Elden Ring: Crucible Knight (Stormhill Evergaol) Boss Fight

As you may know, bosses in Elden Ring are divided into three tiers. From lowest to highest: Field Bosses, Greater Enemy Bosses and finally Demigods and Legends.

Crucible Knight is in the lowest tier, Field Bosses, and is the only enemy found in the Stormhill Evergaol in Limgrave. Like most lesser bosses in Elden Ring, this one is optional in the sense that you don’t need to kill it to advance the story.

There are many annoying bosses in Elden Ring and the previous Souls games. And then there’s this guy. I’m not going to claim that he’s the hardest boss in the series by any means, but I will claim that he’s the hardest boss in Limgrave and Stormveil Castle. I guess he may be easier for some builds, but in melee he’s one of the most annoying enemies I’ve ever faced. To me at least, he was much harder than the actual end boss of the region.

And why is that? He’s not particularly fast. He doesn’t have a lot of different attacks. He does have two phases, but so do many other bosses. So, what’s the problem? I don’t know and that’s exactly why he is so annoying!

Everything about him feels like he should be fairly easy, but he’s not. There is something about the speed of his attacks and the sheer relentlessness of them that just makes it very very difficult to get the timing exactly right and get some hits in between his. Combined with his high armor, large health pool, and the fact that he hits extremely hard and will take most of your health bar in a single hit, it sums up to this boss being a lot harder than he appears at first glance, because you can’t just take the punches and swap damage with him – at least not if you’re at a reasonable level for Limgrave when you fight him.

After several failed attempts at taking him in melee, I ended up deciding a few handfuls of arrows to his face would do him well, so I dusted off my shortbow and went ranged. I had mostly been using the longbow for pulling enemies at this point in the game, but even though the longbow does more damage per hit, the shortbow is much better for this fight because it’s faster and therefore it’s easier to get hits in during the fairly small openings.

The thing is that he keeps his shield up most of the time when he’s stalking you, so arrows will do very little damage. If you were able to carry thousands of arrows with you, you could just keep chipping away on his shield, but you can’t. That means you’ll only have a second or two when he’s about to attack or right after he attacks to put an arrow or two in him, and the shortbow excels at this because it can be fired very quickly right after a roll. Its Barrage weapon art also allows you to fire many arrows very quickly, but I found opportunities to use that scarcer because he puts up his shield very fast between attacks.

I made use of the circular area in the middle of the evergaol to walk backwards in a circle and kite him behind me, making sure not to be caught in a corner where he could turn me into minced meat. Not that he’s too shy to try to do that out in the open, in fact it felt like that was all he was trying to do for the whole encounter. Like a slow, relentless meat grinder dressed in ridiculous multi-colored armor. That’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

During phase one, I found that the long sword poke he does was the most dangerous attack when going ranged, because he has much longer reach than you would expect, so I would often get stabbed even though I thought I was far enough away from him. He also has a ground shake attack that is very difficult to avoid if you’re in melee and a move where he bashes you with his shield to break your stance and then punishes you hard. Making the latter two less of an issue is a big reason why he feels more manageable at range, I think.

In phase two he will become even more annoying as he starts to make use of a couple of more skills to ruin your day. One of them is a flying charging attack that can be rolled away from at just the right time, so just don’t feel too safe just because you’re ranged, he can close the distances very quickly. The other has him growing what appears to be a very large tail that he attempts to lash you with like some sort of angry lizard! Very not knight-like of him, I think, but apparently before he was imprisoned, this guy attended Bossing 101 like most of his colleagues and learned to never, ever play fair.

Another annoying thing about this boss is his tendency to spot when you try to get a well-deserved sip of Crimson Tears to soothe your bruises and immediately start charging in your direction when you do that. That means it takes a bit of timing to heal in this fight without immediately just losing the health again to another sword smack over the head. This also becomes somewhat easier at range, but you still need to use fairly careful timing before getting a drink.

Taking him down ranged with a shortbow takes a while and some patience as you’ll be slowly chipping away at his health for several minutes, but I suppose exactly testing patience is what this boss is all about. Any time I lost my patience or thought I could get in a couple of fast hits during previous attempts, he would immediately punish me very hard. So slow and steady seems like the best approach on this boss.

According to game lore, the evergaols are some sort of infinite prisons that the prisoner will never escape from, as “gaol” is old English for “jail” and “ever” suggests something is going to take quite a while. Considering all the evil acts that takes place in this game by people who do not end up getting imprisoned in evergaols, it’s difficult to imagine what kind of horrible deed this knight did to end up here. Well, apart from being infinitely annoying. Maybe he annoyed the wrong ruler who then threw him in there, lost the key and happily forgot about him, so he could be infinitely annoying to everybody else who would happen to wander into the evergaol for all eternity.

Well, if said ruler wanted him to be there to annoy people for all eternity, he or she shouldn’t have given the knight any loot to drop when there is clearly a Tarnished around who obviously needs it more and has proven time and time again to be willing to endure all sorts of annoyances to claim it. Not that I’m greedy per se, it’s just that… well… Loot is there to be looted! That’s the whole point of it! I’m just helping it fulfil its destiny! Yeah okay, I’m greedy ;-)

When you finally manage to kill him, he will drop his tail, further making him appear to be some sort of lizard in knight’s armor. Or rather, he will drop an incantation that will allow you to briefly grow a tail yourself and use it to smack down enemies. As fun as that sounds – and it’s definitely not like I’m not a fan of shaking my sweet heinie in the general direction of enemies – I do tend to prefer more pointy weaponry that is less buttocks-based. Also, evil rumors around the house would have you believe that my rear end is already plenty weaponized as it is, but that’s neither here nor there ;-)

At this point, you may also think to yourself that you will never have to face a Crucible Knight again. But no-no, that would be too easy. You will indeed encounter several other Crucible Knights throughout the game. I haven’t gotten too them yet, so I don’t know if they’re all quite as annoying as this guy, but since most of them appear to be armed with sword and shield, they probably are. Anything with a shield tends to be highly annoying to me. Actually, it’s quite impressive that From Software has managed to make a game where I find most of the enemies disgustingly annoying, yet I still consider it one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. It’s really a unique and awesome blend.

And don’t be a Crucible Knight. You’ll go to "gaol" forever ;-)