There are a ton of cool new weapons, like the Light Greatsword Milady in Shadow of the Erdtree, but one of my personal favorites is a Great Katana that you can get at the bottom of the Dragon’s Pit.
To get to the Dragon’s Pit start at the Pillar Path Waypoint Site of Grace and head south. Follow the line of beheaded dragon statues until you see a small fire burning outside a cave. Inside you’ll be able to get an Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone and, if you can beat the Dragon Pit’s boss, the Dragon Hunter’s Great Katana.
Navigating the Dragon’s Pit
In the very first room of the Dragon’s Pit you’ll have to fight two draconic skeletons. They don’t have a huge amount of HP, but they hit hard and unless you make sure to smash their glowing bones to bits, they get back up after you strike them down. Try to keep the fight in that front room because there’s another skeleton that will jump out at you when you start making your way down the hall.
In the next area you’ll find two more skeletons, one shooting arrows at you from afar and the other coming straight forward with an arrow. You’ll also see a shiny piece of loot on the left side of the room, but don’t go anywhere near it until the skeletons are taken out. As soon as you pick it up (congrats on finding a new Ancient Dragon Smithing Stone, by the way) more skeletons will pop out of the ground to ambush you.
The next room in the Dragon’s Pit features a long staircase patrolled by two skeletons. If you head up the stairs, you’ll enter a large chamber where a Magma Wyrm is lying in wait. This one seemed to deal more damage and have more HP than the base game version, but the fight plays out exactly the same. You can kill the Wyrm for a Dragon Heart, but whether or not you fight it, you’ll want to go back down the stairs and jump into the seemingly bottomless pit to reach this dungeon’s boss.
How to beat the Ancient Dragon-Man
The Ancient Dragon-Man isn’t the most annoying boss in “Elden Ring,” but he’s still a significant challenge. He fights very much like an invader who uses greatswords and draconic incantations. I found the best strategy to be paying attention to his sword attacks and using those swings to get easy guard counters. The only basic sword move to watch out for here is a drawn out left swing because the Dragon-Man always follows that up with a quick stab. More than once I tried to get the guard counter off after that initial swing and found myself on the receiving end of a deadly stab.
Aside from melee sword attacks, there are three spells the Dragon-Man uses that you need to watch out for. He’ll sometimes rise up and gather reddish energy around him before slashing with his blade, sending an energy blast in your direction. The other spells are the incantations. One is a large lava blast that coats the ground in front of the Dragon-Man with magma. The other incantation looks quite a bit like Rotten Breath while its casting, but instead of breathing out noxious smoke after rising into the air, the Dragon-Man darts forward with a high-damage bite.
Luckily, all the Dragon-Man’s spells take a second to charge, so they’re pretty easy to see coming. You can interrupt the casting with a heavy attack, or you can just dodge out of the way and dive in for a quick attack to the Dragon-Man’s back. Once you get about half of his HP down, he’ll use a flask like an invader, but after that he’s out of heals.
Defeating the Ancient Dragon-Man leaves you with the Dragon Hunter’s Great Katana and a clear path to the Jagged Peak.
