An Elden Ring challenge runner has just managed to do the unthinkable: one-shot the final — and arguably most difficult — boss of the Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. One hit, blammo, he's down.
Content creator Ainrun has posted a video in which he uses basically every buff you can imagine, including several new to Shadow of the Erdtree, to walk into the final boss arena of the DLC and just smash through the fight's two excruciating phases in a single attack. If you've encountered this boss already, you know how nightmarish this fight can be, to the point where some consider it to be the hardest fight in the entire expansion.
Warning: Spoilers for the identity of the final boss of the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC follow after the video. Read on at your own risk!
We didn't name him above to avoid spoilers, but the boss Ainrun is nuking here is Promised Consort Radahn — an absolutely nightmarish rematch against one of the main game's bosses that has plenty of people tearing their hair out due to the difficulty. The Elden Ring subreddit is full of people complaining about this guy's punishing attack patterns, especially in the second phase when Miquella pops up onto his head and infuses everything he does with a distracting golden light show.
From the creators of 49k Midra comes 93k Radahn pic.twitter.com/qLNkCrbG0t
— Ainrun (@Ainrun_ttv) July 21, 2024
Ainrun just skips all that, though. I asked one of our resident Elden Ring experts, Brendan Graeber, to walk me through what's going on here. He explained that Ainrun is likely doing the following:
This was part of a longer challenge run Ainrun has been attempted where he tries to land 100,000 damage on various bosses in a single hit. In the tweet above, he was unfortunately unable to cross 100k on the final boss, but did manage a whopping 93k — close, and pretty impressive anyway. Then, later on stream, he managed a 105k blow. Ainrun has also done a number of other incredible challenge runs, including beating the DLC with only perfumes or as a porcupine.
More players than just Ainrun are finding fun, strange, challenging, or otherwise unique ways to play through Shadow of the Erdtree. A co-op pair called Let Us Duo Her has invented a new method to cheese one of the base game's toughest bosses. Twitch streamer MissMikkaa beat the DLC using a dance mat as a controller. Community hero Let Me Solo Her has changed his name to Let Me Solo Him and is helping players tackle challenging mid-DLC boss Messmer.
But at IGN, we found the DLC incredible even without performing wild feats like this. We gave it a 10/10 in our review, saying that "[l]ike the base game did before it, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree raises the bar for single-player DLC expansions. It takes everything that made the base game such a landmark RPG, condenses it into a relatively compact 20-25 hour campaign, and provides fantastic new challenges for heavily invested fans to chew on."
Rebekah Valentine is a Senior Reporter at IGN.
