Elden Ring: How to Defeat Messmer the Impaler

Where to Find Messmer

You’ll find Messmer the Impaler within the Shadow Keep location. However, he’s not right at the front gate. Instead, you’ll find a big, annoying Golden Hippopotamus boss fight instead. This fight can be very chaotic, but if you struggle try using Lighting or Fire weapons since it’s weak to both. Once you defeat the hippo, continue up through Shadow Keep until you come into a big elevator.

At this point you’ve reached the Storehouse levels of Shadow Keep. This is this game’s standard “library” location, similar to the Duke’s Archive in DS1/DS3 and many others. Keep going up and making your way across various bridges until you reach a large statue, the feet of which are near a bridge so you can jump up onto it. Cross the statue, activate the Site of Grace, and once again continue on the “standard” path upward. After another Site of Grace, explore around the area until you find a lever, which allows you to rotate the hanging statues and make your way to the final Grace before Messmer.

Once you finish that, you’ll be ready to take on Messmer the Impaler. It took me quite a while to find that lever even after I looked up how to find it, so if you struggle with it, I’d recommend a quick video showing its exact location. It’s a really beautiful area really, if you can avoid getting frustrated due to all the powerful (and annoying) enemies everywhere.

Recommended Weapons & Resistances

Messmer does actually have some notable weaknesses, but none so major they’ll carry you through the fight on their own. He has a significant resistance to fire damage (which shouldn’t be too surprising), and minor resistances to both magic and lightning. However, those last two are small enough that they’re not really worth worrying too much about. He also has no resistance to holy weapons, so those are viable here as well.

Where you’ll have more luck finding weaknesses, though, are in “build-up” effects. While bleed is still a great option, his low resistance to frostbite makes Cold weapons a great idea. If you can find a weapon with both (for example, a katana weapon with a Cold Ash of War), you’ll have a fantastic weapon for fighting Messmer. I think it’s also possible to use strength weapons if you want to, but as with most bosses in general in the DLC, I just feel like speed is more important. Messmer is a very fast opponent, and dodging if more important than tanking his hits, it feels like. His ability to quickly close distance also makes magic difficult, unless you have distractions in the form of summons or spirits like Mimic Tear.

For your own defenses, I’d highly recommend an armor set with a strong fire resistance as well as physical damage negation. Poise is also important when fighting such aggressive, quick enemies. That being said, though, I know that some Elden Ring players are just going to run in there with either no armor at all or the funniest looking set they can find, and honestly I respect that.

How to Fight Messmer

One of Messmer’s main combos is a multi-hit combo where he attacks with fire damage and ends with a stab into the ground followed by numerous spears coming up out of the ground around him. Really, a lot of Messmer’s attacks are just spear attacks with some form of fire thrown in. It makes for a very difficult boss to predict, and he can easily catch you in a combo that feels like certain death.

Throughout phase 1, you really just have to be focused on Messmer’s combos. Do what you can to learn these combos as early as possible, as getting killed over and over again in the first half of the fight can get really demoralizing. Once you get Messmer to around half-health, he’ll embrace his true form and enter a more aggressive phase 2.

In phase 2, Messmer’s snakes become a bigger problem. He uses them more often to attack you, even including an attack that sees him spawn five snakes that attack you from anywhere in the arena. These snake attacks themselves aren’t that hard to predict and dodge, but doing so while also trying to anticipate his next melee combo can be overwhelming until you get down the timing. The snakes remind me a lot of the Hydra from Dark Souls 1, but luckily they’re much less annoying (and time consuming) to deal with.

Messmer is all about combos and learning how to realize what move is coming next the second he starts the animation for it. In many ways, he’s the “ultimate” Elden Ring boss. There’s no major gimmicks with Messmer other than the snakes, and even they aren’t really that oppressive. He’s difficult, but fair. And at the end of the day, that’s the main thing I look for in an Elden Ring / Souls boss.