A lot of Elden Ring players have been struggling with the game’s recently released Shadow of the Erdtree expansion. The DLC, which takes place in an entirely new region, features a hard-as-nails boss gauntlet and a brand new leveling system that has raised the bar for folks, perhaps even a little too high. However, many are beginning to wrap up the expansion and return to the base game, and a lot of them are making a pit stop to flex on a particular boss.
Spoilers for Elden Ring’s endgame follow.
As you approach the end of Elden Ring’s base game, one of the final mandatory fights is against Sir Gideon Ofnir The All-Knowing, an NPC who’s allied with the player character for the vast majority of the game. In your attempt to rise and become the Elden Lord, you naturally come to blows with Gideon, who typically offers advice back at the Roundtable Hold—a gathering place for other Tarnished—even if he is secretly a rat bitch who wants to keep anyone from taking the throne. In short, he has this beating coming. He doesn’t put up a particularly great fight though.
Even on a first playthrough, Gideon is kind of a chump. His fight is immediately followed by a much more epic and demanding encounter against Godfrey/Horah Loux, making Gideon a sort of aperitif to whet the palette before the series of really demanding boss fights which round out Elden Ring. Gideon is a lanky, gaunt figure, whose appearance only betrays that he’s a nerd who knows a lot of spells to use against you. However, he’s mostly lacking in constitution and, anecdotally, he’s kind of a joke. I guess that’s why Elden Ring players relish flexing on him with their newfound abilities and weapons after wrapping up Shadow of the Erdtree’s exorbitantly more difficult content.
There’s a few clips making the rounds online, like a particularly brutal one where a player absolutely skewers Gideon with the Greatsword of Damnation. They more or less follow the same formula: a player saunters up to Gideon, who launches into his spiel before getting almost instantly obliterated. Some clips are a bit longer than others, but for the most part, veterans returning from the Land of Shadow with new armaments and skills are wiping the floor with him and it is extremely funny.
Folks are having a lot of fun dunking on Gideon with a variety of new weapons. Some are using the elemental perfumes to completely melt the guy in a single hit, while a random TikTok I came across featured a guy using the new hand-to-hand combat to whoop him. Perhaps the funniest of the clips involves a large hammer getting swung around and eventually beamed at the guy’s head, at which point he disintegrates.
It’s been great seeing players on top after a few weeks of hearing all about how tough the DLC is. It seems like they’re now taking that pent-up frustration out on Gideon, and evidently there’s precedent for it. Players have apparently been anticipating killing Gideon with new DLC weapons and skills since they were shown off in Shadow of the Erdtree’s first trailer, but even before then, it was customary to kill the guy in the most humiliating way possible. First players developed overpowered builds, but eventually, modders started to decimate Gideon with everything from a gun to Jujutsu Kaisen’s Gojo Satoru.
In summation: eat shit, Gideon.