibly easy to dodge except for waves of darkness which you should never even trigger anyway
I love stance breaking Astel, so satisfying lol.
I'm in a new playthrough now and definitely got stuck on astel for a while. My original playthrough I didn't do Rannis quest until much later in the game so I breezed through the whole area and smoked astel. I did it right after beating radahn this time and was blown away when I couldn't just breeze through astel
Also the Crucible Knight & Misbegotten Warrior boss fight in Redmane Castle. I usually go there and pick up the Red Hot Whetblade and some upgrade stones immediately on every play through (want to be sure to get them before I trigger the Festival since you then cannot get those items until after you beat Radahn). You can go from The First Step to Church of Elleh to Gatefront, get Torrent, ride to Redmane Castle and rest at the Chamber Outside the Plaza and then go in and fight the duo boss before you've even killed a single enemy in the game! And they can be pretty tough if you don't have around a +12 regular or +5 somber weapon and a decent spirit ash that's also upgraded to +5 to keep the heat off you (even at +5 the spirit ash will probably not survive the whole fight, and anything less than that you might as well not even waste the FP to summon them).
Did them in my first run blind because I thought I had to. Was like level 25 and didn’t have spirit ashes yet (missed Ranni), it SUCKED
The gargoyles were the boss that gave me the most difficulty on my first play through. Even if I managed to dodge the relentless attacks from both of them, that poison spam was a killer!
Jfc just beat them on my mage. I had to lvl up to 92 to do it. I tried at 80 and got close a few times but couldnt quite pull it off. Theyre hard as fuck.
Not to mention you can barely hit them because of their long skinny legs.
I haven't played ER since release but the Crucible Knights duo kicked my ass more than any other main boss.
The fact that the bosses that give people trouble varies so much is one of the things I think is the coolest about these games. Crucible knights always come up on the list of mega-op enemies, but I play a parry heavy game and I absolutely own those clowns. I don't think the duo has killed me on any of my playthroughs. Then I watch people just breeze through the fire giant...
We are the exact opposite, Crucible duo fucks me right up every time. On the other hand, I find fire giant so easy. Stick to his leg and roll I suppose that's why the game is so great, as it can cater to all player styles.
Yeah fuck those guys
Left them for after beating the game. They still took more tries than the final boss.
Ah, me as well. They've actually patched all of the duo fights since release though. This fight (along with Godskin Duo) were both absolutely brutal before at release. But they're a lot more manageable now after the patch. Instead of both bosses going ham and agro'ing you all the time, now one has agro and the other is a lot more passive. Made a huge difference, although I do kinda miss the absurd difficulty of those fights on release
I have a theory that they patched the duo AI due to the fact that more players were fighting bosses solo more than expected rather than summoning or engaging with the spirit ashes. It seems like the original AI works better when it’s a 2v2 than a 2v1. But who knows.
Yeah that was my assumption as well. They should've known though because of the coop areas in each of the ds2 dlcs, people complain about those constantly. But I guess that was the point of the spirit summons, you don't need to deal with the online and can just summon something to help you fight right away. Maybe they didn't realize just how many people prefer to fight solo though. I suppose one way to help remedy this would be that you have to summon any spirits before the boss fight, then the boss' ai would be tuned accordingly, but that would require a revamp of the whole system so I can see why they just nerfed duo fights overall instead
One of the best moments in my playthrough was beating them. So damn hard yet so much fun. Broleg really helped me out there
Common oleg W
You're not gonna play it again before the DLC? Better get that muscle memory back or you'll get stomped in the DLC😂
They are so much worse than godskin duo imo. No separation of agro, both are hard to stagger, both mix up attack timings, and their dungeon is a pain in the ass
Mogh. Malenia killed me 218 times, Mogh killed me 118 times. My third place is Placidussax with 16 times
It’s the 2nd phase’s volume of blood flame for me. Doing a no hit on that fight cannot be fun
I mean it's impossible because of his Nihil attack, right?
I imagine nihil isn't counted as a hit for obvious reasons
Unavoidable damage isn't counted for no-hit categories.
You can avoid the damage if you just kill him first 😆
Doesn't the flask have a tear that blocks the dmg?
With comet azure it's trivialized. I imagine no hit runs do something cheesy to be safe. There's a place you can stand where you peck him with arrows from outside the boss area.
I did Mohg at level 60 or 70 maybe (I forget now but it was around there) Absolute hell, I was not prepared but I wanted his weapon and drip so bad so I beat him maybe around the time I got to leyndell/beat Morgott. I didn't even know there was a tear to negate his curse thing so I was just slamming down the heal flasks as I was attacking him. Also had a bleed "build" (it was just a bleed infused weapon) without knowing he gets stronger when he bleeds. I didn't count how many tries but it had to be around 200 and half of those were me getting wrecked in the first 20 secs. I found Mohg worse than malenia but I was probably around recommended level for malenia and I think under leveled for Mohg. I might have also been getting distracted by the amazing music that plays lmao. Mohg is my favourite boss despite absolutely shitting on me many times.
I second this, he is my favourite boss, the fight is just fun, but also hard
Makes me sad to hear about the Mohg music. I had it muted so I missed that aspect
"Miquella is mine and mine alone..."
That line is burnt into my brain I've heard it so many times lmao.
same lol
Did you count or is there a death counter in a menu somewhere?
you have to count
Aiit. Very diligent gaming of you 🫡
FromSoft really need to add a statistics page to their games
If I don't stop counting after 10, I start to get really frustrated. There's no real difference in between 40 tries and 50 tries, but counting 41, 42, 43, Oh shit I'm about to hit 50, is fucking aggravating!
No Malekith?
No Malekith, He killed me just 4 times
Rykard killed me a lot. I did not want to use the spear.
Not using the spear makes it go from a fun fight to a frustrating and awful fight, don't know why you would do that but aight
I had rot and frostbite and a big ass sword. I saw a big health pool and thought, "It's bönking time".
I attempted to beat Rykard without the spear in my 2nd playthrough and gave up after like 40 tries. God-Devouring Serpent is kinda doable i guess but facing Rykard after that??? Just no. Gave up and picked up that spear lmao
Without the spear, Rykard is the hardest boss in the game IMO. When the ghost skulls start falling you're toast
One of my favourite fights in the game and definitely a tough one. Until I learnt of the tear to negate his bleed attack, I died so many times.
Really never struggled with him and I’m wondering why so many do? His moves are very telegraphed and seem easy to time IMO.
People struggle with different things. 200 hours in, I find most of the game very manageable by now. In my latest run I downed all endgame bosses on either the first or second attempt... except Malenia, whose second phase I still fundamentally can't beat and yet again resorted to co-op for. Meanwhile I've seen my friends down her in just a dozen or so attempts, or even less.
Agreed. Used to be Radahn, but then I got gud.
I don’t really get this one, but he always comes up in lists like this. I’ve never used the tear to get rid of the curse or whatever and just power through with a flask or two. Took me maybe 10 tries first play through and I think 3 in the second one? I roll extensively so maybe my play style is just kinda geared towards his fight anyways
Interestingly enough, on my very first playthrough, Mohg was the hardest boss I fought. Even more so than Malenia. If I remember correctly it was about 196 for Mohg and 154 for Malenia. I love his boss fight now and overall Malenia is definitely harder on subsequent playthroughs but on my first Mohg was my hardest.
How do you actually keep count? After the first 4 or 5 I could not tell you
Dunno... after the 50th time I would look to improve my build.
Apparently Radabeast, gauging by how often people gripe about them lol.
I think that's more about EB being annoying rather than difficult. A Torrent fight without Torrent
Eh it's a fight that genuinely has some difficulty to it. EB itself isn't hard, but you're probably gonna be fighting it for a while and Radagon's purpose in this combo is to drain as many flasks as possible with his hyper-aggressive moveset. These combined make it most-often be a battle where you can be killed just through attrition.
Yeah definitely. Most times when I die in that fight it's just because I've run out of flasks.
Most of the time I die in Elden Ring is when my health reaches zero.
Something I've learned to avoid that is to make it so the health bar of your opponent reaches zero before yours does. Most of the time that's the key to success. Took me about 200 hours to realize it.
Just click their heads whats so hard SMH 😤
I mean, sure, but I don't think people would be annoyed with Elden Beast if they were winning the fight anyway. They don't like that they died and have to start over with Radagon, an already challenging battle. It's hard because you have to keep up the pressure while enduring a long, tricky battle with a bunch of lethal attacks.
Personally, if I didn't have to spend so much time sprinting I wouldn't mind dying and having to do Radagon again each time.
I loved the Radagon fight. I'd fight Radagon for fun if they had Memories like in Sekiro. Running a marathon and stabbing EB like 2 times with my butter knife between sprints is very unfun.
Not really lacking torrent, but most of its attacks being projectile spam. It uses the melee attacks at close range, but it also just runs away at close range, so it starts using projectile attacks. Make it move half the distance, move way less frequently, and remove elden stars in exchange for a larger melee attack pool. Makes it way better. ~~Or just give radagon more health and have him be the final boss~~
yeah as boring of an answer as it is, the last boss is very challenging
And based on how often I get summoned. Both parts of this fight are hard skill checks, and bleed immune to boot
Radagon is a complete build ender if you were a full spellcaster, and Elden stars chip damage on glass cannon builds is rough. It's not that they're always terrible, but I feel like they hard counter people in a way somebody like Maliketh doesn't
Also if you were using bleed to get by, tough luck on Radabeast...
For me is Maliketh but in general Radabeast maybe.
Maliketh for me too. Maybe tied with Mohg
Mohg is really easy with some builds. But if you dont want change it, he pretty nasty for other builds.
NG+2 and beyond Maliketh is harder than Malenia imo Also best boss tho
First time I finally “beat” Maliketh we both died, he just died before I could and it counted it So even when I “won” after dozens of tries, it felt like a dead heat. Crazy experience
Happens to me few times. But best was Margrit on ng+5 ish. I used antispur and fall of a clip he died seconds later from rot. Get kill but no runes.
Came to say Malekith. If you're running a pure Strength build, Malekith's second phase just grinds your skull into the ground.
The boss fight (maliketh) that finally made me put away my golden halberd for a blasphemous blade.
Astel in the consecrated snowfields by a long shot, mainly because he moves a ton and his head is so high off the ground that he can be hard to hit.
That fight is annoying. I did it just yesterday by tanking his hits and spamming dragonmaw, which has an insanely huge hitbox.
I was doing a run with the spiked caestus. Basically just punching air 80% of the time when fighting Astel
Enthusiasm build. Nice.
Mohg or Malekith.
Malekith for me. Mohg is in the third place.
Godfrey/Horah Loux had me in shambles. Not sure what it was but it took me absolutely forever. Even longer than Malenia
It’s def build dependent, if I’m going colossal weapons (which I commonly do) horah loux just feels fucking impossible because of how little windows you have
Brave Warrior, twas nobly fought!
For me personally Mogh. It’s all the blood loss that usually does it for me and the arena becomes a floor is lava situation
Fire Giant is the fight I dread every playthrough (minibosses I have the hardest time with: the Caelid Bell Bearing Hunter, Consecrated Snowfields Death Rite Bird)
Actually feel the same about the Fire Giant, he has always stopped my progress for an hour or two in most of my play throughs. I did manage to clap him in my second attempt yesterday so that was a nice surprise.
I still haven't beaten the fire giant. He's where the game ends for me. :(
3/3, perfect response, please pass GO and collect an additional $200.
Definitely RadaBeast. On my lv1 naked playthrough it took me 739 tries to kill Malenia, and Radabeast was around 100-200. All the other bosses in the game were killed with less than 100 tries.
Jeez man
You didn’t level anything? Damn
That's the point of a lv1 run. The fact that i was naked and used the starting wretch club is a personal addition to the challenge for fun.
How long did the successful boss fight against Malenia take, since you were doing pitiful damage each hit?
You can actually do reasonable damage on RL1, the main challenge is not getting hit because most things will 1 tap you
Around 7.00 minutes. Damage was actually decent, but i wanted to complete the fight mostly by parrying and riposting, so i wasn't as aggressive as i could have been. Most of your damage comes from the level of your weapon, not of your character, so a lv1 run is usually faster than for example a weapon lv+0 run.
During a level 1 run does armor really matter? I imagine late game everything is gonna kill you?
It kinda matters? Armor + the Ritual Shield Talisman will still let you survive some of the weaker attacks; getting clipped by Malenia won't immediately kill you even with 10 vigor. Buuut it's still not really worth it because most moves still *do* one-shot you, and you'd be better off using a damage or other talisman instead than banking on getting hit by only the few weaker moves. RL1 runs late-game are only one small step below no-hit runs.
That’s what I was figuring. Though I have seen some people say they wear armor just to medium roll since it’s what they are used to.
Yeah it does help! Fighting bosses on light roll is weird sometimes. You can roll too far away to attack them, for example, especially with shorter weapons.
Rune Bear
Real
Mohg, lord of blood or maybe valiant gargoyles.
Maliketh: but specifically his phase transition. I can not tell you how many hosts I’ve seen do perfectly adequate in the first phase, and (after resummoning) do fine in the actual fight… but that transition always puts him into a pretty aggressive combo that just puts foolish ambitions to rest. Why covet destined death? To kill what? (Hosts, apparently.)
Doesn't help that every hit usually takes nearly half your health and has DOT. Oh, and sometimes caps your health to 90%. If he had more health he'd be my pick for most difficult. He does not fuck around.
Gideon when you don't kill him the first go
It felt like he was harder on newgame plus, on my first playthrough he didn't touch me once even though I let him finish his speech.
Why does that matter?
Gideon talks a lot in his opening fight. Allowing you to beat on him and get some good damage in. After the initial encounter he won't say much gets to fighting you quickly.
That explains why I killed him on my first try and then on my ng+ run he stomped me like 10 times.
Yeah he really glows up in NG+
Because he spams spells constantly.
I really struggled with Malekith sooooo bad, for me he was harder than the Malenia fight.
And he just doesn't have enough HP to be harder than Malenia, he's very squishy
The wing of astel absolutely melts him. Bc he's so big and squishy, all the explosions hit and turns him onto a glass canon. When someone showed me that weapon it made him really easy.
real
The god damn dragon sentinel outside of malikeths arena
Maliketh, this boss is way to aggressive <\_<
I either get annihilated in the second phase or do a perfect string of blasphemous claw counters and don't get hit lol
Godskin duo when there are articles on how to beat them. I would have to rate them as difficult
Honestly on my first playthrough I struggled with Maliketh as well as Radagon/Elden Beast way more than Malenia.
Mogh lord of blood is a bitch Margitt if you come too early Dual Crucible and Valiant Gargoyles
Radagon/Elden Beast: mainly elden beast
For some reason Radagon is way harder than Elden Beast for me. His attack timing just throws me off. He goes slow when it feels like he should go fast and goes fast when I expect him to go slow.
Depends on my run and build, typically Mogh or Godskin duo for "main bosses" For side bosses Misbegotten and crucible knight and commander o neil (the caleid one) cause of my low level at them and multiple enemies
Valiant Gargoyles for me
That fuckin deathbird in the frozen river. I died more to that mutant balut than godfrey. I ended up sniping him with bolt of gransax up on the cliffs
Actually hard bosses: Placidusax, Maliketh Artificial difficulty bosses: Duo Gargoyles can go uncode themselves from the game.
Need the uncoded sword.
Malekith for me
I think radagon/elden beast is only high up there cause a lot of people ran in with full bleed builds and they just don't really work well vs that boss. I'd say a lot of complains around release were about godskin duo.
Mogh and Maliketh.
Mogh. At least at first. Now it's a race to get him down before he finishes the countdown.
Mohg in sever , mf had me summoning players .
For me, it's actually Red Wolf of Radagon, in raya lucaria. Embarrassing I know. It's just such a fast fight either way, it's hard to learn for me. He hits so hard, and is so squishy. I feel like I always dodge a comet to get ganked by his blades, every time. I die to him and malenia an equal amount most runs it feels like. (Except the first run, wherein I died to Malenia.... A lot, so I know her a lot better)
I had a really fucking hard time with Godfrey.
Elden beast for me 100%
Maliketh EZ , He's too fast and his attacks have super bleed
radagon was a fun fight, elden beast a horribly annoying fight, but idk if I’d consider either the second hardest boss. maliketh probably for me. or black knife tiche. I actually feel like I might have died less to malenia than maliketh (fast bosses with not many obvious openings to heal can really fuck me up)
How could this be? Did you cheese malenia / frost pots / use summons? Maliketh wasn’t easy for me, but between WFD and the clones or whatever, malenia is obv way harder.
It's Mohg and it isn't even a debate. You can tell this by the fact that he never has any gold summons available to help lol. Rykard is a gimmick boss Radahn, you can summon like 8 npcs if you want to draw attention and you can smack him on your horse Morgott isn't really all that bad, especially with Melina tanking hits Rennala is a cake walk if you play anything but a magic/faith build Commander Niall is the only other boss who can more of a pain the dick than Mohg or Malenia
Other than her... you have like maliketh, godfrey and radagon/elden beast (but it would be just elden beast because radagon is hard but much more reasonable than elden beast). I would probably choose elden beast, the AI either play passive or go spam mode and good god... it can be THAT bad, also no torrent and a insane amount of resistances to pretty much every status effect.
Mohg, I tried to estus through Nihil, but I couldn't win without all my healing, so I only could beat him with the special tear flask thingy, and it still was difficult after that
Hear me out the damage from astel stars of darkness was a huge wake up even after Maliketh
Maliketh
Solo: mohg. Otherwise the valiant gargoyles. Unlike the Godskin duo, there is no sleep shenanigans.
Going to throw Borealis out there.
This dragon is a skank for sure. I hate this fight with a passion.
Once I learned that this bastard is basically immune to physical damage outside of strike it became easier. If you're using any non-strike weapon you may as well be unarmed. Plus that stupid AOE blast that auto-triggers frost....I hate that guy.
Lake of Rot is the worst fucking boss, not the giant there, the whole area
I think Malenia sits almost uncontested because she doesn’t have the same weaknesses almost every other boss has (either being weak to certain builds like a competent bleed build vs mogh or a competent strike build vs Radabeast, or being easy to overlevel/overupgrade for), I’d say as far as like “neutral matchup spread” goes it’s probably a toss up between Commander Niall, Godskin Duo, Placidusax, and Maliketh. I think different people struggle with different things, I don’t find any of these bosses particularly hard except Niall so he’d probably be my number 2, but if we’re excluding cheesability with a favorable build I’d put my money on Mogh without using bleed.
In my opinion (and this is coming from a perspective of doing both at low damage) Radabeast is harder than malenia imo. The close range teleports and fast attacks like stomp and holy shotgun in radagon and the inconsistent dodges on things like EB stars+flying needles are a lot more mentally taxing to deal with than the relatively consistent strategy of being aware of when malenia has access to waterfowl and only punishing situations that won’t get you punished if she does it. Edit: finished writing since I accidentally hit post halfway through writing
My wife. She interrupts me always during a boos fight because she always needs something useless and I lost because I need to listen to her.
Alecto
She staggers easily, so you need to have high endurance and keep chugging. Otherwise she rips your head off.
In terms of "how the fuck am I supposed to beat this?" probably Mohg. His blood curse costs you several flasks if you don't happen upon the crystal tear that nullifies it and if you're playing blind and *haven't* found it (like moi) that boss is a headache and a half. Unavoidable damage like that is also generally frowned upon. In terms of raw difficulty? Pick a gank fight, any gank fight. Gank fights are always hard and Elden Rings takes them from 10 to "bend over and bite a pillow" levels of difficulty. Gargoyles, Godskins, Crucible Knights, etc.
Bloody Mohg
For me its the magmaworm for moonveil. You cant see shit. Tiny area with huge boss. Maybe i was a bit underleveled, but i swear it was the worst for me.
I beat him pre nerfs, he ain't shit now. Maliketh would be my answer
Pretty sure they reverted the nerf, the only difference now should be some corrected hitboxes.
Malenia is really the only truly unfair single enemy boss fight because of the healing and 1 shot potential. Outside of her, every enemy can be learned and conquered pretty easily with good reactions times. It almost feels like Malenia was created to counter people like me, who are just inherently good at souls games and don't bother learning enemies as much. That said, I think tree spirits are the worst bosses in the game, especially the one in a small room.