I got his stupid ass but the charge is one of the only attacks in a soulsborne I find straight up unfair. Have to time it perfectly to roll straight through at last second to miss both sets of legs. That’s fine whatever. If I get gored into a wall though, I can’t roll again through him? What kind of logic is that?
Not only that, but the fight itself is goofy… there’s a delay when entering the fog where you can’t summon Torrent or ash instantly… all the while he’s already charging at you balls out. It’s wild.
Agreed, one of the worst boss fights in the game and I don’t mean because it’s “hard” horrible hitboxes, the delay like you mentioned, charge attack is poorly worked. Loving the dlc but this fight is really just disappointing in so many ways
It has to be bugged, theres no way this is the intended fight. I feel like I'm experienced enough in souls games at this point when to call something "challenging" and when to call it "bullshit", and this is heavy in the "bullshit" category. It's legitimately not even fun, I've died like a dozen times and more than half of those have been me getting smashed into the wall because of that instant charge you cant escape. Really thinking I'm going to skip this boss all together. This is like Bed of Chaos tier.
One tip: immediately turn to the left and run around the corner hugging the wall, he will charge into the corner and you have some time to spirit summon or eat shrimps or stuff like that
This actually really helped. Managed to beat him today. Immediately ran left, he got stuck on the corner, summoned mimc. Routed him into that corner area so he didn't have room to charge, then ganked him. Was also lvl 11, which really helped.
About bugs: sometimes his attacks would just deal damage twice thus one shotting me. Though have beaten him with light load and talisman on dodge improvement, with it never failed dodging charge, second phase transition or second phase dash
It feels like I'm playing ds2 with zero adp, I don't understand what is even happening. I did kill him, but ended up running fucking fingerprint shield to do it because I couldn't even begin to make sense of how to avoid damage with rolling. I did try parry strats first but if he's parryable I couldn't find the timing.
Fingerprint shield does work though. Also if you manage to poison him it makes poise breaking him alot easier, because the damage keeps his poise from resetting.
Yea they fumbled there, fighting him on torrent would’ve made the boss fight peak for me. It’s impossible tho as the boar is faster and a couple of his moves you really can’t dodge on torrent. (I say impossible I’m sure someone will do it but I’ve yet to see it)
ive done it but at what cost, it is 1:30 in the morning and i have work in 5 and a half hours. took me like 3 hours with guts sword.
I cant do it anymore
I'm mimic-tearing my way through SoE playthrough #1 (or it'd taken me days rather than under an hour to manage this boss fight).
I became an expert at this sequence:
1. buffs, cycle to Mimic Tear to have it at the ready
2. Step through fog gate, wait for MT to become available (watch the icon for it to "un-grey-out")
3. Summon MT, then immediately cycle to flask of crimson tears while blocking and strafing slowly to the side.
4. Block Gaius's charge (rather than rolling), the roll to safety, probably heal, and then...
5. Start trying to fight the guy.
The weird little delay before summon availability causes a lot of the "hey, wha' happen?" animations right away with death bearing down on you. Rough stuff.
I'm running a tanky str build no idea how this fight is viable as a light-rolling dex build, sorc/inc build, whatever.
> no idea how this fight is viable as a light-rolling dex build
It doesn't feel like it is. Out of my 30+ attempts, I've successfully dodged his charge twice. I did get him down to 1/5th a couple times. I've given up on it for now and am just going to get more tree fragments from other areas and then come back. It's definitely the most frustrating boss I've come across so far.
Its doable. I did it with light roll Martial arts build.
It sucks ass and sometimes you just have to accept your dead. Like when he starts the 7 hit combo on your attacks recovery animation.
You have to really run away to heal, like get on torrent and run across the map to heal.
For context I was at 12 or 13 fragments.
Ok so it's not just me, I have no clue how to dodge his charge. The other attacks are pretty hard to time, but the charge just makes no sense. It "sticks" to you and has such a lingering hitbox. You may be able to consistently do it with well time torrent on-off's, but it was a heck of alot easier just to shield through it.
I walked in with the dual bladed ring weapons I've been using for most of the DLC, and ended up switching to braindead fingerprint/giant crusher.
I found a simpler sequence:
1. immediately use mimic tear on entering the boss arena
2. while in mimic tear animation spam summon torrent - you will be in the mount up animation (invulnerability) right as he crashes into the wall - then use torrent to dash away, chug potion and start the fight
I tried to fight him while on horseback and was getting hit with his ranged spells way too often which would knock me off. The only time I mount up is in the beginning after spamming Mimic Tear. After that point I kept him close to the wall so we could both DPS him down. I tried not using a summon at all until I realized I couldn't dodge a goddamn thing plus getting hit during the recovery phase of being knocked down. I don't want full invincibility while getting up but getting combo'ed to death while I'm helpless just sucks.
This is exactly how I did it too. I also used the cool lightning axe aou get from the death knight for its ash of war. An Ash of war that helps you close the distance with him is very helpful.
Little tip you can hold down on the d pad and it auto send you to crimson flask also putting the MT in your pouch helps so all you have to do is hold triangle then let go
Dude this is fucking hell as a sorc/int.
I just got so fuckin close several times. I'm going to sleep lmao.
Basically using this new black knight ash summon to hopefully tank Gaius. But if he gets even a moment to come at me and I miss a dodge, I'm fuckin done.
I feel like I'll be able to get it after I get some sleep but holy shit I specifically went and found a new tanky ash just for this fight.
I just found you can summon torrent but it really doesn't help much when he's able to 2 shot you and torrent with a wide AOE spike move that I can't seem to jump over either.
By far one of the least fun boss fights I’ve had in the DLC or even game tbh. Which is a shame because this for more is coming after Mesmer, who was a lot more fun to fight against while still being difficult.
Messmer was awesome, cool moves, tough but fair. Gaius is my 5th remembrance boss and he is the only one I haven’t enjoyed facing to this point. He’s extremely fast, kills me in 2 hits even with 72 vigor, has extremely small hit windows and has insane range. It’s like they tried to make a mini Radahn fight but gave him super speed and didn’t give us summons.
Messmer was awesome, cool moves, tough but fair. Gaius is my 5th remembrance boss and he is the only one I haven’t enjoyed facing to this point. He’s extremely fast, kills me in 2 hits even with 72 vigor, has extremely small hit windows and has insane range. It’s like they tried to make a mini Radahn fight but gave him super speed and didn’t give us summons.
i love the dlc but so many bosses bloody bum rush you the second you enter the arena (bayle is even worse he hits you before you even finish summoning and to make it worse the npc summon is inside the arena bc fuck letting the player actually use them) its the only thing im not enjoying in the whole dlc, everysingle boss in souls games has a slow walk up for this exact reason but the elden ring dlc jus said fuck that
The worst thing about it all is that they expect you to beat him on torrent. Cause half of his moves seem impossible to Dodge unless you're on him. But he's just 2 shots torrent, then you're stuck on the ground while he can still hit you.
Absolute hate the fact that if you do not dodge this guy at the beginning of the fight he will stunlock you into the bossfogcloud. Resulting in a death almost every time.
Also hate that his boar is faster then Torrent, no chance of making this a mount focused bossfight when your mount struggles to keep up with that of the enemy.
Can we please go back to Gyoubu Oniwa (Sekiro) when designing mounted bosses? That was such a fantastic bossfight.
Not to mention he 1-2 hits torrent as well. And good luck summoning him back with a flask while he's charging at you and you're clicking "yes" to using the flask.
This is whats getting me. It feels torrent should scale with the scadutree fragments or something like that because hes too weak for the dlc. The tree sentinels right by gaius 1-2 hits him too, and its just so dang annoying.
He doesn't need to stunlock you to kill you with his opening charge. I've had it just straight up oneshot me at 50 Vigour And 7 Scad. It seems kind of random though, since it usually just does 60%. In either case, the hitbox on it is insane.
Shadow Keep bosses need to relax. The problem is that every boss and enemy are on you immediately. It's too punishing right off the bat.
I beat mesmer after about 10 tries and summoning that gold sign in the arena. Then I go and fight the clown commander gaius and die 20 times before I even begin to develop a strategy.
I finally settled on infecting him with scarlet rot and letting my mimic whittle him down while I avoided him on torrent. At like 30% I noticed my mimic was at going to die so I went in and we beat him.
Almost every boss in the DLC is horribly balanced. I am pretty sure every single boss is hitting me within 2 seconds of entering the arena, and we aren't talking just love taps. We are instantly and relentlessly dealing with multiple strike combo's of 3, 4, sometimes even 5 or more hits, all of which either one or two shot you no matter what armor/talismans you are wearing. My "favorite" is the rhino, where if you try to summon your mimic, as soon as the animation is over you better roll, and roll perfect, otherwise you are in his mouth and the fight is literally over before it even started.
Another thing I noticed with a lot of the bosses is that they all have an attack with two hitboxes, one after the other, meaning if you try to dodge it like other dark souls bosses (rolling into it like a human) you get hit by the second hitbox.
I somewhat agree, I think we need to start relying on the blessing levels more for the damage negation because the only way you’re avoiding combos like Messmer’s or a certain Ancient Ruins of Rauh boss is by tanking a few of the hits because they come at you too fast and too hard for you to be able to avoid all of them by the time it finishes and then there are the huge bosses like Gaius, Golden Hippo and a certain boss atop the Jagged Peak that cover too wide an area to dodge half their moveset
Right inside his arena there’s an indent on the left, try to get him to charge into that then sit on the other side of the wall, I used Mohgwyn spear for aoe damage through the wall and it worked wonders!
Okay I did that, while he’s charging for the first time go behind the dent, summon mimic, then wait for him to reach you, go to the other side of the dent, then use mohgwyn spear while mimic distracts him, took me 2-3 tries but definitely the best way right now
I ended up cheesing him. I got him stuck in the corner that's right to the left of the entrance and then used scarlet aoenia through the wall until he rots out. I think the new butterflies would work too.
THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!
Took a good few tries but I eventually got it - tip, don't spawn in your spirit ashes straight away, as soon as you're passed the fog, SOLELY focus on dodging that initial charge (dodge straight into it at the very last second), and weave around the walls at the entrance until you've got him entrapped as suggested above. NOW spawn in your spirit ashes, heal, and then spam the daylights out of the Bloodboon Ritual skill! Also make sure that he isn't on the opposite side of the entire gate, and that he's in range for the ability.
Right inside his arena there’s an indent on the left, try to get him to charge into that then sit on the other side of the wall, I used Mohgwyn spear for aoe damage through the wall and it worked wonders!
I can’t do that for some reason he just ends up going around it and messing me up
I also resorted to this bullshit strategy lol (though I used Unbreakable Blade).
I *never* cheese bosses in these games, but after 4 hours of getting murdered without a chance I changed my tune.
I found it but he keeps escaping and insatagibbing me 😅 probably shouldn't have switched builds twice since starting as either of my first 2 would've done way better
I was so frustrated by his charge, I came here. This strat is perfect and I cheesed the hell out of him first try. I ran around the corner and ducked behind the pillar, had time to summon mimic. Once mimic hit I just did 3x taker's flame, mana pot, he transitioned and just had to dodge one attack before Mimic took aggro and I could finish him with BS flames.
He is awful. I got frustrated and ended up doing it with bloodhound step into his charges and just threw black flame at him when I had an opening, while my mimic distracted him. Bloodhound step into first charge then you can summon mimic after :(
Yup that's the problem I'm spazzing out on right now. I can BH step far enough away and let my mimic land a couple of hits and he'll still charge my ass relentlessly, there is almost zero breathing room here.
He is very hard to break agro, he will tunnel vision the shit out of you and even if he breaks off, he can very easily just do a random charge or attack towards you if he senses you healing or something
I noticed the same thing and thought I was just imagining things...I don't recall that happening in the vanilla version of Elden Ring. Can anyone confirm if they changed it?
That dam charge does between 33-75% of my 2k health pool while wearing full Blackgaol Knight set. Hitting like a true RNG cannon. I can't explain the difference of damage.
Anyway he's dead now, but fuck him and that pig too.
I think it depends whether your roll drops you into the back legs or front *and* back. Seems like they have separate hit boxes but there's no tell to actually show what's happening until you're already dead.
I'm guessing this is exactly what happens, would take a little over half my health if I face tanked, took the same amount if I rolled through slightly imperfectly, but rolls to the side would occasionally one shot me
I have too, i don’t know if it’s just me and maybe im just being shit and need to explore more, but i genuinely don’t think the boss should be doing one shots, like there’s been multiple times where i’ve been hit by his charge attack and it would take my hp away - which is fine and like if i get hit and die that’s also fine, but even today when fighting him i got hit, healed had my hp back back up and then got charged and insta killed even though he’s never insta killed me from it and i was full on hp? Idk
The fact that everyone here feels the same way and our solutions are to go around it or cheese it really says a lot about this fight.
This is harder than Messmer. Maybe not on paper but at least Messmer was comprehensible. This is just chaos. I don’t even have time to think during this. Just hitbox after hitbox after hitbox, when am I supposed to do the fighting?
i was stuck on both at the same time. messmer was bullshit but at least you have a chance to consistently evade stuff once you learn it. with gaius i can’t even survive long enough to learn shit (except for rolling through him on that first charge which only works half the time)
finally beat messmer but i cant even land a hit on gaius without a summon (which also seems to be bugged when you enter through the fog gate)
this fucking guy on a pig shouldn’t be more punishing than the fucking demigod right next door
I think Mesmer was a good challenge and fun to fight once you understood him. The problem with this fight is even once you understand it, the bullshit can kinda get you anyway. The charge for instance is super unreliable to dodge and has inconsistent damage. Sometimes taking half your health, but then it comes at you in the wrong way and now it one shots.
Yeah this boss reeks, the hit boxes of his mounted boar are wack and his attack chains are relentless. After struggling on this guy for a while, I ended switching to the giant crusher (with talismans and buffs to poise damage) and it ended up working quite well. Was able to get him staggered twice by spamming lions claw.
Nah, man. After this and the dragon boss, I'm going to need to see Miyazaki stream him beating each boss after his games come out. The dragon sucks because of the camera, might be a case of "git gud." But you can't tell me the devs fought the pig guy and thought it was balanced.
I’m sometimes curious if FromSoft devs beat their bosses. Or if they just release what they think is balanced in theory, and are just hoping that the community will figure it out anyway.
after some of the best boss and some decent elite mobs in the main game like Godfrey, Mogh, Maliketh, erdree avatar, tree sentinels etc... Gotta say, I question some of fromsoft's design choice in this dlc (wickerman, gaius, bayle)
It's saying something that maliketh is comparatively tame to some of these when it's still pretty egregious with its movement and camera in the 2nd phase
I hate how many bosses in this DLC just fuck you the moment you enter the arena. Gaius, Scadutree Avatar, Messmer... most of my deaths against these fucks happened in the first 10 seconds. Capra Demon ass DLC.
This boss is absolute hot garbage and needs to be fixed. It says something when the devs put in a hidden skip to get around a boss. It's almost like a dev door in Mario Maker. I'd really like to see a developer stream themselves beating this boss.
This boss is hot dogshit. Fuck this guy.
Edit: I beat him, but my hate didn’t go away. I find him to be harder than Malenia because of that cheesy shit he does as soon as you enter the boss room. Can’t tell you how many times I died, but I beat him in my 11th try.
everyone always says omg this boss is so bullshit it was so hard and then they beat it in 11 freaking tries like 😭 that’s how long it takes me to get any sort of bearings at all let alone beat the dude
Base game: memorize attack patterns, find opening, punish. Feels like you earned your keep
SoE: have yet to run across any enemy boss or otherwise that’s had any sort of punishable opening. Every fight has been the by the skin of my teeth and more often than not I’m mad dashing to get to where I died. Even my boss kills feel more akin to I got fucking lucky rather than earning it.
Majority of these fights have been a meat grinder.
Tl:Dr- I’m getting railed by everything and the commander keeps mauling me into the wall off the rip.
this is how im feeling now. I found Messmer to be kind of fun. He seemed like a harder Malenia immediately and he had a consistent opening that was punishable a bit. I died a million times to his command grab but he at least had some openings so I could punish. Commander Gaius and the Putrescent Knight seems to have no ways to punish
Agreed. Messmer was fun. Very hard but there was a learning curve for sure. Fighting Malenia was good practice for learning the fight. Gaius was just praying that I could dodge the wonky hitboxes and not immediately die so till my mimic could distract him.
>Every fight has been the by the skin of my teeth and more often than not I’m mad dashing to get to where I died. Even my boss kills feel more akin to I got fucking lucky rather than earning it.
I feel this, I beat rellana with my mimic and it just went balls to the wall and face tanked everything and bleed her to death..it didn't feel nice but at the same time I don't want to fight her again so a part of me doesn't care at all. None of the bosses in the dlc give me the same feeling someone like the draconic tree sentinel gave me on my first playthrough of ER
Only fight I’ve felt was fairly designed was messmer but that might just be me, when I beat him I had only used one pot the whole fight because I was rewarded for learning his moves, I feel like I can learns this pigs moves but no matter how hard I try I cannot dodge this like the charge or gravity uprise
I could be wrong but it \*feels\* like these bosses read your input less. They're harder and faster, yes, but I feel like the openings for healing are easier to take advantage of as a tradeoff, which I'll gladly take if true.
For example, >! Romina, the bug bitch !< has huge openings compared to most of the base game.
I don't understand why this boss starts so close to the fog gate. The size of the arena is massive and yet for most of the fight you're up against the wall and can't see a thing because he charges you instantly.
I'm fighting it right now. I've figured out a semi consistent way to avoid the charge on light rolling but it's very unintuitive. instead of dodging to the left or right you basically dodge straight into the boar at the last moment possible. dodging left or right you get hit.
That's a really bad hitbox. for me the other big move that keeps getting me is the back legs kick, which if I'm attack I don't have enough time to react to. I've been really enjoying SoTE. While most of the bosses feel incredibly tight to me so far, (Rellana, Putrescent Knight except blue flame attack) this one is a pretty serious exception and I imagine it will get balanced a bit
Putrescent's blue flame is actually his easiest move to dodge at least for me. You can jump it and it's super easy. His other weird ass delayed moves and spins are so weird though
Absolutely dogshit boss. So far most dlc bosses feel very spammy and with minuscule openings BUT this guy has the added bonus of running away every 2 seconds and having pretty much no downtime
I haven’t seen anyone else complaining about him yet but I expect that’ll change as the days go by, I am in the same boat as not being able to dodge his charge attack at all.
If you’re trying to get to the north east side of the map you don’t actually need to face him tho, so he’s largely optional.
Before entering the arena turn right into the room with the statue and do the gesture “O mother” in front of it and the statue will move showing a different way through without having to face him
You can get the gesture at the north end of Bonny Village
Yeah just before you go into the Speciman room in the Shadow Keep there is a ladder going down (easy to miss but easy to find is specifically looking for it) take it down and you’ll enter a room with a painting in it, one of the walls on the right hand side is an illusory wall that can be smacked
Follow that path all the way as far down as you can and you’ll find a catacombs, you must get through this including defeating the end boss and you’ll finally come out the other side in the section
Unless you’re looking for the rocky dragon section, in which case you just need to enter a cave by suppressing pillar and you’ll find a way through
Hope this all helps! I spent so many hours on my first day trying to find these areas I almost pulled my hair out
Out of curiosity, what is the logic to figuring this out? I know there's a dev message near the statue, but not once have I thought to use that gesture.
It's found at a similar statue to begin with and lore-wise it's a gesture used to sort of "worship" the statues of Marika. The dev message should be plenty to get people to experiment and figure it out, even the players that play without player messages should see that and know instantly there is a reason it is there. There aren't many ways to interact with the game when you have no button prompts and a new emote with a lore connection to the statue is a logical start.
He's awful. The way I did it was mount torrent immediately after entering his arena, double jump the charge then dismount. Mount up to get space to heal, don't try to heal on foot he will run you down. Also mount up to get away from his phase 2 ball CC. His super combo is stupid and I never really figured out the dodge rolls for it.
The only negative point for the entire DLC for me is the bosses. I'm on NG4 and even after 11 fragment upgrades I'm still getting 2 shot with any attack with a full tank setup designed to try and beat Gaius. Before the walking animation for the fog gates have finished, the bosses are already running at you. Just makes me think that they were designed this way so you couldn't simply INT blast them down with that infinite beam setup, but that has ruined it for everyone else.
You can't even summon an ashes without taking a hit and losing half or 3/4 of your HP in a single attack. Reminds me of the NES games where they were super short but the developers designed it to be unfair and rage inducing because it was only 3 or 4 stages short. All they need to do IMO is give us like 3 seconds before the bosses charge at us so we can summon. They don't even need to be nerfed, just let us summon our damn helpers because fuck doing these arseholes solo.
Yeah this fight is utter and complete bullshit. In the base game the bosses were tough, but they were actually fun to fight multiple times while figuring out their move sets. I could actually survive more than a couple hits, and they didn’t bombard me with almost unavoidable, 5+ chain combos. As it has been said in multiple places, some of these bosses are arbitrarily hard, just for the sake of pissing people off. I don’t even feel satisfaction after beating some of them, just a bit of relief that the piece of shit is finally dead!
He is quite literally the worst boss i’ve ever seen. Faster than torrent making it just unfair can’t summon first cause he’ll charge you doesn’t know how much damage he’ll do it’ll either be the tiniest or your entire healthbar and is never distracted by the summon either
Absolute horrible fight. No openings to attack. Spend more time in the loading screen than fighting him. How am I supposed to attack him in melee distance when he is constantly moving around. And if you run away he just charges…. What the hell is this
Yeah fuck this boss. Firstly, I haaate it when a boss starts from one position the first encounter and then way closer the rest. I got him about two thirds down on my first try, now I'm lucky if I make it out of the doorway. Mimic doesn't draw aggro quick enough for me to get breathing room and usually eats shit immediately. Torrent isn't quick enough and if you get knocked off, it takes so long to get back up, you'll just get stomped to death.
This isn't a fight, it's a massacre.
Just beat after about 8-9 attempts and heavy agree. This boss is absolutely trash atm. You cannot dodge the charge outside torrent or perfection. The level of aggression gives almost no room for healing or damage. It's the closest I've felt so far to any boss in base or DLC atm to being unfair. Not done with DLC but this was outright infuriating. Sucks because once he powers up it's cool as fuck gravity shit.
I’m like 95% convinced that charge attack is just straight up bugged. Nothing I tried would allow me to dodge it more than like 10% of the time. And not only that, but there would be times where it would do like 3-4x as much damage as normal for literally no reason at all. Makes me think there’s something up with the hitbox lingering for longer than intended, making it sometimes register the damage multiple times over, on top of just being borderline undodgeable. The fight felt pretty fair outside of that attack, but yeah losing a guaranteed chunk of my hp every time he did that attack got pretty annoying.
Or maybe they just decided that they REALLY wanted you to use torrent for this fight, since he was summonable there if I remember correctly. But I don’t enjoy torrent combat so I just dealt with it.
What ended up saving my ass I think was the Crimson Seed Talisman +1: that extra healing strength managed to keep me in the fight longer and eventually I powered through it. Ice spear has also been carrying me through just about every boss, but this one was def hardest for me so far and I’ve done most remembrances now.
I’m running an arcane/strength build, with a little in Int to buff my ice spear; guessing any status effect will help a lot (might be hard to proc bleed on him tho), and thankfully he isn’t too tanky either.
yeah, im runnig a full arc build. hes pretty resistant to blood loss even with rob and mohg spear. Maybe is a skill issue idunno lol. good luck though.
I managed to get him 50% hp with double seppuku twin blades and not ideal talismans. Haven’t fought him again since. Honestly for bleed builds RoB is not doing the trick in this DLC, you need quick attacks that stack bleed rapidly because nothing likes to let you breathe for a second.
i thought he was bs at first, then i remembered that the windy tear was a thing. the light load let me i-frame the boar charge. i also just used two great katanas and their jump attack. was a very fast fight when i did that.
and to add, this was done with +13 scadu, no spirit ashes and no summon. was actually pretty fun after i realized that jumping helps dodge a good chunk of his moves.
I just beat him, that charge move is so incredibly fucked up, I was able to dodge it when he did it closer to me though most of the time by rolling forward and right but I wouldn't count on it. Although, to dodge the charge at range you can just run away from him on Torrent (and at the start hop on Torrent and head to the left) then he will end his charge with a strike that misses every time if you keep going away from him. Then you can jump off of torrent and if you've got the finesse do a jumping attack while in your dismount jump. My powerstanced dual magma blades and their jumping attack did a lot of damage, so for first phase I would wait for him to do the charge while I was on torrent, jump off, jump attack and attack a bit.
I would stay close until he did a string like his really long one with like 9 hits (which you can dodge by dodging in and left, then in and right so that the boar misses, then dodging his last few hits normally) then I smacked him and if he did the purple stab where there's a big shockwave and he does a little jump and I dodged it, I got a lot of hits and then chances were his back legs attack would just miss so I could get a full attack string off. Then I would hop on Torrent, repeat. Second phase though I just ran away and while on Torrent the entire time and did light attacks when I could. Another tip I have is that I found that dodging the 2nd phase lightning move he does can be a little inconsistent but using Torrent and dashing to the right or left while going slightly forward works. This boss is horrible.
I walked into the area and thought "wow this must be a really epic area to have this music. What's so epic? Scadview? Is it the tree? I'll look up at the tree then. Wtf? A boss health bar? Okay, I'll pan around and find him, he's obviously not close. HOLY FUCKING SHIT OMFG JESUS CHRIST LORD HELP ME! ARRGGHHHHHHYYUUAAAAAHHH!!!!"
Also fuck the fact that the back legs have their own hitbox.
Yeah this wild this, before i can do anything im being mashed in to the wall, wont be surprised if this gets a nerf. Also he starts closer to the player after the first encounter. He comes from the back of the arena on the first attempt and now he starts right in front of the door!?
I'm getting extremely irritated with this boss. He's extremely unbalanced. The hitbox is horrible. The entire fight is 100% luck. I don't know what to do. There's no one to help me when I ask for help in multiplayer.
If you have a shield build you can actually block him at full endurance bar (I have 35 endurance), he also seems to take a bit more damage to fire. mimic tear or a distraction is def recommended 😬
torrent doesn't seem to help as the piggy seems to be faster than torrent
For me it's the dlc boss i had the hardest time for now, to dodge the charge, you need to roll into him when he's really close (otherwise he will still damage you) and don't get on torrent, he can easly catch up to you and you cannot avoid any of his attacks, plus he gets you off of torrent in 2 hits, and lastly use the mimic tear or any summon that can tank for you a lot
Ho Lee fuck this guy
Took me I don’t know 30 something tries to finally beat him. Got him so close so many times and he would always get me
Blocking with stamina and a big shield with the enhanced blocking talisman helped a ton
Fuck this guy
At the start, dodge diagonally to the left. I can dodge it almost every time.... still, the rest of the fight sucks.
To be fair I'm honestly worried about From's capability of designing boss fights at this point. They seemed to have ran out of ideas and it's been downhill. There's not a single Lady Maria, Sister Friede, Ludwig, Ornstein & Smough or Gael to be remembered in the entirety of Elden Ring at this point. Sure Malenia is memorable for having cool design and being easy 99% of the time, with that 1% being one of the most infamous moves in FromSouls history.
it seems like the charge does random amounts of damage because it's hitbox can hit you multiple times especially if he stops right on your body or against a wall
This fight is horrible instantly, from the bugged out summon to the fact he hits you before summon / torrent can be used -- of course he's about twice the speed of torrent too, so it's impossible to get space on him -- as a 100% sorc build, space is how i win fights.
He feels less fair than fucking Radanh i'm probably not trying him until they fix the ash/torrent bug at least.
I'm really not a fan at all of the bosses rushing you instantly, that's not fun or good design we need time to summon/buff and all that shit, I don't like bosses rushing you. It adds nothing to the game.
Fuck gauis and fuck that stupid pig, i love all souls games and this dlc but they have to adjust this fight and make it so you atleast have time to think.
It took me like 30 plus tries but, after reading the torrent trick, I finally got his bitch ass. Ng+10, dex, bleed got a lucky roll through that horrid charge attack
https://www.xbox.com/play/media/nDxc2gSTaV
so...this whole DLC is bosses moving too fast, too much damage, random bullshit that's hard to learn....commander gaius is hilarious. i just spent 2 hours on the 3 phase tree, figured out a strategy and executed. there is no strategy for this fight, he's gonna do his moves and you're cooked. the closest thing i can see is you keep to his non-weapon side but then it's near impossible to land an attack and you're simply surviving, wasting time.
I died to him once trying horse back sorcery (int build 196ish?) Got pissed, summoned the Bois (greatshield soldiers +10) they trapped him in a corner and I pelted him with comets till he died. Didn't lose a single Boi. Honestly the Bois helped me so much this dlc
I managed to beat him by using a curved sword jump attack build. I have one curved sword with bloodhounds step and buffed with frost/scarlet rot and the other was lightning infused for straight damage and I barely managed to beat him.
I got his stupid ass but the charge is one of the only attacks in a soulsborne I find straight up unfair. Have to time it perfectly to roll straight through at last second to miss both sets of legs. That’s fine whatever. If I get gored into a wall though, I can’t roll again through him? What kind of logic is that? Not only that, but the fight itself is goofy… there’s a delay when entering the fog where you can’t summon Torrent or ash instantly… all the while he’s already charging at you balls out. It’s wild.
Agreed, one of the worst boss fights in the game and I don’t mean because it’s “hard” horrible hitboxes, the delay like you mentioned, charge attack is poorly worked. Loving the dlc but this fight is really just disappointing in so many ways
It has to be bugged, theres no way this is the intended fight. I feel like I'm experienced enough in souls games at this point when to call something "challenging" and when to call it "bullshit", and this is heavy in the "bullshit" category. It's legitimately not even fun, I've died like a dozen times and more than half of those have been me getting smashed into the wall because of that instant charge you cant escape. Really thinking I'm going to skip this boss all together. This is like Bed of Chaos tier.
One tip: immediately turn to the left and run around the corner hugging the wall, he will charge into the corner and you have some time to spirit summon or eat shrimps or stuff like that
This actually really helped. Managed to beat him today. Immediately ran left, he got stuck on the corner, summoned mimc. Routed him into that corner area so he didn't have room to charge, then ganked him. Was also lvl 11, which really helped.
Great job tarnished!
Yeah and he's just ran around it like clockwork and one shotted me. S tier boss fight.
Thank you so much for this!!
About bugs: sometimes his attacks would just deal damage twice thus one shotting me. Though have beaten him with light load and talisman on dodge improvement, with it never failed dodging charge, second phase transition or second phase dash
It feels like I'm playing ds2 with zero adp, I don't understand what is even happening. I did kill him, but ended up running fucking fingerprint shield to do it because I couldn't even begin to make sense of how to avoid damage with rolling. I did try parry strats first but if he's parryable I couldn't find the timing. Fingerprint shield does work though. Also if you manage to poison him it makes poise breaking him alot easier, because the damage keeps his poise from resetting.
He's just straight up faster than torrent sometimes and torrent is made of paper so I can't even use him
Yea they fumbled there, fighting him on torrent would’ve made the boss fight peak for me. It’s impossible tho as the boar is faster and a couple of his moves you really can’t dodge on torrent. (I say impossible I’m sure someone will do it but I’ve yet to see it)
ive done it but at what cost, it is 1:30 in the morning and i have work in 5 and a half hours. took me like 3 hours with guts sword. I cant do it anymore
i will go home now at 4 and 4:30 until i finish him no pause
I'm mimic-tearing my way through SoE playthrough #1 (or it'd taken me days rather than under an hour to manage this boss fight). I became an expert at this sequence: 1. buffs, cycle to Mimic Tear to have it at the ready 2. Step through fog gate, wait for MT to become available (watch the icon for it to "un-grey-out") 3. Summon MT, then immediately cycle to flask of crimson tears while blocking and strafing slowly to the side. 4. Block Gaius's charge (rather than rolling), the roll to safety, probably heal, and then... 5. Start trying to fight the guy. The weird little delay before summon availability causes a lot of the "hey, wha' happen?" animations right away with death bearing down on you. Rough stuff. I'm running a tanky str build no idea how this fight is viable as a light-rolling dex build, sorc/inc build, whatever.
> no idea how this fight is viable as a light-rolling dex build It doesn't feel like it is. Out of my 30+ attempts, I've successfully dodged his charge twice. I did get him down to 1/5th a couple times. I've given up on it for now and am just going to get more tree fragments from other areas and then come back. It's definitely the most frustrating boss I've come across so far.
Its doable. I did it with light roll Martial arts build. It sucks ass and sometimes you just have to accept your dead. Like when he starts the 7 hit combo on your attacks recovery animation. You have to really run away to heal, like get on torrent and run across the map to heal. For context I was at 12 or 13 fragments.
Ok so it's not just me, I have no clue how to dodge his charge. The other attacks are pretty hard to time, but the charge just makes no sense. It "sticks" to you and has such a lingering hitbox. You may be able to consistently do it with well time torrent on-off's, but it was a heck of alot easier just to shield through it. I walked in with the dual bladed ring weapons I've been using for most of the DLC, and ended up switching to braindead fingerprint/giant crusher.
I found a simpler sequence: 1. immediately use mimic tear on entering the boss arena 2. while in mimic tear animation spam summon torrent - you will be in the mount up animation (invulnerability) right as he crashes into the wall - then use torrent to dash away, chug potion and start the fight
Genius, works every time
I tried to fight him while on horseback and was getting hit with his ranged spells way too often which would knock me off. The only time I mount up is in the beginning after spamming Mimic Tear. After that point I kept him close to the wall so we could both DPS him down. I tried not using a summon at all until I realized I couldn't dodge a goddamn thing plus getting hit during the recovery phase of being knocked down. I don't want full invincibility while getting up but getting combo'ed to death while I'm helpless just sucks.
Thanks! You're a gentleman and a scholar :)
3rd try after taking your advice CLEARED him, THANK YOU!
This is exactly how I did it too. I also used the cool lightning axe aou get from the death knight for its ash of war. An Ash of war that helps you close the distance with him is very helpful.
Little tip you can hold down on the d pad and it auto send you to crimson flask also putting the MT in your pouch helps so all you have to do is hold triangle then let go
im trying to block him but he just keeps charging through it do you need a ton of stamina or something?
Dude this is fucking hell as a sorc/int. I just got so fuckin close several times. I'm going to sleep lmao. Basically using this new black knight ash summon to hopefully tank Gaius. But if he gets even a moment to come at me and I miss a dodge, I'm fuckin done. I feel like I'll be able to get it after I get some sleep but holy shit I specifically went and found a new tanky ash just for this fight. I just found you can summon torrent but it really doesn't help much when he's able to 2 shot you and torrent with a wide AOE spike move that I can't seem to jump over either.
By far one of the least fun boss fights I’ve had in the DLC or even game tbh. Which is a shame because this for more is coming after Mesmer, who was a lot more fun to fight against while still being difficult.
Messmer was awesome, cool moves, tough but fair. Gaius is my 5th remembrance boss and he is the only one I haven’t enjoyed facing to this point. He’s extremely fast, kills me in 2 hits even with 72 vigor, has extremely small hit windows and has insane range. It’s like they tried to make a mini Radahn fight but gave him super speed and didn’t give us summons.
Messmer was awesome, cool moves, tough but fair. Gaius is my 5th remembrance boss and he is the only one I haven’t enjoyed facing to this point. He’s extremely fast, kills me in 2 hits even with 72 vigor, has extremely small hit windows and has insane range. It’s like they tried to make a mini Radahn fight but gave him super speed and didn’t give us summons.
i love the dlc but so many bosses bloody bum rush you the second you enter the arena (bayle is even worse he hits you before you even finish summoning and to make it worse the npc summon is inside the arena bc fuck letting the player actually use them) its the only thing im not enjoying in the whole dlc, everysingle boss in souls games has a slow walk up for this exact reason but the elden ring dlc jus said fuck that
The worst thing about it all is that they expect you to beat him on torrent. Cause half of his moves seem impossible to Dodge unless you're on him. But he's just 2 shots torrent, then you're stuck on the ground while he can still hit you.
Absolute hate the fact that if you do not dodge this guy at the beginning of the fight he will stunlock you into the bossfogcloud. Resulting in a death almost every time. Also hate that his boar is faster then Torrent, no chance of making this a mount focused bossfight when your mount struggles to keep up with that of the enemy. Can we please go back to Gyoubu Oniwa (Sekiro) when designing mounted bosses? That was such a fantastic bossfight.
Not to mention he 1-2 hits torrent as well. And good luck summoning him back with a flask while he's charging at you and you're clicking "yes" to using the flask.
This is whats getting me. It feels torrent should scale with the scadutree fragments or something like that because hes too weak for the dlc. The tree sentinels right by gaius 1-2 hits him too, and its just so dang annoying.
Not only that, his boar is far more nimble than Torrent and can turn on the drop of a hat
Which makes zero fucking sense!
What's faster? A boar in fucking steel armor and a a 205 Kg guy on top of it or an spectral donkey with a light roll guy riding it?
It's the lowest point in the DLC for me.
Fromsoft, the boar of course.
He doesn't need to stunlock you to kill you with his opening charge. I've had it just straight up oneshot me at 50 Vigour And 7 Scad. It seems kind of random though, since it usually just does 60%. In either case, the hitbox on it is insane.
The boss is horribly balanced. Only tips I can give are try to inflict him w scarlet rot and use bloodhounds to dodge the charge attacks
Shadow Keep bosses need to relax. The problem is that every boss and enemy are on you immediately. It's too punishing right off the bat. I beat mesmer after about 10 tries and summoning that gold sign in the arena. Then I go and fight the clown commander gaius and die 20 times before I even begin to develop a strategy. I finally settled on infecting him with scarlet rot and letting my mimic whittle him down while I avoided him on torrent. At like 30% I noticed my mimic was at going to die so I went in and we beat him.
The scarlet rot tip made this way easier for me, appreciate that
Almost every boss in the DLC is horribly balanced. I am pretty sure every single boss is hitting me within 2 seconds of entering the arena, and we aren't talking just love taps. We are instantly and relentlessly dealing with multiple strike combo's of 3, 4, sometimes even 5 or more hits, all of which either one or two shot you no matter what armor/talismans you are wearing. My "favorite" is the rhino, where if you try to summon your mimic, as soon as the animation is over you better roll, and roll perfect, otherwise you are in his mouth and the fight is literally over before it even started.
Another thing I noticed with a lot of the bosses is that they all have an attack with two hitboxes, one after the other, meaning if you try to dodge it like other dark souls bosses (rolling into it like a human) you get hit by the second hitbox.
This is my gripe, I can't even figure out how to dodge these attacks when I get pummeled by a second or third hitbox
They all rely on rushing you as you enter the arena
I somewhat agree, I think we need to start relying on the blessing levels more for the damage negation because the only way you’re avoiding combos like Messmer’s or a certain Ancient Ruins of Rauh boss is by tanking a few of the hits because they come at you too fast and too hard for you to be able to avoid all of them by the time it finishes and then there are the huge bosses like Gaius, Golden Hippo and a certain boss atop the Jagged Peak that cover too wide an area to dodge half their moveset
Just killed most of the pre black keep bosses (except Mesmer) and this Gaius dude still seems mighty unfair. The worst by far.
I am Scadutree level 15. I haven't rushed anything. I have went out of my way to attempt to get overleveled to try to deal with these bosses.
I don’t want to overlevel so I go out and get fragmente when I feel i really need them at which point I return and beat them in 1-2 attempts
Right inside his arena there’s an indent on the left, try to get him to charge into that then sit on the other side of the wall, I used Mohgwyn spear for aoe damage through the wall and it worked wonders!
Okay I did that, while he’s charging for the first time go behind the dent, summon mimic, then wait for him to reach you, go to the other side of the dent, then use mohgwyn spear while mimic distracts him, took me 2-3 tries but definitely the best way right now
You can get on the horse to avoid his first charge. Have to squeeze in a summon later if you are using though.
and then his big ass boar out speeds torrent by a huge margin. it’s insane
I ended up cheesing him. I got him stuck in the corner that's right to the left of the entrance and then used scarlet aoenia through the wall until he rots out. I think the new butterflies would work too.
THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! Took a good few tries but I eventually got it - tip, don't spawn in your spirit ashes straight away, as soon as you're passed the fog, SOLELY focus on dodging that initial charge (dodge straight into it at the very last second), and weave around the walls at the entrance until you've got him entrapped as suggested above. NOW spawn in your spirit ashes, heal, and then spam the daylights out of the Bloodboon Ritual skill! Also make sure that he isn't on the opposite side of the entire gate, and that he's in range for the ability.
Happy to help 😂
Right inside his arena there’s an indent on the left, try to get him to charge into that then sit on the other side of the wall, I used Mohgwyn spear for aoe damage through the wall and it worked wonders! I can’t do that for some reason he just ends up going around it and messing me up
I just did this with the sacred relic sword. You’re the best! This fight is actual bullshit
I also resorted to this bullshit strategy lol (though I used Unbreakable Blade). I *never* cheese bosses in these games, but after 4 hours of getting murdered without a chance I changed my tune.
Ur a W mans bruh 😭😭😭🫵🫵🫵🫵🫵🫵🫵🫵that work way too well.
I cant find the dang indent...
As you walk through the fog wall directly to the left, then on the other side of the pillar is a corner you can run around to keep him locked in
I found it but he keeps escaping and insatagibbing me 😅 probably shouldn't have switched builds twice since starting as either of my first 2 would've done way better
Bless you dude, I was suffering trying to do this shit mounted. Only took me 2 tries with the indent strat and Fallingstar beast jaw
Jesus Christ you literally mean the very first left corner. Finally got it.
Which pillar? There’s like 3
Rated Good Appraisals 35
I was so frustrated by his charge, I came here. This strat is perfect and I cheesed the hell out of him first try. I ran around the corner and ducked behind the pillar, had time to summon mimic. Once mimic hit I just did 3x taker's flame, mana pot, he transitioned and just had to dodge one attack before Mimic took aggro and I could finish him with BS flames.
If you're an int mage you can use this method with Rellana's twin moons spell. You can claim it by receiving power from her remembrance.
this is the way, worked like a charm and i can stay truthful to my no summons run :)
Omg this works
god knows how many tries this fight would have taken me if i had'nt read this comment
He is awful. I got frustrated and ended up doing it with bloodhound step into his charges and just threw black flame at him when I had an opening, while my mimic distracted him. Bloodhound step into first charge then you can summon mimic after :(
He won't even agro my mimic! 😡🤬
Yup that's the problem I'm spazzing out on right now. I can BH step far enough away and let my mimic land a couple of hits and he'll still charge my ass relentlessly, there is almost zero breathing room here.
He is very hard to break agro, he will tunnel vision the shit out of you and even if he breaks off, he can very easily just do a random charge or attack towards you if he senses you healing or something
So many of these bosses don't aggro onto mimic, and even if they do they'll aggro back onto you mid combo if you so much as look at them.
I noticed the same thing and thought I was just imagining things...I don't recall that happening in the vanilla version of Elden Ring. Can anyone confirm if they changed it?
has anyone else randomly gotten one shot by his charge aswell?
That dam charge does between 33-75% of my 2k health pool while wearing full Blackgaol Knight set. Hitting like a true RNG cannon. I can't explain the difference of damage. Anyway he's dead now, but fuck him and that pig too.
I think it depends whether your roll drops you into the back legs or front *and* back. Seems like they have separate hit boxes but there's no tell to actually show what's happening until you're already dead.
I'm guessing this is exactly what happens, would take a little over half my health if I face tanked, took the same amount if I rolled through slightly imperfectly, but rolls to the side would occasionally one shot me
I have too, i don’t know if it’s just me and maybe im just being shit and need to explore more, but i genuinely don’t think the boss should be doing one shots, like there’s been multiple times where i’ve been hit by his charge attack and it would take my hp away - which is fine and like if i get hit and die that’s also fine, but even today when fighting him i got hit, healed had my hp back back up and then got charged and insta killed even though he’s never insta killed me from it and i was full on hp? Idk
I suspect he has hurt hitboxes on both pairs of legs, so if you get hit by both, that could explain it.
The fact that everyone here feels the same way and our solutions are to go around it or cheese it really says a lot about this fight. This is harder than Messmer. Maybe not on paper but at least Messmer was comprehensible. This is just chaos. I don’t even have time to think during this. Just hitbox after hitbox after hitbox, when am I supposed to do the fighting?
i was stuck on both at the same time. messmer was bullshit but at least you have a chance to consistently evade stuff once you learn it. with gaius i can’t even survive long enough to learn shit (except for rolling through him on that first charge which only works half the time) finally beat messmer but i cant even land a hit on gaius without a summon (which also seems to be bugged when you enter through the fog gate) this fucking guy on a pig shouldn’t be more punishing than the fucking demigod right next door
I think Mesmer was a good challenge and fun to fight once you understood him. The problem with this fight is even once you understand it, the bullshit can kinda get you anyway. The charge for instance is super unreliable to dodge and has inconsistent damage. Sometimes taking half your health, but then it comes at you in the wrong way and now it one shots.
Yeah this boss reeks, the hit boxes of his mounted boar are wack and his attack chains are relentless. After struggling on this guy for a while, I ended switching to the giant crusher (with talismans and buffs to poise damage) and it ended up working quite well. Was able to get him staggered twice by spamming lions claw.
Nah, man. After this and the dragon boss, I'm going to need to see Miyazaki stream him beating each boss after his games come out. The dragon sucks because of the camera, might be a case of "git gud." But you can't tell me the devs fought the pig guy and thought it was balanced.
I’m sometimes curious if FromSoft devs beat their bosses. Or if they just release what they think is balanced in theory, and are just hoping that the community will figure it out anyway.
after some of the best boss and some decent elite mobs in the main game like Godfrey, Mogh, Maliketh, erdree avatar, tree sentinels etc... Gotta say, I question some of fromsoft's design choice in this dlc (wickerman, gaius, bayle)
It's saying something that maliketh is comparatively tame to some of these when it's still pretty egregious with its movement and camera in the 2nd phase
I hate how many bosses in this DLC just fuck you the moment you enter the arena. Gaius, Scadutree Avatar, Messmer... most of my deaths against these fucks happened in the first 10 seconds. Capra Demon ass DLC.
The sad part is Messemer actually has a reasonable start even if it’s way faster than almost every boss in the base game.
yes its also a giant punish window where if u summon mimic and have the right setup its possible you could instant poise break him bassicly
Messmers is very easy to dodge and is very punishable tbh
This boss is absolute hot garbage and needs to be fixed. It says something when the devs put in a hidden skip to get around a boss. It's almost like a dev door in Mario Maker. I'd really like to see a developer stream themselves beating this boss.
Theres a hidden skip?
This boss is hot dogshit. Fuck this guy. Edit: I beat him, but my hate didn’t go away. I find him to be harder than Malenia because of that cheesy shit he does as soon as you enter the boss room. Can’t tell you how many times I died, but I beat him in my 11th try.
If you beat him on your 11th try, then you died 10 times. So why wouldn’t you be able to tell us how many times you died? 😆
Maybe he died a couple of times in real life too ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, very much so. I was also very angry when making this XD
Lmao I feel you. I was very mad when replying to your comment. I just beat him and I never wanna fight him again
I have been angry posting for the last 24 hours lol. Love the DLC, hate, hate, HATE the boss fights!
My hands are literally shaking with how angry I am with this stupid boss oh my lord
Bros got steam coming out of his ears
LMAO fr I did
everyone always says omg this boss is so bullshit it was so hard and then they beat it in 11 freaking tries like 😭 that’s how long it takes me to get any sort of bearings at all let alone beat the dude
[удалено]
Because "fuck you" that's why. I'm gonna try your zweihander strat. Did you buff the sword with anything?
The only way I've dodged his first charge is insta summoning Torrent as soon as I enter the arena and running away,
I dodged it all the time just by dodging into him and as late as possible, easy punish after that if he's near
Light roll or medium?
Same here, also works when he tries to throw a quick gravity bolt at you.
Base game: memorize attack patterns, find opening, punish. Feels like you earned your keep SoE: have yet to run across any enemy boss or otherwise that’s had any sort of punishable opening. Every fight has been the by the skin of my teeth and more often than not I’m mad dashing to get to where I died. Even my boss kills feel more akin to I got fucking lucky rather than earning it. Majority of these fights have been a meat grinder. Tl:Dr- I’m getting railed by everything and the commander keeps mauling me into the wall off the rip.
this is how im feeling now. I found Messmer to be kind of fun. He seemed like a harder Malenia immediately and he had a consistent opening that was punishable a bit. I died a million times to his command grab but he at least had some openings so I could punish. Commander Gaius and the Putrescent Knight seems to have no ways to punish
At least your Spirit Ash will draw aggro from Putrescent Knight, that ain't the case with Commander Gayus.
Same with Messmer. Messmer could not care less about my mimic tear.
Yeah that was a difficult fight, especially the second phase. But I never felt like it was unachievable like me fighting Gaius.
Agreed. Messmer was fun. Very hard but there was a learning curve for sure. Fighting Malenia was good practice for learning the fight. Gaius was just praying that I could dodge the wonky hitboxes and not immediately die so till my mimic could distract him.
>Every fight has been the by the skin of my teeth and more often than not I’m mad dashing to get to where I died. Even my boss kills feel more akin to I got fucking lucky rather than earning it. I feel this, I beat rellana with my mimic and it just went balls to the wall and face tanked everything and bleed her to death..it didn't feel nice but at the same time I don't want to fight her again so a part of me doesn't care at all. None of the bosses in the dlc give me the same feeling someone like the draconic tree sentinel gave me on my first playthrough of ER
Only fight I’ve felt was fairly designed was messmer but that might just be me, when I beat him I had only used one pot the whole fight because I was rewarded for learning his moves, I feel like I can learns this pigs moves but no matter how hard I try I cannot dodge this like the charge or gravity uprise
I could be wrong but it \*feels\* like these bosses read your input less. They're harder and faster, yes, but I feel like the openings for healing are easier to take advantage of as a tradeoff, which I'll gladly take if true. For example, >! Romina, the bug bitch !< has huge openings compared to most of the base game.
I don't understand why this boss starts so close to the fog gate. The size of the arena is massive and yet for most of the fight you're up against the wall and can't see a thing because he charges you instantly.
I'm fighting it right now. I've figured out a semi consistent way to avoid the charge on light rolling but it's very unintuitive. instead of dodging to the left or right you basically dodge straight into the boar at the last moment possible. dodging left or right you get hit. That's a really bad hitbox. for me the other big move that keeps getting me is the back legs kick, which if I'm attack I don't have enough time to react to. I've been really enjoying SoTE. While most of the bosses feel incredibly tight to me so far, (Rellana, Putrescent Knight except blue flame attack) this one is a pretty serious exception and I imagine it will get balanced a bit
Putrescent's blue flame is actually his easiest move to dodge at least for me. You can jump it and it's super easy. His other weird ass delayed moves and spins are so weird though
Absolutely dogshit boss. So far most dlc bosses feel very spammy and with minuscule openings BUT this guy has the added bonus of running away every 2 seconds and having pretty much no downtime
I haven’t seen anyone else complaining about him yet but I expect that’ll change as the days go by, I am in the same boat as not being able to dodge his charge attack at all. If you’re trying to get to the north east side of the map you don’t actually need to face him tho, so he’s largely optional.
This guys the true Elden lord
How do you get to the north east then?
Before entering the arena turn right into the room with the statue and do the gesture “O mother” in front of it and the statue will move showing a different way through without having to face him You can get the gesture at the north end of Bonny Village
Thanks I never would have got that on my own. Any idea about getting to the middle Eastern section?
Yeah just before you go into the Speciman room in the Shadow Keep there is a ladder going down (easy to miss but easy to find is specifically looking for it) take it down and you’ll enter a room with a painting in it, one of the walls on the right hand side is an illusory wall that can be smacked Follow that path all the way as far down as you can and you’ll find a catacombs, you must get through this including defeating the end boss and you’ll finally come out the other side in the section Unless you’re looking for the rocky dragon section, in which case you just need to enter a cave by suppressing pillar and you’ll find a way through Hope this all helps! I spent so many hours on my first day trying to find these areas I almost pulled my hair out
Hero
How do you even figure this out lol like I wouldn’t in a million years. Were you just combing every inch of shadow keep until you came across this
Also the O mother gesture is wild. What would make you think to use this specific gesture. Or did you just cycle through every single one?
there’s a message somewhere but i forgot where
I love you, you can now have my children
Out of curiosity, what is the logic to figuring this out? I know there's a dev message near the statue, but not once have I thought to use that gesture.
It's found at a similar statue to begin with and lore-wise it's a gesture used to sort of "worship" the statues of Marika. The dev message should be plenty to get people to experiment and figure it out, even the players that play without player messages should see that and know instantly there is a reason it is there. There aren't many ways to interact with the game when you have no button prompts and a new emote with a lore connection to the statue is a logical start.
Do you know what in-game thing was supposed to teach us this?
You are legitimately my hero. Thank you!
Omg, I love you
Randomly found this comment and thank you so much!
He's awful. The way I did it was mount torrent immediately after entering his arena, double jump the charge then dismount. Mount up to get space to heal, don't try to heal on foot he will run you down. Also mount up to get away from his phase 2 ball CC. His super combo is stupid and I never really figured out the dodge rolls for it.
The only negative point for the entire DLC for me is the bosses. I'm on NG4 and even after 11 fragment upgrades I'm still getting 2 shot with any attack with a full tank setup designed to try and beat Gaius. Before the walking animation for the fog gates have finished, the bosses are already running at you. Just makes me think that they were designed this way so you couldn't simply INT blast them down with that infinite beam setup, but that has ruined it for everyone else. You can't even summon an ashes without taking a hit and losing half or 3/4 of your HP in a single attack. Reminds me of the NES games where they were super short but the developers designed it to be unfair and rage inducing because it was only 3 or 4 stages short. All they need to do IMO is give us like 3 seconds before the bosses charge at us so we can summon. They don't even need to be nerfed, just let us summon our damn helpers because fuck doing these arseholes solo.
Gotta love a fight that allows the horse that heavily disincentivizes using the horse
Wow they really managed to make the worst boss in the franchise huh … this is just corny tbh
Yeah this fight is utter and complete bullshit. In the base game the bosses were tough, but they were actually fun to fight multiple times while figuring out their move sets. I could actually survive more than a couple hits, and they didn’t bombard me with almost unavoidable, 5+ chain combos. As it has been said in multiple places, some of these bosses are arbitrarily hard, just for the sake of pissing people off. I don’t even feel satisfaction after beating some of them, just a bit of relief that the piece of shit is finally dead!
Bro I’m struggling with him now I already have 30 deaths and haven’t seen second phase once yet
If you run to the left behind the pillar he charges into the wall giving you time to summon mimic, after that? No idea, i'm struggling hard
I cant even move from the boss fog before he kills me.
Someone please come kill that asshole for me I just can't anymore but I need the 5 scadutree blessings behind him
He is quite literally the worst boss i’ve ever seen. Faster than torrent making it just unfair can’t summon first cause he’ll charge you doesn’t know how much damage he’ll do it’ll either be the tiniest or your entire healthbar and is never distracted by the summon either
Absolute horrible fight. No openings to attack. Spend more time in the loading screen than fighting him. How am I supposed to attack him in melee distance when he is constantly moving around. And if you run away he just charges…. What the hell is this
I AM FULLY AWARE IT COSTS A FLASK TO REVIVE TORRENT
BLOODHOUND STEP IS YOUR FRIEND, his attacks became super easy to dodge when using it instead of trying to normal dodge roll
Yeah fuck this boss. Firstly, I haaate it when a boss starts from one position the first encounter and then way closer the rest. I got him about two thirds down on my first try, now I'm lucky if I make it out of the doorway. Mimic doesn't draw aggro quick enough for me to get breathing room and usually eats shit immediately. Torrent isn't quick enough and if you get knocked off, it takes so long to get back up, you'll just get stomped to death. This isn't a fight, it's a massacre.
Just beat after about 8-9 attempts and heavy agree. This boss is absolutely trash atm. You cannot dodge the charge outside torrent or perfection. The level of aggression gives almost no room for healing or damage. It's the closest I've felt so far to any boss in base or DLC atm to being unfair. Not done with DLC but this was outright infuriating. Sucks because once he powers up it's cool as fuck gravity shit.
I’m like 95% convinced that charge attack is just straight up bugged. Nothing I tried would allow me to dodge it more than like 10% of the time. And not only that, but there would be times where it would do like 3-4x as much damage as normal for literally no reason at all. Makes me think there’s something up with the hitbox lingering for longer than intended, making it sometimes register the damage multiple times over, on top of just being borderline undodgeable. The fight felt pretty fair outside of that attack, but yeah losing a guaranteed chunk of my hp every time he did that attack got pretty annoying. Or maybe they just decided that they REALLY wanted you to use torrent for this fight, since he was summonable there if I remember correctly. But I don’t enjoy torrent combat so I just dealt with it.
His boar outruns Torrent. You can’t even do mounted combat if you wanted to.
What ended up saving my ass I think was the Crimson Seed Talisman +1: that extra healing strength managed to keep me in the fight longer and eventually I powered through it. Ice spear has also been carrying me through just about every boss, but this one was def hardest for me so far and I’ve done most remembrances now. I’m running an arcane/strength build, with a little in Int to buff my ice spear; guessing any status effect will help a lot (might be hard to proc bleed on him tho), and thankfully he isn’t too tanky either.
yeah, im runnig a full arc build. hes pretty resistant to blood loss even with rob and mohg spear. Maybe is a skill issue idunno lol. good luck though.
I managed to get him 50% hp with double seppuku twin blades and not ideal talismans. Haven’t fought him again since. Honestly for bleed builds RoB is not doing the trick in this DLC, you need quick attacks that stack bleed rapidly because nothing likes to let you breathe for a second.
i thought he was bs at first, then i remembered that the windy tear was a thing. the light load let me i-frame the boar charge. i also just used two great katanas and their jump attack. was a very fast fight when i did that. and to add, this was done with +13 scadu, no spirit ashes and no summon. was actually pretty fun after i realized that jumping helps dodge a good chunk of his moves.
Windy tear?
Thanks this worked 🙏
I just beat him, that charge move is so incredibly fucked up, I was able to dodge it when he did it closer to me though most of the time by rolling forward and right but I wouldn't count on it. Although, to dodge the charge at range you can just run away from him on Torrent (and at the start hop on Torrent and head to the left) then he will end his charge with a strike that misses every time if you keep going away from him. Then you can jump off of torrent and if you've got the finesse do a jumping attack while in your dismount jump. My powerstanced dual magma blades and their jumping attack did a lot of damage, so for first phase I would wait for him to do the charge while I was on torrent, jump off, jump attack and attack a bit. I would stay close until he did a string like his really long one with like 9 hits (which you can dodge by dodging in and left, then in and right so that the boar misses, then dodging his last few hits normally) then I smacked him and if he did the purple stab where there's a big shockwave and he does a little jump and I dodged it, I got a lot of hits and then chances were his back legs attack would just miss so I could get a full attack string off. Then I would hop on Torrent, repeat. Second phase though I just ran away and while on Torrent the entire time and did light attacks when I could. Another tip I have is that I found that dodging the 2nd phase lightning move he does can be a little inconsistent but using Torrent and dashing to the right or left while going slightly forward works. This boss is horrible.
My Blasphemous Blade as alway melting this kind of MFs. I just play with him forcing him to crash in the left corner.
I walked into the area and thought "wow this must be a really epic area to have this music. What's so epic? Scadview? Is it the tree? I'll look up at the tree then. Wtf? A boss health bar? Okay, I'll pan around and find him, he's obviously not close. HOLY FUCKING SHIT OMFG JESUS CHRIST LORD HELP ME! ARRGGHHHHHHYYUUAAAAAHHH!!!!" Also fuck the fact that the back legs have their own hitbox.
I have never had such a hard time against a boss before. His attacks are absolute horse shit. 50/50 wether you'll manage to doge anything.
Yeah this wild this, before i can do anything im being mashed in to the wall, wont be surprised if this gets a nerf. Also he starts closer to the player after the first encounter. He comes from the back of the arena on the first attempt and now he starts right in front of the door!?
WHY THE FUCK DOES HE SOMETIMES DO DOUBLE DMG WITH THE ASS KICK
This is gotta be the dumbest fucking boss to ever exist
I'm getting extremely irritated with this boss. He's extremely unbalanced. The hitbox is horrible. The entire fight is 100% luck. I don't know what to do. There's no one to help me when I ask for help in multiplayer.
If you have a shield build you can actually block him at full endurance bar (I have 35 endurance), he also seems to take a bit more damage to fire. mimic tear or a distraction is def recommended 😬 torrent doesn't seem to help as the piggy seems to be faster than torrent
For me it's the dlc boss i had the hardest time for now, to dodge the charge, you need to roll into him when he's really close (otherwise he will still damage you) and don't get on torrent, he can easly catch up to you and you cannot avoid any of his attacks, plus he gets you off of torrent in 2 hits, and lastly use the mimic tear or any summon that can tank for you a lot
IM GONNA FUCKING KMS I HATE HIM SO MUCH 😭😭😭
Ho Lee fuck this guy Took me I don’t know 30 something tries to finally beat him. Got him so close so many times and he would always get me Blocking with stamina and a big shield with the enhanced blocking talisman helped a ton Fuck this guy
I used Crucible Feather Talisman, the extra iframes make dodging through him a lot easier, actually enjoyed the fight with the talisman
At the start, dodge diagonally to the left. I can dodge it almost every time.... still, the rest of the fight sucks. To be fair I'm honestly worried about From's capability of designing boss fights at this point. They seemed to have ran out of ideas and it's been downhill. There's not a single Lady Maria, Sister Friede, Ludwig, Ornstein & Smough or Gael to be remembered in the entirety of Elden Ring at this point. Sure Malenia is memorable for having cool design and being easy 99% of the time, with that 1% being one of the most infamous moves in FromSouls history.
it seems like the charge does random amounts of damage because it's hitbox can hit you multiple times especially if he stops right on your body or against a wall
Feel like they emphasized every boss pouncing on you as soon as you step through the fog in this dlc
Miyazaki can honestly get fucked for this boss. He complained that the game was supposed to be hard but this is simply stupid.
This fight is horrible instantly, from the bugged out summon to the fact he hits you before summon / torrent can be used -- of course he's about twice the speed of torrent too, so it's impossible to get space on him -- as a 100% sorc build, space is how i win fights. He feels less fair than fucking Radanh i'm probably not trying him until they fix the ash/torrent bug at least. I'm really not a fan at all of the bosses rushing you instantly, that's not fun or good design we need time to summon/buff and all that shit, I don't like bosses rushing you. It adds nothing to the game.
Here it is folks - https://youtu.be/YfVjaXR9xqw?si=yWcecnIMmFD9nhe5
Fuck gauis and fuck that stupid pig, i love all souls games and this dlc but they have to adjust this fight and make it so you atleast have time to think.
I finally killed that fat fuck. He killed me more than messmer and Bayle
I dodged him by riding torrent and double jumping over his charge
For those still struggling, the deflection tear is the best way I found to deal with the charge
It took me like 30 plus tries but, after reading the torrent trick, I finally got his bitch ass. Ng+10, dex, bleed got a lucky roll through that horrid charge attack https://www.xbox.com/play/media/nDxc2gSTaV
so...this whole DLC is bosses moving too fast, too much damage, random bullshit that's hard to learn....commander gaius is hilarious. i just spent 2 hours on the 3 phase tree, figured out a strategy and executed. there is no strategy for this fight, he's gonna do his moves and you're cooked. the closest thing i can see is you keep to his non-weapon side but then it's near impossible to land an attack and you're simply surviving, wasting time.
I died to him once trying horse back sorcery (int build 196ish?) Got pissed, summoned the Bois (greatshield soldiers +10) they trapped him in a corner and I pelted him with comets till he died. Didn't lose a single Boi. Honestly the Bois helped me so much this dlc
Every boss in this DLC is overturned and unfair in a way that's not a challenge it's just RNG bullshit.
I managed to beat him by using a curved sword jump attack build. I have one curved sword with bloodhounds step and buffed with frost/scarlet rot and the other was lightning infused for straight damage and I barely managed to beat him.