The Black Blade Kindred found in Caelid is an optional boss. This boss is notoriously difficult, and defeating him will require a good dose of patience, or a healthy amount of cheese.
General Tips
This boss being entirely optional, you always have the choice of continuing through the game instead, and coming back later once you’re better equipped and higher level.
While summons will often not last very long, they can be a great way to give yourself some breathing room during the fight.
If the boss ever resets and respawns in front of the Bestial Sanctum, his HP will not regenerate.
General Strategy
While this guide will mainly focus on cheesing the boss, there are a couple of ways for you to approach this fight if you want to fight it fair and square:
For melee players, remaining on foot and sticking close to the boss will allow you to avoid most of the boss’s quick attacks. While using a good shield will consistently prevent you from getting hit by the rest, you will still have to dodge attacks that come from above such as overhead slashes.
For ranged players, remaining on your horse and patiently waiting for safe moments to cast a spell will be the way to go. You will still have to watch out for the boss’s quick dashes, especially when he’s got the sword in hand.
Cheese Strategy
While there are several ways to cheese the boss, we’ll be listing the two that we found to be the most consistent. For both of these, you’ll be using the Bestial Sanctum found right behind the boss. With that in mind, you can either run past the boss, open the gate to the Bestial Sanctum and activate the site of grace there, or use the waygate in Limgrave to travel directly inside of the sanctum.
Waygate to the Bestial Sanctum
Hit and Run
This cheese strategy is the safest one, but also the slowest one to execute. The idea is that when you come out of the sanctum, the boss will be standing outside with its back turned towards you. Whether you’re a ranged or a melee player, you will be able to use your biggest attack against the boss before the fight even begins. While that may sound like nothing more than a good way to start the fight, this boss’s HP doesn’t actually go back to full if he vanishes and respawns.
With that in mind, start the fight by coming out of the Bestial Sanctum, using your strongest attack against the boss and running back inside of the sanctum. While this boss has access to ranged attacks, you can simply crouch behind the second or third pillar away from the entrance, which will allow you to avoid all of the boss’s attacks.
Now, all you need to do is wait for the boss to either go back to his starting position, or wait for him to disappear, which will cause him to respawn all while his HP will not reset. While you will spend quite a bit of time running back and forth to defeat the boss this way, this strategy is also the safest and the easiest one to execute.
Gurranq, Beast Clergyman
This strategy is riskier, but quite a bit faster than the Hit and Run one. As the name suggests it, it involves using the friendly NPC found in the back of the Bestial Sanctum to defeat the Black Blade Kindred. First, make sure to rest at the sanctum’s site of grace to ensure that the boss is standing outside, unaware of your presence. Next, we need Gurranq to be hostile, which can already be the case if you have been feeding him Deathroot during your playthough. If that’s the case, he will remain hostile until you attack him a few times, at which point he will become friendly once again. However, if you and Gurranq are friends, attack him 3 times to turn him hostile until you either die or reload the game.
The point of turning Gurranq hostile is for him to use his Bestial Claw attack through the sanctum’s entrance. While this attack inflicts high amounts of damage, it can also damage the Black Blade Kindred standing outside without triggering the boss fight.
To dodge the attack yourself, make sure to roll forward, through the attack, as rolling any other direction will result in you taking a huge chunk of damage. If you choose to block it instead, you can get rid of all of your FP flasks and allocate everything towards the HP restoring ones at the nearby site of grace, which will help you sustain through the damage.
The one issue you can run into while trying to execute this strategy, is Gurranq jumping to the side and wasting all of his attacks into the wall. To get him back to the doorway, you can either wait for him to start walking backwards towards his starting position, or just stand on the opposite side of the doorway to get him to walk towards you.
Now, all you need to do is watch out for some of Gurranq‘s attacks that can reach you through the door all while dodging/blocking the Beast Claw attack, and watch the Black Blade Kindred‘s HP go down to 0 without attacking him yourself.
Once the boss is dead, you will need to either die to Gurranq or return to the main menu, as those are your only ways to both leave combat, and get Gurranq back to his friendly state.
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