Elden Ring: Night's Cavalry (Caelid) 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.

Night’s Cavalry is in the lowest tier, Field Bosses, and is found outdoors in Caelid along the road near the Nomadic Merchant in South Caelid. It only spawns at night, so just pass time until Nightfall. Like most lesser bosses in the game, this one is optional in the sense that you do not need to kill it in order to advance the main story.

I have encountered several other members of the Night’s Cavalry on my travels through the Lands Between so far. They all look like black knights atop black horses and they are all high and mighty during the night, but nowhere to be seen during the day. It all seems rather shady to me and judging by how they usually react when I approach, I’m pretty sure that these cavalry guys are up to no good.

Even though I generally dislike mounted combat, I decided I’d try to take this one out on horseback, just to get some practice. There was a lot of riding around and very few hits landed, until he managed to whack me so hard over the head with his flail that I dismounted myself and then just decided to finish the fight on foot, as the mounted combat would have taken forever and just isn’t very fun anyway.

I used my usual strategy of killing the horse first, forcing him to dismount as well. Actually, calling it a “strategy” is perhaps a bit much, it’s more a matter of me swinging my weapon around wildly and happening to hit the horse instead of the rider, but the end result is the same, even if it takes a bit longer to get there.

After being forcefully dismounted by having his horse killed beneath him, the knight will land on his back and become vulnerable to a critical hit. I usually miss those opportunities, but this time I managed to land it, taking a huge chunk off his health. It’s important to stay close to him when fighting him on foot or he will just summon another horse and while there is no point in beating a dead horse, the new one he summons is very much alive and will have to be put down as well. Fortunately, after having a sword-spear inserted into his face, it only took a couple more hits to finish him off, so no more horses had to die ;-)