Elden Ring: Dragonkin Soldier (Lake of Rot) Boss Fight

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.

Dragonkin Soldier is in the middle tier, Greater Enemy Bosses, and is found in the underground hellhole called Lake of Rot, that you will eventually need to explore if you’re doing Ranni’s questline. It is an optional boss in the sense that you do not need to kill it to advance the main story.

You can easily miss this boss (or skip it if you want to) while exploring Lake of Rot. Initially, it doesn’t even look like a boss, it just looks like a big pile of something or maybe a giant corpse sitting out in the infested waters. But when you approach it, it will reveal its boss-like nature and try to kill you for your runes like all the others.

This Dragonkin Soldier feels exactly like the others, except that this time you will most likely have to suffer being infected with Scarlet Rot as you fight it. Scarlet Rot is perhaps the most annoying debuff in the game, like a super-charged poison. That means the clock is ticking on this fight, as you can’t keep healing through it and you most likely don’t have the consumables to keep curing it, as you will get infected almost instantly again.

I once again called upon Banished Knight Engvall to assist me and spare my own tender flesh some of the beating from this boss. It turns out that he is apparently completely unaffected by the Scarlet Rot, so a more reasonable division of labor would have been him fighting the boss alone while I sip piña coladas on the nearby beach.

But of course, the world is not that good. One thing that is good though, is the spot on the inside of the dragonkin soldier’s left leg, as that is a mostly safe space from its attacks, as it will keep pushing you out of harm’s way as it turns. Even so, the Scarlet Rot will still eventually get you if you’re too slow in this fight.

And as usual, now for some boring details about my character. I play as a mostly Dexterity build. My melee weapon is the Guardian’s Swordspear with Keen affinity and Sacred Blade Ash of War. My ranged weapons are the Longbow and the Shortbow. I was rune level 95 when this video was recorded. I’m not really sure if that is generally considered appropriate, but the difficulty of the game seems reasonable to me – I want the sweet spot that isn’t mind-numbing easy-mode, but also not so difficult that I’ll be stuck on the same boss for hours ;-)