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Elden Ring DLC Final Boss Thoughts and Tips Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.


norserednek: This was the only fight in the DLC to make me change up my tactics. Sometimes you gotta swallow your pride and adapt
infinitechoices1641: Radahns second phase gets 40 holy negation, his first phase has 0.
mac2312: Prime Radahn is the only boss in any FromSoft game I ever respeced a character to cheese. I did exactly what ur doing there. It wasn't out of frustration or dying too many times, i managed to get him down to a third of his health without the shield poke meta around my 5th attempt, and just decided to do it. I'm getting older now, and don't feel like banging my head against bosses anymore like I did with Gael and Orphan. It's a great boss
GustavoSilvaBM666: I haven't watched this video yet, but I'm going to say that the only problem i have with this boss is the lighting effects in the second phase and Miquella's giant hair (lmao), there's so much visual pollution that sometimes you can't tell which movement the boss is doing, and there are also constant Framedrops during the second phase because of the lighting effects
MeneltirFalmaro: There is a group of people that want to engage with the moveset of bosses ("the dance", mostly dodge/block-attack timing) but are finding themselves not good enough to continue doing that with the ever increasing complexity and speed of souls bosses (build adjustments notwithstanding, of course you should be equipping appropriate gear for the boss). SotE is extremely challenging if you try to play it that way - and that's great, see for example how happy Ratatoskr was fighting bosses with his themed builds. SotE fights can also be made extremely easy if you figure out how to minimize engaging with the moveset, which the Lion's Claw spam in this here video I would consider an example of - and that's also great, clearly Rurikhan is having a great time. BUT the possibility for a middle ground of having a challenging fight that doesn't take a (subjectively!) unreasonable amount of time and skill to learn is ever shrinking. Not gone, but shrinking.
Personally I found all SotE bosses except the "first" (to a lesser extent) and the last to be perfect dance partners, but ended up using a prepatch thrusting shield on PCR, which was of course less than satisfying. Don't want him changed, but if this design trend continues I may very well end up in the dissatisfied camp in the next game.
rafaelserratjags: The issue with the final boss is not its difficulty, it's its design. Second phase is full of flashy effects that make it difficult to follow the action and the aoe attacks get in the way of the few openings you may have to deal damage. I agree a final boss should push you to take advantage of different tools and approaches, but that is not the same as to force you to completely change your build and playstyle to beat it in a game that promotes freedom in terms of what build or weapon you can use. Even with Gaius, with its weird hitbox and camera angles, I felt each time I died again and again that I was learning and getting better at the fight. With consort, I tried different approaches within the same type of playstyle and build I chose for my playthrough; I dominated phase 1 and even enjoyed it, but in phase 2 I was getting nowhere. I just lost interest and changed to shield/poke and defeat it first try with that no sweat no learning or progression required, but also no enjoyment or satisfaction. Well, and the lore/story issues many of us have with Radahn being the final boss is another story...
nuclearscarab: So, I don't think the difficulty is way too high. I think it just needs to be toned down a bit, and some of the difficulty is from bad sources. Miquella needs a haircut. Players should be able to learn the dance within a reasonable (several hours) amount of time, at least enough to get close to beating even a really difficult boss. When a boss is either: spend 30 hours practicing the moveset or spend 30 minutes to find a build/style that ignores the moveset, I think this is just bad game design. Learning a boss moveset is more satisfying than finding a build that can ignore it. It should obviously take significantly more time to learn it, but it should not be 100x the time investment.

Then there are players who have not played Souls games for thousands of hours and Elden Ring specifically for hundreds of hours. It's a lot more difficult for these people to find a way to break the game, so they just have to wait for guides to come out to have any hope of beating a boss.
ironpro7217: The problem is that for a lot of players changing build to beat a boss makes it less fun than it would be if the boss wasn't so overtuned. Gael is incredible with just a sword and medium rolling. If they tripled his damage and halved his openings then sure, I could beat him by turtling behind a shield, but it wouldn't be as fun for me. And thats how half the end game elden ring bosses feel.

tldr: I want a soulslike to feel dark souls and not terraria
ryanzz1357: My biggest gripe about the last boss is that he doesn’t let my ass to summon my mimic
codyshaffer8714: I don’t think his difficulty is a problem, but the way he’s difficult makes players feel like it’s an insurmountable challenge (even though it’s not). This results from just how the boss is designed. When players get 2 shot by hits in a combo string that lasts for days, people are very justifiably going to feel progressing on the fight is just annoying rather then fun.

His entire second phase, is honestly poorly designed, it’s a nonstop lightshow, throwing as many long winded combos and AoEs at the player as possible, and two massive nova abilities, which only takes the back and forth dance and turns it into a slog of a waiting game.

What they probably should have done, was incorporate the Mohg abilities far more heavily in P2, as opposed to the light show, and saved miquella as a separate boss.


With the use of Mohgs toolkit, the 2nd phase would still be a spectacle, but the reds, and blood flame on the floor as area denial would still be just as challenging if they incorporated the blood flame into the arena itself as environmental hazards (raid boss style) while not having the same blinding visual issues the light show has.


There probably isn’t a single ability in P2, that couldn’t have been utilized in a better way simply by changing the theme of P2.


In its current form, however, the final boss just feels downright tedious and annoying to fight, and leads to players getting frustrated far more faster, blaming it on difficulty, simply because they don’t know a better way to describe it.


We can also keep saying this “adjust your build” thing all we want, but while this is very much possible, and to an extent mandatory for this boss, it signals a glaring problem, in which the DLC heavily limits build diversity, simply due to how many previously usable options (and I don’t just mean the OP stuff), are far to slow to use reasonably in many of the encounters in the DLC.

I do hope they keep these really aggressive boss designs though in future titles, just as long as the players tools in the game can keep up with the faster pacing, but unfortunately ER’s player toolkit has lagged behind bosses that can feel more like dodging simulators, when in a game with faster player actions would feel far more better to fight.


Also greatshield is Big cheese, but bosses cheese you to so fuck anyone that gives people shit for using it.
TheMrrccava: That boss fight was fucking peak i loved it

Jul 10 2024

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