Elden Ring: Commander Niall (Castle Sol) Boss Fight

Published: October 19, 2025 at 8:52:47 PM UTC

Commander Niall is in the middle tier of bosses in Elden Ring, Greater Enemy Bosses, and is the main boss of Castle Sol in the Northern part of Mountaintops of the Giants. He is an optional boss in the sense that he does not need to be defeated in order to progress the main story of the game, but he must be defeated before you can access the Consecrated Snowfield area via the Grand Lift of Rold.

As you probably know, bosses in Elden Ring are divided into three tiers. From lowest to highest: Field Bosses, Greater Enemy Bosses and finally Demigods and Legends.

Commander Niall is in the middle tier, Greater Enemy Bosses, and is the main boss of Castle Sol in the Northern part of Mountaintops of the Giants. He is an optional boss in the sense that he does not need to be defeated in order to progress the main story of the game, but he must be defeated before you can access the Consecrated Snowfield area via the Grand Lift of Rold.

When you enter the boss arena, he will immediately summon two spirits to help him. This does take him a few seconds, so you have a good opportunity to summon something yourself or lay some ranged pain on him if you have it.

It always annoys me when I’m fighting multiple enemies at once, so after a couple of failed attempts, I called in Black Knife Tiche for help. In hindsight, that made the fight too easy, so I kind of wish I had mustered up the patience and willpower to defeat the boss without her, but it was late in the evening, and I just wanted to kill something and go to bed.

Anyway, when fighting this boss I would always kill the two spirits first to make the fight simpler, but I have since learned that they will de-spawn once the boss enters phase two, so it may in fact be better to focus damage on the boss itself. If the spirits are killed, he will immediately enter phase two regardless of his health, making him a lot more aggressive, so keeping the spirits alive would make phase two shorter. But then you’d have phase one with two annoying spirits. Plague or cholera.

In hindsight, I think it could have been a more fun fight if I had summoned a tanky spirit to keep the boss’s spirits busy while I went for the boss, but unfortunately there are no do-overs until new game plus. Another reason I wish for a do-over is that I once again managed to get myself killed just as the boss died, so I had to do yet another run of shame from the Site of Grace instead of basking in the glory of victory. I wonder why I’ll never learn that greed is for loot, not for hits when fighting bosses, in these FromSoft games.

Oh well, now for the usual boring details about my character. I play as a mostly Dexterity build. My melee weapon is the Guardian’s Swordspear with Keen affinity and Spectral Lance Ash of War. My shield is the Great Turtle Shell, which I mostly wear for the stamina recovery. I was level 144 when this video was recorded, which I think is a bit high for this content. I’m always looking for the sweet spot where it’s not mind-numbing easy mode, but also not so difficult that I will be stuck on the same boss for hours ;-)

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