Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is proving to be a bit of a tough nut to crack, and chief among the problems players are facing is the DLC’s final fight. Since launch, even the most seasoned Elden Ring vets have found it immensely difficult, but that hasn’t stopped players from rising to the occasion by crafting the most ridiculous builds. Case in point, a player has now managed to defeat both of the final boss’ phases with a single attack.
Spoilers for the end of Shadow of the Erdtree follow.
First spotted by Gamesradar+, the streamer Ainrun is the latest to fell the DLC’s final boss, Promised Consort Radahn, in utterly stunning fashion. Some have crafted builds that allow them to power through Radahn’s immense attacks, but Ainrun has opted for something entirely different: obliterate him with a single attack.
How does he manage the feat? With the help of several magics. Several more than I even thought you could reasonably stack up in Elden Ring if I’m being entirely honest. As a Soulslike player who often employs the blade and nothing else, magic seems wild in these games. I still won’t use it, but good for you all on evidently cracking this game wide open.
I sincerely do not understand the amount of things that Ainrun uses prior to the fight and their various effects. I get the Physick, obviously, but he goes on to use several more consumables, including a stone that appears to frenzy him—a tactic that’s being used to obliterate other bosses with powerful techniques as well—which stirs his character from a sleep that they fall into due to something else Ainrun does prior to the video starting. He also uses Ash of War techniques, which are abilities often tied to specific weapons that use FP (Elden Ring’s mana), like a flag standard that buffs Ainrun and a literal act of seppuku.
By the end of the exhaustive list, Ainrun is rocking something like a dozen buffs at once. With all the various items and techniques rattled off, including a weapon change, he enters Radahn’s arena, uses one more Ash of War skill, and then launches a charged heavy attack as the boss rushes to close the distance between them. You can barely make it out due to Twitter’s video compression, but that single attack does 93,000 points of damage to Radahn, completely nuking his health bar.
It’s a move so potent, it triggers Radahn’s second-phase cutscene and also skips the entirety of the actual phase. As it ends, Radahn (and Miquella, I guess) fall limp, having barely gotten off a single attack. Radahn’s move does connect and manages to kill Ainrun, but with the boss defeated, only Ainrun will return and be able to claim victory.
As busted as Radahn’s fight at the end of Shadow of the Erdtree is—and for the record, it’s really broken and not in your favor—it’s almost been worth it to see how players like Ainrun craft builds to meet the challenge. There are obviously much simpler ways to buff yourself, like using just a modicum of the skills Ainrun deployed here rather than the full gamut. You can top up on Scadutree blessings to meet Radahn’s immense strength via Shadow of the Erdtree’s independent leveling system, but it’s especially satisfying watching folks go off the deep end and develop wildly cracked builds instead. Hats off to FromSoftware for allowing players to break the game in their own favor, and to the community that has risen to the occasion and shown Radahn what’s what.
