Elden Ring: Elder Dragon Greyoll (Dragonbarrow) Boss Fight

Published: September 17, 2025 at 9:20:35 PM UTC

Elder Dragon Greyoll is in the lowest tier of bosses in Elden Ring, Field Bosses, and is found outdoors near Fort Faroth in the Northern part of Caelid known as Dragonbarrow. Actually, I’m not sure if it’s correct to call it a field boss as it doesn’t have a boss health bar and it doesn’t show an Enemy Felled message when it’s killed, but considering its size, uniqueness and my perceived difficulty of the fight, I’d say it’s a Field Boss, so that’s what I’m going with. Like most lesser bosses in the game, this one is optional in the sense that you do not need to defeat it in order to advance the main story.

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.

Elder Dragon Greyoll is in the lowest tier, Field Bosses, and is found outdoors near Fort Faroth in the Northern part of Caelid known as Dragonbarrow. Actually, I’m not sure if it’s correct to call it a field boss as it doesn’t have a boss health bar and it doesn’t show an Enemy Felled message when it’s killed, but considering its size, uniqueness and my perceived difficulty of the fight, I’d say it’s a Field Boss, so that’s what I’m going with. Like most lesser bosses in the game, this one is optional in the sense that you do not need to defeat it in order to advance the main story.

You can see this boss from the Fort Faroth Site of Grace. It’s a huge, grey-white dragon lying on the ground, appearing to be sleeping or resting. It has five smaller dragons around it and these are the ones you’re actually supposed to fight as the boss itself doesn’t move and isn’t really aggressive, apart from roaring and inflicting you with an annoying debuff that lowers both your attack and your defense.

I believe the lore around it is that Greyoll is the mother of all dragons and that these five are some of her children. For some reason, they’re at half health when the fight starts. Perhaps they’re so young children that they aren’t at full strength yet – which would also explain why they’re still hanging around their mother – or perhaps she’s old and immobile, so she’s draining their health to stay alive. I’m not really sure about that part, but they being at half health from the beginning certainly makes a pretty long fight a lot shorter, so I’ve decided to take a positive stance and consider the dragons half-dead instead of half-alive.

There are several other small dragons in the area a bit further away from the boss that you can practice on without actually starting the boss fight. Individually, the small dragons aren’t very difficult, but if you manage to aggro two or more at the same time, you may end up like a poor schmuck who suffered a violent death from repeated dragon bites and that’s just no fitting fate for the obvious main character of this story.

I started out trying to go mounted against these, but as so often before, I felt that I have too little control while on horseback and since high mobility isn’t a huge advantage in this fight, I quickly decided to fight on foot instead. That’s right, I decided. I definitely didn’t manage to get stomped by a dragon so hard that my horse died. That is definitely not exactly what happened.

I had been away from the game for a few weeks at this point because of reasons, and it was literally the first fight I got into, so I felt a bit rusty, but quickly got the hang of it again. The last boss I fought before the break was the Bell-Bearing Hunter in the nearby Isolated Merchant’s Shack and I found that to be a much much more difficult fight, so perhaps Greyoll was actually a reasonable boss to dust off the old controller on.

Anyway, the main thing to watch out for when fighting the smaller dragons is their tail swipe, which hurts a lot and covers a wide area behind them, so try to do what I say and not what I do, and don’t stand behind them if you can avoid it. Also, when they fly up into the air, be ready for them to come swooping down in an attempt to flatten you. That one hurts as well but can be avoided fairly easily with some well-timed rolling action.

As you can see in the video, I did manage to take out the first three individually, but the last two decided to play unfairly and team up against me. If that happens, I found the best approach was to stay ranged for a bit and chip off some more of their health before taking out the last one in melee.

As each of the smaller dragons die, the boss itself will lose 20% of its health, so once the last smaller dragon is dead, the boss will die too. You don’t get a satisfying enemy felled message, which leaves me wondering if you’re actually supposed to kill this one. Perhaps it’s not considered an enemy at all. But if so, they shouldn’t make it drop loot and runes and then expect someone like me to not shed blood over it ;-)

If you’re finding it difficult to defeat the smaller dragons, there is apparently also a safe spot you can stand in and attack the boss itself, slowly wearing down its health without aggroing neither the boss nor its minions. I’m pretty sure that would be considered an exploit, so I decided to go for the proper way first and since I managed to defeat them all with relative ease, I actually didn’t bother to find out where that safe spot is. If you’re going for Greyoll very early in the game for the massive rune reward, you’re probably able to figure this out for yourself.

Apart from runes, she also drops a dragon heart and unlocks the Greyoll’s Roar incantation at the Cathedral of Dragon Communion. I personally haven’t really gotten into the whole eating dragon hearts and gaining their powers trend yet as I believe they have a lot of trans fats and I heard eating too many of them messes up your eyes, but I bet I could have a lot of fun making some of the smaller field bosses soil themselves if I could roar like a huge dragon, so maybe I’ll consider risking it soon ;-)

I have read some people argue that you shouldn’t kill Greyoll because she is the mother of all dragons and if she dies, it will be the end of all dragonkin in the Lands Between. Only lore-wise of course, there are certainly still plenty of dragonkin left to ruin all your days in the actual game. Anyway, my stance on that is that I have yet to meet a dragon in this game that isn’t a complete menace, so I’m pretty sure that the Lands Between would be a much better place without their constant wing-flapping, fiery bad breath, and relentless attempts at having roasted Tarnished for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

So far, I think the most annoying dragon I have faced in the game was Decaying Ekzykes. I actually ended up taking advantage of him getting stuck in landscape because I was just not having fun with his unbelievably bad breath anymore. If I had known at the time that Greyoll was his mother, I would probably have spiced things up with a few “yo mama” jokes though.

Yo mama’s so big, when she takes a nap, the map gets a new continent labeled “Greyoll’s Belly.”
Yo mama’s so old, Radagon had to consult her before inventing gravity.
Yo mama’s so huge, when she sneezes, it triggers an Erdtree-shaking earthquake and a global Scarlet Rot warning.

What about you, which dragon annoyed you the most? Drop a comment on the video if you feel like sharing your pain with your fellow Tarnished. Or you could share something else, it doesn’t have to be pain. Maybe you have an excellent recipe for mother of dragon soup or an interesting anecdote about that one time you beat a dragon in a single hit with a fishing pole after catching the largest fish in all the realm.

Anyway, considering that this is overall a fairly easy fight and that it rewards a lot of runes, it’s a good idea to wear the Golden Scarab and perhaps also consume a Gold-Pickled Fowl Foot before the fight to boost rune acquisition. Once again, you should do what I say and not what I do, because of course I forgot both. Having said that, I actually feel like I’m leveling a bit too fast currently, and it’s not like runes are a scarce commodity at this stage of the game, so I’ll get over missing a few bonus ones.

And 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 Glintblade Phalanx Ash of War. My ranged weapons are the Longbow and the Shortbow. My shield is the Great Turtle Shell, which I mostly wear for the stamina recovery. I was level 124 when this video was recorded. I’m not sure if that’s generally considered too high for this boss. I know that it can be killed with an exploit at a very low level, but even doing it properly by killing all the lesser dragons, it felt a bit on the easy side of things, so I’m probably a bit over-leveled here. 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 ;-)

Further Reading