Honestly people complaining about Radahn just need to get good. Suck it up. I didn’t even need to upgrade my weapon.
I stuck him with poison and rot then just rode around the desert raising golden meat shields from the ground! Fuck him!
Edit: Nah I cheesed him. The spoiler text is meant to convey that, but also includes a strategy you might prefer to learn on your own. There’s arguably a good clue in the cutscene describing Radahn’s condition just prior to the fight, but I actually took it to mean the opposite initially and spent too long trying other things.
There are a lot of workarounds in this game and I’m all for it because my reflexes are lousy and I don’t have the patience to repeat bosses I don’t enjoy in the first place. In contrast, I could have fought phase 2 Rennala for hours because I could keep her in frame, I could read her attacks, nothing felt unavoidable, her wildest stuff was mostly for show, and her arena was pretty.
I got hilariously murked by Radahn on the first fight by those missiles that are I suppose intended to be arrows. My literal words were “wait is he doing something from all the way over there?” followed by death. Second fight I got him to about 30% health before getting killed by a dive attack I definitely was on iframes for? Anyway, it’s a very cool set piece. Any good way to get rot on my weapons?
just leave a gold sign at the location you want, like normal
if you’re getting summoned by anybody it’s because you’re in appropriate level range, meaning whatever you’re getting is likely worth the trouble in runes.
It’s discourse-y, but there is a funny screencap of three game devs replying to each other on twitter basically having a crisis about how Elden Ring scoring so high on metacritic means that gamers don’t care about their professional occupations in UX, graphics, and quest design lol
If you have enough vigor already and you rarely overheal with your Estus, then the max HP increase from the talisman’s vigor is not super useful and it does not compensate the increase in damage received.
I’m guessing this talisman gets less useful as the game goes on for that reason?
Question: should I not do Radahn for now? I’m level 53 and I see people in the 70s complaining about how tough he is. Does he gate anything? Right now he two shots me with combos too long to roll through and I’m just getting owned over and over and over again. What else is there to do instead? I’ve downed Godrick and Rennala and pretty much cleared those areas, done what’s accessible to me of both Siofra and Ainsel rivers
only, and indirectly, the rest of the siofra and ainsel rivers and all their associated lore/characters/gear. either you fight him or go on to the plateau/volcano/capital. I did him first because I was so compelled by that stuff but I don’t think it’s necessarily advisable
I think he’s a boss that’s going to always one-hit you unless you are super spec’d into taking hits and you have a lot of armor or use a good shield. I just killed him last night around that level, dodging one-hit kills or living with just a sliver on occasion (for no apparent reason?) and I think the NPCs really made the difference.
Yeah I got him to 3rd phase on my first serious try and am now struggling to get him past 20% damage. Which suggests it’s basically RNG based on NPC positioning and what moves he targets you with. I could just fight him 500 times until I get lucky once but I’d kinda prefer to just come back with more resources.
What gets me is it doesn’t feel like a sword saint isshin fight or anything where it’s just going to take a week to learn and then I can perfect it. I can’t see, I can’t even dodge all his attacks even if I know the timing so it’s just a question of doing it until I get a non-shitty pattern. Kind of a bummer honesty for such a cool concept fight
you’re half right – you can kind of manipulate the RNG by riding directly at him from his 2/10 o’clock and slashing at him to make him more predictable, plus he’s quite vulnerable to bleed/rot/stagger, plus his transformation takes forever and he won’t harm you at all during it so if you start an (unmounted) combo when he’s at like 55% health and you just never stop slashing, you’ll get him down to 15% and there’s a good chance your summons will be able to handle the entire last phase of the fight at that point
Honestly my biggest issue with the fight is if I stand back I can see enough of the boss to read him and dodge his attacks pretty consistently, but I can’t hit him. If I go up to where I can hit him, all I can see is a big leg blocking the entire screen and then the leg immediately makes me die due to an attack I don’t even see because it’s happening through the camera clip plane
I completed Rahdan last night using a strat I saw described as “cheese”–it’s certainly much easier but it still took like 6-7 tries for me to execute the cheese properly so it’s still quite hard.
Basically, I respecced to use the Rotten Breath dragon spell, unlocked that spell, and hit him with it. It’s an extraordinarily strong DOT which keeps going for a VERY long time and does both attack damage and DOT damage based on % of health. Using it against regular enemies is great for taking out crowds and cleaning up stragglers; using it on Rahdan allows you to spend most of the fight on horseback managing NPC summons to control his aggro while the dot takes him down.
Basically, you summon the regular guys at the start and make your way to Rahdan. You hit him with the breath 2x during the first phase and 1x during the second phase. The breath does so much damage that he will regularly aggro onto you after doing it, so you’ll have to book it If you can’t block or dodge all of his larger orbs during the second half of the fight, I recommend running away from him, literally all the way across the map up to the ruins in the north, and hiding there or using the dunes/ruins to LOS his orbs.
So yeah it is much easier to do this strat than other strats but it’s hard enough, particularly after 3-4 hours of trying to do Rahdan every which other way, that it felt like a proper culmination of my fight to me, haha.
i would possibly leave radahn until later because the areas and sidequest progression he gates will get you maxed out summons and at least a +9 upgrade to a sombre weapon so you’ll trivialise the capital
those areas and quests are really fuckin’ cool though