Elden Ring players kicked up a fuss recently upon the recent release of the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, with many believing it is simply too hard. New enemies were (and still are) wiping the floor with players, and countless boss fights were (and still are) one-shotting folks right out the gate. This makes the fact that a player has seemingly already managed to beat the DLC’s final boss without healing, dodging, or blocking even funnier.
Spoilers for the final boss of Shadow of the Erdtree follow.
A poster on Reddit shared a clip of their fight against Radahn, who players might recognize as one of the required fights needed to start the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. Despite Radahn’s return, his fight at the end of the DLC is entirely different and he boasts an entirely new moveset that has made him a real pain in the ass for players to overcome. Of course, he’s no match for this chosen Tarnished though, who manages to deal with Radahn as if they were a pesky bug needing swatting.
Before entering the boss arena, the player clearly stacks up on spells that’ll help them accomplish the tremendous feat of not using healing flasks, blocks, or dodges throughout the fight. These elements are crucial to the game, let alone its numerous harrowing boss fights, so to manage without them shows an impressive understanding of the rest of the game’s mechanics and skills.
Among the skills used are two incantations, Blessing’s Boon and Golden Vow, which heal the player over time and boost their damage and defense, respectively. They also make use of Malenia’s restorative great rune and pop their physick, which is a once-per-life consumable that can be mixed with two different effects. The one used here is a very familiar mixture featuring the opaline and crimson bubbletears, which grant a one-hit invulnerability and the restoration of a significant chunk of health once you’re near death.
At that point, the player goes into the fight and simply demolishes Radahn. As one person put it in the Reddit comments, “I think this was Radahn’s boss fight against you, not the other way around.” Not only are they passively healed the entirety of the short fight, but anytime they do damage, they regain a good amount of health, too. The player’s almost consistently above the 50 percent mark of their own health bar the entirety of the encounter thanks to the use of the previously mentioned incantations, and at a few points in the fight they can even be seen swapping talismans to mitigate damage even further. I was awestruck watching someone exercise such command over the fight considering the fact that they’re often supposed to have the player on their backfoot, not the other way around.
At the very end, they also use the Endure skill—which increases your poise and absorbs a certain amount of damage—as well as a damage-reducing aromatic, to stand there and take Radahn’s ultimate meteor attack, and you can see the player’s health bar jump all over the place as their abilities work overtime to passively restore them. They make it with just enough health to land the killing blow and just like that, the DLC is done and dusted; the last boss reduced to an utter joke.
If recjawjind_fmfb can manage all of that by doing the utmost, the rest of us lowly mortals can probably squeeze by on the bare minimum, especially considering the DLC got patched to become easier recently. So if you’re thinking that Elden Ring or its DLC are too hard, here’s proof positive that you can reduce this game’s bosses to absolutely nothing with a bit of gumption, ingenuity, and a few skill points dropped into the faith stat.