Ranking the Dark Souls Bosses From Easiest to Hardest


Ranking the Dark Souls Bosses From Easiest to Hardest

Nearly 15 years since its launch, the first Dark Souls somehow remains a singular experience. It would, of course, go on to inspire a legion of imitators by helping to create the “Soulslike” subgenre, but even the best non-FromSoftware Soulslike games still struggle to fully capture what makes the original Dark Souls so special. One of the aspects that helps set Dark Souls apart not only from other Soulslikes but even from the rest of the FromSoftware catalog is the way that it handles its boss encounters, so we felt it was time to put together our own definitive ranking of these fights from easiest to hardest.

Pinwheel

  • Location — The Catacombs
  • HP — 1,326
  • Weaknesses — Fire
  • Souls — 15,000

Compared to the bosses leading up to Pinwheel and after, the fight against this guardian of The Catacombs is laughably easy. For the most part, Pinwheel just stands there and takes all the punishment you can dole out at it, making it almost harder to lose in this fight than it is to win. With a shockingly low HP pool and no real offensive maneuvers to speak of, Pinwheel is Dark Souls‘ most trivial boss encounter.

Asylum Demon

  • Location — Undead Asylum
  • HP — 813
  • Weaknesses — Plunging Attacks, Fire
  • Souls — 2,000

As the first of Dark Souls‘ many bosses, it makes sense to see the Asylum Demon land so low on a list ranking their difficulty. After all, you can essentially whittle its health down to halfway before the fight even begins in earnest. The only reason it doesn’t rank lower than Pinwheel is that you’re limited in terms of both your strength and your equipment when you face the Asylum Demon, which does a great job of communicating one of the game’s most valuable strategies: lock-on, circle-strafe around to the back, and slash away.

Iron Golem

  • Location — Sen’s Fortress
  • HP — 2,880
  • Weaknesses — Blunt Damage, Lightning
  • Souls — 40,000

The Iron Golem seems like a fitting finale to an area as challenging and labyrinthine as Sen’s Fortress, but appearances can be deceiving. While he might hit like a dump truck, that assumes that the Iron Golem can even catch up to you. The Iron Golem moves like a creature of its size, making it all too easy to quickly dodge out of harm’s way and get in hits where you can. Before you know it, the Iron Golem is no more, and you’re off to where Dark Souls‘ challenge truly begins: Anor Londo.

Taurus Demon

  • Location — Undead Burg
  • HP — 1,215
  • Weaknesses — Lightning
  • Souls — 3,000

Just like the Asylum Demon, the Taurus Demon is mostly all bark and no bite. Sure, he may look intimidating, but you can easily turn tail and run to climb up the tower near the boss arena entrance, getting in a free plunging attack that takes off a massive chunk of health. Even if you decide to fight him without that starting advantage, Taurus Demon has some readily telegraphed attacks that are easy to dodge. If you make good use of the Gold Pine Resin you picked up near the fog gate, expect this fight to be over as soon as it begins.

Moonlight Butterfly

  • Location — Darkroot Garden
  • HP — 1,255
  • Weaknesses — Magic, Fire
  • Souls — 10,000

Depending on your build, Moonlight Butterfly can be one of the more frustrating bosses in Dark Souls, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “hard”. Rather, it’s more of a battle of attrition and watching for your windows of opportunity as you primarily dodge its incoming magic attacks and then dutifully chop away at its health bar whenever it happens to land on the bridge. If you happen to be using a sorcery build with some good Magic spells capable of closing the distance, this fight is all too easy, so long as you don’t get greedy with spamming attacks.

Ceaseless Discharge

  • Location — Demon Ruins
  • HP — 4,200
  • Weaknesses — N/A
  • Souls — 20,000

Whether you use the fog gate cheese to defeat this boss or not, Ceaseless Discharge is pretty easily routed as long as you pay attention to the boss’ movements and react accordingly. Just wait for the boss to slam its limbs down on the ground and get in some safe hits while it can’t counterattack. Rinse and repeat, and you’ll have easily routed this foe. The arena itself is arguably more difficult than Ceaseless Discharge.

Bed of Chaos

  • Location — Lost Izalith
  • HP — 1
  • Weaknesses — N/A
  • Souls — 60,000

Every FromSoft game seemingly has to have at least one gimmick boss, and in Dark Souls, it’s none other than the Bed of Chaos. The bane of many players’ existence, Bed of Chaos isn’t so much a boss as much as it’s a puzzle, forcing the player to carefully navigate the arena as it falls away so you can damage the boss’ two vulnerable spots, opening up a path to the kill shot at the core. That Bed of Chaos’ damage remains from one attempt to the next shows that FromSoftware knew this fight would be frustrating, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

Gaping Dragon

  • Location — Depths
  • HP — 4,660
  • Weaknesses — Lightning
  • Souls — 25,000

The Gaping Dragon is arguably one of Dark Souls‘ most intimidating-looking bosses, even if it’s not all that challenging. The main move to watch out for is the Gaping Dragon’s charge, which is almost a guaranteed one-shot kill if you get caught in it. But with enough poison resistance and some skill with wrangling Dark Souls‘ erratic camera, you can routinely get behind the Gaping Dragon to whittle away at its health bar without ever putting yourself in the path of its deadly charge attack.

Dark Sun Gwyndolin

  • Location — Anor Londo
  • HP — 2,000
  • Weaknesses — Occult Damage
  • Souls — 40,000

Dark Sun Gwyndolin is a tough one to place on a list ranking Dark Souls bosses’ difficulty, mostly because there are two distinct phases to this fight. At range, Gwyndolin is actually pretty deadly, capable of easily killing most players before they have a chance to reach him in the absurdly long hallway where the fight takes place. But once you get the timing and pattern down to dodge his ranged attacks, you can readily get within range of Gwyndolin and turn the tables. Up close, he’s completely toothless and poses little threat to any player with a decently scaled weapon.

Chaos Witch Quelaag

  • Location — Blighttown
  • HP — 3,139
  • Weaknesses — Lightning
  • Souls — 20,000

Queelag is another Dark Souls boss like the Gaping Dragon that looks intimidating at first glance, only to fall prey to the game’s winning strategy: circle-strafing to attack the rear. As long as you can safely get behind Queelag, she has no effective means of hitting you, meaning you’ll just need to watch out for the lava pools in the arena to make short work of her. That said, if you do manage to get caught in one of her attack sequences, it can be a tough uphill climb to get back to a position of advantage in the fight.

Demon Firesage

  • Location — Demon Ruins
  • HP — 5,448
  • Weaknesses — Fire, Lightning, Bleed
  • Souls — 20,000

The third and final boss using the “demon” archetype in Dark Souls (following the Asylum and Stray varieties), the Demon Firesage lands right in the middle in terms of its difficulty. It does have the capacity to hit hard and knock you around the dangerous arena (with lava surrounding you on almost all sides where you fight it), but it’s also susceptible to the rear-attack strategy that worked so effectively on its Asylum and Stray Demon cousins. Plus, by the time you take on the Demon Firesage, your character level and equipment are likely scaled so high as to make the fight trivial, especially with a lightning or bleed weapon.

Crossbreed Priscilla

  • Location — Painted World of Ariamis
  • HP — 2,300
  • Weaknesses — Fire
  • Souls — 30,000

Crossbreed Priscilla isn’t too terrible of a boss fight, once you can find her. A large part of this battle’s difficulty boils down to Priscilla’s invisibility, which forces the player to try and spot her footprints in the snow covering the arena floor in order to get a good couple of hits in. Should you manage to actually track her movements, she goes down fairly quickly, but just getting good at tracking her through the snowfall takes a few attempts, where she’ll handily defeat you as you try and fight an invisible enemy.

Stray Demon

  • Location — Undead Asylum
  • HP — 5,250
  • Weaknesses — Bleed
  • Souls — 20,000

Returning to the Undead Asylum should be a walk in the park by the time you make your way back there, but the Stray Demon shows up to complicate things. Once you fall through the floor where you fought the Asylum Demon, the Stray Demon appears as if to let you know you’re in his world now, and his similarities to the Asylum Demon complicate things further. If you try to lock on like you did in the fight against the Asylum Demon, you’ll likely die, forcing you to forget your original strategy in favor of something new that tends to get much more panicked and frantic as you try to beat the Stray Demon before he wrests control over the encounter.

Gwyn, Lord of Cinder

  • Location — Kiln of the First Flame
  • HP — 4,185
  • Weaknesses — Fire
  • Souls — 70,000

For being the final boss of Dark Souls, you would expect Gwyn to be a lot harder than he actually is. Of course, the difficulty of Gwyn’s fight mostly hinges on how good you are at parrying. If you’ve been practicing for the entirety of Dark Souls and have the timing down, the fight against Gwyn is incredibly easy, watching for his telegraphed attacks, parrying, and then doing riposte damage. If not, prepare for a bit of a longer duel in which both fire attacks and heavy armor will be your best friends.

Bell Gargoyles

  • Location — Undead Parish
  • HP — 1,000/480
  • Weaknesses — Lightning
  • Souls — 10,000

The Bell Gargoyles are a fantastic boss encounter that feels adequately balanced to where the player should ideally be at with both their progression and understanding the game’s mechanics, making the fight against them feel tough but fair. Yes, it’s a two-on-one fight, but chances are you’ll have the first gargoyle on the ropes right as the second is entering the arena, which teaches a valuable lesson about how to approach “gank” fights in a FromSoftware game; if you can, always, always take out the weaker threat first so they can’t double up on you.

Seath the Scaleless

  • Location — Duke’s Archive/Crystal Cave
  • HP — 5,525
  • Weaknesses — Lightning
  • Souls — 60,000

Seath is another one that’s somewhat hard to rank on a Dark Souls boss difficulty list, as how hard or easy he is depends on whether you’re trying to get the Moonlight Greatsword. If all you want to do is kill Seath, his attacks are easily dodged and he shouldn’t put up too much of a fight (especially with a good lightning weapon). However, if you’re aiming to chop off his tail and claim the iconic Moonlight Greatsword, prepare for a battle of attrition against Dark Souls‘ camera as you try to avoid massive AoE swipes and effectively hit his tail enough times to claim your prize.

Capra Demon

  • Location — Undead Burg
  • HP — 1,176
  • Weaknesses — Fire
  • Souls — 6,000

Like some of the other bosses on this list, most of the difficulty of the Capra Demon fight boils down to the cramped arena you face it in. Not only is the space about the size of a broom closet, but the Capra Demon isn’t even the only foe in there. He’s joined by two dogs that only serve to complicate the encounter and add to its frustration, and it’s hard enough to take them out without getting hit by the Capra Demon without throwing in the fact that you have absolutely no room to maneuver. He’s not the hardest, but Capra Demon may very well be the most frustrating of all Dark Souls bosses.

Gravelord Nito

  • Location — Tomb of Giants
  • HP — 4,317
  • Weaknesses — Fire, Blessed Damage
  • Souls — 60,000

By the time you get to Gravelord Nito, you’ve had to endure the grueling gauntlet that is the Tomb of Giants, which makes what should otherwise be a difficult boss encounter feel like a walk in the park, comparatively. Still, Nito is more than capable of dispatching players if they’re not careful, and were it not for my Blessed Damage Claymore putting in the work, he could easily rank a little higher on this list. Stick close to him and constantly circle-strafe around him while watching out for AoE blasts, and you’ll be alright.

Four Kings

  • Location — Abyss
  • HP — 9,504
  • Weaknesses — Fire
  • Souls — 60,000

Both one of the harder boss fights in Dark Souls and one of its coolest, the battle against the Four Kings in the heart of the Abyss is nothing short of disorienting. Fighting not one, but multiple foes in the pitch blackness of the Abyss messes with your depth perception in a way that makes landing attacks difficult, which only ratchets up the tension in an encounter where you have to kill one enemy quickly before three others gang up on you. Make sure to bring plenty of heavy armor and a fast weapon if you want to make this fight less of a headache.

Sanctuary Guardian

  • Location — Sanctuary Garden
  • HP — 2,560
  • Weaknesses — Fire, Bleed
  • Souls — 30,000

It says a lot about how ridiculously challenging the DLC bosses are in Dark Souls that the weakest of the four still comes into the top 10 on a difficulty ranking. In hindsight, Sanctuary Garden feels more like an Elden Ring boss showing up in Dark Souls, only without all the advantages and abilities that Elden Ring gives players to make encounters more accessible and customizable. What you’re left with, then, is a lightning-fast enemy that hits like a dump truck, all while you just have a standard weapon in hand to defeat it. Modern Souls fans have no idea how good they have it.

Great Grey Wolf Sif

  • Location — Darkroot Garden
  • HP — 3,432
  • Weaknesses — Lightning, Bleed
  • Souls — 40,000

Talk about an emotional climax. The fight against Sif in Dark Souls is a poignantly heartbreaking moment that really hammers home the lengths at which Lordran has fallen, all while highlighting the unbreakable bond between a man and his canine companion. Sif’s fight is also suitably challenging, especially if you’ve been maining the wrong weapon up until this point. With how much this giant wolf hops around the screen, you’ll be lucky to get in a single hit with a larger, slower weapon, changing the battle into a fight for survival that it otherwise wouldn’t be with a faster or ranged weapon. And once you get Sif on the ropes, the fight becomes a different kind of “hard” as you struggle to put the wolf out of its misery while it limps across the battlefield. Who’s cutting onions in here?

Centipede Demon

  • Location — Demon Ruins
  • HP — 3,432
  • Weaknesses — Magic, Lightning
  • Souls — 40,000

The Demon Ruins are notorious for being the area where the magic of Dark Souls starts to fall apart a bit, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the fight against the Centipede Demon. The Centipede Demon wouldn’t be nearly as hard as it is were it not for the lava filling the arena, which makes one false step all it takes to lose and have to commit to a runback. The one saving grace here is that, after defeating the Centipede Demon, you finally have a safe way to traverse over all that lava. If only you could’ve had it before the fight.

Artorias the Abysswalker

  • Location — Royal Wood
  • HP — 3,750
  • Weaknesses — N/A
  • Souls — 50,000

For many players, the fight against Artorias is the peak of Dark Souls, and it’s easy to see why. This fight puts the player at a disadvantage right from the get-go, with Artorias obviously outclassing the player in terms of both speed and power and having some dark magic at his fingertips, to boot. But learning each of Artorias’ moves, and how to respond to or counter each one, is one of the most satisfying experiences in the entire FromSoftware catalog, making the eventual victory over this challenging foe that much sweeter. Artorias is a tough fight, but overcoming that challenge, and the feeling of elation it exhibits, is what Dark Souls is all about.

Ornstein and Smough

  • Location — Anor Londo
  • HP — Ornstein: 1,642/2,981; Smough: 2,645/4,094
  • Weaknesses — Fire (Ornstein), Lightning (Smough)
  • Souls — 50,000

When it comes to Dark Souls‘ base game, the “toughest boss” award has to go to Anor Londo’s gilded duo: Ornstein and Smough. These two serve as both the literal and figurative guardians to the back half of Dark Souls, acting as a skill-check for players to see if they’ll have what it takes to face what comes next. Ironically enough, most of the bosses after Ornstein and Smough are easier than taking these two on, which makes the latter part of the experience almost feel like a victory lap. And depending on which of the two you kill first (unless you happen to time it to take both of them out one after another), the fight only gets harder as it drags on.

Black Dragon Kalameet

  • Location — Royal Woods
  • HP — 5,400
  • Weaknesses — Strike Damage
  • Souls — 60,000

Dragons play such an important role in the lore and world-building of the Dark Souls series that it only makes sense for one of the toughest bosses in the games to be these ancient winged beasts, and the first Dark Souls establishes that trend with Black Dragon Kalameet. Kalameet has god-like resistances to just about every element and to most types of physical damage, can attack up close (unlike most dragons), and is much faster than his impressive size might initially let on. Were it not for our number one foe, Kalameet would have a legitimate claim to being both Dark Souls‘ hardest boss and one of the hardest dragon bosses FromSoftware has ever designed.

Manus, Father of the Abyss

  • Location — Chasm of the Abyss
  • HP — 6,665
  • Weaknesses — N/A
  • Souls — 60,000

Making it to the end of the Dark Souls DLC and fighting Manus is something completionists will do before fighting Gwyn, and it feels more like the true “final” boss of the game than the Lord of Cinder. Like the fight against the Four Kings, the arena where players fight Manus is choked with darkness, and his lightning-fast movements and wide array of dark magic abilities make it hard to feel safe whether you’re fighting from a “safe” distance or sticking close to his backside in hopes of getting off some cheap shots before he does yet another jump slam attack. But, like almost every other fight in the top half of the list, just because the fight against Manus is hard doesn’t mean it isn’t awesome.

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