Elden Ring: Starscourge Radahn (Wailing Dunes) 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.

Starscourge Radahn is in the highest tier, Demigods, and is found in the Wailing Dunes area behind Redmane Castle in Caelid when the Festival is active. Despite being a Demigod, this boss is optional in the sense that you do not need to kill him in order to advance the main story, but he is one of the Shardbearers of which at least two must be defeated, and he must be defeated in order to access the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, so for most people he will be a mandatory boss anyway.

This boss fight starts as soon as you teleport through the waygate on the shore. Initially, the boss will be a very long distance away but not being one to miss an opportunity to be highly annoying, he will be shooting great arrows at you. You can avoid them with well-timed rolling or just sprinting sideways, but I found it easiest to use Torrent during this phase of the fight. If you ride sideways and not towards the boss, most of the arrows should miss you. And the arrows hurt quite a bit, so it’s good when they miss.

I suppose it is possible to head straight for the boss and take him on by yourself, but you are clearly meant to make use of multiple NPCs in this one. You will see the first three summoning signs very close to where you start, so run over there and summon them. The debris in front of them will block one great arrow but then be destroyed and not block the next one, so keep moving.

The NPCs can be summoned with a quick button press when riding past them. Even though there is a delay of several seconds before they appear and you get a confirmation message about them being summoned, you can move on quickly and not stand around to wait for them.

I suggest using Torrent to quickly get around the area and summon the remaining NPCs. If all of them are available, you should be able to find summoning symbols for Blaidd, Iron Fist Alexander, Patches, Great Horned Tragoth, Lionel the Lionhearted, Finger Maiden Therolina, and Castellan Jerren, for a total of seven helpers. Since I’m a Dark Souls veteran and therefore have suffered huge piles of crap from Patches in other lives, I killed him on sight in this game, so he wasn’t available to help me in this fight, but the others were there.

When summoned, the NPCs will immediately start running towards the boss. When the first of them reach him, he will stop shooting great arrows but instead launch some sort of arrow-wall attack that will also home in on you, so make sure to avoid that. He will usually only do that once and then do melee battle with the NPCs, giving you a bit of peace to focus on finding all of them.

Once you have found and summoned all the NPCs, you can join the fight with the boss yourself if you want – or you can just keep your distance and make the NPCs do all the work. While safer, that will also take a lot longer. During phase one, he’s not horribly dangerous to engage with as the NPCs will keep him pretty well occupied, so I would suggest contributing some damage yourself.

When you get close to the boss, you will notice that he is riding on a horse that is way too small for him, so small in fact that it looks comical. According to lore, he learned gravity magic to avoid breaking his horse’s back, which also explains why it is so agile with a huge oaf on its back. Learning gravity magic sounds really complicated to me; I would think it would be a lot easier to just stop eating people and gaining weight.

Multiple NPCs will die during the fight, but their summoning signs will reappear and be available for re-summoning after a short while, although not necessarily in the same spot as the first time you summoned them. A large part of this fight is sprinting around on Torrent and looking for summoning symbols to keep enough NPCs active to keep the boss occupied.

When the boss reaches half health, he will jump high up into the air and disappear. With some luck, you may be able to get him a bit below half health before phase two starts, hopefully making it shorter, as it is much more difficult.

After a few seconds, he will come crashing down like a meteor, which will most likely kill you if you’re not somewhere else, so keep moving on Torrent at this time. This is also probably a good time to start looking for summoning signs to re-summon the NPCs that died during phase one, as you definitely want something to distract him in phase two.

During phase two, he gains several new and nasty abilities, so I found that the best approach was to focus on summoning NPCs and keeping my distance. When I had time and happened to be close enough to the boss, I would shoot arrows at him from horseback, but they didn’t do a lot of damage as my instance of the Lands Between appears to have a critical shortage of Smithing Stones + 3, so I’m having a hard time getting my secondary weapons upgraded without lengthy grinding.

Especially the gravity orbs that he summons can be devastating, as they will home in on you, do huge damage and knock you off Torrent if you’re not careful. Torrent getting killed is actually a real risk in this fight, so it may be a good idea to bring some healing items for him as well. It seems to be mostly the melee attacks and area of effect explosions that affect Torrent though, so try to avoid those while mounted.

I did try going melee with him during phase two on previous attempts, but after a while getting one-shotted just wasn’t fun anymore, so in the final battle you see in the video, I decided to let the NPCs do the work in phase two while I just focused on staying alive and re-summoning them when they died, which they did a lot.

I’m not sure if there is a real system to where the summoning signs will re-appear, but they are definitely not guaranteed to be in the same spot every time. Annoyingly, there will sometimes be some lingering glow that can be seen from a distance without a summoning sign actually being there, so sometimes it feels a bit like headless chicken mode to chase around after them randomly. Fortunately, I’m very accustomed to headless chicken mode, that is what usually happens for me during boss fights. In this case, it’s just extra fast headless chicken mode because I’m mounted.

This boss is apparently extremely weak to Scarlet Rot, so you may make this fight easier if you manage to infect him with that. I didn’t use this approach as the Rotbone Arrows are still too scarce for me and I seemed to be doing okay without them. It would probably have gone a lot faster though, but no matter. The NPCs took most of the beating anyway and my own tender flesh likes to be spared that way.

The boss was apparently previously known as General Radahn and is supposed to be the most powerful Demigod alive. He was previously a hero who fought Malenia, but after she gave him a particularly nasty Scarlet Rot infection, he went mad and turned to cannibalism, munching on his own soldiers. Which also explains why Redmane Castle is pretty much empty, and the boss is out in the open, scavenging for food.

I know a lot of people don’t like this fight, but I actually found it a refreshing change of pace, and I had a lot of fun sprinting around on Torrent, summoning people to annoy the boss and getting a few arrows in myself here and there. It’s no secret that I would have loved ranged combat to be more viable in this game, as I tend to always prefer the archer arche-type in typical role playing games, so whenever there is a boss fight where dusting off the longbow (or shortbow) and going ranged seems like a viable choice, I have a lot of fun with it and appreciate the variation.

When the boss is finally dead, you will get a short cutscene of a falling star crashing into the Lands Between. This isn’t just a pretty display, it actually changes the landscape by making a huge hole in the ground back in Limgrave, making a passage to the subterranean Nokron, Eternal City area that was previously inaccessible. This area is optional, but you will need to go through there if you’re doing Ranni’s questline.

Notice that in the area where you fight the boss, there is also an available dungeon when he is dead. It’s called War-Dead Catacombs and is located in the Northern-most part of the area. It’s easy to miss if you don’t expect it to be there, but if you follow the shore, you should notice the door in the cliff side.

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 80 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 or days, as I don’t find that fun at all.