Are you wondering whether Elden Ring is harder or easier than Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro?
The answer: It’s the hardest FromSoftware game so far, harder than Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro – if you play it legit without abusing exploits/cheese methods. There are bigger level-jumps between main bosses so it will require a lot more grinding for level-ups between areas. The difficulty spikes up more noticeably from one main boss to the next, often requiring hours of grinding level-ups to stand a chance. None of the other Souls games required farming this much to survive more than 1 hit. For example, between the first region and the second region, enemies have about twice the health and twice the damage. Endgame bosses are also mixed in with early game areas (such as dragons), you will have to backtrack a lot more. The game being non-linear makes it less obvious where to go and in what order to best approach bosses. You get killed in 1-2 hits frequently. Other Souls games were more linear, in Elden Ring you can easily feel lost without looking up guides or walkthroughs.
On the other hand, due to the game being more open world oriented you can go to other regions right away to collect flask upgrades (Golden Seeds & Sacred Tears) and get better gear to make it easier. If you set it up the right way and explore first and spend a few hours grinding to Level 100+ it’s not too difficult, at least until you reach the endgame bosses. So it also depends a bit on how you set it up. Guides for fast XP farming and gear locations are linked at the end of the guide below.
Playing as a mage lets you fight most bosses from safe distance without needing to be good at melee combat. You can also summon NPCs and Ashen Remains to fight alongside you in battle. Overall there is a lot of freedom with how you want to play, and you even have a mount that you can ride in open world boss fights to evade incoming attacks easily. All that said, the difficulty spikes between areas are definitely more noticeable than any other FromSoftware game, even some early game bosses can feel impossible if you are underleveled or don’t have enough flasks. The last FromSoftware release, Sekiro, didn’t have a stamina bar and you had infinite stamina. In Elden Ring you again are limited to just a few attacks and blocks until your stamina bar is depleted, like the Souls games. This alone makes it harder because you can’t dodge infinitely. Most bosses have quite extensive move sets and can deal damage at long range, or deal AOE damage that’s hard to dodge with a melee character. If playing a melee character in singleplayer, without the help of online players, this is the hardest FromSoftware game so far. Playing the Astrologer (mage) is easiest for newcomers and lets you brute force most bosses if sufficiently leveled. But even a mage build has its limits, several bosses have high resistance to magic so you can’t just spam the same spell for every boss.
In conclusion: if you set it up the right way it is quite manageable and you can always spend a few hours farming runes to overlevel, but if you wanted to just rush from one boss to the next using a melee build it is extremely punishing. Without abusing cheese methods or exploitable attacks it’s more challenging than any other FromSoftware game.
Below we will break down in more detail what makes Elden Ring harder and easier and compared to Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro.
What makes Elden Ring harder:
- Much bigger difficulty spikes between areas and main bosses, requiring hours of farming level-ups to stand a chance.
- Frequently getting 1-hitted by bosses and even normal mobs, wearing light or medium armor at 20+ points Vigor (health stat). Be prepared to pump a lot of points into Vigor, especially after the first main bosses and then again in late-game areas when the difficulty starts to spike up. In the late game I even got one-hitted by some bosses with 50 Vigor wearing Medium Armor.
- Enemies/Bosses have more resistances than previous games. For example, some have high resistance to magic (e.g. dragons), requiring you to mix up your playstyle when playing a mage, otherwise you deal hardly any damage against some bosses. Likewise there are bosses that are resistant to physical melee damage.
- Some bosses have a lot more health than the average Souls bosses in the past. You will frequently feel like you’re hardly doing any damage, or in the case of playing a mage run out of mana before you can down a boss (even if allocating all flasks to mana).
- Bosses use more long-range attacks than previous games and throw more stuff at you. When you want to use a health flask to restore health, bosses will punish you hard and immediately attack or throw something at you, so while you drink your health flask you will already get hit by the next thing.
- Some bosses have insane hitboxes and player tracking, making instant turns in the middle of their attacks to refocus on you, or homing in on you. Overall more unpredictable and erratic move sets than most bosses in previous games.
- Bosses deal more damage in general. Even blocking with a 100% physical resistance shield will make you run out of Stamina immediately when bosses land more than 1 hit on you.
- There are a lot more bosses and enemy types overall, meaning more fights to deal with, more move sets to learn (however, most bosses are optional).
- The game is by far the longest and biggest FromSoftware game so far. Only truly dedicated players will make it to the end.
- Includes hardest bosses in the Soulsborne franchise – if you fight them legit without abusing exploits/cheese methods. Particularly: Malenia, Fire Giant, Radagon/Elden Beast are at the top of the difficulty scale that players have the most trouble with.
- A whole bunch of double bosses, fighting 2 or more bosses simultaneously. There is even a triple boss, fighting 3 bosses simultaneously. However, majority of these are optional.
- In case you played the alpha network test, you may remember the Prophet had an attack called Beast Claw that was very powerful, but this is no longer a starting item so can no longer be exploited. The Astrologer is the next-best thing to cast spells.
What makes Elden Ring easier:
- A lot of the open world is accessible from the start. If you focus on uncovering the map and exploring for items before going for main bosses, you can reduce the difficulty a bit. The game is geared much more towards exploration than any of the previous Souls games.
- Particularly the fact that you can get a lot of flasks early on helps a lot with main bosses. You need Golden Seeds to increase the number of flasks and Sacred Tears to make the flasks restore more health/mana. See Golden Seed Locations & Sacred Tear Locations.
- There are some fantastic rune farming spots (XP farming) early on. There are locations open from the start that can get you 300,000+ runes per hour, with this you can reach Level 100 in a few hours of farming. See Best Rune Farming Methods.
- You can now respawn from your place of death instead of having to run all the way back from the nearest save point. After dying choose to respawn from the last stake of Marika and you’ll respawn right in front of a boss. The save points (sites of grace) are also much closer to bosses this time. This means you can retry bosses faster without so much running around, thus taking out a lot of the frustration. Loading times are also much shorter on current-gen systems PS5 / Xbox Series, thus making deaths a little less loading-screen-intensive.
- The ability to summon Ashen Remains (spirits) to fight alongside you and distract enemies. This can make some bosses trivial, especially when you’ve level up those Ashes. They draw the attention of the enemy so you can attack from behind without the boss attacking you. Some bosses are easily exploited with this, but it doesn’t work against all of them.
- Even playing solo offline you can summon NPC helpers before main bosses (orange markings on ground before boss gates). These should easily survive the first half of the boss fight, during that time the NPC helper will attack the boss and draw all the attention. Then you can attack safely from behind. In combination with summoning Ashen Remains this makes the first half of every boss fight quite trivial.
- You have a mount, which is useful for open world bosses, especially dragons. The mount allows you to get around quickly and evade boss attacks, then go in for a few quick hits or cast spells from a safe distance. However, for the most difficult bosses you are usually locked indoors and can’t use the horse so it’s of limited use.
- Cheese methods (exploits) for all difficult bosses. You can exploit basically all bosses the following way – as a Mage you can one-shot most bosses using Comet Azur + Cerulean Hidden Tear (against fast bosses that jump out of the way, Meteorite Staff + Rock Sling is an easy strategy). For melee characters, the skill Hoarfrost Stomp is very effective against small-medium sized bosses. However, the same is true for other Souls games, if you really wanted to cheese them and use exploits you could. But in no other Souls game did I ever feel myself drawn to using such methods due to difficulty or unfairness of bosses. Especially Malenia and some other endgame bosses are borderline unfair if you don’t vastly overlevel or resort to exploits. A single combo will kill you even at 99 max Vigor and wearing the heaviest armor in the game and the best protective Talismans – meaning cheese methods have their limits and you still need at least a little bit of skill.
The above is based on 200h of gameplay and also having unlocked the platinum trophy. These are the combined findings of 5 of our staff members, all of whom played previous Souls games to 100% completion.
What is your difficulty rating of Elden Ring after having beaten it? Which bosses did you find the hardest? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
More Guides:
- Elden Ring Wiki & Strategy Guide
- Elden Ring – Walkthrough
- Elden Ring – Boss Guide (All Bosses)
- Elden Ring – All Sites of Grace Locations
- Elden Ring – All Spells Locations
- Elden Ring – All Weapon Locations
- Elden Ring – All Armor Locations
- Elden Ring – All Talisman Locations
- Elden Ring – All Golden Seed Locations (Flask Amount Upgrades)
- Elden Ring – All Sacred Tear Locations (Flask Strength Upgrades)
- Elden Ring – All Ashen Remains Locations (Spirit Summons)
- Elden Ring – All Ashes of War Locations (Weapon Skills)
- Elden Ring – How to Use & Equip Skills
- Elden RIng – How to Summon Ashes
- Elden Ring – Where to Bring Great Runes
- Elden Ring – Best Starting Class Guide
- Elden Ring – Best Starting Keepsake
- Elden Ring – Infinite Runes Farming Exploit
thomas2400 says
If you maxed out your stats to 99 for everything alongside getting all the flask upgrades would the bosses still be hard or would they become trivial?
PowerPyx says
Would be mostly trivial if you max out everything. For the difficult bosses there are cheese methods known by now (easy exploits).
If you were to dupe stacks of 99 endgame runes over and over until you have all stats maxed, it would be pretty easy, like any other Souls game if you did it that way. Some bosses will still kill you in 3 hits though, even with heavy armor and maxed out Vigor.
JoeT says
Dang I thought playing Horizon and not being able to stand in front of a Slitherfang was annoying…never wanted to take cover or dodge roll-just all out assault. I would like be too patient to beat any boss in this game cuz I always just wanna attack with melee.
Marshall says
Use hookclaws and get high poise and vigor and you can literally just keep attacking bosses bleed damage is insane in this game and most bosses are trivial for me
Bathor says
I do understand this but would you still say Elden Ring is more difficult than Bloodborne’s dlc?
Dave says
No. Elden Ring is easily the least difficult Souls game.
Schaefer Southard says
It’s by far the easiest of all From Software games. Summons, horse, instant teleport with no reprisal, level up spots literally everywhere, flasks refill constantly, bosses are nothing like the other games.
PowerPyx says
Have you fought Malenia yet? Some of the bosses in this game are by far the hardest of any souls game without using exploits and cheese methods. You don’t have a horse against the hard bosses, and some are in rather small rooms.
TheGuyWithTheRightAnswer says
Don’t listen to the guy that commented. Malenia is not hard I beat her first try on my first playthrough with 0 cheese starts and I went there very under-leveled at around lvl 90
Az says
Personally the easiest of the Souls.. I have completed all of them and currently running Sekiro, I did ER 100% week of release before all the guides poured in, Malenia took a few tried but nobody compares to the likes of Gael, not even close imo.
CrazyFlasher says
Gael is a nowhere near as problematic as Malenia. The last four main bosses starting with the duo are also more difficult. Mind you, i am talking about fight them legit one on one without spirits. As a souls player, I started first with ds3 and then played the other ones and have solo’ed every boss. Elden Ring’s bosses give you fewer openings than the previous souls games as they are balanced around spirit ashes. Your opinion is in the minority from what i have seen on the subreddit and video rankings of hardest soulsborne bosses, check them out maybe. From what i remember most players had more problems with Midir than Gael. You must have used spirit ashes or a broken build or both against Malenia because i see even experienced players stuck on her for hours if they try to solo. Watch playthroughs.
Astrid says
Yeah no, this is the easiest of the souls games, the amount of utility you can bring just makes some enemies a joke, sure some are still pretty hard, but dying somewhere on one of the other games to a variety of mobs you had to work your way slowly back and hope you don’t make any mistakes in order to get your souls back, in ER just ride a dam horse and pick them up. combined with the spirit ashes that can get pretty OP, and the ability to regain health pots in the open world its makes it so much easier in that respect. sure there are dungeons that make you play like an original souls game where you are stuck with one set of health pots and that is all, but they seem so short that most of the time you will be done before you know it.
also you do not need to farm to level up in order to defeat the bosses, you can indeed do them with a normal progression. you just need to study and learn their rotations as well as your own weapon and its strengths.
so while some parts are hard, it is not the “hardest souls game” in fact the open world is laughable easy for a souls game.
sun bro says
Bruh I beat the game with level 72 you don’t have to grind levels if you can just git gud : )
DeeDoo says
Not the hardest, but it is the most fun for casual players that like enjoying games.
TheGuyWithTheRightAnswer says
This is not the hardest souls game its the easiest by far have you ever played the game?
TheGuyWithTheRightAnswer says
Malenia is easy learn to dodge waterfowl then shes easy.
“You don’t have the horse in most bosses” okay? cool in the other games you didn’t have a horse at all quit complaining and get good ts so easy man