How I beat Malenia as a strength-build while being bad at Elden Ring

[gungadin22000]

Sometimes in life, you need to ask yourself: do I suck? If you are like me, the answer is a resounding yes.

I am bad at Elden Ring and all soulslikes, and by sheer chance I happened to pick a strength build for my first playthrough, which is said to be the most awkward way to play ER.

I did, however, manage to beat the game just fine with a greatshield and great mace.

Like many other players, however, I ran into a brick wall when I encountered Malenia. After trying for 3-4 hours to beat her, I worked out a strategy for no-skill players to defeat her that doesn't revolve around using overpowered summons, exploits or cookie-cutter builds.

What you need:

1. A strong greatshield with high guard boost and 100% physical protection. Fingerprint Shield is best for this, but others can be used.

2. A weapon allowing you to stab from behind the shield, spears or rapiers qualify. I used the Serpent-Hunter at +10, as you get it automatically from the Rykard fight and it scales well with strength.

3. Greatshield talisman for more effective blocking

4. +rot immunity talisman to counter phase 2 rot shenanigans.

Armour isn't really that important considering you're not likely to get hit a lot, endurance and lots of HP are far more important. I was level 155 or so when I fought her.

Phase 1 strategy:
Hide behind your shield, do not EVER lower your shield unless it is to regain stamina, keep poking away at Mal with light attacks and guard- counter the lunging stab and flying downward slash, nothing else. When she is poise broken after 3-4 strong attacks, crit her, then charge attack her when she is getting up for free damage.

Keep very close to Mal at all times and keep stabbing. This will interrupt her BS grab move, which will 1shot you if you're not highly tanky.

Do not attempt to dodge - if you are reading this, you suck at the game like me and WILL get hit and leeched for far more HP than if you had just blocked. Waterfowl dance can be blocked 100% with a decent shield for no damage.

Keep your HP at 100% at all times. If you are below 90% or so, she WILL 1hit you with her BS grab move if it lands, no matter how much armour you pile on.

This phase can be loooong depending on how lucky you are with dodging grab moves and how often she does waterfowl dance for max leeching, but if you follow this tactic the first phase takes next to no skill, perfect for me.

Phase 2 strategy:
Almost entirely like phase 1, just with cooler visuals and eugh....scarlet rot. At the start of the fight, run straight towards Mal and then to the left or right. This will cause her flower- nuke to slam into the ground and have the lingering scarlet rot AOE miss you.

Then run up to her and repeat phase 1 strategy.

Only differences are:

-when she leaps into the air to slam her sword down as part of a combo, she will cause scarlet rot explosions. Dodge left or right after blocking the swipe to avoid rot.

-when she does her flower-nuke, just.....block it. Really, it works fine, doesn't do that much scarlet rot buildup and is a lot safer than guessing her timing.

-you may actually want to try dodging her waterfowl dance in phase 2, not due to the heal but due to the BS rot buildup. If you can't figure out the dodge timing for 2nd and 3rd part of the combo, consider using a bolus. This attack is why you want to stack some rot resistance before entering the fight.

Other than that, just stay in her face and poke away from behind a greatshield again. For as long as you can sliiiightly outdamage her constant healing, you will win a hard-fought victory.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you defeat the toughest ER boss while being crap at the game and using nothing but a spear and huge shield. Takes little skill or timing, just some patience, as the fight will take like 5-10 minutes, depending on how much damage she heals back from hitting your shield, but it is pretty safe and you will only die if you derp out.

Mind you, you are also at the mercy of the RNG gods: if she spams waterfowl dance several times in close succession during phase 2, the scarlet rot may well kill you, and her grabs are BS and can also be strung together for a hellish phase 1 or 2. If she catches you out, just try again and hope for better RNG or that you have magically stopped sucking at dodging since your last try.

As for summons, Mal is almost the opposite of any other boss in the game, since most summons I tried only made this fight way harder. Mal heals more from unblocked hits and the non-OP BS summons don't do enough damage or stagger to nullify her healing and I wasn't about to start using mimic tear for the first time in the game.

Exception to the rule is Redmane Knight Ogha, who is very useful for particularly the first part of the fight. He still does crap damage, but his attacks aren't frequent enough to have him draw aggro from Mal and each arrow knocks her down unless she is in the middle of an attack, allowing you to do a charged attack for free. Her phase 2 attacks seem to have more hyperarmour than in phase 1, so she will not get knocked down nearly as often by Ogha, and she LOVES doing a fast karate kick after getting up from the ground, making charge-attacking her while down not really worth the risk.

There you have it, a Mal guide for a weak character build played by a weak player that does not revolve around overpowered weapon arts or summons. I love this boss and it was great fun trying every trick in the book to make her beatable with my build.

[Kyutaru]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftPB20Y8iOo

[Haruspex]

Whoa a bad player that actually got creative with the amount of options in this game and beat arguably the hardest boss in the game?
Nonsense! It's more efficient to complain in threads!

[gungadin22000]

Originally posted by Pathetic Sort Ahead:

Whoa a bad player that actually got creative with the amount of options and beat a boss?
Nonsense! It's more efficient to complain in threads!

Indeed. And I managed to do it without gittin gud.

[Kyutaru]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTpR6V6wLYc

[Sabaithal]

Something to mention, the weapon you use behind said shield needs to be one that does high stamina damage. Not every spear does this.

Greatspears and great thrusting swords are good with this. Silurias spear for example destroys posture, and does good damage.

[♔V3RD1CT]

Why would they do all that when they can just nerf it now a days, and pretend they are good at something?

[Lyote]

Pretty similar to how I did the Malenia fight to be honest.

I used Godskin Stitcher with Cold and Step.

If you have enough Endurance to trigger it, there's a damage taken threshold that causes her to nope out to max range (usually follows up with the lunge or multi strike that heals more than normal)

I discovered that after a few trial attempts with spears and regular rapiers.
Heavy Thrusting Sword ended up the best ratio of damage per hit, stamina cost per thrust and rangeq.

Discovered that thrusting into every attack she does causes her to back off at right around the same time I got low on Stamina.
This ended up being my winning strategy.
Let her slam the shield while poking at her until she ran off, closed the distance while getting stamina back and starting again.

Only needed to dodge the massive lunge, as that heals her for a big chunk. Can block that one but really drags the fight out lol.

[Sabaithal]

Originally posted by Lyote:

Only needed to dodge the massive lunge, as that heals her for a big chunk. Can block that one but really drags the fight out lol.

Bloodhounds step
Or Vow of the indominable if you can't get it

[Lyote]

Originally posted by Sabaithal:

Originally posted by Lyote:

Only needed to dodge the massive lunge, as that heals her for a big chunk. Can block that one but really drags the fight out lol.

Bloodhounds step
Or Vow of the indominable if you can't get it

Yeh, I did say I was using the Step lol.

Ended up not using it much though. Probably just a muscle memory issue but felt like I was always late when using it against the lunge lol
Had better luck just rolling normally XD