Elden Ring: Glintstone Dragon Adula (Three Sisters and Cathedral of Manus Celes) 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.

Glintstone Dragon Adula is in the middle tier, Greater Enemy Bosses, and is first encountered in the Three Sisters area, and then again later at the Cathedral of Manus Celes at Moonlight Altar. It is an optional boss in the sense that you do not need to kill it to advance the main story. You will encounter it during Ranni’s questline, but it is not strictly required to defeat it to complete those quests either.

You will encounter Glintstone Dragon Adula when exploring the Three Sisters area, most likely when doing Ranni’s questline. Unlike most of the previously encountered dragons, this one is not asleep, but already in full-on grumpy dragon mode, so I didn’t get to use my preferred dragon-waking method: an arrow to the face. But to be fair, all that does is just instantly trigger full-on grumpy dragon mode and since the dragon was already there, I suppose that saved me an arrow.

Like most dragons, this one will parade around, do a lot of huffing and puffing, breathe nasty things at you and just generally be hugely annoying. The only thing that is not annoying about dragons is that they tend to make their lairs in areas with a lot of rocks or other structures to hide behind when they use their breath weapons. It’s almost suspiciously convenient.

I generally find dragons more manageable from range, so as usual I decided to take it on with my longbow and shortbow. There is a conveniently placed staircase with a wall that can be used for cover, making ranged combat a lot safer than melee.

As it turns out, this dragon is prone to flying too far away from its spawn point and then reset. I think it’s too bad, this would have been a much more interesting fight if the dragon could fly around and attack from other directions. I didn’t know it would reset like this, which is why you will see me running around and looking for it for a while.

The first encounter with Glintstone Dragon Adula can’t really be won, because it will fly away and not come back at around 50% health, so the point of this fight is just to get the giant reptile to stop bothering you while you explore the area. There aren’t really any other dangerous enemies around these parts, so getting rid of the dragon makes the whole situation a lot more relaxed.

I suppose it is possible that I could have found another place to fight it than the stairs where it kept resetting, but that was the spot where I first saw it and it seemed like a good spot for a dragon fight, so I didn’t see any point in moving around much. It’s just too bad that the dragon resets so easily.

Once the dragon disappears, you will not see it again until much later in Ranni’s questline, when it shows up near Cathedral of Manus Celes in Moonlight Altar.

Much later in Ranni’s questline, after having braved the certifiable hellhole known as Lake of Rot and defeated Astel, Naturalborn of the Void, you will gain access to the Moonlight Altar area, which is in the South-Western part of Liurnia of the Lakes. Apart from the large and very grumpy dragon that this video is about, you will also be able to obtain one of the best spirit ashes in this area, so if – like me – you prefer to summon in some assistance to spare your own tender flesh a beating every once in a while, you should make sure to do Ranni’s questline, if for no other reason, then for this. Oh, and the dragon drops a huge number of runes too, so there is that.

At first, this area seems peaceful and without a lot of annoying enemies around, but just as you approach what appears to be the ruins of an old church (it’s really the Cathedral of Manus Seles), your old buddy Glintstone Dragon Adula shows up out of nowhere. And it’s still in full-on grumpy dragon mode.

It seems to have had time to heal, as it is back in full health for this encounter. Unfortunately, it still has a tendency to reset if it gets too far away from its spawn point, which is really annoying, because “too far” isn’t really very far in this case. I had it happen several times both when attempting to fight it melee on horseback and when going ranged and seeking cover behind some of the close-by rock formations – the dragon would fly around and then get itself so far away from the spawn point that it would reset.

Similar to how the dragon must be kept fairly close to the spawn point, it also seems that the area where the use of spirit ashes is allowed is fairly small too, as I had Banished Knight Engvall de-spawn on me in the middle of the fight at one attempt, apparently because the dragon and we got too far away from the allowed area.

Now, if the dragon resets, it will just go back to the spawn point without regaining its health, so you can just continue the fight there. But if a spirit ash de-spawns, you may not be able to summon it again, which can be a huge disadvantage if you like to rely on them for assistance.

So, in the end, I decided to just hurry inside the cathedral and use that for cover instead while fighting the dragon with ranged weapons, my trusty longbow and shortbow.

I realize some people will consider this cheesing or even cheating. I can sort of agree with the cheesing part, but even so, I don’t share the consensus among many other former Dark Souls players that this game must be difficult and if it isn’t, it’s up to the player to nerf oneself to make it more difficult. Making things harder than they need to be just seems silly to me. Figuring out a way to defeat a boss easily is much more fulfilling to me than spending hours learning attack patterns and getting sore thumbs from my controller, but that just goes to show how different people are.

I think it’s perfectly valid to use all the tools the game makes available to you, even if that makes the game a lot easier. Perhaps Elden Ring just isn’t supposed to be a particularly difficult game? I mean, any game can be hugely difficult if you nerf yourself by not allowing certain tactics, skills or weapons.

Anyway, standing just inside the cathedral makes this fight a lot easier if you have ranged weapons at your disposal. You still need to be careful not to just stand there, as the dragon has a lot of ranged attacks at its disposal too, but at this point in the game you have probably fought enough dragons to know first-hand how annoying they are.

Its breath attacks can mostly be avoided by hiding behind the wall when it starts winding it up. Don’t stay too close to the wall, as it seems like it will sometimes go through it a little bit.

The magic missiles it fires home in on you and may go around the corner of the wall, so you still need to watch out for those and be ready to dodge them.

The most dangerous attack inside the cathedral is the one where the dragon will suddenly hold what appears to be a large crystal sword in its jaws, that it will then proceed to try to hit you with. That sword will go straight through the wall and hit you perfectly fine on the other side of it, so make sure to gain some distance when you see that coming.

The dragon seems to easily get stuck on the stairs and be a prime target for some arrows-to-the-face action. It’s really strange, because there is no roof on the cathedral, so the dragon should have been able to fly over it and use its breath attacks, which would have made this a much more fun fight, requiring me to run around and seek cover on opposite sides of the wall, but sadly it doesn’t do that.

If you fight the dragon outside the cathedral, you can summon spirit ashes to assist you, but that is not possible when inside the cathedral. Which seems fair enough, it’s not exactly difficult to defeat it this way. But if I could have summoned Latenna the Albinauric, it might have saved me some arrows. And I don’t mean to sound stingy, but an arrow is an arrow and a rune is a rune and there is no point in spending too many runes on arrows if you can get spirits to shoot them for free. I hear that being a spirit is really boring, so I’m sure they’re happy to get to see some action every now and then.

And now for the usual boring information 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’m not sure what rune level I was when the first part of the video at Three Sisters was recorded, but I was rune level 99 when the second part was recorded much later. I’m not really sure if that is generally considered appropriate, but that is the level I happened to have reached at the time, and 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 ;-)

I was considering splitting this up into two videos, but in the end I decided to just do one video with both encounters of the dragon, to sort of tie things together ;-)