So You Want to Track Elden Ring Bosses Like a Maniac
I spent about forty hours last year just running around the Lands Between trying to document every boss encounter for myself. I figured other people might want the same thing, so I ended up putting together something most people refer to as the Elden Ring Boss Journal Top 10. It's not an official FromSoftware product, obviously. It's a community spreadsheet and tracking system that some of us have been refining for a while. At its core, it's a large spreadsheet — Google Sheets or a private Excel file hosted on GitHub — that lists every boss in the base game plus the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. Each entry has columns for name, location, whether you've beaten it, your attempt count, build info, and notes on strategy. The top 10 version is just a filtered view that highlights the bosses that are statistically hardest based on community vote data. There's no app. No auto-sync. You type stuff in. I'll be honest about the first major issue I hit. When I first started using the shared sheet, I noticed that the attempt counters were completely useless. People were either counting each death separately or counting full runs of the same boss over multiple days. The inconsistency made the difficulty rankings garbage. My workaround was to add a column called "consolidated attempts" where you only count unique sessions where the boss was actually attempted, not total deaths. This cleaned up the data significantly and brought the average error rate down to somewhere around 8-10 percent instead of 40 plus percent.
How to Get Started
The main sheet lives on Google Sheets and the link circulates on the Elden Ring Discord and the official subreddit. Search for "Elden Ring Boss Tracker Community" and you'll find it. There's a "Copy" button on the first tab that makes you a personal clone. Do not edit the master file directly. People do that and then someone loses their entire difficulty ranking. Once you have your copy, here's the workflow I use. Before you fight a boss, I note your build, weapon, talismans, and estimated level. During the fight I keep a phone timer running and log the attempt number when it dies. After I win, I fill in the damage numbers, the longest phase I survived, and a one-line strategy note. This takes about two minutes per boss. If you're spending more than that, you're overcomplicating it. The top 10 list at the top of the sheet is auto-calculated. It pulls from the "votes" column where each tracker rates a boss's difficulty from one to five after beating it. The sort order updates automatically. I've found this works well for casual reference but falls apart if you only play one build. Radahn looks easy on a bleed build and brutal on a pure magic build, and the aggregate numbers can't capture that nuance. I added a second filter tab that lets you sort by build type, which fixed most of the problems I was having.
Advanced Stuff People Miss
Most guides tell you to track your stats and forget about it. That's fine if you just want a record. But the real value is in cross-referencing. I started noticing patterns when I looked at my own data sideways. For example, the Malenia phase two deaths spike at exactly the same attempt number for nearly everyone on the sheet. Around attempt seven is when people tend to stop panicking and start recognizing the waterfowl pattern timing. The sheet shows this clearly if you plot your personal death curve against the column for her. Another counter-intuitive thing: the "hardest boss" ranking barely moves regardless of who fills it out. Mohg, Maliketh, and Placidusax stay in the top three no matter the regional spread or how many people play on PC versus console. That consistency is actually meaningful. It means the difficulty isn't a fluke or a meta complaint. The game is genuinely designed that way. On the other hand, bosses like Godrick and Rennala swing wildly depending on whether you're speedrunning or playing straight through the story. Ignore those rankings if you just want a straightforward read. There's a trick most people don't mention. The sheet has a hidden macro that calculates your average attempts per boss category. If you go to View and press Ctrl+Shift+F9, it refreshes the aggregate stats. I use this after every major boss to see if my overall progress is trending toward a completion milestone. It takes about three seconds to run and saves you from doing the math manually.
Get the Full Details
When the System Breaks
Here's where things get ugly. The shared sheet does not support multiplayer sync. If you and a friend both beat the same boss on the same day, your attempt counts won't match. Some people handle this by designating a primary tracker and a secondary tracker, but that doubles your work and nobody really does it. Another failure point is the DLC section. When Shadow of the Erdtree dropped, the sheet wasn't updated for about three weeks because the original maintainer was busy. During that window, anyone who tried to track DLC bosses had to add rows manually, and the formulas broke on half the entries. You have to re-link the calculation range after any manual row insert. If you're someone who plays cooperatively, I'd recommend keeping a separate local copy instead of relying on the shared sheet. The collaboration overhead outweighs the convenience after a while. I switched to a local Excel file with a simple macro and stopped trying to sync with others. My personal tracking time went from roughly twenty minutes per boss down to about four minutes, and the data quality improved because nobody else was polluting my numbers.
The Actual Top 10 (As of Right Now)
The current rankings based on community votes are roughly: Malenia Blade of Miquella, Maliketh the Black Blade, Placidusax, Godfrey First Elden Lord, Mohg Lord of Blood, Radahn Festival, Rennala Queen of the Full Moon, Morgott the Omen King, Dragonlord Placidusax, and Fire Giant. The order shifts slightly depending on which build filter you apply, but those ten stay consistent within a two-point margin. Malenia and Maliketh are consistently the top two across every subset. If you're new to the tracker, start by comparing your numbers against theirs and seeing where you fall. That alone tells you more about your skill progression than any single boss rating ever will. The sheet is free. No account required for the copy. Just search the community posts, grab the link, and start logging.
