Dark Souls III: Ancient Wyvern Boss Fight

The Ancient Wyvern is found in the optional area Archdragon Peak. In order to go there, you first need to kill Oceiros the Consumed King and then obtain the Path of the Dragon gesture in the large tomb behind his room.

Then go to the small outdoors plateau in Irithyll Dungeon and find the skeleton of a lizard man sitting in the same pose amid some empty husks of hollows.

Place yourself in the position by using the gesture next to the skeleton and you will be teleported to Archdragon Peak after a short cutscene.

Unlike what occurred during the Twin Princes boss fight earlier, this time the teleportation is actually pretty cool and does not lead me into a lengthy rant and some ill-advised slogan making for vacuum cleaner companies.

Arriving at Archdragon Peak is probably the closest to basking on a sunny mountainside you're ever going to get in a Dark Souls game, it was actually quite nice to see some proper daylight, although it also felt a little out of place at first, like I was playing some sort of happy adventure game. But then I got ganked by the first enemy I encountered and then remembered what I was playing ;-)

Archdragon Peak is populated by some strange lizard- or dragon-like humanoids that you don't see anywhere else in the game. They're not particularly tough or hard to kill, but they do have some very high damage output and if you're facing multiple of them at the same time, they can easily stunlock you.

They also come in a caster variety that shoot fireballs at you from very far away, so it's good if you have some ranged weaponry to reciprocate. My favorite ranged weapon in all the Dark Souls games is the Black Bow of Pharis and that is also the one I'm using here.

Since the entire area is optional and doesn't need to be completed in order to progress the main story, so is the Ancient Wyvern boss. However, if you do want to complete the Archdragon Peak area and get to the next boss, then you must dispose of the Ancient Wyvern first.

The Ancient Wyvern is an interesting boss, because you don't really spend a lot of time fighting the boss itself, but instead you fight your way up to a position above it, so you can do a plunging attack and impale the wyvern's head with your weapon.

This makes it one of the easiest bosses in the game, although - as you will see in this video - the way up to the elevated position can be challenging as well. Especially if you end up running around like a headless chicken, as I did ;-)

In the crystal clarity of hindsight, I'm pretty sure that it would have been possible to just sprint past all the enemies and get up to the correct position much faster than I did, but the video is based on my very first successful attempt, so by the time I reached the giant lizard man about halfway through, I actually had no idea where I was going as it was the first time I had gotten that far.

Speaking of giant lizard men, this was also my first and rather embarrassing attempt at fighting one of those, caught on camera.

The only one encountered in Archdragon Peak before this one is just outside the boss gate, but it is easily avoidable or backstabable, so I hadn't really fought one for real before and was somewhat unprepared for its move set, especially the very long chain that apparently goes through walls like some sort of medieval plasma cutter.

I'm not very proud of my performance in this video, but then again, if you want to see videos featuring professional gamers making perfect kills for the 117th time, you can find those elsewhere.

I try to show how it might look the first time something is accomplished by someone who isn't particularly great at this game. And that isn't always going to be pretty, but it may be closer to something that my fellow casual gamers can realistically expect to do without turning gaming into a lifestyle.

Due to the lack of complicated boss mechanics to explain and my mind-boggling slowness in getting to the kill spot, we have some time to waste here, so I'm going to ask you the age-old question of how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck would?

I've always claimed that a woodchuck would chuck more wood if a woodchuck could chuck wood than a woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck couldn't chuck wood, but it was recently brought to my attention that the woodchuck would chuck, he would, as much as he could, and chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

Okay, I think it's good that we got that sorted, just to make sure we're on the same page before we proceed :-)

Now, during your climb up to the sweet spot where you can drop yourself onto the head of the wyvern with your pointiest end down, it is possible in several places to use the wyvern's fire breath to your advantage by attempting to place the smaller enemies in harm's way and letting the wyvern roast them.

For some reason, though, the big fiery lizard always seems very reluctant to do me any favors by using its breath at just the right time, so I ended up doing most of the killing myself.

When you cross the long bridge just before the ladder up to the point where you can drop down, you're going to be shot at from both ends by fireball-hurling casters. I recommend taking them out from afar with a ranged weapon as their fireballs can knock you over and keep you in harm's way of the wyvern's breath for longer than is ideally comfortable.

When you get up on the scaffolding in the end, you just need to go to the place with the two notes on the floor and then try to position yourself just over the wyvern's head. The big lizard appears to be unusually docile at this point and doesn't move around a lot, so it's not too difficult to get the positioning right.

When you're certain that you are in a good spot, drop over the edge of the ledge and press the light attack button on your way down to do a plunging attack. If done right, you will land on the wyvern's head, impale it with your weapon and basically one-shot the boss.

The reward for killing this boss is not a boss soul as you might expect, but a Dragon Head Stone, which is an item that allows you to turn your head into a fire-breathing dragon head!

Not too shabby, it almost makes me regret spending a small fortune in souls on getting my good looks restored by the Fire Keeper earlier ;-)

After the wyvern is dead, you will be teleported to the next area, very close to a bonfire. Once again, this is the kind of teleportation I don't mind so much.

Exploring the remainder of Archdragon Peak will eventually lead you to a very large bell that you can ring to summon the second and final boss of the area, the Nameless King, who is definitely a much, much harder boss than the Ancient Wyvern.

I do have a video of me killing the Nameless King as well, so check that out when you have the time and energy for more shenanigans ;-)