My favourite Elden Ring boss fight

I won’t really hold back on spoilers and I also won’t give any further warnings beyond this point. If you’re sensitive to spoilers and for this game I highly recommend trying to not get spoiled and to experience the game’s world as much as possible for yourself, you should probably click away now. For those deciding to stay, I’d like to ask you to please not spoil anything in the comments that isn’t discussed in this piece either, as many still haven’t finished the game yet.

Also this isn’t a guide btw., just my perspective and overall approach to challenging boss fights in general, with a little bit of story time on the side. Good? Good!

It took me two and a half weeks to platinum Elden Ring with just over 100 hours in-game time. I actually kind of forgot that I would also need to go back to Horizon Forbidden West as I did pay for that game as well, plus I kind of want to go back to playing Guilty Gear Strive at some point too. All in good time I guess, because there was just no way that I would have stopped playing Elden Ring, the game’s just too good. As good as it is I do seem to be actively breaking the game rather frequently… when I am not doing that however, it’s me getting smacked six ways to Sunday by bosses. An activity that honestly makes up the majority of my time spent with Elden Ring.

Smooth sailing so far

There have been quite a few bosses in the game up to this point that really challenged me. Radahn was one such boss. While Radahn was an entirely new experience for me, being what is essentially a Raid boss, it was all very doable within a few attempts. Granted Radahn took me a lot of attempts, but that’s mainly as I also didn’t realise for quite some time, that you can resummon NPCs that were already killed off by him. All in all, while challenging, no boss had really felt like an impenetrable wall up to this point. Well, things were about to change.

My road to Godskin Apostle

First and foremost I had reached this place very early on as I was exploring every nook and cranny I could think of and had access to. Long before I had any damage output, weapons or anything really. So when I made it up the tower to find a closed door and then went all the way to the bottom to be confronted with Godskin Apostle, I was doing such pitiful damage to him that there was really no point in even trying to learn the boss fight at this point. I put two and two together and came to the conclusion that I have to beat him to open the door upstairs. I didn’t really think much of it, left it for later and kind of forgot about that boss fight to be honest.

Fast forward several tens of hours later and I am out exploring as per usual and come across the windmill village, giving off the creepiest of Midsommar vibes. As I make my way through the village, who do I meet at the top? Godskin Apostle. My original encounter with him was very brief and quite some time ago, so I can’t really figure out why his design and name seem familiar right now. Either way, it’s an open area, I can use my summons to distract him and kill him off, whenever he isn’t focused on me. That fight was in fact so easy that I barely even took note of his moveset. A few hours more pass with me doing whatever and I finally decide to test my mettle against Radahn once more. This time I actually succeeded in learning the fight and bringing him down. I explore the arena, find a cave, run through that, beat the Putrid Tree Spirit after a few attempts and check the stuff I got. At that point I realise that I can’t select Radahn’s Great Rune. I didn’t need to think about that since beating Godrick, as Rennala’s didn’t require anything of the sort. So I check the description and it mentions the Divine Tower of Caelid, which as I check my map I do have access to and that’s when I finally remembered the Godskin Apostle down there and why the guy on the hill seemed familiar.

Most challenging boss for me yet

Let me get two things out of the way first. The first one; this has been by far the most difficult boss fight for me in all of FromSoft’s Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro titles so far. Not even exaggerating. Gael and Midir took about two hours each to learn and beat, Orphan of Kos less than two hours, Demon of Hatred also about an hour or so. Ornstein and Smough took me the longest in my original run I’d say, which definitely exceeded two hours. It’s been so long though that I can’t really recall how exactly that went down anymore. Divine Tower of Caelid’s Godskin Apostle however, blows all of this out of the water, as I was banging my head against this wall for a solid four hours plus. Technically the absolute longest would’ve been Ludwig at BL4, which took me north of six hours for my first kill, but that’s a challenge run and doesn’t really count in my opinion. The second point; if you are just here to unlock the rune, you don’t actually need to fight him at all. The door, just like it was with Godrick, opens after you’ve beaten Radahn. I am not going to front, if I had known that, I probably would’ve come back later for Godskin Apostle, but I didn’t check and just assumed that I needed to kill him for that. I am however glad that I persevered and got to ride that high that comes with overcoming a challenge. That dopamine rush is so good, that I’ll just be happy that I am dumb and got rewarded for it anyway.

Divine Tower of Caelid’s Godskin Apostle

I can only assume that this version of the boss shares the same moveset as his windmill village counterpart, but I don’t know as I cheesed the everloving fluff out of that one. While it might be possible to cheese the Divine Tower version as well, it at least doesn’t work the same way as he immediately dispatched my summons. In the end I didn’t even bother trying that anymore and went back to the old ways and just tried to learn his moveset and deal with it.

While his second phase seems really threatening, he leaves a lot of wide openings and also gives you a lot more time to respond to the majority of his attacks. His first phase is the real challenge though and considering how much energy it takes to focus on everything it’s very likely that you have run yourself dry by the second phase and thus start to think that it’s difficult, when the second phase is almost a freebie as long as you have seen every attack at least once or twice. So what makes his first phase so difficult?

1st Phase

As with most enemies using a weapon that attacks with spinning animations, it can take a while to identify which animation signifies what, as all that spinning, twirling and other animation flourishes can start to blur together. It’s a lot harder than say dealing with a sword type, this might be more of a me problem though. In any case, once you can visually identify his moves, the next issues are follow up attacks, delayed attacks and the occasional hitbox that gives you Plesioth PTSD flashbacks, even though it really isn’t anywhere near that bad, salt does have its way with your mind though.

Early on you might also figure out that certain moves at range and out of his strings allow you to go for easy punishes on him. The two I focused on first were his slam down attacks, as well as his black flame toss. The black flame toss at range is essentially him screwing up and granting you a freebie, because the actual use of that move is far more nefarious. If you ever decide to heal without having baited out an attack first, he will chuck this black flame at you, for every single healing attempt you make, without fail. The lesson here is the same as it is in any fighting game, if it’s predictable, you should probably be doing something else first to mask your intent. That’s another thing you have to keep in the back of your head, as you will actually have to make sure he does something else first before you can heal, as you will otherwise run out of flasks and still haven’t really managed to actually heal up the damage.

Another one and I don’t really know what to call this move, he kind of spins his weapon in front of him while walking forward, creating a wall of multi hitting and continuous damage. Let’s call it twirly spinning damage shield attack. They should hire me for my genius level sense of naming things. Anyway, he starts that move by swinging his weapon in front of him in a cross-like pattern first, which means you should be dodging and running backwards, which also leaves a good opportunity to punish him. If you however got hit by the spin or generally needed to heal, this is a perfect opportunity to do so, as he is stuck in this animation for quite a while. The cross animation of his weapon can also lead to another attack, but that is also avoided by dodging backwards. So long as you respond to the initial animation you will be fine. The attack string also ends in a slam, which means this can be punished nicely as well.

The last move that I found that can be easily punished, at least once you get used to the hitbox on it, is his poke and pull attack. The hitbox on this one can be a little aggravating, but if you have a longer reaching weapon, an L2 attack or anything else with a little bit of reach, dodging to the left or back, going left makes it easier though and creating a little bit of space between your and his weapon should give you enough time to get some damage in.

While the fight and especially with the points I’ve just laid out seems extremely simple on the surface, there are a lot of things to consider. I haven’t even listed all of his moves, it’s just the ones that I felt I needed to look out for the most. The way his moves are designed, coupled with the fact that you cannot safely attack or heal while he is turtling and regenerating his invisible stance break gauge, a lot of things are starting to pile up on you, not too dissimilar from what is commonly being discussed in fighting games in regards to your mental stack. This is still easier of course, because it’s not a person, the boss is designed to be beaten and it has fixed behavioural patterns. This is an amazingly crafted moveset though, at least in my opinion it is. Being able to exploit it a little bit more with every attempt, creates a feedback loop that keeps you engaged and wanting to try again. Once you have internalised his moveset and don’t need to expend as much mental power towards his first phase anymore, his second phase loses almost all of its threat. From roughly the 60% mark of his health bar onwards he will transition into his second phase, as soon as he gets a moment to breathe that is. Depending on your damage output, his health might actually be a lot lower by the time he transitions. Good for you.

2nd Phase

There isn’t much to take note of in his second phase. Once you understand that all of his enhancements actually make your life easier, it really just becomes a game of remembering as much as possible and then just going ham on him. His black flame AoE attacks can’t really hurt you as long as you take care not to get cornered and his body stretching attacks, that might even give Dhalsim a few new ideas, have either long startups, long recovery periods or both. Chances are you will probably still get killed off by his second phase a few times as well, but it’s seriously nowhere near the threat that his first phase is. If you can get past his first phase consistently, it won’t take too many attempts to kill him off afterwards.

I really like this boss

While Margit, Agheel and the Tree Sentinel have been lauded for their tutorial-like structures, that mainly refers to people not used to challenging boss fights. Agheel might be the exception here, as that is a real tutorial on forcing you to use a hybrid playstyle of Torrent to create space, attacking the head with jumping attacks and taking advantage of stance breaks, which as a combination is unique to Elden Ring. What Godskin Apostle does down here is to force you to deal with his moves, tendencies and timings. It’s one of the most pure boss encounters I’ve had in Elden Ring so far. Summons seemed useless to me, there are no horse iFrames to take advantage of, it’s an enclosed and a relatively small space, which means you can’t really run away from him either. No it’s not a huge spectacle, there’s no need to even fight him, unless you want the armour set or the treasure in the back, but it’s just a very well put together boss encounter and I really enjoyed it. Did I get salty during all of this? Of course I did, if you’ve ever watched any of my live streams, you would have known that already though. The salt is worth the gratification of overcoming a challenge like this though, it’s just amazing.

Closing Words

What are your thoughts on this boss? Let me know in the comments, either here or in the YouTube video above, but please, as I mentioned in the beginning, please do not mention anything outside of the content that I discussed in here. It is an open world game, everyone takes different routes through the game and many of us haven’t finished the game yet. Don’t ruin the experience for others and please keep the discussion focused on the topics mentioned in this piece only.

Thank you very much for sticking around all the way to the end. See you next time!