Elden Ring: Erdtree Burial Watchdog (Wyndham Catacombs) 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.

This Erdtree Burial Watchdog is in the middle tier, Greater Enemy Bosses, and is the end boss of the Wyndham Catacombs dungeon in the Western part of Altus Plateau. It is an optional boss in the sense that you do not need to defeat it in order to advance the main story of the game.

Okay, here we go again. Another day, another dungeon, another so-called watchdog that is clearly a cat. And not only is it clearly a cat, it’s a very bad kitty indeed.

If you have watched any of my other recent videos, you will know that I’m generally feeling a bit over-leveled currently, since I didn’t start on Altus Plateau until after I had mostly finished Ranni’s questline. I consider the latter parts of that much harder than the Altus Plateau area, so right now I’m getting a lot of smooth sailing with bosses. Which is needed after the traumas of Lake of Rot, to be honest.

Anyway, since I have also started feeling a bit too reliant on summoned help, I figured I could take on a well-known cat slash dog type boss on my own, but once again this game is ready to harshly punish any perceived over-confidence and for some reason, this boss was much more difficult than I thought it would be. I constantly miss-timed my attacks, letting the boss jump on top of me repeatedly, got zapped by lightning and overall, I was really missing one of my spirit companions by the middle of it. I would have had much more fun if it had been Engvall who had been zapped by lightning and jumped on by a huge cat-like dog statue. In fact, I might have pointed and laughed out loud.

It wasn’t until the boss died that I realized that this particular Erdtree Burial Watchdog is considered a Greater Enemy, whereas all the others I have fought so far are just regular Enemies or Field Bosses. That’s really no excuse as there doesn’t seem to be much consistency between these titles and the actual difficulty (Alecto is only a Field Boss for example), but even so, it makes me think that this may have been a beefier watchdog than I expected. It still looks like a bad kitty though. And I did kill it on the first attempt, so it wasn’t hugely difficult, I just expected it to be easier than this.

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 Chilling Mist Ash of War. My ranged weapons are the Longbow and the Shortbow. I was level 105 when this video was recorded. I would say that’s probably a bit high for this boss, as I consider my slight struggle more a matter of poor concentration and lack of focus than an issue with my character ;-)