Dark Souls – Chaos Witch Quelaag Defeated

Previously on Dark Souls, our intrepid Knight Thomas dispatched the Gaping Dragon on his way through The Depths. The Gaping Dragon dropped a key which opened a door leading to Blighttown, a total bastard of a zone, pardon my French.

Let’s just say that Thomas the Knight died a lot-sometimes from falling but mostly from getting poisoned. Not just regular poison, either. Super-duper “toxic” poison, delivered by friendly neighborhood Blowdart Snipers hiding in hard-to-reach areas, spitting deadly darts rapid-fire while you climb up and down ladders and navigate across shaky wooden bridges, dodging Ghouls and Flaming Attack Dogs. Even after abandoning his knightly armor and switching to poison-resistant Thief gear, Thomas the Knight was quite sick most of the time.

Eventually Thomas the Knight made it all the way to the bottom of Blighttown to reach a swamp filled with annoying poisonous mosquitos and murky poisonous water. At least it was “only” regular poison. At the end of that swamp lay Quelaag’s Domain and the lair of Chaos Witch Quelaag, the boss guarding the second bell.

It “only” took me 18 tries to defeat the Chaos Witch, which I take as a sign that I’m finally getting the hang of this game. It didn’t take me long to give up on trying to avoid getting poisoned in that swamp, so every time I had to start out with a slow drain of health. Thankfully as a Knight you get a lot of health so it wasn’t that much of an issue. I continued using my trusty Halberd and Tower Shield in that fight, but I switched to the Wanderer’s armor set because it had a higher fire resistance.

I discovered by accident that if you run right up in her face, she can’t hit you very well with her Firesword. (Every boss seems to have one vulnerability like that.) Then the only other thing I had to watch out for was the Red Glowy Attack (a highly technical name I have given it). I was able to block the brunt of it with the Tower Shield but if it ever went off unexpectedly it would usually one-shot me. (In subsequent fights on other characters I learned it was better to run away from it instead of trying to block it-it’s a short-range AoE.) Otherwise I just had to stay to the side so she wouldn’t spit lava on me.

(The sound is all screwed up in the following YouTube Gaming video. I had the game sound way too low compared to the webcam, so don’t turn it up too loud. :)

After the Chaos Witch was dead, Thomas the Knight was able to find and ring the second bell, opening the gate leading to Sen’s Fortress and many further adventures.

Posted on Blaugust Day 13. Read all of my Blaugust posts here.