Shadow of the Erdtree Main Bosses, Ranked by Difficulty

2026-10-24 · 11 min read · Elden Ring

Shadow of the Erdtree is the hardest thing FromSoftware has ever shipped, and it is not particularly close. That reputation gets thrown around about every DLC, but here it holds up: players who had cleared the base game of Elden Ring several times, Malenia included, walked into the Realm of Shadow in June 2024 and got flattened by the first boss of the first legacy dungeon. Some of that was the bosses. A lot of it was a progression system nobody had internalised yet.

So before the ranking, one rule that frames everything below. The DLC runs on its own power curve. Your level and weapon upgrades still matter, but the number that decides whether a boss is fair or impossible is your Scadutree Blessing, raised by Scadutree Fragments scattered across the map, with a separate Revered Spirit Ash blessing for your summons. The blessing goes up to 20. A boss that feels like a brick wall at blessing 3 can be a perfectly reasonable duel at blessing 10, and a lot of early discourse about how broken the DLC was came from people who had skipped half the fragments on the way. The order below assumes you have explored roughly as much as the game expects you to have explored by the time you meet each boss.

It covers the eleven fights most people would call the main bosses of the expansion - the ones that guard progress, the marquee optional dragons and demons, and the final encounter. Field bosses and catacomb guardians are a separate conversation, though a couple of them deserve a mention at the end.

11. Metyr, Mother of Fingers

Metyr is the most beautiful arena in the DLC and the least threatening fight on this list. The Cathedral of Manus Metyr is a cosmic dead end hidden behind the Finger Ruins, and the reveal of what the Two Fingers actually came from is one of the better lore moments in the expansion. The fight itself is a light show. She fills the screen with projectiles and beams, almost all of which can be outrun or sidestepped once you realise how slowly she commits.

Her real difficulty is visual noise. The first few attempts go badly because you cannot see your own character through the effects, not because the attacks are hard to dodge. Once your eyes adjust she is a damage check with a lot of downtime, and players who reach her late, at high blessing, frequently kill her in one try and wonder what the fuss was.

10. Scadutree Avatar

The Scadutree Avatar is the expansion's answer to the Erdtree Avatars of the base game, except instead of a single walking tree you get a tree that refuses to stay dead. Kill it and it reforms at one of the glowing spots around the arena, which means the fight is really three short fights stitched together, each with a slightly different pattern.

It hits hard with holy and it covers ground, but it is readable, and the resurrection mechanic turns out to be generous: each life is small enough that a decent build removes it before the avatar has time to do anything interesting. The fight is a stamina test rather than a skill test, and it sits this low because nothing about it requires unlearning a habit.

9. Putrescent Knight

The Putrescent Knight lives at the bottom of the Stone Coffin Fissure, and it looks like a nightmare somebody assembled out of black tar and a horse skeleton. It swings a huge sickle with ridiculous reach, and halfway through it drags the fight into a dark void where the floor and sky stop meaning anything.

That void phase sounds worse than it plays. Its attacks are long and dramatic, the arena gives you room, and the main trap is panic-rolling into the sickle's follow-through. It is a great example of FromSoftware using spectacle to make a mid-difficulty boss feel like an event, and it is one of the few DLC bosses where a confident player can learn most of the moveset in a single attempt.

8. Romina, Saint of the Bud

Romina guards the Church of the Bud in the Ancient Ruins of Rauh, and she is the gate to Enir-Ilim, which puts her in a strange place: she is mandatory, she is late, and she is noticeably easier than several bosses players will have already beaten. She is a scarlet rot saint fused to an insectoid lower body, and her arena sits in a field of burning flowers.

Her threat is rot buildup and a handful of wide sweeping combos that punish anyone who stays directly in front of her. Bring a cure, stay at her flank, and she goes down. Her placement makes her feel like a breather the game hands you before the final ascent, which is fair, because what waits at the top of Enir-Ilim is not a breather.

7. Midra, Lord of Frenzied Flame

Midra is the reward for surviving the Abyssal Woods, and the best piece of horror direction in the DLC. You walk into Midra's Manse, you find a man sitting quietly, and the fight begins as a conversation with someone who has been holding the Frenzied Flame inside himself for a very long time. Then he lets it go.

Mechanically, Midra is two different problems. The first phase is a sword duel that most players handle comfortably. The second turns him into a towering yellow-flame monster whose real weapon is frenzy buildup, a status that eats your health and most of your FP at once. Players who do not have a counter for it lose the fight from full health without understanding what happened. Players who stay out of his eyeline and bring something to blunt the frenzy find a fight that is more scary than hard.

6. Bayle the Dread

Bayle is the dragon fight Elden Ring had been promising since its first trailer. At the top of the Jagged Peak, an ancient dragon who once challenged Placidusax waits on a ruined mountaintop, and if you have met Igon on the way up, the old dragon hunter joins you, shouting at Bayle for the whole fight in one of the most cathartic NPC summons FromSoftware has ever written.

Without Igon, Bayle is a big, fast, aggressive dragon with a lot of health and fire that covers the arena. With Igon, the fight is easier, mostly because Bayle stops looking at you for a few seconds at a time. He sits in the middle of the list because his attacks are big and loud rather than deceptive. Dragons in Souls games have historically been awkward to fight, all hitbox and camera. Bayle is the first one where the camera mostly cooperates and the fight is about reading a creature rather than wrestling a lock-on.

5. Divine Beast Dancing Lion

This is the boss that convinced half the internet the DLC was overtuned. The Divine Beast Dancing Lion waits at the end of Belurat, Tower Settlement, the first legacy dungeon, and it was the first contact many players had with the blessing system. Walk in at blessing zero and it deletes you in a few hits.

Even at a sensible blessing, it is a genuinely hard boss for where it sits. It is a ceremonial lion costume come to life, it changes its elemental behaviour as the fight goes on, and its jumps and spins are built to disrupt the lock-on camera. The camera is the real enemy here - the creature is large, it leaps over you, and a locked-on player loses track of it constantly. Breaking lock and fighting manually, which almost nobody does instinctively, is the actual solution. It ranks this high because it is the hardest boss relative to the point in the game where you meet it.

4. Rellana, Twin Moon Knight

Rellana is Rennala's sister, and she guards Castle Ensis with a style that mixes Carian sorcery and fire in the same combo strings. That mix is what makes her hard: she alternates between fast twin-sword melee and spells that change the safe distance, so the spacing that saved you from her blades gets you hit by the moon a second later.

Her second phase brings out the twin moons that give her the title, and it is one of the most visually spectacular attacks in the expansion. It is also one of the most punishing if you have not learned where to stand. Rellana is the first DLC boss that feels like a proper Malenia-tier duel: no gimmick, no camera trick, just a skilled fighter with long strings and very few gaps. If the Dancing Lion was the lesson in blessings, Rellana is the lesson in patience.

3. Commander Gaius

Gaius is Radahn's sworn brother, a heavy knight riding a giant boar, and he is optional, and he is miserable in a way that is hard to defend. His charge covers enormous distance, his boar's hitbox lingers longer than it looks like it should, and his arena makes him spend half the fight far away from you and the other half running you over.

Some of the frustration is legitimate difficulty and some of it is the camera again, struggling to frame a large mounted enemy moving at speed. The fight improves a lot once you learn which charges to roll toward rather than away from, and Gaius's lore - one of the few people Radahn trusted - gives the encounter weight. But he earns his place near the top through raw unpleasantness as much as design, and that is worth being honest about.

2. Messmer the Impaler

Messmer is the face of the expansion and the best boss in it. A son of Marika, sealed with a cursed eye and left to burn the Realm of Shadow on her behalf, he waits at the top of Shadow Keep with a spear, a flame that does not behave like normal fire, and serpents that coil out of his body. He is the antagonist of the DLC in every sense - the man responsible for the crusade whose victims you have been walking past for hours.

As a fight, he is nearly perfect. His first phase is a fast, honest spear duel with clear punish windows if you are willing to stay close. His second phase sprouts wings and adds aerial follow-ups and serpent attacks that extend his reach in ways that punish players who learned only phase one. Nothing about him feels cheap. He is hard because he is fast, aggressive and varied, which is exactly the kind of hard the series built its reputation on.

Messmer is the fight where you stop blaming the camera and start blaming yourself, and that is the highest compliment a FromSoftware boss can get.

1. Promised Consort Radahn

The final boss of Shadow of the Erdtree is the hardest boss FromSoftware has made, and on release it was the most argued about. At the top of Enir-Ilim, Miquella's plan finally pays off: Radahn, the conqueror of the stars, is brought back in a new body to stand as his consort, and you fight what the most famous warrior of the Lands Between becomes when a god-to-be gives him everything.

His first phase is already a top-tier fight: enormous twin greatswords, gravity magic, and combos that end in slams covering most of the arena. His second phase is where the argument starts. Miquella joins in, every big swing is followed by delayed holy light that strikes after the blade has passed, and the screen fills with effects that make it genuinely difficult to see what is happening. Players who loved it call it the purest dodge test in the series. Players who hated it point out that you are often dodging things you could not see coming.

Both are partly right. The fight is learnable and it is beaten every day by people with nothing but a weapon and patience. But it is also the clearest example of where Elden Ring's maximalism tips over. The fix most players land on is the same one that works for the Dancing Lion: more blessing, a shield, or a spirit ash to split his attention. There is no shame in any of that. The game gives you those tools because it knows exactly how much it is asking.

The ones that did not make the list

A few non-main bosses deserve an honourable mention because they are harder than half the fights above. Rakshasa, out by Rauh Base, is a pure speed check that kills careless players in two or three swings. Dryleaf Dane, the martial artist on Moorth Highway, is a short fight with the most unpredictable timings in the expansion. Neither is required, both are better than some of the mandatory fights, and both prove that the DLC's difficulty is spread across the map rather than saved for the end.

The overall shape of the ranking says something about the expansion. The hardest fights - Radahn, Messmer, Rellana - are duels against humanoid opponents. The bosses that frustrate rather than challenge - the Lion, Gaius - are the ones fighting the camera. FromSoftware is at its best when it builds a skilled opponent and at its most divisive when it builds a large one.

Test your memory of the Realm of Shadow

All eleven bosses above are in the Soulsdle boss pool, filed under the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. In Classic mode they share the same region, Realm of Shadow, and the same DLC clue, so once both turn green you are down to a small list and the type and health columns do the rest. Telling Messmer and Radahn apart by silhouette is considerably easier than beating either of them.