Elden Ring: Malenia, Blade of Miquella / Malenia, Goddess of Rot (Haligtree Roots) Boss Fight
Published: November 26, 2025 at 10:59:50 PM UTC
Malenia, Blade of Miquella / Malenia, Goddess of Rot is in the highest tier of bosses in Elden Ring, Demigods, and is found at the Haligtree Roots at the bottom of Miquella’s Haligtree. She is an optional boss in the sense that it is not required to defeat her in order to progress the main story of the game. She is by many considered the hardest boss in the base 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.
Malenia, Blade of Miquella / Malenia, Goddess of Rot is in the highest tier, Demigods, and is found at the Haligtree Roots at the bottom of Miquella’s Haligtree. She is an optional boss in the sense that it is not required to defeat her in order to progress the main story of the game. She is by many considered the hardest boss in the base game.
I actually got to this boss a while back, after clearing the Haligtree and Elphael areas, but like many other players, I hit a brick wall. In my opinion, Malenia is definitely the hardest boss in the base game. I have heard of even harder ones in the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, but I haven’t gotten to those yet.
When I first got to her, I got to spend an afternoon dying until I finally figured I’d go do something else for a while. My weapons weren’t fully upgraded, and my stats weren’t entirely where I wanted them to be when facing the hardest boss in the game, so I figured I’d go finish off the main story first and then come back.
When first encountered, Malenia is in her human form. She is a very fast and agile fighter wielding a katana. In the first phase of the fight, the two most annoying things with her is that she heals herself on every hit and that she does something called Waterfowl Dance, which is a four-step move that does insanely high damage and will usually mean death if you don’t dodge at least some of it.
I found the self-healing part less of a problem than I thought it would be. If using a spirit summon like I did, Black Knife Tiche is probably the best in phase one, as she is quite good at dodging the boss’s attacks and therefore limiting how much the boss will heal herself.
Phase one is hard, but it didn’t take many attempts until I felt I had that one pretty well under control. But then I got to phase two and realized that by comparison, phase one was not hard at all.
When Malenia, Blade of Miquella is defeated, she will transform into her true self, Malenia, Goddess of Rot. In this phase she still has many of the same attacks that she did in phase one, but she gains several new Scarlet Rot-inflicting area of effect and ranged attacks.
She will always start phase two by floating in the air for a couple of seconds, then come crashing down and knock you over, then after couple of seconds more do a Scarlet Rot explosion that does huge damage. If you get hit and knocked down by her, you will most likely not have time to get away from the explosion, so what I usually do is just start sprinting as soon as phase two starts as that allows me to avoid it most of the time.
After the explosion, she will be inside a flower and quite passive for several seconds. The area around her inflicts heavy Scarlet Rot damage at this point – which would often kill Tiche – but she is open to ranged attacks, and that was actually what I took advantage of on my successful kill of her in this video.
I had died to her more times than I can be bothered to count while attempting to take her in melee, but going ranged helped a whole lot. Whenever she’s not doing the explosion and flower part, just focus on staying alive and dodging her attacks, don’t try to attack her back. Once she does the flower, take the opportunity to return some pain.
And 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. I also used the Black Bow with Serpent Arrows as well as regular Arrows in this fight. I was level 178 when this video was recorded, which I think is a bit high for this content, but it was still a reasonably fun and 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 ;-)
Fan art inspired by this boss fight
Further Reading
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