With 165 boss encounters throughout Elden Ring, it can be difficult for even FromSoftware to make sure that every boss fight is among the best in its development catalog. This is unfortunately evident in the case of Elden Ring's Valiant Gargoyles, who block off an otherwise impressive location with one of the most frustrating bosses currently in the game.
To say that the Valiant Gargoyles are frustrating isn't quite the same as looking at struggling with the difficulty of the fight and trying to find an excuse for why it might take multiple attempts to finish the encounter. Instead, it is the specific design of this boss that stands out from other Elden Ring fights, thanks to it being two enemies that grind harshly against combat mechanics individually and fail to synergize together.
Elden Ring's Valiant Gargoyles' Immunities and Resistances
Looking at each of the Valiant Gargoyles individually, the problems with this fight start from the way that the base design of these enemies conflicts with the player's toolkit up until this point in the game. Starting with tools that casual players might not bother with, the Valiant Gargoyles are immune to every single type of status effect available in Elden Ring. This means that builds that rely on bleed, frostbite, or the various types of poison to deal damage are completely at a loss against either Gargoyle, due to this immunity.
As for the tools that the majority of players will likely have by the time they face off against the Valiant Gargoyles, these bosses are also resistant to almost every other type of damage that isn't status effect based. This turns fighting with Elden Ring's wide variety of swords, claws, spears, and anything that doesn't specifically do striking damage into a slog of chip damage. It isn't an uncommon tactic to make bosses harder by removing some parts of the player's toolkit when fighting them, but the Valiant Gargoyles go an extra step by being resistant to the vast majority of options that could otherwise work for the rest of the game.
Elden Ring's Gargoyles are Worse Together than Apart
All of the problems that come with the Gargoyles individually are rough enough during any playthrough of Elden Ring. There are even several moments where players are pitted against Gargoyles on their own, or the Black Blade Kindred variants, that already highlight the battle as a long, unrewarding process. However, facing off against only one of these Valiant Gargoyles is nowhere near as terrible as when the game decides to put two in the same room and have them fight at the same time.
Pulling away from how players attack the Valiant Gargoyles, it can be important to also note the different ways that these bosses are able to deal out damage themselves. Most of the attacks have all of the bells and whistles of Elden Ring's bosses, with combos that last for several minutes at a time, no delay between combos, and windups that hold multiple beats longer than natural before snapping into action. However, beyond all of that, the Gargoyles have two specific types of attacks that can make fighting two of them nearly impossible. These are their abilities to summon wind and exhale poison.
The frustration of the wind attacks comes from the way that wind can appear around bosses in Elden Ring with almost no telegraphing, and the attacks themselves last longer than a single dodge can manage to avoid. In the case of the poison mist, the visual indication of this poison is extremely difficult to see while in the middle of a fight, and it also ticks damage on the player along with adding the status effect. Each of these attacks wouldn't be too terrible on their own, but when both compound these attacks together at the same time it might just be easier to cheese Elden RIng's Valiant Gargoyles and move on to the more interesting areas behind them.
Elden Ring is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
