Elden Ring: Lichdragon Fortissax (Deeproot Depths) 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.

Lichdragon Fortissax is in the highest tier, Legendary Bosses, and is found in the Northern part of Deeproot Depths, but only if you have progressed Fia's questline far enough. It is an optional boss in the sense that you do not need to kill it to advance the main story, but it is required to finish Fia's questline.

In order to access this boss, you will need to progress Fia's questline far enough so that she is found sleeping near the Prince of Death’s Throne site of grace in Deeproot Depths, the same area you have previously fought her Champions in if you’re doing her questline.

When interacting with the sleeping Fia, you will be asked about whether you want to enter the Deathbed Dream. Do so and you will be quickly facing a very grumpy undead dragon without further notice or warning, so make sure you’re prepared for that.

The area this fight takes place in is a bit different to the previous dragons I have faced, in that there are no rock formations or other things to hide behind. I found the only way to avoid his breath attacks was to keep running and stay mobile.

In addition to breath attacks, biting, clawing, flying up and charging you, this dragon is constantly making clouds that cause Deathblight build-up, which will kill you instantly if it gets full. Because of that, I decided that it was too risky for me and my tender flesh to melee him, so I once again sent in Banished Knight Engvall to do the dirty work, while I stayed at range and used my shortbow to chip away at the boss’s health.

As I still haven’t managed to get my secondary weapons upgraded very well due to the critical Smithing Stone 3 shortage in the Lands Between, which is definitely neither caused by me upgrading too many weapons early in the game, nor by my general reluctance to go grinding for materials, my shortbow is doing abysmal damage on its own, so I decided to spice things up and use some of my newly crafted Rotbone Arrows to infect the old lizard with a horrible disease, while I cackled manically.

It worked pretty well. Once the dragon was infected, its health started to tick away at a reasonable rate while I kept shooting regular arrows at it. A single infection wasn’t enough to kill it completely, but I was too stingy with the Rotbone Arrows to infect it again as I’m still not at a place where I can farm the materials to make more and I have a strange feeling that this is not the last annoying boss that I will need to give a horrible infection before I’m done with this game ;-)

The Deathblight build-up didn’t seem to affect Engvall at all, as he was running around and swinging his halberd wildly as usual, so it seemed like a very reasonable division of labor to send him in close.

The Deathblight isn’t the only thing to worry about in this fight though, as the dragon obviously has all the tricks of other dragons, plus it will even summon what appears to be a very large sword made of red lightning, that it will try to use to slice unwary Tarnished with.

Fortunately, this particular Tarnished is quite wary and has faced much worse than swords made of red lightning at this point, so the dragon might as well have saved himself the effort and just died and handed over the loot without all that huffing and puffing and parading around when we all know who the main character and hero of this story is.

I found it to be a pretty fun fight. I always like fights where I can go ranged and run around to keep my distance, especially with these large bosses where the camera can quickly become the main enemy. Difficulty-wise, it felt like one of the easier dragons I have faced so far. The main danger seems to be the Deathblight build-up, but that can be largely avoided by staying at range. I imagine it would be much harder as a melee-only character though.

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 89 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 ;-)