You Can Dunk On Elden Ring’s Radahn By Making Him Dunk Himself

Here’s a tip for one of the most notorious Elden Ring (opens in new tab) bosses: let Radahn defeat himself. You don’t need magic or a powered-up weapon, you just need enough dignity to let one of the most feared warriors in the Lands Between launch himself off the map to an instant death.

Some devious Elden Ring players have discovered that Radahn’s gravity magic has a fatal weakness, and that weakness is water. When you get about halfway through the big guy’s health bar, he propels himself into the sky and zooms back down as a deadly meteor. Usually you need to run like mad to dodge what is almost surely an one-hit death, but if you instead lure Radahn over near the water in his massive boss arena, he will land in it and sink.

To pull this off you need to start by fighting Radahn normally, preferably by summoning all the allies that are available in the fight. That’ll keep Radahn distracted while you throw magic at him or get a few sword swipes in. When he’s close to half health, you can start to lure him towards the  water on horseback. If you stay slightly outside of his melee range, he’ll have no choice but to chase you, and you can take him all the way to the edge of the ocean and trigger his meteor attack.

This absurd strategy—found by both Reddit user HomeGrownCrown7 (opens in new tab) and Twitter user izuoku_ (opens in new tab)—trivializes the constant balance passes on the Radahn fight, but to me it still falls in line with a history of weird tactics for Souls bosses. FromSoftware initially nerfed Radahn’s damage output too much and recently (opens in new tab) made him threatening again. Now you can’t boast about killing Radahn without specifying exactly when you killed Radahn. Surely the git gud-ers won’t like you making a fool of the Starscourge himself, but I think this method is the most in keeping with how surprisingly funny (opens in new tab) Elden Ring is all the time.

“Did you ever hear the tragedy of General Radahn The Starscourge?” joked Reddit user sebaniko93 (opens in new tab) in a post where someone showed off this method. “I thought not. It’s not a story the Roundtable would tell you.”

It’s always humbling to see that while everyone is touting rune farms (opens in new tab) and the best weapons to use, someone finds a way to achieve something difficult in the most ridiculous way possible. 

Tyler has covered games, games culture, and hardware for over a decade before joining PC Gamer as Associate Editor. He’s done in-depth reporting on communities and games as well as criticism for sites like Polygon, Wired, and Waypoint. He’s interested in the weird and the fascinating when it comes to games, spending time probing for stories and talking to the people involved. Tyler loves sinking into games like Final Fantasy 14, Overwatch, and Dark Souls to see what makes them tick and pluck out the parts worth talking about. His goal is to talk about games the way they are: broken, beautiful, and bizarre.