Elden Ring players have encountered a bug that sees Messmer the Impaler kill himself during one of Shadow of the Erdtree’s toughest boss battles.
Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is filled with challenging boss fights, from Divine Beast Dancing Lion to Midra, Lord of Frenzied Flame.
The Messmer battle counts among the most difficult, featuring a two-part fight whose second phase involves a giant serpent.
While players have suffered through hours of trial and error, some have defeated the Impaler by sheer luck. As one Reddit user demonstrated, Messmer can take his own life by accidentally falling off the fighting platform.
Redditor X1Reaper1X shared footage of their final 30 seconds in the Messmer battle, which shows the boss’ serpent form suddenly falling off the map and dying. All things considered, this made for a relatively easy win as seen in the following clip:
Naturally, users can’t help but wonder why the arena’s presumed “invisible boss walls” didn’t prevent this from happening.
Some Elden Ring players think the Messmer bug may constitute an online-specific glitch since similar clips and reports also include summons.
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“This happened when I was a summon for someone,” reads one such reply.
“It must be some sort of online bug because every clip I’ve seen has involved summons,” another user noted.
But solo players have thrown a wrench in this theory by claiming they, too, have encountered the error. Thus, Messmer’s proximity to the arena’s edge during the second phase may be the primary cause of the glitch.
“Apparently, if he’s by the edge and turns into a snake, he’ll just fall down,” one person wrote in the thread.
Regardless, Elden Ring players have more than one way to take Messmer down – at least until this is likely fixed in a future update.