Elden Ring: Regal Ancestor Spirit (Nokron Hallowhorn Grounds) 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.

Regal Ancestor Spirit is in the highest tier, Legendary Bosses, and is found in the Hallowhorn Grounds area of the underground Nokron, Eternal City. Notice that there are two separate places in the game called Hallowhorn Grounds, the other is in the nearby Siofra River. This boss is optional in the sense that you do not need to kill it in order to advance the main story.

If you have already been to Siofra River, you know how this works. You will find what appears to be a dead reindeer inside a crumbling temple-like structure. On the stairs leading up to the temple are some pillars that need to be lit on fire. The way to do that is to find some corresponding pillars in the area around the temple and light those, then the ones along the stairs will also light up. Once they’re all lit, you can interact with the dead reindeer and be teleported to an area where you will get to fight a much livelier version of it.

If you already lit the similar pillars in Siofra River, you may remember there were eight of them. If you’re like me, you might assume that there are eight in Nokron as well and spend a lot of time searching for the last two, only to find out that there are in fact only six. You should get a message about something happening when you have lit all six, but I must have missed that in the middle of all the excitement, because I actually spent quite a while searching for two more until I happened to come by the temple and noticed all six were lit. Even for a patient person like myself, searching for something that doesn’t exist is going to take unreasonably long, so I decided to stop looking and go do glorious battle instead.

The boss itself appears to be a huge, magical reindeer, very much like the Ancestral Spirit in the temple in Siofra River, except this one is bigger and badder. It can fly too, so I’m still leaning toward both of them in fact being Santa’s reindeer. And they certainly both belong on the Naughty list, they’re really not very well-behaved.

You fight it in what appears to be a dimly lit, underground swamp with the spirits of many other animals around. At first, I thought they were the spirits of all the sheep I had killed to get materials for crafting bone arrows, but if that was the case, there would have been a lot more of them, so these must be completely different sheep.

I wonder what a sheep could do to deserve having to spend eternity underground with a huge and grumpy reindeer though. Unless they’re members of some sort of secret and evil reindeer worshipping cult. Sheep look innocent, but you can never know for sure what goes on in their heads. Of all the things that could go on, worshipping a reindeer seems strange, but also something that a sheep might do. I think I might be on to a hidden and nefarious plot here.

Anyway, I once again called upon Banished Knight Engvall to assist me in this fight, but I’m actually thinking that something with ranged attacks would have been better, as the reindeer flies around a lot and is a bit difficult to get into melee range of. Unless it charges you, then it certainly wants to get close in a rush. Because of that, I spend a lot of time in this fight trying to chase it down. If I hadn’t been too stingy with arrows, I would probably have had a better time trying to take it down in ranged combat. I usually find that more fun anyway, so I’m actually not sure why it didn’t occur to me in this case, except for the fact that the critical shortage of Smithing Stones + 3 in the Lands Between keeps me from getting my secondary weapons upgraded at this point, so they do pitiful damage.

In addition to flying around and generally being reluctant to place itself in convenient swordspear-poking-range, the boss will also sometimes teleport to its starting location. It looks almost like it’s dropping aggro and resetting, but I’m not sure what could cause it as there is really no landscape to exploit in this area. I took it to be a combination of a brief moment to catch a breath and the reindeer just going out of its way to not go melee with a couple of magnificent warriors like Engvall and my humble self ;-)

When it does get close enough to melee, you might think something called a “regal” anything would be too well-behaved to kick people in the face. You would be wrong though, as this behemoth will happily give you a double-whammy with both hooves if you try to poke it with a spear while standing behind it. I guess that’s a natural response from any large animal being poked from behind with a spear, but it’s just not very regal-like.

Despite living inside heavy armor and parading around like a high and mighty knight, Engvall once again managed to get himself killed, forcing me to get my act together and manage on my own near the end of the fight. I know I said in the last video that he would have some job security for a while longer, but he shouldn’t be too sure if he keeps dying and letting me do all the hard work. He’s here to do the hard work for me, not the other way around. I don’t want to keep mentioning my own tender flesh, but that is in fact what Engvall is here to protect and keep safe from violent beatings from grumpy bosses.

When the boss is finally dead, you will get one of those gleaming streams in the air that will offer to teleport you out of there, but due to the size of the area, it can be a bit difficult to spot. I spent a while running around and looking for it, not sure it would be there, but it was. I didn’t find anything else interesting in the area either.

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 Longbow and Shortbow. I was rune level 83 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, as I don’t find that fun at all.