Game:

Elden Ring (2022)

Duration: 37:58

2,214 views

124

This will be my last challenge kill upload for a while. I might make more when DLC releases, we'll see. Getting this fight took 2-3 days of grinding despite all my previous experience on this boss, and I do consider it as the best fight performed against Maliketh to this day.
This upload is an archive. The kill was originally done on February 25th, 2023, on Elden Ring (and Maliketh's) 1 year anniversary.

After 100 to 150 hours studying Maliketh for challenge fights and multiple guides for challenge/hitless communities, a final showdown of the culmination of the most optimal and aggressive strategies I've developped for this spectacular bossfight.

A solo battle against my favorite boss of the entire FromSoft series, Beast Clergyman / Maliketh the Black Blade, at Level 1, New Game +7 (max game difficulty), using a non upgraded base torch, and without talismans to confer more survivability or damage. The fight lasts 37 minutes (about 13:30 minutes of phase 1 and 24 minutes of phase 2) of no hit gameplay.

The mechanical mastery and the knowledge of the boss's behavior required to succeed this challenge are the following:

- Perfect knowledge of each of his attacks, follow-ups and mix-ups potential at every point of his combo trees. Often enough the boss will get stuck against a pillar or the edge of the arena mid-combo, and the positioning difference will affect the choice of his next attack, to which you will need to react in the fraction of a second.
- Knowing how to avoid a good portion of his attacks without rolling (strafes) to optimize stamina usage and have more time to punish, but also the roll timings for every attack in the rare case scenario where the boss gets stuck against terrain and make an attack impossible to strafe (numerous of those scenarios requiring a reaction/decision making time as short as 0.2-0.3 seconds).
- Mastery of spacing and positioning in order to be able to not only trigger desired attacks for better punish opportunities, but also perform optimized and more difficult variations of those strats. Example with his p1 melee combos for which it's optimal to to trigger his final ground stab for a charged attack: sneaking in extra hits during his attacks within the combo for more damage, as well as positioning in order to almost brush against the hitbox of the attack and perform a fully charged attack + a quick attack in the same window of opportunity.
- Active use of jumps as dodges allowing bonus hits (e.g above his double swipe in p1) and, in the various case scenarios where the character enter in collision with the boss during the jump, which pushes the character aside and changes timings, knowing how to manually reorient the jump mid-air to avoid falling back into the attack all the while inflicting an attack punish on Gurranq's head.
- Perfectly knowing the hurtbox of the boss and managing the lock-on in order to free-aim torch attacks (which otherwise miss a majority of the time because the reach is too short to touch Maliketh's slender model).
- Dealing on the fly with intricacies and other bugs of Maliketh's moveset unknown to the majority of the playerbase and runners, such as pseudo-random Destined Deaths from neutral, the glitched double spin, and more.
- And countless other details too hard to explain without falling into a deep technical jargon.

Music used as background of the video:
Metal Gear Rising Revengeance - I'm My Own Master Now
Pokémon Sword and Shield - Calyrex Final Battle Music
Monster Hunter Rise - Red Glare In The Darkness: Nargacuga
Monster Hunter Rise - The Rampage
Dark Souls 3 - Slave Knight Gael
Dark Souls 3 - Demon Prince
Monster Hunter World - Pride Of A Nameless Hunter
Dark Souls 3 - Sister Friede And Father Ariandel
Hollow Knight - Nightmare King Grimm
Monster Hunter World - Proof Of A Hero
Ori and the Blind Forest - Restoring the Light, Facing the Dark
(Outro) Ori and the Will of the Wisps - Main Theme

Amazing thumbnail/endcard artwork by my friend https://twitter.com/Aggronize

My other Elden Ring challenges: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9AUPD_UAv7ev2fuOVx3hCBoooKAwSoVV

If you wish to learn more about Maliketh in detail, here's my Maliketh-specific playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9AUPD_UAv7dT-yFa44n2TouFp7Ln0yPO

Here is also a written guide going in-depth on Maliketh's attacks, behavior and strategies: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15Ao3Y9GPs_esC2U9B3LqqT0SgmXVb5I8G5c3ALeRx1E/edit

Other Statistics