Elden Ring: Dragonlord Placidusax (Crumbling Farum Azula) Boss Fight
Published: November 11, 2025 at 8:07:32 PM UTC
Dragonlord Placidusax is in the highest tier of bosses in Elden Ring, Legendary Bosses, and is found in Crumbling Farum Azula, by jumping down a series of ledges and then lying down in an empty grave. He is easy to miss and an optional boss in the sense that it is not required to defeat him in order to progress the main story of the game.
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.
Dragonlord Placidusax is in the highest tier, Legendary Bosses, and is found in Crumbling Farum Azula, by jumping down a series of ledges and then lying down in an empty grave. He is easy to miss and an optional boss in the sense that it is not required to defeat him in order to progress the main story of the game.
First of all, finding and getting to this boss is a bit tricky. I like to explore, but I had missed it at first and just checked a guide to make sure I was not missing anything important before proceeding to the end boss, and this nasty dragon reared its ugly face.
The closest Site of Grace is the one called Beside the Great Bridge. From that, turn around and take the lift back down into the church. Kill or sprint past the beastmen there and run straight out of the church towards the cluster of trees, carefully jump down to the ledge a little to the left and proceed down until you get to an empty tomb that prompts you to “Lie down”. Do that and you will be transported to the boss’s arena where glorious battle will take place.
This is definitely one of the harder dragons in the game, perhaps because it has two heads, which makes it twice as likely to think up annoying things to do to me. I had a few attempts in melee, but as usual with these huge enemies, it was very difficult to see what was going on and when he was about to do some sort of area of effect attack, so in the end I decided to go ranged. Which I generally find more fun anyway, so yay me.
I thought the Bolt of Gransax would be an excellent choice for this fight as it’s supposed to do bonus damage to dragons, but for some reason that doesn’t seem to work on this one, so in the end, my Black Bow with Barrage Ash of War seemed to be the better choice.
I also summoned Black Knife Tiche, which definitely helped a lot, but even she is not able to fully trivialize this boss. She even managed to get herself killed, which doesn’t happen often.
I tried using Serpent Arrows to get a poison damage over time effect ticking on the boss. I’m actually not sure if I succeeded, he apparently has very high resistance to both poison and scarlet rot, but at least the arrows did some damage on their own and with the Barrage Ash of War, I could fire a lot of them rapidly. I actually don’t know why I haven’t made use of that very often before, it actually seems like a decent way to dish out some damage against larger enemies, especially those who don’t move around too quickly all the time.
Anyway, the boss itself has a lot of things to watch out for. As soon as the fight starts, he will be marking the ground with a red lightning effect, and you will do well to not stand around in that to see what happens. What happens is that you will get your sweet behind roasted with more red lightning, trust me, I have tried it many times, so you don’t have to. When the red lightning is on the ground, I would actually advice you to just focus on avoiding that and not trying to do a lot of damage to the boss.
He will also do some sort of yellow area of effect on the floor. I’m not sure if it’s fire or holy damage, but it would often get me when I was in melee range. It was easy to avoid at range though.
His most deadly attacks are when he teleports away as he will often come swooping down from above and strike at you. I died to that several times until I got fairly good at timing my rolls and avoiding the worst of it.
And finally, he will shoot some sort of medieval laser beams from his eyes and those really really hurt and have very long range. So, all in all, he’s definitely annoying enough to be considered lord of the dragons.
Oh well, now for the usual boring details about my character. I play as a mostly Dexterity build. My melee weapons are the Nagakiba with Keen affinity and Thunderbolt Ash of War, and the Uchigatana also with Keen affinity. In this fight, I used the Black Bow with Barrage Ash of War and Serpent Arrows, as well as regular Arrows. I was level 169 when this video was recorded, which I think is a bit high for this content, but it was still a fun and reasonably challenging fight. 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 ;-)
Fanart inspired by this boss fight
Further Reading
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