So first off, if you'd like to just see my run of beating King of Storms/Nameless King (which in my mind is probably the hardest boss I've ever faced in a video game ever), then you can go see that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw1gsf9DNCo

If for some reason that video makes it look easy, please understand that I had spent three days on this boss, well over 75 attempts...alone and with co-op partners.

My character was basically a Knight with just enough DEX to use Gundyr's Halberd. I upgraded Gundyr's Halberd to +5, which is max. I two-handed it without a shield (trust me, I would have LOVED to use a shield for this fight).

The most important thing for me for understanding and beating this boss was primarily two things:

1. Using the Carthus Bloodring (which extends your rolling invincibility)
2. Understanding the second phase (Nameless King) and the rhythm of his close-up strikes

Once those two things were locked down, this boss became very doable.

On the first phase, you're going to want to look out for the obvious windows to hit the feathered dragon on the neck or head. His spitting fire animation is the easiest opportunity to get 3-4 good hits in with your weapon. When he's spitting fire do NOT try to hit him on the head but rather the neck. If you touch the fire from his mouth even a little bit you will get staggered and fall to the ground, which kills your opportunity for hits.

Also, an important point is that there IS a way to escape his flame attack AOE where he blasts the floor with fire. As soon as the dragon flies up and shrieks at the same time, immediately starting running away and don't stop. In the video above I get close to escaping the flame but the very edge caught me. It's okay if it does, as there's plenty of time for a quickie sippy of Estus after you get hit with the fire.

Otherwise, this first phase is about staying relatively close right under the dragon's chest area so that the sword strikes don't hit you. Keep rolling through the sword strikes and take those opportunities to hit the dragon's neck/head whenever you see the opportunity. You will most likely only get chances for one hit, except for the spitting fire animation that we talked about earlier.

75% of the time you will have an opportunity for a visceral attack on the dragon. As soon as the opportunity comes up just do it, even if you're low on health. There will be plenty of time after your visceral attack to heal since it takes a moment for the dragon to get back up.

Now the hardest part is easily the second phase, where you're one-on-one with Nameless King. For me, I died way, way too easily by trying to stay far away from him. When you're far away from him he does chain after chain of his distance-closing strikes, which are brutally accurate and devastating to your health (if they don't kill you outright).

So my personal advice is to stay close to him at all times. His up-close strikes and combos are much more predictable once you understand their rhythm. Keep rolling through his combos or heavy strikes, the ring will help you greatly with boosted i-frames.

Now, at the end of each of his combos or at the end of one of his heavy strikes, you have an opportunity for JUST ONE hit. Do NOT try to take more than one unless he is staggered or after a visceral attack. If you try to do more than one hit he will have already begun his next combo or heavy strike and either kill you or eliminate most of your health.

My other crucial realization: At the end of his combo or heavy strike, you have an opportunity to do one of two things - either one hit of damage OR a sip of Estus. You do NOT have time to do both. So every time you have that "window" you need to decide if you're going to heal or strike.

As you can see in the video, even if he took off only a little health, the next window I got I chose to heal. It's better to have full health in this fight at all times because accidental hits or combos can wipe you out easily.

And, of course with any Souls boss fight, just practice practice practice. Understanding the rhythm of attacks for both phases is the name of the game - because then you can just roll through and pick your opportunities for quick one-hits of damage. In my opinion this fight is about attrition - your "big moments" of damage will come with opportunities for visceral attacks. Otherwise, you really just need to take your time.

I would also offer the advice of "don't get greedy" but honestly even just trying for ONE more hit in either phase of this boss usually leads to instant death, so I feel like that piece of advice is generally just implied.

So that's my take! I hope this helps.

You can do this!!

Just a heads up, you probably shouldn't post boss names in the topic title. And give us a spoiler warning, even if it's obvious :)

@rikiguitarist: Crap you're right. Totally forgot. Fixed title.

I'll throw in some tips as well.

Use a lightning weapon/buff for the first phase, and focus attacks on his neck.

Switch weapons/buffs for the second phase. Nameless King is VERY strong against lightning attacks.

If you're going to summon, never summon more than one phantom. This applies to almost all Souls bosses. Bosses get serious defensive buffs/health when that second phantom is added. In the case of the Nameless King, it also makes the first phase even more chaotic and his animations even more difficult to read as he switches targets around.

I'd go into more depth, but I'm on my phone.

EDIT: And if somebody is ever offended by finding out there is a Dark Souls boss named Nameless King, they should be karate chopped in the throat.

Biggest thing for me was using one of the high Lightening resist shields, like The Spirit Tree crest shield. Beat him on 3rd try with it, just makes his 2nd phase easy once you know his attacks.

My strategy was the opposite, I stayed the fuck away from him and as far away as possible. Only then did I have any chance of surviving. I'm playing a two-handed Greatsword build with 40 STR/40 DEX and using the Estus Ring instead of the Carthus Bloodring, because my priority was more HP recovery over rolling (since I'm rolling/running away from him most of the time I didn't need extra i-frames).

My only opportunity of attack (with my Greatsword) is when he does his jumping lunge attack, which I can easily dodge into him and strike once before running away as soon as possible. When I'm far away I would kite him with throwing knives (kukri to be specific) or throwing fire orbs. This will either chip away his HP or force him to perform that jumping lunge attack. His ground lunge attacks are easy to avoid if you're simply as furtherest away from him while still being able to target him (though when he charges up that's usually when I run the hell back just in case).

The wind projectiles are fairly easy to roll away, you just gotta remember when he first does the "wave" version you gotta run close to the edge of either side of the wave and then roll away as simply rolling through the wave doesn't always work. However, if you do get hit by the wave, it usually knocks you off so you don't need to do anything about the second wind attack (let's call this the "arrow"), you will most likely get up after the arrow has passed you.

Because I'm mostly doing a range battle, I never was able to perform the massive damage-dealing attacks when you stagger him but the risk of getting close to him was not worth it. Being at a distance from him also allows me to make more mistakes than usual, because I can safely drink estus flasks and not get hit by his ridiculously fast close range attacks. The only real trouble is when he starts summoning lightning strikes which take off close to 50% of my health but other than that most of his attacks then are avoidable.

So that's my take on the fight, I'm looking forward to seeing how different other people's builds/strategies are fighting what I also consider to be one of the toughest bosses I've ever faced in any Souls game.

I did the typical strategy of staying underneath the dragon which is par for the course with huge monsters in these games. However, the dragon uses his aerial flame blast attack much more often when you do that. If you stay in front of him he rarely does it, and when he does it's much easier to completely dodge the damage. Once I figured that out the second phase went pretty smooth, with all those estus flasks saved up.

This just took me learning the patterns of his moves and dodging properly. King of Storms is actually really easy, but if you are using lock-on the whole time, you are fighting with the goddamn camera more than anything. Once I knew the patterns, I was able to manipulate the camera perfectly and then wreck King of Storms super hard. Also, Gold Pine Resin fucks him up bad.

It's Nameless King himself that causes much of the issue in the fight, and it's because his movements are incredibly fast, his attacks are precise, and...in case no one else has noticed, he has lock-on to the player. This means that if you are not dodging his attacks at the LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT of their animation hitting you, then you are going to be fucked pretty hard.

My loadout for the fight was:

• Estus Ring (to add more value to the moments when I could heal)
• Life Ring (every little bit counts)
• Thunder Stoneplate Ring (because lightning absorption is dope as fuck)
• Hornet Ring (when King of Storms goes down and you get that crit against him, as well as when Nameless King hits his knees)
• Refined Dark Sword + 10 with 40 strength and 30 dexterity
• Grass Crest Shield
• Any armor with high lightning absorption/resistance as well as high physical reduction

I don't do any form of spellcasting, so every fight for me is just about dodging, blocking, and swinging. Took me a little while (probably six hours total), but I eventually got him. Seriously, those animations are PRECISE on his attacks.

It was a really fun fight with my first melee character, dodging, tactics timings etc.

But second playthrough on a int/faith hybrid he just got destroyed with appropriate magic. Lightning spears are super effective on the dragon part, staggering at half hp, and chaos fireball with appropriate rings just chunked the dude part of the fight in a few casts.

Nameless King in melee is a real pain, so your best bet is to find the range in which he walks forward slowly, while still being able to lock onto him. This will allow you to plink him with magic/arrows; avoid/block the cloud wave, dodge his jumping lunge and then roll the fuck away, and then repeat.

A bit cheesy but you'll pull him apart real fast. In NG+ his damage is quite high, so I did this with Crystal Soul Spears and he was killed without much hassle.

It's not just the game's hardest optional boss, it's the hardest boss in the game period. Only reason I didn't have a lot of trouble with him was because I went BACK to fight him after finishing the story. I was pretty overleveled.

Best boss in the game too

I really enjoyed the fight - took me about 15-20 attempts but only about 3-4 of those were Nameless King fights, the rest were me dying quickly to the first phase. I never really got used to the downwards AoE flame breath, so that'd pretty much one-shot me.

For the first phase you can roll through a lot of the big slams and then just focus on the head. After a few hits it goes down and you can run in for a critical attack. Getting used to roll timings was the key there for me.

Second phase was mostly rolling too, with only a few exceptions. His timings are actually such that with my Broadsword I could roll, hit, then roll again because of the time between combo hits. I think having a fast weapon was the key because I didn't tend to trade hits much, could just dodge, hit, and get away again. As with most souls fights, rolling towards is generally favourable over rolling backwards.

Here's what I posted in another thread, reposted here for relevance;

Tips for The Nameless King

This is a hard fight, hope I can help someone out there. Note, a lot of these tips are for melee players, though many can be transferable to other playstyles.

Gear:

• This fight isn't one for fashion-souls. Mix and match your armour in every slot to make sure you have the highest Physical, Lightning and Fire absorption possible while staying under 70% equip load (in that order of importance). The Mirrah Vest mixed and matched with heavy armour elsewhere tends to be a good go-to. Silver Knight stuff is great too.
• The Lothric Knight shield or Spirit Tree shield are almost must-haves to make this fight do-able. Upgrade them as high as you can to increase their stability stat (meaning you lose less stamina when you block). These shields have 85% lightning resist and make blocking the heavier one-off hits actually viable through this fight.
• EDIT: If you're a greatshield person, the Dragonslayer Great Shield (gotten from the Dragonslayer Armour boss soul) is the best shield for this fight but requires 38 STR and weighs... a lot.
• The Thunder Stoneplate Ring and Ring of Steel Protection are good-to-haves, but not required (I ended up not using them as I like Ring of Favor, Havel's, Chloranthy and Estus)
• Weapon-wise you generally want something fast and that does pure physical damage (ie, heavy, sharp, refined or even raw if you don't have good stats). Multi-damage-type weapons calculate armour for each type separately, so you'll do way less damage than a weapon or spell which does similar total damage of only one type (I beat this fight with a Sunlight Straight Sword +5). That said, the namless king is actually weak to fire so if you have a fire infused weapon of a high enough level, that could be fine.

Strategy (Phase 1) - Using the gameplan below, I ended up only ever using 1-2 estus max for this phase of the fight. It all comes down to getting your spacing and dodge timing right.

• The trick for stage 1 is to just stay far away and let him come to you / only run in to punish a miss. When far away he doesn't use his downwards breath attack (or if he does it wont hit you if you walk away from him).
• Camera-wise, lock onto the dragon's head rather than the nameless king since that's what you need to be hitting. Hitting anywhere else does bugger all damage and the head is not too hard to keep track of visually speaking if you keep your distance. The only times you'll need to lock on again are when he quickly flies over you - otherwise it's a good enough lock to tell when either it or the nameless king is about to do something (ie, when to start dodging for your life).
• If you lose lock-on (ie, when under the dragon after an attack) don't waste time re-locking until you do whatever business you're there to do and get far away again.
• The times to attack are when the nameless king attacks (and you successfully dodge or block), as the dragon's head is really close to the ground at that point. I say this because when the nameless king attacks he actually comes closer to you, and you end up pretty much right next to the dragon's head if you dodge right or back. So, yeah, staying away and dodging the nameless king's physical strikes works really well. Blocking works too, especially with the afore mentioned shields, but the hit stun robs you of some DPS time.
• Additionally, when the dragon's charging up to do it's sideways breath attack, I usually move straight towards the head and dodge through the fire for some risk-free hits to his head. If you get there faster, you can actually stand just behind the head (and avoid all of the fire) and wail away.
• When you damage the dragon enough, it'll stagger. Be sure to run up to it's head and hit R1 for some massive damage (I was doing 1500 or so). NOTE: After the reposte, the dragon actually falls down again for a short period, so you can actually run up and hit it a couple more times before it can fully recover. Frequently this ended the fight for me.

Strategy (Phase 2) - No cheeses or room for error here, this is a tough fight.

• In general, this is a normal Dark Souls human-sized-boss fight except you can't backstab and I wouldn't recommend trying to parry. When you have a good amount of stamina available, stay in his face and circle / dodge around him and hit him only when there's an opening.
• The real trick of it is keeping track of your stamina. You'll find that with the above shields you can shrug off his attacks 90% of the time - however, even with a maxed shield, his attacks drain a ton of stamina. You definitely don't want to run out mid combo, and you may find yourself with no stamina left to attack when he's done too. When you're low on stamina, back off.
• Seriously, back off when you're low on stamina and just dodge back/sideways for a while till you're back at max.
• When up close, I found that dodging the first two swings of his combos and then blocking or dodging the third left me with enough stamina to hit him once or twice then get the hell away from him. I essentially just repeated this pattern for the first half of his fight on my successful run.
• For the 2nd half of the fight, keeping your distance works best. Only ever let him do his long-wind-up attacks for easy dodges / punishes. The worst things that can happen here are either getting pushed up against the invisible walls or getting greedy. All of his attacks at range can be dodged sideways or diagonally forwards.
• The main thing for this part of the fight is remembering which attacks have a follow-up and making sure you don't get "grabbed" by his occasional sword-thrust/grab attack. The more you execute on dodging BOTH the attack and the inevitable follow-up, the more opportunities you'll have to land one or two hits.
• Be satisfied with one or two hits at a time, don't get greedy.
• No seriously, don't get greedy.
• Now, one of the best things about having the shields mentioned is in this final phase of the fight. When the nameless king charges his sword (and I think he raises it sometimes too), he does a massive lightning strike that can easily do 400-500 damage to you even with good armour. It is really tempting to try and dodge this attack, and sometimes that works - however, it is FAR safer to just shield tank it. Trust in your sheild, 85% damage resist means 85% and you'll find yourself laughing at his lightning strikes as it gives you an opportunity to chug an estus during his recovery.
• Finally, if you're feeling a little risky, it's actually almost safe to charge him and wail away while he's charging his spear during the 2nd half of the fight. This is especially true if he charges it a second or third time because you're doing a good job of staying alive. Just make sure to get away from him again when you get low on stamina.

and that's it! Took me 10-15 tries, but in the end it was just a slow wittle-him-away type fight that felt pretty safe (apart from my numerous screw-ups that ended up in me chugging like 12 estus).

I've been helping people with the Nameless King every day since I beat the game, it's a lot of fun co-op but beating him solo was an incredible feeling so I'd recommend everyone try and do it that way.

If you're using a shield for this fight, I found the best option is to roll through the first attacks and then shield the last attack. If you constantly rotate around him at close range, often the 3rd attack of a combo will just clip your shield or actually go over your head. That leaves you plenty of time for a big R2 hit and a roll away. If you roll through the last attack of a combo sometimes he moves out of range and you lose the opportunity.

I have to say, given all the talk I saw on forums before facing this guy last night, I think I had him far too built up in my mind. Honestly, I think learning the first part is the most frustrating because you're struggling with the camera. It took me about five tries to learn moveset and get to the second phase, but I beat it on the first go-around. What I mean by that is, as someone going in blind, not knowing his moveset, I felt like all of his moves were incredibly telegraphed or easy enough to dodge. I was wearing a full eastern set and using Uchigatana. If you beat Dragonslayer Armour, you can do this.

I never thought Nameless King was the hardest boss, for me it was always Champion Gundyr. Nameless King is tricky in the first half because the lack of perspective when targeting the dragon, but afterwards he felt more or less like beefier version of Dragonslayer Armor. Sure he has devastating moves but they are all fairly predictable. I beat him on my third attempt, first time I didn't even kill the dragon. Gundyr on the otherhand feels like a relentless assault that is incredibly hard to get an opening in on.

Edit: My vote for hardest Souls boss is still Ornstein and Smough, maybe the tigers in Dark Souls 2 DLC.

@plasmaduck: Well everybody has different experiences. It took me around 20 tries to beat the nameless king ,it went pretty smooth once i finally grew a brain and started to equip some lightning resist eq and buffs. The champion i beat in first try and was just surprised he never evolved into a second phase like the first Gundyr. The hardest boss for me was easily the Pontif dude.

Dragonslayer Armour, got on my 2nd try. Champion Gundyr, my 3rd. But this guy... man, he's giving me a lot of trouble. More than Pontiff Sulyvahn, who I personally found was the hardest boss up until now, and ended up having to summon for. I really want to do this one solo though.

Had a go at him the other day. Felt doable as long as I didn't mess up the first phase. I'm cowering behind Dragonslayer's lightning resistant shield and trying to figure some things out. Might consider embering during the phase switch to give me more room for error.

YEAH!

Stay close and pray for staggers. As for the first phase, its a bit RNG-dependent. On both phases, have a big greatshield handy. You can cower behind it to withstand the big fire breath. I tend to tank it because I can never get the distance to clear it. Dragonslayer's shield's lightning defence is great til you find an opening on Nameless.

I beat him by stripping down so I could use the Dragonslayer Shield and still be under 70%. This gave me some margin for error on those attacks I wasn't able to time just right. Form there, it was just a matter of learning which attacks I could punish. The easiest were those where he flies up into the air or dashes to the side. Roll into the attack instead of away from it, get in a few quick hits with my +10 Broadsword, and get out. I kept my distance so I could both time my dodges and bait his dash attacks. I never did stagger him. Once I landed on this strategy it took me probably five tries.